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Contents:
How the Holocaust Permanently Redefined Mankind’s Attitude Toward Evil: Jonathan Kay, National Post, Apr. 16, 2015 — The New York Times report on the slaughter of Jews in the Galician city of Lviv was brief but horrifying.
Holocaust Remembrance Day: 70 Years After World War II, Jew-Hatred is Back in Europe: Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Fox News, Apr. 15, 2015 — Seventy years after the end of World War II, the first and last documents authored and signed by Adolph Hitler continue to impact on events and the hearts and minds of men.
The Iranian Crisis — American Jews Must Stand and Be Counted: Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 14, 2015— The announcement of the Lausanne joint statement concerning the framework of the US deal with Iran highlighted the extent of President Barack Obama’s subterfuge and deception.
Obama and Revolutionary Romance: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Apr. 14, 2015— Lots of questions arise about the muddled foreign policy of the Obama administration.
The “Other” Israel: Charles Bybelezer, CIJR, Apr. 15, 2015 — In some ways, Israel is indeed what many have been conditioned to see: A conflict zone.
Understanding the Nazis: Ian Brunskill, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 10, 2015
What the West’s Long Struggle With Communism Tells Us About the Battle with Islamic Terrorism: Michael Bliss, National Post, Apr. 14, 2015
Trouble For J Street? Liberal Jews Turn on Obama Over Iran Deal: Moshe Phillips & Benyamin Korn, Algemeiner, Apr. 12, 2015
Israel, THE Liberal Country of the Middle East: Paul Gherkin, Jewish Press, Apr . 12, 2015
HOW THE HOLOCAUST PERMANENTLY REDEFINED
MANKIND’S ATTITUDE TOWARD EVIL
Jonathan Kay
National Post, Apr. 16, 2015
The New York Times report on the slaughter of Jews in the Galician city of Lviv was brief but horrifying. “Eleven hundred Jews were killed during the recent massacre,” the Times declared. “Hundreds of Jews are said to have barricaded themselves in a synagogue, which was set afire. Those who attempted to escape from this refuge were fired upon.”
The dateline was Nov. 29, 1918 — more than three decades before Adolf Hitler began his systematic program of exterminating Europe’s Jews. From 1917 to 1921, amid the aftermath of the First World War and the chaos of the Russian Revolution, uniformed armies and peasant gangs staged hundreds of deadly pogroms. Estimates of the total number of Jews killed range from several tens of thousands to a quarter million. No one really knows the precise number because the slaughter was done in small batches, often spontaneously. That New York Times article quoted above represents one of the very few Western reports on the subject published during this entire period.
For these victims, there were no official apologies, no days of remembrance, no memorials. Few prominent historians or journalists cared much about Jewish suffering. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was just one of dozens of popular anti-Semitic tracts popularized during this era.) And in any case, mass slaughter was a common feature of just about every conflict during this period. In the Congo Free State, somewhere between five and 10 million Africans (again, no one is really sure of the exact figure) had died under the forced-labour regime implemented by King Leopold II. The Turks had just exterminated as many as 1.5 million Armenians without attracting much in the way of international condemnation. Legions of Assyrians and Greeks also were slaughtered by the Turks during the same period. The death toll was in the hundreds of thousands, yet the entire episode languished in historical obscurity. Set amidst all of this bloodshed, the Jews of Lviv were but a rounding error.
I recite all of these grim precedents now — on Holocaust Remembrance Day — because it helps us appreciate the Shoah not just as an epic tragedy, but also as a crucial turning point in the way our species marks the fact of human evil. For as long as I can remember, Jewish leaders have worried that the world eventually would forget about the Holocaust. Twentieth-century history shows the exact opposite to be true. Whereas the historical details surrounding previous acts of slaughter against Jews and other minorities receded quickly into the mists of time, the Holocaust has remained a permanent, jagged scar on the landscape of Western history, culture and politics.
