Australia is following the Marxist, Muslim, Leftist, Looney, Lovies, PC culture to its own destruction.
‘Do you detect any bias in this newspaper report?
“An elite Brisbane private school has bowed to pressure and dropped a sex-education book that suggests God hates homosexuals, gay people can “successfully” change to heterosexual, and people with ambiguous genitalia are “freaks”. Following Courier-Mail coverage that exposed the offensive book used in Year 10 religion classes at Moreton Bay Boys’ College and an angry backlash from parents, the school has confirmed the resource will be scrapped.” Queensland Courier Mail, August 4, 2020, Page 1.
Editorial Comment: Well it is true the Bible reports the Creator God does hate homosexuality, along with adultery, gluttony, thievery, etc, all in the same paragraph, (1 Corinthians 6:9). Therefore, would it be fair to say the Courier FeMale author of this report hates God’s Word?
Ever since same-sex marriage has been legalized in Australia (which doesn’t make it anymore right than before it was legalized) the LGBTQI crowd have been busy pushing their ungodly agenda. Jude 1:7 Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.
The nutsos continue to have great influence in Federal and state governments here in Australia. Yes, ‘Children face various struggles growing up. Every parent knows that. It’s never plain sailing all the way to adulthood.
And now, a dangerous Bill before the ACT Legislative Assembly on Thursday threatens to make it a criminal offence for a Christian parent to help a child deal with questions of gender and sexuality in a godly and biblical way. The police may bring criminal charges, carrying a maximum of 12 months imprisonment.
Under the Sexual and Gender Identity Conversion Practices Bill 2020 it will be an offence to engage in activity that appears to be for the purpose of changing someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.
Legal advice on the Bill received reveals that:
Parents who counsel their 5-year-old boy that he is a boy, despite the boy saying that he wants to be a girl, could be subject to criminal proceedings.
Teachers who treat the same gender-confused boy as a boy, in accordance with parents’ wishes, could also be subject to a criminal charge.
Schools set up with a religious ethos and teaching that there are only two genders could be at risk of being investigated by the ACT Human Rights Commission for conducting ‘conversion therapy’ practices.
Preachers teaching a biblically orthodox view of sexuality could be exposed to a conversion practice complaint.
Pastors who counsel any members of their congregations over unwanted same-sex attraction could be reported under the Act.
If Sleepy Joe wins the 2020 Presidential election America is done! Anyone with any sense at all knows ‘Politicians and babies both need to be changed often and for the same reason, and Americans will be attempting to make changes in November. America’s future depends on what change if any, we make at the voting booth. And the results will depend on whether we go to the polls or mail in a ballot. The long-honored absentee ballot is generally safe, but a massive mail-in vote is an engraved invitation for vote corruption.
Often, a politician may indicate a need for a change, but in reality, it’s only a bad odor. Not yet. While it might be premature to change a baby’s diaper impulsively, it might be perilous to do the same for a politician. Hence, the need to not be hasty in the November election.
While there are thousands of hopeful politicians on the ballots, the most vital is the presidential race, but does that position need to be changed?
We have a choice of Donald Trump who has a checkered past bedding various women but who has kept many of his promises he made to us. In that, he is a very unusual politician. For me, this is a replay of 2016—choosing the one who will do less damage, stabilize our economy, keep the baby butchers at bay, return peace to our cities, keep China behind her famous wall—without bankrupting our nation.
His vice-president Mike Pence is a good man. After caving to the LGBTQ tyrants in Indiana pre-election, he has done better than any other politician in standing for family and morality. While he could be more forceful, we all know the LGBTQ crowd specializes in bullying, badgering, and blackmailing decent opponents. He has done a respectable job with the other chores Trump assigned him.
As an Independent, that is the team I will vote for again, understanding that no candidate is perfect. I decided not to run this time.
The other ticket is abysmal, and it is difficult to understand how any honest American could put them in office. Joe Biden has a history of plagiarism, lying, very loose hands around girls and women, fanatically desirous of grabbing every gun in America and putting us in debt quadrillions of dollars. Biden is the description of a Throttlebottom—an innocuously inept and futile person in public office.
