Israel Commentary

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6794

June 14, 2013

By FRANCIS X. ROCCA
The Wall Street Journal
June 13, 2013

Vatican City

II Reader’s comment below

Nearly half a century ago, the Second Vatican Council corrected the Roman Catholic Church’s historical attitude toward Jews with the document “Nostra Aetate,” which exonerated the Jewish people of any collective guilt for the killing of Jesus and affirmed that God’s covenant with them had never been abrogated.

The document remains a source of controversy among Catholics, particularly over the question of whether they should ever seek to convert Jews, or merely, as “Nostra Aetate” says, await “that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord with a single voice.” Yet the 1965 document unquestionably opened a period of unprecedented dialogue and dramatic overtures by Catholic leaders—a movement that promises to continue, and even rise to another level, under Pope Francis.

While Jews have an obvious interest in communication and harmony with the world’s largest church, the interest for Catholics is more complex. Dialogue allows the church to repudiate the anti-Semitism encouraged or tolerated by its leaders and members over the centuries, and to acknowledge what “Nostra Aetate” called its “sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.” A Catholicism that regards the people of its divine founder with anything other than love and honor is a religion profoundly at odds with itself.

Pope John Paul II, who grew up with friends from Poland’s large prewar Jewish community, became in 1986 the first pope of modern times to visit a synagogue — in the very Roman Ghetto where his predecessors had kept Jews confined until the late 19th century. The pope visited Jerusalem in 2000 and prayed at the Western Wall, expressing sadness for past injuries to Jews. John Paul also opened full diplomatic relations between Israel and the Holy See.

Pope Benedict XVI followed John Paul’s lead, also visiting the Rome synagogue and Israel, and he reiterated and elaborated on Vatican II’s denial that the Jewish people were culpable for Jesus’ death. Benedict also modified John Paul’s famous description of Jews as Christians’ “elder brothers,” in favor of what he deemed a more unambiguously reverent term, “fathers in the faith.” When Benedict’s decision in 2009 to readmit to the Catholic Church an excommunicated traditionalist bishop who turned out to be a public Holocaust denier stirred an international furor, the pope pointedly thanked “our Jewish friends” for their support.

Benedict’s words and gestures, coming from a German who had served (unwillingly) in the Hitler Youth and then his country’s military during World War II, had a special historical resonance. They also indicated that friendship with the Jews was a principle of church teaching rather than merely the inclination of a given pontiff.

Nevertheless, given the rising urgency of pursuing a dialogue with Islam, it was hardly obvious that Benedict’s successor in Rome would promote the church’s relationship with Judaism with the same focus and zeal, especially if the new pope came from outside Europe.

As it turned out, the College of Cardinals could not have elected a man with a clearer commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations than Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, he had celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Hanukah in local synagogues, voiced solidarity with Jewish victims of terrorism, and co-written a book with a prominent rabbi. Touching on one of the most sensitive points in the relationship between Catholics and Jews, Bergoglio had called for the Vatican to open its archives from the pontificate of Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, to address lingering questions about whether the wartime pope had done or said enough to oppose the Nazi genocide.

It is relevant in this connection that the new pope comes from Buenos Aires, the city with the largest Jewish community in the Southern Hemisphere. No pope since the church’s early centuries has come from a society as culturally diverse as modern Argentina, which Francis has celebrated for its blend of ethnicities and religions.

This background helps explain the strikingly matter-of-fact and unselfconscious character of his book-length conversation with Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Buenos Aires, published in Spanish three years ago and recently brought out in English under the title “On Heaven and Earth.” Only a few pages of the discussion between the then-cardinal and the rabbi touch on the historical tensions between Catholics and Jews or how they might be resolved — questions that have traditionally loomed large in Catholic-Jewish exchanges.

Instead, the book presents two religious leaders reflecting together as friends on topics as varied as feminism, globalization and same-sex marriage. The two men compare notes on the approaches of their respective traditions, often agreeing yet not hesitating to note differences. In the (future) pope’s own words: “With Skorka I never had to compromise my Catholic identity, just as he never did with his Jewish identity, and this was not only because of the respect we have for each other, but also because that is how we understand inter-religious dialogue.”

Half a century after Vatican II, following John Paul’s pioneering opening to Judaism and its confirmation under Benedict, Pope Francis’s pontificate now offers the prospect of an achievement no less historic for Catholic-Jewish relations: normalcy.

Mr. Rocca is the Rome bureau chief of Catholic News Service.

