RUTHFULLY YOURS

While reading Stephen Coughlin’s seminal and all-important Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, I frequently encountered quotations the author used to stress his many points that in terms of defending this country from Islamic incursions, or, rather, failing to defend it, the language of the defenders has been corrupted and rendered meaningless. The quotations came from Josef Pieper’s Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (Mißbrauch der Sprache, Machtmißbrauch), first published in 1974. The quotations were so intriguing that I ordered the book, which is actually a 54-page pamphlet featuring two essays by Pieper, “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power,” and “Knowledge and Freedom.” Coughlin remarked that Pieper’s book “underlies much in what I do.”

Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a German philosopher and a key figure in the Thomist revival. In his teens, he was initially drawn to the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, but after being recommended a work by Aquinas, Commentary to the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel, he became a lifelong devotee to Aquinas. Ignatius Press’s Insight reveals that:

Pieper went to the University of Münster in 1923, and later on he went to Berlin. The plan of his first book – which he ultimately submitted to the university in order to obtain his doctorate in philosophy – was born during a lecture on Goethe and Thomas Aquinas, given by Msgr. Romano Guardini at the Jugendburg Rothenfels on the Main in 1924; the lecture was entitled “About Classical Spirit.” Pieper’s first book, Die Wirklichkeit und das Gute (Reality and the Good; contained in Living the Truth [Ignatius Press, 1989]) based on St. Thomas’ works, tries to show that the good is nothing else but what is in accordance with the reality of things.

Ah, parental love for children and the reciprocal, deep love the children have for their parents. And for many of the children of the Islamic State, IS not just a government, but their devoted parent, more important than the biological parents who bore them, raised them. This was gruesomely proven when an ISIS member turned against his mother and cemented his bloody bond to IS by publicly killing her at their command.

And what of those “hundreds of people who witnessed the event?

Communist dictator Joseph Stalin reputedly stated that “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” That might explain why so many have become indifferent to this ongoing bloodletting by so many or shockingly why President Barack Hussein Obama (D) initially labelled them “”jv”, junior varsity and led the BBC to note

It’s the macabre twist of having Lena al-Qasem’s son kill her that’s captured the world’s attention.

The University of Missouri has been the location of several anti-Semitic acts that the president, Tim Wolfe, appeared reluctant to address. The final vile act, which included the formation of a swastika, was enough to encourage thirty-six Jewish and civil rights organizations to demand the president’s resignation. Concurrently, Black graduate student, Jonathan Butler, heroically began a hunger strike, and within days, both the president and Chancellor Loftin stepped down from their positions.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, who usually gets it right, this time said that Jewish students will likely find themselves facing an even more hostile, threatening and unsafe environment because administrators are either too busy or too scared to address anti-Semitism, thereby leaving Jewish students more vulnerable and unprotected. So, should the inmates continue running the asylum? Acts of bigotry are occurring throughout America’s campuses and worldwide, whether or not the students are outspoken. Anything can trigger another “moderate” to becoming an active aggressor, whether the bully is motivated by others’ acts of intolerance and violence or by the relatively unobtrusive prey. Being busy or scared is hardly an excuse for the head of a university to shirk his responsibilities.

Rossman-Benjamin suggested that a president may fear appearing to favor Jewish students. Does she think it’s wrong to favor any victimized students or just the Jewish students? What if there were a second group of victims? Would the administration feel more comfortable and legitimized if a non-Jewish group were imperiled along with the Jewish? In fact, is it not moral to protect and care for the students who are attacked? An administrator must display the attributes of both ethics and courage to govern such an institution, and use the event as a teaching strategy and warning.

During the course of last fall’s semester, swastikas were found at the posh Fieldston School in Riverdale and a sixth grade student drew one in art class, seemingly unaware of its significance. Additionally, a notebook appeared with the cover exclamation “Hitler Rocks.” In response to the protests of Jewish parents, the school convened a special meeting for the sixth grade to discuss these events but apparently stressed the original use of the swastika as a symbol of peace, stating it could also be a symbol of hate but failing to even mention the word Holocaust. To make a second round of amends after this egregious “oversight,” the school made arrangements for the Simon Wiesenthal Center to send its regional director, along with a Holocaust survivor to tell her story to the entire middle school.

