RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hamburg city officials say that owners of vacant real estate have refused to make their property available to the city on a voluntary basis, and thus the city should be given the right to take it by force.

“The proposed confiscation of private land and buildings is a massive attack on the property rights of the citizens of Hamburg. It amounts to an expropriation by the state [and a] “law of intimidation.” — André Trepoll, Christian Democratic Union.

“If a property is confiscated… a lawsuit to determine the legality of the confiscation can only be resolved after the fact. But the accommodation would succeed in any event.” — Tübingen Mayor Boris Palmer.

Officials in North Rhine-Westphalia seized a private resort in the town of Olpe to provide housing for up to 400 migrants

“I find it impossible to understand how the city can treat me like this. I have struggled through life with grief and sorrow and now I get an eviction notice. It is a like a kick in the stomach.” — Bettina Halbey, 51-year-old nurse, after being notified that she must vacate her apartment so that migrants can move in.

The landlord is being paid 552 euros ($617) for each migrant he takes in. By cramming as many migrants into his property as possible, he stands to receive payments of more than 2 million euros a year from government.

We all know that Jewish life on many North American and European college campuses today has become a living hell: Jewish students are lambasted on all sides for affiliating proudly with the Jewish people and with its revived, historic homeland, the State of Israel. This predicament, although more severe than ever, is not a new one.

I furiously scribbled the following essay in the space of a single evening and night in the Fall of 1990 while attending graduate school at Columbia University, and I re-issue it here in the hope that it may furnish succor — and throw up a challenge — to our young comrades in arms battling it out on the front lines from Berkeley to Brown.

The starting point of the essay involved a lecture delivered on the Columbia campus by a professor of African studies to whom a number of anti-Semitic slurs had been attributed. The piece pulls no punches and will unquestionably anger some readers, but hey: I’m used to that…

***

Last Monday night Leonard Jeffries came to Columbia, and I went to hear him speak. Seldom have I experienced such a welling-up of nausea, such an onslaught of disgust, such a feeling of helplessness in the face of unbounded ignorance, such a feeling of hopelessness for the predicament of my people, as I did that night. Yet strange to say, all those gut-wrenching, heart-searing emotions converged upon me before the esteemed professor began his demagogic discourse, indeed, before I even entered Ferris Booth Hall. For it was there, standing in line on that building’s patio, that I had the misfortune to witness one of the most saddening and despair-inducing spectacles I have seen in a good while.

There on the grass opposite were my fellow Jews, pleading with the crowd to understand that hating Jews is bad, and that (even worse) it has “no place in multiculturalism.” They were there “to express our anger, and our fear” (our fear!). As I listened to these members of my supposedly proud family begging the gentiles (who for the most part ignored them, busy chatting away amiably enough): “We appeal to you, look into our faces, see our pain,” my revulsion soared to unprecedented heights; as I watched these representatives of my supposedly creative community standing silently (!) behind a fence (!!) holding up signs rehearsing the same old useless platitudes, I felt ashamed; and when I heard the pathetically comical “dialogue” between one group of retreating Jews half-heartedly crying, “We want Jeffries fired!” (quite the maximalists, aren’t we?) and another group frenziedly hushing them (no doubt the chant was deemed inconducive to the all important “image” the second group was so “responsibly” and “moderately” seeking to evoke — after all, the “Spectator” might get the wrong idea!) — when my ears caught this finale of idiocy, which produced its share of chuckles and smirks from those standing in line, I confess that I bowed my head and thanked the Lord that next year I will live in Jerusalem forever, and never again have to subject myself to the flagrant manifestations of the ever-new lows to which some diaspora Jews will descend.

1. The US connection: Columbus Day is celebrated around Sukkot. According to “Columbus Then and Now” (Miles Davidson, 1997, p. 268), Columbus arrived in America on Friday afternoon, October 12, 1492, the 21st day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, the Jewish year 5235, the 7th day of Sukkot, Hosha’na’ Rabbah, a day of universal deliverance and miracles. Hosha’na’ Rabbah is celebrated 26 days following the beginning of the Creation, and 26 is the numerical value of Jehovah (יהוה). Hosha’ (הושע) is the Hebrew word for “deliverance” and Na’ (נא) is the Hebrew word for “please.” The numerical value of Na’ is 51 (נ=50 and א=1), and Hosha’na’ Rabbah is celebrated on the 51st day following Moses’ ascension to Mt. Sinai, which marks the conclusion of the repentance process (of Yom Kippur).

