Elder of Ziyon is one of the must goes for news of Israel’s war with Hamas. A few days ago they had a post of an interview with a man named Dr. Harold Rhode who holds a doctorate in Islamic history, lived in Muslim lands for a very long time and has been an advisor on the middle east for more than a quarter of a century. His perspective on what’s going on is the type of info people need if they want to understand Hamas et/al:
And the peace we are looking for is that you will stop fighting, and we will stop fighting, and everyone will live together in peace. But the Muslims do not have a concept like that. They won’t stop until the whole world will be Muslim. They follow what their prophet Muhammad did. He signed a 10-year ceasefire with Quraysh. After 2 years, Muhammad realized Quraysh had weakened — so he attacked them, and won. There is a classic Latin phrase “Bellum omnium contra omnes, pace inter omnes interpellatur,” that war is the natural state of man, interrupted by periods of peace.
We do not look at life like that, but historically most people do. From a Muslim point of view, they can agree to have relations with their enemies — whether they be Muslims, Jews, or anybody else. They can make temporary agreements just like their prophet did. Those agreements can be renewed, renewed, and renewed. But to think that the Saudis see peace the way we Jews see it is a pipe dream.
In 1949, after Israel’s War of Independence, there was a peace conference in Rhodes. The Arabs insisted the borders be called “ceasefire lines” and not borders. The situation was not set in stone. Arabs do not have the concept that when the fighting is over, we can be friends
To them the war never ends which is why you must never show weakness. That’s also why the “protestors are shoving western cities around. As long as their response if weak they will assert themselves, once you respond with strength and it cost them something, then it will change.
For theses reasons none of our parishes, clergy, parish leadership, and staff as official, public representatives of the Catholic Church, can support, or publically [sic] be affiliated with CUSH.”
Father Reesman said the following to KCE Monday evening:
” [The letter] was shared first with the pastors of Saint Mark and Saint Mary’s Parishes before it was made public, and after I had first discussed the issue with them. If there are any ongoing questions from the parishes or their leadership about the contents of this letter, we will handle them on a case by case basis.”
It seems when you push back against gay porn in schools and drag queen story hours, good things happen which is what happened when the folks at Mass Resistance got involved.
Speaking of Push back some armed home invaders got some pushback last week that left one dead, two arrested and the family safe. A sheriff evaluated what they family did and gave it a thumbs up
I like the way Dave and Susie handled this attack. It appears that they must have discussed home invasions and developed a plan. Not responding verbally to the home invaders kept the crooks wondering where their victims might actually be located. And blocking the door with the couch caused their attacker to focus on that chore instead of keeping his full attention focused on looking for victims. Susie gets points for maintaining an open line of communications with the 9-1-1 dispatcher. And Dave was also very smart to put his gun down and meet the police officer with empty hands. Latest reports are that police investigators see no legal problems for Dave & Susie and, in addition, a series of other home invasions may be cleared by this shooting and the subsequent arrests.
Loftis announced that South Carolina will divest $105 million worth of Disney debt securities due to concerns over the company’s leadership and its embrace of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) principles.
Loftis said Disney has abandoned its fiduciary duty to shareholders in favor of ESG, which he defined as a “speech and behavior code that was … created by the left and delivered to everybody else.”
“The sane, sober, talented, mature people are gone, and now you have the gender studies crowd running Disney,” Loftis said, “That’s why their movies are flops and their market cap, I think, is about half what it used to be. It’s a tremendous loss to America — we all grew up on Disney,” he added.
Note the argument made, not because Disney is woke but because “woke” costs them cash. That’s the type of pushback shareholder listen to.
Finally the Harvard Crimson published a dissenting opinion calling for President Gay to go.
We are tired of reading about Harvard’s failures every time we check the news. We are sick of reporters hassling us for interviews in the Yard. We don’t want to return home for break and get pestered by friends and family, asking what is happening on campus or how we’re holding up in this awful environment. Our classes and our studying should not be interrupted by noisemakers and megaphones. Signing an affirmation that we will follow the Harvard College Honor Code before we take our final exams should not feel like a farce.