Biden is pathetic and surely will only get the sympathy vote and maybe his wife’s.
Kamala Harris is his choice for Vice-President, and she has a record that is far, far left. She is the most radical U.S. Senator. She climbed to power in California with the help of her lover Willie Brown, thirty years her senior and Speaker of the House in California. Brown has been separated from his wife since 1976 (but not divorced), and Kamala is only one of many women with whom he fornicated. Her appointed job required no credentials, no work, and she was “paid the equivalent of a full-time [state] senator for arriving at a one- to two-hour meeting each month.”
A Republican member of the state assembly at the time said, “Screwing the speaker has its rewards. Stevie Wonder could have seen through that play.” However, whatever hours she has logged in bed, she is far more dangerous to America than Hillary.
Senator Harris went after Judge Kavanaugh relentlessly like a pit bull going after a porterhouse steak. She believed the unsupported, unreal, and unchaste charges because “a woman would never lie about such a thing.” Now that it is to her benefit, she refuses to believe the senate aide’s accusation of Biden—because it is in her interest not to believe.
There is little benefit of listing all the decadent, dangerous, and deadly positions Kamala has taken; however, her willingness to be on the ticket with Biden, who has refused to answer a charge of sexual abuse, shows her lack of character. She has always played to the gallery and reverses positions to meet her immediate needs. During the primary race, she believed Joe was guilty of sexual abuse of his senate aide Tara Reade. Now, she is partnered with a predator! That used to be known as being two-faced and would require her spending extra time each day putting makeup on her two faces.
Before the Never-Trumpers and Hate-Trumpers remind us again of Trump’s aggressive, appalling, and adulterous affairs, he never slept around to his political or monetary advantage. However, moral issues do not seem to concern most people.
On the political issues alone, the Biden-Harris ticket would literally destroy America! So, the choice is simple.
America deserves and must have more decent, qualified, honest officials. Still, mail-in-voting will only make a bad problem even worse, allowing into office many incompetent, indecent, and ignominious scalawags and lowlifes. It is no surprise our cities, states, and nation are a mess.
Headlines on July 24, 2020, in USSA News screamed, “Democratic Ex-Congressman Charged With Rigging Votes, Bribery, Falsifying Records And Obstruction.” The article revealed that a former congressman had been charged by the federal government with ballot stuffing, bribery, and obstruction. Michael Myers, 77, was charged with conspiring with and bribing a former elections judge in Philadelphia to add votes to favored candidates over several elections.
Yet, we are told over and over that voting fraud is no problem, but public facts disprove that.
According to Judicial Watch’s analysis of data released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) this year, “there are 378 counties nationwide that have more voter registrations than citizens living there and old enough to vote.” I’m math deficient, but I don’t think that is possible.
“According to one study, by News21, there have been 2,068 cases of alleged election fraud since 2000.” Yet, Democrats declare there is very little election fraud!
Electronic voting was supposed to improve the election process in making voting more efficient, quicker, and less fraud, but Rhode Island voters uncovered fraud. Rock Island County Republican voters gathered outside of the Rock Island County Clerk’s office on Friday, October 24, alleging a voting machine switched their vote. “Voters said when they selected a candidate on the electronic voting machine, the machine would switch their vote to the opposing candidate.” Is that fraud, or is it failure since Democrats had the same problem?
Voting machines are not as reliable as touted to be according to the Salina Journal on November 26, 2014 issue. “A malfunction of electronic voting equipment left 5,207 votes out of the original Nov. 4 Saline County, Kansas vote total.”
Brad Friedman of the very liberal Huffington Post admitted, “What we have here is an extraordinarily compelling case that our electoral system has gone terribly wrong…We’ve got one election after another that makes no sense whatsoever. They may have been rigged, they may have failed due to error – (but because they can’t be audited) it’s 100 percent faith-based voting.” This is the reason we now print out our machine ballot in Georgia, sign, and deposit it.
Recently, a local television station experimented with vote-by-mail, and it exposed the deficiencies of the system. WRDW in Philadelphia sent 100 “mock ballots” from across the city to a post office box set up specifically for the test. The results showed 21 percent of the votes hadn’t been delivered within the same city after four days. Some mailed a week prior were also missing.
