Today is the anniversary of the beginning of the two-day slaughter at Babi Yar.
The Nazis (and their helpers) were just learning then how to be efficient at the art of genocide. A few victims survived to describe their experiences.
You may not know about Babi Yar. But if you’re part of the gun-rights world, you’ve seen at least a few of the photos the proud murderers took.
Just a reminder of why we never disarm, why we never trust those who seek the power to make us helpless.
Last week I posted about a new Ken Burns documentary, Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War. I linked to a New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof, who rightly praised the courage of the Sharps and other “righteous Gentiles” who risked their lives to save Jews from Hitler’s beastiality. He spoke of how world governments rejected Jewish refugees, dooming many of them to death, while individuals (including a few “rogue” individuals within government bureaucracies) saved Jewish lives.
Unfortunately, Kristof also used his NYT pulpit to try to guilt-trip contemporary readers and leaders into being more liberal in acceptance of today’s headline refugees, Muslims from the chaotic Middle East.
Now comes another article on the documentary, this time from the Washington Post, which is less agenda-driven, but still quotes a White House official who uses a screening of the film to promote more U.S. acceptance of Muslim refugees:
“The Sharps are the better angels of America,” said Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last week at a White House screening for scholars, diplomats, Holocaust survivors and other dignitaries. (The Obamas did not attend.) The film, Blinken said, humanizes relief work at a time when the world needs to do far more to aid refugees from war-torn Syria and elsewhere.
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In the NYT, Kristof wrote: “As today’s leaders gather for their summit sessions, they should remember that history eventually sides with those who help refugees, not with those who vilify them.”
And generally, that’s true. Generally.
I’ve lived among immigrants all my life, including spending a couple of years in a neighborhood of resettled Southeast Asian war refugees. Although the first members of my mother’s family arrived in the American colonies before the Revolution, on my father’s side I’m not far removed from starving Irish peasants who arrived in “coffin ships” and were caricatured by the natives as dumb apes. I’ve seen first-hand how immigrants have been stereotyped. And I know how refugees have enriched, and continue to enrich, our culture.
I am also an individualist who believes that every person deserves to be considered on his or her own merits. So it pains me on two counts to say this. But urging acceptance of Muslim refugees based on the fact that other refugees, in other times, have enriched our culture — or based on guilt because “we” didn’t aid WWII-era Jewish refugees who deserved rescue — is bogus.
From Paris to Minnesota, wherever in the West communities of Middle Eastern or African Muslims have been settled, terrorism has followed. Free speech becomes a capital offense. Women suffer. And Jews are in particular peril. Just ask the Jewish population of France — formerly of France, now fleeing the country.
Elitists, from their WaPost or Gray Lady perches, urge toleration for those who won’t tolerate us, acceptance for those who won’t accept us, and peace toward those who bring with them random violence in the name Allah. But of course Nicholas Kristof and his kind aren’t going to have to live in the Muslim neighborhoods where even police dare not go. They’re not going to be shopping in the malls or attending the schools that will be attacked. They’re going to be comfortable in their gated communities. When horrors happen, they can continue pontificating about tolerance — and oh by the way, the need for fewer guns in the hands of We the Peasants, more surveillance, more “security,” and less of that nasty, messy freedom.
Some Jews, whose ancestors were granted life in the West when they were desperate refugees from Nazism, now join the call for embracing Muslim refugees. Maybe it’s a generous, kind-hearted, and decent impulse.
But these remind me of the Jews who meaninglessly cry, “Never again!” while actively working to disarm all innocents, leaving us at the mercy of anyone with few scruples and evil intentions.
This is for the Gentiles hereabouts (me included): Would you hide a Jew from the Nazis?
We all think we would. But the reality of WWII tells us that defying deadly power, especially for the sake of those we’ve been taught to think of as “other,” is an act of rare and admirable courage.
The linked article has an agenda. That agenda is not about helping Jews. That agenda is, in fact, a bait-and-switch. The article tells the tales of brave, principled individuals who saved hunted Jews from death. Then it shames us over the issue of what today’s governments should do about Islamic refugees.
My main reason for linking that article is the stories of individual courage and an upcoming Ken Burns documentary you may want to watch: Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War. Who were the Sharps?
Unto the breach stepped a 33-year-old woman from Massachusetts named Martha Sharp.
With steely nerve, she led one anti-Nazi journalist through police checkpoints in Nazi-occupied Prague to safety by pretending that he was her husband.
