RUTHFULLY YOURS

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL: KATHRYN LEE BATES 1913

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern impassion’d stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America! May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev’ry gain divine!

O Beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Revolutions are not unique. Some countries have revolutions all the time until revolution becomes their national sport. In banana republics the overthrow of one dictator to make way for another gives everyone a day off from work.

These revolutions, no matter how they are cloaked in the familiar rhetoric of liberty, are nothing more than tyranny by other means.

What made the American Revolution unique was that its cause was not the mere transfer of power from one ruler to another or one system to another, but a fundamental transformation of the nature of rule.

Every revolution claims to be carried out in the name of the people, but it’s never the people who end up running things.

The Declaration of Independence did more than talk about the rights of the people. It placed the people at the center of the nation and its government, not as an undifferentiated mass to be harnessed for whatever propaganda purposes they might be good for, but as individuals with hopes and dreams.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That is not merely some bland reference to a mass of people. There is no collective here, only the individual. The greater good of independence is not some system that will meet with the approval of the mass, but that will make it possible for the individual, each individual, to live a free life, not a life lived purely for the good of the mass, but for his own sake.

In a time when government mandates what you can eat and how much of it, only one of the ways it seeks to regulate every aspect of daily life for the greater good– the declaration that started it all declares that the purpose of government is not social justice, a minimally obese population, universal tolerance or even equality. Equality is acknowledged as a fact, not as a goal.

For Gustav Niebuhr, a former religion reporter with The New York Times, last month’s decision by the Presbyterian Church (USA) to divest from companies that do business with Israel is an affront — both spiritual and personal.

The nephew of famed Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr — once described by Barack Obama as “one of my favorite philosophers” — is fighting back against what he sees as a misguided take on Israel and an attack on his great uncle.

The Jewish community was also taken aback — and angered — by the national Presybterian organization’s approval of the divestment, which narrowly passed with a 310-303 vote after a decade of similar efforts and earlier this year, the release of a controversial document.

In “Zionism Unsettled,” a study guide published by a national committee of the Presbyterian Church that blames the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “on pathology inherent in Zionism,” the authors attack not only the Jewish state, but also its supporters — including Reinhold Nie­buhr.

Niebuhr was one of the most prominent theologians in America until his death in 1971 and a close friend of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a leading Jewish thinker. But the study guide casts him in a different light. It accuses him of “moral blindness” in supporting the Jewish state and ignoring the plight of Palestinians.

“To call him ‘morally blind’ is really just disgraceful,” said Gustav Niebuhr, who is Presbyterian and a professor of religion at Syracuse University. Also, “it’s just not true.”

In response, Niebuhr is working with Presbyterian clergy and laypeople around the United States — including at least one minister in Philadelphia — to mend ties with the Jewish community. He is also helping draft a full-page advertisement to run in The New York Times on behalf of Presbyterians who oppose the divestment.

Niebuhr was 16 when his great-uncle died, and remembered him as a “kind older relative” who lived on the Upper West Side. But much of his connection to the prominent theologist came later, reading his books and what others had written about him. Toward the end of Reinhold’s life, as his health declined after several strokes, he took almost daily walks with Heschel.

“These walks, ordered by the doctor for Reinhold’s health, when in the company of Abraham, became times of exchange and refreshment,” his widow, Ursula Niebuhr, said in a 1983 speech delivered at the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota. “It was no wonder to me that these two friends found each other so congenial, not only in this shared universe of discourse, but also in their dependence upon and reference to the Hebrew prophets.”

Go into any Jewish community in the United States these days and spend a few hours talking to people. At a certain point in the conversation, at least one person will bring up Ari Shavit’s bestselling book, My Promised Land.

Mention of the book will arouse great enthusiasm. Invariably, a prominent member of the group will say, with utter conviction, and to the nods of all present, “I think that Shavit’s book should be required reading for all American Jewish students.”

The most illustrious American Jewish writers and editors today are all but unanimous in their praise for Shavit’s book, which they proclaim is an “epic,” account of Israel.

As Martin Kramer wrote this week in the online journal Mosaic, “the last ‘epic’ account of [Israel’s birth in] 1948 to seize the imagination of its Jewish and non-Jewish readers,” as Shavit’s has done was Leon Uris’s Exodus, published in 1958.

Uris’s book was an inspirational, historical fiction that told the story of Israel’s birth. Decades of American Jewish readers were profoundly influenced by the narrative. Ask any American Jew over the age of 35 who made aliyah if he read Uris’s Hollywood-style account of the Zionist revolution. The answer is almost always affirmative.

Like Exodus, Shavit’s My Promised Land has been a runaway success. As Kramer noted, Shavit has been embraced by the Jewish establishment’s celebrity intellectuals – sharing stages with New Yorker editor David Remnick, and Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg. He’s been kvelled over by Tom Friedman and Franklin Foer from The New Republic.

Shavit got marquis billing at the AIPAC policy conference in Washington in March, and has been feted by the Jewish Federations and the most affluent synagogues in America.

Unlike Exodus, which is a fictional account of Israel’s founding, Shavit insists that his narrative is the undisputed truth. As Foer put it in his blurb an on the back cover, Shavit’s book is an, “epic history . . . full of moral complexity . . . mind-blowing, trustworthy insights.”

Diana West was attacked on American Thinker by two columnists who, in their own words “did not read the book” .

