RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ebola arrived in New York last week, as officials announced Thursday night that Craig Spencer, a physician who’d recently returned from a Doctors Without Borders volunteer mission in Guinea, had developed symptoms after returning to the city. Spencer is receiving treatment at Bellevue Hospital; his fiancee, who is thus far asymptomatic, is under quarantine at the couple’s Harlem apartment.
At the press conference, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of Spencer: “He was familiar with the possibility and the circumstances, so he handled himself accordingly.” The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber, in a Friday piece, disagreed: “This is clearly not true. Despite the fact that Dr. Spencer presented a miniscule [sic] risk to anyone around him when he decided to ride the subway, go bowling, and frolic at the High Line Park on Wednesday, he obviously should not have been out and about.”

Scheiber thinks the falsehood was deliberate. Yet “having said all that,” he writes, “I kinda think Cuomo et al were right to lie last night”:

The big problem these officials faced in the aftermath of the Spencer news was massive public anxiety. . . . In this context, publicly calling out Dr. Spencer for his failure to self-quarantine could have turned into its own minor disaster. . . . Had they taken the additional step of criticizing Spencer for not isolating himself beforehand, you can imagine that dominating the headlines, drowning out most of what they said, and generally contributing to the very panic they were trying to defuse. . . . Far better to play it cool while, behind the scenes, making sure any health worker who’s recently returned from the affected African countries has a month’s supply of Stouffer’s in his freezer and a complimentary Netflix subscription.

So one cheer for lying, Mr. and Mrs. Public Official.

My family was from Poland and I speak Polish rather fluently…..This sentence is dead wrong and ridiculous “It was the Poles alone who armed the Jewish underground during the war and did more than any other nation in Europe to try to save European Jewry. ”

Calling the relationship “desperately complicated” is putting lipstick on a pig. It is a dreadful history of Polish complicity in the murder of two thirds of world Jewry. But, and here is a big but….Polish youth is astonishing….having overthrown the shackles of Communism they revel in capitalist freedom; while they eschew too much talk about their role in the Holocaust, it is amazing how many boast of having had a Jew in the family- many going as far as wearing Jewish stars; they respect and admire Israel; some even bemoan the “Jewish brain drain” that has left Poland without great advances in science, medicine and technology. Unlike Hungary there is no seriously anti-Semitic political party in Poland. The media is generally very pro-Israel….History is clear but the present is “complicated .” rsk

Capturing a ‘desperately complicated’ history in a new museum, one that is also a warning to Europe.

Warsaw

The translucent green building lights up the working-class neighborhood of Muranów. Its glass exterior reflects the trees from a park and shabby Communist-era apartment blocks nearby. A memorial to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising stands outside. The architectural boldness of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is matched by its intentions.

The opening of the museum’s core exhibition on Tuesday, coming 10 days ahead of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is a fitting tribute to the possibilities of freedom in Europe.

What is most remarkable is that this institution ever came to be. To utter the phrase “Polish-Jewish relations” is a provocation. Poland is the world’s largest Jewish graveyard. Before Hitler perpetrated the Holocaust mostly on its soil, for half a millennium Poland was Europe’s largest Jewish sanctuary. Four in five American Jews and nine in 14 world-wide trace their roots back to Poland. Everything else is debatable, and these debates inevitably bring out the passions and misunderstandings of the worst family quarrels.

The relationship between the Obama administration and the government of Israel is beginning to look like one of those longtime marriages you encounter all the time. Maybe you’re in one yourself. He feels, Rodney Dangerfield-like, that he gets no respect. She’d be happy to offer some—if only she could find something to respect.

The solution is a trial separation. Give this couple time apart to figure out what, if anything, still draws them together.

The latest eruption of pettiness—when marriages are in trouble, it’s always the petty things that tell—was the very public refusal of John Kerry and Joe Biden to meet with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon during his visit to Washington last week. Mr. Yaalon was quoted earlier this year saying some impolitic things about the U.S. secretary of state, including that he was “obsessive and messianic” and that “the only thing that can save us is if Kerry wins the Nobel Prize and leaves us alone.”

