5777: The Theme is Freedom

And Its Author

"Sound the ram’s horn all over the land. Sanctify the fiftieth year; make it a holy year. Proclaim freedom all over the land to everyone who lives in it—a Jubilee for you."--Leviticus 25 9-10

President Donald J. Trump Proclaims May 1, 2017, as Loyalty Day

Loyalty Day, 2017

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By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation

On Loyalty Day, we recognize and reaffirm our allegiance to the principles upon which our Nation is built.  We pledge our dedication to the United States of America and honor its unique heritage, reminding ourselves that we are one Nation, under God, made possible by those who have sacrificed to defend our liberty.  We honor our Republic and acknowledge the great responsibility that self-governance demands of each of us.
The United States stands as the world's leader in upholding the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice.  Together, and with these fundamental concepts enshrined in our Constitution, our Nation perseveres in the face of those who would seek to harm it.
As one Nation, we will always stand strong against the threats of terrorism and lawlessness.  The loyalty of our citizenry sends a clear signal to our allies and enemies that the United States will never yield from our way of life.  Through the Department of Defense and other national security agencies, we are working to destroy ISIS, and to secure for all Americans the liberty terrorists seek to extinguish.  We humbly thank our brave service members and veterans who have worn our Nation's uniform ‑‑ from the American Revolution to the present day.  Their unwavering loyalty and fidelity has made the world a safer, more free, and more just place.  We are inspired by their pride in our country's principles, their devotion to our freedom, and their solemn pledge to protect and defend our Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
To express our country's loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government, and to the inherent dignity of every human being, the Congress, by Public Law 85-529 as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day."  On this day, we honor the United States of America and those who uphold its values, particularly those who have fought and continue to fight to defend the freedom it affords us.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim May 1, 2017, as Loyalty Day.  This Loyalty Day, I call on all Americans to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies in our schools and other public places, including recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America.  I also call upon all Government officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings and grounds on that day.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-eighth day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand seventeen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-first.

DONALD J. TRUMP

Students for Free Speech: "Over the weekend, 25 students from about 20 colleges around the country gathered at the University of Chicago to try to start a movement in which students would become leading defenders of free speech on campus -- including speech that they find offensive. The students issued a statement Sunday that they plan to urge other students to sign and to abide by.
"The Free Speech Movement began as an entirely student-led initiative," says the statement, referring to the University of California, Berkeley, movement of the 1960s. "However, free speech has been increasingly undermined by attempts of students and administrators alike to silence those with whom they disagree. We seek to reclaim that original tradition."",,,,,,,

Some observations on Class Warfare vs. The Warfare Class from Sarah Hoyt:

"In societies with slaves, at least since Rome, at some point there evolved a rule that said something like “Such the womb, such the child’s condition” meaning that— if you were born to a free mother you were free.  If you were born to a slave mother, you were a slave.  This applied regardless of color of skin and any qualities of the child.  You were born to a slave mother, you were a slave.  In fact much the same applied to all “classes” that were inherent at birth, in European systems that required nobility (or serfdom) at birth.

It was the inherent injustice of this system, to a great extent, that propelled the enlightenment and more just laws of the “condition” of humans.

It is actually fascinating to read Dumas, and catch the idea of inherent nobility (of character) or baseness (of same character) depending on your station at birth.  You also catch that if you read any historically accurate books, particularly those set before the 18th century....

Mostly because Europe still largely thinks in “Classes” — I know, I was born and raised there — and those of us in whose mind it doesn’t fit easily always felt weird about it.

Guys, we’re starting to feel weird about what the US is doing too.

Because this whole “social justice” thing and various set asides sound EXACTLY like “such the womb such the condition”.

Yeah, I know it’s all dressed up, all purty-like in “addressing historical injustices” and “making people more equal.”  With due respect (which is known) that is the greatest load of twaddle I’ve ever heard. ...

All of this insanity descends directly from the idea that people are BORN with privilege or victimhood, and that they should either be mollycoddled or shunned according to their PHYSICAL characteristics at birth, and the race of their ancestors.

Let’s be real, okay?  The only real slavery subsisting is in Arab countries and they take slaves of every race, including their own.  The only real sexism is also in Arab countries.  At this point, people are being compensated for things that they’ve never endured, and don’t even have a very clear idea of.  (Most American people think white people INVENTED slavery to enslave black people, and not that it’s an old and persistent sin of mankind, affecting every race and every culture until the industrial revolution.  This backfires and is actually very bad for black people in America because it gives them the sense they’re uniquely weak, for this to have happened to them.)  As for the so called oppression of women in America, most American women could benefit a great deal from living six months in working class anywhere in the world.  Maybe that would stop them going to war with philology and would get them to give thanks fasting for living in what is ultimately genuinely a matriarchy.

People are supposedly being compensated for things that happened to their great grandparents.