Another time, she smuggled prominent Jewish opponents of Naziism, including a leading surgeon and two journalists, by train through Germany, by pretending that they were her household workers.
“If the Gestapo should charge us with assisting the refugees to escape, prison would be a light sentence,” she later wrote in an unpublished memoir. “Torture and death were the usual punishments.”
Sharp was in Europe because the Unitarian Church had asked her and her husband, Waitstill Sharp, a Unitarian minister, if they would assist Jewish refugees. Seventeen others had refused the mission, but the Sharps agreed — and left their two small children behind in Wellesley, Mass.
The documentary about the Sharps comes out this Tuesday.
A reader sent this link to Instagram, where someone has posted his own version of Aaron Zelman’s famous Star of David “gun owner” image.
Aaron may not have known what a meme was, but he created an indelible one. We just added our own sticker version to the store, and as far as we’re concerned, the more this meme gets around, the better.
But it’s the comments on the Instagram page that are notable — and chilling.
The poster repeatedly has to defend himself against accusations of everything from plain bad taste to absurd overstatement.
One comment in particular, from sierraechotangohotel (Seth), a self-identified proud American Jew, reminds us of the famous dictum that the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history. He writes, in part:
Just remember there is in no way shape or format any iota of comparison of the current state of firearms laws to the holocaust! I am a proud Jewish American and I just don’t understand what makes you think these two subjects are in any way comparable. If we lived in Venezuela where they are currently crushing firearms and making its citizens register it’s ammunition, I might understand then but we live in the greatest country this world has to offer!
You’ve got to wonder, don’t you, how many people in early 20th-century Germany, including Jews, thought their own country was the “greatest the world has to offer.” After all, it was a grand center of civilization and had been for centuries. It was the land of Goethe and Beethoven and Schiller. Of Schopenhauer and Kant and E.T.A. Hoffman and entire hordes of Bachs. Men of the mind. Men of the arts. Thriving in Germany’s orderly civil society.
What could possibly go wrong?
Except we all know what did go wrong — and how quickly.
(“Gun control” was an integral part of what enabled things to go bad. That and … that big Egyptian river.)
Still, Seth has a point. Nobody’s crushing firearms in America. Yet. Or at least it’s not being done widely. No one — well, hardly anyone — plans to register ammunition. Not here in the greatest country this world has to offer.
But what about Venezuela? They’re busily crushing guns there, terrified of violence in the streets. Never mind that most criminals in that desperate country are buying their firearms from equally desperate or simply corrupt police. Never mind that the problem isn’t so much guns as an economy in ruins beyond anything we prosperous first-worlders can imagine.
Venezuela was once the most prosperous — one could say the greatest — country in South America. It’s got some of the world’s biggest oil reserves. It had a long, noble tradition. So how long did it take for Venezuela to go from greatness to such hell that people can’t even buy toilet paper? Seventeen years. From the ascension of Hugo Chavez, who vigorously began implementing utopian Socialist plans in 1999 (to the applause of the world’s celebrities) to the muddle of his hand-picked successor Nicolas Maduro. Seventeen little years.
Slightly less time than it took Hitler to go from demonization to destruction of Germany’s Jews. Slightly longer than it took for Germany to go from pre-WWI prosperity to hyperinflation to the Holocaust to bombed-out ruins.
Still, we’ve got nothing to worry about, right? As Seth says, there’s not a thing to be concerned about until the firearms are being crushed en masse and ammo being actively registered.
And by that impeccable logic, the Jews in Germany were perfectly sensible to stay put and stay happy until the boxcars started rumbling down the tracks.
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Get those stickers here. Share them with friends.
When a TZP supporter first sent this news item, I didn’t think much about it. Saudi judo competitor Joud Fahmy forfeited a first-round match against a woman from Mauritius. Word in Israel was that she did it to avoid facing an Israeli Jew, Gili Cohen, in the second round.
Fahmy said she was injured and couldn’t compete. I thought, “Well, maybe she really was.” After all, if her purpose was to avoid contact with Cohen, why not go ahead and compete in the first round and see whether that would even become an issue? If she’d have lost in the first round … no need to touch a Jew. So it was certainly possible she really was injured and not just avoiding contact.
But this morning comes word of a blatant, public act of bigotry. In men’s judo, an Egyptian competitor snottily snubbed the Israeli who beat him.
