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FOR THE JEWISH NEW YEAR-HOPE: THE GIFT OF JUDAISM: DIANE BEDERMAN

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/hope-the-gift-of-the-jews/

One of the greatest gifts the Jewish people have given to the world is the concept of hope, for a better future.  And we make that future possible because of the belief in moral agency: free will. With free will we choose hope, because we choose life. God said “I give you the blessing and the curse, life and death, choose life for you and your seed.” This teaching, this exhortation, this obligation has kept the Jewish people alive for more than three millennia, despite the innumerable attempts to wipe the Jewish people off the face of the earth.

The Jewish people keep hope alive.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” has been on our lips since the 15th century. Its use during Passover was first recorded by Isaac Tyrnau. On the run for so many centuries, always choosing life, we knew to look forward with hope. And now, here we are in Jerusalem.

The Jewish people brought about the greatest change in the collective unconscious of humanity since the caveman made fire. Pantheism and paganism had kept us in bondage to the whims of nature with constant sacrifices to the gods, and never allowed us to believe that we had any control over our lives. Time was cyclical rather than linear, and we lived our lives like hamsters in a wheel. There was no sense of history or the idea that each moment has a meaning and that we are all part of a long journey that has a beginning and will have a middle and an end: historical time, in other words, not the time of the seasons of nature.

Judaism taught us that we are the subject of our future, our destiny, not the object of a pre-determined fate based on birth. We choose.

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Epidemic of illogicality Culture and behaviour are key to containing the virus Melanie Phillips

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/epidemic-of-illogicality?token=

One of the many regrettable consequences of the Covid-19 crisis has been an epidemic of illogicality. Thus:

Countries which originally locked down have rising infection rates. Therefore lockdown was useless and the economic damage it caused was entirely unnecessary.

Sweden never locked down and now its infection rate is negligible. Therefore we should all have behaved like Sweden. 

Although infection rates are rising, the numbers who are dying or need intensive care have declined. Therefore the crisis is over and there’s no need for any more restrictions.

Most of the rising infection rates involve young people. Young people don’t generally have a serious form of the virus. Therefore the crisis is over and there’s no need for any more restrictions.

A lot of the statistics being banded about are rubbish. This proves the whole idea that this pandemic requires drastic action is rubbish.

Despite the panic having been unjustified hysteria from the start, government ministers are still deliberately ramping up public terror in order to increase the power of the state and seize control of our lives.

Duh?

Such arguments, and many more in similar vein, display a regrettable failure to acknowledge complexity, or the difference between correlation and causation, or the concept of being between a rock and a hard place – which means the alternative to something bad may not be something good but something else that’s bad too. Does that really need spelling out? Apparently so.

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Why the Erasure of History Matters by Asaf Romirowsky

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

http://www.romirowsky.com/24530/why-the-erasure-of-history-matters

At a time when statues and monuments are being destroyed in an attempt to rewrite history and create new narratives, it is critical to understand the importance of history and historiography. It is the only method by which to understand how we got to our current period. The late historian Yosef Yerushalmi, in his seminal study Zakhor (literary Hebrew for “to remember”), wrote,EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: History and historiography matter. As Winston Churchill astutely said, “Everyone can recognize history when it happens. Everyone can recognize history after it has happened; but only the wise man knows at the moment what is vital and permanent, what is lasting and memorable.” Today, such sensitivity to the value of history is evaporating from the public consciousness. The willful blindness to the instructional value of the past is manifesting itself in attempts to erase history rather than reckon with it responsibly.

The historian does not simply come in to replenish the gaps of memory; he constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact. Moreover, in common with historians in all fields of inquiry, he seeks ultimately to recover a total past—in this case the entire Jewish past—even if he is directly concerned with only a segment of it. No subject is potentially unworthy of his interest, no document or artifact beneath his attention.

Radicals who are uncomfortable with history do not follow Yerushalmi’s guidelines or, indeed, any other historical norms. Today’s protesters are not interested in facts but in feelings and opinions, which afford them a greater sense of both comfort and control.