Students are not the only ones frustrated. Faculty are concerned with her academic misconduct too, though many refuse to go on the record, perhaps for fear of the consequences (a fact the Board’s opinion notes but seems not to take to heart).
Donors are tripping over each other to sever ties with the University. A senator has written in the Wall Street Journal that he was accosted in Widener Library. Congress has launched — and now expanded — an investigation into Harvard. Early application numbers have dropped sharply compared with peer institutions, perhaps in response to the turmoil.
It’s that pushback that is the real driver here and is the only thing that drives leftists away.
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It is a good thing that St. Mary’s Catholic College for Women in Indiana has reversed their decision to admit men who identify as women to their college after huge pressure from alumni and their Bishop who noted that both Pope Benedict XVI:
No doubt Saint Mary’s College desires to promote love, inclusion, and acceptance within the community. But it does not do so authentically when it separates love from truth. In his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), Pope Benedict XVI wrote: “Only in truth does charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth is the light that gives meaning and value to charity… Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word ‘love’ is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite” (#3).
And Pope Francis
Pope Francis also teaches about the intimate connection between truth and love in his first encyclical, Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith). He writes: “Love requires truth. Only to the extent that love is grounded in truth can it endure over time, can it transcend the passing moment and be sufficiently solid to sustain a shared journey. If love is not tied to truth, it falls prey to fickle emotions and cannot stand the test of time. True love, on the other hand, unifies all the elements of our person and becomes a new light pointing the way to a great and fulfilled life” (#27).
note that you can’t separate “love” and “Truth”.
Despite this reversal I recommend asking for the resignation of both the President of the college and the current board of trusties and if they don’t resign, their dismissal.
Why, well despite the Bishops charitable description of their initial decision’s motives let’s look at the initial announcement of their now reversed policy.
Conboy said in the email that the Board “fully supports” the new policy.
“This confidence from our Board underscores their commitment that as an employer, Saint Mary’s must stand firm in its position as an inclusive community leader, and that as educators, we should continue to create an environment where all women belong and thrive,” Conboy wrote.
By definition the president of a Catholic college and such a college’s board should be both defenders of the faith and examples of how the faith should be practiced and imparted to young people who are to be educated at their school.
Yet not only did the president of said college celebrate this change but noted that the board “fully supported” it. No sign of dissenters, no sign of objections, no members of the board threatening to resign or making a public declaration that this is contrary to the faith. None of those things moved them.
As this last month unfolded, we lost people’s trust and unintentionally created division where we had hoped for unity. For this, we are deeply sorry.
Forgive me for saying this but I submit and suggest this is a lie, I think the truth is more like what this member of the Alumni said about the reversal:
“When this admissions decision became public hundreds of alumni banded together to stand for the Church and her teachings,” said Clare Ath, who graduated from the college in 2018. “While I would hope the reversal is because administrators realized we must teach the truth with love, my guess is the reversal is because alumni banded together, pulled their donations, notified their diocese and media, and said we will not let Our Lady’s college be corrupted by secular gender ideology.”
Put simply they’re not sorry they did it, they’re sorry that they received pushback and faced the loss of donation and support.
This suggests that if some time in the future a less vigilant Bishop is in place they will try something like this again. My thought is “why take a chance?” There are no shortage of faithful Catholics who actually believe what the Church teaches who are qualified for both the board and the presidency.
So I humbly suggest for the good of the future of the college that the president and the board resign en masse to make room for people who will be dedicated to keeping this particular Catholic college Catholic.
Closing thought: This post gave me AnnaMariaCollegeVisitflashbacks. I suspect his decision to not go there is a contributing factor for him remaining a devout #catholic into his 30’s.
Ernst Janning: Judge Haywood… the reason I asked you to come: Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it, You must believe it!
Judge Dan Haywood: Herr Janning, it “came to that” the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.
Judgement at Nuremburg 1961
11 years ago I was credentialed press at the Mitt Romney “victory” party in Boston. After the result became clear I was interviewed by French Radio concerning the result. One of the things I said in the interview is that we were no longer a single American culture but now two separate cultures living in the same country.