II I belong to St Joan of Arc Catholic Church in Boca Raton, Florida. Once every year,
we JOINTLY celebrate the Sabbath together. Catholics, with the Pastor, attend the Friday
Evening Prayers at the Temple which is across our Church and on Sunday, The Rabbi and
his Congregation celebrate with us the Sunday Mass at the Church.

God bless ALL RELIGIONS. I am sure if God WANTED, He would have created
ONLY ONE RELIGION to be followed by all creatures.

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6763

Bill Cosby “I’m 74 and Tired” (Born July 12th. 1937) – Recommended reading

(PS Several reliable readers have advised me that Cosby did not write this. No matter to me. Whoever wrote it has my vote for President. Have a great week-end). jsk

This should be required reading for every man, woman and child in Jamaica, the UK, United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the world…

I’m 74. Except for brief period in the 50′s when I was doing my National Service, I’ve worked hard since I was 17. Except for some some serious health challenges, I put in 50-hour weeks, and didn’t call in sick in nearly 40 years. I made a reasonable salary, but I didn’t inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, it looks as though retirement was a bad idea, and I’m tired. Very tired.

I’m tired of being told that I have to “spread the wealth” to people who don’t have my work ethic. I’m tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it.

I’m tired of being told that Islam is a “Religion of Peace,” when every day I can read dozens of stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family “honor”; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren’t “believers”; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for “adultery”; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur’an and Shari’a law tells them to.

I’m tired of being told that out of “tolerance for other cultures” we must let Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries use our oil money to fund mosques and madrassa Islamic schools to preach hate in Australia , New Zealand , UK, America and Canada , while no one from these countries are allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia or any other Arab country to teach love and tolerance…

I’m tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate.

I’m tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses or stick a needle in their arm while they tried to fight it off?

I’m tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of all parties talking about innocent mistakes, stupid mistakes or youthful mistakes, when we all know they think their only mistake was getting caught. I’m tired of people with a sense of entitlement, rich or poor.

I’m really tired of people who don’t take responsibility for their lives and actions. I’m tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big business whatever for their problems.

I’m also tired and fed up with seeing young men and women in their teens and early 20′s be-deck themselves in tattoos and face studs, thereby making themselves un-employable and claiming money from the Government.

Yes, I’m damn tired. But I’m also glad to be 74. Because, mostly, I’m not going to have to see the world these people are making. I’m just sorry for my granddaughter and her children. Thank God I’m on the way out and not on the way in.

John Bolton: Snowden ‘Committed Act of War Against United States’

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6771

Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013

By Melanie Batley and John Bachman

Edward Snowden is a “traitor” who has “committed an act of war against the United States,” former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton said in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.

The self-confessed leaker of top-secret documents detailing the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet-surveillance programs is a “deceitful and dishonest man” who violated oaths he undertook to keep secret classified information about a program approved by all three branches of the government to protect Americans, Bolton added.

“Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution and it talks about waging war against the United States — which this is — and giving aid and comfort to our enemies, and God knows they’ve gotten a lot of aid and comfort from this release,” Bolton said in the interview with Newsmax TV.

“Let me ask, who died and made him king? Who gave him the authority to endanger 300 million Americans? That’s not the way it works, and if he thinks he can get away with that, he’s got another think coming.”

Bolton pointed out that treason is punishable by death, but accepted that it is unlikely the Justice Department would charge Snowden with espionage. However, he said the now-fired Booz Allen Hamilton contractor should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible.

“If he gets a jail sentence it ought to be about five life terms running consecutively.”

Bolton defended the NSA program, saying it was unlike scandals involving the IRS targeting conservative groups or the cover-up of the killings in Benghazi, Libya, where President Barack Obama’s administration may have been using the power of government for political purposes.

Bolton said he could see why the NSA program has a 60 percent favorability rating among Americans, according to a Washington Post-Pew Research poll.

“The American people understand that we are threatened not just by terrorists but, for example, by China’s incredible cyberwarfare capabilities. … Technology is a wonderful thing, but it has its upsides and downsides, and America needs to be defended,” he said.

“Here, the power of government is being used to protect innocent American civilians.”

Bolton said Obama’s poor management style is part of the problem with the way the NSA leak has been handled.

“This is a real failing of Barack Obama, who before becoming elected president had never managed anything bigger than a Senate office (for a very short time) and it almost seems like he doesn’t even know where part of his federal government is.

“I’m wondering really if he understood or paid attention when he was being told about these various NSA programs,” he said.

