Friday, August 31, 2007


Meanings :


(NWN: Sent in by a reader. There is a US bias in the post.)


Africa: The proof that, by being enslaved by whites, blacks never had it so good.


African-Americans: (1) A people who were once enslaved, but who now enjoy special privileges as a result of constantly whining that theyare oppressed; (2) A people who keep changing their name -- niggers,darkies, colored people, negroes, blacks, Afro-Americans, African-Americans -- because they keep trying to run away from all the unpleasant associations which their behavior keeps attaching tothem.


Antisemite: (1) Originally, one who did not like Jews; now, one whom the Jews do not like (Lou Rollins)


Bigot: One who disagrees with a liberal/leftie.


Black caucus: A bunch of Crows who Caw and Cuss in a place called Incongruous.


Conservative: A liberal who's been mugged. (Unknown)


Discrimination: Preferring the desirable to the undesirable.


Equality: The theory that black equals white, dumb equals smart, incompetence equals competence, lies equal truth, and bad equals good.




Feminist: A man-eating tigress; a female with all the vices of women and none of the virtues; a woman who couldn't find a man and couldn't even get work as a whore.


Gun control: The belief that no one has the right to shoot back.


Hitler: A man who is hated so much by Jews that they are constantly building memorials to his work.


Homosexuals: Men who have confused boys with girls, toilet stalls with bedrooms, and lovemaking with frolicking in a sewer.


Jesse Jackson: A man whose expertise in racism comes from referring to New York as 'Hymietown' and serving whites soup into which he had spit.


Liberal/leftie: Someone who believes it is his moral duty to let minorities take their pleasure in everybody else's backside besides his own.


Mexico: A toilet on which America sits, and which is beginning to back up.


NAACP: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Who Would Be Offended If You Called Them That.


Nigger: A term of denigration used in referring to negroes, and frequently used by negroes to refer to one another, thereby showing that negroes know what they are talking about.


Prejudiced: Less willing to believe what the government tells you about minorities than what you are told by family, friends, or your own eyes.


Racial slur: An unpleasant truth.


Third World: A place that has a great love for whites, provided only they are baked, boiled or roasted.


Welfare: Taking money from the productive and giving it to the unproductive so they can not only remain unproductive, but can breed even more unproductives.

By-Election: Loughton - Alderton ward, Epping Forest (30/8/2007)


BNP hold this seat !
After a three year hiatus the BNP is back on the winning track with our first council by-election win since 2004.
Yesterday's win in Loughton Alderton Ward means the Party retains a total of six councillors on Epping Forest District councillor in southern Essex.A closely fought campaign between the BNP and the Independent Residents Association resulted in a win for Tony Frankland, a victory even more worthy by noting that this was the first ever election the Party has won that was caused by one of our won councillors quitting.
Voters tend to punish parties which force by-elections in mid term.
The victory is testimony to the hard working team of councillors headed by Cllr. Pat Richardson and the valued contribution they have made in improving the lot of residents in the Loughton area. By-elections in wards that we have previously won or even where we have previously done very well are also very difficult for us, as the enemy 'know we are coming' and can pull out all the stops to prevent us from winning. The enemy consists of (amongst other groups, organisations and institutions) all the other parties together (who invariably choreograph their campaigns), it also consists of various hostile Trade Unions and 'Third Party' groups - in this instance a group called Redbridge and Epping Forest Together which is sponsored by the anti-British Searchlight organisation - who intervene in the elections campaigning against us.
So difficult is the task that the BNP has previously never won a by-election in these circumstances.The opposition lined up with hard campaigns by all the other parties. Labour (who used to control the ward) put out a lot of leaflets - the contents of which were dominated by attacks on us and the claim that only they could defeat us and did some canvassing. The Conservatives also put out many leaflets (the contents of which were again dominated by attacks upon us), the canvassed and whipped their vote in and again claimed that only they could defeat us.
The Liberal Democrats put in a very heavy campaign, with a large number of different leaflets (oh yes, the contents of which were….), they carried out at least two canvass sweeps and whipped in.
UKIP even put out several different leaflets and did some canvassing.
The Loughton Residents Association (who work very closely with Redbridge and Epping Forest Together) also put in a very heavy campaign (they have come second twice in a row). It is fairly clear that the other parties used their leaflets to attack us and canvassed against us, leaving the so-called Loughton Residents Association as the main challenger.Well it did not work!
We out performed the lot of them in a textbook campaign. The poor electors of Loughton Alderton ward must have had more leaflets delivered and had more knocks on their doors than in any recent election in British political history.
On polling day it was not uncommon to see people from three different parties whipping in on the same street!
It was a political slugging match.The truly appalling vote for UKIP must now, if any reminders were ever needed, be seen as the final last gasp of what was in 2004 the UK’s largest euro-realist party.
While its failed leadership continues to posture and make feeble anti-EU noises, it remains an hindrance rather than a help in the battle to free the UK from the EU. The hard working campaign led by Eddy Butler deserves to be wholeheartedly congratulated by the entire Party for this unprecedented win.
Results in full
FRANKLAND, Tony: BNP - 393 (32.2%)
BROOKES, Ros: Residents Asso. - 367 (30.1%)
WOOLLCOTT, Neil James: Lib-Dems – 172 (14.1%)
STACEY, Edward John: Cons – 163 (13.3%)
BARNES, Stephen William: Lab – 98 (8.0%)
SMITH, Andrew George: UKIP – 28 (2.3%)
Electorate: 3,344 Turnout: 36.72%

Thursday, August 30, 2007


The Mandela statue - E-petition


E-petition to No. 10


We, the undersigned, petition the Prime Minister to relocate the Nelson Mandela statue to where it belongs...South Africa.


