ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Understanding ‘End the occupation’ by Moshe Dann

Posted By on June 23rd, 2017

During the last few decades, the Palestinian propaganda machine aided by anti-Israel elements in the international community have created one of the most powerful and effective emotional and psychological weapons to defeat Israel: “End the occupation.”

Although it’s a popular mantra, few understand what it means.

It could refer to what Israel conquered during the Six Day War in 1967, or what Israel acquired during the War of Independence (1948-49), or everything “from the river to the sea.”

At first, Arab Palestinian propaganda focused on Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) as a “violation of international law,” specifically, the Fourth Geneva Convention as interpreted by the International Committee of the Red Cross. An anti-Israel, Geneva-based NGO, the International Committee of the Red Cross was the first to accuse Israel of “occupying Palestinian territory,” thus arbitrarily allotting a disputed area to one side. Because the International Committee of the Red Cross is also – uniquely – an official UN agency, its decisions are considered authoritative.

After Israel signed the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat (for the PLO), withdrew from Areas A and B, and along with the international community assisted the Palestinian Authority in developing its institutional structure, the focus turned to Israel’s legal and historical claims to Area C, in which all of the “settlements” are located. Experts and pundits debated the issue, but neither side was able to convince the other.

The debate over territory was important, but had limited effect because as Palestinian terrorism and incitement continued unabated and after two more withdrawals – from southern Lebanon in 2000 (which empowered Hezbollah), and from the Gaza Strip in 2005 (which empowered Hamas) – Israel was reluctant to surrender more territory. The “land for peace” mantra no longer persuaded anyone except hard-line ideologues. Even Israelis who supported the “two-state solution” were unwilling to make further concessions.

During the last decade or so, a new argument became prominent, often espoused by Israeli Jews and Progressive Jews in North America who are pro-Israel: “The occupation” is not only about territory, but is about “the Palestinian people.”

This shift to a humanitarian argument is persuasive because it is presented as a moral issue: Israel has no right to control another people, or nation – the Palestinians.

This portrays Israelis (i.e. Jews) as persecutors and Palestinians as their victims.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Google’s YouTube – Soap Box for Terrorists by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on June 23rd, 2017

If anyone still doubted at that point the connection between terrorism and Google’s video platform, the Daily Telegraph revealed that British counterterrorism police had been monitoring a cell of ISIS “wannabes” since March, and recorded its members discussing how to use YouTube to plot a vehicular ramming and stabbing attack in London. Terrorists have learned that YouTube can be as deadly a weapon as cars and knives.

YouTube and Google, by posting such videos, are effectively being accessories to murder. They are also inviting class-action lawsuits from families and individuals victimized by terrorism. They need to be held criminally liable for aiding and abetting mass murder.

In Arabic with French subtitles, the clip lauds terrorists “martyred for Allah.” User comments include: “beautiful… may Allah give us all the knowledge and power to accelerate our imams.” In other words, the pictures of smiling terrorists and their dead bodies serve as an inspiration to young Muslims seeking Paradise through martyrdom. This is not theoretical. According to the website Wired UK, as of June 5, there were 535 terrorist attacks around the world — with 3,635 fatalities — since the beginning of 2017 alone.

In mid-March this year, major companies began withdrawing or reducing advertising from Google Inc., the owner of YouTube, for allowing their brand names to pop up alongside videos promoting jihad, a new report released on June 15 by the Middle East Research Media Institute (MEMRI) reveals.

According to the report — which documents the failure of Google to remove jihadi content that MEMRI volunteered to assist in flagging — thus far, AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson, Enterprise Holdings and GSK are among the companies pulling their ads from the platform. Google responded by promising to be more aggressive in ensuring brand safety of ad placements.

Then came the Westminster attack. On March 22, 2017, Khalid Masood rammed his car into pedestrians — killing four people and wounding dozens of others – then stabbed an unarmed police officer to death.

