Sunday, March 30, 2008

Lessons of history

A while ago I posted about an article comparing suppression of Nazi resistance in post-war Germany and current counter-insurgency operations in Iraq.  Today Sultan Knish provides some more information on this comparison:



While liberals commonly scoff at the comparison between WW2 and the Iraq War and prefer to dredge up their inevitable Vietnam references with even some conservatives joining in, the reality is that there is far more overlap between WW2 and the Iraq war than many realize.

Part of the problem is that most people have bought into the Spielbergized image of WW2 as a clean war with a clear enemy and for which victory brought a clean end. But the reality was quite different.

During the US occupation of Germany, American forces faced threats on two fronts. First the various elements of the Nazi party and particularly the SS, analogous to the Baathists in Iraq, also formed underground organizations with the aim of carrying on an active insurgency against America. The most famous of these was Operation Werewolf which functioned much like the original Sunni resistance did. In fact Saddam Hussein may have derived his plan for the Sunni resistance from Operation Werewolf. The irony then would be that both the US and the Baathists were replaying a modified version of a WW2 endgame with some tactical improvements.



Take your time and read the whole Sultan Knish's article.  Then go and read the article he linked to, comparing the Iraqi insurgents and Nazi Werewolves.  Sultan did something even more incredible.  I've heard many time that reporting about post-war Germany was just as defeatist and biased as the reporting today about Iraq.  I might have even wrote about it myself.  But I have never been able to find any actual articles from the late 1940s.  Well, Sultan Knish did find just such an article:



...The lieutenant has been talking about the traffic in Army property, the leaking of gasoline into the black market in France and Belgium even while the fighting was going on, the way the Army kicks the civilians around, the looting.


“Lust, liquor and loot are the soldier’s pay,” interrupts a red-faced major.


The lieutenant comes out with his conclusion: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” You hear these two phrases again and again in about every bull session on the shop. “Two wrongs don’t make a right” and “Don’t think I’m sticking up for the Germans, but….”


The troops returning home are worried. “We’ve lost the peace,” men tell you. “We can’t make it stick.”


A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.


You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last was America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now.


Never has American prestige in Europe been lower. People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of out misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market. They blame us for the corruption and disorganization of UNRRA. They blame us for the fumbling timidity of our negotiations with the Soviet Union. They tell us that our mechanical de-nazification policy in Germany is producing results opposite to those we planned. “Have you no statesmen in America?” they ask.



Do read it all.  This is indeed incredible.  You replace the word "Germany" with "Iraq", and the date of the article could be 2008 instead of any time between 1945 and 1949.  Ironically, this gives me even more hope: despite the leftist defeatism we will succeed, just like we did in the late 1940s.  And it also shows just how idiotic the leftist media is.


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Thursday, March 27, 2008

Geert Wilders' film - updated

I am joining the long list of bloggers posting the film "Fitna" produced by the Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders.  Undoubtedly, my readership is nothing compared to big blogs like Little Green Footballs.  So, why am I bothering with this?  Here are the reasons:


1. The more people see it, the better;


2. Out of solidarity with the other bloggers;


3. My way of saying "Screw you!" to the jihadists.


So, here it is:


Update - 3/28/08, 11:00 p. m.:


LiveLeak, who originally released the video, now has removed it because of the death threats.  I am leaving their original video here below because it now displays their explanation.  Meanwhile, here is the Google video.  And to the jihadists: take your jihad and shove it up your ass!




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Sunday, March 23, 2008

Obama's speech

Last Monday Barack Obama gave his speech on race.  On the Left people continue to view him as a Messiah, while on the Right people continue saying how inadequate it was.  The speech seems to fail to convince anyone of anything.  Rather, Obama's support is dwindling after vile rants of his pastor were revealed.  I heard parts of his speech while I was driving to work.  It did sound good.  And, ironically, Obama seemed to be saying: "Enough already talking about racial origins of people".  At least, it seemed that way to me.  I would never vote for someone like Obama based on his policies, but I could not care less about his race.


So, I started to think: "Is it fair to judge Obama by his associations?"  I started thinking about people I know.  Some of them harbor mistrust of Black Americans bordering on racism.  Others suspect every non-Jew of being anti-Semites.  I don't hold either of these views, so I don't think I should be judged by the views of those people.  But then I realized something.  Those people I know would not be able to promote those views in my presence without me arguing against them.  And if they would sound as vile as Obama's pastor, they would not be able to maintain their relationship with me.  When I was looking for a Hebrew School for my older daughter to attend, I actually looked for the one I would be comfortable with.  So, in my case, I ended up with Chabad, even though neither my wife nor I are religious, because any Reform Congregation would likely be, in the words of Michael Medved, "Democratic Party with candles".  Furthermore, if a rabbi in my synagogue would ever say anything even remotely close to the kind of crap spouted by Obama's pastor, I would never set my foot in that particular temple again, and my daughter definitely would not be attending Hebrew School there.  I would never allow my kids to be exposed to that kind of crap.  So, I guess, in my case, I really should not be judged by the views of the people I know.


