A Polish Politician Extinguishes a Hanukkah Menorah. What do you do when the worst stereotypes seem to be true?

 

A Polish Politician Extinguishes a Hanukkah Menorah

What do you do when the worst stereotypes seem to be true?

 

Grzegorz Michal Braun is a 56-year-old Polish parliamentarian. On Tuesday, December 12, 2023, Braun used a fire extinguisher to snuff out the candles on a Hanukkah menorah erected in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm (pronounced "Same"). Warsaw Rabbi Shalom Stambler and Deputy Speaker of Parliament Piotr Zgorzelski had lighted the candles. The rabbi was accompanied by two of his children, ages 7 and 11. Chabad Rabbi Stambler has been lighting Hanukkah candles in the Sejm for the past seventeen years.

 

A Jewish woman, Dr. Magdalena Gudzinska-Adamczyk, physically confronted Braun and attempted to stop him. He sprayed her in her face and she required medical attention. She displayed courage in spite of being a petite woman, smaller than Braun (photo here). She later said, "I have stopped feeling safe in this country." Dr. Gudzinska-Adamczyk also said, "This is my religious symbol, I have the right to defend it, because we live in a free, democratic country. And no one has the right to direct a powder extinguisher in my face because I am defending my religious symbol."

 

Attempting to justify his crime immediately afterward, Braun said, "Those who take part in acts of satanic worship should be ashamed … There can be no place for the acts of this racist, tribal, wild Talmudic cult on the premises of the Sejm … You are not aware of the message of this act innocently called Hanukkah … I am restoring a state of normality by putting an end to acts of satanic, racist triumphalism because that is the message of these holidays." His statement was booed by other parliamentarians.

 

Braun's antisemitic vandalism was immediately and widely condemned, including by members of his own party.

 

"All decent people think exactly the same thing, this is an unacceptable thing, this must never happen again. This is a disgrace," said Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who assumed office on December 13, 2023.

 

Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told Reuters by telephone that Braun's actions were not representative of Poland and that he was "embarrassed" by them.

 

"I declare that I am ashamed and apologize to the entire Jewish community in Poland," said Cardinal Grzegorz Rys.

 

Mariusz Blaszczak is chairman of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc, or Law and Justice Party Parliamentary club. Law and Justice is a right-wing party; it recently lost its parliamentary majority. Blaszczak said that "Braun should be expelled from Confederation," that is, Braun's own party should expel him. "If he is not expelled, it will mean Krzysztof Bosak [the head of Braun's party] stands by him, and he [Bosak] should step down as deputy speaker of the Sejm … There is no justification for the attack because it was an attack on Poland … It is an attack conducted by a man who is either completely irresponsible or someone who acts to the detriment of our country."

 

Piotr Glinski, former Deputy Prime Minister and current Sejm member also spoke on behalf of Law and Justice. "I am turning to the Confederation community," he said, addressing Braun's party. "We are crossing a terrible line in politics … This is aggression not only on religious grounds, but also on interpersonal grounds. There were little children there. This is not to be defended and not to be spun."

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children: Hannah Barnes' new book demolishes trans extremism

 

Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children
Hannah Barnes' new book demolishes trans extremism

 

Swift Press describes itself as an "independent press." In February, 2023, three-year-old Swift Press published Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock's Gender Service for Children. Author Hannah Barnes is, according to her online bio, "an award-winning journalist at the BBC's flagship current affairs program Newsnight … Hannah has specialized in investigative and analytical journalism." My review copy of Time to Think is 445 pages long, inclusive of 59 pages of notes and an eight-page index.

 

Before Swift Press accepted Time to Think, it had been rejected by twenty-two publishers. Some publishers praised Barnes' proposal as an important story that needed to be told, but not by them, because the transing of children was a "sensitive" and "controversial" topic and if they published the book they would face backlash. Barnes says that "Swift did not require my manuscript to be scrutinized by sensitivity readers, nor did they ask me to change a word."

 

Thank the Lord for Swift Press.

 

I have never read another book that so thoroughly smashes to smithereens a powerful ideology. Those who understand trans extremism as a fad and social contagion await an event called "peak trans." Peak trans is that tipping point when trans extremism reaches its greatest power, after which it begins to diminish. Time to Think will contribute to peak trans. No rational person can read this book and not think twice about the transing of children.

