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How Hinduism Has Persisted for 4,000 Years With no compulsory dogmas, the religion can reinvent itself over and over. By Shashi Tharoor

By on January 18th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-hinduism-has-persisted-for-4-000-years-11547770953

The word “Hindu” denotes more than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages, French and Persian among them, the word for Indian is Hindu. Originally foreigners used it when referring to the people beyond the Indus River, which is now in Islamic Pakistan. In fact, the word Hindu did not exist in any Indian language until its use by outsiders gave Indians a term for self-definition. Many Hindus, in other words, call themselves by a label that they didn’t invent but adopted cheerfully.

“Hinduism,” then, is the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices—from pantheism to agnosticism, from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. Yet none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu. We have no compulsory dogmas.

The religion is predicated on the idea that the eternal wisdom of the ages and of divinity cannot be confined to a single sacred book. While others might look to the heavens to find God, the Hindu looks within himself. There is no Hindu pope, no Hindu Vatican, no Hindu catechism, not even a Hindu Sunday. Hinduism does not oblige the adherent to demonstrate his faith by any visible sign. Instead Hinduism offers a smorgasbord of options to the worshiper: of divinities to adore and to pray to, of rituals to observe, of customs and practices to honor, of fasts to keep. Hinduism allows believers to stretch their imaginations to personal notions of the creative Godhead.

The Hindu texts operate from a platform of skepticism, not a springboard of certitude. The 3,500-year-old Rig Veda—in its creation hymn, “Nasadiya Sukta”—wonders about the mysteries of creation. It concludes, “In the highest heaven, only He knows—or perhaps He does not know.” Not even what one might think of as the most basic tenet of any religion, a belief in the existence of God, is a prerequisite: Agnosticism is a key principle of at least one major school of Hindu philosophy.

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Arbor Day (Tu Bishvat) Guide for the Perplexed, 2019

By on January 18th, 2019

1. The Jewish Arbor Day, Tu Bishvat (ט”ו בשבט) highlights human gratitude for the creation of the fruit-bearing trees. Jewish tradition stipulates a one-sentence-blessing before consuming any fruit.

2. The centrality of trees is reflected by the date of Tu Bishvat, which is during the week when Jews commemorate the receipt of the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), including the Ten Commandments (Exodus chapters 13-17).

3. Tu Bishvat (the 15th day of the month of Shvat – full moon, just like the holidays of Passover, Tabernacles, Purim) is one of the four Jewish New Years:

*The first day of the Jewish month of Nissan – the month of Passover, the Exodus from Egypt and the birth of the Jewish people.

*The first day of the Jewish month of Elul – the tithing of cattle during the days of the ancient Temple.

*The first day of the Jewish month of Tishrei – Rosh Hashanah.

*Tu Bishvat, the 15th day of the Jewish month of Shvat (January 21, 2019), whose zodiac is Aquarius (water bucket in Hebrew, דלי), is the New Year of the trees, highlighting the rejuvenation of trees. The cold, rainy season is winding down, sap starts to rise and fruit begins to ripen. Israel’s Legislature (the Knesset) was established on Tu Bishvat 1949.

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The Golan Heights mean more than security for Israel Not just for Israeli security, but for Biblical and Ancestral Jewish Sovereignty, the Golan Heights must be recognized as Israeli territory by the US. Victor Sharpe

By on January 11th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23280

On Sunday, January 5th, 2019, Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, requested visiting U.S. National Security Advisor, John Bolton, to seek Washington’s long delayed recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. In doing so Netanyahu stressed the vital security importance of the Heights. He told Bolton that, “When you are there, you’ll be able to understand perfectly why we will never leave the Golan Heights and why it is important that all countries recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.”

Indeed, those of us who have stood on the Golan’s 1,700 foot steep escarpment, are struck by its immense strategic value overlooking Israel’s fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp shaped lake below, called in Hebrew, Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) because of its unique shape.

Syria had occupied it for 44 years during which time no agriculture of any significance or restoration of its terrain ever took place. Instead, the Golan was a Syrian army artillery encampment whose sole purpose was to deliberately rain down an endless barrage of shells upon Israeli farmers, fishermen and villagers .

Israel’s liberation of the Golan in 1967 has lasted 52 years. Ask yourself then, who has possessed the Golan the longest and who has millennial historic, religious, Biblical and post-Biblical attachment to it? And it is that last reference to the ancestral and Biblical attachment to the Golan that must be included as an imperative and crucial component of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s claim.