But what about Obama?  For 20 years he sat there and listened to this stuff.  He picked this church, the church that reportedly Oprah Winfrey left, presumably because she would not stand for this crap.  He was married there and allowed his kids to listen to his pastor as well.  Some pundits on the Right are quick to say that, while they don't accuse Obama of sharing his pastor's views, they want an explanation of why he listened to Rev. Wright for 20 years.  That is political correctness at its worst.  I will not sugar-coat this.  I suspect Obama of sharing anti-American, anti-Semitic and racist views of Rev. Wright.  There are telltale signs of just that: his wife's being ashamed of this country, his refusal to wear an American Flag lapel pin etc.  The fact that he kept coming to that church for 20 years can be most easily explained by the fact that he felt comfortable listening to his pastor's rants.  There is no real way around it.  And so, there you have it: we have a Presidential Candidate from a the Democratic Party who very likely hates this country, or at least finds the views of his pastor justifiable.  Thus, I am not judging Obama by his association with his racist pastor.  Rather, I am judging Obama by his own views that allowed him to call Rev. Wright his mentor.  And those views are disgusting.


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Sunday, March 16, 2008

A familiar story

Yesterday we visited out friend in Los Angeles.  Her little girl is the same age as my older daughter, and she had a birthday party, so we went there.  After the kids' party we went to our friend's house.  Later in the evening her parents came over.  We were sitting there and talking about life, politics, history etc.  And in the course of the conversation my friend's father told me a story, his story.  It was a story I've heard before.  No, not from him.  But I've heard similar stories about members of my own family and about members of my wife's family.  I've read stories like this many times.  Yet, when someone who lived through this and tells you about it is someone you know, someone sitting next to you at a dinner table, that tends to affect you much more...


My friend's family is from Berdichev, a small town in Northern Ukraine.  Her father, Mr. K., was 4 years old when the Nazis entered the city in the early July of 1941.  The Jews comprised a very large percentage of the population, perhaps even a majority: the city was historically a shtetl and a center of the Jewish life in Ukraine.  The city's male population of military age was in the Soviet Army fighting the Nazis, including Mr. K's father.  The rest of the Berdichev's Jews did not have time to evacuate and frankly did not think it was necessary.  You see, Berdichev was already occupied by the German Army once before, in 1918.  Back then the relationship between the Jews and the Germans was quite friendly.  There were Jews in the German Army, and the Germans of 1918 preferred to deal with the Jews: Yiddish is close enough to the German language, so they simply could communicate easily.  But in 1941 things were different.


According to Mr. K's recollection, around mid-September of 1941 the Jews of Berdichev were rounded up and brought to the square in the center of the city, ostensibly to be moved somewhere.  Mr. K was there with his mother, his 6 years old older brother and his 2 years old younger brother.  His grandparents were also there.  The rumor had it that those with the little kids would be left alone, and so Mr. K's mom sent his older brother to be next to the grandparents.  Soon Mr. K's mom sensed that something was not right.  She told her parents that she had a feeling they they were all going to be shot.  So she decided to make a run for it.  She picked her youngest one up, took Mr. K's hand and told her oldest to keep running with her and not to stop no matter what happens.  They ran.  The Germans were shooting at them, but they kept running.  Finally they got away far enough and hid in some orchard.  Mr. K's older brother was not with them.  They have never seen him again.  Perhaps he was hit while they were running.  They were recaptured later that day, but by that time the Nazis were done with murder for the day.  As they were recaptured, an auxiliary policeman from the locals hit Mr. K's mom in the shoulder with his rifle butt.  Ironically, a German officer intervened.  They were brought to the market place and placed in a line with a bunch of other Jews they thought were recaptured like them.  But it turned out that those people were the ones who had some skills deemed useful by the Germans: tailors, cobblers, jewelers, dentists etc.  Amazingly, all those people were released for the time being.  Mr. K with his mom and the little brother came back to their apartment.  They hoped that the oldest kid might come there if he was alive, but he was not there.  The apartment was already looted.  The only thing left there was Mr. K's father's green army-style wool blanket.  So, Mr. K's mother said: "That's it, we have to get out of Berdichev".  They picked up the blanket and left.  They figured that the further away from the city they get, the better chance they would have to survive.  The Germans and the local collaborators would be further away: they tended to stay closer to the city.  And the locals would be nicer.


