Everybody probably knows this but I had no idea, and I’m really taken by the story. Throughout WWII, the British prohibited Jews from coming to Palestine. Still, a group of Zionist Jews managed to get there and start fighting for a Jewish state.

These Jews had been kept by Stalin in concentration camps in Siberia. When Stalin allowed Polish prisoners in the GULAG to form an army to fight against Germans, these Polish Jews joined.

For obvious reasons, Stalin couldn’t let Poles fight on the Eastern front, so he sent this small Polish army to the Western front. The Jews who were part of this Polish military force marched all the way from Siberia, through India and Iran, and to Palestine. Menachem Begin was actually one of them. These Jews entered Palestine because they were wearing the Allied forces uniform, and the British could do nothing.

This is such a powerful, beautiful story that I can’t get over it.

Wow, globalization helps spread idiocy extremely fast. Not two days ago, self-righteous American twitterers and facebookers started hectoring people who expressed support for France for not expressing the same support for the victims of the terror attack in Lebanon. [I discussed what I think about these finger-waggers here.]

Today, this same form of didactic and self-satisfied lecturing made its way onto the only remaining somewhat dissident TV channel in Russia. The Russians haven’t caught on to Lebanon yet, so people were chided for caring more about Paris than the victims of the Boko Haram acts of terror in Nigeria. Of course, Russian-speakers tend to be a lot more blunt and honest about this sort of thing, so the response to the Russian finger-waggers was much stronger than anything we ever hear in the West. 

I only wish it were as easy to spread intelligent ideas as it is these stupid exercises in moral superiority.

One of the vicious animals who inspired the Friday acts of terror in Paris told the terrorists to kill all Americans and Europeans they can, and “especially the filthy French.” [Note the word “filthy.”] The ISIS press release on the attack insistently linked France with prostitution.

When we all started asking ourselves why France keeps being hit by terrorists, the answers that came to mind reflected our own way of understanding the world: they hit France because it was bombing ISIS in Syria, they hit France because there are many grandchildren of Algerian immigrants from the 1960s, they hit France because there are Syrian refugees there, etc.

The mentality of the terrorists is very different, though. They talk of the “especially filthy French” and target France because of the 18th-19th-century stereotype of France as a place of sexual libertinage. This is not the first time that ISIS betrays a very late 18th – early 19th-century mentality*. There is a lot to study here, but our understanding is often clouded by the need to imagine everybody in the world as mirror images of ourselves.

*People say ISIS represents medieval Islam but I’m not seeing that at all. The Caliphate of Córdoba they are trying to recreate was the polar opposite of what they are actually doing.

President Obama has spoken about the environment on campuses, and this is the part that caught my attention:

And I say to them, Listen, if you hear somebody using a racial epithet, if you hear somebody who’s anti-Semitic, if you see an injustice, I want you to speak out, and I want you to be firm and clear, and I want you to protect people who many not have voices themselves.

It’s very refreshing to see the President mention anti-Semitism. It has become fashionable amongst the most obnoxious among my fellow progressives to roll eyes and make weird clucking sounds whenever anti-Semitism is mentioned. This is a subject that, at best, gets a yes-butting from people who can wax enthusiastic for hours about any other sort of oppression, including every imaginary one.

Things have gotten to the point where people see a building defaced with a swastika and still can’t squeeze out the word “anti-Semitism.” Let’s hope that Obama’s words, at least, will have an impact.

There must be a reason why Putin is dressed in something resembling a Nazi uniform in the applique but that’s a question for the designer.