 

Barnes is not anti-trans. She uses chosen pronouns and supports transing for some children. In interviews, she places distance between herself and "right-wingers" who want to, as one interviewer put it, "kill all trans people." Barnes includes brief accounts of some former GIDS patients who are happy with transitioning. Barnes presents without criticism speakers' reasons for insisting that they are the sex opposite to their own. Males are "really" female because they wear fingernail polish and high-heeled shoes, or because they dance ballet and hate sports. Females are "really" male because they prefer rough and tumble sports to Barbie dolls, or because they were interested in computers.

 

Barnes is not an ideologue. In interviews, she is a soft-spoken woman in unglamorous attire. She speaks slowly and hesitantly and often stutters as she appears to be searching for the least controversial way to state an astounding fact. Barnes looks a lot like that girl in high school science class who wore no make-up and paid a lot more fascinated attention than anyone else to the anatomy of the dissected frog.

 

Time to Think could have been written by a robot. That's not an insult. Time to Think is dispassionate. It has all the literary style of a workplace report in a three-ring binder; there's no tugging at heartstrings, and no real narrative drive. There is just a series of facts. In spite of Barnes' clinical approach, a roomful of readers would not be silent; rather, the room would resound with the sound of gasps, hands slapping foreheads, and outraged cries of, "How could they?"

Israel and Hamas: For the Shocked and Confused

 

Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel: a primer

 

Some friends on social media remain unclear about the following. What did Hamas do in Israel on October 7? Why have so many around the world responded with anti-Semitism? Let's take these questions one at a time.

 

What did Hamas do in Israel on October 7?

 

Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered, tortured, and kidnapped defenseless Israeli men, women, and children, ordinary civilians doing ordinary things like eating breakfast.

 

The extensive evidence of Hamas' atrocities includes the corpses of a father and child tied together with wire and then burned alive, and twenty children tied together and burned; bodies with hacked off limbs and gauged out eyes; and bodies bespeaking gang rape so severe that victims' leg and pelvic bones were broken. First responder Asher Moskowitz found a baby that Hamas had cooked to death in an oven. The oven's heating element was still attached to the corpse.

 

Captured terrorists offered full confessions. One said, "We became animals. We did things that humans do not do." One confessed that the corpses of young women were raped. Stephen D. Smith reports that there was "an instruction to bring back the dead body of an IDF soldier and posthumously crucify him."

 

Hamas made and shared, via social media, videos. They videorecorded the murder of a helpless grandmother, and posted the video on her Facebook page, so that her loved ones would watch. A child hostage was forced to watch Hamas videos. If the child cried, Hamas members pressed a gun to the child. In videos, terrorists shoot household pets dead.

 

Ben Shapiro posted a compilation. A YouTube poster responded. "As a US Iraq war Vet I started to watch this episode and stopped … I've seen a lot, done a lot but I caved … Tears streamed down my face as I watched without stopping, without looking away, gritting my teeth ... If I could return to the battlefield and join your brothers and sisters and do what I could to avenge/protect/free those that are captured I would in a heartbeat … I salute Israel … I bow my head in prayer multiple times throughout the day that this evil will end."

Rustin 2023 Movie Review

 

Rustin 2023
A new Netflix film draws attention to a "lost prophet."

 

I didn't plan on watching Soviet Communism die, but I did. The child of Polish and Slovak immigrants, I had traveled to my ancestral homelands a few times before I left to study for a year, 1988-89. I didn't know in advance that I'd be attending meetings with Jacek Kuron, the "godfather of the Polish opposition," or marching in the street chanting "Soviets go home," or running from riot police and being tear gassed and shot with water canons. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

 

I returned to the States. Before shouting slogans at communism's riot police, I had previously been a Peace Corps volunteer, a nurse's aide, a volunteer with the Sisters of Charity, an inner city teacher, and a door-to-door canvasser. I'd had ample opportunity to consider how one "saves the world," or to be less grandiose, how one attempts to right wrongs.

 

I'd learn to distrust what I dubbed "virtue celebrities." My rule: the more a person in our group became known for his "compassion," the less reliable that person was in the trenches. You can't predict in advance who the hero will be once you are in a foxhole. Chances are it won't be the person whose face is Velcroed to reporters' cameras.