They moved from one village to another for over 2 years, until the liberation.  Mr. K's mom could sew, and so they would stay with people in a village until she would sew clothes for them.  Then the peasants would ask them to leave and go somewhere else.  You can't blame those peasants for that: hiding a Jewish family in occupied Ukraine was extremely dangerous.  If discovered, the Jews had a chance of being sent to a camp: still some meager chance of survival.  But people hiding them would likely be shot on the spot, the whole family.  So, Mr. K with his mother and brother had to move around.  In the summer they hid in the farm fields, and in the winter people hid them in their houses.  They survived.  When the Soviets came back, it was still a liberation: as bad as Stalin's regime was, it was better than the Nazis.  In 1944 they got that telegram dreaded by every soldier's family: Mr. K's father was killed in action.


So, there were only 3 people left out of a pretty large family: Mr. K, his little brother and their mom.  They survived, thanks to Mr. K's mother's resourcefulness and her will to save her children.  As for those Ukrainian peasants that hid them, there are no words to express my gratitude.  Clearly, Mr. K's mom's sewing was very meager compensation for the risks they took.  It had to be their simple humanity that prompted them to save this mother with her 2 young kids.  I hope those people had long and happy lives.


In this country among Jews Ukrainians often regarded as universally anti-Semitic.  There is some truth to it: from the time of Bogdan Khmelnytsky anti-Semitism was rampant in Ukraine.  But there were people who were willing to risk their lives to save other human beings.  They sometimes might bad-mouth Jews and even call them derogatory names, but they would still save them.  In fact, I knew people like that.


This is history.  But how is it relevant now?  Well, for starters, there are some nuts that insist that Mr. K's story never happened.  And my and my wife's family members were not murdered.  Those nuts want the world to believe them, rather than Mr. K.  They don't want the world to believe the stories my grandpa told me.  There is one nut in Iran that accuses Mr. K of lying, while he himself wants to acquire weapons to make it happen again.  Look at this video that Judith Klinghoffer sent me:





While you are watching, pay close attention to those "salutes" so loved by Islamo-Fascists.  And, to refresh what you saw, take another look at the pictures in this article of mine.  There quite a number of people in the world that want to repeat Mr. K's story once again, only this time ensuring that there are no survivors.  To this I say:


NEVER AGAIN!


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Thursday, March 13, 2008

Another school shooting

It's been 4 days since it happened (via Israellycool):



An Arab terrorist infiltrated Jerusalem's Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva at around 8:30 Thursday night and murdered eight Jews. At least 10 students were wounded, including five in serious to critical condition.


Five of the dead were high school students in Merkaz Harav's Yeshiva LeTze'irim, and three studied in the upper-school Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva. 



I should have warned you: it's graphic.  The idiotic leftist media keeps talking about a "cycle of violence".  Of course, there is no "cycle": as soon as the bastards leave the Jews alone, the violence will stop.  Of course, those Nazis will not stop:



10:05PM: Abu Abir, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees:



“The only way that Israelis will have security is to get up and leave Palestine. All Palestinians will chase after every last one; we won’t leave them space to bury their dead. This is the first of many acts that the Palestinian resistance promised and started to carry out.”



I have an idea: let’s negotiate!



And so, we have to kill them before they kill us.  But here are the differences between this latest school shooting and a bunch of recent school shooting in America:


1. This one was undisputedly an act of terrorism, rather than possibly violence perpetrated by a disturbed individual.


2. Unlike, say, in the case of Virginia Tech massacre, the number of victims of this shooting was limited, thank G-d and a guy named Yitzhak Dadon:



The part-time yeshiva student who first shot the terrorist, 40-year-old Yitzchak Dadon, said he was in the Yeshiva's study hall when he heard the shots.  "Everyone left through a side door," he said, "and I left through a window, and lied down on a roof overlooking the library... When he came out, I shot him in the head twice.  I saw him start to stagger, and then David Shapira [a yeshiva graduate and paratroopers officer] arrived on the scene, shot him with his M-16 rifle, and then we emptied our magazines into him."



A good guy with a gun saved lives!  What a concept!  But of course the anti-gun leftist idiots would take away Yitzhak Dadon's gun, so that piece of shit Nazi would be able to go hunting for Jewish teenagers unopposed.  I also would not be surprised if some idiot calls for investigation of why Dadon and the other guy emptied their magazines into the terrorist.  After all, that surely was a violation of his civil rights.


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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Helen's reply

Helen has replied to my open letter, here and here.  In order to avoid being accused of misquoting her, here is her response in full:



Hi Eric, I think you are trying to use me to make a point that isn’t there. I’ve never seen any of these photos before and have nothing to say about them. I’ve made it very clear that I believe the Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in history. Now if that’s anti-Semitic, we have done a 180! Believing that the US needs a different, more just distribution of wealth is not an endorsement of Hitler.