Now, yes, inequalities subsist, but at this point they subsist BECAUSE of the set asides, encouragement and molly coddling and also, because, frankly anything Government and/or progressives do tends to come out bass awkward. ...

Social justice is feudalism dressed in pretty clothes.  It is slavery and I say to hell with it.

Each human should be born equal before the laws.  Any tampering with that legal equality is the establishment of nobility and slavery and classes neverending. ...

All the rest is just the old beast wearing a prettier costume.".......

From our "They told me if I voted for Trump, it would be like the Thirties again!"-Department, Facing History: Controlling the Universities:

"The Nazis attempted to root out any dissent to their policies and ideology that remained in German higher education.

Peter Drucker, an Austrian economist, was then a lecturer at Frankfurt University. Fearful of Hitler’s plans for Germany, he was prepared to leave the country but hoped that it would not be necessary to do so. The first Nazi-led faculty meeting at the university convinced him otherwise.

"Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.

Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist-physiologist of Nobel-Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar was announced . . . and every teacher and graduate assistant at the university was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear this new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. I had never before attended a faculty meeting, but I did attend this one.

The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities. He immediately announced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15; this was something that no one had thought possible despite the Nazis’ loud antisemitism. Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had been heard rarely even in the barracks and never before in academia. . . . [He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.” There was silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist-physiologist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said, “Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating: but one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?"

The meeting broke up shortly thereafter with the commissar assuring the scholars that indeed there would be plenty of money for “racially pure science.” A few of the professors had the courage to walk out with their Jewish colleagues, but most kept a safe distance from these who only a few hours earlier had been their close friends. I went out sick unto death—and I knew that I was going to leave Germany within forty-eight hours."

Kurt Schlichter: "#TheResistance is not really resisting Trump as much as it is resisting us. The elite establishment is outraged that we normals have demanded to govern ourselves rather than begging for scraps from our betters in DC, NY and LA. It wasn’t just that horrible, sick old woman that we rejected; it was them. And by doing so, we “stole” what they see as their birthright to reign sovereign over us. They try to cover up their humiliation with tales of “Russians” and “hacking” because the truth is too painful to face. This election was about the people they sought to rule looking at them and their track record of failure and saying, “Nah, you suck.”

#TheResistance has got nothing. The kook caucus is now slow-walking its insistence that The Donald and Vlad were hanging out in hot tubs playing patty-cake because it became clear that the Obama White House had been spying on the Republicans knowing that they’d never be held to account with President Hillary in office. Oops. That worked out poorly; my advice to Ben Rhodes is, on your first day on the cellblock, take a swing at the biggest guy you can find.

#The Resistance is a mess. Now they’re reduced to fighting for supremacy in their final redoubt, the universities where their fascist intimidation and suppression of speech provides a glimpse of America as it would have been had Trump not been elected. That they are forced into a last-ditch effort to keep power in an institution where their control is total is proof positive of their weakness. And the fact that the only way they have a shot at succeeding is to actively work to silence the voices of non-idiocy is icing on the cake. Their goose-stepping antics on campus are providing America a preview of life under Democrats, and it’s not helping them.

Then there’s the cultural backlash, which is accomplishing … nothing. Polls show readers are less likely to trust the mainstream media than random emails from Nigerian princes. ESPN is dying, in no small part thanks to the campaign to throw tiresome progressive tropes into a network people turn to for some mindless sportsball. No one wants to see the next Keith Olbermann fulminating about “TRUMP’S TREASON!!!!!” between dwarf tosses on The Ocho." ....... Not even the dwarves.

And from the good old days, The Smallest Minority from 2003:

"The first line of the Declaration is one strongly definitive of an American ideal - equality of birth.

There is a story, a joke in some ways, an allegory in others, that dates way back. In it, a British Lord travels to the Frontier West, America in the 1800's. His horse throws a shoe on the trail, so at the first little frontier town he comes to, he finds a blacksmith's shop to have the shoe replaced. As he rides up, he sees a large, sweaty, filthy man hammering on a piece of red-hot iron. The Lord sits on his horse, waiting to be served, but the blacksmith doesn't pay him any attention and continues to work his iron. Finally, the Lord, outraged to have been ignored this way by an obvious servant, dismounts, approaches the 'smith, and taps the man on the shoulder with his riding crop.

"You, man!" he barks, "Who is your Master! I wish to have a word with him!"

The blacksmith turns, looks at the Englishman, spits a stream of tobacco juice on the point of the Lord's boot and says,

"That sumbitch ain't been born." 

 

 

Charles Krauthammer, May 18, 2007:

"There has hardly been a Middle East peace plan in the past 40 years -- including the current Saudi version -- that does not demand a return to the status quo of June 4, 1967. Why is that date so sacred? Because it was the day before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in which Israel scored one of the most stunning victories of the 20th century. The Arabs have spent four decades trying to undo its consequences.

