How Barack Obama Fooled the Jews and Betrayed them Once He Had Their Money: Lawrence Solomon, National Post, Dec. 29. 2016— “(President Obama) called me into the Oval Office before the election and he said to me, ‘Alan, I want your support. And I have to tell you, I will always have Israel’s back.’
The 'Trump Effect': Dominic Green, Weekly Standard, Dec. 26, 2016 — A historian can be wise after the fact, but a political analyst must be wise before it.
Giorgio Perlasca: The ‘Italian Wallenberg’: Menucha Chana Levin, Jewish Press, Jan. 2, 2017— While not as famous as some other Holocaust heroes, Giorgio Perlasca saved more Jews than the 1,200 saved by the famous Oskar Schindler.
Marion Pritchard, Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Jews From Nazis, Dies at 96: Richard Sandomir, New York Times, Dec. 23, 2016— Marion Pritchard, a gentile whose shock at watching Nazi soldiers storm a home for Jewish children in Amsterdam and load them into a truck for deportation inspired her to enter a clandestine world of rescuing Jews, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Washington. She was 96.
Israel and the Trump Administration: Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 5, 2016
Saving Europe From Itself—Again: Mark Helprin, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 14, 2016
Meet Henry Orenstein, the Man Who Changed How the World Plays: Abigail Jones, Newsweek, Dec. 21, 2016
How Celine Dion Helped Save Montreal’s Most Iconic Jewish Deli: Gabe Friedman, JTA, Dec. 29, 2016
HOW BARACK OBAMA FOOLED THE JEWS
AND BETRAYED THEM ONCE HE HAD THEIR MONEY
Lawrence Solomon
National Post, Dec. 29. 2016
“(President Obama) called me into the Oval Office before the election and he said to me, ‘Alan, I want your support. And I have to tell you, I will always have Israel’s back.’ I didn’t realize that what he meant was that he’d have (Israel’s) back to stab them in the back.”
So spoke this week a livid Alan Dershowitz, the famed Harvard professor, legal scholar and criminal lawyer whose judgment American Jews have long trusted and respected. Dershowitz now realizes that Obama had repeatedly duped him, and that through his endorsements of Obama, Dershowitz in turn duped many American Jews, helping to secure Obama’s election and re-election. Now Israel has been compromised as never before, with the United Nations through Obama’s manoeuvrings having declared that Jews have no right to live in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, which they have inhabited for the greater part of 3,000 years, and that Israel has no rights to its holiest sites, including the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.
Winning Jewish support wasn’t especially important to Obama and other Democrats in terms of votes — Jews represent just two per cent of the U.S. electorate, generally making their numbers inconsequential at the ballot box. But Jews are hugely important — even decisive — in their political giving. The Jewish two per cent — which is overwhelmingly liberal — accounts for about two-thirds of all donations received by the Democratic Party. Put another way, the Jewish two per cent donates twice as much to Democrats as the non-Jewish 98 per cent.
The importance of Jewish money to Democratic fortunes explains why Obama waited to make his moves against Israel until after his two presidential campaigns and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, whom he hoped would preserve his legacy. If Jews understood his real intentions toward Israel, Obama knew, many would withdraw their financial support.
Obama’s prudent course — his only viable course — in realizing his desire to strip Israel of its paramount possessions, embodiments of its heritage, was to keep his intentions secret, all the while upping his rhetoric that “no president has ever done more for Israel.” Obama also needed to maintain this public pretence to keep his fellow Democrats in the dark, most of whom would blanche at the thought of offending, and losing, their Jewish backers. The American public’s general sympathy for Israel, and general antipathy toward Palestinians, also made any prior anti-Israel coming out a non-starter.
