RUTHFULLY YOURS

Meet Jack Taylor, the Hollywood dentist turned SEAL who was captured behind enemy lines.

Seventy years ago, Jack Taylor, arguably America’s first Navy SEAL, spent Christmas being tortured and beaten in a small, dank cell in a Gestapo prison. “I broke down. It was the only time during all of my captivity,” he says.

Taylor was a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Maritime Unit, the group that pioneered the technology and tactics that were the origins of today’s U.S. Navy SEALs. It was an extraordinary and eclectic group of men that also included an archeologist who could have been the model for Indiana Jones and Sterling Hayden, one of Hollywood’s leading stars.

One man close to the organization described the ideal OSS operative as “a Ph.D. who could win a bar fight.” Jack Taylor personified that ideal.

As one of the OSS’s most experienced operatives, this first SEAL planned and executed a parachute mission deep into the Third Reich in the fall of 1944. After Taylor and his team were captured far behind German lines in Austria, he found himself with other high-level prisoners in Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

The stories of Taylor and the other OSS frogmen are captured for the first time in my new book, First SEALs: The Untold Story of the Forging of America’s Most Elite Unit.

For the first time in 1,400 years, there will be no Christmas celebrations in Nineveh province, home to Iraq’s largest remaining Christian community and largest non-Muslim minority, and a site of great biblical significance. This northern province, whose area is over three times larger than that of Lebanon, is now part of the Islamic State’s caliphate, and its Christians and churches are no longer tolerated.

What has become of Nineveh’s Christians? What will be their fate?

These should be pressing concerns for America, especially its 247 million Christians. Yet the mainstream media rarely cover this story — a New York Times reporter in a recent e-mail says it’s of “limited interest,” explaining that “most of our readers have only vague notions of who they are anyway and why their issues are relevant to the United States.” A better explanation would be that the Times and other establishment elites are reluctant to focus on the goals, rather than just the tactics, of Islamist extremist ideology. A main goal is total Islamization — and it is on the verge of being realized in Iraq.

Iraq’s Christians, who in recent years have clustered in their ancestral Nineveh homeland to escape persecution in Baghdad and Basra, are important culturally and politically. With authentic roots in the earliest years of the faith, they constitute one of the largest remaining native Christian communities in Christianity’s cradle. It was these communities that first structured the sacred liturgy, developed religious music (leading to Gregorian chant), brought to the West monasticism for men and women, and otherwise provided great treasures of Christian patrimony.

Stanley Weintraub, Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Penn State University, has authored a number of books about celebrating Christmas while at war. His latest, about a war he served in, is A Christmas Far from Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War. He talks about the book, war, and writing history with National Review Online. – KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What turned your attention to Korea for your latest book?

Stanley Weintraub: I was a young Army officer in wartime Korea for 17 months, over two Christmases.

Lopez: How is A Christmas Far from Home “a narrative of two fantasies”?

Weintraub: MacArthur’s fantasy, fed by poor intelligence and personal hubris, was that he could unify all of Korea by Christmas without Red Chinese intervention. He fed the unrealistic hopes of his troops that they would be on the way home by Christmas 1950.

Lopez: Why is the Korean War considered “the Forgotten War”?

Weintraub: The Korean War, only five years after the close of World War II, was almost a continuation of that war. Further, memories of it were overwhelmed by the catastrophe of Vietnam.

‘What’s merry about all this, you ask?”

Thus began a Christmas Eve message from General Anthony McAuliffe to his troops besieged at the Belgium town of Bastogne. Adolf Hitler had launched a desperate counteroffensive against the allies in the West in December 1944. As described in the book No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne, the town became a linchpin of the Battle of the Bulge.

Hitler hoped to split the Allied armies and retake the crucial harbor at Antwerp. His attack through the Ardennes forest, accompanied by a withering artillery barrage, caught the Allies by surprise and met with initial success.

But he needed Bastogne, a crossroads that General Dwight Eisenhower quickly decided must be held.