Visit Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, or any of the dozens of other similarly themed museums around the world, and you come to realize that we know more about the Holocaust than perhaps every other human genocide put together. That’s because the Holocaust was not only the world’s first centrally organized industrial genocide, it also was the first to leave behind a bureaucratic paper trail. It took place in the era of photography, and even of primitive video (for example, footage of the Liepāja killings in Latvia). And so it shocked the world’s conscience in an indelible way that isolated early 20th-century pogroms could not. From the proliferation of digital resources, specialized academic disciplines, Holocaust literature and even a Hollywood genre…our understanding of the Shoah has created the template that now is applied retroactively to virtually every other historical slaughter — from the slave trade, to the Holodomor, to (most recently) the victims of communism.
A century ago, we didn’t even bother counting evil’s victims. Now, we etch their names into stone, and mark days on the calendar when we observe their suffering. That’s progress. But there’s also a horrible flip side to this transformed understanding of human evil: for those disposed to admire Hitler and follow in his footsteps, the lesson of the Holocaust was that the extermination of gigantic swathes of humanity is a scientifically realistic goal. The mass slaughter of Jews that took place a century ago, in the era of horseback pogroms, tended to be a random, village-by-village, piecemeal process — much as it had been in medieval times. Yet just 20 years later, Jews were being exterminated systematically like pigs at a slaughterhouse. This was a gruesome technological upgrade: Hitler fundamentally changed evil’s delivery system…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
70 YEARS AFTER WORLD WAR II, JEW-HATRED IS BACK IN EUROPE
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Fox News, Apr. 15, 2015
Seventy years after the end of World War II, the first and last documents authored and signed by Adolph Hitler continue to impact on events and the hearts and minds of men. At 4 am, on April 29, 1945, the man who had vowed that his Third Reich would last a thousand years signed his final political will and testament. Later that same day he would marry his longtime girlfriend Eva Braun. The next day they committed suicide rather than be captured by the Soviet army.
Despite the fact that the genocidal monster had succeeded in destroying two out of every three European Jews, including Anne Frank and 1.5 million other Jewish children, in the document Hitler still blamed the Jews for the catastrophic global conflict he had unleashed. And then he added these words about his archenemy — the Jews: “Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred against those finally responsible whom we have to thank for everything, international Jewry and its helpers, will grow.” The Fuehrer was wrong. It didn’t take centuries but a mere 70 years for history’s oldest hate to ferociously reemerge on the streets of Europe. Respected polls indicate that at least 150 million Europeans harbor anti-Semitic and/or extreme anti-Israel views.
Anne Frank, who perished in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp just before British troops “liberated” the skeletal survivors, penned these words in her diary: “I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” But even as millions of tourists stream into Anne’s hiding place in Amsterdam, Dutch Jews who openly display their Jewishness, find themselves under assault…
This Yom Hashoah, Jews cry not only over past martyrdom but also to mourn the growing number of European Jews killed by Islamist terrorists: A rabbi and 8-year old girl executed on a Jewish school playground; a volunteer guard gunned down at the entrance to a Copenhagen synagogue where a Bat Mitzvah celebration was taking place; four Jewish shoppers slaughtered at a kosher supermarket in Paris; and four people killed outside the Jewish Museum in Brussels. It is true that today’s terror is different. It is not launched by a government but by a transnational, theologically-fueled terrorists. Increasingly however many European Jews are feeling the frigid chill of apathy, the type of which encouraged Hitler in the 1930s and paved the way for the genocide of the 1940s.
This Yom Hashoah community leaders wonder what good is it to have politicians shed a ceremonial tear for dead Jews, when they don’t take steps to protect live ones. On May 8, President Obama and other world leaders will travel to Germany to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of the Nazi tyranny. Many eloquent words and symbolically rich moments will be beamed around the globe. But Holocaust survivors and world Jewry would give it all up—for the following words from President Obama, Chancellor Merkel, Prime Minister Cameron and President Putin to the Ayatollah Khamenei: “On the 70th anniversary of the end of World Ware II and the Nazi Holocaust, the P5+1 will sign no nuclear deal, will end no sanctions unless and until you publicly end your stated goal of annihilating the Jewish State of Israel.”…
[To Read the Full Article With Footnotes Click the Following Link—Ed.]
