Here are the Blogs in the Richard L. Rubenstein category.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
The Seventieth Anniversary of the Start of World War II
by Rabbi John Crites-Borak
September 1, 2009. The seventieth anniversary of the start of World War Two. The invasion of Poland. I mark this day with a profound sadness that may seem odd for one who was born seven years after the war ended, and especially since Viet Nam is seen as the war of my generation. I have shed my tears at the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington, DC, of course – who among us hasn't? – but WWII is my cradle.
My father was a paratrooper, a Pathfinder in the 505th of the 82nd who landed behind the lines near the small town of Ste. Mere Eglise just after midnight on June 6, 1944. He survived Operation Overlord. On September 17 of that year he dropped into Holland, near Nijmegen, as part of Operation Market Garden. Within a few days – the record is unclear – shards of Krupp steel from a German mortar destroyed the hearing in his right ear and left a sucking gash above his heart. "Jack, you lucky son of a bitch," his buddy said to him as the stretcher-bearers carried him away, "you're going home." It was considered a million-dollar wound even though it landed him for more than a year in a series of Veterans' Hospitals.
People who knew him before the war say he returned a different man. Maybe it was the battlefield. Maybe it was the long convalescence. He used to say about being in the hospital, "I felt so guilty being there. Sure, I'd been banged up a bit, but what right did I have to a bed and medical care when there were guys who'd lost their legs?" Whatever it was, his war-time experience permanently changed and redefined him. The man who would have become my father was no less a victim.
I often wonder how my life might have been different if my father had not lost the joie d'vivre that apparently characterized him before he experienced the terrors and pain imposed by that noble cause. I also wonder if so many millions would have suffered and died if the world had just been able to see (and act effectively against!) the Nazi threat for what it was early on instead of striving for an illusory "peace in our time." I am not a war monger, but I can't help wondering how many fewer millions of victims there would have been if Kristallnacht had been seen as the opening battle of WWII. Perhaps the person my father could have become would have survived.
We read so often about the children of Holocaust Survivors and the unique problems they encounter in life as a result of their legacy. I do not minimize them. I want only to suggest WWII affected (and affects) almost all of us in the modern day – Jew and non-Jew alike – in ways we might never suspect.
Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the start of World War II. In our worst dreams, those of us who were old enough to have an inkling of what was happening - I was a high school senior - we never imagined how nightmarish that war would be. On a personal note, there has always been a streak of profound conservatism and distrust of politicians and planners in my thinking, theological, political, and military, which is directly related to that war that I witnessed in safety and from afar.
(The following video comes to us thanks to Norman Berdichevsky - ed.)
Who are Amrit Singh and Jameel Jaffer? They are attorneys for the ACLU which in the past has defended American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan in the name of "freedom of expression." I found a story about them, with their pictures, in the New York Times for August 30, 2009. ( Scott Shane, "ACLU Lawyers Mine Documents for Truth About Detainees and Interrogations," New York Times). I was curious and decided to do a a cursory Google search. Although the information was sparse, I did learn that Jaffer is a Muslim born in Canada. According to Law.Com, Jaffer went to "Williams College, worked as an investment banker for Lehman Brothers, attended Cambridge University and then returned to the United States for Harvard Law School." Singh is a graduate of Cambridge, Oxford, and Yale Law School. She holds joint American and Indian citizenship and is the youngest daughter of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and is married to Barton Beebe, a professor at NYU School of Law. She co-authored with Jaffer the book, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond , a documentary history.
I also learned from Der Spiegel, the German weekly news magazine, that Jaffer has complained that the scope of the Special Prosecutor's proposed investigation is too narrow. Apparently referring to Vice President Cheney and perhaps former President Bush, Jaffer was quoted as declaring that the probe should include "higher-ups." ("Obama Should Make Sure that Cheney is Brought to Justice") Googling a little further, I learned that Jaffer had successfully argued before the federal appeals court in New York City that a lower court ruling allowing the government to bar Tariq Ramadan from entering the United States should be reversed. The government argued that Ramadan had contributed to a charity with connections to Islamist terrorism. On August 18, 2009 Ramadan was fired by the City of Rotterdam and Rotterdam's Erasmus University from his positions supposedly aimed at "fostering integration" between immigrant Muslims and the indigenous Dutch population when Rotterdam authorities learned that Ramadan' s weekly program on Iran's Press TV was paid for by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iranian government. ("Rotterdam Fires Ramadan over Iranian TV Show," NRC Handelsblad, August 18, 2009)
I was perplexed. I asked myself, "Could it be both weird and extremely dangerous that, in the name of "human rights," two highly-trained, recent immigrants to the United States, one with dual citizenship, not only can place CIA agents and even a former President and Vice President of the United States in such jeopardy but can with impunity jeopardize the security of the United States? Could it be that by threatening to punish CIA agents for attempting to prevent a repetition of 9/11 or worse, Attorney General Holder was sending a very unpleasant message to those Americans responsible for interrogating terrorists? Even the New York Times carried a major op-ed piece protesting Holder's decision to place the CIA agents in "double jeopardy." (Joseph Finder, "The CIA in Double Jeopardy," New York Times, August 30, 2009.) On Saturday August 29, 2009, the Wall Street Journal carried a major article by Reuel Marc Gerecht, "Interrogating the CIA," outlining the permanent damage to national security the special counsel's probe is likely to engender.