Persuading Dershowitz — an important step to winning over the Jewish community — could not have been an easy feat. Shortly after Dershowitz’s first endorsement of Obama, in the 2008 presidential election, Dershowitz became alarmed at Obama’s apparent willingness to let Iran develop nuclear weapons, coming to believe that Obama’s policies were dangerous for Israel and that Obama could be “remembered in history as the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st century, the person who didn‘t see the greatest evil, didn’t recognize the greatest evil of the 20th century.” Yet despite these concerns, coupled with pique that Obama had ties to anti-Semites and a staff that was hostile to Israel, Obama somehow managed to persuade Dershowitz that he would never, ever let Israel down. Dershowitz endorsed Obama for a second time and even campaigned for him against Mitt Romney, a true friend of Israel.
After Obama’s reelection, Dershowitz again had buyer’s remorse, becoming ever more forceful in his criticisms of Obama, calling him a bully and an inept negotiator, to the point that when they met Obama “won’t look me in the eye.” Yet Dershowitz continued to have faith in Obama’s good intentions. Unlike America’s conservative Jews, most of whom saw Obama’s animus toward Israel early on — Obama combined a courtship of the Muslim states with deliberate slights of Israel and its prime minister — Dershowitz remained under Obama’s spell, seeing him as merely misguided, and persuadable.
The Dershowitz delusion persisted with Obama’s successor, Hillary Clinton, whom Dershowitz backed despite her own close and questionable associations, including Huma Abedin, an aide and travelling companion who had worked for a radical Muslim publication, and Sid Blumenthal, who fed Hillary with the bigoted material of his son, Max Blumenthal, “a despicable anti-Semite and a horrible person,” in Dershowitz’s estimation.
With this week’s passage of the anti-Israel UN resolution, the Dershowitz infatuation with Obama is over. The famed criminal lawyer finally sees the evidence that had been in plain sight all along, and now understands the extent of Obama’s deception. It was “so nasty. He pulled a bait-and-switch,” Dershowitz laments, in explaining how Obama in private pretended that it was “the settlements deep in the West Bank” that were negotiable, not the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, so core to Judaism and to Israel’s heritage. Dershowitz, and with him the great majority of America’s Jews, took the bait. The rest is history.
Dominic Green
Weekly Standard, Dec. 26, 2016
A historian can be wise after the fact, but a political analyst must be wise before it. Most commentators failed to detect the signs of Donald Trump’s presidential victory, despite their received wisdom and psephological sensitivity. (The exception seems to have been those relying on that most sensitive of all predictors, the gut.) Since the election, some of the commentariat, straining to get ahead of the next inconvenient fact, have settled upon a new narrative. A concept sufficient to explain all unforeseen, objectionable, and confusing phenomena; an insurance policy so extensive as to forestall any accident of reality: the Trump Effect.
The Trump Effect, the wise now agree, is a kind of sickness in the democratic system. The early symptoms—nativist grumblings, nocturnal tweeting, and disinhibited behavior around women and immigrants—may lead to a crisis, especially in cases where the major parties have left their voters to fend for themselves in a globalized economy. This crisis may continue for as long as four years. Public life may be impaired and civility permanently weakened. Grandiosity and an increase in risk-taking behavior may lead to a rise in the racial temperature and the loss of old friendships. It is not yet clear if the Trump Effect can be remedied by treatment with tariffs, subsidies, and border defenses involving moats and alligators—or if these are actually signs of its terminal phase. It may in fact be incurable, like senility and other symptoms of decay.
Worse, the Trump Effect can jump like a virus from one sick constitution to another. Named for its first appearance in the United States in early November 2016, within weeks the Trump Effect claimed its first European victim. The Italian prime minister was overthrown in a referendum on constitutional reform. In their presidential election, 46 percent of Austrians showed symptoms, voting for Norbert Hofer and the anti-immigrant Freedom party. A full-scale epidemic is expected in 2017, with significant outbreaks of populism in France, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Britain. Further complications may induce the amputation of the southern tier of the European Union.
