RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Rosenwald,” a documentary film about the early 20th-century philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, disappeared from theaters much too quickly after being released in August. An Academy Award nomination next month, when the honorees will be announced, may be a long shot for writer-director Aviva Kempner, but it would give the film the wider audience it deserves. It also would be a public service.

The Chicago-based Rosenwald, a son of German-Jewish immigrants, made his fortune in the early 1900s running Sears, Roebuck & Company when it was the nation’s largest retailer. The film’s main focus, however, is Rosenwald’s largely unsung philanthropic collaboration with Booker T. Washington, the former slave and black educator best known for his self-help philosophy and for training black teachers in the post-Civil War South. After Reconstruction ended, white backlash resulted in scarce funding for black public education in southern states, where nearly 90% of the black population lived. Washington therefore sought assistance from northern philanthropists like Rosenwald, who graciously obliged.

PARIS—Western security officials are struggling to respond to the threat that Islamic State can make authentic-looking Syrian and Iraqi passports, which could be used to hide operatives planning attacks in Europe or the U.S. among refugees.

Islamic State has likely obtained equipment and blank passport books needed to make Syrian passports when the group took control of the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour, those officials said. It has also gained control of materials to make Iraqi passports when it occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, a Belgian counterterrorism official disclosed for the first time.

But the near-absence of communication with the Syrian government means Western officials are lacking key information that could be used to identify the passports, according to a confidential analysis by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

If you believe Islam’s well-funded propaganda machine, as our latest PM professes to do, Arab scholars were advancing the frontiers of knowledge long before Newton emerged from his study. From flying machines to theoretical physics, the Koran inspired them all.
Islam is fighting a military and ideological battle that began some 300 years ago. The last decades of the 17th century mark the critical point of divergence of Western and Islamic civilizations, as one began its ascent and the other its decline. Central to this great shift in respective power was a pivotal military defeat and the Scientific Revolution. The implications of these events are still working themselves out in the realms of jihadi terrorism and propaganda about Islamic science, as Islam struggles to find a viable identity and role in the contemporary world.

In 1683 the Muslim Ottoman Empire besieged Vienna, in the very heartland of Europe. The Ottomans were a superpower that had long threatened to engulf the West. It had taken Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, in 1453, most of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, and had been seeking to capture Vienna for centuries, launching an earlier siege in 1529, during the height of the chaos in Europe caused by the Reformation. The city was of immense strategic value because of its control of the Danube basin and the trade routes throughout southern and central Europe. It had to be seized if the Ottomans were to fulfil their divine mission, conquer Europe, and bring the entire continent under the flag of Islam. Eventually, the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Holy League marched out to face the invaders, and the two immense armies plunged into battle on the flanks of the Kahlenberg Mountain near the city. Amidst enormous carnage, the battle was won by the Christian forces, preserving Christendom, and signalling the slow but remorseless decline of the Ottoman Empire that culminated with its demise, along with the Caliphate, or spiritual leadership of Islam, in 1922.

Meanwhile, 1250 kilometres away at Cambridge, Isaac Newton had commenced work on what would become his Principia Mathematica, which appeared in 1687. There is no argument that this was one of the most important works in the history of science, and, indeed, human history as a whole. Certainly, it was the creation of an immense intelligence that has possibly never been excelled; as Alexander Pope said of his contemporary:

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light”.

Along with pioneers like Galileo Galilei, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, and Francis Bacon, Newton established the principles of scientific method and penetrated through the misleading realm of everyday experience to identify and codify the underlying laws of nature and give them mathematical expression. Consequently, the Principia Mathematica and other work provided the theoretical basis for the Scientific Revolution and for the titanic technological and scientific advances that drove the Industrial Revolution, and the transformation of Western Civilization into a global power that would shape the modern world.