Michael Cohen, the Wiesenthal representative, goes into great detail in an article in The Jewish Week (Jan about what short and long term goals the combined organizations developed to enlighten both students and faculty about the Holocaust and tolerance education. At a school whose tuition is $45,000/yr, one would expect this to be part of the regular curriculum in any class of World History, particularly in a city with the largest share of survivors and their descendants, in a school heavily populated with Jewish students. Surely it doesn’t require a visit from the NAACP for Fieldston students to learn about slavery and the Civil war..

Throughout Mr. Cohen’s account, whenever he mentions the Holocaust, he adds tolerance education, as though the phenomenon of the extermination of Europe’s Jews were not a sufficiently large topic in itself. When Black Lives Matter holds a protest, they don’t include qualifiers extending to other groups suffering from intolerance of persecution. When LGBT holds rallies, they similarly don’t include anti-Semitism or racism. Only Jews are forever minimizing their own causes and still trying to prove to mainstream society that what happened to them is important because it can also affect other groups. Intolerance and bullying are school-yard words that have no place in the same sentence as Holocaust. Once you’ve paired intolerance with lactose, it’s forever inappropriate for the industry of mass starvation, torture, medical atrocities, freezing, rape, shooting people into the pit they’ve had to dig or making them watch their babies’ heads bashed against a wall or thrown into the air as target practice.

On January 4, Iran’s Shiite Lebanese mercenary force, Hezbollah, detonated a large explosive device on the Lebanon-Israel border in the Mount Dov region. Their target was a pair of Israeli D-9 armored bulldozers clearing the area of brush and other obstructions. There were no Israeli casualties.

Israel had anticipated an attack from Hezbollah following its liquidation of Samir Kuntar – the notorious child-killer turned Hezbollah commander – and other senior pro-Assad mercenaries in a Damascus suburb on December 19, 2015. Israel’s Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot warned Hezbollah of “harsh” consequences if the group decided to initiate a terror attack to avenge Kuntar.

The attack itself accomplished nothing. The heavily armored D-9 bulldozers were able to withstand the blast. In an effort to bolster its image and play to a demoralized constituency, Hezbollah claimed that the attack targeted a senior Mossad official and wounded some Israelis. The claim of course was false but demonstrates Hezbollah’s desperation.

In July and August of 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a 33-day war. Hezbollah propagandists tried to spin the war as a Hezbollah victory but the reality on the ground was quite different and the war in fact, represented a major strategic victory for Israel. Hezbollah lost between 600 to 1,000 fighters and much of its infrastructure, painstakingly constructed with Iranian and North Korean assistance, was destroyed. Most importantly, the war established Israeli deterrence and imposed new rules on Hezbollah. The group could no longer rely on a predictable, measured Israeli response to border provocations. Instead, the new rules meant that Israel could and would respond with overwhelming force to any provocation.

The most telling account of the conflict came from none other than Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, who noted that he would have never initiated the terror attack that preceded the conflict had he known of the Israeli response beforehand. Indeed, since 2006 Israel’s Lebanon border experienced a quiet not witnessed since the early 1960s.

Former U.S. envoy to the Middle East Martin Indyk should title his next book “The Art of Defamation,” and dedicate it to the Palestinians and the Israeli Left.

On a PBS Frontline documentary about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that aired Tuesday evening, Indyk dropped a stink bomb, and the stench has not yet dissipated.

Reminiscing about times past — 20 years ago, to be precise — Indyk said, “Netanyahu sat next to me when I was ambassador in Israel at the time of [assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin’s funeral. I remember Netanyahu saying to me: ‘Look, look at this. He’s a hero now, but if he had not been assassinated, I would have beaten him in the elections, and then he would have gone down in history as a failed politician.'”

On Wednesday morning, Netanyahu’s office immediately issued a denial, asserting that the conversation Indyk recounted “never happened.”

By Wednesday afternoon, a video of the funeral was circulating on social media, showing Netanyahu, who was head of the opposition at the time, seated next to a number of people, but Indyk was not among them.

His lie now exposed, Indyk instantly took to Twitter to change his story. “The conversation with Bibi took place on Nov 5, 1995 when we sat together at the Knesset ceremony to receive Rabin’s coffin to lie in state,” he tweeted.