Exactly two months later, on May 22, Salman Ramadan Abedi detonated a shrapnel-laden homemade bomb at the Manchester Arena, after a concert by American singer Ariana Grande. The blast killed 22 people and wounded more than 100 others.

On June 3, ahead of Britain’s general election five days later, Khuram Shazad Butt, Rachid Redouane and Youssef Zaghba murdered eight people and wounded 48 others in a combined van-ramming and stabbing attack on London Bridge.

On June 6, Britain’s three main political parties pulled their campaign advertisements from YouTube, after realizing that they were placed in or alongside jihadi videos.

If anyone still doubted at that point the connection between terrorism and Google’s video platform, the Daily Telegraph revealed that British counterterrorism police had been monitoring a cell of ISIS “wannabes” since March, and recorded its members discussing how to use YouTube to plot a vehicular ramming and stabbing attack in London.

Appallingly, the surveillance did nothing to prevent the carnage. It did provide further evidence, however, that jihadis purposely use the major online platform to spread their message and recruit soldiers in their war against the West and any Muslims deemed “infidels.” Terrorists have learned that YouTube can be as deadly a weapon as cars and knives.

Nor could Google claim that it is unaware of the increasing pernicious use of its platform, or that it lacks the algorithmic tools to monitor YouTube’s massive traffic – involving 1.3 billion users and 300 hours of video uploaded every minute.

In the first place, complaints about jihadi content have been lodged by individuals and organizations for years. Secondly, Google vowed to tackle the problem through a flagging feature that alerts YouTube to material that “promotes terrorism.” Furthermore, YouTube itself claims: “Our staff reviews flagged videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to determine whether they violate our Community Guidelines.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Appalling Delusion of 100 Percent Renewables, Exposed The National Academy of Science refutes Mark Jacobson’s dream that our economy can run exclusively on ‘green’ energy.. By Robert Bryce

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

The idea that the U.S. economy can be run solely with renewable energy — a claim that leftist politicians, environmentalists, and climate activists have endlessly promoted — has always been a fool’s errand. And on Monday, the National Academy of Sciences published a blockbuster paper by an all-star group of American scientists that says exactly that.

The paper, by Chris Clack, formerly with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder, and 20 other top scientists, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It decimates the work of Mark Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor whose wildly exaggerated claims about the economic and technical viability of a 100 percent renewable-energy system has made him a celebrity (he appeared on David Letterman’s show in 2013) and the hero of Sierra Clubbers, Bernie Sanders, and Hollywood movie stars, including Leonardo DiCaprio.

Jacobson became the darling of the green Left even though his work was based on Enron accounting, alternative facts, and technology hopium. Nevertheless, his claims were politically popular, and his academic papers routinely sailed through peer review. In 2015, Jacobson published a paper, co-written with Mark Delucchi, a research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper, which claimed to offer “a low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem” with 100 percent renewables, went on to win the Cozzarelli Prize, an annual award handed out by the National Academy. A Stanford website said that Jacobson’s paper was one of six chosen by “the editorial board of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the more than 3,000 research articles published in the journal in 2015.” The fact that the National Academy would bestow such a prestigious award on such weak scholarship greatly embarrass the Academy, which gets 85 percent of its funding from the federal government.

In their scathing takedown of Jacobson, Clack and his co-authors — who include Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution, Dan Kammen of the University of California, Berkeley, former EPA Science Advisory Board chairman Granger Morgan, and Jane Long of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — concluded that Jacobson’s 2015 paper contained “numerous shortcomings and errors.” The paper used “invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” Those errors “render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100 percent wind, solar, and hydroelectric power system.”

Among the biggest errors — and one that should force the Academy to withdraw Jacobson’s 2015 paper — is that Jacobson and Delucchi overstated by roughly a factor of ten the ability of the United States to increase its hydropower output. Furthermore, the paper ignores two key issues: electricity storage and land use. Jacobson claimed that the U.S. can store energy underground or store it in the form of hydrogen. Clack and his co-authors wrote that “there are no electric storage systems available today that can affordably and dependably store the vast amounts of energy needed over weeks to reliably satisfy demand using expanded wind and solar power generation alone.”

