RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israelis in Berlin: Is anything cooler, more postmodern, more transgressive, more emblematic of our hip, new borderless world? In October, New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren wrote of an Israeli “Exodus” to Germany spurred by rising rents and prices of consumer goods in the Jewish State. Not to be outdone, the Washington Post chimed in the following week with a similar story about the “waves of young Israelis” bringing “the long-lost scent of freshly baked rugelach and hamantaschen cookies back to the streets of Berlin.” Meanwhile, the Economist asks, “Is Berlin the new Jerusalem?”

There’s not much new to report about Israelis in Berlin, which has been a “thing” for years. Fania Oz-Sulzberger, the daughter of Israeli novelist Amos Oz, wrote a book about the phenomenon, straightforwardly titled Israelis in Berlin, nearly 15 years ago. Modern Hebrew, she pointed out to me in a recent phone interview, was spoken in Berlin in the early 20th century, long before it became the official language of the Jewish State. In the 1960s, around the time that official diplomatic relations were established between the postwar Federal Republic and Israel, a “trickle of Israelis” began returning to West Germany, many of them German Jews “who couldn’t live with their longing,” for the land of their birth, as well as “hard-core socialists” who moved to the German Democratic Republic in the East.

“Israelis in Berlin” has all the components of a perfect media meme: a once oppressed people returning to, and thriving in, the country that attempted to exterminate them. And it’s one that Germans, hungry for any angle that reflects positively on their relationship to world Jewry, are eager to trumpet. In 2012, Der Spiegel published a long feature titled “Young Israel’s New Love Affair With Germany,” which heralded the Israeli millennials and Gen-Xers, now at least two generations removed from the Holocaust, flooding to the German capital for the cheap rent, pulsating nightlife, and world-renowned arts scene. “For them, Germany is not just a country like any other—it also happens to be one of their favorites,” the weekly boasted. The previous year, the magazine ran a story titled “UnKosher Nightlife and Holocaust Humor: Israelis Learn To Love the New Berlin.” You get the picture.

Irrespective of Israel’s policies and existence, Iran’s pursuit of mega-capability (nuclear) aims at removing the mega-obstacle (the US power projection), which would enable the Ayatollahs to attain their mega-goal: the domination of the Persian Gulf as a prelude to the domination of the Muslim World and then the entire globe.

According to the fact-driven “Guilty until proven innocent school of thought”– and in contrast to the hope-driven, fact-dismissing “Innocent until proven guilty school of thought” – a nuclear Iran would compound the clear, present and lethal threat posed by a conventional Iran to critical American and Western interests, to the survival of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Arab oil-producers and to global sanity.

Moreover, the Ayatollahs’ track record (e.g., sacrificing 500,000 of its own youth on the altar of clearing minefields during the 1980-88 war against Iraq) suggests that a nuclear, apocalyptic Iran would not be contained, while tolerating Iran as a threshold nuclear power could trigger a nuclear world war.

“With all thy getting, get understanding.”

It is fitting and proper–indeed essential for our very security–that Speaker John Boehner has extended an invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran and its efforts to develop nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them anywhere in the world. The invitation has bipartisan support because many members on both sides of the aisle recognize the fundamental threat to world peace that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose. Like Winston Churchill in the 1930s with Nazi Germany, Netanyahu has been sounding the alarm about Iran’s ominous nuclear and terrorist activities.

It’s a message much of Europe and even segments of the US, particularly in the Obama administration, don’t want to hear. The President has made clear his intense dislike of Israel’s prime minister and his refusal to keep quiet about Obama’s desire to conclude a Neville Chamberlain-like deal with Teheran. In a flagrant interference in another country’s election, Obama operatives are working hard in Israel to help bring down the courageous Prime Minister.

Congress needs to hear first-hand the truth about what Iran is doing and the dreadful implications of those activities.

Thanks to US leadership, the ever-harder sanctions imposed over the years had taken a politically damaging toll on the Iranian economy. The mullahs agreed to sit down with the US and Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany to come up with an agreement ostensibly to get Iran to back off its nuclear ambitions. Iran’s agenda was simple: get the sanctions eased, and then with a loophole-ridden treaty, get them removed altogether.