CLARICE FELDMAN WEIGHS IN ON DIANA WEST WITHOUT HAVING READ THE BOOK!!!! SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/demagogic_writers_and_the_people_who_love_them.html

“This week I’m making an exception in highlighting the imbroglio between Ron Radosh, an historian whose knowledge of the American Communist party and the McCarthy era is unmatched, and Diana West, author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on our Nation’s Character. I’m doing so, not to attack West whose work I have not read, but to point out the dangers of demagogic writers — everywhere on the political spectrum and the emotional bonds their fans form with them. ”
ANOTHER “REVIEW” OF DIANA WEST BY RON CAPSHAW-SOMEONE WHO HAS NOT READ THE BOOK !!!!

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/the_beginning_of_wisdom.html

“I haven’t read West (I do intend to), but from the scuttlebutt and reviews circulating the internet, it is fairly apparent that she is a reckless historian of the McCarthy school of history. This, Ron Radosh is not. Unlike the conspiratorial school, populated on the left by Oliver Stone, and onthe right by West, Radosh dares to take a complex view of history. He is grown up enough to realize that both Hiss was guilty and McCarthy was a reckless demagogue; that the blacklist was wrong and that the Hollywood Ten were selective civil libertarians.”

Furthermore, the shrill and unbecoming attacks from Radosh, Horowitz, Conrad Black were deflected by Vladimir Bukovsky with the strongest defense of West and her work…..rsk

“With the publication of my second book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, I am looking forward to a vigorous debate about my findings,” Diana West wrote when the book was released.

What followed was not exactly what she had in mind.

On August 9, 2013, after the book had received largely glowing reviews and endorsements from conservative writers, Frontpage Magazine published a blistering attack by Ronald Radosh, “McCarthy on Steroids.” The review questioned not only the author’s conclusions, but her competence.

This kicked off the nastiest internecine conflict on the right in recent memory, pitting, in the eyes of their adversaries, supine “court historians” against wild-eyed “yellow journalists.” Embroiled in the controversy were, among others, two groups of individuals who, in some cases, had been barely aware of each other — critics of Islam and writers on Soviet subversion in the U.S. in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Concerned about the “decline in patriotic feeling and civic engagement” in present day America, editors Amy A. Kass, Leon R. Kass and Diana Schaub have compiled a thought-provoking anthology entitled What so Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song. It is a particularly timely item.

If nothing else, I have to thank the 44th President because without his total disregard for the United States Constitution, I would never have begun the exhilarating process of becoming a more informed American.

Thus, I came across the words of a true leader — President Abraham Lincoln.

On January 27, 1838 in an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, a young politician by the name of Abraham Lincoln expressed his concern that “Americans were increasingly inclined to take the law into their own hands” and were “substituting vigilante justice for the justice of the law.” Entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” it speaks to the “reverence for the Constitution and the laws” something which this present administration and members of both political parties have forgotten.

Lincoln was concerned about the consequences of such actions.

Obama incites people to lose their temper. He understands that embedded in the word danger is the word anger and as he continues to put us in danger, he is counting on our anger taking front and center stage. The more Obama goads the people, the more he hopes we will make his self-fulfilling prophecy of a defeated America come true.

Consider, for example, that this White House, under the pseudo-guise of compassion, actually advertised for escort services for unaccompanied alien children to pour into the southern border of America. Narcotics smuggling, human trafficking and possible terrorist infiltration constitute this brewing cauldron. Diseases that American doctors have not seen in years are beginning to appear, and now states have to shoulder the financial hardships as these children are shipped to various locales.

It certainly does not take much imagination to understand the seething anger that people experience because of this deliberate usurpation of the law by Obama. Righteous resentment is building.

And it was exactly this that Lincoln was concerned about when he asserted that:

By its own admission, the Arab world loves death more than it loves life.

Consider that “during all periods of their history, the ancient Egyptians seem to have spent much of their time thinking of death and making provisions for their afterlife. The vast size … and the ubiquity of their funerary monuments bear testimony to this obsession.”

Consider that the Palestinian world teaches its children to embrace shahid, or martyrdom. It is an aberrant culture where parents celebrate their own children’s deaths by the promotion of suicide terrorism.

Consider that these suicide/homicide bombers are taught that death will bring them sexual pleasure. Thus, “[s]hahada or death for Allah mandates Muslims to aspire to die in combat for Islam … where the most prominent reward are the ’72 dark-eyed virgins in Paradise.'”

Consider the partying and exuberance of the Palestinian world when hearing of the 9-11 attacks and the deaths of 3,000 Americans of all races and religions.

Consider the recent three-finger salute among the Arabs and handing out of candy regarding the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenage boys.

Consider that Islamic jihadists have no problem with using children as shields in their fight against the infidel.

Which makes one wonder how Barack Hussein Obama could maintain that “Allah is supreme, Allah is supreme, Allah is supreme, Allah is supreme. I witness that there is no god but Allah” is “one of the prettiest sounds on earth.” It is not the “Stars and Stripes” nor “America the Beautiful” that he cites. It is the call to prayer for a “culture of death,” as affirmed by Pope Francis’s secretary, Father Yoannis Lahzi Gaido, an Egyptian Christian Copt who speaks fluent Arabic.

In fact, Obama, the president of the United States, smiles when Bergdahl’s father recites the Arabic prayer intimating the caliphate capture of land.