The American general rushed the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) to the town, together with other units. Seventy years ago, the heroes of Bastogne, or, as they were fondly dubbed, “the battered bastards of Bastogne,” spent Christmas breaking the advance of the German army in one of the most storied fights in American history.

It is Bastogne that gives us some of the great statements of American military defiance. When the Germans demanded surrender of his forces, Generl McAuliffe shot back with his famous rejoinder, “NUTS!” A soldier’s quip captured the spirit of the American defenders: “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”

At 2:45 p.m [1]., Saturday, December 20, 2014, Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley [2] approached two people on a street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After requesting that they follow him on Instagram, he told them, “Watch what I’m going to do.” Within 2 minutes, at 2:47 p.m [1]., Brinsley reached the passenger window of a marked police car, and fired a lethal barrage at the heads of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. Fleeing into a nearby subway station, pursued by police officers, Ismaaiyl Brinsley stopped, and shot himself, fatally [1], in the head.

Immediate post-mortem accounts riveted, appropriately [3], on Brinsley’s history of mental illness, personal failure, and paroxysms of violent anger—he even wounded his Baltimore area girlfriend, just before departing by bus for New York City, that fateful Saturday morning. However, by Saturday, Brinsley had focused his vengeful rage [3] on the recent deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. According to the now rigidly enforced narrative, Brinsley executed Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu in cold blood due, solely, to his warped perception of their “shared culpability” in the tragic deaths of Garner and Brown.

““The whole narrative of widespread police brutality is a big fat lie.”

Advice to the perplexed: if approached by a police officer, do not pull out a revolver and point it at him [1]. It doesn’t matter if you are white, black, pink, or purple: such behavior is not conducive to your longevity. And that, frankly, is the way things should be.

As I have noted here on several [2] occasions [3], the militarization of the police in the U.S. is a minatory development that should be scrutinized and reversed. American police should not be swaggering about town in armored vehicles and accoutered like a Navy SEAL en route to bin Laden’s Pakastani retreat. In America, the default posture of the police should be like something out of Mayberry, province of sheriff Andy Taylor, protector of the peace on The Andy Griffith Show. Deep down, of course, it is not Andy but the townspeople of Mayberry who are responsible for maintaining order. “Andy,” as I wrote in one of the above linked columns,

is simply a sort of boundary marker. He represents what Walter Bagehot might have called the impressive side of the social contract. He has a sidearm. He rarely wears it. It’s usually at home, unloaded, hidden on top of a china cabinet. He barely wears a uniform. That’s to say, his uniform is homey, not scary.

Why? Because he wished people to trust and respect him and not fear him [4]; he was an authority, not an authoritarian figure. His sidekick, the lovable but bumbling Barney Fife, likes the paraphernalia of police garb. Andy lets him wear a revolver, but it has to be unloaded. He’s allowed to carry one round of ammunition in his shirt pocket.

via The Hollywood Reporter:

The BBC’s director of television Danny Cohen said that he has “never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew” following what he felt was a rise in anti-semitism in the country and the rest of Europe in the last year, reports The Independent.

Speaking to an audience at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, a conference addressing the ability of comedy to drive forward social change, Cohen said “I’ve never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as I’ve felt in the last 12 months. And it’s made me think about, you know, is it our long-term home, actually? Because you feel it. I’ve felt it in a way I’ve never felt before.”

Cohen outlined how anti-semitism was on the rise again across Europe. “You’ve seen the number of attacks rise, you’ve seen murders in France, you’ve seen murders in Belgium. It’s been pretty grim actually,” he said.

The unrest here at home has moved the frothing anti-Israel hordes to the background for now, but they’re still out there. Europe is getting positively frightening, however. For so long, a blind eye was turned to the radical Islam elements taking root all over the continent and now there is a militant infrastructure in place to whip all the reliable useful idiots into a frenzy.

It is interesting, and important, that a member of the media is addressing this rising tension. The media everywhere plays a big part in egging agitators on, especially with the way the “news” from Israel is covered. Cohen doesn’t mention that in this interview, but his position at the BBC is lofty enough that it should give some pause, and perhaps make them think a little about their roles.