It was an elaborate, unmistakable triple snub. Islam El Shehaby (in blue) first refused the traditional bow (a sign of respect that’s part of judo’s very fiber). Then he refused to walk to the middle of the mat for a handshake with the victor, Or Sasson. Finally, he refused Sasson’s offered hand when the gracious Israeli walked across the mat to him.
It’s unfortunate that the Olympics (partly thanks to Hitler in 1936) have become such a show of nationalism, rather than a celebration of the hard work and talents of awesome individuals. But there’s just no civilized excuse for El Shehaby’s behavior.
In the context, he came across not only as a pathetically sore loser, but as a disgusting bigot. You’re willing to do hand-to-hand combat with an Israeli individual, but not to shake his hand afterward? Shame on you, you foul creature and the foul dogma that motivates you.
Unlike some of my colleagues here at TZP, I’m no giant fan of Israel. I consider it a necessary homeland for a people who’ve been homeless, vulnerable, and fatally abused far too long. But its government is a government like any other and sometimes does objectionable things, even appalling things. But then, what government doesn’t? When it comes to appalling things done specifically to Muslims and Arabs, they should look to some of their own governments and neighboring Islamic governments, where savagery, corruption, oppression, and suppression of individualism have been the norm for centuries. Israel has been a piker when it comes to harming Muslims.
But even if that were not so, to show such public contempt for a man who, just moments earlier, was your honorable competitor is inexcusable.
Apparently the International Judo Federation considers it a sign of progress that an Arab was even willing to compete against an Israeli Jew. But I’m glad to learn that the audience in Rio gave the bigot a resounding round of righteous contempt for his unsportsmanlike and soulless conduct.
This post appeared first on TZP’s Monday email alert.
Plans to ban guns based on appearance march on. Late last month, Washington Ceasefire and Ceasefire Oregon announced a joint effort to get “assault weapons” banned in both states.
Specifically, they want to create a “West Coast Wall.” Building on California’s existing bans, they want to make the entire U.S. west coast … um, wait, what do they want to make it? I live here and I don’t even know. More on that in a moment.
The groups say they want legislation that uses “Connecticut’s ban on assault weapons as a guide.”
Whether they chose Connecticut because there’s something they particularly like about that state’s instant-felon creation machinery or because Connecticut = Sandy Hook = emotions overriding thought, I don’t know. At a glance, that state’s AW law seems to focus on banning — very strictly — the usual “shoulder thing that goes up” type features, and standard-capacity magazines, as well as a list of specific firearms and their derivatives.
One thing the Ceasefire activists surely do like is that the U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld Connecticut’s law, giving them a leg up in the enforcement department if they’re able to impose their legislative will.
But the thing I wonder about is that “West Coast Wall.” What is its exactly? How will it work? One can merely speculate.
“West Coast Wall.” Has a powerful sound, doesn’t it? Nice alliteration. Good meme. The antis have always had us gunfolk beat in the slogan-and-meme department. But what it means, if it means anything at all, remains a mystery.
Will Washington Ceasefire and Ceasefire Oregon succeed in building the thing, whatever it may be? Hard to say. Both states are very blue, but it’s always been a different shade of blue than the benighted mid-Atlantic or even California. Sort of a free-and-easy, here-have-a-latte shade of blue. Both states were sufficiently live-and-let-live to be among the earliest to legalize recreational marijuana. Police statism clashes with the laid-back, outdoorsy, brew-pubby, salmon-and-blueberry Pacific Northwest culture.
In Washington over the years, a few key legislators have held the line on victim disarmament. But in the past activists have turned successfully to the initiative process (as they did in 2014 when, with mega-billionaire funding, they imposed universal background checks).
Washington’s grassroots pro-gun defense has sometimes been weak and compromising. Fortunately, up-and-coming activists (especially the many roused by 2014’s defeat at the hands of the billionaires) are less willing to go along to get along.
Oregon’s grassroots are stronger, but on the other hand, their legislature lacks Washington’s long-time and well-placed legislative gun-rights defenders. Both states have rural, pro-gun eastern sides whose populations are outnumbered — but also getting very tired of being pushed around by — effete urbanites near the coast.
Hard to say what’ll happen. If the banners succeed, it’ll be interesting — as in the Chinese curse — to find out exactly what type of wall they build. Whatever it is, do they really imagine it’ll hold us?
Have you entered to win TZP’s historic Nazi-made, Israeli-adopted Mauser 98? All it takes is a few words and a modest entry fee. Please check it out, then enter today!