THE IRANIAN CRISIS — AMERICAN JEWS MUST STAND AND BE COUNTED
Isi Leibler
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 14, 2015
The announcement of the Lausanne joint statement concerning the framework of the US deal with Iran highlighted the extent of President Barack Obama’s subterfuge and deception. We also witnessed the blatant contempt of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who rejected key components of the “agreements” and referred to America’s “devilish” objectives while his audience chanted “Death to America.” Yet Obama continued insisting that a genuine framework for a deal had been achieved and dismissed Khamenei’s remarks as merely for “domestic consumption.” He reiterated that Iran would not become a nuclear power “under his watch.”…
The problem is that Obama and his acolytes refuse to face the reality that the Iranian regime is not merely a terrorist state but is controlled by messianic religious fundamentalist fanatics who, during the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, systematically sacrificed 500,000 child soldiers carrying plastic keys to Paradise as they were “martyred.” Mutually assured destruction, which created the deterrence between the Soviets and the West during the Cold War, cannot be applied to leaders capable of launching a suicidal nuclear inferno to destroy Israel, content in the belief that they will be rewarded for their efforts with heavenly paradise.
However, the Iranians will in all likelihood ultimately accept the deal offered because it will relieve economic sanctions, transform them legally into a threshold nuclear state, and, according to Obama himself, provide the legitimacy to become a fullfledged nuclear power after 13 years. As former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Negotiations…to prevent Iranian capability to develop a nuclear arsenal are ending with an agreement that concedes this very capability.”…
Only Congress can prevent the implementation of this shocking act of appeasement with its catastrophic global implications – and there are only a few weeks left to act. Proposed bills requiring congressional approval for the Iran deal and removal of sanctions are currently being debated and may be voted on this week. In this context, the response of American Jews to Obama’s actions could be a crucial factor in determining the outcome.
There is already unprecedented tension evident among Jews who are shocked with their vindictive president’s determination to proceed with policies that amount to an abandonment of Israel. Obama is sensitive to this and has suddenly become excessively solicitous, disingenuously expressing astonishment at those who felt that Israel was not close to his heart, making the cynical observation that a weakened Israel “would be a failure for my presidency.” What an extraordinary statement from a president who, for most of his term of office, has treated Israel worse than rogue states. He also stated “that if anyone messes with Israel, America will be there.” Aside from being meaningless, taking account of Obama’s track record with his allies, this is a pathetic utterance.
Indeed, when in the midst of negotiations, the Iranian leaders reiterated that “the destruction of Israel is nonnegotiable,” Obama merely expressed regret, but refused to allow this to influence his position. These developments have obliged even liberal Zionist Jews to admit the painful reality that their president has turned on Israel. Yet some of Obama’s most fervid supporters are Jews or of Jewish origin. The most benign are schizophrenics who still love Israel but instead of criticizing the administration, vent their spleen on Netanyahu for his “extremism.” The more vicious are the anti-Israel bashers and left-wing organizations such as J Street, which urge Obama to “punish Israel.” Obama’s verbal onslaughts provide grist for the mill of Jews promoting anti-Israel boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and those at the recent J Street conference, where one panel participant was applauded when she questioned the need to retain a Jewish state…
[To Read the Full Article With Footnotes Click the Following Link—Ed.]
OBAMA AND REVOLUTIONARY ROMANCE
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, Apr. 14, 2015
Lots of questions arise about the muddled foreign policy of the Obama administration. Critics suggest that America’s friends have now become enemies, and enemies friends. Others cite incompetence and naïveté rather than deliberate agendas as the cause of American decline, and of growing global chaos from Libya to Ukraine. But, in fact, there is a predictable pattern to Obama’s foreign policy.