 

In the all-night strategy sessions debating how to right wrongs, two moments stand out. The first moment occurred one night in Nepal when we were sitting around the Momo Cave, a dingy hole-in-the-wall where men drank raksi, a foul moonshine. A beautiful young Peace Corps volunteer, accompanying herself on guitar, began singing a song written by Donovan about Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

"If you want your dream to be

 

Take your time, go slowly

 

Do few things but do them well

 

Heartfelt work grows purely."

 

I thought, my God, that's it. We all wanted to "save the world," to perform some grand gesture. We couldn't bring clean water to every Nepali village, but we could teach one kid to read. In Poland, we used to say, "Everybody wants to die for Poland, but who is willing to live for Poland?" Who was willing to do the thankless, anonymous, unglamorous day-to-day work?

 

The second moment occurred in a living room in Bloomington, Indiana, when I found myself sitting face to face with Lech Walesa. Walesa was the son of a man imprisoned and ultimately killed by Nazis. Walesa was himself a former auto mechanic, shipyard electrician, TIME man of the year, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Polish president. By the time I met Walesa in 1998, the Soviet Union was an historical fossil and Poland was doing better and better everyday. I asked Walesa how Poland had avoided the traps so many other post-revolutionary populations had fallen into. He didn't hesitate. He immediately and thoroughly credited Christianity for Poland's revolutionary and post-revolutionary successes. 

Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy by Graham Linehan. Book Review.

 

Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy
Graham Linehan's memoir is, by turns, horrific, informative, and a hero's journey

Graham Linehan is 55-year-old Irish writer and director of sitcoms. He's the winner of five BAFTA awards, that is awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He has also won awards from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the Irish Film and Television Academy. In recent years, Linehan has made public statements disagreeing with trans extremism. For this, he has been canceled. Friends and colleagues rejected and abandoned him. Work dried up. His marriage ended. The LGBT website Pink News, he reports, has published 75 hit pieces on him – they've published more since that tally.

On October 31, 2023, Eye Books Limited released, in the US, Linehan's memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy. The book is 288 pages long. It includes black-and-white photographs. Most of the book addresses Linehan's comedy career and comedy and popular culture in general. Much of the book is a meditation on the impact of the internet. The second half of the book addresses Linehan's canceling and the extent of trans extremism in the UK. Irish identity in the twenty-first century and Linehan's jaundiced view of Catholicism are constant themes.

Linehan created The IT Crowd, a British sitcom that ran 2006-2010, with a farewell broadcast airing in 2013. In an episode entitled "The Speech," there is a comedic fight between Douglas (Matt Berry) and April (Lucy Montgomery). April – the character, not the actress who plays April – is a man who identifies as a woman. Douglas becomes uncomfortable dating April, and he breaks up with her. April is crushed to be rejected. At first she pleads in a hyper-feminine way for Douglas to recognize her as a woman. Douglas, apparently distraught and speaking in an exaggerated melodramatic style, insists that the two must part. April changes from sad to enraged and punches Douglas in the face. The two engage in highly choreographed, hand-to-hand combat typical of an action movie. The setting enhances the comedy. They are duking it out in a sterile laboratory as masked, white-coated workers look on. Eventually their fight breaks through a wall and into the resolution of another subplot in this episode. The combatants crash onto the stage where another character is delivering a speech she's been anxious about. The scene is funny. It can be viewed here.

How We Understand Anti-Semitism

 

How We Understand Anti-Semitism, Christianity, and Islam
 Let's avoid popular misconceptions

 

The atrocities Hamas committed on October 7, 2023, and subsequent worldwide support for the genocidal "judenrein-from-the-river-to-the-sea" ideology revealed the prevalence of widespread anti-Semitism. Terrorism has a worldwide reach. The Israel-Hamas war affects international markets and geopolitics. Anyone on the planet, Jewish or not, might suffer from anti-Semitism. It is important, therefore, to understand anti-Semitism.

 

This essay rejects supernatural or genetic explanations for anti-Semitism. Jews are not a different species of human being. Humans are more alike than different. Children born black or white, Muslim or Jewish, offer the same potential.