2. Sukkot – the 3rd Jewish pilgrimage, following Passover and Shavou’ot (Pentecost) – is a universal holiday, inviting all peoples to come on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as expressed in the reading (Haftarah) of Zechariah 14: 16-19 on the first day of Sukkot: “Then, the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up [to Jerusalem] every year to worship the Lord Almighty and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.” According to the Sukkah tractate of the Mishnah (the oral Torah), the 70 sacrificial bulls of Sukkot represent the pilgrimage of 70 nations to Jerusalem; a demonstration of universal solidarity and comity. Sukkot expresses the yearning for universal peace, highlighting the Sukkah of Shalom (peace). Shalom is also one of the names of God. Shalem (שלם) – wholesome and complete in Hebrew – is the ancient name of Jerusalem and of 32 towns (Salem) in the USA.

I presume that I am to feel honored that a Jew, one Roger Cohen, during the break from synagogue services in London on Yom Kippur this year, penned, without breaking his fast, an op-ed for the New York Times entitled “Jews as Far as Possible” the whole point of which was to focus on my residency in Shiloh and to defame me as a “Messianic Jewish settler”.

His title originates in a phrase of Maimonides he quotes:

“We have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.”

The phrase is from Maimonides’ “Guide for the Perplexed”, Book Three, Chapter 46 in discussing the sacrificial goat to be sent off to Azazel:these ceremonies are of a symbolic character, and serve to impress men with a certain idea, and to induce them to repent; as if to say, we have freed ourselves of our previous deeds, have cast them behind our backs, and removed them from us as far as possible.

Cohen may have seen it in Rabbi Sacks’ April article. Cohen’s conclusion is that

Jews, as I said, are a practical people. Their interest is in the feasible not in magic wands.Possibly short of words, he again quotes, this time Stefan Zweig, who defined Jews as“the ever-recurring — since Egypt — community of expulsion,”

So short of words was Cohen we know because his op-ed of last October carries the same theme and the same title, The Community of Expulsion. At that High Holiday season he was upset that his Rabbi had not mentioned the Gaza hostilities of last summer. Zweig’s quotation is found in his memoir sent to his publisher a few months before doing what, presumably, Cohen perhaps thinks as practical: he and his wife committed suicide. His Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday, in which you can read this: “The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intel­lectual world.”) reflects at one point on the situation the Jews of Austria found themselves during the Hitler ascendancy and the persecution that followed and it readsonly now, for the first time in hundreds of years, the Jews were forced into a community of interest to which they had long ceased to be sensitive, the ever-recurring — since Egypt — community of expulsion. But why this fate for them and always for them alone? What was the reason, the sense, the aim of this senseless persecution? They were driven out of lands but without a land to go to.”

“As heaven knows, good cannot overcome evil unless both are acknowledged and only one fought for.”

As his five-day visit to the United States comes to an end, Pope Francis continues to receive the undivided attention of audiences as major in number as in stature.
It is not clear whether the head of the Holy See is worried about the danger of succumbing to the sin of pride from having his ring kissed so readily by so many illustrious figures.
Something for which the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church ought to hang his head in shame, however, is his repeated sins of omission.
While Christians across the Middle East are being terrorized, tortured, sold into slavery and slaughtered, the pope spoke before the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, at Ground Zero and other venues about peace and justice.

Bill Clinton blasts media for overblowing Hillary email scandal: ‘Never seen so much expended on so little’

President Clinton isn’t buying into the scandal swirling around his wife’s use of personal emails during her time as Secretary of State.
In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, the 42nd President of the United States said the controversy is merely “catnip” that the Republican Party is tossing at his wife in order to distract voters from the real issues like student loan debt, income inequality, mental health care and more.
“I actually am amazed she’s borne up under it as well as she has; I’ve never seen so much expended on so little,” Clinton said.

There are some decisions which I simply cannot fathom how anyone could make. We’ve discussed here the issue surrounding U.S. Army Special Forces Green Berets Captain Dan Quinn and Sergeant First Class Charles Martland. These men were relieved of their positions by the chain of command because they physically assaulted an Afghan police officer who had raped a young boy and beaten his mother.

We reported on SFC Martland’s appeal regarding his involuntary discharge from the Army because of the adverse actions taken against him and placed in his personnel record. Captain Quinn left the Army.

