As an American living overseas it is interesting to view the USA political scene from afar. From my perspective the Loony Left seem to be getting so far afield it is hard for normal thinking people to comprehend them.
‘Hollywood exemplifies desperation and utter ideological servitude when they worship the ground that failed 2020 presidential candidate-turned 2020 Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris walks. Yeah, so what if her record as San Fran DA contradicts BLM demands? She’s the woman of color VP nom we were all promised.
After the left-wing candidate was announced as Biden’s running mate, famous Hollywood fools went into ecstasy. Though, after all, how could any of them brave giving a less-than-enthusiastic, much less, critical response to a woman of color VP nod? Despite the fact that she represents everything gross and totalitarian about the far left, she fits the gender/racial politics profile that party wants.
Thus we get a sensitive lefty man-child like Disney star Josh Gad talking about tears of “joy” at the announcement. The Sleeping Beauty actor was that excited about the Kamala Harris news that he actually tweeted, “I am crying with joy!!!!” Ah, yes, Kamala inducing tears of joy. That enthusiasm sure was present during her presidential run.
Trump hater extraordinaire Patton Oswalt provided Kamala with some serious lip service in the wake of the announcement, virtually high-fiving Biden over picking someone that could smash Pence on the debate stage, allegedly. Patton tweeted, “Not cool, Joe. You know Pence can’t be alone onstage to debate Harris. Why put that poor, frail flower through all this angst?” Oh right, and we’re sure Tim Kaine felt the same way as Pence calmly waved through his defense of Hillary last cycle.
Star Wars star Mark Hamill made a prediction immediately after the news, tweeting that Kamala will be “The next Vice President of the United States of America.” That’s bold. Remember when Hillary’s staff tweeted, “Happy Birthday to this future president” before she won? Hopefully this is one of those accidents.
Rob Reiner added to his collection of stupid tweets for the week with one saying, “Finally a Presidential ticket that looks like America!!” Oh, that’s interesting. So America looks like a gaffe-prone old man and a progressive, pro-abort San Francisco DA who detests conservatives.
Reiner added, “Now we all go to work to restore the soul of our Nation. VOTE!!!!” Again, what about this radical leftist ticket is restorative of anything?
Actress Kerry Washington provided some hype for the Biden/Harris ticket, mostly on the grounds of race. The Scandal actress tweeted, “Overwhelmed by this historic moment. @KamalaHarris is the first Black woman & first Asian-American/Indian to be a VP nominee of a major party.” Washington added, “My heart is soaring for all the kids out there who see themselves in her and will dream bigger because of this.”
Though this seems slightly ironic for someone like Washington who supports Black Lives Matter but then tells African American kids they’ll look up to Harris. Harris’ lack of popularity among Democrat voters has been tied to her tough stance on criminal justice.
Our Internet has been down for almost a week so that is the main reason you have not heard from me. Well, we are back up and running. Now, this article by Don Boys just might be a little controversial to some, however, it will make you think; I hope!
‘Is it right to do one monstrous wrong in order to produce a world-changing positive impact on all deprived, desperate, deformed, diseased, and dying people of the world? The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in perhaps the world’s greatest novel The Brothers Karamazov, seeks to answer that question.
The character Ivan Karamazov, a flaming atheist, blames God for permitting the innocent to suffer. (Don’t they all?) Then Ivan asks his brother Alyosha, a professed believer, if he would do a bad act if it resulted in the eternal happiness of mankind. His required act would be to torture an innocent child after which this eternal happiness would come into existence.
Ivan asks, “Would you consent to be the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly!”
“No, I wouldn’t agree,” said Alyosha quietly.
Neither would I. The basic premise doing evil that good may come of it is flawed.
It is tempting to do one act of cruelty that would give sight to every blind person, permit the crippled to walk, and eliminate all deadly diseases in the world. However, my refusal would not be a lack of concern for others but because of personal honor, responsibility, and accountability. Every person on earth must give an account for his or her own actions.
I am not responsible for decisions made by world leaders; however, I must give a personal account for what I do and my motives for doing it. Even if doing wrong would result in much good, I cannot do it—no matter how strong my altruistic desires may be.
That now brings me to a very practical, personal, and problematic decision made in time of war. What are my obligations before God for actions in time of a national emergency?
I have often silently questioned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (neither was a vital military target) to end WWII and restore relative peace, permanency, and prosperity to the world. After much thought, I would not have dropped those bombs nor done the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden!
It has been long recognized that bombing of enemy barracks, communication centers, railroads, airports, and fuel depots was acceptable, but never targeting civilians. Churchill changed that followed by Hitler’s nightly bombing of London.
No, I am not a pacifist. I believe in personal defense and I believe a nation must defend itself. Japan attacked us; we had to respond. Roosevelt had cut off Japan’s oil supply, basically a death blow to an oil-starved nation, so the Japanese leaders retaliated; however, they did attack us. But was there justification for dropping the atomic bombs killing 185,000 innocent civilians?
The experts told us that up to a million American lives would be lost if an invasion of Japan were launched. Moreover, the argument was made that in killing so many people in nuclear blasts, it would drive Japan to the negotiating table; however, Japan had been willing to surrender but not “unconditionally” as required by the Allied Powers. That is what continued the war.