But the most obvious flaw in Jacobson’s scheme involves his years-long refusal to admit the massive amount of land his proposal would require; his myriad acolytes have repeated his nonsensical claims. For instance, last year, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and one of America’s highest-profile climate activists, wrote an August 2016 cover story for The New Republic in which he lauded Jacobson’s work and repeated Jacobson’s erroneous claim that his all-renewable program would need only “about four-tenths of America’s landmass.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

University: Saying ‘Gender Plays No Part in Whom We Hire’ Is a ‘Microaggression’ And if you say it, you’ll need a third-party intervention. By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

According to a document on Rowan University’s official website, saying that “gender plays no part in who we hire” is a microaggression, and you should intervene and correct people if you hear them saying it.

The phrase is just one of many on the official “Tool: Interrupting Microaggressions” handout, which contains a list of microaggressions, a method for “Third Party Intervention,” and a “Communication Approach.”

“Gender plays no part in who we hire” is listed as a “microaggression” under the subhead “Myth of Meritocracy.” The suggested way to intervene, according to the document, would be to say: “How might we examine our implicit bias to ensure that gender plays no part in this and we have a fair process? What do we need to be aware of?” (Because that’s a really normal way to talk.)

Another example of a microaggression, according to the document, is to say to a black person, “Why do you have to be so loud/animated? Just calm down.” Now, the fact that that is actually being defined as a “microaggression” seems pretty absurd to me. If anything, this anti-microaggressions guide seems like it is engaging in some microaggression itself by implicitly suggesting that only black people are inappropriately loud. I mean honestly — if someone were to say something like “Why are black people so loud?” then of course that would qualify as being racially offensive, but how can making a race-neutral statement telling someone to “calm down” be considered racist? Should no one ever tell anyone who is not white to “calm down,” no matter the situation, for fear of being branded a bigot?

Well, if you hear someone telling a person who happens to be black to “calm down,” you should intervene, the guide advises, and say: “It appears you were uncomfortable when ___said that. I’m thinking that there are many styles to express ourselves. How we can honor all styles of expression — can we talk about that?”

Here’s the thing, though: Could you imagine someone actually doing that? I don’t know about you, but if someone ever felt the need to interrupt one of my conversations to babble on about how he was “thinking that there are many styles to express ourselves,” I’d have a hard time deciding between giving him the stink-eye and asking him if he needed medical attention because he was acting so erratically.

This story was previously covered in an article at Campus Reform.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What to Make of the Saudi Shake-up The king has scrambled the line of succession. By Elliott Abrams

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

On Wednesday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia pushed aside his heir-apparent, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, and moved his own son Mohamed bin Salman into that spot. He also removed Mohamed bin Nayef (known as MbN) from his powerful post as interior minister, meaning that MbN’s days in the sun are entirely over.

What’s up? Why did this happen, and what comes next?

Here are a few key points.

First, it has been obvious since King Salman ascended to the throne in January 2015 that he wanted his son Mohamed bin Salman (known as MbS) to succeed him. The young man was the apple of his eye, and was immediately named deputy crown prince. The question was whether the aged king — now 81 and in questionable health — would live long enough to elevate young MbS, who was then only 29 and is now 31. The danger, for the king, has been that he would die suddenly, and that MbN would ascend to the throne and remove his cousin MbS from the line of succession. This week the king decided that waiting is not smart: Why take chances? Perhaps there is a saying in Arabic that resembles “God helps those who help themselves.”

