World War II was my war. We fought the Germans.  They were the enemy. There was a German problem. Of course, if we had stopped to think about it, which we didn’t because we were too busy trying to win the war, we would have realized that not every German wanted to fight us; maybe not even a majority of them did. But they didn’t oppose the Nazi extremists who had taken over their government and attacked us in the name of German racial superiority. I’m sure a lot of Germans agreed with Hitler. But those who were against him, didn’t dare speak up. A few did, of course, like the great German patriot Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He spoke out against the Nazi thugs. For his pains he was put into a concentration camp and died there.

Jihadist thugs are now attacking us in the name of Islam. No doubt there are a lot of Islamic believers who don’t support this. But like the Germans in World War II, they are not speaking up… for good reason of course, as there was a good reason back in the days of the Third Reich. But because they aren’t speaking up to oppose what is being done in their name, the world has a Muslim problem. Everybody knows this. Not many public figures dare to say it out loud. Some public figures don’t want to know it, much less say it out loud.

Bill O’Reilly, who has taken great pains in recent years to position himself as a centrist, has now had the courage to say out loud what everybody knows. The predictable cries of outrage have ensued. Juan Williams, a true blue liberal who has no doubt outraged his bosses at NPR for years by appearing on Fox, even if it was to espouse their cause, is now paying the price for O’Reilly. They couldn’t fire him; he doesn’t work for them. Juan does, so out he went. (more…)

After years of being thought of mainly as the dedicatee of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as the famous author’s third wife (and, oddly enough, his third consecutive wife from St. Louis), Martha Gellhorn has begun to come into her own, with a recent biography by Caroline Moorehead, an HBO film in the works and a possible feature film as well.

On D-Day, Gellhorn was first on Omaha Beach after the beach was secured (while her estranged husband Hemingway — also a great war correspondent — stewed on board a troopship in the English Channel).  For Collier’s, which gave her her start as as a war correspondent, she had been in the middle of the fighting during the Spanish Civil War, was at the liberation of Dachau and the liberation of Paris, and later covered Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. She hated her years with Hemingway and later in life refused to discuss him or their time together.

Here’s a sample of her work, written in Madrid while the city was under siege from Franco: (more…)

Calm, cool, collected, and just slightly irascible, Eric Sevareid was the uncle who cuffed your ear instead of giving you a nickel. That was because he’d earned his bona fides the hard way: as one of Edward R. Murrow’s boys, Sevareid was in the thick of it during World War, from the fall of France, to the Battle of Britain, to the Pacific theater, where he once parachuted from a crashing airplane, then helped rescue the survivors. Reporters, and Americans, were made of sterner stuff back then.

As a kid, the Norwegian-American from North Dakota once paddled a canoe 2,250 miles from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay; after the war he served as CBS’s bureau chief in Washington, took on Sen. McCarthy and had his own youthful leftist past investigated by the FBI. He spent the last part of his career providing two-minute commentaries about world affairs on the CBS Evening News. (more…)

Huh?

Q. When the past becomes politically incorrect, what kind of country are we living in?

A. A “progressive” one.

How do you like it now?

Pretty darn ignorant, to judge by this story by Ron Grossman in the Chicago Tribune:

I took a quick survey in the newsroom the other day, something between a Rorschach test and a pop quiz, asking younger colleagues to identify an iconic photograph of World War II.

While some instantly recognized the image, others couldn’t quite place it. (more…)

As we celebrate Presidents Day today, we may observe that there have been no shortage of people attempting to link themselves to the legacy of the greatest President of these United States. This includes the current President of the United States, who commented on Honest Abe’s example in a February 12, 2009 AP story:

Lincoln “could have sought revenge,” Obama said, but he insisted that no Confederate troops be punished.

“All Lincoln wanted was for Confederate troops to go back home and return to work on their farms and in their shops,” Obama said. “That was the only way, Lincoln knew, to repair the rifts that had torn this country apart. It was the only way to begin the healing that our nation so desperately needed.”

That’s great and it obviously speaks to the “let’s forget about ideologies and principles and just all get along” message that is a central theme of the Obama administration. Nothing would please the President more than for us crabby conservatives to shut up and go back, both figuratively and literally, to our farms and shops. (more…)

The original blueprints for the Auschwitz death camp went on display in late January after being discovered in November 2008. They were found by chance behind a wall in a Berlin apartment during renovation work, yet the exact location of their discovery is being kept secret. No one will say whose apartment it was.

There are numerous bits of evidence, however, that point to a possible location where Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, lived during World War II. And in the course of investigating this, I have found that the Mufti was involved in and may even have created the Final Solution for European Jews – and yet his central participation in the Holocaust has been covered up and forgotten.

The Mufti, whom his nephew Yasser Arafat called “our hero,” is famous for his fanatical Jew-hatred. During World War II, the Mufti lived in Berlin, where he met Hitler and traveled in top Nazi circles (he even stayed in Hitler’s bunker toward the end of the war). Among his close friends was Adolf Eichmann, who is commonly thought to be the architect of the Holocaust. Journalist Maurice Pearlman, author of the 1947 book The Mufti of Jerusalem, said that the Mufti advised Eichmann on the best ways to persecute Jews. (more…)