1. Irwin Cotler in the Jerusalem Post: Raoul Wallenberg Day: Remembering the hero who saved 100,000 Jews
To the “desk murderer” Adolf Eichmann, who was organizing the transports to Auschwitz, Wallenberg was the Judenhund Wallenberg, the “Jewish Dog.” To the Jews, as those saved by Wallenberg would tell me, Wallenberg was the “Guardian Angel.”
Yet, while Wallenberg saved so many, he was not himself saved by so many who could. Rather than greet Wallenberg as the liberator he was, the Soviets – who entered Hungary as liberators themselves on January 17, 1945 – imprisoned him, as I mentioned above, where he disappeared into the gulag. The Soviets first claimed that he died of a heart attack in July 1947, before changing their story to claim that he was murdered, also in July 1947.
These contradictory Soviet claims have been refuted by several inquiries, including the 1990 International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg, which I chaired, along with Wallenberg’s brother Guy von Dardel, US Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, Russian scholar Mikhail Chlenov, and former Israeli attorney-general Gideon Hausner.
Indeed, in 1985, as our Commission report cited, a US federal court found the evidence “incontrovertible” that Wallenberg was alive in 1947, “compelling” that he was alive in the 1960s, and “credible” that he remained alive into the 1980s – a position held by Soviet Nobel Peace Laureate Andrei Sakharov, who conveyed this information personally to Chlenov and me in a meeting we had in Moscow in November 1989, shortly before Sakharov’s passing in December.
It is imperative that the international community at this important inflection moment, finally come together to secure for Wallenberg and his family the long-denied truth and justice owed to them. Accordingly, I am delighted that Susanne Berger, founder and coordinator of the Raoul Wallenberg Research Initiative (RWI-70) and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, has launched an initiative that opens up the blank pages of history.
The countries of Wallenberg’s Honourary Citizenship, including Israel, should lead an international consortium calling upon Russia to open its archives and reveal the long-sought and suppressed truth about this disappeared Hero of Humanity, whom the UN called “the greatest humanitarian of the 20th century.”
- WSJ Editorial: Mike Pence’s Truth Bomb in Hong Kong
For a mild-mannered guy, Mike Pence packs a punch. On Thursday, speaking in Hong Kong at the UBS Wealth Insights summit, the former Vice President called for the release of the newspaperman Jimmy Lai, whose trial on national-security charges was also taking place in another part of the city.
“There is probably no more compelling gesture in the short term to send a message of good will to the people of the United States, or the free world, than if China were to take steps to free Jimmy Lai,” Mr. Pence said. It says something about today’s Hong Kong that stating this is controversial.
- Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: The Anti-Social Century
Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.
Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. In 2023, Vivek Murthy, Joe Biden’s surgeon general, published an 81-page warning about America’s “epidemic of loneliness,” claiming that its negative health effects were on par with those of tobacco use and obesity. A growing number of public-health officials seem to regard loneliness as the developed world’s next critical public-health issue. The United Kingdom now has a minister for loneliness. So does Japan.
In the smoldering rubble of Rick and Tracy McGeagh’s Pacific Palisades home, a statue of Mary stands serene and unscathed amid mangled ruins.
Their son Jack, a psychologist, took many photos of their property after the catastrophic Jan. 7 fire that destroyed the entire community. There was much to weep over, but an image of the Blessed Mother moved the family to a different kind of tears: Mary prays near a charred tree reminiscent of the cross. High in the smoke-darkened sky, a bright sun casts a single beam of light toward the scene of devastation and of faith.
“It’s like Calvary Hill,” McGeagh said. “Mary is at the foot of the cross, as she was, and the sun is God, beaming down on them.”
He has shared the photo with everyone who contacted him to offer love and support.
“I find it a message of hope, that God is telling us that we are going to get through this as Mary did,” he said.
- Alexander Raikin: A Pattern of Noncompliance
Ontario’s euthanasia regulators have tracked 428 cases of possible criminal violations — and not referred a single case to law enforcement, say leaked documents.
Three Alberta disability advocacy groups say they’re shocked and saddened after learning the provincial government plans to back out of their funding contracts more than a year early.
“This hits deep,” Leah Dormaar, the executive director of the Southern Alberta Individualized Planning Association in Lethbridge, Alta., told a news conference Wednesday.