Bolton also reflected on recent CBS News reports that the State Department may have covered up allegations of misconduct and illegal activities, including an underground drug ring, sexual assault, and the hiring of prostitutes by members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail.

“The culture of the State Department is very self-protective, but having investigation after investigation quashed really raises a lot of questions about what’s going on,” he said. “I’ve lost count of how many scandals we’ve got going at the moment — but on a clear day this would be a scandal big enough to rock any administration, and it’ll have its impact here.”

He said that while Clinton was seemingly adept at keeping her “fingerprints off” the issue by having her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, intervene, it’s likely she was aware of what was happening and was involved in decisions to keep the issue quiet, as she likely was about the Benghazi scandal.

“Whether it’s Benghazi or this allegation,” he said, “it goes right back to the secretary’s office door and [it's] very hard to see how it doesn’t end up right on her desk.”

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved

Obscuring honest reporting of arch Islamic Terrorist Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s reign of terror

By Jerome S. Kaufman

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6757

Maybe Megan Kelly and Fox News are now worried that the IRS, the EPA, the Justice Dept. — all of Obama’s dedicated minions — will harass them just as they have done journalist James Rosen and are afraid to tell the truth? As a result — another instance of Islamic terrorism is covered up, hood-winking the American people as to their true enemy.

No, Hasan’s killing spree does not revolve around some obfuscated, politically correct term — “War on Terrorism.” Far more accurately and specifically, it is a prime example of our war against Islamic Terrorism.

Unfortunately, a small number of incidental nuts have been inspired by the success of these dedicated killers and have gone on senseless personally motivated sprees of their own that have no relation to any thing but their own insanity.

For those of you who have been beguiled into some phony evaluation of the Islamic terrorist Major Nidal Malik Hasan story, below is the final portion of an article appearing in Israel Commentary April 17, 2013.  

The Impending Trial of Major Nidal Malik Hasan

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6382

II What really happened in excerpts from an article written at the time – November 9, 2009.

Hasan awoke in the hospital bed as it was revealed that he apparently attended the same Virginia mosque as two September 11 hijackers in 2001, a time when a radical imam preached there.

Army psychiatrist Major Hasan had killed 13 and left 31 injured after he jumped on to a desk screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ – God in Great – and fired on defenseless colleagues. But the carnage would have been even greater were it not for the actions of a very brave female, Police Sergeant Kim Munley, who minutes earlier had been directing traffic.

In the months leading to Thursday’s shooting spree, Hasan raised eyebrows with comments that the war on terror was “a war on Islam” and wrestled with what to tell fellow Muslim solders who had their doubts about fighting in Islamic countries.

“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who complained to administrators at a military university about what he considered Hasan’s “anti-American” rants. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”

Hasan persistently complained about perceived anti-Muslim sentiment in the military and injected his politics into courses where they had no place. It was assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates at the Maryland graduate military medical program.

Read complete 2009 article from link below. (Please copy and paste to your search engine if it will not open here)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225627/Fort-Hood-shootings-Army-major-Nidal-Malik-Hasan-kills-12-injures-31-shootout-troops-army-base.html

Let us hope Megan Kelly and Fox News get their tongues back from the cat and give an honest accounting of what this sick, lethally indoctrinated man did killing his fellow soldiers. They might also discard the false term, “War on Terror” and enlighten the American people as to what they are truly facing. It is, in fact, their job to forewarn and gird Americans in our on-going existential battle against world-wide Islamic Terrorism.

Reader comment:

Janet Clare
Jerome, David Horowitz uncovered that Hasan was a member of President Obama’s Islamic Advisory Commission (or titled something like that). Because of this, he got promoted quickly in the military, and he was not reprimanded for his anti-US hate speech. Perhaps this is why even Fox news doesn’t want to touch Obama’s personal advisor.

Four billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority – Not donated by oil-rich Arab nations.

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6751

By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, June 9, 2013

Secretary of State John Kerry’s contention that a $4BN grant would revitalize the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the peace process, ignores the Palestinian track record, at least, since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Kerry overlooks the impact of the $400MN in annual US aid which has fueled an all-time-high Palestinian corruption (Mahoud Abbas’ nickname is “Mr. 20%), hate education, terrorism, anti-US incitement, oppression, in general, and discrimination against Christians, in particular, and the Palestinian affinity toward America’s enemies and adversaries: Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. The PA follows in the footsteps of previous Palestinian leaders who sided with the Nazis, the Communist Bloc and Khomeini.