This is the newly received wisdom of the Trump Effect. Except there is no Trump Effect. Pundits have correctly diagnosed one thing: the symptoms of America's domestic problems and the possible effects of a Trump presidency on America's global position. But their assumption that Trump's victory makes electoral revolts in Europe more likely is erroneous. Europe's insurrections may arise for similar reasons, and may even take similar form, but correlation, as the analysts hate to admit, is not causality. Europeans and Americans may face similar challenges in a globalized economy, but they are heirs to different histories.
The Trump Effect is in reality a misleading narrative that reverses the current of recent events. Internationally, the Trump Effect is a domino theory of democratic reaction, in which Trump, to use the key term, "emboldens" Europeans to vote for the alt-right flat-earthers for whom they would not otherwise have voted. Yet the sorry truth is that Europeans are already uninhibited when it comes to voting for bigots and xenophobes. Further, the extremity of Europe's "New Right" parties is not uniform, and some of Europe's antiestablishment parties are not of the right at all. As for the alleged domino effect, if any dominoes are falling, they are falling towards the United States, not from it.
If we were to name a political condition after a deliberately controversial populist with a blond bouffant and a fondness for anti-immigrant statements, a more accurate name would be the Wilders Effect. Its symptoms appeared in Holland several years before the crash of 2008 and the subsequent rush of blood to the extremities that produced the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, and the Trump candidacy.
In 2004, when Donald Trump was beginning his career in the entertainment business with the first season of The Apprentice, the bleached and bequiffed Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was expelled from Holland's center-right People's Party for Freedom and Democracy. As party spokesman, Wilders had repeatedly embarrassed his colleagues with hostile statements about Islam and immigration. The last straw was his refusal to agree that the European Union should start negotiating Turkey's long-promised entry into the club.
Following his expulsion, Wilders launched the Party for Freedom. He combined a Thatcherite economic agenda with strongly nationalistic positions on Islam, immigration, and identity. Almost immediately, he required police protection because of regular death threats from Islamists. As Trump was to do a decade later, Wilders cultivated popular support by mocking professional politicians, the media, and political correctness. A born entertainer, he exploited the media's amoral appetite for drama by discussing delicate subjects in crude language. His rivals made the mistake of responding in equally melodramatic fashion and his enemies the mistake of trying to censor him…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
GIORGIO PERLASCA: THE ‘ITALIAN WALLENBERG’
Menucha Chana Levin
Jewish Press, Jan. 2, 2017
While not as famous as some other Holocaust heroes, Giorgio Perlasca saved more Jews than the 1,200 saved by the famous Oskar Schindler. Like Raoul Wallenberg, Perlasca boldly rescued Hungarian Jews from under the noses of the Nazis. Yet, while Schindler and Wallenberg are well-known names from this terrible era, heroic Giorgio Perlasca still remains virtually unheard of.
Born in 1910 in the small northern Italian town of Como and raised in nearby Padua, Perlasca was born into a family of civil servants and army officers. Initially attracted to Italian fascism, he volunteered for the army when Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Later he joined the Corps of Volunteer Troops, an Italian force assisting the rebel forces of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. In gratitude for his service, Perlasca received a letter of thanks from Franco’s victorious new government. The letter instructed the Spanish foreign service to come to his aid if he should ever need diplomatic assistance. At the time Perlasca had no idea how important this letter would turn out to be.
Upon his return home to Italy, he found Mussolini had aligned with Hitler’s Third Reich and introduced its racial laws in 1938. Perlasca, who had many Jewish friends from Padua and from his army service, was strongly opposed to anti-Semitism. At one time he explained, “I was neither fascist, nor anti-fascist; I was anti-Nazi.” From then on, he reserved his loyalty for the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III.
In the early days of World War II, Perlasca avoided the draft by working as an import-export agent for the Italian army. He traveled to Zagreb, Belgrade, and Eastern Europe, where he witnessed vicious Axis massacres of Jews and Serbs. In 1942, he was assigned to Budapest. He found the Hungarian capital “full of life, where nothing was lacking and the restaurants and theaters were full of seemingly carefree people, many of them Jews.” Tall, well-dressed and stylish, Perlasca also enjoyed an active social life.