 

Both anti-Semites and philo-Semites repeat the same formulaic phrases: "Jews are the most persecuted minority," and "Anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred." Anti-Semites like these phrases. There must be something wrong with Jews, they insist, since Jews are hated everywhere. My friend Alex, a philo-Semite, repeats these phrases as well. He sees them as proof of a unique and romantic quality to Jewishness. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the seventeenth-century Ukrainian leader Bogdan Chmielnicki, and Hamas are all identical because they all killed Jews. I disagree. The pharaohs, seventeenth-century Ukrainians, and Hamas are not magical reincarnations of each other. They had different motivations, methods, and goals. No supernatural thread connects them. To understand them, one must understand their particular historical context, not presumed supernatural curses.

 

Anti-Semitism isn't the world's oldest hatred, nor is it the hatred with the highest body count. Misogyny has a longer history and has claimed more victims. The caste system in India "has existed in some form for at least 3000 years." Recent estimates are that there are 200 million Dalits, aka untouchables. The suffering Dalits have endured is unspeakable.

 

Westerners, living in a world strongly affected by Christendom, associate anti-Semitism with Christianity. The standard approach is to blame Christianity, the religion, and to ignore historical context. If discussing anti-Semitism among Muslims, the standard position is to argue that historical context, rather than religion, caused the anti-Semitism. This essay argues for a reverse of these approaches.

 

These approaches distort reality. When Christianity is understood as inherently anti-Semitic, Christians, even those who support Israel, are assessed as inescapably anti-Semitic. Anthony Weiner is a former congressman who currently broadcasts via WABC. In October, 2023, he made a comment that shocked me. I requested clarification. Did he really say that "Christians support Israel because they want all the Jews to be in one spot so that God can kill them all more easily"? Weiner did not respond with a yes or a no, but with a link to a Washington Post article.

 

In the "Christianity is anti-Semitic" worldview, Christians who are not anti-Semitic are understood to be "modernized." In this view, the more Christian you are, the more anti-Semitic you are, and the more "modern" or "secular" you are, the less anti-Semitic you are. Data does not support this assumption. In Russell Middleton's peer-reviewed publication, "Do Christian Beliefs Cause anti-Semitism?" Middleton concluded that "Religious orthodoxy was uncorrelated with anti-Semitism" and that "the well-springs of anti-Semitism today" may be "largely secular." A 2019 Gallup poll suggested that those who attend church regularly are more likely to be sympathetic to Israel. "Highly religious Americans continue to be much more sympathetic toward Israel than those who are less religious." Worldwide anti-Semitic protests in autumn, 2023, are not populated by visibly Christian protestors. Rather, these protesters appear to be more Woke than Christian.

 

This distortion of Christians and Christianity matters. Some start from this false assumption and go on to apply a distorted lens to Islam. That distorted conclusion goes like this, "Christians were anti-Semitic when they were devout, but as they modernized they became less anti-Semitic." We can't assume that anything like this process will change the hearts and minds of Muslims. "Modern" Muslims might turn out to be just as anti-Semitic as "old-fashioned" Muslims.  

 

This essay will argue that to understand anti-Semitism among Christians, one must factor in historical context. To understand anti-Semitism among Muslims, more attention must be paid to religion.

Splinters from a Broken Heart: Israel, Hamas, and Social Media

 

Splinters from a Broken Heart
Israel, Hamas, and social media

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a sixteenth-century star in the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance. He's most often associated with paintings of peasants and other common people doing everyday things: hunting in the snow, ice-skating, dancing at a wedding, eating, sleeping, and playing children's games. In one painting, a peasant is doing what peasants have been doing for over ten thousand years. He is plowing. The earth rises up in furrows. The horse trudges forward. The plowman keeps his gaze directed at the ground beneath his feet. On a terrace beneath the plowman, a blank-faced shepherd, surrounded by sheep, leans on his staff and directs his gaze toward the sky. Further down, a fisherman casts out his line. In the distance, the wind puffs the sails of a galleon. Only after learning the name of the painting does the viewer search the scene beyond these prominent features. And there the viewer finds them: two pale, naked legs are plunging into the water. This is "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Icarus was a character in Greek mythology. His father manufactured wings so his son could fly. The wings gave way and Icarus fell to earth. Many other artists have depicted Icarus' fall. They usually place him in the center. Bruegel did not.

In 1938, almost four hundred years after "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," poet W.H. Auden visited Belgium's Royal Museums of Fine Arts. He wrote a poem about the paintings he saw there. Auden observes that the Old Masters were never wrong in their artistic depictions of human suffering. In Nativity scenes, there are some children who don't much care about the birth of the Messiah; they are off ice-skating. In scenes of martyrdom, "the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree."