Statues in London should be reserved for British heroes and heroines.



Tories welcome Cameron's tough talk on immigration
NWN: We have seen this somewhere before haven't we ?
1979 - Maggie Thatcher ?
And ,we know that Herr Griffin can't be bothered with the General Election. Surely a recipe for disaster! The only good thing will be ,most of the 'johnny come lately' tories in the BNP will now push off !

David Cameron: getting tough on immigration

Tory MPs and activists were delighted today after David Cameron hardened his image with calls for curbs on immigration and "tough punishment" for criminals.

The Conservative leader also confirmed that he would push up air taxes and hit airlines with new levies for flying half-empty planes.

Mr Cameron said his party had "fire in its belly" for a snap autumn poll, but refused to reveal whether he would step down should he fail to defeat Gordon Brown at the next election.

Having until now deliberately avoided talk of immigration, Mr Cameron declared that it was putting too much pressure on housing and public services in an interview on Newsnight last night. He said that the level of migration had been "too high" under Labour.

"I do think that people have a very real concern about levels of immigrationand not because of different cultures or the colour of their skin," he said. "Concern is about services. It's the pressure on schools, pressure on hospitals, pressure on housing.

"It's important to understand that if your child is going into a reception class and suddenly 20 new kids turn up because lots more families have arrived, then that is a big pressure."

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Atlanta baggy pants war goes on........
Atlanta officials buckle not in saggy pants war


The Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionPublished on: 08/29/07

Atlanta officials did not decide Tuesday whether they should become fashion police.

However, they did agree to continue to debate whether the city should regulate whether folks can walk around Atlanta with saggy pants and exposed undies. Council members expect to create a 10- to 12-member task force soon to further the debate and decide whether Atlanta should —- or can —- pass a law to control fashion.

Either way, the issue drew heated discussion from a crowd of about 55 who packed the first City Council committee debate on the subject Tuesday afternoon.
Here's what some folks had to say:

Dave Walker, East Atlanta: We got old and forgot there are fads. They come and they go and no legislation is going to get rid of natural trends. We have no right to legislate what folks wear.

James Allen, Atlanta: It bothers me as a black man. They dress down. They talk down. Some of the things they do are downright lowdown. It sickens me. We need to teach them in a way they will become prospects, not suspects.

Yemaya Bourdain, senior at Clark Atlanta University: This is absolutely asinine. I can't believe this is the best you guys can come up with. As if we don't have enough already targeting our black youth. Who can this help?

Clyde Wilson, Atlanta: It is a problem. Not just the men wear their clothes down, the women do. If you dress like a prostitute, they are going to treat you like one.

Naomi Ward, Atlanta: I am supportive of the ordinance. It is not just unsightly. It is what it represents. It is restrictive and constrictive. It restricts the physical movement. And it constricts the mind.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007


Tarred, feathered and tied to a lamppost: Justice for a drug dealer on the streets of Ulster
Tied to a lamppost, he stands with his head and upper body covered in tar and feathers. A makeshift placard hung around his neck with a piece of string announces the reason for his treatment.
It is a very public humiliation, and a medieval one. Almost ten years since Northern Ireland's Troubles officially ended, this remains the crude face of justice on the streets of south Belfast.
Scroll down for more...

The man is forced to carry a sign detailing his alleged crime

This man was subjected to the painful tarring and feathering on the Taughmonagh estate, a loyalist stronghold in the city.

Locals had accused the victim, who is in his thirties, of being a drug dealer. And when police allegedly did not act, they took the law into their own hands.

Two masked men tied up the accused victim, poured tar over his head and then covered him in white feathers, apparently from a pillow case.

A small crowd including women and children looked on as the men then adorned their victim with a placard reading: "I'm a drug dealing scumbag".
Pictures of the punishment were sent to a local newspaper.

For more ;

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=478310&in_page_id=1811


¡NUEVO!
Eduardo López Pascual
PROCESO A UN HOMBRE MUERTO


215 págs., ilustrado, 215 págs.Cubierta a todo color, con solapas y platificada brillo.15x21 cms.

P.V.P.: 15 €
Ahora que se está falsificando la historia aprovechando la ignorancia histórica de una inmensa mayoría de españoles, el autor ha querido mostrarnos, aunque de forma novelada, que la mentora nunca puede quedar impune porque «la verdad os hará libres». Esta y no otra ha sido la intención del autor de esta novela Proceso a un hombre muerto que no ha tolerado la profanación de que los hunos y los hotros, en palabras de Unamuno, carguen sobre José Antonio Primo de Rivera todos los males poniendo siempre como pantalla la palabra fascista, cuando el mayor peligro para la humanidad ha venido siempre de la mano de la ideología marxista —la época en que vivió José Antonio, el PSOE era marxista—, pues no hay nada a lo que no se atreva y allí donde ha conquistado el poder, se muestra en todo momento salvaje e inhumano. El autor ha sido a través de su novela implacable con tanta mentira, lo que hace que su lectura vaya calando poco a poco hasta tal punto que invita al lector a leer su trabajo de un solo tirón. López Pascual defiende a José Antonio y piensa, como también lo pensó María Teresa León, que su juicio fue una equivocación política además de injusto, porque no se estaba juzgando a un hombre sino a una ideología política y por tanto su proceso fue una gran farsa porque ni tan siquiera aceptaron su oferta de intentar encontrar la paz, como bien recoge el testimonio de quien fue presidente de las Cortes y presidente de la República en el exilio, Diego Martínez Barrio. Quienes condenaron a muerte a José Antonio Primo de Rivera fueron los seguidores de esa ideología que produjo a los largo de su historia más de cien millones de muertos. El fundador de Falange fue uno de ellos; ya lo dejó muy claro la Pasionaria: «Más vale condenar a cien inocentes que absolber a un solo culpable». Y lo dijo en Valencia en un mitin comunista, según dejó escrito el destacado miembro del Comité Ejecutivo del POUM, Julián Gorkin»