If one is to understand the present, one has to document the historical periods that preceded it. Samuel Kassow’s critical book, incisively titled Who Will Write Our History?, tells the story of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and the creation of the Oyneg Shabes Archive. Under desperate circumstances, Ringelblum documented Jewish life in Warsaw as the Final Solution was being implemented and captured a picture of a Jewish community on the verge of destruction. Ringelblum was committed to ensuring that the events that unfolded in Nazi-occupied Europe would have a Jewish observer and that future generations would have Jewish documents to study rather than solely Polish ones. As Kassow explained, Ringelblum’s mission was to use history to defend Jewish honor and combat antisemitism. As Kassow put it in the conclusion to his study, Ringelblum’s message was that a fuller and better documented history would demonstrate to posterity that “Jews were not just victims; they were people and part of a living resilient nation.”

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Ruthie Blum Viral apathy in Israel

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/viral-apathy-in-israel/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a joint press conference on Monday evening with Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein and National Coronavirus Project coordinator Ronni Gamzu.

The purpose of the event, after which only Netanyahu responded to reporters’ questions, was pretty clear: to display a unified front in what has begun to seem like a circus of contradictory COVID-19 rules and a losing battle against the spread of the virus.

The discrepancy between the Jewish state’s stellar record during the first wave and its current failing grade—listed earlier this week by John Hopkins University as having the world’s highest rate of new infections per day per million people—is only part of the reason that Netanyahu, Gantz, Edelstein and Gamzu each took to the podium to make a statement.

The greater impetus was the recent confusion surrounding the government’s latest conflicting announcements on how it intends to tackle the worrisome infection rates and rising death toll. On Thursday, the coronavirus cabinet decided to impose a general seven-day lockdown on some 30 of the country’s “red” towns and cities—those with the highest morbidity rates—in accordance with Gamzu’s color-coding “traffic light” model, which was to go into effect on Sunday.

The cabinet determined that the week-long lockdown on the yet-to-be-finalized areas would be extended if necessary. By Sunday night, however, two things happened.

The first was that the number of “red” cities was increased to 40. The second was that the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties, realizing that their population was going to be hard-hit by the lockdown, railed against Netanyahu.

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Why San Francisco Is In Trouble – 19,000 Highly Compensated City Employees Earned $150,000+ In Pay & Perks Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/09/01/why-san-francisco-is-in

San Fran wants a big coronavirus bailout from the American taxpayer. So, our auditors dug into how they spent their budget in 2019. 

You are not going to believe the pay in city agencies!

Here are just a few samples of our findings:

Mayor London Breed made $452,421 in pay and perks in 2019 — topping every other mayor across the country. 
Police officers are called “peace officers” and earned up to $574,595 in pay and perks last year!
Two fire chiefs worked five and seven months each and made $386,727 and $442,722 respectively.
Self-declared “Mr. Clean,” the Public Works Director made $380,000 in total comp before he was arrested by the FBI. 

San Francisco is a mess. Literally. Our auditors found that complaints of human waste in the public way spiked to an all-time high (31,000) last year!

Read our piece at Forbes where you’ll find more jaw-dropping compensation.

Why is San Francisco oversight important? The city is home to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Governor Galvin Newsom, and vice-presidential candidate U.S. Senator Kamala Harris!

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey’s ‘Filthy War’ Against Syria, Libya by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16466/turkey-war-syria-libya

The Turkish regime, about a month ago, cut off the water supply to residents of northern Syria, where the temperature in August easily reaches more than 39° Celsius (103° Fahrenheit). It is a move, human rights advocates said, that “amounts to crimes against humanity.” They called for launching an international investigation into Erdogan’s violations and “crimes.”

Political analyst Mayyar Shehadeh pointed out that although the European Union has objected to Erdogan’s “provocations”, it has not taken any effective action to stop him from pursuing his violations against the civilians in northern Syria.