If I had been a soldier during WWII, I suppose I would have been a pilot since I later became one and a plane owner. I would have had no problem being a fighter pilot since that is a one-on-one fight between two soldiers in defense of their nation’s objectives. However, if I had flown over Hamburg with a load of bombs knowing there were thousands of innocent people below that had nothing to do with the war, I could not have pushed a button and released the bombs on innocent people. From 42,000 to 45,000 people died in the destruction of Hamburg with more people dying in that bombing alone than in the entire German bombing campaign against England!
Many would call my refusal to bomb German civilians treason to my country but I’m convinced it is faithfulness to God; however, this is one time I must not be too hard on my critics. I might be, notice I said, I might be wrong; but my Bible-based conscience says I’m right.
During the closing stages of the war in 1945, Churchill reveled in bombing the German populace and refugees as they tried to escape from Germany. He knew terror worked. Churchill revealed his desire to use terror bombing in a memorandum in November 1942 in which he declared that “all the industrial cities should be attacked in an intense fashion, every effort being made to terrorise and paralyse the population.” Yes, Churchill was a terrorist, but he was “our” terrorist and President Roosevelt agreed with his decision to terrorize and kill civilians. Stalin was delighted.
Dresden was an old city with few military targets (and not one anti-aircraft gun) and was crowded with refugees from Breslau fleeing the Russian advance into Germany. Breslau had experienced a killing field that cost the lives of 170,000 civilians. The refuges and Dresden citizens, thinking they were relatively safe were shocked on the night of February 13, 1945 to see 800 RAF bombers drop more than 1,400 tons of bombs and more than 1,100 tons of incendiaries over the city creating a massive firestorm that incinerated an estimated 25,000 to over 300,000 civilian deaths!
The Dresden bombing was the most controversial and tragic bombing of the war. Even a certified butcher would have difficulty defending it.
About six months later, President Truman decided to end the war by using the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but contrary to what most people think, it was not a universally approved decision. However, it was a popular decision in America at the time.
Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bird, General Curtis LeMay, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, former President Herbert Hoover, and President Truman’s chief of staff Admiral William Leahy had voiced protests about using the bomb but their protests had no impact on Truman’s decision.
The President, no doubt thinking it was the wise decision, ordered the Japanese cities to be bombed in August of 1945. In 1946, Truman ordered a U.S. Bombing Survey to be done a few months after the two Japanese cities were bombed, and it decided, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
The use of nuclear bombs killing 185,000 innocent people within a few days and injuring 135,000 more was unnecessary, and the nuclear genie was released from the bottle.
It was discovered years later that many famous, powerful American officials disagreed with the decision to use the Bomb.
Norman Cousins, a famous author, editor, and aide to General MacArthur, asked the general about dropping the bomb and “He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”
General Eisenhower confessed, “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing” (Newsweek, 11/11/63).
Soon after the bombing of Japan, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out…The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment…It was a mistake to ever drop it.”
Concerning the war in Europe, Hitler said, “Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.” The definition of terrorism is “the targeting of innocent civilians to achieve a political goal.” Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin used terror against a German terrorist with a bad haircut and funny mustache who had grandiose military ambitions.
The Allies, ostensibly taking the high ground in all matters, decided to become temporary terrorists!
Only God requires and deserves unqualified obedience. However, to quote Alyosha, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers, “If God is dead, everything is permitted.” But God is not dead. He’s not even sick. And it is He to whom each person is responsible.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan and the unnecessary bombing of civilians was wrong; but then only a fool or fanatic says military leaders always make the right decisions.
The Marxist, Muslim Leftist, Lovies desire to bury you anyway they can. One example is ‘Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson, an Obama appointee to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, on Friday overturned the death sentence of Boston Marathon jihad bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. President Trump is unhappy. Early Sunday morning he tweeted: “Death penalty! He killed and badly wounded many. Justice!”
Democrats, in contrast, appear to be fine with Thompson’s decision, as some Democratic leaders are on record saying not only that Tsarnaev should not be put to death, but that he should vote.
As far as Trump is concerned, this is still a live issue despite Thompson’s ruling. On Sunday afternoon he followed up his initial tweet with two more, saying: “Rarely has anybody deserved the death penalty more than the Boston Bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The court agreed that this ‘was one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks since the 9/11 atrocities’. Yet the appellate court tossed out the death sentence. So many lives lost and ruined. The Federal Government must again seek the Death Penalty in a do-over of that chapter of the original trial. Our Country cannot let the appellate decision stand. Also, it is ridiculous that this process is taking so long!”
Trump also took this question right to the Democrats, saying after the ruling was announced on Friday: “They protect criminals and Biden opposes the death penalty, even for cop killers and child murderers.” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is a child murderer, as one of his victims in the Marathon bombings was an eight-year-old boy named Martin Richard.
But the Democrats nevertheless want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev alive, well, and voting a straight Democrat ticket. Back in April 2019, Bernie Sanders came out for restoring voting rights for convicted felons. He was asked if he believed that even “terrible people,” including convicted murderers such as Tsarnaev, should have the right to vote. Sanders was unequivocal: “Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote. Well, that person did that. Not going to let that person vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope.”
With Marxism and Islam growing worldwide be assured the following story will be repeated again just as spoken of in the Word of God! Mark 13:14 But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains
‘Tibor Spitz, a retired chemical engineer turned renowned artist and educator, spoke to Aish.com about the extraordinary events of his life before, during and after the Holocaust.