LIBRERÍA EUROPALa otra cara de la HistoriaHorario de 10 a 14 horas y de 16.30 a 20.30 de la tarde de lunes a sábado.Calle Séneca, 12 bajos (Metro "Diagonal")Apartado de Correos 9169 E-08006 BarcelonaTelf.: 00-34-932370009 Fax: 00-34-934159845Nuestra cuenta bancaria: La Caixa 2100-1344-60-0200026408IBAN ES32 2100-1344-6002 0002 6408 / BIC CAIXESBBXXXhttp://www.libreriaeuropa.info/
http://www.libreriaeuropa.es/http://www.libreriaeuropa.org/http://www.libreriaeuropa.tk/ www.telefonica.net/web2/libreriaeuropa(Si no desea recibir más información por correo electrónico, sólo tiene que indicarlo y le borraremos de nuestro listado)

Bacup in Lancashire - bye- election - September 2007


Where are all the 'Red White & Bluers' have they got back yet?
Apparently, it has been left to the 'fighting few' yet again, doing the BNP election 'leg work', according to our info.


The poor old 'dinosaurs' and 'vermin' are left to do the work again !



France's Sarkozy raises prospect of Iran airstrikes



In his first major foreign policy speech, French president says diplomatic push by world's powers to rein in Tehran's nuclear program is only alternative to 'Iranian bomb or bombing of Iran'


French President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Monday a diplomatic push by the world's powers to rein in Tehran's nuclear program was the only alternative to "an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."

In his first major foreign policy speech, Sarkozy emphasized his existing foreign policy priorities, such as opposing Turkish membership of the European Union and pushing for a new Mediterranean Union that he hopes will include Ankara.

Global Threat
Iran develops 900-kg ‘smart bomb’ - official media / Reuters
Guided bomb developed by specialists within Islamic Republic’s Defense Ministry and is now operational, IRNA news agency reports, adding it could be dropped from F-4 and F-5 jets
Full story
He also presented some new ideas, such as possibly renewing high-level dialogue with Syria and expanding the Group of Eight industrialized nations to include the biggest developing states.

Sarkozy said a nuclear-armed Iran would be unacceptable and that major powers should continue their policy of incrementally increasing sanctions against Tehran while being open to talks if Iran suspended nuclear activities.

"This initiative is the only one that can enable us to escape an alternative that I say is catastrophic: the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran," he said, adding that it was the worst crisis currently facing the world.

Tehran says it only wants to generate electricity but it has yet to convince the world's most powerful countries that it is not secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.


http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3442638,00.html


NWN: Well there's a major surprise ! He had Nick Griffin fooled though.

Monday, August 27, 2007


Simon Darby ? An interesting post made to NWN !


The letter(NWN:letter of resignation from Cllr.Simon Smith) sent to the Express & Star was not published.
Simon Darby's letter published about Simon Smith's resignation.
Simon Smith - An elected councillor. Letter not published.
Not allowed through on Stormfront either !
I am coming to believe Darby works for the state.
That is the opinion of a number of BNP branch officials and at least two leaders of minor nationalist parties.
I believe there may be some sort of "D" notice on accusations about BNP finance.
Could I suggest to the blog owner we have an article about Simon Darby, whereby we can share evidence on Teflon SD's possible "state credentials".
IF Darby is "state", Griffin will have known for years.
IF Griffin has known for years then the BNP has just been a safety valve. IF Darby is "state"....
11:10 PM


Spanish nationalists are having a demonstration against the arrest of Gerd Honsik.

Anyone who wishes to attend, please contact NWN for more details.

Sunday, August 26, 2007



RAF poofters about to join the Gay parade in Manchester.

NWN : Exasperated ! The Ducie Arms is one of my favourite watering holes. It was opposite the Boddingtons brewery close to Victoria station.



Greater Manchester Police mince their way through City centre !



Police take lead in Pride parade

The event celebrates the diversity of the gay community
More than 130 police officers and staff from forces around the country have taken part in the parade at Manchester's Gay Pride festival.

A police band made up of officers from Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside led the procession.

Thousands of people are expected to attend the annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) festival over the August Bank Holiday.

A police spokesman said it was a "privilege to be leading this weekend".

'Diverse cities'
PC Darren Haslam, chairman of Greater Manchester Police's (GMP) Lesbian and Gay Staff Affiliation, said: "It's a clear demonstration of the commitment of GMP and forces across the country to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-sexual communities.

"We want to show that we are both representative and supportive of all the communities we serve.

"This is the largest ever police presence in a gay Pride parade and I am delighted that it is happening in Manchester, one of the world's most welcoming and diverse cities."
NWN: The picture is an ABBOT self propelled gun from the Royal Artillery. What the feck is going on here ?
The police ought to be doing their job of crime detection, and deterrence, not indulging in crass PR exercises.

Saturday, August 25, 2007

US Police charge a KKK guy after 40+ years
A US nationalist comments;


Hey there guys.

When you're done with these seven cases, if you can find the time, could you kindly reopen the cases of some 270 White Californianswho were systematically shot/raped/butchered to death by NOI niggers in the 70's?

You know, the Zebra killings.

Look it up, "Special" Agents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_murdershttp://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=stixn&date=061022Thttp://www.webcommentary.com/asp/ShowArticle.asp?id=stixn&date=061022T

hanks a bunch. Hugs and kisses, JimInCO.