Second, we now know (barring calamities like assassination) who will rule the kingdom for many decades. King Salman may rule for several additional years, but there is no reason MbS cannot rule after him for 50 more. This has never happened before. The Saudi system has had brother succeed brother — all of them the sons of the founder of the modern kingdom, Ibn Saud (1875–1953). Naturally, as his sons succeeded each other more or less in order of age, each successor was older than his predecessor; as noted, Salman was 79 when he became king. So the system has produced geriatric rule for decades now, while the Saudi population grew younger and younger. The CIA World Factbook says the median age in the kingdom is now just 27. And now the kingdom will have a ruler from those younger generations — for the first time ever.

Third, the Saudi system of brother following brother could only work for one generation — and King Salman was the end of that system. Ibn Saud had 45 sons of whom 36 survived to adulthood, and some of them were clearly ineligible to be king. So, there were a limited number of truly eligible brothers to take the throne from his death in 1953 until now — seven decades. But all those sons of the founder simply had too many sons themselves, and there has been no workable principle for figuring out how to choose a king in the follow-on generation. It looked like the first person in that generation, the grandchildren of the founder, would be MbN, but that’s over; it will be MbS. And (again, barring some calamity) he will rule for decades. What may happen by the time the aged MbS leaves the throne in, say, 2070, is that his line will have seized and will thenceforth keep the throne. He might name a son of his as crown prince, and that son could serve for ten or 20 years and be accepted as successor, and the old Saudi system will have changed: The bin Salman line will be the true royal family, and the others will all be on the outs.

Why should they accept that outcome? Because no one has offered an alternative that’s better, and there does have to be a king; Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. If there is an election of sorts for king, among thousands of princes who are both voters and candidates, that’s close enough to an electoral democracy to give non-royal Saudis modern ideas about actual elections — something the royals will want to discourage — and would diminish the status of whoever was “elected” king. Moreover, there are still plenty of jobs and financial rewards to pass around. Mohamed bin Nayef’s father, Prince Nayef, was minister of the interior and MbN got the post when his father died. In this week’s shake-up MbN was removed not only as crown prince but also as minister of the interior; but a nephew of his, Abdul Aziz Bin Saud Bin Nayef, age 33, was given the post — keeping it in the bin Nayef line and thereby reducing intra-family dissension. A son of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the long-time ambassador to Washington, was named ambassador to Germany, so the bin Sultans (Prince Sultan, Bandar’s father, was the minister of defense from 1963 until his death in 2011) also get a prize.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump and His Generals Trump’s reliance on his generals shows that he values merit over politics. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

Donald Trump earned respect from the Washington establishment for appointing three of the nation’s most accomplished generals to direct his national-security policy: James Mattis (secretary of defense), H. R. McMaster (national-security adviser), and John Kelly (secretary of homeland security).

In the first five months of the Trump administration, the three generals — along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon Mobil CEO — have already recalibrated America’s defenses.

At home, illegal immigration is down by some 70 percent. Abroad, a new policy of principled realism seeks to reestablish deterrence through credible threats of retaliation. The generals are repairing old friendships with allies and neutrals while warning traditional enemies not to press their luck.

Trump has turned over most of the details of military operations to his generals. According to his critics, Trump is improperly outsourcing to his generals both strategic decision-making and its tactical implementation.

But is Trump really doing that?

In his campaign, Trump vowed to avoid new ground wars while not losing those he inherited. He pledged to wipe out ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism without invading Middle Eastern countries to turn them into democracies.

Those are wide but nonetheless unmistakable parameters.

Within them, the U.S. military can drop a huge bomb on the Taliban, strike the chemical weapons depots of Syria’s Bashar Assad, or choose the sort of ships it will use to deter North Korean aggression — without Trump poring over a map, or hectoring Mattis or McMaster about what particular move is politically appropriate or might poll well.

Other presidents have done the same.

A wartime President Lincoln — up for reelection in 1864 — wanted the tottering Confederacy invaded and humiliated. But he had no idea that General William Tecumseh Sherman would interpret that vague wish as nearly destroying Atlanta, and then cutting his supply lines to march across Georgia to the sea at Savannah.