For the mainstream media and human rights organizations, human rights violations are news only when they come with a “made in Israel” sticker on them.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has used international aid funds to build prisons and detention centers in the West Bank where torture has become the norm.

Dr. Ammar Dwaik, Director General of the Independent Commission for Human Rights, a Palestinian group, revealed that his group received 782 complaints regarding torture — 168 in the West Bank and 614 in the Gaza Strip.

Both Hamas and the PA each fears that in a free election it could lose some of its power. Why hold an election if you are not sure about the results?

Needed desperately: scrutiny of Palestinian society by international media and human rights groups — beginning with Palestinian prisons. Anyone stepping up?

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are torturing Palestinians. Still.

The two Palestinian governments, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, are both major violators of human rights. Assaults on public freedoms and crackdowns on political rivals are just the first chapters of a very long story.

Most Jews and Israelis see Evangelical support for Israel as an American phenomenon • Dr. Jürgen Bühler, CEO of International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, explains that it is now a worldwide affair • From Africa to South America to Asia, Israel can now count on Evangelical communities all over the globe for sympathy and support.

As we enter 2016, there is good news for Israel. True, the country is facing a wave of terror at home, growing criticism from Europe, and attempts to expand the boycott and de-legitimization of Israel on American campuses. But at the same time there also is growing support for Zionism in non-aligned countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In countries like China, El Salvador, Brazil, the Philippines, Ghana, Nigeria and many other nations a real revolution is taking place, which not many Israelis are aware of it: an “Evangelical Revolution.”

The world has, according to estimates, more than half a billion evangelical Christians. In the past, this current has been linked mainly to the United States, but in the last two decades, the number of Evangelicals in the Southern Hemisphere has jumped dramatically.

For example, the Pew Institute’s research estimates that a fifth of evangelical Christians worldwide live in Asia – approximately 150 million people. This is a fact that the Israeli public ignores. For Israelis, evangelism is an American story, but the reality is completely different. One by one, residents of Asia, including millions in such hostile Islamic countries as Malaysia and Indonesia, adopt the evangelical Christian faith. Not only Asians are embracing evangelical Christianity: 14 percent of the residents of Africa – over 180 million people – and nearly 100 million people in Latin America are evangelical Christians. This revolution is sweeping the entire southern hemisphere.

“We were in a Jewish setting and you can only criticize Israel,” Tenenbom said of the Limmud Conference, “for me, that was the worst.” By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

“Yes, all voices are welcome, so long as they are critical of Israel,” is how Tuvia Tenenbom, journalist, dramatist and best-selling author, described the Limmud Conference in Birmingham, England on Dec. 27 – 31, 2015.

Tenenbom, author of “Catch the Jew,” sat through several days, but not all, of the recent conference. Tenenbom was supposed to be there for the entire conference, he was a speaker, but after being disinvited from the fourth session in which he was supposed to appear, and after enduring scathingly hostile verbal attacks from audience members and former Limmud officials, Tenenbom had enough.

That’s what Tenenbom says.

What Keith Kahn-Harris says is quite different and he’s the organizer and leader of the session from which Tenenbom was dropped, and he’s the one who told Tenenbom he was disinvited.

According to Kahn-Harris, it was his decision alone to drop Tenenbom from the final panel and it was “not an ideological decision from someone ideologically opposed to Tuvia Tenenbom.” Instead, Kahn-Harris said he dropped Tenenbom from the session because he had invited four participants but only really wanted three – and he “left it to the [time of the] conference” to decide whom to cut.

Two thirds of Israeli Arabs say that their Knesset representatives are not advancing their interests.
Last October, as the Palestinians began their latest round of terrorist war against Israel, lawmakers from the Joint Arab List participated in mass anti-Israel rallies in major Arab towns. One such rally in Nazareth in mid-October attracted some 2,500 participants. After it ended, some demonstrators started throwing rocks at Jews.

The next day, MK Ayman Odeh, who heads the Joint Arab List stood on a street in Nazareth and gave a live interview to Channel 2 news.

Just as the camera began filming, Nazareth Mayor Ali Salam drove down the street. Seeing Odeh, Salam stopped his car and began bellowing, “Get out of here! Enough of your interviews. Go ruin things somewhere else!” Odeh tried lamely to get the camera to stop filming. But Salam continued shouting.