To the Editor of the New York Times Book Review Section:
I was dismayed that a scholar of Fouad Ajami's eminence would state in his review of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution In Europe, "The question of Islam in Europe has occasioned calls of alarm about 'Eurabia'” (Book Review, August 2, 2009). There is a hint of unmerited dismissiveness in this comment that is disappointing to those of us have been engaged in long-term, serious scholarship on the impact of Islamic immigration on Western Europe. The fundamental issue is whether the newcomers intend to adopt to their host cultures or whether, as so many of their leaders have promised, they intend to transform Europe into a predominantly Muslim realm. We are not alarmists; we are responsible scholars who are seriously concerned about the future of Western civilization.
Professor Ajami also quotes Caldwell as assuring us that Islam "is in no sense Europe’s religion and it is in no sense Europe’s culture.” Few, if any, thoughtful people would dispute that statement, but the real question is not what Europe is but what it is in danger of becoming. Let us not forget that it has happened before. Some of Christianity's greatest teachers-such as St. Augustine-were products of a North African Christianity that disappeared permanently with the Muslim conquests of the seventh century.
Richard L. Rubenstein
President Emeritus
University of Bridgeport
Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus
Florida State University
(Richard L. Rubenstein is the author of La Perfidie de 'lHistoire (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf and Éditions Les Provinciales, 2005), a study of the impact of Islam on contemporary Europe, and Jihad and Genocide (forthcoming, Rowman and Littlefield andÉditions Les Provinciales), a study of the genocidal potentialities of jihad.
I have just completed the manuscript of Jihad and Genocide and sent it off today to the publishers (Rowman and Littlefield in US & UK , Editions Les Provinciales in France .) It is not a cheerful book. One of my conclusions after four grueling years working on it, is that they mean to kill us if they can and, at least with regard to Israel, there are people in elite circles in the US who see that as the "Final Solution" to their Israel problem, although, being elite, they are being discreet about fully expressing their views. During WW II, the same kind of people welcomed the Shoah (yes, welcomed) in the US and UK . The more dead Jews, they figured, the fewer would come to the US or Palestine .
I am especially gratified that at age 85, my mind is sufficiently in good order that I can produce a decently researched book that is to be published in the US, the UK, and France.
Some Reflections on "The Odd Couple": A Reply to Martin Marty
The winter issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies is devoted to Jewish-Christian dialogue. The central essay is by Martin Marty, professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and probably the most important mainstream Protestant academic voice in the US in the last thirty years. His article, "The Odd Couple," chides some Jews for their alliance on Israel with right-wing Evangelical Protestants. I was asked to respond to Marty whom I have known since the 1960s. Here is my response in pdf form (Journal of Ecumenical Studies Winter 2009 used by permission)
In his Inaugural Address our new president described the United States as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and non-believers.” As a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former editor of the Harvard Law Review, President Obama, knows the significance of words and the order in which they appear. Given his superb legal training, he knew exactly what he was doing. In a subtle but effective way, he has rejected the idea of America as a Judeo-Christian civilization and replaced it with the idea of America as a Christian-Muslim civilization, while providing himself with the necessary deniability should this newly formulated coincidentia oppositorum (union of opposites) yield too much outrage. The mainstream Jewish organizations cannot be counted on to protest, especially in this time of new-president euphoria. Hopefully, when the euphoria cools, Evangelical Christians will do so. Unfortunately, all too many liberal Christians and liberal Jews ignore or are ignorant of the fact that for Islam religion is a zero-sum game. There is no middle way. Our new president has tried to unite incompatible opposites that have a 1400 year history of irreconcilable conflict. By his deliberately chosen choice of words, he has given a place at the table to some Muslim organizations that do not assign a very high priority to America's national interests and have Islamists sympathies. This is a pity because Barack Obama is the only president we've got and he should have left this issue for another day. He can get away with it now, but, nota bene, it should be remembered. In the history of religion, even small shifts of a letter or an accent can result in long-term consequences, as was evident long ago in the debate at the Council of Nicea (325 C.E.) over whether Christ was homoousias ("of the same essence with the Father") or homoiousias ("of like essence with the Father".)
