Monday, July 1, 2019

Talking with Angels

Jun 29, 2019  |  by 
Talking with Angels
Margit (Gitta) Mallasz, swimming champion, artist and writer, saved 100 Jewish women and children in Budapest.
Margit (Gitta) Mallasz was born in 1907 in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, now Slovenia, to an upper-class family. Her father was an officer in the Hungarian army and her mother was Austrian. At the age of 15 Gitta moved to Budapest where she became a champion swimmer. Her best friends, Lili Straus, a sports teacher, and Hanna Dallos, a graphic designer, were both Jewish. After Hanna married Joseph Kreutzer they opened a graphic art studio and asked Gitta, who also had a talent for graphic art, to work with them.
Gitta and her brother in 1914
As anti-Semitism grew more widespread in Budapest, Gitta became the official manager of the studio for Hanna and Joseph. When the World War II began, the Jewish couple relocated to a small house outside Budapest, keeping a cautiously low profile. In March, 1944, when the Germans invaded Hungary, the friends closed the studio and returned to Budapest. Two months later, after the Jewish ghetto was created, Joseph Kreutzer was arrested and never seen again.
Then one of Gitta’s friends introduced her to Father Pal Klinda, a brave priest who sheltered Jewish women in a sewing workshop producing military uniforms. When Father Klinda asked Gitta to take charge of the workshop, she agreed if her friends Hanna and Lili could work there too.
Hanna and Joseph, Gitta, and Lili
Since the workshop was contributing to the German war effort, it was legally permitted to employ Jews on condition they were registered and authorized. Father Klinda and Gitta defied that regulation and sheltered many unauthorized children of the Jewish workers.
In October, 1944, the Arrow Cross, a fascist organization took control of the Hungarian government and started a brutal reign of terror for the Jews in Budapest. Thousands were tortured, abused and murdered in the final six months of the war and their property stolen or destroyed. During this fearful time, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Budapest Jews using Swedish protective passports. Other foreign diplomats such as Giorgio Perlasca, Carl Lutz and George Mandel-Mantelloalso organized false documents and safe houses for them in Budapest. However, despite these valiant efforts, only 200,000 Jews (about 25%) managed to survive the Holocaust.
The situation in Gitta’s workshop grew more dangerous as the Arrow Cross militia searched for Jews throughout the city. Then a group of SS men moved into a villa right next door to the workshop. In November 1944 Arrow Cross men, headed by Father Andras Kun, a virulent anti-Semite, broke into the workshop. The vicious Father Kun wanted to destroy the Jews that were being save by Father Klinda. Claiming the workshop did not have a permit, Kun insisted that Gitta should give him a list of names of the Jewish workers. He threatened to shoot her if she refused.
Realizing some of the Jewish women had already managed to escape, Gitta provided Kun with a smaller number of names. The remaining women were taken away but fortunately one of the workers notified Father Klinda. He managed to save them and brought them back to the workshop.
After this petrifying ordeal, Gitta persuaded a German soldier to give her a document certifying the workshop was legal under the auspices of the SS. She even had the courage to complain to the SS men in the villa next door that her workshop was being harassed by the Arrow Cross.
Despite her brave efforts, the Arrow Cross men returned one month later. Gitta called the SS men and began negotiating with the Arrow Cross intruders. That gave most of the women enough time to escape through a hole in the wall which she had prearranged in case of necessity.
Thanks to Gitta’s foresight, 100 women and children managed to escape. Tragically, 16 were captured, including her close friends Hanna and Lili, and taken to the Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Eva Langley-Danos was the only survivor of these 16 women. Upon her return from Ravensbruck, she wrote an account of their fate. This account, together with the testimonies of the women and children who were sheltered in the workshop and escaped, later enabled Yad Vashem to verify the story.
After the war, each priest got what he deserved. Father Klinda was honored by Yad Vashem while Kun was executed.
Gitta remained in postwar Communist Hungary to support her impoverished parents and other family members, despite feeling stifled under Soviet oppression.
Fifteen years later, after her parents died and her nephews and nieces reached adulthood, Gitta “chose freedom” by fleeing the iron curtain to France in 1960.
Her life changed completely. She resumed her career as a graphic artist and married for the first time at age 53.
Although mourning the loss of her close friends, Gitta still had one tangible possession she had brought from Budapest. Consisting of several notebooks, these were transcripts of instructions Hannah claimed were given to her by an angel early in the war. After many years, Gitta decided to translate these spiritual notebooks from Hungarian into French and publish them as a book. “Talking with Angels” became a best seller and was translated into many other languages. Gitta always rejected the idea that she was the author of the book insisting, “I am merely the ‘scribe’ of the angels.”
However, for a hundred Jewish women and children from Budapest, Gitta herself was the courageous ‘angel’ who had saved their lives.
Spending her final peaceful years in the French countryside writing her books, she died on May 25, 1992 at the age of 85. In 2011, Gitta Mallasz was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
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The Rage Less Traveled The Rage Less Traveled A terror attack left Kay Wilson with multiple machete wounds. She continues to courageously fight back. by Rabbi Shraga Simmons