Quote:

The killers all sought membership in an elite NOI group called the “Death Angels,” which had recruiting meetings and pep rallies in the loft at Black Self-Help. In order to become a Death Angel, one had to murder four white children, five white women, or nine white men. In the NOI, cowardice is a virtue.

According to Clark Howard, the NOI had gangs of assassins up and down the state of California:At that time, there were fifteen accredited Death Angels in California.

To achieve their collective membership, they had already quietly killed throughout the state 135 white men, 75 white women, 60 white children – or enough of a combination thereof to give each of them his required four, five, or nine credits.

This was October of 1973.

The California attorney general’s office had already secretly compiled a list of forty-five of those killings which had taken place in the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Long Beach, Signal Hill, Santa Barbara, Palo Alto, Pacifica, San Diego, and Los Angeles; and in the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Ventura, and Alameda.

All of the victims were white.

All the known suspects in the killings had been associated with the Black Muslim movement.

The killings were even then continuing throughout the state.

The operation came down from the highest reaches of the NOI, making the NOI the bloodiest domestic terrorist group in American history.
__________________

Merkel under pressure to ban neo-Nazi party
NWN:(NPD)

Chancellor Angela Merkel is coming under mounting pressure to ban Germany's main neo-Nazi party following a brutal attack on eight Indian traders who were chased and beaten by a mob screaming racist abuse.

A leader of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) was charged with inciting racial hatred yesterday after he proposed Adolf Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, for the Nobel Peace Prize. Hours after Udo Voigt made the remarks in a speech in Jena marking the 20th anniversary of Hess's death last Saturday night, the Indian men were chased through the nearby town of Mügeln.

Kurt Beck, the leader of Ms Merkel's Social Democrat coalition partners, said that in light of the attacks he was preparing a new legal initiative aimed at outlawing the NPD. But Ms Merkel said she remained sceptical about such a move.

"I found the previous experience we had with this highly disagreeable," she said. "I definitely don't want a repeat of last time." An effort to ban the NPD failed in 2003 when judges at the country's highest court rejected the government's case after it emerged that some of the testimony was from government informants within the party.

The calls for a ban on Germany's largest neo-Nazi party - which has won parliamentary seats in two eastern states in recent regional elections - were the latest response to last weekend's disturbing outbreak of xenophobic violence.

Local people in the small town in the east German state of Saxony were enjoying the final hours of an annual street party on Saturday night when a drunken mob of 50 youths rampaged through a market and started harassing eight Indian stall holders who were selling textiles.
Shouting, "Get out of Germany" and chanting the far right slogan "Long live the national resistance" the gang chased the terrified Indians, who took refuge in a pizzeria and tried to barricade themselves in with the restaurant's tables. However, the mob smashed their way into the building, kicking and punching the Indians and attacking them with bottles. More than 70 heavily armed riot police rescued them. Gurminder Singh, one of the injured men, appeared on German television with a six-inch long head wound.

Amal, one of the main anti-Nazi groups in the region, said there had been 137 neo-Nazi attacks on individuals in Saxony during the first half of 2007, but believes the unofficial figure is much higher.

A recent survey conducted by the Forsa research group showed that every second east German youth between the age of 14 and 25 believed that National Socialism had " good sides".

The NPD won seats in Saxony in the state's last elections, and also captured seats in Ms Merkel's home state of Mecklenburg-Pomerania last year, when violent crimes by far-right extremists reached their highest level since the country's reunification in 1990. Rising far-right violence prompted Ms Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schröder to launch an attempt to ban the NPD in 2003, but the result was a legal fiasco. A ban was rejected by Germany's Karlsruhe constitutional court after it established that most of the evidence against the far-right party was inadmissible as it had been collected by government intelligence agents who had infiltrated the organisation.

Here , what about all these Poles ?

There seems to be some dispute among the nationalist community. We at NWN say; we do not want all these surplus immigrants coming here, and undercutting British workers wages.

Yes, they are white people, but this is our land.

If they were fleeing communism, as many did in the 40's and 50's, we would welcome them in the UK. They were seperate but asked for no welfare, and worked within our society.

Now there are many thousands of them. This must cease !

They should work in or change their own Country.

Friday, August 24, 2007


Go-ahead for maternity shake-up


A CONTROVERSIAL £60m shake-up of maternity care across Greater Manchester was given the go-ahead today.
Health secretary Alan Johnson approved plans to cut overnight care for mums and babies from 12 hospitals to eight, including the formation of three `super centres'.
Mr Johnson, who delayed his decision for a month to `fully consider' things, also rubber-stamped a £38m shake-up of hospital services in the north east of Greater Manchester, which means that Rochdale Infirmary will lose its accident and emergency ward and be downgraded to a locality hospital.
His decision also means children will only be born at hospitals in Salford, Bury and Trafford after 2011 if health chiefs set up midwife-led units there.
This is in spite of campaigns by mothers, midwifes and politicians from Salford, Bury and Rochdale, who have fought to save local services with marches, petitions and Commons debates.An independent review of the plans agreed with the decision to launch the shake-up and leading doctors say the changes will save the lives of mothers and babies, with some of the extra cash funding 79 extra special care baby nurses.
Sir David Henshaw, chairman of NHS North West said: "This will lead to the provision of better and safer healthcare for everyone."

NWN: This looks more like a way of saving money and reducing services, never mind if lives are lost.
At the same time. in this part of Lancashire, they are also closing Accident & Emergency units such as Rochdale.
This will provoke more babies to be born at home, which may not be a bad thing. But Emergency treatment is 'what it says on the tin' - EMERGENCY !
By closing these A&E units, lives in places like Rochdale will be lost. They are making a 'cock-up' just like they have done with the very sparsely covered Dental care we now have in the UK. We wonder how much that has saved this Labour Government ?