Born in 1929, Tibor Spitz grew up in the small town of Dolny Kubin, nestled in a picturesque mountainous region of Orava, Slovakia, shouldering the country’s border with Poland. “It was a very beautiful place to grow up, but it wasn’t in my parents plans to live in Slovakia at all,” Spitz explains. “Several years earlier they had moved to the Land of Israel but had to return to Europe.”
Tibor Spitz, one year old, in 1930
Tibor’s parents Yosef Tzvi and Shoshana Spitz had realized their dream to settle in the Land of Israel in 1920, living in what was then the small town of Bnei Brak. “It was there that my oldest sister Esther Spitz was born, but she died at a young age from illness.” The couple’s fortunes continued to decline when Yosef Tzvi was shot by Arab marauders. Suffering from an infection to the wound, and with Shoshana pregnant, they were advised to return to Europe to receive medical care.
The Spitz family in 1936. Tibor is on the left
Back in Slovakia, the Spitz’s had three children, Ernest, Chava and Tibor. “It was more or less a happy childhood. Living in the mountains made us tough, there was snow on the ground for around eight or ten months of the year and we became strong and healthy.”
“My father had the most beautiful voice. Before moving to Israel, he had trained as an opera singer in Vienna and he had mixed with so many well-known composers.“ In Slovakia he found work as a chazan. “My father was angelic person, and his voice was a healer.”
“Music was a basic part of my life, our home was filled with singing. My father often played music on a gramophone, and aside from leading services, he taught Hebrew and would give talks about living in the Land of Israel.” Tibor’s father also acted as the shochet (ritual slaughterer). “He did everything except circumcisions, and I was like the rabbi’s son.”
The Jewish community of Dolny Kubin numbered just 100 families. “We were not big enough to have a cheder, (Jewish school) so I along with the other Jewish children went to public school. Despite the small size of the community, it was rich in its diversity.”
Tibor was ten years old when the Nazis began their conquest of Europe.
Anti-Semitic measures
In March 1939, Slovakia aligned itself as an ally to the Nazis, with Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest turned politician, introducing harsh anti-Jewish measures. (After the war in 1947, Tiso would be tried and executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity).
One day Tibor returned home with tears in his eyes. “As the only Jewish boy in a large elementary class, I asked my mother what I should do, as I was being cursed for being Jewish. She gave me this advice, ‘You better live the way that people would have reasons to envy you rather than feel sorry for you.’ It was then that I learned in any situation to try to remain a mensch, a decent human being.”
“In 1940, we were kicked out of public school and overnight my mother became a teacher to the town’s 24 Jewish children aged 6 to 16.”
Josef Tiso meeting Adolph Hitler. Slovakia aligned itself as a Nazi client state
In 1941, the Jews of Slovakia were forced to wear a star, and in the same year, the Slovak government negotiated with Nazi Germany for the mass deportation of Jews to German-occupied Poland. By 1942 deportations had begun. By the end of the war, around 69,000 of the country’s estimated 90,000 Jews had been murdered, although the deportations were staggered and typically shrouded in false promises.
“I used to ask myself: why they didn’t just deport all of the Jews straight away? But I realized, of course, that we would have tried to run away.”
“Tiso announced that the country would remain civilized, but each week or two, another measure was introduced against us. They took our property, musical equipment, eventually also our fur coats, jewelry and our money but life somehow just seemed to carry on.”
It was all a ruse; we were being sent to our deaths.
“When deportation orders were given, they told us to learn a manual trade for our new lives in the East, and they even provided workshops.” Tibor learned to be a bricklayer, while his father learned glass making. “It was all a ruse; we were being sent to our deaths. They turned up the heat of the water little by little until we were too weak and were trapped.”
On the last train
After the deportations began, some Jews were left to run some confiscated businesses, pharmacies, essential services including the cemetery. “Part of my father’s duties had been to officiate at the Jewish funerals. My brother and I also helped with the manual cemetery work.” Yosef Zvi was told that his family would be deported on the last train.
“We didn’t trust the authorities and every time there was a deportation, we went into hiding.”
In 1943 Germans began to lose ground against the Russians on the Eastern front. “By that time, almost all Jews were gone and only some remained in either Slovak Labor camps or waiting in limbo, as we did.”
This situation continued until 1944 when part of the Slovak army along with many civilians joined partisans and started an uprising against the Slovak fascist government. The Red Army was already in neighboring Ukraine in the east and in Poland across the northern border, so the rebels expected a quick victory. But the Germans crushed the uprising and took over the entire territory of Slovakia.
Escape to the forest
Amid aerial bombardment and mortar fire, the Nazi invasion had seen many Slovaks leave the cities to seek refuge in the outlying villages. “One night, accompanied by my grandfather who had been staying with us, we collected our things and left, pretending to be refugees. It was chaos.
“The Germans put up posters – ‘Come back to your homes, even Jews! You will have rights.’” The Spitz family was not convinced. “My parents said we would be crazy to go back to our homes.”
Briefly renting a room in a nearby village but knowing it still might take the Red Army months to break through on the Eastern front, Tibor’s brother Ernest came up with a plan.
“The Nazis were on every corner looking at documents. We were thinking of hiding under the ground in a forest for several months before my brother Ernest thought it over to the smallest detail. He said we needed to find a stream that would give us a water supply, in a steep valley far enough off the beaten track that no one would pass through.”
Ernest’s plan was to cut a triangle out of the slope near to the floor of the valley, which would provide the family with cover from the rain and shade from the sun.