The president has an adolescent, romantic view of professed revolutionary societies and anti-Western poseurs — and of his own ability uniquely to reach out and win them over. In the most superficial sense, Obama demonstrates his empathy for supposedly revolutionary figures of the non-Western world through gratuitous, often silly remarks about Christianity and Western colonial excesses, past and present. He apologizes with talk of our “own dark periods” and warns of past U.S. “dictating”; he contextualizes; he ankle-bites the very culture he grew up and thrived in, as if he can unapologetically and without guilt enjoy the West’s largesse only by deriding its history and values.
In lieu of reading or speaking a foreign language, or knowing much about geography (Austrians speak Austrian, the death camps were Polish, the Indian Ocean Maldives are the politically correct name of the Falklands, cities along the U.S. Atlantic Coast are Gulf ports, etc.), Obama adopts, in the manner of a with-it English professor, hokey accentuation to suggest an in-the-know fides anytime he refers to the Taliban, Pakistan, or Teheran. Reminiscent of college naïfs with dorm-room posters of Che Guevara, Obama mythologizes about the underappreciated multicultural “Other” that did everything from fuel the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment to critique Christian excesses during the Inquisition.
In truth, what he delivers is only a smoother and more refined version of Al Sharpton’s incoherent historical riff on “astrology” and “Greek homos.” Obama refuses to concede that Islam can become a catalyst for radical killers and terrorists, and he has a starry-eyed crush on those who strike anti-Western poses and have turned their societies upside down on behalf of the proverbial people. Keep that in mind, and it makes sense that, during the Egyptian turmoil, Obama was intent on ousting the pro-Western kleptocrat Hosni Mubarak and investing in the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the dark anti-democratic history of Mohamed Morsi and the Brothers and their agenda of Islamicizing the most populous country in the Arab world. For Obama, such zealotry is evidence of their legitimacy and the justice of their efforts to overturn the established hierarchies of old Egypt.
Moammar Qaddafi was a monster and a thug. But in fear both of radical Islamists and of the implications for Libya of the Western military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and eager to have Western knowhow rehabilitate his ailing oil and gas industry, he had reached out to the West and ceased his support for international terrorists. But ridding Libya of the cartoonish and geriatric Qaddafi and allowing it to be overrun by stern revolutionary Islamists was again in tune with Obama’s rose-colored view of the Middle East…
[To Read the Full Article With Footnotes Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Charles Bybelezer
CIJR, Apr. 15, 2015
In some ways, Israel is indeed what many have been conditioned to see: A conflict zone. Directly to the north is Syria, whose civil war has left more than 200,000 people dead and terrorist groups manning the Golan Heights along Israel’s border. Next door, Lebanon is run by the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, the leader of which has encouraged world Jewry to immigrate en masse to Israel, as the concentration of Jews there would make it easier to dispose of them in one fell-swoop. To the South, Hamas-ruled Gaza continues to pose a major military threat…
While it is easy to criticize Israel from an external perch, the circumstances appear much less black and white from the inside looking out. Quite simply, a plurality of Israelis, like Netanyahu, view reality in stark objectivity, recognizing, in survival mode, that the country is surrounded by implacable enemies. For this reason, Netanyahu is considered by many as the most suitable candidate to defend Israel against its many threats that are otherwise the cause of the rest of the Middle East imploding. Moreover, Israelis have watched the Left’s land-for-peace paradigm literally explode in their faces, given that territories vacated by Israel in the past have all been occupied by terror groups, and are no longer willing to take “bold risks” in the prevailing climate.
But there is another, less-discussed reason the country chose Netanyahu; namely, that he has contributed perhaps more than any other politician in transforming Israel from a stagnant socialist bureaucracy into the “Start-Up Nation” flourishing today. As the Financial Post’s Lawrence Solomon recently wrote, “…under Netanyahu’s influence, starting in the late 1990s with his first term as prime minister, Israel systematically began dismantling the welfare state, tackling both the social safety net and the vested corporate interests.