In fact, the real anniversary should be now, three weeks earlier. On May 16, 1967, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser ordered the evacuation from the Sinai Peninsula of the U.N. buffer force that had kept Israel and Egypt at peace for 10 years. The United Nations complied, at which point Nasser imposed a naval blockade of Israel's only outlet to the south, the port of Eilat -- an open act of war. 
How Egypt came to this reckless provocation is a complicated tale (chronicled in Michael Oren's magisterial "Six Days of War") of aggressive intent compounded with miscommunication and, most fatefully, disinformation. The Soviet Union had reported urgently and falsely to its Middle East clients, Syria and Egypt, that Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border for an attack. Israel desperately tried to disprove this charge by three times inviting the Soviet ambassador in Israel to visit the front. He refused. The Soviet warnings led to a cascade of intra-Arab maneuvers that in turn led Nasser, the champion of pan-Arabism, to mortally confront Israel with a remilitarized Sinai and a southern blockade.

Why is this still important? Because that three-week period between May 16 and June 5 helps explain Israel's 40-year reluctance to give up the fruits of that war -- the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza -- in return for paper guarantees of peace. Israel had similar guarantees from the 1956 Suez war, after which it evacuated the Sinai in return for that U.N. buffer force and for assurances from the Western powers of free passage through the Straits of Tiran.
All this disappeared with a wave of Nasser's hand. During those three interminable weeks, President Lyndon Johnson did try to rustle up an armada of countries to run the blockade and open Israel's south. The effort failed dismally.
It is hard to exaggerate what it was like for Israel in those three weeks. Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel's every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. "We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants," declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, "and as for the survivors -- if there are any -- the boats are ready to deport them."
For Israel, the waiting was excruciating and debilitating. Israel's citizen army had to be mobilized. As its soldiers waited on the various fronts for the world to rescue the nation from its peril, Israeli society ground to a halt and its economy began bleeding to death. Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin, later to be hailed as a war hero and even later as a martyred man of peace, had a nervous breakdown. He was incapacitated to the point of incoherence by the unbearable tension of waiting with the life of his country in the balance, knowing that waiting too long would allow the armies of 100 million Arabs to strike first his country of 3 million.
We know the rest of the story. Rabin did recover in time to lead Israel to victory. But we forget how perilous was Israel's condition. The victory hinged on a successful attack on Egypt's air force on the morning of June 5. It was a gamble of astonishing proportions. Israel sent the bulk of its 200-plane air force on the mission, fully exposed to antiaircraft fire and missiles. Had they been detected and the force destroyed, the number of planes remaining behind to defend the Israeli homeland -- its cities and civilians -- from the Arab air forces' combined 900 planes was . . . 12.
We also forget that Israel's occupation of the West Bank was entirely unsought. Israel begged King Hussein of Jordan to stay out of the conflict. Engaged in fierce combat with a numerically superior Egypt, Israel had no desire to open a new front just yards from Jewish Jerusalem and just miles from Tel Aviv. But Nasser personally told Hussein that Egypt had destroyed Israel's air force and airfields and that total victory was at hand. Hussein could not resist the temptation to join the fight. He joined. He lost.
The world will soon be awash with 40th-anniversary retrospectives of the war -- and exegeses on the peace of the ages that awaits if Israel would only to return to lines of June 4, 1967. But Israelis are cautious. They remember the terror of that June 4 and of that unbearable May when, with Israel in possession of no occupied territories whatsoever, the entire Arab world was furiously preparing Israel's imminent extinction.

And the world did nothing."

But He did.

 

Times of Israel:



The iconic Rubinger photo of the three paratroopers at the recaptured Western Wall in June 1967
(Courtesy Rubinger/Knesset Collection)





"To many, the 50th anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War — in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula –is a bittersweet one. It represents half a century since the Old City and other historic Jewish sites returned to Jewish hands, but also half a century of Israeli military rule over the Palestinians.

Asked about the dual nature of the jubilee, the men appear to be as divided as Israeli society.

“There is something to be said for that [calling the image the start of the tragedy of the state of Israel] Yifat said. “I don’t believe that we should be ruling over another nation.”

“How can you say that as an Israeli who fought for something after 2,000 years of longing?” Karasenti shot back. “We returned the heart of the Jewish people to this land.”

Retorted Yifat: “What am I supposed to tell my grandchildren? That there will be war every year?”

Despite their political differences, the three men, now in their 70s, say they have remained close friends over the years.

As Karasenti, Oshri, and Yifat approached the wall to take a picture this week, a passerby stopped the three to thank them.

“All of the people that are here right now are only here because of you,” this man said. “It’s you, and all of the other soldiers who fought then. This is all thanks to your courage and your faith. So again, thank you so much.”"

 Haim Oshri, Dr. Itzik Yifat and Zion Karasenti stand in front of the Western Wall in April 2017, 50 years after
the three former paratroopers were resonantly photographed at the holy site by David Rubinger
immediately after its capture in the Six Day War.

 

"Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom."
--2 Corinthians 3:17