RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is not common knowledge, but Ayn Rand, the novelist/philosopher, described the means and ends of Sharia law, doubtless before she had ever heard of it. She died in 1982, but in one key chapter of The Fountainhead, her archvillain, Ellsworth Toohey, newspaper columnist and power-lusting gadabout, describes to Peter Keating, his protégé in destruction, what he wants to see happen to Howard Roark.

Roark is the architect-hero of the novel. He is scheduled to be tried for blowing up a public housing project. Toohey confronts Keating to obtain a key incriminating piece of evidence that Roark designed the project, not Keating. Roark’s plans were altered by a team of second-handers, which included Keating. Roark subsequently dynamited the half-finished project. Toohey bares his soul to Keating for the first time. Keating is frightened, understanding only now the charming, flattering, but dark motive behind Toohey’s friendship with him.

Keating: “Why do you want to kill Howard?”

Toohey: “I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped – and alive. He’ll get up when they tell him to. He’ll eat what they give him. He’ll move when he’s told to move and stop when he’s told. He’ll walk to the jute mill, when he’s told, and he’ll work as he’s told. They’ll push him, if he doesn’t move fast enough, and they’ll slap his face when they feel like it, and they’ll beat him with a rubber hose if he doesn’t obey. And he’ll obey. He’ll take orders. He’ll take orders!”*

Holidays are a calendar. They mark points in emotional and physical time. They remind of us who we are.

Many of those celebrating Chanukah celebrate a holiday that does nothing more than celebrate ‘celebration’, the rituals and rites of entertainment, a special food, a symbol whose meaning they don’t remember and a little family fun.

Chanukah is many things but it is not a safe holiday. It is a victory celebration in a guerrilla war. It is a reminder that Obama’s war on Jerusalem was preceded long before him by Antiochus’s war on Jerusalem. It is a brief light in a period of great darkness.

The great irony of Chanukah is that those likeliest to strip away its historical and religious meaning would have been fighting against the Macabees. The battle to preserve the meaning of Chanukah is part of the struggle to preserve the Jewish traditions and culture that the left attacks.

Today’s struggle for Jerusalem, for Judaism, for freedom of religion and a meaningful life continues that same old struggle of Chanukah.

The overt militarism of the Chanukah story has made it an uncomfortable fit for liberal Jews who found it easier to strip away its dangerous underlying message that a time comes when you must choose between the destruction of your culture and a war you can’t win. In those dark days a war must be fought if the soul of the nation is to survive.

There are worse things than death and slavery, the fate that waited for the Maccabees and their allies had they failed, the fates that came anyway when the last of the Maccabees were betrayed and murdered by Caesar’s Edomite minister, whose sons went on to rule over Israel as the Herodian dynasty.

“Get out!!” bellowed Quamisi, jumping up and overturning the coffee service, which tumbled off the desk and clattered to the rug, the pot’s contents spilling over the colors. .…”Get out, killer of my brother!!” Weakened with pent-up rage, Quamisi leaned with both arms on the desktop. “I will have you, and I will have that coin!!”

“Of course you will,” replied Fury. His expression had turned to mild contempt. “When the sun rises in the west.” Then he turned and left the room.

Excerpt from We Three Kings

My very first completed novel, finished sometime in the early 1970s on an Underwood manual typewriter, was a dystopian one, In the Land of the Pharaohs, set in the future in a New York City under the thumb of a fascist dictatorship. I don’t even recall the year I typed the last page of it. I managed to find representation for it by a literary agent, the late Oscar Collier, who was unable to interest a publisher in the novel. The story centered on the exploits of a homicide detective, Kenticott Coldiron, who eventually encounters a gang of patriots who raid the fortress-like Federal Reserve Bank in lower Manhattan and make off with its stash of gold bullion.

The gang’s headquarters were in an abandoned subway station. The story climaxed in a shootout between Coldiron and Treasury Agent Frank Vishonn in a disused subway car. Vishonn perishes, and the gang disappears, as does Coldiron. That gang was a predecessor of what would become the Skelly gang of patriotic but Crown-defying smugglers in Sparrowhawk. I remember few of the other characters’ names. I did, however, appropriate the name Vishonn for a Virginia planter in the Sparrowhawk series, and also Gramatan. The colonial Vishonn dies, too, and violently. I eventually disposed of the manuscript of Pharaohs, after I’d written my second detective novel, First Prize, as unworthy of further submission to publishers, although some fans claim to still have a copy.