When Sherman pulled off the March to the Sea, Lincoln confessed that he had been wrongly skeptical of, totally surprised, and utterly delighted with Sherman’s victories. He then left it to Sherman and General Ulysses S. Grant to plan the final campaign of the war.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

You Can’t be Pro-Palestinian and a Feminist You can either be a feminist. Or you can believe women should marry their rapists. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

64% of “Palestinian” men say that women who dress provocatively deserve to be sexually harassed. 52% believe that women who are in public places at night are asking to be harassed.

57% think that a woman should marry her rapist and 47% believe that women who are honor killed for bringing “shame” to their families usually did something to deserve it.

A third of “Palestinian” men say that women who don’t wear hijabs deserve to be insulted.

And the women aren’t much better.

More “Palestinian” women than men justify sexual harassment in public places. 54% believe that a woman who was raped should marry her rapist. 41% don’t think he should be prosecuted.

43% of “Palestinian” women agree that women who are out in public at night deserve to be harassed.

Half the population knew of an honor killing that had taken place in their community in the previous year.

These are the results of a U.N. Women study which finds horrifying attitudes and behaviors toward women in the Muslim world. And which, in true U.N. fashion, attempts to blame it on Israel.

This is the “feminist” reality in the Muslim settlements in the parts of Israel occupied by the rival Islamic warlords of Hamas and Fatah. Both had their roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is a direct link to the Islamist organization. Arafat had first invaded Israel with a Muslim Brotherhood force. He encountered two key Fatah co-founders, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, with the Brotherhood.

Hamas gets its backing from the Islamist terror states of Iran, Turkey and Qatar. Fatah’s Palestinian Authority is funded by Western countries. And so it has to be more circumspect. But, like ISIS, the “Palestinian” colonies are efforts to build Islamic states inside Israel. Both declare that their legal systems are based on Islamic sharia law. Their roots are in the Koran which deprives women of basic civil rights and authorizes men to rape non-Muslim women and to beat their Muslim wives.

“Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made the one of them to excel the other,” the Koran says. “And those you fear may be rebellious admonish; banish them to their couches, and beat them.”

Roughly a quarter of “Palestinians” have seen this Koranic dictum being put into action as their fathers or male relatives beat their mothers.

Islam declares that a woman suffers from a “deficiency in her intelligence” so that it takes two female witnesses to equal one male witness. Women in Islam are considered good for only one thing.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Tunisian Muslim Shouting “Allahu Akbar” Stabs Officer in the Neck at Michigan Airport Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

This echoes similar attacks in Europe.

A police officer was stabbed in the neck at Flint’s Bishop International Airport in Michigan by Amor Ftouhi, a Tunisian Muslim who holds Canadian citizenship.

Ftouhi shouted “Allahu Akbar” repeatedly.

Ftouhi yelled “Allahu Akbar” — “Allah is the greatest” — before making the attack, according to the affidavit.

After stabbing the officer in the neck, Ftouhi continued to yell, “Allah,” several times, Sondgeroth’s statement says.

“He further exclaimed something similar to, ‘you have killed people in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and we are all going to die.’ ”

But… but the real problem is fear of being stabbed in the neck by a Muslim terrorist shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Murder of a U.S. Citizen” Double standards and media myths on North Korea’s “brutal and despotic” regime. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

American student Otto Warmbier, 22, passed away in Cincinnati on Monday, only days after he returned from North Korea unable to speak, see or respond to voices. North Korea had sentenced Warmbier to 15 years hard labor based on a bogus charge.

President Trump said “It’s a total disgrace what happened to Otto and it should never ever be allowed to happen.” The American’s death also prompted outrage from a leading Democrat.

“The barbaric treatment of Otto Warmbier by the North Korean regime amounts to the murder of a U.S. citizen,” California Democrat Adam Schiff told reporters. “The North Korean regime has shown once again that it is perfectly willing to treat Americans who visit their nation as hostages to extract concessions from the United States.” Schiff also echoed Republican calls for a ban on travel to North Korea because tourism “helps to fund one of the most brutal and despotic regimes in the world.”