“With neither pen, nor ink or paper to draw on, he used charcoal from the brick stove to draw a plan on the wall of the apartment we were hiding in, and we tried to remember every detail.”
After Ernest had located a steep valley that closely matched their needs, they began to prepare for their escape.
“During the day we would stay in the village, pretending to be war refugees helping the villagers with their harvest, but at nights we would build our shelter. We had neither tools, nor nails or ropes. Just a small military trench shovel we found, a small hatchet, and our bare hands.
“It was extremely difficult to dig the ground in a pristine forest, pull out boulders and rocks, cut roots, and move the dirt. Our hands were bloody. To make a hole to squeeze six people into the side of a steep hill took days. We improvised, used fallen tree trunks and branches and then camouflaged the area so that nothing would reveal any human presence.”
After completing the shelter and camouflaging the area the family disappeared into the forest.
Illustration by Spitz of how the family built their forest hideout
Surviving
“Not all Slovaks were fanatical believers in the Nazi victory, and the German Army was close to collapse, so it did not even cross our minds that we would have to spent such a long time in the snow-covered mountain. Also nobody forecast that 1944 would be the coldest winter of the century.
“We hid for 200 days, and every day was the longest I have ever experienced. As patrols on horseback and foot searched the forests, each day could have been our last.
“Under the ground, we didn’t feel the cold so much, and we also had three layers of clothes. I vividly remember that the hole was smaller than we needed and we could not stretch or lie out. We were squeezed into uncomfortable positions.
A painting by Spitz of the family’s underground hideout. Patrols were a common threat
“We lived like animals, like foxes, instinctively, surviving from one minute to the next. We ate berries, we knew the mushrooms that we could eat, and sucked the water from the snow and ice to stay alive. The forests and the wild nature felt like friends helping us to hide from the human predators and murderers.
“When I would go to find food, I would fill in my footprints with snow to prevent anyone discovering our whereabouts.”
“It was just a biological level of survival. That’s all.” Spitz says, “On the most basic level that you could imagine, nothing else mattered.”
Brush with death
In February 1944, just over two months into hiding, Ukrainian partisans assisting the Red Army and operating in the forest discovered the Spitz family.
“They lined us up, one of them guarded us while the other went through our things. My mother said we should pray, but my father just wanted it to be over with, they began arguing. ‘We are not your enemies,’ my mother pleaded with them. ‘It’s not worth it, Hitler wants to kill us all,’ my father interrupted her. Meanwhile, the soldiers began laughing watching them argue it out.”
The end of family, by Spitz
Amid the scene, Tibor hedged his bets and ran away, returning hours later after he hadn’t heard any shots.
“It turned out that they had been under strict orders not to kill civilians, but they had taken all of our clothes and the primitive food supply we had. It was a miracle to not be killed, but that winter was the coldest of the century and it was practically a death sentence.”
That night, the family wondered whether they should risk going to a nearby village to ask for help, or stay where they were and freeze or starve to death. “The SS Gestapo was absolutely desperate to kill us; we had witnessed enough of their crimes to know how much money they put on Jewish heads.”
Miracle
“As we were freezing, something incredible happened to us that I look at as a miracle. We were so cold, and from nowhere, there erupted a warm spring of water with a strong smell of sulphur. It warmed our tiny hole in the valley. It was such a healer and raised our spirits.”
With renewed hope, Tibor’s mother took the risk of asking for help. “These villages were stricken with poverty. Eventually she found partisans who also had very little but they were sympathetic to our family’s needs.”
Menorah, by Tibor Spitz, a message of hope
“If you are alive come out”
In April 1945 news of the end of the war reached the Spitz family hiding in the forest. Tibor was 14 years old. “One day peasants came through the forests calling out, ‘If you are alive, come out.’ This was our liberation.”
“At first, we went back to my grandfather’s home where he and our grandmother had raised their seven children.” The grandfather had suffered from the physical and emotional strain of the war. “Aside from us, all of his other children and grandchildren were wiped out. He was broken by the loss, and lasted just three months before he died.”
In July, 1945 the family returned to Dolny Kubin. “People looked at us like we were ghosts, and were even coming up to us and touching us. Because of all that had happened, we couldn’t have been real people.
“Life was so unpleasant, yet we tried to continue our lives. At the end of that summer, in September we went back to school. I had lost a year of studies and it was not easy.”
Later, the Spitz family moved to another town, Liptovsky Mikulas, 50km away, where Yosef Zvi once again took on the role of rabbi and cantor for the Jews that remained there. Later Tibor and Ernest headed to Prague to complete high school and then university. “I went on to study chemistry while my brother studied art.
“Prague was the best place to be as a chemistry student.” He scored the highest grades in his school. Meanwhile, Ernest was making a reputation as a talented artist.
“He was outspoken in fighting against the communist regime for artists’ expression. He opened a gallery, and shared messages through his paintings and murals promoting human rights.” Sadly, he died a young man aged 33. “I don’t have the proof, but I think the authorities were behind his death.”
Self portrait by Ernest Spitz, 1955, five years before his death aged 33
Judaism seen as a hostile ideology
“When I look back now, what motivates me to tell my story is my forced silence while living in communist Czechoslovakia. Judaism was considered a hostile, subversive ideology and Jewish suffering and the subject of the Holocaust became practically forbidden in politics, cultural life, art and literature alike.