The comments were made privately but were leaked to the press. Mr. Yaalon apologized for them. His meeting with Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon last week was all smiles. Asked by the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth about the Kerry kerfuffle, he replied, “We overcame that.”

Or not.

It would be interesting to know which Arab leaders are telling US Secretary of State John Kerry that the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians is “a cause of recruitment” to Islamic State.

Is that something he is hearing from Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani? The Qatari leader, whose kingdom has been cited by the US Treasury Department as a major funder of Islamic State (IS), is certainly one of Kerry’s favorite regional leaders.

If Thani did blame Israel for the rise of IS, then his statement would constitute yet another instance of the double game Qatar has been playing with the Americans. On the one hand, the regime is financing jihad, and other the other hand, it pretends to side with the West against the jihad that it is funding.

This is certainly the case in Jerusalem.

According to an investigative report published Friday in Yisrael Hayom , Qatar is financing the violence in the capital. Veteran Jerusalem affairs reporter Nadav Shragai wrote that the Islamic rioters who daily attack Jewish visitors and police forces on the Temple Mount are paid by Qatar through the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement.

The Qatari government and other Islamic funds are transferring vast sums of money to the Islamic Movement’s radical northern branch headed by Sheikh Ra’ed Salah. The Islamic Movement in turn is paying thousands of shekels every month to hundreds of women and men, mainly Muslim Israeli citizens, who call themselves the Murbitat.

The Murbitat presents itself as an Islamic prayer group, but according to Shragai, the group’s job is to harass Jews and police on the Temple Mount. They scream and curse at Jewish visitors and in recent months have escalated their violence against them, and their police escorts. These violent attacks include assaults with rocks, firebombs and firecrackers.

Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter said that if the public referendum were permitted to proceed, it would give the anti-mosque campaign “a democratic veneer, which we want to avoid.”

In late 2013, the proposed mosque was given a new name, the Munich Forum for Islam, apparently in an effort to dispel growing public unease about the mosque’s broader ambitions.

Anti-mosque activists say that the enforcers of multiculturalism in Bavaria have determined that the mosque project will proceed, even if it requires bypassing the democratic process.

“By stopping the vote from going ahead, the City Council is preventing your opinion from being abused by the anti-democratic goals of extremists.” — The Munich Forum for Islam.

A court in Bavaria, the largest state in Germany, has reaffirmed that it is lawful for the government to spy on citizens who are opposed to the construction of a controversial mega-mosque in Munich.

The ruling effectively quashes a lawsuit filed by anti-mosque activists who argue that state surveillance is an intimidation tactic aimed at silencing public opposition to the mosque.

The ruling comes just days after another court in Bavaria ordered a leading anti-mosque campaigner to pay a hefty fine for “defaming” Islam after he repeatedly warned that Islam is incompatible with democracy.

Meanwhile, Munich city officials have announced that a public referendum on the mosque—now known as the Munich Forum for Islam—will not be allowed to take place, even though anti-mosque activists have gathered twice the number of signatures needed to allow local citizens to determine if the mosque should be built.

Anti-mosque activists say the recent actions show that the enforcers of multiculturalism in Bavaria have determined that the mosque project will proceed, even if it requires bypassing the democratic process, and that public opposition to the project will be silenced, even it if entails trampling on the constitutional right to free speech.

On October 18, the Munich-based Administrative Court of Bavaria (Verwaltungsgericht) ruled that it is lawful for the Bavarian branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), to continue spying on anti-mosque activists.

Why is it that Democrats see Republican women, especially those in public life, as not women? The answer has to do with the fact that to Democrats those women don’t meet their preconceptions as to what a woman should be. To a Democrat, a woman politician who does not see other women as “victims,” and who does not first proclaim for abortion rights and gender equality, fails to meet their test, no matter her opinion on other issues. But Democrats’ insistence that Republicans are at war with women also suggests a politically correct world that is unraveling.

