RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-farce-of-the-nobel-peace-prize

Betraying the Nobel: The Secrets and Corruption Behind the Nobel Peace Prize

Unni Turrettini, with a foreword by Michael Nobel

Pegasus, pp. 304, £20

Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel Family Society for 15 years, Michael believes that the Nobel Peace Institute has betrayed the ‘original conditions of Alfred Nobel’s will and intentions’. Its selection process is ‘very sketchy’ and its committee of Norwegian parliamentarians reflects the balance of power in their parliament. Its awards follow ‘personal interests’, ‘political and national considerations’ and ‘human rights or global warming’, all of which have ‘little or nothing’ to do with Alfred Nobel’s bequest.

The Prize was a dynamite idea when it was founded in 1900. What better way to avoid war than to recycle the profits from explosives into an incentive scheme for perpetual peace? But, as Unni Turrettini describes in her efficient and quietly devastating account, the Peace Prize soon fell to secret horse-trading, moral grandstanding and what one Norwegian parliamentarian calls ‘the privatisation of foreign policy’.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish engineer who had stabilised nitroglycerine in 1863, began selling it to miners as ‘Safety Powder’ in 1867. Safety Powder created the St Gotthard tunnel through the Alps. It also killed Tsar Alexander II when assassins lobbed a dynamite-filled bomb at his carriage. Nobel died in San Remo in 1896, aged 63. Childless and unhappy — his mother had blocked a love match with Bertha Kinsky, an idealistic Russian countess — the ‘Dynamite King’ bequeathed annual prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and literature, to be administrated by apolitical Swedish institutions; the Karolinska Institute, a medical university, awards the medicine prize. A fifth, in memory of Bertha’s values, was to be granted by the Norwegian parliament.

https://www.city-journal.org/review-of-peter-woods-critique-of-1619-project

1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, by Peter W. Wood (Encounter Books, 272 pp., $28.99)

In August 2019, the New York Times magazine published the “1619 Project.” This series of essays and articles provided readers with many “facts” that they may not have known: that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery; that Abraham Lincoln was a racist; that America’s foundational premise was “slavocracy;” that present-day American wealth is a direct consequence of slavery; and that the essential pattern of our history is not one of unprecedented growth in freedom and democracy but institutional hatred and oppression of blacks.

If you were unfamiliar with these facts, there is good reason—none are true. As National Association of Scholars president Peter W. Wood reveals in 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, the larger purpose of the Times’s project appears to have been to promote racial grievances and resentment. Most damningly, Wood points out that a Times fact-checker who contacted a radical historian to weigh the claim that the revolution was fought to protect slavery was told that this was nonsense. But the paper ignored that input, and 1619’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, herself recently said that the project was not intended to serve as history (after nearly a year of claiming the opposite).

Wood’s 1620 is an extraordinary book. Readers looking for a polemic should be forewarned: it is a learned and thoughtful investigation of the topic, and Wood goes to considerable lengths to give a hearing to Hannah-Jones’s assertions. In doing so, he systematically demolishes all but one of them.

Wood makes a convincing case against the 1619 Project’s contention that Lincoln was a racist who was merely opposed to slavery’s cruelty. He acknowledges that Lincoln was a politician and, as such, capable of being quite guarded about his ultimate aims, thus making a definitive argument hard to present. So, while Wood concedes the well-known fact that Lincoln had a meeting with black leaders in 1862 to discuss repatriating freed blacks back to Africa, he points out that the president made the unusual and seemingly calculated gesture of inviting a reporter to attend. This suggests that it was for show, intended to allay concerns among some whites that he sought abolition and racial equality. Yet Wood notes that Lincoln had said that the Declaration of Independence’s phrase “all men are created equal” should actually include all men, and that he publicly and controversially endorsed a constitutional amendment for African-American voting at the end of his life.

https://tikvahfund.org/ajj-ebook/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIo_3i6fGM7gIVEPLICh1RsguOEAEYASAAEgIHjvD_BwE
One respected the Jews. One despised them. They both protected their religious liberty.

In July of 1776, a group of 56 men signed a document signifying the birth of a brand-new nation. This assembly of founders was seemingly in no way connected with the Jews, Judaism, or ancient Hebrew culture. But John Adams argued that Jewish concepts and principles permeate the framework of the American government — perhaps more than you might realize.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams disagreed on the contributions of the Jewish people — yet they protected the religious liberties of both Jew and Gentile. Why?

In this new e-book from the Tikvah Fund, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik examines Adams’ and Jefferson’s writings about the Jewish people, their teachings, and impact. With him you will explore:

How did the history, heritage, and practices of the Jewish people influence these two men and the foundation of our country?
How did the concepts of monotheism, morality, and divine intervention impact their thought?
Can the American Revolution be categorized as an achievement of Judaism?
What can this history teach us about the foundations and preservation of our religious liberty today?

Find out by reading Adams, Jefferson, and the Jews.

https://www.amazon.com/UNREPORTED-TRUTHS-ABOUT-COVID-19-LOCKDOWNS/dp/1953039103/ref=zg_bsnr_books_53?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=RBY8TCS8A4MX1CT3XESD

Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson offers all a combined version of three booklets in the controversial and best-selling Unreported Truths about Covid series – at one low price.Since the publication of the first booklet in June, Unreported Truths has offered an honest counterpart to over-the-top media coverage about the risks of the coronavirus and ways to stop it. Part 1 focused on the ways governments count and report Covid-19 deaths. Part 2 covered the history of lockdowns and the evidence that they work – or don’t. And Part 3 gave the same treatment to masks and mask mandates.All three booklets draw on primary sources like Centers for Disease Control reports, news articles, and scientific papers – and all three offer direct links to the material so that you the reader can judge it for yourself.With a quarter-million copies sold, Unreported Truths has become an independent journalism phenomenon. And as the fight over our response to Covid drags on, knowing the facts is more important than ever! Now, for the first time, all three booklets are available in a single package. Whether you are wondering about the series, have read one booklet but are interested in the others, or simply want them together for convenience, the Combined Edition offers fresh flexibility.With a new introduction!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/barack-obama-hates-israel-and-wants-you-hate-it-robert-spencer/