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60 Years On: Reflections on the Revolution in Cuba written by Jorge C. Carrasco

By on January 8th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/01/07/60-years-on-reflections-on-the-

Sixty years ago, as thousands of Cubans celebrated the fall of Fulgencio Batista’s regime, an atmosphere of hype and hatred was also overtaking Havana. Not many people foresaw what was to come, but on January 1, 1959, the Republic of Cuba was murdered. Few tears were shed for her at the time—some were too busy desperately packing their bags, while others were preoccupied with burning cars and smashing storefront windows. The institutions not destroyed by the previous dictatorship were savagely dismembered in the following months and years by the Castro regime. Cuba’s National Congress would never again return to session in the National Capitol building (or anywhere else, for that matter). Christmas, bars and cabaret clubs, independent trade unions, religious schools, private clubs, large and small businesses, any and all vestiges of what was Cuba before communism—all of these were destroyed, expropriated, or otherwise expunged from the lives and minds of the Cuban people.

The Cuban Revolution never disguised its contempt for the greatest symbol of the Republican era: Havana itself. The Havana Hilton hotel was renamed, and the city’s glorious buildings, beautiful parks, grand mansions, statues, theatres, and museums were all deemed too bourgeois and ostentatious by the revolutionaries, products as they were of the hated “capitalists and imperialists” they had just driven from power. All this too was now consigned to oblivion or simply neglected as if it had been complicit in some unimaginable evil. “Bourgeois Havana,” hitherto one of the world’s most socially and culturally rich cities, gradually collapsed. One by one, its buildings fell into ruin and disrepair, and in their place, nothing was built after 1959 that would return the city to its former splendor.

The bourgeois Republic’s glamour had masked its cruelty and inequality, but the Revolution ushered in a violent and grotesque cruelty of its own, as ugly as the Soviet brutalist architecture that now filled the Havana suburbs with hundreds of square housing complexes devoid of elegance and grace. Havana began to resemble a permanent war zone, in which a seemingly unending battle would be waged for the next 60 years and counting between the revolutionary tyrants and the ordinary people who populate the city, and who, generation after generation, give it life.

Fidel Castro knew that Cubans in the 1950s would not receive him as some kind of redemptive socialist deity (as North Koreans had done with the Kim dynasty). So, instead, he demanded allegiance to the Revolution itself, the romantic idealism of which masked the pitilessness of the political system that had replaced the Republic Castro despised. “Revolution” meant the liberation of the island and its people from Batista’s dictatorship and battles in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. It meant “social justice” and the promise of equality for all. It meant the sugarcane harvest, the nation’s newly forged ties to the equally revolutionary Soviet Union and its Communist Party, anti-imperialism, and the cult of Che Guevara. And, in the end, of course, it meant Fidel Castro himself.

If you had a house, ate the State-rationed food, enjoyed access to free healthcare and education, then this was all thanks to the Revolution. And if you suffered or went hungry, or were persecuted and oppressed, if you denounced your “counter-revolutionary” neighbors and relatives to the secret police and pelted political dissidents and homosexuals with eggs, then this too was all for the Revolution. Every time a Cuban referred to the Revolution, instead of the Republic or the government or simply Cuba, he became more than a mere citizen—he became a soldier of revolutionary progress. Uncountable crimes were perpetrated and justified in the name of that single word.

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Chaim of Arabia: The First Arab-Zionist Alliance Rick Richman

By on January 7th, 2019

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/4992/chaim-of-arabia-the-first-arab-zionis

On January 3, 1919, a few weeks after World War I ended, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met with Emir Faisal, the commander-in-chief of the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire, at a London hotel. Faisal’s father, King Hussein of Hedjaz, ruled the two holiest sites of Islam—Mecca and Medina—and the family traced its lineage to the prophet Muhammad. Faisal was accompanied to the meeting by his adviser, friend, and translator, T. E. Lawrence, who had helped him lead the Arab Revolt.

At the meeting, Weizmann and Faisal signed an agreement, brokered over the preceding month by Lawrence, exchanging Arab acceptance of the Balfour Declaration for Zionist support of an Arab state in the rest of the Ottoman lands. In February, they traveled to the Paris Peace Conference, where the victorious Allies would remap Europe and the Middle East, and made complementary presentations about the future of the region.

In the famous 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence would be played by Peter O’Toole, and Faisal by Alec Guinness. Weizmann was not portrayed at all, but perhaps he should have been. His arduous wartime trip, in June 1918, from Palestine to Faisal’s remote desert military camp—a five-day journey by train, boat, car, camel, and foot—led to their January agreement.

The Balfour Declaration, issued on November 2, 1917, had pledged support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, in part to generate support in America and Russia for Britain’s war effort. The British believed that both countries had influential Jewish populations and that the declaration would help keep Russia and America in the war against Germany and the Ottoman Turks. It was also, however, part of a broader British war strategy—one designed to bring the Jewish, Arab, and Armenian national movements into an informal alliance to defeat the Ottoman Empire.