Why don’t the Arab oil-producing countries provide $4BN to the PA, which they could easily afford in view of their robust $100 per barrel economy?

While Kerry considers the Palestinian issue to be central to Middle East developments and the crown-jewel of Arab policy-making, the Arab oil-producing countries shower the PA with rhetoric, but no money. Arab policy-makers are primarily concerned about domestic and regional issues, resulting from the seismic stormy Arab Winter, which supersede the Palestinian issue. They are preoccupied with the threatening Middle Eastern “sandstorms,” not with “tumbleweeds.”

Furthermore, Arab regimes view the Palestinians as a potentially subversive, treacherous and destabilizing element, based upon the Palestinian intra-Arab track record since the 1950s: a trail of subversion and terrorism in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait. For example, the Arab Gulf states do not forget or forgive the August 1990 back-stabbing of Kuwait and the Gulf States by Mahmoud Abbas and Arafat, who collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s invasion and plunder of Kuwait. They betrayed Kuwait which hosted some 300,000 of their Palestinian allies and relatives, and transferred billions of dollars to their stashed bank accounts.

Therefore, the Arab states have been known to talk the Palestinian talk, but never walk-the-walk, while maintaining their mega billion dollar military acquisitions and lavish life-style.

On December 26, 2012, Nabil Elaraby, the Secretary General of the Arab League, criticized Arabs for reneging on their financial pledges to the PA. He divulged that, “Arab countries pledged a $100 million monthly safety net to the PA, at the March, 2012 Baghdad Arab Summit, but none of it has been realized yet.”

A December 9, 2011, article by Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News highlights a World Bank report: “Arab countries have cut aid to Palestinians substantially, despite their rhetoric of supporting Palestinian rights…. Arab donors provided less than $80 million in the first half of 2011, compared to $231 million in 2010, $462 million in 2009 and $446 million in 2008…. Arab countries have committed to billions in aid in past years that never materialized…. One reason could be that the Arab world has become fed up with the Palestinian problem.”

According to a 2005 report by the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, the United Arab Emirates pledged $43 million to the PA in 2004 – compared to its 2004 oil revenue of $30 billion. The Emirates’ actual aid delivery was zero….The budget of UNRWA, which has looked after Palestinian refugees since 1950, is financed mainly by Western governments — at $127 million in 2004, the US is the largest national contributor…. Arab states pledged $999 million in aid for 2004, of which $572 million was pledged by Arab members of OPEC. Only $107 million of this aid was actually delivered [irrespective of the dramatic hike in the price of oil].”

Demonstrating the secondary role played by the Palestinian issue in the Arab order of priorities, Arab financial support of the PLO, during the 1980s, was less than 10% of Arab financial support of the anti-Soviet Muslims in Afghanistan. Arabs pledged more than $2 billion in support of the first (1987-1992) and second (2000-2005) Palestinian “Intifada” against Israel, but less than $500 million was delivered. During the October 2010 Arab Summit, Arab leaders pledged $500MN to the Palestinians, but only seven percent was delivered.

The Arab League does not discuss the 2013 Syrian retaliation against — and expulsion of – Palestinian supporters of Assad; did not interfere in 2007, when the Lebanese military demolished Palestinian strongholds near Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon which terrorized and murdered Lebanese soldiers; did not stop the 2003 Iraqi reprisals against — and expulsion of – Palestinian allies of Saddam Hussein; did not condemn Kuwait for expelling almost 300,000 Palestinians following their mega-betrayal in 1990; did not attempt to stop the PLO expulsion from Lebanon in 1982 (by Israel), and 1983 (by Syria), following the PLO plunder of Lebanon in the 1970 and 1980s; did not save Mahmoud Abbas and Arafat from the wrath of Jordan’s King Hussein in 1970following the PLO betrayal of their Hashemite host; and did not condemn Egypt and Syria for expelling Abbas and Arafat during the 1950s and 1960s.

Extending a $4BN grant — and persisting in annual aid — to the PA would reflect a determination to ignore the costly Arab lessons in dealing with the Palestinians and would repeat — rather than avoid — past traumatic mistakes.

Have a pleasant week, Shavua tov.

Happy Israel

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6744

by Daniel Pipes
The Washington Times
June 5, 2013

“Reasons to smile in Israel”

In a typically maladroit statement, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry recently complained that Israelis are too contented to end their conflict with the Palestinians: “People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity.”