And then there is that boy falling out of the sky.

"the ploughman may

have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

but for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

The human ability to ignore shocking data and to carry on with the business of every day life is an important survival skill. Perhaps nothing is as shocking to an individual as losing a loved one to death, and yet we get up the next morning, make breakfast, clock in at work, and march dully forward into a future void where our departed loved one will never again play any part. The problem is, of course, that evil people count on this human ability to stroll past atrocity. The internet seemed, at first, to promise that that most precious of commodities, human attention, would be focused on wrongdoing. Evil people, thus exposed, would hesitate to commit crimes, or would stop committing crimes once those crimes were filmed and witnessed by others.

"Fair Play" 2023 on Netflix

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Killing the Witches: Book Review

Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard

This book is just about a perfect read

St. Martin's Press released Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts on September 26, 2023. The book is 291 pages long, inclusive of an index. My copy has, strangely, no table of contents, and, unfortunately, no bibliography or endnotes. Killing the Witches is the thirteenth book in the "killing" series. The cover describes O'Reilly as the author of eighteen #1 bestsellers.

I never watched O'Reilly's Fox TV show. I'm a woman and a Catholic, and there are controversies in his career that trouble me. I mention my own feelings here because I want anyone who isn't an O'Reilly fan to know – I loved this book. It was pretty close to a perfect read. I wish there were more books like it. If you are at all interested in the Salem witch trials and their echoes, including down to the twenty-first century, and you want a reader-friendly account, buy the book right now. The rest of this review will encourage you to do just that.

Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts is a misleading title. The first 144 pages directly address the Salem witch trials. Pages 145-231 address colonial America, the Revolution, and the new United States, with a focus on the biography of Ben Franklin. In this portion of the book, the authors discuss how various Founding Fathers felt about the question of freedom of religion, and how the legacy of the Salem witch trials influenced their worldview. Pages 232-263 recount the alleged 1949 demonic possession and exorcism of 13-year-old Ronald Hunkeler of Cottage City, Maryland, and also William Peter Blatty's 1971 book The Exorcist, and the 1973 William Freidkin film of the same name. A three-page "Author's Note" relates witch hunts to contemporary cancel culture. A six-page "Afterword" describes Salem, the tourist destination, today. A six-age "Postscript" describes the final days of Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and John Adams.

All of this has been covered in other books. What makes Killing stand out? The book's style. Killing could be read by an intelligent eighth grader. The vocabulary is basic. There are no attempts at deathless eloquence. There is no attempt to manipulate the facts to support some overarching pet theory. There's minimal editorializing. The authors allow the facts to rattle, provoke, and horrify the reader; the authors don't tell the reader how to feel or how to interpret the facts. You could read this book on a train or in the smallest room in the house. These are not put-downs; they are compliments.

Understanding Hamas Atrocities and Hamas’ Glee in Sharing Videos of Those Atrocities

 

source

Understanding Hamas Atrocities and Hamas’ Glee in Sharing Videos of Those Atrocities
A 2011 book by the son of a Hamas co-founder offers unique insights

 

On October 7, 2023, Hamas mounted a surprise attack against Israeli civilians. Hamas did not focus on military sites. Hamas embarked on a grand guignol torture tour. Elderly women, young women, babies, toddlers, men, the handicapped, a wheelchair-bound Holocaust survivor, were stripped, raped, paraded, mutilated, decapitated, stepped on, spat on, taunted, and burned alive. Bodies of the dead were dramatically desecrated. Women were raped next to the corpses of their friends and then executed.

 

Daily Wire's Ben Shapiro compiled video and photographic records of these atrocities against defenseless civilians. He was able to do so because the Hamas torturers were very proud of their accomplishments, and they posted video on social media. The Face of Absolute Evil can be viewed on YouTube here. If YouTube removes the video, you can see it at the Daily Wire site or at Rumble.

 

Westerners inculcated in the Judeo-Christian tradition were confused. They found all these features confusing: Hamas war crimes, those crimes' extensive documentation by Hamas criminals, and Hamas war criminals proudly sharing evidence of their atrocities via the worldwide web. Hamas' audiences, around the world, cheered these atrocities. They ululated, the sound Arab women make when celebrating. They chanted "Allahu akbar," roughly translated as "Allah is greater than other gods."