The Times report goes on to reveal voter corruption in Texas, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. Yet, dishonest, desperate, and distressed Democrats keep telling us that there is no problem with voter fraud.
On August 8, the media reported, “more than 223,000 mail-in ballots sent to registered voters in Clark County, Nevada, were bounced as “undeliverable” in the state’s June primary election, newly released data reveals.”
Also, on August 8, the New York City Board of Elections disqualified 84,208 vote-by-mail ballots in the June 23 Democratic presidential primary, “according to a report cited Wednesday evening by the New York Post.”
It is obvious to anyone deaf, dumb, and blind that mail-in-voting is not reliable. So, even the most rabid Democrat can understand that fact.
The Washington Times reported on voter fraud in Virginia. “A study by the watchdog Public Interest Legal Foundation found in just eight Virginia counties, 1,046 alien non-citizens successfully registered to vote.” But it gets worse. “Nearly 43,000 voters in Pennsylvania had potentially duplicate registrations in either Pennsylvania or other states.”
Another longtime problem, especially among Democrats, is the strange determination of dead people to vote. The Times reported on this phenomenon: “A report in Denver exposed multiple incidents in recent years where dead Coloradans were still voting.” But then, dead Democrats have been voting in Chicago for decades.
This November election, because of the hatred of Donald Trump, there will be massive problems: lost ballots, stolen ballots, late ballots, machine failures, machine malfunction, intimidation, multiple votes from the same people, alien voters, and of course, many dead people will rise and vote—all Democrats.
This week the Detroit News reported that Michigan clerks rejected 846 mailed ballots during the August 4 primary “because the voter was dead.” But the Democrats keep saying there is little voter fraud.
I just heard the shocking, surprising, and even startling news that my lifetime Republican cousin in Cook County, Illinois, is voting Democrat this November. But it would never happen if he were still alive.
A quote from one of my ebooks dealing with voter fraud is very appropriate here:
We stumble along to democracy’s demise, following along behind those “boys” from the Democratic clubhouse in Chicago. Two of their finest were in a graveyard in the middle of the night, copying names from tombstones to bring them back to life, at least politically. One of them fell two rows behind the other in getting the names.
“What’s the matter?” shouted the name-taker in the lead. “Hurry it up, will you?”
His teammate, who was lagging behind, complained, “The name on this tombstone is one of those long, complicated ones, probably Polish.” “Well,” shouted the other, “Forget about that one. Go on to the next one.” In a burst of righteous democratic zeal, the laggard yelled, “What do you mean, ‘Go on to the next one’? This guy has as much right to vote as anybody else in this graveyard!”
Alas, there is more truth than humor in that apocryphal incident. With vote-by-mail making it even easier for the dead to vote, we could be on a downward slide into the darkest days of our republic.
CNN opined, there is very, very little evidence of any sort of widespread voter fraud in the country.” They chastised Trump for declaring vote-by-mail would result in cheating, pointing out that he had voted absentee ballot. Absentee voting is no problem, but there is a huge difference in that and everyone voting by mail. It has even been stated that ballots be provided for every person in the country, with no mention of citizenship or age. Or voter registration. It is an engraved invitation for illegal voting.
The Marxist Muslim Leftist Loony Lovies crowd cannot even enjoy a good cartoon. ‘A Johannes Leak cartoon published in The Australian today, in which US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is depicted calling his vice-presidential running mate Kamala Harris a “little brown girl”, has drawn widespread condemnation.’
Here is the cartoon that is SOOOOO offensive to the Leftist Loony mob.
I love the cartoon. Johannes is simply saying what Biden and Democrat PC machine is doing! Nevertheless, the Leftist, Loony, Lovies don’t and are not shy in telling us why.
This Leftist Loony journalism lecturer said he was ‘…firmly in the camp that thinks this is a racist and sexist cartoon. As a journalism lecturer with an ongoing interest in the diversity of Australian media, I think today’s outrage shows there is still much work ahead in making newsrooms less overwhelmingly white.
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.
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
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 