While Mr. Kerry misunderstands Israelis (Palestinian rejectionism, not prosperity, caused them to give up on diplomacy), he is right that Israelis have a “sense of security and … of prosperity.” They are generally a happy lot. A recent poll found 93 percent of Jewish Israelis proud of be Israeli.(As the rest of us are very proud to be Jews). Yes, Iranian nuclear weapons loom and confrontation with Moscow is possible, but things have never been so good. With thanks to Efraim Inbar of Bar-Ilan University for some of the following information, Let us count the ways.

Israel has more children per capita than any other advanced country.

– Women need to give birth to 2.1 children to sustain a country’s population; Israel has a birthrate of 2.65, making it the only advanced country to exceed replacement. (The next highest is France at 2.08; the lowest is Singapore at 0.79.) While Haredis and Arabs account for some of this robust rate, secular Jews are the key.

– Israel enjoyed a 14.5 percent growth of gross domestic product during the 2008-12 recession, giving it the highest economic growth rate of any OECD country. (In contrast, advanced economies as a whole had a 2.3 percent growth rate, with the United States weighing in at 2.9 percent and the Euro zone at minus 0.4 percent.) Israel invests 4.5 percent of GDP in research & development — the highest percentage of any country.

– Due to major gas and oil finds, Walter Russell Mead observes, “the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be … inch for inch the most valuable and energy rich country anywhere in the world.” These resources enhance Israel’s position in the world.

Natural gas from Israel’s Tamar field has just begun flowing to customers.
– With Syria and Egypt consumed by internal problems, the existential threat they once posed to Israel has, for the moment, nearly disappeared. Thanks to innovative tactics, terror attacks have been nearly eliminated. The IDF has outstanding human resources and stands at the forefront of military technologies; and Israeli society has proven its readiness to fight a protracted conflict. Mr. Inbar, a strategist, concludes that “the power differential between Israel and its Arab neighbors is continuously growing.”

– The Palestinian diplomatic focus that dominated the country’s politics for decades after 1967 has receded, with only 10 percent of Jewish Israelis considering negotiations the top priority. Mr. Kerry may obsess over this issue but, in the acerbic words of one politico, “Debating the peace process to most Israelis is the equivalent of debating the color of the shirt you will wear when landing on Mars.”

– Even the Iranian nuclear issue may be less dire than it appears. Between the vastly greater destructive power of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its growing missile defense system, military analyst Anthony Cordesman predicts that an exchange of nuclear weapons would leave Israel damaged badly but Iranian civilization destroyed. “Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term.” Maniacal as the Iranian leadership is, will it really risk all?

– Successes of the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement are pretty meager (Stephen Hawking snubbed the president’s invitation! A United Nations body passed another absurd condemnation). Israel has diplomatic relations with 156 out of the United Nations’ 193 members. Looking at multiple indices, Mr. Inbar finds that, globally, “Israel is rather well integrated.”

– In public opinion surveys in the United States, the world’s most important country and Israel’s main ally, Israel regularly beats the Palestinians by a 4-to-1 ratio. And while universities are indeed hostile, I ask hand wringers this question: Where would you rather be strong, the U.S. Congress or the campuses? To ask that question is to answer it.

– Ashkenazi-Sephardi tensions have diminished over time due to a combination of intermarriage and cultural cross-pollination. The issue of Haredi non-participation is finally being addressed.

– Israelis have made impressive cultural contributions, especially to classical music, leading one critic, David Goldman, to call Israel a “pocket superpower in the arts.”

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936 is a leading cultural institution.

Listen up, anti-Zionists and anti-Semites, Palestinians and Islamists, extreme right — and left-wingers: You are fighting a losing battle; the Jewish State is prevailing. As Mr. Inbar rightly concludes, “Time seems to be on Israel’s side.” Give up and find some other country to torment.

Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2013 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.

Time to confront Croatia’s hidden Holocaust

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6720

Redacted from an article by Michael Freund
The Jerusalem Post
May 30, 2013

Just over a month from now, on July 1, a historic event will take place in the heart of Europe, when the EU welcomes Croatia as its 28th member state. The move will mark the culmination of a grueling decade long process, one in which the former Yugoslav republic had to implement widespread changes in a number of fields — ranging from intellectual property law to the free movement of capital — to bring itself in line with accepted EU practice.

But however much the Balkan state may have tweaked its legal system and upgraded its food safety and environmental protection standards, there is one thing Croatia has demonstrably failed to do: come to terms with its disgraceful record of mass murder during World War II.