'Friendly fire' kills UK soldiers

Seventy-three UK troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001

Three British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan by so-called friendly fire from American fighter planes, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has said.
The MoD said the soldiers, from 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment, were killed at around 1830 local time (1500 BST) on Thursday.
It is understood they died when the planes dropped a bomb near their patrol in Helmand province.
Two other soldiers were also injured. Next of kin have been informed.
The fighter planes had been called in to give air support to ground troops, the Ministry of Defence said.
Defence Secretary Des Browne said he was "very saddened" by the death of "three brave men who were tragically killed in what is believed to be a friendly fire incident".
He said such incidents were "rare" and it would be thoroughly investigated.
'Very seriously injured'
The United States expresses its deep condolences to the families and loved ones of the soldiers who died
US Embassy statement
No easy fix for 'friendly fire'
"We will look at this incident very carefully and make sure the families, who are uppermost in our thoughts, know exactly what happened to their loved ones," he said.
He added that US air support was very important and had often helped get British troops out of dangerous situations.
"We go to extraordinary lengths to ensure these things don't happen but at the end of the day combat environments are very complex environments. Human error is always a possibility," he said.
The US Embassy in London said in a statement: "The United States expresses its deep condolences to the families and loved ones of the soldiers who died, and we wish those who were injured a speedy recovery."
The MoD said all of the soldiers had been taking part in a fighting patrol to disrupt Taleban activity to the north west of Kajaki, in Helmand province.
They came under attack from Taleban insurgents and during the firefight that followed, close air support was called in from two US F15 aircraft, according to the MoD.

Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Mayo, a spokesman for British troops in Helmand province told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "During this patrol they came into contact with some Taleban from a number of firing positions.
"As they came under fire they then called in some close air support to assist them and an aircraft came in, it dropped a bomb and tragically this bomb killed three of the soldiers and injured two more."
The three soldiers were declared dead at the scene. The injured two were evacuated by helicopter to the medical facility at Camp Bastion.
Lt Col Mayo said one of the two was very seriously wounded and the other seriously wounded.
BBC Kabul correspondent Alastair Leithead said this was the second case of British service personnel being killed in a friendly fire incident involving American military personnel in Afghanistan.
Royal Anglian fatalities
An inquiry was launched into the death of marine Jonathan Wigley, 21, after he was killed during an intense battle in Helmand province in December 2006.
In February, Mr Browne told MPs that since 1990, 12 UK service personnel had been killed in friendly fire incidents involving American military personnel in Iraq.
The three deaths on Thursday mean the total number of UK troops killed while on operations in Afghanistan since 2001 has risen to 73. Fifty have been killed in action.
The Royal Anglians, which have been based at Pirbright in Surrey for about five years, have been one of the regiments hardest hit by the fighting in Afghanistan.
There has now been a total of nine soldiers killed from the regiment. It is one of the worst casualty rates since Operation Herrick, the campaign in Afghanistan, began in 2001.
On 11 August the regiment's Captain David Hicks was killed during an attack by the Taleban on his patrol base northeast of Sangin in Helmand province.
The regimental headquarters of the Royal Anglians is in Bury St Edmunds. The regiment recruits mainly from the counties of Essex, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6962071.stm

Jack sends this post, he is on holiday in Turkey at the moment;




Oldies but goodies
1. Two blondes walk into a building..........you'd think at least one of them would have seen it
2. Phone answering machine message - "...If you want to buy marijuana press the hash key...
3. A guy walks into the psychiatrist wearing only clingfilm for shorts The shrink says, "Well, I can clearly see you're nuts."
4. I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn't find any
5. I went to the butchers the other day and I bet him 50 quid that he couldn't reach the meat off the top shelf. He said, "No, the steaks are too high."
6. My friend drowned in a bowl of muesli. A strong currant pulled him in
7. A man came round in hospital after a serious accident. He shouted "Doctor, doctor, I can't feel my legs!" The doctor replied, "I know you can't, I've cut your arms off".
8. I went to a seafood disco last week...and pulled a muscle
9. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly. They lit a fire in the craft, it sank, proving once and for all that you can't have your kayak and heat it too
10. Our ice cream man was found lying on the floor of his van covered with hundreds and thousands. Police say that he topped himself
11. Man goes to the doctor, with a strawberry growing out of his head. Doc says "I'll give you some cream for that."
12. 'Doc I can't stop singing 'The Green, Green Grass of Home' "That's like Tom Jones syndrome. 'Is it common? ' "It's not unusual."
13. A man takes his Rottweiler to the vet. "My dog's cross-eyed, is there anything you can do for him?" "Well," says the vet, "let's have a look at him" So he picks the dog up and examines his eyes, then checks his teeth Finally, he says, "I'm going to have to put him down." "What? Because he's cross-eyed? ""No, because he's really heavy"
14. Guy goes into the doctor's. "Doc, I've got a cricket ball stuck up my backside." "How's that?" "Don't you start."
15. Two elephants walk off a cliff...boom, boom!
16. What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh
17. So I was getting into my car, and this bloke says to me "Can you give me a lift?" I said "Sure, you look great, the world's your oyster, go for it.'
18.Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. There are 5 people in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my Mum or my Dad, or my older Brother Colin, or my younger Brother Ho-Cha-Chu? But I think its Colin 1
9. Two fat blokes in a pub, one says to the other "Your round." The other one says "So are you, you fat bast**d!
20. Police arrested two kids yesterday, one was drinking battery acid, and the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off
21."You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen. It said, 'Parking Fine.' So that was nice."
22. A man walked into the doctors, he said, "I've hurt my arm in several places" The doctor said, "Well don't go there anymore"
23. Ireland's worst air disaster occurred early this morning when a small two-seater Cessna plane crashed into a cemetery. Irish search and rescue workers have recovered 1826 bodies so far and expect that number to climb<

Thursday, August 23, 2007



HELLO AMERICA!