The basic problem is that the Obama administration wants a deal–any deal–with Teheran and the other parties to the talks are willing to go along in order to snag business contracts with Iran, oblivious to the implications of a radical regime that will be in the position to get the Bomb any time it wants.

Israel’s sovereignty was recognized by the United States in 1948. The United States recognized the Federation of Nigeria on October 1, 1960, in a congratulatory message from Secretary of State Christian Herter and a congratulatory letter from President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered to Prime Minister Sir Abubukar Tafawa Balewa on October 2, 1960. Nigeria had been previously under British sovereignty.
Israel remains a democracy with highly advanced scientific, cultural, technological, and social and civil rights institutions.
Nigeria is in total chaos with rampant terrorism, massacres, oppression and murder of Christians, kidnappings. cruel enforcements of Sharia law, and increasingly dominated by Boko Haram an offshoot of the Taliban/Al Qaeda.
Nonetheless Israel is pummeled, derided and continually scolded by the Obama administration.
There was a minor blip on the kidnapping of teenage girls by Mrs. Obama…but not much else. And former Sec. of State and now Presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton refused to call Boko Haram a “terrorist” group.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/07/hillary-s-state-department-refused-to-brand-boko-haram-as-terrorists.html

“The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years. And now, lawmakers and former U.S. officials are saying that the decision may have hampered the American government’s ability to confront the Nigerian group that shocked the world by abducting hundreds of innocent girls.”
Well maybe she was rattled that day by the fact that a porch was added to a home in one of Israel’s “settlements.”

Leave France or die. As Bret Stephens noted in the Wall Street Journal recently, it has come down to this choice for French Jews, who are beginning to stream out of the country as violent Islamic Jew-hatred there grows. They may certainly take advantage of Israel’s right of return if they choose, but if they are serious about the vow “Never again,” then it’s time for Jews in France and elsewhere to get serious about defending themselves.

Over a hundred years ago, long before the Holocaust, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, advocated that Jews arm themselves (“Jewish youth, learn to shoot!”). But today, long after the harsh lessons of the Holocaust, Jews are loath to take up arms against their enemies. Instead, too many urge each other simply to flee their homes or conceal their Jewishness.

For example: for those who dare to stay in France, a French hairdresser has come up with a way to boost “Jews’ feeling of confidence as they walked on the streets”: a Magic Kippah made of real or synthetic hair that blends into the wearer’s hair, making it nearly invisible and thus making Jews less of a public target. This brings to mind British authorities advising soldiers not to wear their uniforms in public, making them, too, less of a target for Islamic murderers like those who savagely butchered Lee Rigby. Or American soldiers in Europe being cautioned not to wear their uniforms off-base due to threats from ISIS.

Israel’s reported strike January 18 on a joint Iranian-Hezbollah convoy driving on the Syrian Golan Heights was one of the most strategically significant events to have occurred in Israel’s neighborhood in recent months. Its significance lies both in what it accomplished operationally and what it exposed.

From what been published to date about the identities of those killed in the strike, it is clear that in one fell swoop the air force decapitated the Iranian and Hezbollah operational command in Syria.

The head of Hezbollah’s operations in Syria, the head of its liaison with Iran, and Jihad Mughniyeh, the son of Hezbollah’s longtime operational commander Imad Mughniyeh who was killed by Israel in Damascus in 2008, were killed. The younger Mughniyeh reportedly served as commander of Hezbollah forces along the Syrian-Israeli border.
According to a report by Brig.-Gen. (res.) Shimon Shapira, a Hezbollah expert from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the Iranian losses included three generals. Brig.- Gen. Mohammed Alladadi was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps liaison officer to Hezbollah and to Syrian intelligence. He was also in charge of weapons shipments from Iran to Hezbollah. Gen. Ali Tabatabai was the IRGC commander in the Golan Heights and, according to Shapira, an additional general, known only as Assadi, “was, in all likelihood, the commander of Iranian expeditionary forces in Lebanon.”