“There was no outlet for either healing or reducing the pain. To the contrary, we were constantly reminded and suspected of having connections to democratic Israel that was oriented towards the West and became an adversary to the USSR. Religious institutions were persecuted but the accumulated traditional hatred and hostility against the Jewish religion became specifically intense. Judaism, with its wisdom and promotion of freedom, particularly irritated the dictators who considered the Jews to be subversive enemies.”
Tibor’s family
During his time in Prague, Tibor’s father also passed away. “He was taken to hospital with something trivial and never came out. He was not even 60.”
His sister Chava cared for their mother who died in Slovakia in 1986. “Chava later moved to Kfar Saba in Israel and was married and had children but died just ten years later.”
In 1967, aged 38, after graduating with a PhD in chemistry, Spitz was encouraged to meet Noemi, a daughter of the head of the Jewish community of Bratislava, and also a survivor of the Holocaust.
“I was raised deeply as a Jew, and so after the war it was absolutely essential to me that I could only marry a Jew. I was a good catch,” he laughs. “As a husband, I had everything a girl could imagine, I was educated, and had job prospects, but for years I resisted marriage as I felt a built-in conflict. Life was still far from normal, where a person could just walk up to you and call you a dirty Jew.”
Tibor and Noemi met and their second meeting was their wedding – a private ceremony in Prague City Hall.
Escaping communist rule
“God gives us the strength to survive.” Tibor says. “Survival is not only about dodging the bullets, God gave us a ‘seichel’ a brain, and we are given all the tools we need.”
Accepting a work contract in Cuba, Tibor and Noemi left Prague. Nine months later, they made a successful attempt to escape from a refueling Cuban airplane and became political refugees living in Canada. “At home the courts sentenced us to 15 years in prison.”
After nine years in Canada, they settled in the US in Kingston, where Tibor worked for a company pioneering magnetic recording heads.
Holocaust education
Over the years, Spitz has taken a prominent role in Holocaust education and is a regular speaker at universities, high schools and embassies in the US. Last year, he gave 26 lectures alone.
Delivering a lecture in May 2019 to Baruch College, NYC
“Jewish collective ignorance, disbelief in unlimited cruelty and lack of unity before and during the Nazi era cost us the lives of a third of all Jews on this planet. No other nation or country would have survived such impact, yet three years after it ended, the Jews proclaimed the existence of the State of Israel on the territory of their ancestors.
“I have visited Israel many times. It is a 2,000-year-old dream. It is a miracle and we live in a generation when it is happening before our eyes. We need to be proud of who we are.
“To be a Jew, for me, is to live with an uncompromising moral fight for justice. I was raised to be proud as a Jew and I still feel that. Every holiday is my favorite holiday, they each teach such important lessons with unprecedented wisdom. But now, I think to myself, I am alive and I see every day as a holiday.”
World leaders have also been guests at his lectures, especially from Slovakia of whom he has been invited to meet successive presidents.
“I stress the importance of seeing world events truthfully without adjusting them to be either more pleasant or harmless, to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others and to eliminate fear as an emotion.
“We should also remember that Western civilizations based their values on Jewish Scriptures connected to pursuing peace, cooperation and tolerance, including the Jewish principle ‘Do not do to others you do not want done to you.’”
Together with his wife, Noemi and former Slovakian President Andrej Kiska
Revisiting Dolny Kubin
In 2002, Tibor was invited by a film crew to try to relocate their hideout. “An old woman who remembered our family from the war times explained that for many years villagers had visited our hiding place to commemorate the superhuman endurance of a Jewish family hiding in their forest.
“After more than seven decades it was not easy to find the remnants of an underground place covering just a few square yards. Topography of the area had changed significantly as the forest wood was harvested and the areas covered by trees have significantly changed.
At the site in the forest of what remains of the hideout
Five years ago, an annual ‘Peace March’ began, with hundreds of people walking from the nearest village to the hideout, with Tibor and his wife participating as an eyewitness giving public lectures and interviews for local and national TV and radio.
“Revisiting brought memories of the terrible times and so many victims, too many of them children, my cousins, and schoolmates – one of them shot dead while also hiding in the forest. I also felt celebration for freedom and life as well. I was filled with an awareness of breathing, feeling, loving, and the ability to perceive colors, shapes and sounds to listen to music and human speech. Not to be hungry to the level of counting the last drop of energy before your body shuts down and to be in the presence of people you do not have to be afraid of.”
Artwork
Over the last few decades, Tibor Spitz’s artwork has been displayed in the US, Canada and Europe. His artwork shares a variety of themes, not only the Holocaust, but also Kabballah, Jewish heritage and identity. He paints, sculpts and works with ceramic, wood among other artforms.
The March to Eternity, artwork by Tibor Spitz
“In 2002 I received an offer to exhibit my Holocaust paintings in Bratislava, Slovakia. Slovak President Schuster sponsored the event, and arrived there personally together with other government representatives.”
Several additional exhibitions of Tibor’s artwork have also been held in the country since. The last was held in August 2019 in Dolny Kubin on the occasion of Tibor’s 90th birthday.
The Spitz’s living room is adorned with 50 of his own works. One of his latest creations was a wood carving shaped into a horse with a rider, in honor of a local bar mitzvah boy. “This piece of wood had a hole in it, he says. I found a good use for it.” He adds, showing how it became the horse’s eye. “I say, don’t cry over spilt milk, you can turn everything in life into a positive. You have to stay positive; if not, you live your life in disharmony.”’https://www.aish.com/ho/p/Hiding-from-Nazis.html?s=ss2
The following is not a surprise to anyone who is even a little discerning of Hollywood, communism and totalitarian governments.