Everybody goes on about how we need to have more women and minorities in starring roles, both in society and in movies.
Until … wait for it … a strong new female superhero is an Israeli Jew.
Yes, Wonder Woman, the impressive Gal Gadot, soon to be the lead in her very own movie after debuting the role in Batman vs. Superman, was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. Therefore … tweetstorm of bigotry against her.
(H/T Irons in the Fire)
This post appeared first in TZP’s weekly email alert.
You may know that The Zelman Partisans is holding a contest to award this beautiful Israeli Mauser 98 to one of you out there in the gun world. Entering is as simple as writing a statement on “Why I want to own this rifle” and paying an entry fee.
You’ll have to come up with your own reason (or reasons; we encourage multiple entries and offer discounts for them). But to inspire you, here are 10 things to consider:
You might really, really, really want to own this rifle because:
1. It’s rare. Sure, there are lots of Mauser 98s in the world. But not many of them were made by Nazis then later adopted and adapted to become Israeli liberation tools. You’ve got to admit, that’s amazing.
2. It’s historic. This very rifle helped create the nation of Israel. It may have served the Irgun or the Haganah; it certainly served one of the many liberation forces. From there, it went on to join the IDF and may later have served civilian guards, protecting Israeli citizens.
3. It’s in beautiful condition and comes with a frameable Certificate of History.
4. Where else are you going to get a treasure like this with an investment of only $10? Such a deal! Invest $25 for three entries and have an even better chance; it’s still a deal.
5. Where else are you going to get a treasure like this just for paying your entry fee and writing a simple statement about why you want this rifle? How long does it take to write a sentence or two? You’d regret it if you lost out because you didn’t take time to jot down your thoughts.
6. Okay, true. You might not win. But with only 300 total entries allowed, you have a darned good chance to stand out amid the competition.
7. There’s a reason there are so many Mauser 98s in the world. They’re rugged, durable, reliable shooters. Though we expect this one is likely to end up over a mantelpiece or in a display case next to its framed certificate, in time of need, it can be taken down and put to its historic work of fighting for freedom.
8. Think of this firearm’s symbolic value. Its spirit, if you will. This rifle, this very rifle, already helped bring freedom out of savagery. Look at the Middle East — a cauldron of tyranny, terrorism, perpetual war, and medieval intolerance. Then look at Israel — standing alone amid the chaos, a modern, civilized land. This rifle, and the people who wielded it, helped make that difference.
9. Consider the conversations this historic firearm will start. Think of the awe when your friends learn the meaning of the firearm you so proudly display. It came from savagery; it overcame savagery.
10. We hope you also want this rifle because your entry fee helps The Zelman Partisans stand tall for its mission: Jews. Guns. No compromise. No surrender.
We’d like one of you great-hearted supporters to own this rifle for all 10 of those reasons.
So please enter today. Make one entry or use the special form for multiple entries. Enter as many times as you like. Once we’ve received 300 statements on “Why I want to own this rifle,” we’ll close to contest, judge the entries, choose a winner (and second- and third-place winners, as well), and award this incredible piece of history.
YOU might soon hold this rare and significant rifle in your hands.
We’ve just added a small, but very handy item to the TZP store:
Earplugs in a TZP-customized case. Carry one pair in your range bag in case you forget your earmuffs or need to loan a pair. Or carry them on your keychain every day for a noise emergency. Carry three or more so you can give them away to all those newbies you take to the range. The plugs are high quality and make very good ear protection.
Two purchase options, both available on our Cool Gear page:
1. Buy 3 pairs (with 3 cases) for $12.50 plus shipping.
2. Or add a single pair to any order for $5 and no additional shipping charge. (Single pairs are available only as an add-on item.)
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While I’m at it, I’ll also second Carl Bussjaeger’s urging that you enter to win our rare, historic Nazi-made Israeli Mauser 98. Entering is super-simple. Just tell us in 50 words or less why you’d like to own this rifle, then pay your entry fee. You can enter as many times as you like. In fact, we have a special form and a discount for multiple entries.
Not a writer? Not to worry! We’re looking for sentiment and ideas more than cleverness or polish. (We’ve already received at least one single-word entry, and while we encourage you to write a little more than that, even a single short sentence could be the winner.)
After last week’s monstrous mass-murder-by-truck in France, is it possible that American hoplophobes will finally begin to get that guns aren’t the problem — that vicious humans are the problem and that they’ll use any weapon to carry out their evil will? Give your opinion here or below.