Most of us are aware of camps such as Birkenau, Dachau, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen, where the Germans and their henchmen systematically slaughtered millions of innocents. But how many of us have heard of Jasenovac or the horrors that were perpetrated there by Croatian fascists? Known as “the Auschwitz of the Balkans,” it was the largest of a network of camps established by the independent state of Croatia, which the Nazis set up on April 10, 1941.

Hitler assigned the task of ruling Croatia to Ante Pavelic, head of the fascist Ustashe movement, which vowed to rid the country of Serbs, Jews and other minorities. Following in the Germans’ footsteps, Pavelic passed racial laws against the Jews, imposed restrictions on their freedom of movement and banned them from various professions. Ultimately, the Ustashe murdered more than 30,000 Jews, or 75 percent of the country’s prewar Jewish community.

But it was the two million Serbs then living in Croatia who were the primary targets of Pavelic and his quislings. With a bloodlust rivaled only by that of their Nazi patrons, the Ustashe set about the task of “cleansing” Croatian soil by torching Serb villages, beheading priests and herding Serbian worshipers into Orthodox churches before setting them alight. Over 200,000 Serbs were forcibly converted to Catholicism, with the active help and encouragement of the Archbishop of Zagreb, Aloysius Stepinac.

It was at the Jasenovac camp that the Croats unleashed their most bestial cruelty, by many accounts killing at least several hundred thousand people in an orgy of indescribable savagery. Jasenovac had no gas chambers or murder machines, so each killing had to be carried out the old-fashioned way: with knives, bars, axes or even hammers. If Auschwitz was the epitome of mechanized murder, Jasenovac was the embodiment of manually orchestrated massacre.

In an interview that appeared earlier this month in the Serbian newspaper Politika, Jasa Almuli, a 95-year old author and journalist who previously served as president of the Belgrade Jewish community, described Jasenovac as “barbaric,” saying that “the murders were predominantly carried out manually.” “Very seldom did they use bullets,” he said, “because they believed the victims ‘didn’t merit it.’” Almuli went on to describe some of the Ustashe’s methods, which included cutting out the eyes of their victims and slitting their throats, throwing live prisoners into brick furnaces and poisoning children. The Ustashe even employed a special knife they called a “Srbosjek,” or “Serb-cutter,” to slaughter as many Serbs as possible.

There are numerous detailed accounts of the malevolence that was perpetrated at the camp. Eduard Sajer, a Jew from southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, was imprisoned in Jasenovac in November 1941. His parents and four of his five siblings were murdered there, and in an interview for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he recounted some of the Ustashe’s chilling practices, which included the use of blowtorches and welding rods for torturing inmates. Sajer also described how his younger brother was bludgeoned to death by Croatian guards with a sledgehammer before his own eyes, and how he watched in horror as a group of Jews from Sarajevo were burned alive.

After the war and the establishment of Communist Yugoslavia, the camp was bulldozed and Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito sought to suppress the story of Jasenovac because he didn’t want it getting in the way of creating a new Yugoslav identity. As a result, Croats were not forced to come to terms with their past or their dark deeds, a reality that continued even after the demise of Yugoslavia and Croatian independence. Indeed, even though Croatian leaders have traveled to Jerusalem to offer words of apology at the Knesset, the legacy of the Ustashe remains very much alive and even admired among some Croats.

For example, a year and a half ago, in December 2011, large memorial masses were held in two Catholic churches in the Croatian cities of Zagreb and Split for Ustashe leader Pavelic, despite the fact that he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. A key part of the problem lies in the fact that the memorial museum erected by Croatia at the Jasenovac site seems to have been deliberately designed to obfuscate the true nature of what took place there.

A few weeks ago, a former board member of the Jasenovac museum also raised serious concerns about the nature of the exhibition. In a letter addressed to foreign ambassadors in Zagreb, Julija Kos said that the museum display presented a false image of what took place, calling it “blurred” and “systematic in avoiding a clear presentation of the information.” For over seven years, Kos wrote, she had “persistently pleaded with high government officials to do something to fix the problem,” but they had refused.

At a time of rising extremism and anti-Semitism across the continent, it is essential that Croatia’s hidden Holocaust, as embodied at Jasenovac, not be shunted aside. Europe is still in a position to make these demands, and it should not shy away from doing so. That is the least they can do in memory of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and others who were slaughtered there.

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6711

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
The Washington Times
May 16, 2013

Government is bad for personal freedom. That argument is premised upon the truism that everything government does interferes with freedom because it either prohibits or compels. Everything it owns it has taken from others. Much of what it says is divorced from the truth. President Obama, like President George W. Bush, has argued that his first job is to keep America safe, and if he impairs personal freedom in the process, that is a small price to pay for safety. Many of my colleagues in the media on the left and right have bought this argument, notwithstanding its fallacies.

