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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, January 14, 2005
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Memogate Cartoons RatherBiased.com has two collections of CBSgate cartoons. (Since there are so many images, a broadband connection is highly desirable, if not outright necessary, to view.)
Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 07:08:58 PM |
Text of CBSgate Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 06:48:00 PM |
Pope Pius XII Was Smeared Again But we really knew that already, didn't we? Zenit has the real story, Jan. 12: The latest in a series of accusations about Pope Pius XII's behavior vis-à-vis the Jews and Nazi persecution seems to have little basis in fact. The latest round began Dec. 28 when an Italian newspaper published passages of an alleged 1946 Vatican document that supposedly aimed to keep baptized Jewish children from being returned to their families. The text, as stated in Il Corriere della Sera by Alberto Melloni, director of the G. Dossetti Library of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Sciences of Bologna, was "a disposition of the Holy Office," as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was formerly known. The document was said to be dated Oct. 20, 1946. But after careful research, ZENIT discovered that the document, in fact, was not of the Holy Office and did not bear evidence of the reported date. Nor did it state what the article in Il Corriere said it did.... See also Against the Grain Smacks UK Guardian. (Thanks, G. Thomas.) P.S. Thanks to Margaret for forwarding this Catholic League press release, today: The document that was the source of the New York Times piece says that Pope Pius XII personally approved the decision not to return Jewish children who had been sheltered by Catholics during the war. But there are many problems with this interpretation. As first pointed out by Rev. Peter Gumpel in Rome, the document was unsigned, did not appear on Vatican stationery and was written in French, not Italian. Even more convincing is what has been learned subsequently. Thanks to Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli of Il Giornale, the original document in question has now been identified. To begin with, the document never originated in the Holy See: the text bears the seal of the apostolic nunciature of France. And not only does the document not say what it has been alleged to say, it says the very opposite! To wit: It expressly says that the children who were sheltered by Catholic institutions should be returned to their original Jewish families. In the event Jewish organizations, as opposed to Jewish families, sought custody of the children, that was to be handled on a case-by-case basis. Zenit, the international news agency that covers the Vatican, learned that the origins of the document extend to a letter written in 1946 by Isaac Herzog, chief rabbi of Jerusalem, to Pius XII. In it, Herzog thanked the pope for helping Jews during the Holocaust and for sheltering "thousands of children who were hidden in Catholic institutions." He then requested that these children be returned to their original families. Which, as we now know, is what happened. In short, what the critics of Pius XII are suffering from is a heady dose of Rathergate: they willingly took the bait and now look rather foolish. How long do you think we'll have to wait before a mainstream-media publication distorts and misrepresents the facts to make a pope or even a Republican president look good instead of bad? Isn't it... funny... how, so far, the mistakes all go one way? Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 06:25:39 PM |
It's New City Journal Time Again Yes, it's that time again. Your Humble, Faithful Blogster has been informed by no less than the Senior Editor himself of City Journal that the latest issue is now available. As usual, I haven't had a chance to look at anything in depth, so here follows Brian Anderson's synopsis. + + + + + In "On Campus, Conservatives Talk Back," I report that academe is growing less politically monolithic. Not the faculty, of course; but today's students are much less radical than their sixties-generation profs, and, thanks to their own efforts, reinforced by help from outside conservative groups, they have initiated a two-way conversation, even in Ivy League institutions, leavening colleges with some of the intellectual diversity they have hitherto shunned. David Horowitz's efforts are analyzed in detail. Heather Mac Donald's "How to Interrogate Terrorists" shows that the widely accepted belief that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal sprang from our military's standard war-on-terror interrogation procedures-a belief nurtured to discredit both the war and our good faith in fighting it-is a myth. In fact, our interrogators take a fastidiously mild approach-too mild, she makes clear. But of course, most of those who promote the myth that we condone and practice torture are ex-sixties leftists for whom every war is Vietnam. America's terrorist enemies are aware of how the cultural love of self-criticism and intellectual freedom central to Western democracy's strength can be transformed into weakness by propaganda campaigns to fan antiwar dissent, as Victor Davis Hanson explains in the hard-hitting "Postmodern War." They can't defeat us on the conventional battlefield, Hanson says, but they can triumph on the TV screen, by (for instance) making us look like butchers and torturers-which, as the Vietnam generation knows, can be enough. As the New Left wanes, Steven Malanga's "The Real Engine of Blue America" describes the emergence of an increasingly powerful New New Left, a coalition of public-sector unions and social-services providers, whose agenda is always bigger government, more services, and more taxes. These tax eaters, increasingly the most powerful political force in the urban areas that the district- by-district electoral map shows really are "Blue" America, are growing ever more powerful in the national Democratic Party. Lots of other things, too Kay Hymowitz, Theodore Dalrymple, Peter Huber, etc. + + + + + See also these, too. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 05:46:49 PM |
"The 'Happiness' Without a Cause" Random Poetry List II
The "Happiness" without a cause, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Originally e-mailed on Monday, January 14, 2002 @ 8:30 PM. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 08:08:16 AM |
Re: CBSgate A reader writes: My take is that, like the MSM itself, this panel seemed to think that there are some things that are untouchable re: any reflection on the nature of the "news business." And leading that list is the fact of political bias. I think that one of the things about the blogosphere that drives the MSM types nuts is that bloggers are not shy, and see no reason to be shy, about revealing their political and ideological leanings. The great advantage of this is that bloggers and their commentators are free to argue their viewpoints in a natural and honest way, free of the strain of masquerading their biases and prejudices as some higher plane of "objective" truth. In this way, truth can be wooed and won rather than taken for granted as one's institutional due. What matters in the end in convincing someone of something is not the purity of one's intentions but the force and reasonable of one's arguments. It seems that in the arrogance of their heyday, the MSM folks forgot this in their desire to rule or "form" opinion rather than inform it. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 07:55:49 AM |
Stromata Blog Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 07:37:58 AM |
RatherBiased.com Also Catches Up With The Blog from the Core
Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 01/14/05 07:18:08 AM |
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