The Tehran Holocaust denial conference was denounced by the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, the British and French Parliaments, and the Israeli Knesset.
But even as outrage over the conference spread, the world could only guess at what was transpiring behind the closed doors of the clandestine meeting rooms where the deniers plotted their strategy.

Now the world will have to guess no longer, because one man -- Holocaust historian and documentary filmmaker David Stein -- was able to infiltrate the conference and secretly record the proceedings.
Stein, currently at work on the documentary film Nuremberg, starring Whoopi Goldberg, put all of his projects on hold when he learned about the Tehran conference. "I felt that someone had to document what was going on," Stein gtold me durting a recent interview. "Someone had to record the deniers' plans, and someone had to tell the worl. This was the first time that a government had sponsored a Holocust denial conference. Deniers have had conferences before, but always inprimatge or secret. Now, they were the honored buesgs atg a state-sponsored event. That's a very ominous sign."

As a well-known documentary filmmaker, and a Jew, Stein couldn't infiltrate the conference himself, so he worked in tandem with an associate who was able to slip in and out of the conference unnoticed. "At the close of the conference," Stein adds grimly, "President Ahmadinejad pledged twenty-five million dollars to the cause of Holocaust denial, and the attendees toasted to the destruction of Israel. And we have it all on tape."

Stein is editing the footage from the Iran conference into a documentary film, which will explore the rise in anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial worldwide. Apart from the footage in Iran, Stein was able to score another exclusive -- an interview with Mel Gibson's Holocaust father. "Mel's dad had never before granted an on-camera interview," explains Stein. "I sat him down to ask him the questions that are on everyone's mind, questions like how deeply does anti-Semitism factor into Gibson family life, and what does Mel think about his dad's outspoken Holocaust denial. The answers I got were sometimes very shocking."

David, whose production company is Nistarim International Media (http://www.nistarim.com/), hopes to have hif film ready by the end of the year ('07),
? Copyright 2007 by canyon-news.com

Wednesday, August 22, 2007


National Front demo - Saturday 25th.August - Manchester
We have no firm details of this planned demonstration against the Annual Gay march in the city. Can anyone send us some details so we can advertise it for them ? The NF website is down.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007


More support for the neo-cons by Nick Griffin



21st August 2007News article filed by BNP news team


The suggestion that a French President, who is of second generation Hungarian Jewish origin may be an (admittedly), unlikely candidate to receive the accolade of the most nationalist head of state, will doubtless seem controversial to the many adherents of the old style nationalist parties across Europe, who have regrettably inherited and furthermore institutionalised some degree of anti-Semitism. However the BNP looks forward, not backward and looks beyond such blinkered vision and while acknowledging that President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected on a populist patriotic nationalist platform at the expense of the BNP’s friends in Le Pen’s Front National, there is no doubt that Le President is continuing to deliver the goods to the long suffering voters of France. Yesterday the no-nonsense President announced new measures to deal with repeat sex offenders in response to a high-level paedophile scandal.


cut.........


One to watch


President Sarkozy is definitely one to watch. As all of Europe faces the common enemy of militant Islam; the scourge of Marxist-liberalism; the interference of the unelected European Commission and the widespread decline of an industrial economic base, it remains to be seen whether Sarkozy’s actions are merely headline grabbing window dressing or genuine action to rescue a nation under threat from within and without. How France responds to these issues could set the scene for replication across all of Europe, including the UK.

NWN: What pap ! The BNP support for this neo-con stuff is embarassing. We also noticed that Sarkozy was immediate in his support ,after his election, for the neo=cons and Bush, in their war against Islam in Iraq and Afghanistan. But will the French be sending French troops to die in these God forsaken lands ?
It's just another case of 'blood being thicker than water' with Sarkozy linking up with his fellow zionists who hold sway in Bushs regime.
This 'cliche ridden tripe' by the writer, fails to persuade us to support their line.

Indians Attacked by Crowd at Street Party

NWN: Sent in by our German correspondent


A group of eight Indians was attacked by a mob at a street party in eastern Germany on the weekend. All were injured, one seriously. The police deny there was a political motive behind the attack despite calls of "foreigners out."


Singh Gorvinda was one of the Indians injured in the attack.Despite a mob's calls of "foreigners out," police are denying there was a far-right motive behind an attack on a group of Indians in eastern Germany this weekend.

The eight men were attacked by a mob of around 50 Germans at a street party in the early hours of Sunday in the small town of Mügeln in the eastern German state of Saxony. The trigger for the violence was a brawl on the dance floor in a party tent shortly before 1 a.m., police said. The reason for the brawl was not yet clear.

The Indians left the tent where the dance was being held but were then attacked by the mob, which chased them across the town's market place until they took shelter in a pizzeria run by an Indian. The owner let them in, but the mob tried to kick in the doors of the restaurants as a large crowd looked on. The restaurant owner's car was also seriously damaged.

Seventy police officers were called in to restore order. Fourteen people were injured in the incident, including the eight Indians, four of the attackers and two police officers. One of the Indians and one of the attackers were taken to hospital for treatment. Two of the attackers, aged 21 and 23, were arrested on Saturday night but later released. The police have set up a task force to investigate the incident.

In remarks to the German news agency DDP Monday, a police spokeswoman in Leipzig denied there was a neo-Nazi motive behind the attack, despite eye-witnesses accounts of people calling for "foreigners out."