Nothing better illustrates this than What we’ve seen from the left in the last 10 days.
Consider: In the last 10 days we have had.
Presidents of elite ivy colleges state that it’s a question of “context” if calling for the extermination of Jews on campus is against school policy.
The Mayor of a major city hold and defend holding a segregated Christmas party
Harvard having a Jewish group remove the menorah each night for fear it would be vandalized and the university’s reputation take a hit (what they can’t afford security)
Students at various college campus in fear for their lives at their own schools
Complete media silence on Americans being held hostage by terrorists
A congressional staffer filming gay porn in the US capital
An ivy league college tolerating plagiarism by their president (but not their students)
Disruption of Christmas tree lightings all over the nation
Large numbers of US students, and faculty publicly defending people currently holding Americans hostage.
There was a time not long ago when none of this would be tolerated by society. They would have been considered violations of common decency and such actions would have led to swift and immediate consequences.
But the truth is and has been for a decade that we no longer have a common decency. We have utility and Marxism and tribalism which means that all of these must be excused because those people practicing these things are on the left and for the left/media/educational/entertainment complex the cause is above all.
And for those who claim the same on the right, remind me which party expelled George Santos even through it shrunk their majority to a microscopic level.
I’m sure there are democrats who see the actions of Senator Carden’s staff member and never thought it would come to that.
Frankly it came to that when the party defended Bill Clinton getting blow jobs from interns and when they Democrat house didn’t expel Gary Studds, the first openly gay member of congress, for banging underage boys at the capital.
K’Mtar: [Alexander has just dropped an opponent in the Holodeck] Po’tajg! Po’tajg! Finish him. [Alexander drops his bat’leth and walks away. The Hologram Klingon gets up knife ready to kill him from behind] Freeze program. [To Alexander] You should have killed him when you had the chance. Lt. Worf:Why did you not? Alexander:I don’t know. K’Mtar:Look at him! He did not care that you showed him mercy. He was going to kill you. Lt. Worf:K’mtar, that is enough. K’Mtar:If this was real, he’d be dead by now.
“We thought that Palestinians are good people. All they want is peace and prosperity,” Lahav told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview from a hotel in this Red Sea resort city where she and most of her community were temporarily relocated. “It’s just that Hamas is forcing them to be in this aggressive situation.”
When terrorists first shook the door of her safe room on Oct. 7, Lahav was sure that she and her 22-year-old daughter were about to be killed. But a makeshift lock she had fashioned out of an oar and a vacuum cleaner thwarted three separate break-in attempts. The women lay in the darkened room for about 10 hours listening to sounds of automatic gunfire and grenade explosions. At one point, they heard a group of teenagers robbing their house.
Later, Lahav learned from other Nir Oz survivors that Gazan women and children as young as 10 years old had followed Hamas terrorists into the kibbutz, looting, helping the armed terrorists, and apparently enjoying themselves.
Here is the video
It’s heartbreaking because better than one in four of the people in her Kibbutz were killed or kidnapped. But it’s also maddening because this woman is in her 60’s and the evidence during her entire life has been that the Palestinians have wanted them dead, have cheered when terror attacks had taken place and only saw the Israeli peace camp as useful idiots to be exploited.
Yet it took the slaughter of her neighbors for her to learn this lesson and the only reason she and her daughter lived long enough to learn that lesson was that her makeshift lock held out.
How many of her neighbors would still be alive today if they had learned that lesson before Oct 7th?
And let’s ask two more important question to folks here in the states, questions whose answers I believe are just as clear:
How many of those protesting in the streets today in NYC, DC and elsewhere would kill the Jews they encounter here if they thought they could get away with it?
Is there any reason to believe they would or will stop with the Jews when they are done
I submit and suggest that the answer to question 1 is “Yes” and the answer to question 2 is “No” and the only reason you will not likely see this happen in the US is that the citizens of this country are the most heavily armed civilian population in the world today, possibly in history.
Which explains why the left wants us disarmed.
May Israel grow wiser from these event and may the west profit from this horrible example. Finally to those who don’t think this could happen here, I wish you the best of luck, may the dear school of experience never take residence in your town.
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