Schiff is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee and a prime mover of the charge that “President Vladimir Putin decided to become an active participant in the U.S. election and attempt to influence its result for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton.” This sudden display of wrath against North Korea might lead some to believe that the American left has always opposed that regime with the same vigor. Such is hardly the case.

With aid from American Stalinist spies such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin gained the technology to build nuclear weapons. The USSR exploded its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949 and the blast encouraged Stalin to mount a surge in his expansionist plans. He urged his North Korean ally Kim Il-Sung to attack South Korea, an ally of the United States, and on July 25, 1950, the Communist forces invaded.

According to The Hidden History of the Korean War, it was South Korea that invaded North Korea. That was the official Soviet position, and no surprise from author I.F. Stone. As John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev explain in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Stone was in fact a Soviet agent who took money from the KGB. He made a career of recycling Communist propaganda but “by the time he died in 1989, I.F. Stone had been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power.”

Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs books, explains that the publishing house, “is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.” The first mentor is “I. F. Stone, proprietor of I. F. Stone’s Weekly,” a man who “combined a commitment to the First Amendment with entrepreneurial zeal and reporting skill and became one of the great independent journalists in American history.”

In similar style, when he passed away, the New York Times called Stone an “independent, radical pamphleteer of American journalism.”

In Hollywood, Communist writers portrayed North Korea as a peaceful, democratic country struggling to defend itself against the evil United States. Stalinist screenwriter Lester Cole, one of Hollywood Ten, praised North Korean cinema in his 1981 memoir Hollywood Red.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germanic Umma A Germany with a new purpose and new faith. Michael Finch

Posted By on June 22nd, 2017

Germany will be Islamic in about two decades. The process by which this happens and the results of this transformation will be consequential beyond measure, not just for Europe, but for the world. And Germany’s acceptance of Islam as its national religion will be peaceful and seamless. In making this prediction, I am certainly not alone; many books are being written about the fall of Europe. Yet while many assume this is the “end” of Europe, that the wave of Islamic immigration and migration will cause a collapse,. I am not so certain.

Europe is not “dying.” Western Civilization as we have known it for two millenniums is dying, but Europe as a grouping of over 700 million people with technology and economies that match America and China is far from dying.

Germany, a little over 70 years after the utter destruction of the Third Reich and Hitler’s dream of ruling Europe, is now the dominant European power. The Wehrmacht may not be blitzkrieging its way through France and Poland anymore, but Germany does rule Europe. We call Europe weak, old and dying. Maybe someday, but Germany, at this point in time, is none of those things. Possessing the fourth largest economy in the world, with its exports and manufacturing, its education system and workforce, Germany’s financial might is anyone’s envy. Berlin is the de facto European capital.

But despite the past decades of progress and the build-up of technology, Western Europe is racked with guilt; a bloody century that left tens of millions of dead will do that to a continent and a civilization. WWI itself seemed to pull the cord out of what remained of Christian Europe. By the time of the Armistice, Christendom had collapsed. With the breakup of the Royal Empires came the guilt of colonialism, imperialism, and the shadow cast by the “white man’s burden” loomed large over European culture. And that is just Western Europe. What specifically of Germany?

The culture and the nation that gave the world so much wonder and beauty had been betrayed by its own hubris. The culture of Bach, Goethe, Beethoven and Schiller became the nation of Hitler and the SS and the death of over 11 million in the camps, 6 million of them Jews. The horror of Auschwitz, the vision of the camps, the death pallor will hang over Germany, and Germans, forever.

Christianity, which died on the fields of Flanders in the First War, utterly failed Germany. Yes, there were the Bonhoeffers and thousands more Christian martyrs that died in the camps at the hands of the Nazis, but on the whole, the churches, Lutheran and Catholic alike, share in the nation’s guilt. The Lutheran Church of old Prussia, in particular, acquiesced and was silent, its head bowed in forever shame.