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” is a truism, in politics as well as in war. With Democrats facing headwinds, such as scandals, a dysfunctional foreign policy, an underemployed labor force, increased income inequality and an Ebola scare, all of which result from incompetency in the White House and a mendacious Senate leader to whom the ends are worth whatever the means entail. Democrats are desperate to find any policy that might incite their side. The result is the fictitious accusation that Republicans have declared “war” on women. Senator Mark Udall of Colorado has pushed so hard on this issue, he is now known as Senator “Mark Uterus.”

Nevertheless, I believe most Democrats, in spite of the priggish and condescending way they sometimes come across, are perfectly normal – perhaps a little foolish, but not paranoid, as are so many of their political leaders. I have many Democrat friends who are civil and reasonable. Most acknowledge that women are as intelligent and capable as men, and don’t need the pampering some politicians believe they require. Most recognize and, in fact, applaud those unique characteristics that make women different than men. It is when politicians make up issues about gender inequality that my Democrat friends begin to sound defensive, dated and, frankly, idiotic.

Republicans are more likely to look past the gender (as well as color and race) to the individual. When a Republican woman is elected to public office it has nothing to do with her womanhood and everything to do with her ideas. Not so with Democrats, where gender comes first. Using the analogy of a book, it is the cover that interests Democrats, not the contents. And, it is not just women they patronize; it is anyone who can be portrayed as a victim – gays, Hispanics, African-Americans, as well as women.

ANTI SEMITISM IN FRANCE? SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

In France, Leon Blum was the first Jewish, Socialist Prime Minister of France (4 June 1936 – 22 June 1937) and again briefly (13 March 1938 – 10 April 1938).

When the Germans occupied France in June 1940, Blum A well known and “respected” socialist leader escaped to southern France,where the French ordered his arrest. First he was imprisoned in Fort du Portalet in the Pyrenees and held until 1942, when he was put on trial in the Riom Trial on charges of treason. The Kangaroo court accused him of having “weakened France’s defenses” by ordering arms shipped to Spain, leaving France’s infantry unsupported by heavy artillery on the eastern front against Nazi Germany. To his credit he delivered a brilliant indictment[of the French military and pro-German politicians like Pierre Laval and the trial was canceled but he was turned over to the Germans and imprisoned until 1945

In April 1943, he was imprisoned in Buchenwald as a “high ranking prisoner” but when the Allied armies approached Buchenwald, he was transferred to Dachau, near Munich, and in late April 1945, together with other notable inmates, to Tyrol.

In the last weeks of the war the Nazi regime gave orders that he was to be executed. Blum was rescued by Allied troops in May 1945.

His brother René, the founder of the Ballet de l’Opéra à Monte Carlo, was arrested in Paris in 1942. He was deported to Auschwitz where, according to the Vrba-Wetzler report, he was tortured and killed in April 1943.

There was no Emile Zola to accuse, and the French public barely noticed.

And today French Moslems are driving the anti-Semitism….but les enfants de la patrie don’t give a merde.

But a number of working-class French Jews don’t care

A few weeks before this summer’s eruption of violence in Israel and against the Jews of Paris, I attended a dinner of mostly secular young Jews at a private home in a well-to-do Parisian suburb. Graduates of the country’s elite educational institutions, they were now, in their late twenties or early thirties, well launched on sterling careers in industry, politics, and the French civil service. The mood was jovial, the food and wine superb, the air thick with insider political gossip. Cultivated and public-service minded, the group seemed to personify the opportunities open to individual Jews in France’s national life today.

And yet, as this was a private event where Jews met other Jews, conversation inevitably turned without prompting to the “situation.” While this entailed oblique acknowledgements of “difficulties” for Jews in particular, the company tended to submerge these in the wider national malaise. “Over the last decades our institutions have eroded, and people have really very little in which to believe,” one defense-ministry official suggested. “These young men, immigrants or not, isolated in their small apartments—looking out, they see the Jews, surrounded by family and friends on the High Holy Days, and they get jealous and enraged.”