That came to an abrupt end in September 1943 when Italy surrendered to the Allies and the country was split. Some aligned themselves with Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic while others supported the king who joined the Allies. Perlasca was arrested as an enemy alien and interned in a camp near the Austrian border. Escaping in October 1943, he made his way back to Budapest.
Life changed drastically in March 1944 when the Hungarian Nazis seized power. Perlasca ran to the Spanish Consulate in Budapest and, producing his vital letter from the Spanish authorities, he received a Spanish passport with his new name: Jorge Perlasca. He soon discovered that the Spanish Consul Angel Sanz Briz was issuing “letters of protection” for Hungarian Jews who were forced to wear the yellow Star of David. The embassy was overwhelmed with requests from stateless Jews seeking asylum in a neutral country such as Spain or safe passage out of Europe.
The Consulate also employed Jews as clerks, and housed them in eight apartment buildings under its control. Perlasca offered his assistance. The Hungarian government then discovered that the Spanish officials had been harboring Jews in their houses and embassy and began raiding them. With Budapest in chaos, Ángel Sans Briz and other officials received orders to vacate immediately. He left a note for Perlasca imploring him to leave as well. Realizing that without protection many Jews would be killed, Perlasca bravely decided to remain.
As the only person in the Consulate with a Spanish passport, he went to the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, utilizing his boundless chutzpah and a letter he had forged, Perlasca succeeded in convincing the officials he had been appointed the new Spanish Consul and that Sanz Briz was simply on leave. The German and Hungarian officials believed him, as well as his warning that Spain would retaliate if forced to turn over the refugees under his protection. Fortunately, they were unable to confirm Perlasca’s new status with Madrid and he was permitted to continue working. “I couldn’t stand the sight of people being branded like animals… I couldn’t stand seeing children being killed. I did what I had to do,” he stated.
Perlasca described his situation: “At first, I didn’t know what to do, but then I began to feel like a fish in water. I continued giving out protective passes and looked after the Jews in the ‘safe houses’ flying the Spanish flag. As the proverb says, ‘Opportunity makes the thief.'” The new “Consul” organized food, medical aid and protection for 5,200 Jews in the Consulate’s apartments. An intelligence network warned him in advance of possible Nazi searches. The diplomatic missions of four other neutral states – Portugal, Switzerland, the Vatican and Sweden – also helped save Jewish lives…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
MARION PRITCHARD, WHO RISKED HER LIFE TO
RESCUE JEWS FROM NAZIS, DIES AT 96
Richard Sandomir
New York Times, Dec. 23, 2016
Marion Pritchard, a gentile whose shock at watching Nazi soldiers storm a home for Jewish children in Amsterdam and load them into a truck for deportation inspired her to enter a clandestine world of rescuing Jews, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Washington. She was 96. The cause was cerebral arteriosclerosis, her family said. “By 1945, I had lied, stolen, cheated, deceived and even killed,” Ms. Pritchard said in a lecture in 1996 at the University of Michigan, where she received the Wallenberg Medal, a humanitarian award given by the university in memory of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who rescued tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II.
In the spring of 1942, Ms. Pritchard was a social work student who had been imbued by her father, a judge, with a strong sense of outrage about the injustices perpetrated against the Jews during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. One day, she recalled, as she was riding her bicycle to class, she saw Nazis at the children’s home “picking up the kids by an arm or a leg or by the hair” and throwing them into a truck. “Well, I stopped my bike and looked,” she said in an oral history recorded in 1984 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. “Two other women coming down on the street got so furious, they attacked the German soldiers, and they just picked the women up and threw them in the truck after the kids. “I just stood there,” she added. “I’m one of those people who sat there and watched it happen.”