Until now.

This past week, we learned that the Internal Revenue Service has targeted for additional scrutiny the tax-exemption applications of groups with whose messages it disagrees. We also learned that the Department of Justice obtained the personal telephone records of hundreds of reporters and editors employed by The Associated Press without a search warrant issued by a judge. During this past week, we also learned that the White House, the Department of State and the CIA all engaged in a conspiracy of disinformation so that the official versions of events of what caused the killings of four Americans at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would not impair Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign last year.

The common threads in all of this government secrecy and lying involve a general rejection of government’s moral obligation to tell the truth, a disturbing yet brazen willingness to evade and avoid the restrictions the Constitution has built deliberately around government, and a glib acknowledgment that the government can do as it pleases so long as it can get away with it politically.

The Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause requires that the government treat all similarly situated entities in a similar manner. The Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits the government from using the speech and expressive activities of people in America as a basis for the disparate treatment of them.

Thus, on its face — that is, on the basis of what the IRS has admitted and without any further investigation — we have violations of these constitutional principles. If the IRS were to examine the applications for tax exemption of Media Matters with the same level of scrutiny as it does with the Tea Party Patriots, it would not run afoul of these principles. But Congress has given the IRS broad latitude to scrutinize the behavior of the taxpayers it chooses to scrutinize, and the IRS has given itself authority to probe, prod and plunder wherever it wishes. I say “given itself” because the IRS has rule-making power, which, when overlooked by Congress (as is almost always the case), serves to enhance IRS powers beyond what Congress permits.

Short of criminal behavior such as bribery or conspiracy, the IRS employees who have singled out applications for tax-exempt status for more scrutiny based on anticipated political expression are subject to removal from office, but they cannot be prosecuted or sued. Here again, Congress is to blame, as both Republicans and Democrats have used and abused the IRS to their advantage, and neither party inwardly wants laws that will prevent it from doing so in the future. Is this what you expect of our tax collectors?

The First Amendment also ensures the right of professional journalists to seek and protect their sources, and it gives them immunity from government prosecution or retribution for truthfully publishing matters of material public interest, even when it involves information stolen from the government. The Supreme Court taught us this in the Pentagon Papers case.

Moreover, the Fourth Amendment requires that if the government wants private information about who stole its secrets, it needs a search warrant from a judge. However, the USA Patriot Act, which was celebrated by some in the media whose telephone records have since been seized, permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when they seek records from a third party such as a telephone company and can claim that pursuit of terrorists is at stake. The Patriot Act makes a mockery of the Fourth Amendment, and the government knows that. When the government chills free speech, we all suffer. Thomas Jefferson preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers. Whose personal records will the government authorize itself to seize next?

The lesson of Benghazi is that we had no lawful right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the Libyan government. It was unlawful for Mr. Obama to bomb Moammar Gadhafi without a congressional declaration of war. The organized assault on our consulate was the unintended consequence of us using force to infuse American-style democracy on a people whose culture is unable and unwilling to accept it.

The president’s people, though, were terrified that the killing of our ambassador to Libya during the presidential campaign might impair Mr. Obama’s re-election chances. So they and he tried to rewrite history, and the more they and he lied, the more they and he needed to lie to cover up their original lies. Would you retain an employee who lied to you about the deaths of innocents and lied more to cover up the original lies?

Now, back to Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama and the president’s job. According to the Constitution, the president’s first job obligation is to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. According to the Constitution, that means preserving Americans’ freedom first and safety second. Freedom is our natural state and is the ultimate natural right. Safety is a need that we ourselves can provide when unimpeded by the government. If the president keeps us safe but not free, he is not doing his job. Do you know anyone who feels freer or even any safer because the government has trampled personal freedoms and so far has gotten away with it?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Mr. Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”

No Joke: Making Jewish Humor

http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6663

BY RUTH R. WISSE
Princeton University Press,
292 pages

Redacted from an excellent review by RICK RICHMAN
COMMENTARY, JUNE 2013

IN Jews and Power, her brilliant 2007 analysis, Ruth R. Wisse described the Jews’ survival strategy after the Romans destroyed their state (circa 70CE and 135 CE – The Bar Kochba Revolt):

Jews converted to a purely spiritual nation, ascribing their defeat not to the power of their enemies but to God’s dissatisfaction with them, and devoted themselves to proving their moral worth to God. This way of thinking gave Jews an independence from temporal powers, but it ran the risk of venerating powerlessness as if it were a Jewish ideal. And indeed, the modem state of Israel became the only nation to win multiple defensive wars and each time sue for peace, from enemies who viewed Western morality as weakness.