There were reports Monday that the police had been warned in advance of the attack but had done nothing to prevent it. Mayor Gotthard Deuse told the German news station N24 that there had been warnings of possible problems at the street party. However, the police spokeswoman denied this, saying that the warning in question had been sent to a youth club in the town, warning of a robbery. This had "absolutely nothing to do" with the attacks, the spokeswoman said. The mayor said there were no neo-Nazis in the town and that, if the incident did have a far-right motive, it was most likely caused by people from outside the city.

Some of the men were merchants living in the area, police said. "They just wanted to take part in the celebrations," a police spokesman told the Associated Press.

Attacks on foreigners are far from unusual in eastern German states such as Saxony, where there are concerns that far-right groups are gaining in strength and taking on institutional roles in some places. The far-right, neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) holds several seats in Saxony's state assembly, having won over 9 percent of the vote in the 2004 state election.
dgs/ddp/ap/dpa

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,500879,00.html

Trafalgar
Nelson: "Order the signal, Hardy."
Hardy: "Aye, aye sir."
Nelson: "Hold on, that's not what I dictated to Flags. What's the meaning of this?"
Hardy: "Sorry sir?"
Nelson (reading aloud): "' England expects every person to do his or her duty, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religious persuasion or disability.' - What gobbledegook is this?"
Hardy: "Admiralty policy, I'm afraid, sir. We're an equal opportunities employer now. We had the devil's own job getting ' England ' past the censors, lest it be considered racist."
Nelson: "Gadzooks, Hardy. Hand me my pipe and tobacco."
Hardy: "Sorry sir. All naval vessels have now been designated smoke-free working environments."
Nelson: "In that case, break open the rum ration. Let us splice the mainbrace to steel the men before battle."
Hardy: "The rum ration has been abolished, Admiral. Its part of the Government's policy on binge drinking."
Nelson: "Good heavens, Hardy. I suppose we'd better get on with it ........... full speed ahead."
Hardy: "I think you'll find that there's a 4 knot speed limit in this stretch of water."
Nelson: "Damn it man! We are on the eve of the greatest sea battle in history. We must advance with all dispatch. Report from the crow's nest please."
Hardy: "That won't be possible, sir."
Nelson: "What?"
Hardy: "Health and Safety have closed the crow's nest, sir. No harness; and they said that rope ladders don't meet regulations. They won't let anyone up there until a proper scaffolding can be erected."
Nelson: "Then get me the ship's carpenter without delay, Hardy.
"Hardy: "He's busy knocking up a wheelchair access to the foredeck Admiral."
Nelson: "Wheelchair access? I've never heard anything so absurd."
Hardy: "Health and safety again, sir. We have to provide a barrier-free environment for the differently abled."
Nelson: "Differently abled? I've only one arm and one eye and I refuse even to hear mention of the word. I didn't rise to the rank of admiral by playing the disability card."
Hardy: "Actually, sir, you did. The Royal Navy is under represented in the areas of visual impairment and limb deficiency."
Nelson: "Whatever next? Give me full sail. The salt spray beckons."
Hardy: "A couple of problems there too, sir. Health and safety won't let the crew up the rigging without hard hats. And they don't want anyone breathing in too much salt - haven't you seen the adverts?"
Nelson: "I've never heard such infamy. Break out the cannon and tell the men to stand by to engage the enemy."
Hardy: "The men are a bit worried about shooting at anyone, Admiral."
Nelson: "What? This is mutiny!"
Hardy: "It's not that, sir. It's just that they're afraid of being charged with murder if they actually kill anyone. There's a couple of legal-aid lawyers on board, watching everyone like hawks."
Nelson: "Then how are we to sink the Frenchies and the Spanish?"
Hardy: "Actually, sir, we're not."
Nelson: "We're not?"
Hardy: "No, sir. The French and the Spanish are our European partners now. According to the Common Fisheries Policy, we shouldn't even be in this stretch of water. We could get hit with a claim for compensation."
Nelson: "But you must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil."
Hardy: "I wouldn't let the ship's diversity co-ordinator hear you saying that sir. You'll be up on disciplinary report."
Nelson: "You must consider every man an enemy, who speaks ill of your King."
Hardy: "Not any more, sir. We must be inclusive in this multicultural age. Now put on your Kevlar vest; it's the rules. It could save your life"
Nelson: "Don't tell me - health and safety. Whatever happened to rum, sodomy and the lash?"
Hardy: As I explained, sir, rum is off the menu! And there's a ban on corporal punishment."
Nelson: "What about sodomy?"
Hardy: "I believe that is now legal, sir."
Nelson: "In that case............................... kiss me, Hardy."

Monday, August 20, 2007



Has the next General Election been scrapped by the BNP ?


Target Europe


The above clip from a latest BNP bulletin suggests that this is so. There are many reasons why the BNP hierarchy would need a breathing space, lack of money being one of them. The reason given, and suggesting that the Euro elections in 2008 are now the main target, is nonsense. This tactic by Mr.Griffin has been tried before in 2001. We are very sure that many members will have many and varied reasons and ideas for this appalling decision by the BNP. Oh dear. The words 'brewery,booze-up, organise and couldn't' immediately come to mind.



Another case of don't do as I do. do as I say.