I find your list shallow. And as for etymology, take the word gay. Now there’s a 180! Unless, of course, you think homosexuals are the world’s happiest people.


Now find somebody else to misquote and argue with. I have more important things to do than worry about your misunderstandings of racism in this country. You are so hung up on being Jewish, which is a fine thing to be, that you don’t recognize suffering in others.


Write all the open letters that you want, but this is my final answer. For what I believe, see my blog.
Helen Losse
http://helenl.wordpress.com/


And having three copies of the same thing on the web won’t make it any more right.



So, nothing to say about those photos?  Helen hasn't seen the photographs of the Palestinian policemen and Hezbollah rising their right hands in Nazi salute prior to me showing her these photos.  And because of that she has no comments.  That is an iron-clad logic.  Here they are, those pictures, in the post below, 2 of them with working source links!  And she still can't comment.  To be perfectly honest, I did not expect an instant denunciation of the Palestinians or the leftist support for them.  Something like "Wow!", or "Oh, my God!", or "I am shocked, I did not know!" would have been enough for me.  You know, a mild expression of shock and outrage.  But instead, she has nothing to say.  And because I point out that the islamo-fascists are in fact the modern-day Nazis, because I point out the similarities between the Left and National-Socialism and because I point out the Nazi-like anti-Semitism often found on the Left, because of that I am too hung up on being Jewish.  By the way, to answer another of Helen's comments, Judaism is a religion, but "a Jew" is an ethnic definition.  Jews have their own language and distinctive physical characteristics, Southern European or Middle Eastern, to be exact.  Thus, in countries like Russia we are quite easily identified by the way we look, for example by my big nose.  So, anti-Semitism of European kind has much more in common with racism than Helen could ever imagine in this great melting pot called America.  But Helen would never know these details, because in a stereotypical leftist fashion she does not want facts to bother her, if those facts contradict her leftist views.  Rather than confronting unpleasant facts, it is much easier to just say: "I have nothing to say".  Dennis Prager often says that being on the Left means that you never have to say "Sorry", or change your views for that matter.  He is right, of course.  After all, if you are on the Left, your intentions are good.  Who cares about facts or results!


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Monday, March 3, 2008

An open letter to Helen

Some time ago I engaged in an argument with a nice leftist lady named Helen.  The argument started in the comments section of the Bookworm blog post on the issue of racism and continued on this blog and Helen's blog.  In the course of this very civil argument I suggested to Helen that she might find my "Reclaiming the Terms" article interesting.  She did read the article.  At first she commented that she will write more later.  I'll take a liberty to offer her second comment here in its entirety:



After reading this again, Eric, I really don't have much more to say. Etymology is an interesting field. But I do think it’s part of the reason the term “progressive” came into being. What you learned when you studied English has changed. All languages are living, dynamic, or else dead, like Latin. As times change, so does language. There are those who are mad because homosexuals use the term “gay.” They have to do what you have to do: Get over it.



It's been a while, but it is time to respond.


Dear Helen,


It is a pity that you don't have anything to say.  Because unfortunately you missed my point entirely.  What I said about English being my second language was meant as sarcasm.  The article has nothing to do with etymology.  You are right, the meaning of words often does change over time, but never to mean something 180 degrees opposite to the original meaning.


So, it is a pity that you don't have any comments.  I was especially eagerly awaiting your comment on so-called "liberal" support for those "saluting" Palestinian policemen.  Let's see that photograph again:



The link to the original Reuters page does not work any longer.  But this Time Magazine link still does:



I call this photograph "Hezbo-Jugend", similar to "Hitler-Jugend.  This one still works as well:



Here is the link directly to this last image.  So, do you have any comments on the "liberal" support for these people?


You say that the meaning of words changes over time.  Fine, let's recap the meaning of the word "Liberal" in the modern sense, as you understand it.


1. Government-enforced redistribution of wealth, i. e. socialism.


2. Government-enforced limitations of speech, i. e. hate speech laws, political correctness etc.


3. Awarding of privileges based on race and ethnicity, i. e. Affirmative Action.


4. Support for racist organizations like "La Raza".


5. Support for the outright Nazis - see the photographs above.


6. Support for euthanasia, like in the Terri Schiavo case.


How do you like my list of "liberal" positions so far?  In addition to this list you can also often find pretty wild anti-Semitism on the Left.  In fact, 65 years ago there was a government that pretty much held all those positions.  They even used that "salute", now appropriated by the Palestinian Arabs, those darlings of the Left.  And, if you look at the videos of Obama rallies, they will remind you of those documentaries from 1930s Germany.  So, there is only one more step that remains for the Left: to raise its collective right hand forward and repeat after those Palestinians: "Sig ..."


I sincerely hope that you will have something to say, especially about those photographs.


Best regards,


Eric.


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