Maj. Gen. Ahmad Al-Mismari, spokesman of the Libyan National Army, warned Europe against the escalation of illegal immigration across the Mediterranean, and indicated that this migration may not be innocent: there may be terrorist elements among them that cause unrest in Europe.

“The move against Palestine is not a step that can be stomached,” Erdogan said. The thirst-ravaged Syrian civilians near the border with Turkey and the victims of the civil war in Libya, however, do not seem to be worried about the Israel-UAE deal. Erdogan’s victims want to see him held to account for his crimes against innocent civilians.

“The spirit of conquest is dominant in the modern Turkish political scene and their regional interventions. Rooted in the Ottoman ‘law of the sword’ – or the idea that the conqueror can rule a conquered country or territory according to his desires – Turkey has returned to its Ottoman ambitions.” — Costas Mavrides, Cypriot member of the European Parliament and committee chair at The Union for the Mediterranean.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is committing “horrific violations” against civilians in northern Syria, according to a report in the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper Al-Roeya on August 30.

As a result of these violations, a million civilians living in the area, parts of which are controlled by Turkey, are facing “an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.”

Arab political analysts and human rights advocates who spoke to Al-Roeya said that the Turkish regime, about a month ago, cut off the water supply to the residents of the region, where the temperature in August easily reaches more than 39° Celsius (103° Fahrenheit). It is a move, they said, that “amounts to crimes against humanity.” They called for launching an international investigation into Erdogan’s violations and “crimes.”

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Trump is right about the 1619 project By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/trump_is_right_about_the_1619_project.html

We are slowly reaching a point where we will be two nations with two separate history books.  It’s sort of like Cubans in the island and those of us who migrated to the U.S.  We have two histories of what happened before and after Castro.  

We may be reaching the same point in the U.S.  It may be that we turn into two countries with a big wall keeping the “blues” from jumping over to look for work in the red side.

President Trump is 100% correct about this 1619 project.  It is a fraud and a version of U.S. history intended to destroy everything that is white and European.  It is a first-rate lie, as President Trump has expressed:    

The project is based on the premise that American history began in 1619 — cited as the date African slaves arrived in Virginia — and that everything following this should be viewed through that lens. The Pulitzer Center released a school curriculum based on the project, and Trump responded to a tweet stating that California would be using it.

Forcing 1619 on public schools will accomplish several things:

First, it will promote more racism.  In other words, nothing promotes more racism to be called a racist because you are white.  Forget that thousands of whites actually made the civil rights marches possible.  Forget that hundreds of thousands of northern young men died to end slavery.  Forget all this and just call everyone a racist because their ancestors settled this land.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Battle of Kulikovo: Russian Liberation from the Muslim Horde By Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/battle_of_kulikovo_russian_liberation_from_the_muslim_horde_.html

Today in history, on September 8, 1380, Russia began its long march to liberation from the Tatar yoke, by way of a battle that is as important to Russian history as the battles of Tours and Vienna are to the West.

Although pagan when they conquered Russia around 1240, by 1300, the Mongols were thoroughly Islamized.  Arabic was adopted; “the entire Muslim religious establishment of qadis, muftis, and the like arose in Sarai, the Golden Horde’s capital on the lower Volga”; and “sharia, Muslim religious law,” reigned supreme.  “With this the Russo-Tatar conquest society entered the mainstream of Medieval Christian-Muslim frontier life” — that is, it entered into a familiar paradigm of enmity and war, punctuated only by vast sums of gold and slaves flowing from Russia to the Horde.

In 1327, Uzbek Khan’s cousin Shevkal — “the destroyer of Christianity,” according to a Russian chronicle — asked a boon of his khan: “allow me to go to Rus to destroy their Christian faith, to kill their princes and to bring you their wives and children.”  Uzbek consented.  At the head of a vast horde, Shevkal invaded Russia “with great haughtiness and violence.  He inaugurated great persecution of the Christians, [using] force, pillage, torture, and abuse.”  Nor were Russians ignorant of the reason behind their (renewed) sufferings: everywhere in their chronicles, “they appear as defenders of the faith battling to save Christianity from marauding infidels driven by religious animosity.”  Moreover, “Mongol atrocities” are always recorded “as incidents in a continuous religious war.”