Great news: Barack Hussein Obama is now not only a Nobel laureate, but he has opened up a big lead among the presidents as the one with by far the most autobiographies. The marvelous narcissist now leads all other presidents who have written autobiographies by two, as he has written three, compared to a number of his peers who are tied at one. However, his latest one, A Promised Land, is more than just an update on the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the Most Undeservedly Celebrated Man on the Planet; it’s a full-on apologia for his policies as president, and a program for his impending third term, aka the Biden administration.

The weighty 768-page tome not only tells you more about His Wonderfulness than you ever thought you wanted to know; it also provides a potted Leftist history of Israel that abundantly illustrates how Leftists see our most reliable ally in the Middle East, and why they hate it with such focused laser-beam intensity.

Obama portrays Britain and then Israel as occupying powers in Palestine, without ever explaining who actually owned the land they were and are supposedly occupying. He makes no mention of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. As The Palestinian Delusion explains in detail, the Mandate directed the British to encourage “close settlement by Jews on the land” for “the establishment of the Jewish national home.” What gave the League the right to do such a thing? The dying Ottoman Empire had ceded Palestine to the League in 1918. Jews had lived in that land from time immemorial, and it was otherwise sparsely populated. It was a perfect place for the Jews who faced discrimination, harassment and worse in Europe and elsewhere to settle.

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) has always stood up for justice.  He has written a pamphlet book, Countdown to Socialism in the style of what Thomas Paine had distributed preceding the Revolutionary War. In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy, ringing the alarm for what was wrong and what needed to be done. Now, Congressman Nunes is warning Americans that something needs to be done before this country loses its morals and values.  American Thinker had the privilege of interviewing him.

In Chapter One, he wrote, “the Left has wholly rejected the fundamental principles that bound Americans together and allowed us to work out our differences democratically and peacefully. They now reject free speech, a fair voting system, private property, and the rule of law. They don’t dare yet admit it publicly, but as you’ll see in this book, their policies and rhetoric are incompatible with any of these principles as we understand them today.”

He explained in the book, “Socialist regimes tend to excel at propaganda. By necessity socialism is a resentful ideology that exploits and widens class conflict, racial strife, and other social cleavages, pitting countrymen against one another. Their proposals have one thing in common: they will increase the Democrats’ vote count. At both the state and national levels, they are working hard to fundamentally change the voting system by abolishing the Electoral College, greatly expanding mail-in voting, enfranchising felons, legalizing vote harvesting, lowering the voting age, and allowing current non-citizens to vote through mass amnesties and other means,” not to mention packing the Supreme Court by expanding it.

https://artsfuse.org/217348/book-review-from-left-to-right-the-story-of-holocaust-historian-lucy-s-dawidowicz/

This biography of Lucy S. Dawidowicz performs the invaluable function of gathering relevant documents and drafting a narrative that rescues a fascinating historian from oblivion. But it does not add much to the history of the New York intellectuals.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff. Wayne State University Press, 538 pp., $34.99.

There were several reasons I wanted to read a biography of historian and public intellectual Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990). First, From Left to Right is yet another piece of the extensive feminist project of writing overlooked women back into history. Set mainly in 20th-century Manhattan among the New York Jews who then dominated its intellectual life, From Left to Right foregrounds a wren against a background of peacocks such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz — all male, with the notable exceptions of the formidable Hannah Arendt and Diana Trilling.

I was also interested in many particular facets of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s life. As a girl, Lucy Schildkret was a graduate, like Cynthia Ozick and Hortense Calisher (and later Elena Kagan and Avril Haines), of Hunter College High School — the only American public school for intellectually gifted girls. After school, she pursued a Yiddish-language education at the secular nonpolitically-affiliated Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. She graduated from Hunter College in 1936 and began a Master’s program in English literature at Columbia University, but dropped out after two weeks. She eventually obtained a Master’s in history but not a PhD.

Like many other intellectually gifted women of her generation, Dawidowicz would spend far too many years — the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — working out of public view as a secretary, translator, or researcher for men whose publications rarely acknowledged her in print. Finally, in 1967, at the age of 52, she published her own book, a massive anthology of primary sources titled The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, and was hired to teach at Yeshiva University’s all-female Stern College, where she created one of the first courses in what is now called Holocaust Studies.

https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Down-Harbor-Aboard-Arizona/dp/0316560529/r

A deeply personal and never-before-told account of one of America’s darkest days, from the bestselling author of The Admirals and MacArthur at War.

The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 remains one of the most traumatic events in American history. America’s battleship fleet was crippled, thousands of lives were lost, and the United States was propelled into a world war. Few realize that aboard the iconic, ill-fated USS Arizona were an incredible seventy-nine blood relatives. Tragically, in an era when family members serving together was an accepted, even encouraged, practice, sixty-three of the Arizona’s 1,177 dead turned out to be brothers.

In Brothers Down, acclaimed historian Walter R. Borneman returns to that critical week of December, masterfully guiding us on an unforgettable journey of sacrifice and heroism, all told through the lives of these brothers and their fateful experience on the Arizona. Weaving in the heartbreaking stories of the parents, wives, and sweethearts who wrote to and worried about these men, Borneman draws from a treasure trove of unpublished source material to bring to vivid life the minor decisions that became a matter of life or death when the bombs began to fall. More than just an account of familial bonds and national heartbreak, what emerges promises to define a turning point in American military history.