We shared with you earlier this week how the U.S. Military has issued orders to troops in Afghanistan to disregard the instances of sexual abuse of young boys by Afghan officials – even if they occurred on U.S. Military bases. We know three Marines lost their lives in Helmand province when one of these “chai boys” took the AK-47 of the pedophile Afghan police chief and gunned them down while they worked out in the FOB gym.

And now we get this news.

As reported by The Daily Caller, “The U.S. Army has just rejected the appeal of Green Beret Sgt. 1st Class Charles Martland, who received a discharge scheduled to take effect Nov. 1 for shoving an Afghan rapist to the ground. “Consequently, your request for an appeal and continued service is disapproved,” U.S. Human Resources Command (USAHRC) said in a Sept. 14 memo sent to Martland. The reason for the denial? The office said that Martland’s appeal attempt “does not meet the criteria” because it brings no new information to the table.

The European Union’s plan to force poorer nations to accept thousands of refugees.

On Tuesday, national sovereignty gave way to mandatory multiculturalism in the European Union. A plan to relocate an additional 120,000 Middle Eastern migrants was imposed by EU ministers over the objections four Eastern European countries adamantly opposed to the plan. Slovakia’s Robert Fico illuminated the resistance. “As long as I am prime minister, mandatory quotas will not be implemented on Slovak territory,” he declared in Bratislava.

Slovakia was joined by the Czech Republic, Romania and Hungary. Finland abstained from the vote. Yet despite the quartet’s disapproval, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, led by France and Germany, pushed through the plan proposed by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker during his annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg earlier this month. The plan called for 160,000 migrants to be forcibly redistributed from Italy, Greece and Hungary to all other member states, save Britain, Ireland and Denmark, who remain exempt from EU treaties. In addition, Junker called for a review of the “Dublin system” that determines which EU nation is responsible for asylum claims.

In order to make the plan more politically palatable, 66,000 migrants are currently slated for relocation, joining 40,000 migrants approved for asylum in July. The remaining 54,000 had originally been allocated to Hungary where they are currently camped out. But Budapest refused to abide a plan it characterized as an invitation to economic migrants. Thus, those migrants will be reallocated in 2016, possibly among Greece, Italy, Croatia and Austria, bringing the overall total of relocated migrants to 160,000. The plan is ostensibly limited to Syrian, Iraqi and Eritrean asylum-seekers, but the details have yet to be worked out. All of those migrants are people who have purportedly crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey and northern Africa, fleeing the unrelenting violence in Iraq and Syria.

Republican presidential candidates will keep Iran front and center as proof of the Obama administration’s national-security malpractice. But they don’t all seem to grasp why the Iran nuclear accord is flawed and why it matters so much.

Among the main criticisms is that the deal reflects President Obama’s lack of negotiating skill. But he knows how to negotiate — look at how he handled Congress on this matter. The accord is weak because along the way he changed his goal; he decided to paper over the nuclear problem in order to pursue a broader partnership between America and the clerical regime in Tehran.

Not long ago, President Obama promised to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon. He demanded that Iran dismantle its relevant facilities. And he implied (“all options are on the table”) that he would use military power, if necessary, to block Iran.

But after a while, he saw he couldn’t talk Iran’s clerical leaders out of their nuclear ambitions. Without admitting as much, Mr. Obama gave up on stopping Iran. Instead, he aimed simply to slow them down for a while.

That was a momentous reversal. He signaled it by changing the way he talked. One couldn’t always hit home runs, he said. One had to bend to reality. What was important was getting the best deal possible.

The unique demands of the nation’s highest office conflict with orthodox Islamic teaching.Does Charles Krauthammer get Islam wrong because he gets the Constitution wrong? Or does he get the Constitution wrong because he gets Islam wrong?

This conundrum comes to the fore — and not for the first time — after Dr. Krauthammer’s serial denunciations of Dr. Ben Carson. In a Sunday Meet the Press interview, Carson opined that Islam is inconsistent with the United States Constitution and, therefore, that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation” — meaning he would not recommend that voters elect a Muslim president.

Dr. K decries Dr. C’s remarks as “morally outrageous,” albeit “sincerely felt.” With Democrats in distress, the columnist fears Republicans are undermining their golden 2016 opportunity: “It is certainly damaging to any party when one of its two front-runners denigrates, however thoughtlessly, the nation’s entire Muslim American community.”

But what loseth a man if he denigrates a tiny community — a large percentage of whose members are Islamists reliably aligned with Democrats — but gains the esteem of a vast political base convinced that Washington is insane on matters Muslim?