Should.

In a world where the attention spans are shrinking by the hour, shrill sells better than ever these days, especially in television news. The more incendiary, the better. Until the fire hits their doorsteps.

William Congreve- “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast”…Not these savages and barbarians…only death of “infidels” soothes them….Is it to be “Fugue for a Beheading” next?…rsk

“Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.”—Henry David Thoreau

Recently promoted to a full professorship in Music at the University of Haifa, Professor Arik Shapira is striking a discordant tone with the rest of the Israeli public who through their taxes pay his salary. Shapira isn’t just sympathetic to the Palestinians, he is sympathetic to Hamas and rubs elbows with the Free Gaza Movement to boot.

For the small minority who are even aware of Shapira’s work in Israel, he is best known for his malicious “Upon thy ruins, Ophra”, celebrating the destruction of the West Bank Jewish settlement of Ophra. You can hear it here.

Israeli media commented about “Ophra”: “For those of you who thought that the self-hating Israeli literati could not sink any lower, there is bad news. Last month, on Israel’s ‘Kol Musica’ radio show, Arik Shapira, winner of the Israel Prize, played his new composition, ‘On Thy Ruins, Ofra,’ a twisted takeoff on Isaiah’s beautiful poem, ‘Upon thy walls, O Jerusalem’ (62:6). The song is dedicated, in the words of Shapira, ‘toward the destruction of Ofra, with the evacuation of all the settlements.'”

In a conversation with the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the composer said, “This is a public that I despise. They didn’t contribute anything in the years before the rise of the State…When someone plays the flutes I break up and rework the notes to sound like shots. This is what they do, these scoundrels, these settlers. I abhor them.”

Does this sound a tad like the present when the entire Western world refuses to understand the Islamic goals of conquest and subjugation? rsk

“Nazism, writes Daniel Johnson, is best understood as a movement to destroy Western civilization, a goal it shared with Soviet Communism. Too few Europeans understood this in the 1930s. One who did was Aurel Kolnai, a Hungarian Jew who moved to England, fleeing the rising tide of continental anti-Semitism:

Kolnai’s great achievement was to show that Nazi ideology was animated by a hatred of Western civilization. Nothing less than its total defeat would suffice. “The Western cause does not mean a nation set against another nation, not even a party fighting another party: it means the world of civilization organized in moral self-awareness versus the rebels to mankind.” He was clear that “the conflict between the West and Nazi Germany is inseparably connected with the inner problem of Western society.” Kolnai also saw that the enemies of Western civilization had already combined “in an embryonic form” during the Great War. We know that as a young man in Budapest, he ardently prayed for an Allied victory over the Central Powers, even though the defeat of his Hungarian countrymen led to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, revolution, counterrevolution, and his own exile. He warned that “the Soul of the West is everything. There must be a spark to kindle the fire; there must be a living and active core around which to align mankind: the West aware of the menace of its Foe, and all that is Western and akin to Western essence, outside the West.”

It is a society that rejects religious zealotry. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslim and one can hear the five-times-a-day Muslim call to prayer, but it is muted and ignored by most.

Like Israel, Kurdistan is more democratic than any of its neighbors. Like Israel, Kurdistan is surrounded by enemies that wish it did not exist. Like Israel, Kurdistan looks West. And like Israel, Kurdistan has maintained an internal equilibrium though all the world betrays it.

Iraqi Kurdistan is full of surprises. Probably, the most unexpected discovery is how normal life is in its capital city, Erbil. Despite a late summer scare by Islamic State [IS] military gains north of Mosul and the threat of suicide bomber attacks, the social discipline of Kurdistan’s citizens is admirable. There is a relaxed state of tension. It is “business as usual.”

There is also a sense of optimism, pervasive and infectious. Entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. While there was an exodus of foreign businessmen after the initial territorial gains by the IS, foreign investors are filtering back. The Kurdistan Regional Government [KRG] has already drawn up plans for large-scale projects to improve the infrastructure. Heavy-duty construction vehicles are everywhere. The most visible project is the beltway being built around the city.