‘This report examines the ways in which Beijing’s censors have affected and influenced Hollywood and the global filmmaking industry. Stories shape the way people think, and the stories told by Hollywood reach billions. As an anti-censorship organization dedicated to the celebration of open cultural and artistic expression, PEN America has sought to understand how one of the world’s most censorious regimes is extending its influence over the global locus for filmmaking here in the United States, shaping what is perhaps the world’s most influential artistic and cultural medium.
PEN America defends and celebrates freedom of expression in the United States and globally. Our work has included a decades-long advocacy engagement on China, where dozens of members of our sister PEN organization—the Independent Chinese PEN Center—have been imprisoned or persecuted by Beijing. The most influential of those colleagues was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence for his writings when he died of liver cancer.2 Our work has involved advocacy campaigns, detailed research reports, literary exchanges, and other efforts aimed at pushing back against Beijing’s censorship policies and its criminalization of dissent.
Over the last decade or more, as Beijing has expanded its global role as a world power, leading trade partner, sovereign investor, and cultural influence, these domestic patterns of censorship and control have extended beyond China’s borders. Beijing’s rising global influence has meant that the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) approach to censorship is making itself felt by publishers, authors, scholars, writers, journalists, and others who address topics of interest to China, regardless of their citizenship or where they are based. In 2015, PEN America documented Chinese publishers’ censorship of Chinese-language translations of foreign authors in our report Censorship and Conscience: Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship. In 2016, we analyzed the CCP’s efforts to affect foreign media’s coverage of the country in Darkened Screen: Constraints on Foreign Journalists in China, and its enforced disappearance of five publishers (including two with foreign citizenship) connected to a Hong Kong bookstore in Writing on the Wall: Disappeared Booksellers and Free Expression in Hong Kong. In 2018, our research on social media censorship in China for Forbidden Feeds: Government Controls on Social Media in China included an analysis of how Beijing’s digital censorship affected users of Chinese digital platforms even when they were outside the country.
We have seen this exportation of censorious pressure elsewhere, so much so that there is a long—and growing longer—list of examples from the last few years alone: the major academic publisher Cambridge University Press attempting to pull titles from access by Chinese audience due to fear of CCP retaliation; the consistent degradation of press freedoms and civil liberties in Hong Kong; New Zealand publishers finding their books censored by Chinese printers; academics and students across the globe facing intimidation when they speak out on issues the CCP considers sensitive; and global brands forced to apologize simply for printing the words “Taiwan” or “the Dalai Lama.”
Increasingly, Beijing’s economic clout has allowed it to insist that others comply with its censorship strictures—or has led others to voluntarily internalize these strictures, even without being asked—as a prerequisite to doing business with or in the country. While individual compromises may seem minor or worthwhile in exchange for the opportunity to engage with China’s population, the collective global implications of playing by Beijing’s rules need to be recognized and understood before acquiescence to Chinese censorship becomes a new normal in countries that have prided themselves for their staunch free speech protections.
Hollywood is an important bellwether. The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”8 Within the pages of this report, we detail how Hollywood decision-makers and other filmmaking professionals are increasingly making decisions about their films—the content, casting, plot, dialogue, and settings—based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.
As U.S. film studios compete for the opportunity to access Chinese audiences, many are making difficult and troubling compromises on free expression: changing the content of films intended for international—including American—audiences; engaging in self-censorship; agreeing to provide a censored version of a movie for screening in China; and in some instances directly inviting Chinese government censors onto their film sets to advise them on how to avoid tripping the censors’ wires. These concessions to the power of the Chinese market have happened mostly quietly, with little attention and, often, little debate. Steadily, a new set of mores has taken hold in Hollywood, one in which appeasing Chinese government investors and gatekeepers has simply become a way of doing business.’ For the full report go to https://pen.org/report/made-in-hollywood-censored-by-beijing/
Freedom isn’t lost in just one act. It usually takes several acts of government to erode the freedoms that were once taken for granted. Is the China virus one of those ‘things’ that has set the clock for government to erode more of the people’s liberty?
This video is scary in that there are ways for the police to get information concerning drivers without smashing windows. For instance, there is a state register of car owners and their address kept on file by the government and that information is only a call away. But, why do that when we can intimidate the person?
In the Australian state of Victoria nothing should come as a surprise. The state Premier Daniel Andrews, according to reports, has signed the state up to China CCP’s belt and road initiative supposedly without the knowledge of the opposition. Now, with the China virus hitting the socialist republic of Victoria, the hardest of all the Australian states, Andrews is using Communist police methods on Victorian citizens. Rather than calling in for owner information on an automobile Victorian police will smash your window and forcibly drag you out and force that information out of you! If that isn’t communist Marxist tactics what is? Therefore we are not surprised to read that the Victorian ‘Police have been forced into the extraordinary measure of smashing car windows to get Victorians to comply with second wave COVID-19 restrictions in Victoria. “On at least three or four occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide us their details because they weren’t telling us where they were going, they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said. Mr Patton said the discretion period for COVID-19 rules in Victoria had “virtually closed” and more than 1500 patrolling officers and PSOs would enforce the restrictions every day. “It will only be in an exceptional circumstance – in an exceptional circumstance – that Victoria Police will be using discretion because we just have to stop this movement,” he said. “In the last week we’ve seen a trend, an emergence if you like, of groups of people, small groups, but nonetheless concerning groups who classify themselves as sovereign citizens – whatever that might mean – people who don’t think the law applies to them. “We’ve seen them at checkpoints baiting police, not providing their name and address. “There are consequences for your actions, and if you’re not doing the right thing we will not hesitate to issue infringements, to arrest you, to detail you where it’s appropriate.”’https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6177862528001
I have attached the video below. The ‘Shocking police body camera footage has revealed the brutal arrest of a father for refusing to leave the bedside of his critically ill six-year-old daughter, after doctors announced life-saving treatment would be withdrawn without the family’s consent.