 

All these behaviors struck Western observers, not just as disgusting and evil, but also as irrational and self-destructive. The entire October 7 attack defied logic. Hamas knew it would not claim territory or achieve its stated goal, the "obliteration" of Israel. Hamas knew that Israel would strike back, with American and international support. Hamas knew that hundreds, if not thousands of Arab Muslims would perish in Israeli counterstrikes. Hamas knew that it might be inviting a nuclear war that would take the lives of millions of innocents, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

 

Social media used the word "animals" to describe the Hamas attackers. In fact, of course, Hamas attackers are human beings, and all the war crimes they committed are acts that human beings commit. Non-human animals do not, typically, devote their time to torturing their fellows, and then bragging to others about that torture. Non-human animals have better things to do with their time.

May God Grant Israel a Rapid and Complete Victory, Security, and Peace

 

The Nazis carried out the Holocaust, largely, in Nazi-occupied Poland. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chlemno, Sobibor, The Warsaw and Lodz Ghettos were all in Nazi-occupied Poland.

 "The German Nazis deported to Auschwitz at least 1.3 million people of more than 20 nationalities. Of that amount, 400 thousand were registered and incarcerated in the concentration camp as prisoners while 900 thousand were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. Jews constituted 85% of all deportees and 90% of those who were murdered." source

Poland did not do this; Nazi Germany did this. But this happened on Polish soil. 

We Poles and Polonians can respond to this heavy burden of history by doing whatever we can to resist genocidal murderers, especially genocidal murderers of Jews. 

As an American, I support my country's significant support of Israel. I vote for candidates who support Israel. I reject isolationists. 

As an individual, I have little power. I can use my pip-squeak voice to speak big truths. 

There is a right side and a wrong side when it comes to conflict between Israel and Arab Muslims. Israel is the right side. Arab Muslims who attack Israel, and who commit the atrocities we see now, are on the wrong side. 

Please note that your news sources may not be covering the atrocities Arab Muslims are committing. Please do some research and discover what's really going on. This is a war carried out through the torture, murder, and desecration of the elderly, women, and children. 

Israel has a right to exist. See my piece "Coming Out as Pro-Israel on Faceook" here.

Israel's Arab Muslim opponents are not reasonable people seeking solutions to limited points of contention. They are genocidal and they are profoundly anti-Semitic. The Hamas Covenant calls for the "obliteration" of Israel and for Islam to dominate the world. See here.

It is not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim to state these basic facts. It is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim to avoid these basic facts. Israel is not a serious threat to Muslims or to Arabs. See for example this chart Muslims nations pose a far greater threat to their neighbors and to their own populations than Israel poses to them. Iran and Iraq, Civil War in Yemen and Syria, genocide in Darfur, have all taken far more Arab Muslim lives than Israel has in defending herself. 

There are more Muslims and / or Arabs on the street today celebrating the attack on Israel than took to the streets to protest the allegedly genocidal actions of China against Uighurs. 

Why? Because attacks on Israel are not about Arab rights or Muslim rights. They are about genocidal anti-Semitism.

For all these reasons this Polish American and all decent people worldwide hope and pray for a rapid and complete victory for Israel, and security and peace for Israel. 

Am Yisrael Chai!

The Sound of Murder: Broken Windows Policing Could Have Saved One Life

 

Source

The Sound of Murder
Broken windows policing and emphasis on family could have saved one life

 

On Saturday, September 2, 2023, I woke from sleep at four a.m. and looked out my window in search of the waning moon. Media had described the second full moon of August as a "blue moon" and a "super moon" and I hadn't yet seen it.

 

I saw some black men partying on the sidewalk around Costello Park. Lately the park has become a site of all-night parties. Men gather on the sidewalk after sunset and remain till near dawn. I'd estimate about fifteen partiers. They sit on milk crates and metal chairs that Paterson, as part of a renovation, using taxpayer dollars from wealthier towns, placed in Costello Park. The metal chairs have been dragged out of the park onto the sidewalk for the all-night parties. Eventually these chairs, one by one, are disappearing entirely.