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Atrocities Revealed by the Vatican By Alex Grobman

By on December 28th, 2018

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/28717-atrocities-revealed-by-the-vatican
Part XIII

The previously inadequate reporting by the American press of the plight of European Jewry improved somewhat in 1940. On January 23, The New York Times reported that Vatican radio had denounced the atrocities committed against the Polish people. The papal radio station stated it was receiving almost daily reports from Warsaw, Cracow, Pomerania, Poznan and Silesia about the “destitution, destruction and infamy of every description.”

The report that Jews and Poles were being moved into hermetically sealed ghettos that were inadequate to sustain the millions destined to live there was especially disconcerting. The Vatican concluded this was “one more grievous affront to the moral conscience of mankind, one more contemptuous insult to the law of nations.” There could be no doubt that these accounts were accurate, because they came from unimpeachable sources.

In an editorial on the following day, the Times explained its previous reluctance to report atrocity stories: “All we have heard until now have been unofficial reports of such horrors that we chose to disbelieve them as ‘exaggerated.’” Now that the Vatican “has spoken with authority that cannot be questioned; and has confirmed the worst intimations of terror which comes out of the Polish darkness.”

What the Times did not explain is why these unofficial reports and those supplied by the JTA could not have been independently investigated all along.

In The Terrible Secret, historian Walter Laqueur explained the reluctance in Britain, the US, and even in Germany and among Jews to accept the news from Poland. Many individuals remembered the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, when each side charged the other with wanton brutality. The Germans were accused of burning down villages, cutting off breasts and tongues, making soap from dead soldiers (a myth that found its way into the press during the Second World War as well, only with Jewish bodies being used instead) and other unspeakable crimes. The press duly reported the atrocities, but at the end of the war, it became clear they had been duped; many of the stories had either been made up or were greatly exaggerated.

In Buried by The Times, Laurel Leff, a seasoned professional journalist, found that editors who were young reporters during World War I were extremely skeptical of atrocity stories. After having witnessed how each side used false reports of atrocities to advance their cause during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), this experience only reinforced their distrust of such allegations.

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The Death and Mystery of Jan Masaryk By Geoffrey Luck

By on December 27th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/12/the-death-and-mystery-of-jan-masaryk/

A mere two weeks after Stalin’s puppets took control of Czechoslovakia, foreign minister and national hero Jan Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard below his apartment. There was no suicide note nor hint of explanation beyond an enigmatic Bible verse. Today, seven decades on, the who, why and how remain a riddle that grows ever more intriguing.

Hands up those of you who remember Jan Masaryk (left) and the mystery of his death, seventy years ago? In the swirl of historical developments in the aftermath of World War II, his was a headline fodder, at the centre of events as diverse as the fight to establish the state of Israel and the encroachment of the Soviet bloc. Now, a new theory purports to explain how he fell victim to the double-dealing of the Cold War.

The basic facts of the case are simple: two weeks after the Communist takeover of the government in Czechoslovakia, Masaryk, the Foreign Minister, was found dead in his pyjamas, on the courtyard cobblestones below his apartment in the Foreign Ministry’s Cerninsky Palace. The Soviet Union had occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, and it had seemed likely would try to install a Communist government, as it had in Poland, East Germany and elsewhere. Masaryk had dealt skilfully with Stalin, assuring him that a democratic nation posed no security threat to Russia. Then he blundered, proposing to accept aid under America’s Marshall Plan, something Russia could not allow.

When news of his death flashed around Prague on the morning of March 10, 1948, the immediate official explanation was that he had jumped from the bathroom window of the apartment, on the third floor. (In Europe, the ground floor is counted as Level 1, not G). But immediately there were suspicions of murder. Masaryk’s death was a double shock to the little nation, still adapting to life under Communist rule. He was a national hero, the son of Czechoslovakia’s first president, Tomas Garrique Masaryk, regarded as the founder of the nation. Like de Gaulle, he had gone into exile in Britain with his president, Edvard Benes, at the Nazi invasion, and had broadcast regularly on the BBC to inspire citizens and partisans in his homeland.

In February, when Communist Prime Minister Klement Gottwald demanded a Communist-dominated cabinet, twelve democratic politicians resigned en masse in protest, but Masaryk did not. His reasons were never articulated, but friends believed he decided to stay on, in the hope of moderating the Soviet policies. It was claimed that he did this with a heavy heart, feeling pressures from both east and west. The official line was that he was suffering from depression and insomnia, badly hurt by British and American criticisms of his decision to remain in office. A press report from Prague the day after his death claimed that he had been held a virtual prisoner in his apartment, surrounded by new secretaries, and not permitted to meet visitors alone.

Bit by bit, suggestive evidence dribbled out. The police doctor who certified the death as a suicide did not attend the autopsy. He himself was found dead a few weeks later, another suicide. Plaster was allegedly found under the fingernails of the corpse; there were marks on the walls of the room as if he had pressed his hands against them while resisting. He left no suicide note. Then the former Justice Minister was savagely beaten, his body dumped beneath the window of his flat.