The arrest led to long serving NHS respiratory consultant, Dr Rashid Abbasi, 58, having a heart attack outside his daughter’s hospital room as four police officers arrested him on 19 August 2019.
Doctors at the hospital, which cannot be named for legal reasons, called for the police to remove or arrest Dr Abbasi after they announced they would withdraw treatment and ultimately enforce end of life ‘treatment’ on his six-year-old daughter, Zainab, through extubating her.
The case, hitherto unknown to the public, is reminiscent of the high-profile tragedies of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard.
Reluctant to treat six-year-old girl
Six-year-old Zainab was suffering from a rare life-limiting neurodegenerative condition called Niemann-Pick Disease. Unrelated to that, she also contracted swine flu at the age of two, which led to serious respiratory problems requiring treatment.
The parents believe that the doctors became increasingly reluctant to treat even the treatable respiratory problems because of her underlying life-limiting neurodegenerative disease. Fighting for her life was seen as pointless by the hospital because the genetic disease would make it likely that she would die during childhood.
This caused numerous disputes between the parents, who are both doctors, and the medical team supporting Zainab, about the appropriate intensity of treatment, culminating in the incident captured on video in August 2019.
Zainab sadly died four weeks later.
Legal challenge
Supported by the Christian Legal Centre, Dr Abbasi and his family have begun legal proceedings against the police for wrongful arrest and are considering legal action against the NHS.
Responding to the video footage the police have said to the Mail on Sunday that it “sets out a very different picture to the limited version of events which have been presented to us.”
Dr Abbasi said: “We have lost our daughter Zainab, but we want to take action for future Zainabs so that no one else has to go through what she did and what we have.”
‘They just want to kill her’
Shortly before the police body-cam video footage begins, Dr Abbasi and his family had been informed by the medical team responsible for Zainab’s care that they would be withdrawing life-saving treatment.
In recorded audio, Dr Abbasi can be heard saying that medical staff are trying “to kill my daughter.”
One doctor can be heard saying in the meeting that the process of withdrawing life support needs to start “straight away.”
Fearful that his daughter was being extubated in their absence from the intensive care unit, Dr Abbasi rushed back to her bedside and medical staff tried to block his way.
When Dr and Mrs Abbasi refused to consent to their daughter’s immediate extubation, the doctors tried to hand over a letter to severely restrict him from visiting his critically ill daughter. A few days earlier staff had tried to restrict his access due to claims that he was difficult but had to step down after he challenged the decision.
At Zainab’s bedside, Dr Abbasi’s wife, Dr Aliya Abbasi can be heard crying and saying: “They have made their decision already; they just want to kill her…they are going to just take the tube out. Let’s take her home.”
‘I’m having a heart attack’
The video footage begins with Dr Abbasi sitting tenderly holding his daughter’s hand with his wife and son at his side. Dr Abbasi has said that when his daughter developed the debilitating illness, she would communicate by squeezing his fingers with her little hand.
The police ask to speak to Dr Abbasi outside saying that “they have some concerns about his behaviour.” He replies quietly and calmly: “This is a lie…I don’t want to leave my daughter; my daughter is dying,” and he kisses her hand.
A six-foot police officer then approaches Dr Abbasi and says: “If you do not comply with what I am saying, there may be a necessity to place you under arrest.”
At no point, however, were the police able to produce any paperwork justifying this course of action. Police have still not produced an justification for Dr Abbasi’s arrest, despite our requesting all footage from the police officers.
As Dr Abbasi again refuses to leave, a police officer uses a metal spiked instrument to unclasp his hand from his daughter’s.
Meanwhile his wife pleads with the police and medical staff to show compassion but is then pulled by the shoulders away from the bedside and falls and screams in distress.
Alarmed at what is happening to his wife, Dr Abbasi shouts “what are you doing to my wife?” Two officers then drag him from the bedside and onto the floor.
A struggle follows with four police officers and Dr Abbasi breathlessly shouts: “I’ve got chest pains; I’m having a heart attack” and urgently asks for the medicine in his pocket to relieve his angina.
His repeated requests, however, are ignored by the police and he is instead told that he is ‘disgusting’ and is an ‘animal’ who has brought it all on himself. The police handcuff him, kick him, strap his legs together, dump him on a trolley and wheel him out of the unit.
Dr Abbasi is then taken to A&E where he is later de-arrested. Medical records later confirm that he had indeed had a heart attack. His health has not been right since. The day following the arrest he had to have an emergency procedure, and has since had two more.
Emergency hearings
Following his arrest and heart attack, Dr Abbasi was only allowed back to see Zainab under harsh restrictions. This included a two-hour visiting window where he was escorted throughout the building and was prevented from questioning or challenging the care his daughter was receiving.