 

Car stereos blast rap music. There are kids in this building, black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids. I grew up poorer than these kids, but I never had to struggle for sleep against intrusive noise pollution. I never had to sleep through classes in school because there was so much noise in the street the night before. Loud street parties were just not done. In my hometown, fathers left for work before we left for school. They worked hard all day. They arrived home in worn blue uniforms stained with dirt and grease. They ate dinner, they watched TV for a short while, and then they snored in comfortable chairs till wives or kids gently roused them and ushered them to bed. These hard-working men needed sleep, and the town was quiet at night.

 

I mentioned the noise in a Facebook post. I met Merlin when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley. Merlin is handsome, witty, and charismatic. He's a PhD, polyamorist, international bon vivant, and Burning Man veteran. He lived on Grizzly Peak, 1,400 feet up in the Berkeley Hills, where even small homes cost over a million dollars. As night follows day, Merlin said that my mentioning Paterson's noise was racist. Only a white supremacist would gripe about loud and obscene rap from car stereos all night long.

 

"Noise pollution loudest in black neighborhoods" announced a 2017 headline. "This is yet another study that shows that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of pollution … [noise pollution] makes things worse for everybody," UC Berkeley researchers reported. What does it do to children's little bodies to emerge into a world of car stereos, police sirens, screams, crashes? Noise pollution damages children's minds and bodies in all the ways described here. And the all-night partiers don't just pollute with noise. They leave trash like paper plates and plastic bottles scattered on the sidewalk around the park.

 

I didn't see the moon on September 2. I had been at the window for less than a minute. I returned to bed. I heard a crash. My nerves burst into flames; my muscles stiffened; my breath became rapid and shallow; my stomach clenched and poured out acid. I have become very familiar with this bodily response to stressful stimuli. I'm an adult and can try to quell this response with practiced prayer and meditation. I know that Paterson's majority minority children are too young to master these skills and, as a teacher, I know that they suffer in ways that I don't.

 

I investigated the apartment. I couldn't find the source of the crashing sound. I went back to bed and tried to sleep. I had to get up early the next morning to work. Sleep eluded me. Again, at work, all day, I'd be fighting to stay alert, to rein in my dyslexia and spell words correctly.  

 

In the morning light I saw the broken glass and the shattered pane. Someone had thrown a rock at my window, just after I had looked out that window in search of the moon.

Christian Cooper "Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World"

 

That Infamous Central Park Birdwatcher Writes a Memoir
Christian Cooper's superhero name is Captain Cry Bully

As a teacher in front of a class I saw my students as their fellow students did not see them. The pale girl with thin hair looked as if a stiff wind might shred her. If others noticed her at all, they wrote her off as "shy." In fact cancer had monopolized thirty percent of this teen's time on planet earth. She was taking college classes on the off chance that she might survive long enough to have a career. A middle-aged German immigrant performed better than her peers. This apparent superhuman hid vulnerabilities. In addition to school, she had work, and daily visits to her hospitalized son after his nearly fatal accident. The very handsome Circassian lad assured me that his parents would kill him if they knew he was gay and did not believe in Allah. There was the smiling, effervescent baker who had to rise at three a.m. Without parents or scholarships, she was paying her own way and lived in rock bottom poverty. All these students were white.

I grew up poor; my mother lost three babies; four of my siblings died young. One of my childhood friends was so malnourished and neglected that doctors tell him his life span will be shortened. Three of his grandparents died in the Gulag. One escaped. My friend now lives in a comfortable suburb. How? William Saroyan described my friend's trajectory.

"Work. Work all my life. All my life, work.

From small boy to old man, work.

In old country, work. In new country, work.

In New York. Pittsburgh. Detroit. Chicago. Imperial Valley. San Francisco.

Work. No beg. Work."

A getaway for him is, if he can squeeze it in, an hour's walk in a wooded area. He has so many dreams but work eats up the limited time he has left. He's a white man.

When I was a nurse's aide, I had to catheterize a beautiful, young athlete who looked like Michelangelo's David. His final act in a functioning body was to dive into water. Some kink in the physics of that dive paralyzed him from the neck down. He was a white man. In Nepal I helped nuns from the Sisters of Charity collect the elderly from the streets where their families dropped them off to die. We washed countless lice and fleas out of their clothing with cold water from a pump in the courtyard.

Humans are social animals and evolution has equipped us with compassion. Decent people like you and me want to address suffering so we donate to charitable organizations, we volunteer, we visit nursing homes, we lend an ear and a shoulder, we pray. Morally retarded people do something else with suffering.