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Jihad: Islam’s Engine By Amil Imani

By on December 27th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/jihad_islams_engine.html

Right from the start, violent jihad served as the engine of Islam under the command and supervision of Muhammad himself. To understand how quickly Islam spread around the world, we must see the timeline of Islam.

After Muhammad’s death in 632 A.D., his friend Abu Bakr was named caliph and ruler of the Islamic community, or Ummah. Muhammad’s followers in a short time occupied a vast geographic area; conversion to Islam was heightened by Islamic missionaries, who intermingled with local populations to promulgate the Islamic teachings. It resulted in Islam’s spread outward from Mecca toward both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the creation of the Muslim world.

In no time at all, Islam spread like a pandemic. Once it attacked the mind of its victims, this debilitating disease was capable of transforming them into helpless pawns that had no choice but to execute what they were directed to do.

Here is the truth, as bitter as it may be. Islam is the culprit. Islam is anything but a religion of peace. Violence is at the core of Islam. Violence is institutionalized in the Muslim’s holy book, the Qur’an, in many verses:

Qur’an: 9:5: “Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”

Qur’an: 9:112: “The Believers fight in Allah’s cause; they slay and are slain, kill and are killed.”

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Western Leaders Pervert History in Recalling World War I By Julia Gorin

By on December 20th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/20/western-leaders-pervert-history

No sooner was President Trump derided for “brightening” upon Vladimir Putin’s arrival at the Armistice Day centenary last month than he canceled his planned meeting with Russia’s president at the recent G20 summit. This left Putin to high-five Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in a gesture, no doubt intended to troll the Western hypocrites pretending to not know either.

Pretense and hypocrisy, however, seem to rule the day, and their current mascot is French President Emmanuel Macron. At last month’s Armistice Day observances, which his country hosted, he presumed to lecture the American president on nationalism.

Quite rightly, Trump skipped the peace forum Macron “had arranged with the intention that his fellow leaders ruminate on the murderous follies of the Great War and compare it to the rise of nationalism today,” the Guardian reported. World affairs editor Julian Borger observed an “absence of Western solidarity,” concluding that “Trump showed himself ill at ease with most of his European counterparts and the fleeting encounter with Putin was a reminder of his much greater affinity for autocrats.”

Or perhaps his greater affinity for those who can smell a rat. This is the same “united West” which uniformly snubbed a commemoration that was at least as important: the last major celebration of Victory Day that any veterans may still be alive to celebrate. In May 2015, the 70th anniversary, Washington gave an instruction to world leaders to boycott Russia’s observances. Only the Czech Republic defied it, President Zeman sending the American ambassador packing, and reaffirming that his visit would be a thank-you to Russia “for not having to speak German in this country.”

There were Americans who saw the snub for the insult it was to our own dead from World War II. The following letter from Michael Gardner of Jacksonville, Florida appeared in English-language Pravda:

. . . When I heard our U.S. government was not going to send a delegation to Moscow for the 70th anniversary victory celebrations, I was very angry. It was an insult to the men of all the Allied Forces who fought and died in Europe. Their sacrifice was ignored because of petty politics by the U.S. government . . . I was moved by what I saw in Moscow, and . . . boycott or not, I will be in Moscow in 2020 for the 75th anniversary victory celebration and I will carry a picture of my father, Corporal James P. Gardner, and honor all those who fought in the Great Patriotic War.

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Manifest Destiny and President Polk By Howard Tanzman see note please

By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2018/12/12/manifest_destiny_and_president_polk_394.html

An excellent book on this great but unsung president is:
A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (Simon & Schuster America Collection)

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (Simon & Schuster America Collection)
Nov 3, 2009
The area of the United States is about 3.8 million square miles. The country increased its size through several historical events:

1783 Treaty Ending the Revolutionary War (~890,000 square miles)
1803 Louisiana Purchase (President Jefferson ~820,000 square miles)
1845 Texas Annexation (Presidents Tyler and Polk – ~390,000 square miles)
1846 Oregon Treaty (President Polk – ~285,000 square miles)
1848 Mexican Cession (President Polk – ~530,000 square miles)
1867 Alaska Purchase (President Johnson – ~585,000 square miles)

Three of those events occurred under President James Polk, totaling over 1.1 million square miles.

Polk was a protégé of fellow Tennessean President Andrew Jackson. He served in the House of Representatives and as governor of Tennessee. In 1844, Martin Van Buren was the front runner to receive the Democratic presidential nomination, but after coming out against the annexation of Texas he was unable to obtain the then needed two-thirds majority vote at the Democratic convention. On the ninth ballot, Polk, a dark horse candidate was selected. He defeated Senator Henry Clay, who also opposed the Texas annexation, in one of the closest elections in U.S. history.

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