Despite the threat of Zainab being immediately extubated, this did not escalate further, but instead the steroid treatment she needed to survive was slowly withdrawn.
On 29 August 2019, the Hospital made an application to the High Court for an order authorising a withdrawal of life support.
The trial was listed for 19-20 September 2019 and the Court imposed an anonymity order to prohibit identification of the parties in any reporting of the case.
On 15 September 2019, Zainab’s condition deteriorated. The parents secured two emergency telephone hearings before Mr Justice Cohen, where they argued for an escalation of life-saving steroid treatment which had been reduced.
The application was refused, and Zainab died the following morning.
‘I was treated like a criminal’
The Abbasi family say that there was a ‘toxic environment’ surrounding the medical care of their daughter.
Dr Abbasi said: “I reacted as any father would who is suffering from grief, but I also knew in my professional capacity that my daughter was purposefully not receiving the treatment she needed to live.
“For challenging this and trying to protect my daughter’s life, I was treated like a criminal and an animal. This was brutal and unacceptable, but we want to emphasise that it was the doctors and the hospital who escalated the situation and involved the police unnecessarily.
“Ultimately, this story is about life and the value the NHS places on life and the wishes and rights of the parents involved.
“We are still grieving deeply, but we have no choice but to expose what has happened and to fight for justice for our daughter.
“We insist that what happened to Zainab should be rigorously investigated by an independent and impartial tribunal.”
‘Culture of death must be exposed’
Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “Any parent or indeed anyone who has ever lost a loved one will be deeply moved and appalled by this story. You could not find more caring and loving parents who simply wanted their daughter to have a chance to continue to live.
“The family showed an extraordinary amount of restraint in the face of their brutal treatment by the police and the hospital. They genuinely feared that their only daughter, their youngest child was about to die.
“Can you imagine how in such a moment it would feel to be treated as they were?
“The whole system needs a major overhaul. These tragic cases occur in a shroud of secrecy. Nothing breaks through because of the way in which the law operates to prevent close and open inspection and accountability. Parents are expected to navigate a complicated system weighted against them. It is almost impossible. This has to change.
“Sadly, the culture of death has resulted in more and more of this type of story, from Alfie Evans to Charlie Gard, where deeply disturbing decisions have been made by treating clinicians, police and the courts. The family, in their grief, have the whole legal machinery tumble down on them and no one advocating for them during the most harrowing life experience anyone could imagine.
“At a time when the parents need support and compassion, they are met with a court order to extubate their child meaning certain death. The order is enforced by judges and the police and backed up by medical establishment opinion.
“Why is it that time and time again when parents resist end of life treatment being imposed on their children, the police swiftly appear?
“We are living in a culture of death, and when our society and frontline services unilaterally decide that death is in a child’s best interest, and the parents are left powerless in the face of the ‘system’, it has to be exposed.
Genesis 8:22While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. “
‘Burning fuel for heat and cooking in developing countries could be harmful to health. In many cases, dwellings may not have chimneys. Add to this the fact that the scarcity of other fuels may result in people, for example, burning animal and human excrement, with health hazards resulting from the process.
Most developing countries would be in a position to establish electrical power grids, which would vastly improve health conditions. However, what fuel would be used to generate the electricity? Many developing countries have large coal reserves, which they would like to exploit in order to emulate the development of Western countries. Their development would be better than that of the west, given that pollutants released in coal burning, such as sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides, are, today, easy to remove. So what prevents such countries from rapid development? The answer is global warming policies imposed by international bodies, such as the UN. Such bodies are fearful of the possible increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and therefore apply restrictions on the development of coal-fired power plants. This prevents such countries from industrial development and leaves large numbers of people trapped in poverty. Yet, as we have previously discussed on Creation Moments, these regulations are based on false science, which has nevertheless become the accepted standard.
Yes, even in Australia ‘The woke-left is emboldened. Conservative voices are deplatformed, western culture is cancelled, statues are toppled and history is rewritten. Conservatism is under attack. But what can you do?CPAC was launched in 2019 to provide a platform for conservatives to gather and discuss ideas without harassment over wrong-think. It’s for all of us who believe that true freedom is built upon free speech, free markets and a free society. But we know that others don’t share these values. Last year CPAC was attacked by the Labor Party through Senator’s Kristina Keneally, Penny Wong and opposition leader Anthony Albanese. Antifa and Socialist Alliance also sent their goons to demonstrate at CPAC, to yell abuse and to threaten violence. Then the bureaucrats came. They colluded with Labor to threaten the organiser with jail for failing to comply with demands that were impossible to meet. We know what the left want to do and they are doing it.’https://www.cpacaustralia.org/
Tibor Spitz, one year old, in 1930
The Spitz family in 1936. Tibor is on the left
Josef Tiso meeting Adolph Hitler. Slovakia aligned itself as a Nazi client state
Illustration by Spitz of how the family built their forest hideout
A painting by Spitz of the family’s underground hideout. Patrols were a common threat
The end of family, by Spitz
Menorah, by Tibor Spitz, a message of hope
Self portrait by Ernest Spitz, 1955, five years before his death aged 33
Delivering a lecture in May 2019 to Baruch College, NYC
Together with his wife, Noemi and former Slovakian President Andrej Kiska
At the site in the forest of what remains of the hideout
The March to Eternity, artwork by Tibor Spitz
whatyareckon 