More than forty years ago, in a little-remembered column in National Review, James Burnham, the former Trotskyist turned Cold War analyst, focused his insightful gaze upon the rise of radical Islam and the threat it posed to the world. The genesis of the column, which appeared in the November 8, 1974 issue of the magazine, was Arab use of the oil weapon, but Burnham sensed larger forces—religious, ideological, demographic, and geopolitical—at work.

“Islam,” he wrote in words that today might result in death threats or worse, “is a militant religion in the earthly as well as the spiritual sense.” According to the Koran, Burnham noted, “[i]t is the will of Allah that all men should acknowledge Him, should be under the temporary sway of the descendants of Mohammed, and made subject to the laws of the Koran.” He continued:

In its union of a universal earthly goal (global Islam),
totalist system of belief, and correlated army of believers,
Islam is analogous to modern Communism. In the jihad,
the holy war to fulfill Allah’s will that is suspended from
time to time but never ended until completed, these true
believers who die are translated at once to Paradise.

In exile in Argentina, the world’s most wanted man was writing a defense of the indefensible.

He rejected “so-called Western culture” whose bible “expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Instead he looked to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” whose good opinion of his crimes he wanted.

These millions of people were not in Germany. They weren’t even in Argentina.

His fellow Nazis had abandoned him after deciding that the murder of millions of Jews was indefensible and had to be denied instead of defended. But he did not want to be denied. He wanted to be admired.

“You 360 million Mohammedans to whom I have had a strong inner connection since the days of my association with your Grand Mufti of Jerusalem,” Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust wrote. “You, who have a greater truth in the surahs of your Koran, I call upon you to pass judgment on me.”

Eichmann knew he could expect a good verdict from a religion whose prophet had ordered the ethnic cleansing of Jews and which believes the end will

“not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

Holocaust and Hezbollah reminders
On Tuesday, the world commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which coincided this year with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. One response to this significant anniversary was a tweet posted by BBC One’s “The Big Questions.”

“Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest?” it asked.

Given the steep rise in European anti-Semitism and global jihadist terrorism — as well as a recent study indicating that a quarter of young British Jews believe another Holocaust will occur during their lifetimes — the repugnant rhetorical question should have been worded differently.

“Is it the time coming to lay the last Holocaust to rest and prepare for the next one?” would have been far more apt.

On the same day, Hezbollah terrorists, backed by Iran, launched four rockets into Israel from Syria. Two of these exploded in the Golan Heights. The Israel Defense Forces responded with artillery fire, while the Israeli government placed the north of the country on high alert. It was assumed that this incident was but a taste of what Iran had in store for the Jewish state, in the wake of a drone strike in Syria on Jan. 19, during which six Hezbollah terrorists and an Iranian general were killed.

Communities — cities — need Catholic schools. Why? What is to be done in an environment when the closing of Catholic elementary and secondary schools have big cities and small towns alike? In their book Lost Classroom, Lost Community: Catholic Schools’ Importance in Urban America, Margaret F. Brinig and Nicole Garnett document the importance of the schools and the damage done by their disappearance. It’s a sobering, encouraging, and challenging read. Kathryn Jean Lopez: What are the chief ways a neighborhood suffers when a school disappears?

Margaret F. Brinig: When a Catholic school closes, entire neighborhoods suffer. That is, we found that the negative effects of school closures are experienced not just by the members of a school community. What we can demonstrate statistically is that after a Catholic school closes, the “social capital” — the web of connections and trust between people — in the neighborhood declines. People are less likely to feel that their neighbors will help them shovel if it snows, keep an eye on children playing outside, unite for a community project, and so forth.

When they are less likely to feel trust and bonding to one another, eventually other bad things start to happen, too — there are more signs of disorder, like cigarette butts or broken bottles on the sidewalk or in the streets, more groups loitering on street corners, more prostitution, and so forth. Ultimately there’s more crime. Although we study a time when crime was declining across the U.S., we found that crime declines more slowly in neighborhoods, in Chicago and in Philadelphia, that lost Catholic schools. Between 1995 and 2005 in Chicago, serious crime declined 25 percent citywide but only 17 percent in police beats that lost Catholic schools.