RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Starry Messenger Van Gogh failed as an art dealer, dropped out of divinity school and was deemed too zealous to be a missionary. At 27, he took his brother’s advice and became a painter.

“Vincent van Gogh understood his art as nothing less than a lifeline for his immortal soul, the elusive reason for his existence. The continued prominence of his work as a touchstone of cultural achievement may, in part, offer redemption for his struggles. His life is unquestionably art history’s most compelling story of misunderstood genius, and whether told in a book that is too fat or too thin, too speculative or too terse, his story will always be worth reading.”

When he posed for his renowned self-portraits, Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) adopted a variety of guises, thoughtfully assessing the effects of life’s unfolding events on his character. He might wear the straw hat in which he worked, or an overcoat for a day in the city, or a bandage over his wounded ear. But when we see his piercing blue eyes and sober visage staring out from the canvas, we feel sure that this is Vincent, a singular personality who takes his own measure and yearns to find his place in the scheme of things. “My existence is not without reason,” the artist once wrote to his brother Theo. “There is something inside me, what can it be?”

British painter and writer Julian Bell answers that question forcefully in the subtitle of “Van Gogh: A Power Seething,” an impressively concise biography that offers a solid introduction to the troubled artist’s life, paintings and emotional travails. Imagining the interior of Van Gogh’s psyche, Mr. Bell invites us to picture “a frantic internal bubbling, driven by a heat from below, liable to boil and spill beyond the container of personal identity.” Add an ear and a razor to that scenario and there can be little doubt what happens next.

The National Front leader says ‘we are the only ones to solve the problem’ of the country’s Islamist threat.

Nanterre, France

Following last week’s terror attacks in Paris on journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher supermarket, many Western leaders have been reluctant to say the motive was at all religious. French President François Hollande said Charlie Hebdo had been targeted by “obscurantism,” whatever that is. And White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday spent a painful five minutes explaining the Obama administration’s aversion to using the term “radical Islam.”

That’s not a problem for Marine Le Pen, who is never obscure.

“It’s clear Islamic fundamentalism,” says the leader of the National Front, France’s far-right political party that has been gaining in the polls. “Now all the eyes are open,” she adds, referring to a general French awakening to the Islamist threat. And “we are the only ones to solve the problem,” by which she means the National Front.

Once a political outlier, Ms. Le Pen has been gaining prominence as France’s problems—a moribund economy and its un-assimilated Muslim-immigrant population—have become more acute and seemingly beyond cure by the traditional political class. Now, in the aftermath of the home-grown Islamist slaughter in Paris, Ms. Le Pen is betting that she is the French politician most likely to benefit from her countrymen’s shock and disbelief over the threat in their midst.

While Jordan occupied Jerusalem 1949-1967 Arab/Muslims routinely smashed, defaced and desecrated all Jewish shrines, cemeteries. Ancient Jewish gravestones were made into latrines…..After Israel liberated its capital Jerusalem in 1967 Israel meticulously restored all sacred sites of all faiths. rsk

Raymond Ibrahim reported:

A man was kneeling in prayer before the statue of the revered Madonna, with the photograph of a loved one in hand, in the small chapel of St. Barnabas in Perugia (Italy), when he was attacked by five “immigrants.”

The first thing they did was rip the photo from his hands.

Next they unleashed their hatred against the image of the Virgin Mary. They broke the statue to pieces and then urinated on it.

Don Scarda, pastor of St. Barnabas, said the event was led by five “foreigners.” By the time police arrived at the chapel, the unidentified attackers had already fled.

The incident has caused a stir among locals. Some have lambasted Pope Francis who is accused of appeasing immigrants—mostly Muslims—to wild extremes. Earlier he had said that “Migrants, through their own humanity, cultural values, expand the sense of human brotherhood.”

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet reflects on a week that has seen a nation realise it can put aside its differences at the graveside.

It is surely fitting that the best comment on the extra-ordinary days we have lived since the Charlie Hebdo shootings has been made in, what else, a cartoon.

Staring at a crystal ball, a crone predicts: “You’re going to be assassinated by terrorists…the bells of Notre Dame will be rung in your honour; there will be a procession led by Hollande, Valls, Sarkozy, Merkel, Cameron, even Netanyahu… there will be tricolours everywhere and people will sing the Marseillaise…both the Nasdaq and the Académie Française will proclaim ‘Je Suis Charlie’ and the Pope will pray for you…”

Opposite the fortune-teller, Charb, Tignous, Cabu and Wolinski, the cartoonists murdered in the attack and known for their militant atheism and iconoclastic contempt of political pieties, are so contorted with laughter that they can’t sit straight; crying and howling with glee at such a joke.

The Fallacy of Workable Tyranny

I was asked to watch and rate the first episode of an up-and-coming series for Amazon Instant Video, which was an hour long, and to provide remarks. Here is an expanded version of my assessment of the episode, or what I would have said had there not been a word count limit set by Amazon.