Wisse’s new book. No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, extends her insights into a surprising realm. This is a historical, literary, and polemical study of the Jewish joke. Explaining humor can be difficult: The novelist David Foster Wallace once noted that the difference between a Calvin Klein ad and a hard-core adult film was the difference between “a funny joke and an explanation of what is funny about that joke.” Explaining a joke can rob it of its magic.

Wisse, a longtime COMMENTARY contributor and professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, avoids that danger, because her principal purpose is not to explain the jokes but to locate them within Jewish history. It is a measure of her achievement that laughter serves as a measure of humanity, with Jews competing with each other in humor. But the joke also reflects its historical background.

Humor was the only weapon Jews in Eastern Europe could safely use against hostile peasants, landowners, and police. Jewish jokes reflected the societies and times in which Jews lived; the underlying theme was the precarious relationship of Jews to the wider world. Humor became so important that the Yiddish language itself once spoken by 10 million, more Jews than ever shared the same
language before or since—came to be considered inherently witty. (And, it was and still is)

Yiddish jokes were the product of a culture that used humor as a psychological defense, to explain the glaring contradiction between the promise of divine election and the continuing presence of unrelenting persecution. Many jokes mocked Jewish passivity and over reliance on intellect. Jewish jokes also mocked pseudo-intellectual explanations for self-interested actions, as when four Jews trade stories about why they converted to Christianity:

The first explains he was the victim of a false accusation and converted to escape the harsh sentence. …
The second confesses his parents drove him wild with complaints about his lax Jewish observance, so he converted to spite them.

The third gives a rambling account of falling in love with a Christian girl….
The fourth pipes up, “Unlike the rest of you, I converted out of firm conviction that Christianity is a religion of a higher order…”

“Oh, please!” the others interrupt him ‘Tell it to the goyim!” ( Who might swallow that line of crap)

Wisse’s background in Jewish humor goes back more than 40 years. Her doctoral dissertation, published in 1971 by the University of Chicago Press as The Schlemiel as Modem Hero, analyzed the schlemiel as a comic figure that resonated with American Jews, who were living with opportunities their grandparents once associated with a messianic age but who still shared their ancestors’ anxieties. The schlemiel was the funny fool, whose comedy was intended to persuade others that weakness was his strength.

He became a recurrent figure in American culture in the 1950s as Jewish humor became widespread. Wisse ended her 1971 book with an analysis of two recent Jewish books she saw as part of an important revolt against schlemiel literature. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth used comedy to criticize the crippling effect on the Jewish psyche of the schlemiel identity.

Norman Podhoretz’s autobiography, Making It, recounted his coming to the “astonishing revelation” at age 35 that, “it is better to be a success than a failure.” Wisse praised the book as the tale of “the unmaking of a schlemiel.” Both were controversial at the time, a sign of how deeply ingrained the schlemiel heritage was in American Jews.

In her new book, Wisse includes an incisive analysis of Portnoy’s Complaint that demonstrates how serious a novel it was. She calls the novel an “early warning that laughter as a strategy for survival could become a recipe for defeat.” Wisse’s new book, No Joke is a new warning that this may not be good for the Jews.

There is a moral hazard at the heart of Jewish humor: It is intended to deflect the difficulties of life, but at some point the difficulties need to be faced, not laughed off. Wisse describes the disparity in the 1930s between secure American Jews and Jews living in Europe and Palestine in a gathering storm, and she asks rhetorically what we should make of the fantastic spurt of Jewish laughter in the very years when American Jews ought, perhaps, to have been laughing less and doing more? The question reverberates today, as European and Muslim anti-Semitism grows unabated and the Jewish State is under existential threat.

Wisse has written an appreciation of Jewish humor while warning Jews against relying on it too much. Her final message is that until Muslims joke about Mohammad, Arabs satirize jihad and anti-Semites start to kid themselves, Jews should “re-examine their brand.” It is dangerous when only one side is laughing.

No Joke is a remarkable combination of scholarship and current concerns written in elegant prose, which can be enjoyed three times; first, for the humor; second, for the erudition and finally and most important, for its moral vision.

(And still more important, as a desperate warning to the same ignorant, benighted, naively sanguine Jews that have made the identical mistakes of avoidance and denial for the last over 2000 years) jsk