The implication? Strengthen the economy, revive French political life, and the problem of anti-Semitism will be solved or at least attenuated. A young economist went further. Referring to Jews by the absurd 19th-century designation “français de confession israélite” (as if one’s Judaism were reducible to where one said “confession”), he averred that France was “not at all anti-Semitic, no matter how many times Americans say so. We have problems of integration, of growth. But aside from a small minority, no one pays attention to your religion. It poses no obstacles.”

I do wonder whether the ensuing events of this past summer, so ably and grimly described by Robert Wistrich in “Summer in Paris,” have shaken the complacency of this economist. But despite the almost unbelievable myopia displayed by him and others that evening on the issue of anti-Semitism, one can at least partially sympathize with their diagnosis of the overall French condition. As Michel Gurfinkiel notes in “The Ferment that Feeds Anti-Semitism in France,” his response to Wistrich, the violence against Jews that erupted over the summer is a product not only or not simply of Muslim immigrant rage but of broader and deeper failures.

4 Reasons Jews Shouldn’t Fear Moving to Israel

Israel is becoming a more and more popular place for Jews to live. When I made aliyah (a word that means “ascent” or “Jewish immigration to Israel”) from the U.S. in 1984, the Jewish population stood at around three million; today it has doubled to over six million and is the largest Jewish community in the world. The huge rise comes from both natural growth and immigration. Jews who are already here vote “yes” by having the Western world’s highest fertility rates; many Jews who were living elsewhere have been coming here.

And now it turns out that the rate of yerida (a word that means “descent” or “Jewish emigration from Israel”) is at an all-time low—yes, even in this era of globalization, and with some Israelis loudly complaining about high prices here. The Jerusalem Post reports:

In 2012…the number of émigrés—people who left Israel and stayed abroad for over a year—went down to 15,900, the lowest since the establishment of the state….

Nearly a quarter of them had returned to the country or reported a planned return date as of April 2014.

Most of those who left the country were not born in Israel, and 25 percent of them are not Jewish. Many had moved to Israel from the former Soviet Union since 1990.

And the New York Times adds that

Sergio DellaPergola, a leading [Israeli] demographer, said emigration was actually lower now than at any time in Israel’s 66-year history, and also lower than in comparably developed countries. Far more people left Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, when inflation skyrocketed….

She is already lawyered up and planning a suit….The Sandra Fluke of the Ebola crisis…she will probably be invited to the next Democratic Convention….rsk

READ:http://online.wsj.com/articles/nurse-detained-in-new-jersey-for-ebola-calls-conditions-really-inhumane-1414352575?KEYWORDS=kaci+ebola+nurse

Norman Siegel, a prominent civil rights attorney in New York City, said he planned to file a lawsuit to lift the order keeping Kaci Hickox, a 33-year-old Doctors Without Borders nurse, under quarantine.

I read this account of Kaci Hickox, a nurse for Doctors without Borders who returned from West Africa and was placed in quarantine as a result of the new policy adopted by New Jersey, with a growing sense of outrage and disgust.

She says there’s “disorganization” and “fear.” She says people treated her “like a criminal.” She says she worries that other health workers returning from Africa will also be put upon.

The fact that all four cases of Ebola in America are directly connected to returning health care workers from Africa doesn’t seem to penetrate; that the routine screening done at the airport didn’t detect Ebola in either Thomas Duncan or Dr. Spencer. Hickox seems perfectly willing to take a chance that health care workers returning from Africa don’t have the disease and should be able to walk around freely while “self-monitoring” their condition.

What a brave woman — who takes chances with other people’s lives. I don’t care how small the chance of contagion is — it is the responsibility of authorities to bring the chance of anyone else getting sick as close to zero as humanly possible.

I arrived at the Newark Liberty International Airport around 1 p.m. on Friday, after a grueling two-day journey from Sierra Leone. I walked up to the immigration official at the airport and was greeted with a big smile and a “hello.”

I told him that I have traveled from Sierra Leone and he replied, a little less enthusiastically: “No problem. They are probably going to ask you a few questions.”