ISRAEL UPDATE
 
 The Rage Less Traveled 
 The Rage Less Traveled 
 A terror attack left Kay Wilson with multiple machete wounds. She continues to courageously fight back. 
 by Rabbi Shraga Simmons 
 
For British-Israeli tour guide Kay Wilson, December 18, 2010 began like any other day. On a hike with a Christian-American friend, Kristine Luken, they’d been enjoying a balmy day in the Mata Forest west of Jerusalem – a sanctuary of pine trees, humming birds, and wildflowers.
The women sat on a limestone slab, eating sunflower seeds under the shade of a carob tree. Kristine was humming “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” when Kay noticed two men, 20 yards away, crouching in the bushes.
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2020 Dems Appeal To An ‘Imaginary God Created in Their Own Minds,’ Robert Jeffress Says July 01 2019

2020 Dems Appeal To An ‘Imaginary God Created in Their Own Minds,’ Robert Jeffress Says

July 01 2019

    WASHINGTON — Dallas megachurch pastor and one of President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisors Robert Jeffress criticized the Democratic Party’s recent hiring of a faith outreach director, saying Saturday morning that it is a “godless party” looking to an “imaginary God.”
    Jeffress, the 63-year-old pastor of the 13,000-member First Baptist Dallas, spoke before hundreds of social conservative activists gathered for the final day of the four-day summit hosted by the nation’s leading conservative evangelical grassroots organization at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.
    Referencing news this week that the Democrat Party hired Union Seminary Vice President Derrick Harkins to lead the party’s 2020 faith outreach efforts, Jeffress didn’t mince words about what he thought about the Democrat’s attempt to appeal to faith voters.
    “I am not a Republican or a Democrat so I don’t say this from a partisan perspective,” the Fox News contributor said at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference. “But the truth is that when you talk about righteousness and unrighteousness. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the Democrat Party has truly become a godless party. It is a godless party.”
    Jeffress, who has long been critical about the Democratic Party’s stances on abortion and LGBT issues, pointed out that some Democratic Party delegates tried to remove God from its own party platform in 2012.
    “Today, they are actively working to remove ‘so help me God’ from their oaths of office,” he stressed. “The problem runs much deeper than that. They are promoting policies and values that are completely antithetical to the Christian faith.”
    “You have seen lately, in fact even this week, that the Democrats are realizing that they have a God problem in connecting with voters,” he continued. “They don’t want to completely write-off faith voters, so they have hired this week a faith outreach director.”
    Speaking about Harkins, Jeffress called him a “Trump-hating pastor” that comes from a “liberal seminary that is filled with liberal professors who couldn’t find God if their life depended on it.”
    “That will be their faith outreach director in an effort to connect with faith voters,” he said.
    Jeffress asked the crowd if they have noticed all the “God talk” coming from many of the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates.
    “Suddenly, they are all talking about God and their personal faith in God,” Jeffress said.
    “Don’t be fooled by that. When they talk about God, they are not talking about the real God — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who revealed Himself in the Bible. They are not talking about the real God. These liberal Democrats are talking about an imaginary God they have created in their own minds: a god who loves abortion and hates Israel. The true God of the Bible, the real God, is a God who hates abortion and loves Israel.”
    Jeffress concluded his speech by encouraging Christian conservatives to be “intolerant” and let their faith guide them in speaking up in the public square.
    “I close today with these words from William Watkins in his book The New Absolutes. He says it is time for Christians to reject the new tolerance and instead become a people marked by intolerance, not intolerance that unleashes hate upon people,” Jeffress stressed. “But an intolerance that refuses to allow error to masquerade as truth any longer. An intolerance that is willing to stand up and call good, good and evil, evil.”
    During the Democratic primary debate on Thursday night, South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a gay Christian, took aim at religious conservatives who support the Trump administration.
    Buttigieg stated that the Democratic Party doesn’t talk about God much for a “very good reason,” which is the party’s commitment to “the separation of church and state.”
    But stating that the “Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion,” Buttigieg argued that the Republicans lost its ability to use “religious language again.”
    He urged Democrats to “call out hypocrisy when we see it,” referring to the Trump administration’s strict enforcement of immigration laws and reports of terrifying conditions facing children detained at the border.
    “[F]or a party that associates itself with Christianity, to say that it is okay to suggest that God would smile on the division of families at the hands of federal agents, that God would condone putting children in cages has lost all claim to ever use religious language again,” Buttigieg said.
    In his speech, Jeffress pointed out the irony in the Democrat outreach to faith voters while supporting policies that promote and further abortion in America.
    “Do you think God has any feeling about the 52 million children that have been butchered in the womb through abortion since 1973?” Jeffress asked. “Do you think He has any feeling today about the 1.1 million children being murdered in the womb every year? Do you think He has any feeling about that at all?”
    On Twitter, conservative Princeton University law professor Robert P. George took to Twitter to argue that Buttigieg is himself being hypocritical.
    “[F]or an ambitious politician who associates himself with Christianity to say it’s OK to suggest that God smiles on the division of a child into a collection of severed body parts at the hands of an abortionist, has lost all claim to be other than a hypocrite,” George wrote.
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    Iran Strikes Back Against America. Is a War Coming to the Middle East?