Dormaar’s organization, as well as the Self Advocacy Federation in Edmonton and the Disability Action Hall in Calgary, support Albertans with intellectual and physical disabilities by connecting them with peers and helping them develop skills to advocate for themselves.
Keri McEachern, a facilitator with the Self Advocacy Federation, said each organization has a three-year funding contract with the government to support their operational costs.
But she said that earlier this month, the government told them the funding would stop in April, more than a year before the contracts were set to expire.
Collectively, McEachern said, the organizations receive just under $425,000 per year from the government.
McEachern said the Self Advocacy Federation’s Edmonton chapter, which also employs eight self advocates, relies entirely on this funding to cover costs and its future is uncertain without it.
- Washington Post: Should doctors help people die? Global debate hits home in the U.S.
In statehouses across the country, lawmakers this year will consider bills that, if widely adopted, could chart a new course for how Americans approach end-of-life decisions by giving terminally ill patients a legal means of choosing how and when they die.
Five states already have active legislation around physician-assisted suicide, with advocates expecting that number to reach nearly 20 after other statehouses resume sessions later this month. Bills in New York and Delaware fell short of passing last year, but sponsors and supporters are hopeful, if not confident, the renewed bills will become law in 2025. If passed, they would join 10 states and Washington that already allow a qualifying terminally ill patient to seek a lethal prescription from a doctor.
As Americans take a piecemeal approach to legalization, their global cousins in Canada and the United Kingdom are rapidly remaking their laws. Domestically, the moral and ethical tensions over the issue continue to divide faith, disability and medical communities more than three decades after Oregon became the first state to allow the practice.
- Patrick T. Brown: Remote Work Created a Baby Boom. Can We Keep It Up?
When white-collar workers were all still Zooming (or, écrasez l’infâme, Microsoft Teams-ing), it was much easier for an expectant mom to hide pregnancy symptoms until much later than would have been noticed in an office environment. Some women were even able to not just conceal a pandemic-era pregnancy but give birth to a secret COVID baby without their colleagues being any the wiser. Take a few days off, make sure you’re on mute during the next check-in, and before you know it, baby will be old enough to help code those TPS reports.
America’s abrupt introduction to widespread remote work created a more pro-natal and parent-friendly work environment. Employees were no longer expected to, and often couldn’t, leave their identity as a parent at the door. Conference calls with Paw Patrol softly piping through the background became commonplace. Commutes became less onerous. Jobs that once were thought to require 40 hours a week in person turned out not to—though whether they can sustainably subsist on zero hours a week in person remains to be seen.
- Francis X. Maier: Sing to Me, Muse, of the Man
In a broader, popular sense, we live in a turbulent age, a time of radical unrest, innovation, and change when (as Marx said) “all that is solid melts into air, [and] all that is holy is profaned.” People are hungry for anything grounded and permanent. Anything that can provide them with a meaningful story of their own beginnings and purpose has magnetic appeal.
The epic poetry of Homer and Virgil has endured because it captures – truthfully and with enormous power – the full range of human virtue, sin, hatred, savagery, love, heroism, self-sacrifice, cowardice, fidelity, and betrayal. Which is why Nolan’s film version of The Odyssey, if it’s faithful to Homer’s text, will do more than entertain.
In its own small way, it may ennoble. Nobility is in the poem’s DNA, and a little of it tends to rub off on the soul. Progressive blather about sexism and right-wing obsessions demeans the grandeur of the poetry with small-minded political garbage.
On Saturday evening, July 27, 2024, Walid’s ten-year-old daughter “Leila” was playing on the soccer pitch of Majdal Shams along with another dozen children. At around 6:15 pm, she started home. A few minutes later, the rocket from Lebanon hit the sports field.
Poor Walid is conflicted. Leila survived by virtue of an early chance departure. But two of her friends were killed, and that memory will remain a lifetime scar.
Walid is also squeezed. Squeezed between a Syrian nationalism he cannot kick and a Zionist reality he cannot resist. Squeezed between an Arabic that he cultivates in his children and a Hebrew that is a ticket to their opportunity. Squeezed between a Lebanese terrorist organization and a Jewish state which will defend him, and his land, as its own.