When the Golden Horde’s infrastructure began to fracture from internal discord in 1359, the principality of Moscow (or Muscovy) began to defy its overlords.  So Khan Mamai, seeking to squash the rebels and “impose Islam on the Russians,” made for Moscow with, according to sources, some 100,000 Turco-Tatars in 1380.  Boasting that they would put their swords “to the test for the Russian land and the Christian faith” against “the armor of the Moslems,” the Russians accepted the challenge.

Under the general leadership of Grand Prince Dmitri Ivanovich of Moscow, some 50,000 Russians went out and met the khan at Kulikovo Field, near the Don River and other tributaries.  The opposing armies were so vast as to be spread out over eight miles.  The Christians strategically positioned themselves between rivers and dense forests, thereby limiting the Tatar horsemen’s maneuvering and flanking abilities.

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Sweden: The Violence Is “Extremely Serious” by Judith Bergman

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16457/sweden-violence-crime

“The police must ensure that the criminals are arrested and can be prosecuted. The criminals need to disappear from our streets and squares so that no more ruthless crimes are committed… We work intensively, around the clock, despite this, the severe violence continues.” — Sweden’s National Police Chief Anders Thornberg, August 29, 2020.

Gothenburg’s Ali Khan clan has been reported to the police more than 200 times but the police had to close almost all cases because the gang threatens the victims and witnesses to stay silent.

“This weekend, two boys were subjected to terrible atrocities in a cemetery in Solna for an entire night. On Tuesday, a teacher in Gothenburg was kidnapped and beaten after contacting the police. What we now experience almost daily is not normal… Sweden should start by making it a crime to be part of a criminal gang, in the same way that it should be a crime to be part of a terrorist organization.”. — Ulf Kristersson, leader of the opposition Moderate Party, Facebook post, August 27, 2020.

“Unfortunately, there is a grudge against Christian culture among certain groups and the Church of Sweden in Malmö cannot be passive while the Christian cultural heritage is vandalized” — Sweden Democrats Party, August 26, 2020.

Things in Sweden have now deteriorated to such a degree that on August 29, the Swedish police published a statement titled “The trends in violence are extremely serious.” It said:

“Recently, there have been serious incidents and serious acts of violence linked to criminal networks, in which several people have been murdered and others seriously injured…

“In Stockholm, two people were murdered in the past week, and in Gothenburg, criminal groups have tried to demonstrate power by controlling vehicles entering certain districts. Earlier in August, an innocent 12-year-old girl was murdered… [during a gang incident], and in other parts of the country there are conflicts between various criminal networks and other ruthless crime, as well. On Friday night, a violent riot also occurred in Malmö where several police officers were injured…”

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President Trump Makes One Sorry Fascist By Jack Cashill

Posted By on September 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/president_trump_makes_one_sorry_fascist.html

On every fascist metric, Obama beats Trump by a giant goose step.

“Of course we’ll have fascism,” legendary Huey Long was reported to have said. “We’ll have it under the guise of anti-fascism.” Today, of course, we see the confirmation of Long’s prediction on America’s streets in the self-parodying Antifa movement.

At the executive level, for all the mindless chatter about President Trump as Hitler or worse, it is not he who deserves the label “fascist.” By American standards, that honor goes to President Obama and his fierce little toady, Joe Biden. To gauge the fascistic impulses of Trump and Obama respectively, Merriam-Webster offers a useful measuring stick, a definition of “fascism” untainted by the politics of the moment:

A political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

On every fascist metric, Obama beats Trump by a giant goose step. One could argue that Trump “exalts nation” more than Obama, and that is true, but not “above the individual.” For Obama, like all socialists, national socialists included, the individual was expected to subordinate his interests to those of the state.