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer -- Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer
Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

Sometime during the summer of 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page's memoir Pageboy on Amazon. I take words seriously, even the words that constitute Amazon reviews. Language can convey truth; language can empower lies. The difference between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. In my faith, Satan is the father of lies. God is the logos, the Word; God is truth and the truth sets us free. 

Elliot Page's Pageboy is a poorly written book. I said so in my review. I said this because bad writing matters. "Writing clearly is thinking clearly." Writing poorly underwrites destructive behavior. Identifying bad writing is a worthwhile use of time.

I'm thinking of a novelist who earned his PhD writing about theater. This short, physically handicapped novelist didn't deal in bullets or fisticuffs, but he was Hitler's right-hand. Without Joseph Goebbels' speeches, movies, school curricula, and book burnings, Nazism would have found it more difficult to achieve its diabolical ends. On the other end of the ethical spectrum, we have the words of the Ten Commandments; we have the Beatitudes; we have crusading novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped end slavery. Yes, words and how we use them matter a great deal.

In my review of Pageboy, mindful of current speech codes, I did not refer to Elliot Page as "she." Rather, I focused on, as I said in the review, "sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence." I received a cheerfully-worded email telling me that my review was up, thanking me for the review, and providing a link that allowed me to visit the review. I did so. I saw the review on Amazon.

A few days later I thought of the review again, clicked on the link Amazon provided, and saw an error message. "That page does not exist," the message said, or words to that effect. I had received no notification from Amazon that the review would be removed. I received no explanation as to why it was removed. I received no warning telling me that if I posted another honest review of a poorly written book, I would be banished from Amazon forever. I received no instruction on how to write reviews that Amazon would not delete.

Perhaps a month after that, I again attempted to review a book on Amazon, Christian Cooper's Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Again, I received a cheery notification from Amazon telling me that my review was posted. I clicked on the link Amazon sent and I saw the review. Again, a few days later, I clicked on that same link and got the same message. "This page does not exist." Again,  I received no notification, and no explanation.

I shrugged. I was resigned. I moved on with my life.

On September 7, 2023, weeks after the above events, my inbox was flooded with approximately one hundred emails from Amazon. The emails that I read before deleting them all said the same thing. "Thank you for reporting a fake review," or words to that effect. This made no sense. I hadn't been reporting fake reviews at Amazon. At the end of this avalanche of spam from Amazon came the final email. That final email informed me that all of my reviews, reviews going back almost thirty years, had been removed. I would never again be allowed to post reviews on Amazon, not for books or for anything else. If I bought a spatula that was a really good spatula, I could never say that on Amazon.

I was offered a link to click. I clicked on the link and was sent to the main Amazon page. There was I invited to click on another link. Computer expert friends warned me not to click on the link Amazon sent me. It was a scam link to malware. Someone at Amazon had used my account to generate a series of false reports of fake reviews, and then to ensnare me into clicking on a malware link.

The Devil and Bella Dodd by Mary Nicholas and Paul Kengor. Book Review

 

The Devil and Bella Dodd
How the Most Important Female Communist in the US Found God and Rejected the Devil

The Devil and Bella Dodd: One Woman's Struggle Against Communism and Her Redemption is a 2022 account of the career of Bella Dodd (1904-1969), once "the most important female communist in the United States." Author Mary A. Nicholas is a physician and research librarian. Her co-author, Paul Kengor, is a political science professor, bestselling author, think tank director, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Tan Books is a Catholic publisher. The Devil and Bella Dodd is 422 pages long, inclusive of an index, a bibliography, and extensive footnotes.

Bella Dodd's life story is so astounding that if it were fiction, readers could be forgiven for thinking that it could never have happened in real life. Maria Assunta Isabella Visono came to the US when she was five years old. She had been living with foster parents. Her parents and many siblings had already immigrated to the US, possibly when Dodd was two years old. She used the name "Bella" and eventually married a man named Dodd. The marriage ended because of her commitment to the Communist Party. Dodd received degrees from New York University and Columbia, an Ivy League school – remarkable for a female Italian American immigrant from a poor family. She became a professor, lawyer, and organizer. She described herself as a key figure who injected the Communist Party's agenda into American public education. She claimed that she had placed over a thousand Party followers into Catholic seminaries. She began to have doubts about the Party in the 1940s. Her deteriorating attitude prompted her to be expelled in 1949.