Please help us improve Amazon Instant Video by rating the video and audio quality of The Man in the High Castle Episode 1: The Man in the High Castle.

I read The Man in the High Castle (or Tower) when it was first published decades ago, or a little after 1962, when I was still in high school. Interesting alternate history fiction. The production values of High Castle are in the same league as those of Fatherland, which differs significantly from the novel by Robert Harris; with House of Cards, a species of “contemporaneous” alternate history fiction, and which differs radically from both the novel by Michael Dobbs and the British TV version; and with V for Vendetta, which differs so radically from the original graphic novel that to describe the differences here would merit a separate column.

The Amazon presentation of High Castle is being adapted by Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame.

The salient point about Amazon’s High Castle, however, is that it stretches credibility about what would have happened had Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany won WWII, carved up the U.S., and militarily occupied the continent. The Japanese were savagely brutal in their conquests, as were the Nazis. Remember, for example, what the Japanese did to Nanking, China, and what happened to British, Indian, and Canadian men and women and their Chinese dependents after the surrenders of Hong Kong and Singapore. (Atrocities were the byword of all Japanese conquests, much as it is ISIS’s today in Syria and Iraq.) This perspective is buttressed by recent revelations of the Japanese atrocities committed against American and Philippine POWs.

It’s difficult to overstate the potential importance of the Egyptian president’s New Year speech on Islam – and equally important to avoid overly optimistic expectations as to its practical impact.

“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!” – Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Al-Azhar, January 1

“O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty.” – Koran, Sura 9:123

“Violence… occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.” – Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 1993

On New Year’s Day, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a remarkable address at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University.

The Obama-Sisi contrast

He directed measured, but nonetheless severe, censure at much of the Islamic clergy, their interpretation of religious texts and their prescription for how Muslims should practice their faith in the modern day: “I am referring here to the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing – and I have, in fact, addressed this topic a couple of times before. It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!”

Special prosecutor in Argentine Jewish Center bombing case shot dead after asserting president’s involvement in cover-up.

Argentine state prosecutor Alberto Nisman was shot dead just hours before he was going to testify to the Argentinian Congress on Monday, Jan. 19, that his country’s president was directly involved in cover-ups to obscure Iran’s involvement in the Buenos Aires bombing of the Israeli Embassy and Jewish Community Center.

On July 18, 1994, the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building was bombed, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds.

Nisman was the special prosecutor on the case. In 2006 he formally accused the government of Iran of directing the bombing and the Hezbollah terrorist organization of carrying it out.

In May, 2013, Nisman released a report accusing Iran of establishing terrorist networks in Latin America dating back decades. That report provided evidence, he claimed, of an “intelligence and terrorist network” in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Guyana, Trinidad, Tobago and Suriname.

Nisman further claimed that the evidence in his report proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” that former Iranian cultural attaché in Argentina, Mohsen Rabbani, was responsible for the 1994 AMIA bombing, and that he was the “coordinator of the Iranian infiltration of South America.”

Next time, send Slayer.

Let us call the roll of national badasses: the 75th Ranger Regiment, USMC Force Reconnaissance, the SEALS, Delta Force . . . James Taylor?

What sort of warriors does a weary nation facing a savage enemy turn to? “The Quiet Professionals,” “Semper Fidelis,” “Death from Above” . . .

“A Churning Urn of Burning Funk.”

The spectacle of the Obama administration’s dispatching Secretary of State John Kerry to “share a big hug with Paris” as James Taylor — who still exists — crooned “You’ve Got a Friend” is the perfect objective correlative for American decline: The pathetic self-regard of John Kerry and James Taylor’s Baby Boomers meets the cynical, self-serving, going-through-the-motions style of Barack Obama’s Generation X as disenchanted Millennials in parental basements across the fruited plains no doubt injured their thumbs typing “WTF?” It is the substitution of celebrity for power, of sentiment for analysis, of sloppy gesture for clear-headed commitment.

We’re responding to barbarism from the 7th century with soft rock from the 1970s.

Two events recently transpired that forced mainstream media to address a question they habitually dodge: Is Islam intrinsically violent? First, on New Year’s Day, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi — a world leader, and a Muslim — did the unthinkable when he publicly asserted that Islamic texts and thinking have made the Muslim world a scourge to humanity. The MSM ignored it until, as if to prove his point, Muslim gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” killed a dozen people in offices of a satirical newspaper in Paris.

Two separate editorials — by the New York Times and CNN — responded by purportedly tackling the question of whether Islam is inherently violent in the context of the Paris attack and Sisi’s speech. Both quoted me as responding in the affirmative — and both instantly dismissed my partially presented views in “straw-man” fashion.

“Impeccably researched and clearly written, Messrs. Motadel and Ihrig’s books will transform our understanding of the Nazi policies that were, Mr. Motadel writes, some “of the most vigorous attempts to politicize and instrumentalize Islam in modern history.”
The Führer admired Atatürk’s subordination of religion to the state—and his ruthless treatment of minorities.

‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” of Christianity.