Subject: Harvard/CFR jew antagonizes the tribe

Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He has aired aspects of judaism in this item in the New York Times that have caused his fellow tribespeople to have hissy-fits.http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?ei=5070&en=7bcdd039990d1403&ex=1187496000&pagewanted=print
Orthodox Paradox By NOAH FELDMAN
A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had kids.
This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox.
I brought my girlfriend.
At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked again.
My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.
I didn’t want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend, to whom I was by that time engaged.
So I called my oldest school friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said.
My fiancée was Korean-American.
Her presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who was not Jewish.
That hint was reason enough to keep us out.
Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom Kippur.
When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what I already knew. “It wasn’t me,” he said.
I believed him.
Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school’s alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say “in contact,” but that implies mutuality where none exists.
What I really mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him several updates about my life, for inclusion in the “Mazal Tov” section of the newsletter.
I sent him news of my marriage.
When our son was born, I asked him to report that happy event.
The most recent news was the birth of our daughter this winter.
Nothing doing. None of my reports made it into print.
It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of its consequences.
But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is an anachronism.
Many of my closest relationships are still with people who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand.
What remains of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in the school’s formal publications, where my classmates’ growing families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.
The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated to prime us for the Ivy League.
To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.
That aspiration is not without its difficulties.
My own personal lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity — of Slobodka and St. Paul’s.
In premodern Europe, where the state gave the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community.
The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not a legal one.
Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing of alumni newsletters.
Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school’s inability to treat me like any other graduate.
I have tried in my own imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me, expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in the public sphere.
As a result, I have not felt myself to have rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done so by virtue of my marriage. Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience — that the individual human beings who make up the institution and community where I spent so many years of my life will put our longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries.
The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer fully in the community.
If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence. After all, the school’s attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive.
For those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it almost worked.
Fitting In
Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613 biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the reality of the modern world.
You must strive to be, as a poet of the time put it, “a Jew in the home and a man in the street.”
Even as we students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream people, not fanatics or cult members.
This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman.
His run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the “modern” in modern Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux, then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, “I don’t think American voters care where a man goes to church on Sunday.”)
Whatever concerns Lieberman’s Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly believe in something.
His Orthodoxy elicited none of the half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism has already prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was, in some basic sense, weird.
Lieberman’s overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons.
Morning prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which, though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted in “The Da Vinci Code.” Food restrictions are tight: a committed modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was prepared with a kosher knife).
The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance the observant person from the rest of the world.
When followed precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that. Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of the rules borne by those who keep kosher.
The category of the unkosher comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say, almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not.
You cannot easily break bread with them, but that is not all.
You cannot, in a deeper sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring the body through food. And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world.
Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible from memory. Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt immediate kinship.
They read those same exact texts again and again — often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the American wilderness.
In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer’s wine-dark sea, then move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered, it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what is work?
The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for “work” to have occurred? You might perform an act of work absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome — but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work’s taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.
Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge, our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.’s and near-doctorates to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were fantastic.
One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy’s condemnation of homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer cluelessness of the administration.
Lord only knows what teachers like him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways.
(In the book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously transformed into Italian-Americans.)In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to achieving it.
The Dynamics of Prohibition
For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.
One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young — addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew.
The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally.
The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged.
One of my teachers rose to suggest that the doctor’s attitude was putting him in danger of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the patient’s life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the Sabbath violation to occur.
Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he said to the doctor.
His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in the audience when he made them.
The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved.
To accept this version of the tradition would be to accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world could not proceed in good faith.Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young man than the question of our relationship to sex.
Modernity, and maybe the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day of sex ed in seventh grade.
I have the feeling that the content of our sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future.
After the scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been introduced.
After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.
After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education. We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school’s standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to distract the males around them.
Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had been seen holding a girl’s hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday afternoon.
The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.
My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, “in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage.” Rabbi Feinstein’s legal judgment with respect to romantic love among persons too young to marry was definitive.
He prohibited it absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional. What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — “as though one had contracted the sickness of love.”
Feinstein’s opinion directed my attention to a passage in Maimonides’s legal writings prohibiting various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as follows: “Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited.” I have never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don’ts that is Maimonides’s Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.
Difference and Reconciliation
I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.
Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation.
Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy.
Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”
This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith.
The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt.
Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.
The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy.
Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.
The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent.
The solution adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not to ask) as by what they do.
Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of social membership in the modern Orthodox community.
Marrying a Jewish but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued belonging difficult.
Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.
Us and Them
In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy’s line-drawing has been implicated in some truly horrifying events.
Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin’s peace efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely executed because he is in the act of killing Jews.
In 1994, Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced two Nobel Prize winners.)
Because of the proximity of Goldstein’s background and mine, the details of his reasoning have haunted me.
Goldstein committed his terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the Amalekites.
The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.
This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide depicted in the Western canon: God’s directive to King Saul to kill every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and cattle. Saul fell short.
He left the Amalekite king alive and spared the sheep.
As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter, God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I can remember this portion verbatim.
That Saturday, like Goldstein, I was in synagogue, too. Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of the Assyrian King Sennacherib’s policy of population movement at the time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who was by descent an Amalekite.
But as a schoolboy I was taught that the story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical recurrence: “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands.”
The Jews’ enemies today are the Amalekites of old.
The inquisitors, the Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.
To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites.
Like a Puritan seeking the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him.
Commanded to settle the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as well as similarity.
According to one newspaper account, when he was serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people, “Clean of hands and pure of heart.”It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense.
After the Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment — said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs buried below.
Lives of Contradiction
Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. “But why not?” I asked.
Her answer was illuminating.
As someone who never took steps that would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.
For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such risk.
With no danger of feeling owned, I haven’t lost the wish to be treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living.
But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my past.
In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it.
I was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who, naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn’t think so. Our life choices are constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but palpably, measurably so.
I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the conclusion. Couldn’t the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn’t everyone’s life a mass of contradictions?
My best friend just laughed.
Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.