    July 01 2019

      By most accounts, the United States and Iran came within minutes of armed conflict with each other on June 20, 2019.
      Around 4:30 AM that morning, a U.S. Navy RQ-4N Global Hawk spy drone flying a routine circuit over international airspace in the Persian Gulf was shot down by an Iranian Ra’ad surface-to-air missile system.
      Later that day, U.S. forces were ostensibly “ten minutes” away from striking three Iranian bases likely with air- and sea-launched missiles when President Donald Trump changed his mind and canceled the attack. He later cited concerns that killing an estimated 150 Iranians over the loss of an unmanned drone was a disproportionate response.
      Since the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018, it has waged a “maximum pressure campaign” on Tehran through economic sanctions. Iran had been complying with the JCPOA nuclear deal, which sharply restricted its nuclear technologies and opened sites to foreign inspectors in exchange for allowing Western companies access to the Iranian market. However, the deal’s critics complained the JCPOA did not regulate Iran’s rapidly improving ballistic missile capabilities nor address Iran’s involvement in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and support for Hezbollah.
      For one year, Tehran continued adhering to the JCPOA. However, the destabilizing effects of the new sanctions proved intolerable.
      Iran’s oil exports have diminished to one-fifth their previous level, from 2.5 million barrels per day to 500,000. The sanctions also scared away most European investment, even though European signatories to the nuclear deal still adhere to the JCPOA. This has resulted in a devastating recession, with Iran’s economy shrinking 4-6 percent and Iranian citizens being affected by 40-60 percent inflation, and unemployment projected to rise from 12 to 26 percent.
      But though the sanctions imposed by Washington inflicted the intended damage, they succeeded only in angering, not cowing, Iran’s leaders.
      Just as the United States’s stark political divisions arguably were decisive in Trump’s withdrawal from the Obama-era JCPOA, Iran’s competing power centers were divided over the agreement. Those supporting limited compromises with West have been made to look foolish, giving ammunition to the hardline religious factions and their Revolutionary Guard Corps paramilitaries.
      Thus, Tehran is now retaliating with a “maximum pressure” campaign of its own. Iran cannot use sanctions to punish America, but it can inflict economic pain by threatening the valuable shipping lanes running from Persian Gulf ports, through the straits of Hormuz, and into the Gulf of Oman.
      During the Cold War, Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev famously said “[West] Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.” The Persian Gulf is Iran’s West Berlin.
      One-third of all the world’s oil passes through Hormuz. Both the Gulf and the Straits are quite narrow—only twenty-one miles at the latter’s narrowest point—and shallow, with only one or two viable transit lanes through which large tankers can pass at parts. The north-eastern half of the Gulf coast is Iranian territory, meaning Iranian units can stage fast boats and long-range missile batteries for attacks at any point along that roughly 1,000-mile coastline.
      The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has trained to launch hit-and-run attacks on both military and commercial shipping using swarms of fast, expendable motor boats, naval mines, and long-range anti-ship missiles. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran also used oil platforms, islands and even converted tankers to stage forces for attacks.
      Iran’s regular (“Artesh”) Navy includes over two dozen small mini-submarines and divers equipped with swimmer-delivery vehicles (SDVs) well suited to hiding in the noisy, shallow crags of the Gulf to launch surprise torpedo attacks or deploy mines in key shipping lanes.
      Consider, then, the sequence of events since May 2019.
      On May 12, four merchant ships anchored off the Gulf of Oman by the United Arab Emirates were sabotaged with limpet mines. Investigators noted the precision with which they were laid suggested elite combat divers.