To save and shelter Jews, Ms. Pritchard registered Jewish infants as her own children and found safe, non-Jewish homes for them. She helped feed Jews and get them ration cards. She secured false identification papers to help them avoid capture by the Nazis, and found medical care for children through a friendly pediatrician. Sometimes her role was simply to be one in a line of rescuers who handed Jewish children to someone else, who would then lead them out of danger. By her estimate, she helped rescue 150 Jews.
She never discussed her activities with her parents, or with her younger brother, Jan, fearing that saying anything would endanger them. “You just did not talk,” she said. Ms. Pritchard was recognized in 1981 by Yad Vashem, the world center for Holocaust research and commemoration in Jerusalem, as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Ms. Pritchard, who was Anglican, is one of about 26,000 people to receive the award. About one-fifth of them were from the Netherlands.
She was born Marion Philippina van Binsbergen on Nov. 7, 1920, in Amsterdam, one of two children of Jacob and Grace van Binsbergen…Her best-known rescue started in late 1942. She was asked by a friend to hide Fred Polak and his young children, Erica, an infant, and her brothers, Lex, 4, and Tom, 2. When she could not find a safe place, her friend persuaded his mother-in-law to let Ms. Pritchard and the Polaks move into the servants’ quarters of her villa in Huizen, 15 miles outside Amsterdam. Jews in hiding, like the Polaks, feared the Nazis’ nighttime raids demanding their papers. So they developed a routine: If they felt in danger — most often by hearing the approach of the vehicle the Germans would arrive in — they would push aside the coffee table and rug in the living room, pull up the floorboards and hide below in a pit. They practiced the drill often and could complete it in less than a minute.
One night in late 1944, three Nazis and a Dutch collaborator, who had been a police officer before the war, came to the door. The Polaks were in the pit. “They didn’t find the hiding place,” Ms. Pritchard recalled. “But the Nazis had learned that if they didn’t find the hiding place, if they came back an hour later, the Jew or Jews might have come out of the hiding place and they could pick them up.”
The Dutch collaborator returned in about a half-hour, entering through an unlocked door. The children were out of hiding because Erica had started crying — she had not been given sleeping powder — and her brothers had wanted to be out as well. The hiding place had not yet been concealed again, and knowing that the children were in mortal danger, Ms. Pritchard took out a revolver hidden on a bookshelf in the room and shot the intruder. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do but kill him,” she told the filmmaker Aviva Slesin in an interview for her 2002 documentary “Secret Lives: Hidden Children and Their Rescuers.” “There was a moment of great exhilaration. Thank God the kids were safe.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
Israel and the Trump Administration: Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 5, 2016—In just two weeks, a new US administration will enter the White House. It may well prove to be a turning point for Israel, reversing the tide of global hostility of the past eight years, in which the outgoing administration regarded us diplomatically as a rogue state rather than an ally.
Saving Europe From Itself—Again: Mark Helprin, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 14, 2016—Though Europeans bridle when confronted with the possibility that Americans have something to offer, the Champs Élysées is not called Unter den Linden, and the Thousand-Year Reich and Warsaw Pact are no more, because—intelligently, successfully, and sacrificially—the U.S. came three times to Europe’s aid.
Meet Henry Orenstein, the Man Who Changed How the World Plays: Abigail Jones, Newsweek, Dec. 21, 2016—Henry Orenstein was standing outside his concentration camp barracks, shivering, when the amplified voice of his salvation cut through the frigid air: “All Jewish scientists, engineers, inventors, chemists and mathematicians must register immediately.”
How Celine Dion Helped Save Montreal’s Most Iconic Jewish Deli: Gabe Friedman, JTA, Dec. 29, 2016—Near, far — wherever you are — Schwartz’s is known for being one of Montreal’s oldest and most storied Jewish delis. Its famed smoked meat — a subtly different cousin of pastrami — has attracted scores of customers since it opened in 1928.