“[Netanyahu] sold off Israel’s interests in state enterprises, abolished foreign exchange controls and otherwise liberalized the economy, attracting foreign capital and turning Israel into an entrepreneurial marvel.…” Despite the widespread conception that Israel is isolated, Solomon points out that the country’s economic development has, in fact, enabled Jerusalem to forge close ties with superpowers such as China and Russia, emerging economies such as India and Nigeria, and even Arab countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. It is this “other” Israel that much of the mainstream media ignores, leaving that phenomenon unknown to the public at-large…
Overlooked is the development by Israeli companies of so many life-altering technologies, such as drip-irrigation systems which have helped feed millions of people throughout Africa and Asia; the newly-launched ReWalk bionic assistance suit that enables paraplegics to stand upright and even climb stairs; and the “Pillcam,”an ingestible device which identifies diseases by photographing the digestive track. Israeli companies have been instrumental in the development of ground-breaking products such as the USB flash drive, the computer microprocessor, the cell phone, instant messaging, as well as staple applications like Waze, Viber, and Get Taxi.
It is for this reason that I encourage people to attend a one-of-a-kind upcoming conference in Montreal: “Israel's High-Tech Miracle & Canada: Innovation for Humanity.” The April 29 event, organized by the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, will provide individuals—Jewish and, perhaps more importantly, non-Jewish alike—with the opportunity to see this “other” side. A small sample of those taking part includes Prof. Itzhak Ben Israel, chairman of the Israel Space Agency, the Jewish state being one of a handful of countries ever to successfully launch a satellite into orbit. Likewise on hand will be Mr. Haim Rousso, Executive Vice President of Elbit Systems, a company whose technology was used to create the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, which has saved thousands of Israeli and, in turn, Palestinian lives.
Also participating is Mr. Barry Fishman, the former CEO of the Canadian branch of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the largest generic drug maker in the world and responsible for such revolutionary medications as Copaxone, the best-selling treatment for Multiple Sclerosis. Mr. Pierre Boivin, current President and CEO of Claridge Investments and former chief of the Montreal Canadiens hockey club, will also be speaking. These pioneers will be joined by numerous academics from across the country, who will convene to offer a counterpoise to the growing de-legitimization of Israel on campuses throughout North America; Jerusalem’s Ambassador to Ottawa, Mr. Rafael Barak, will deliver one of the keynote addresses.
Whatever its faults, Israel is so much more than meets the eye; it is, by any objective measure, a technological wonder to which other countries are increasingly turning for life-saving goods and services. Against all odds, the Jewish state has become a living, breathing embodiment of what can be accomplished when a people comes together to create rather than to destroy; it is a tribute to human ingenuity, a beacon of hope in an otherwise desolate region. I encourage everyone to look past the stereotypes and experience the “other” Israel first-hand.
Charles Bybelezer is an I24 Correspondent and a former CIJR Publications Manager
CIJR Wishes all our Friends and Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Understanding the Nazis: Ian Brunskill, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 10, 2015 — Few subjects in history can have been as exhaustively researched as the Third Reich.
What the West’s Long Struggle With Communism Tells Us About the Battle with Islamic Terrorism: Michael Bliss, National Post, Apr. 14, 2015 — It won’t surprise you that a historian believes the best way to begin to think about the unknowable future is to consider some of the things we have seen in the past.
Trouble For J Street? Liberal Jews Turn on Obama Over Iran Deal: Moshe Phillips & Benyamin Korn, Algemeiner, Apr. 12, 2015 —The top political and intellectual leaders of the Israeli left are coming out against President Obama’s capitulation to Iran. This development will impact the political dynamics in Israel, the American Jewish community, and the US-Israel relationship. And it will leave J Street on the fringe, once again.
Israel, THE Liberal Country of the Middle East: Paul Gherkin, Jewish Press, Apr . 12, 2015 — Diversity of population. Israel has a diverse population. The majority, 75%, are Jewish, about 20% Arab Muslims, and the balance of 5% a mix of Christians, Baha’i, Druze and others.
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