      Then on June 13, another two tankers—the Norwegian Front Altair and the Japanese Kokuka Courageous—experienced fiery blasts within minutes of each other at 3 AM. Iranian vessels rescued most of their crews and fired a man-portable anti-aircraft missile (that missed) at a U.S. MQ-9 drone observing the scene. The crew of an IRGCN patrol boat was also filmed removing an unexploded limpet mine from the side of the Kokuka Courageous.
      Iran clearly had both the means (it’s specialized naval forces) and motive (retaliating against the maximum pressure campaign) for the attacks, the precise and nigh-simultaneous execution of which seem calculated to signal Iranian authorship, while maintaining a veneer of deniability for propaganda purposes.
      On June 17, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced Iran would recommence enriching higher-grade uranium in violation of the nuclear deal.
      Three days later, the Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down the U.S. Navy drone—possibly without Rouhani’s approval. Iranian and American accounts disagree as to whether the drone had violated Iranian airspace, but bear in mind the slow, conspicuous and expensive RQ-4 is not designed to overfly hostile airspace.
      These acts are Tehran’s way of signaling it can and will retaliate if the United States maintains its economic vice. Iran couldn’t “win” a war versus the United States—Iran’s annual defense budget costs roughly the same as a single U.S. aircraft carrier—but it could cause losses in amounting to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in disrupted trade, and a terrible toll in human lives, not just drones and damaged tanker hulls.
      Some anti-Iranian ideologues like National Security Advisor John Bolton, and like-minded national leaders in Israel and Saudi Arabia, have believed the high costs of war are worth paying to suppress Iran’s nuclear research program. (Conveniently for America’s allies, that cost would be born foremost by the United States.) Those who see war with Iran as desirable and “winnable” may hope Iran’s escalation will “gift” America with a causus belli.
      But what would a U.S. “victory” in such a war even look like? The Pentagon certainly has no appetite for an invasion and occupation of Iran, which has twice the population of Iraq. A prolonged air war—the more likely outcome—could kill thousands, and deplete stocks of expensive standoff-range missiles, without necessarily succeeding at destroying Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile technologies in their hardened underground shelters.
      Meanwhile, Iran would retaliate with asymmetric warfare across the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and potentially beyond. Nor could the United States necessarily control the duration of the war. Remember, Iran pressed on with the Iran-Iraq war for six more bloody years after it had mostly expelled invading Iraqi troops.
      Washington instinctively wishes to punish Iran so as not to reward its aggressive tactics. For example, after canceling the air strikes, the Trump ordered a cyber attack on Iran’s missile systems, and on June 24 placed new sanctions on Supreme Leader Ali Khameini. Rouhani responded by describing Trump as “mentally retarded” and announced plans to abrogate additional provisions of the JCPOA, while his foreign minister stated this marked “the permanent closure of the path of diplomacy.”
      Trying to one-up the Iranians in tit-for-tat aggravations—one cyber attack, downed drone, imposed sanction and broken treaty obligation at time—is a losing game. Tehran is simply unlikely to respond constructively to threats of “obliteration.”
      If America wants Iran to change its behavior, it will have to re-establish ruptured lines of communication and re-create genuine incentives for diplomacy, rather than leading with threats of war and crushing sanctions. After all, the danger of devastating and messy regional war already underpins Iran’s own deterrence-based security strategy in the Persian Gulf—and games of chicken where neither side de-escalates end badly for everyone involved.
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