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July 3, 2008

Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski: A spiritual budget (TOUCHING!)

Jeff Jacoby: Israel still paying for its defeat

JWisdom:: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part IV by Rabbi David Aaron

July 2, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Appeasers Make Poor Patriots

The Kosher Gourmet By Kathleen Purvis: Slaw, y'all: For BBQs or Sabbath dinner, these southern recipes are something else!

JWisdom:: Rabbi Mordechai Becher: Jewish Rx for A Simpler Life

July 1, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q. I think it's important to leave a legacy to my children. How much should I save towards this end?

Paul Greenberg:A President who is history deficient?

JWisdom:: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Poland's Unique Antisemitism

June 30, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Remembering the architect of Torah Judaism for the modern world

Abe Novick: Hulk: Still a Jew?

JWisdom: : Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality, Part 2: The Abandoned Child

June 26, 2008

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: Quantum leap to evil

Caroline B. Glick: Victimized families must not be allowed to dictate policy

June 25, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Today in Biblical History: King Jeroboam of Israel prevents pilgrimage to Jerusalem

Jonathan Tobin: Real Friends and Real Enemies

JWisdom: Raping of reason By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 25, 2008

Steven Emerson: Kristof: Never Mind the Terrorists

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: Mediterranean Flyover: Telegraphing an Israeli Punch?

JWisdom: Rabbi David Aaron: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part III

June 24, 2008

Caroline B. Glick: What were they thinking!?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Guilty knowledge

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Warping Innocence

June 23, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Diploma dilemma

Jeff Jacoby: A world without children

JWisdom: Rabbi Dovid Gross: Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality --- Introduction

June 20, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Man: The Crowning Glory of Creation

Caroline B. Glick: Israel's darkest week

JWisdom: We aren't worthy? by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 19, 2008

Rabbi Elazar Meisels: The saints who don't come marchin' in

Chris Christoff: Muslim woman demands an apology from Obama after camera snub

June 18, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Still Dancing Around Jerusalem

The Kosher Gourmet by Steve Petusevsky: Chilled fruit and vegetable soups

JWisdom: Souls Need A Check Up? by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 17, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Baby Einstein

Caroline B. Glick: Bush's rhetoric, Bush's policies

JWisdom: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part II by Rabbi David Aaron

June 16, 2008

Varda Branfman: Bob Dylan, won't you please come home?

Diana West: Academic dares to question the 'religion of peace'

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Positive Backfire

June 13, 2008

Rabbi Berel Wein: Trading manna for whine

Caroline B. Glick: Peace with friends

JWisdom: From the mouths of … by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 12, 2008

Michael Feldberg: Meet Paul Revere's pal, the Orthodox Jew who played a key role in laying Boston's cultural and business infrastructure

The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Manweiler: No need to be tempted by Wendy's mandarin chicken salad

JWisdom: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part I by Rabbi David Aaron

June 11, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: What would Hillel say?

Jonathan Tobin: UNRWA and NGOs: The Real U.N. 'Insult'

JWisdom: Sara Yoheved Rigler: Greatness Made Simple: How a momentary decision shifted life's course and destination

June 6, 2008

Rabbi Pinchas Stolper: Revelation: The basis of faith

Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Mere hours after becoming Israel's new 'best friend' Obama backtracks on status of Jerusalem

Caroline B. Glick: UN choosing to protect rogue nuclear programs

JWisdom: Sameness in difference by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 5, 2008

David Lightman: Now Obama wants to be Israel's newest 'best friend'

Obama's remarks to AIPAC policy conference

The Kosher Gourmet By Ethel G. Hofman: Shavous cuisine: Ruby Fruit Soup, Lokshen Kugel with Cheese, Key Lime Curd, Calsone Casserole Frittata with Wild Mushrooms, Sun-dried tomatoes and Olives, Baked Tilapia with Pepper Cheese Cream and Brown Sugar Shortbread

JWisdom: Why a Jewish Jerusalem makes so many nervous by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 4, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: A different sort of 'religious broadcaster'

Jonathan Tobin: Misgivings on the Road to Damascus

JWisdom: 44 Years Without An Argument? by Sara Yoheved Rigler

June 3, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Obama vs. McCain on the Middle East

Everything's Relative: There is a crisis growing in Orthodox synagogues worldwide, reveals Jordan "Gorf" Gorfinkel

JWisdom: White Facades; Black Secrets by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 2, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: Lie to outsmart discriminator?

He writes the songs that make our souls sing:Gavriel Aryeh Sanders interviews Jewish music legend Ben Zion Shenker; includes stirring, uplifting song

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Of laws and lives

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Jan. 10, 2007 / 20 Teves, 5767

A figment of his supporters' imagination

By Jonathan Gurwitz


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Saddam Hussein is history, his choking grip on Iraqi society broken by a noose. His merciless crimes, however, live on in photographs, grainy videos and, not least, in the memories of those who suffered his rule.


If the former dictator had lived and met his end in one of the great civilizations of Mesopotamia he tried to emulate — Saddam fancied himself the successor to Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar — his adversaries might also have extirpated him from history. The ancients didn't only destroy the physical presence of reviled leaders, scattering their bodies to the four winds. They also erased all records of the lives and deeds of the vanquished. They renamed cities. They chiseled names off monuments. They put blood relatives to the sword.


Plenty of people around the world today would be happy to emulate antiquity, to wipe the history books clean of Saddam. In life, he was variously regarded as a champion of pan-Arabism, a defender of Islam, a proxy U.S. ally in a troubled region and a lone antagonist against American hegemony.


In death, his three decades of absolute rule in Iraq and the atrocities he committed are, now, embarrassments. Without the Baathist propaganda machine churning out encomiums and Saddam enforcing the glorification of his own greatness, the truth about the modern-day Hammurabi is harder to ignore.


Those who celebrated Saddam as the standard bearer of Arab pride and unity would like to conceal the fact that his most intimate victims were fellow Arabs — hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, then tens of thousands of Kuwaitis. A man regarded as an Arab hero for championing the extremist cause against Israel was responsible in 24 years for Arab death on a scale that dwarfs the casualties of all the Arab-Israeli conflicts combined.


Those who bizarrely came to view Saddam as a defender of Islam would like to obscure his homicidal secularism and the detail that his victims — well more than a million in all — were overwhelmingly Muslim. Islamists who condemn the U.S.-led war on terror as a purported war on Islam have a hard time explaining Saddam's very real wars against Iraqi and Iranian Shiites and Sunni Kurds.


Foreign policy realists in the United States did more than merely accept Saddam as the enemy of our Iranian enemy. A succession of American leaders, beginning with the Carter administration, aligned U.S. interests with Baathist interests, supplying money, weapons, intelligence and training despite full knowledge of Saddam's psychopathic repression, mass murder and use of chemical weapons.


An international cadre of politicians, businessmen and United Nations employees enriched themselves by skimming money off a U.N. program that was supposed to provide food and medicine to the Iraqi people.


So many people would like to see history buried along with Saddam. Dr. Najmaldin Karim is not one of them


In 1972, Karim abandoned his medical career in northern Iraq to join the Kurdish resistance. Today he is an American neurosurgeon and the president of the Washington Kurdish Institute. While he escaped Saddam's murderous reign, members of his family did not.


Writing recently in the New York Times, he called Saddam's execution an act of justice. But, he wrote, the execution came both too late and too early:


"Too late, because had Saddam Hussein been removed from the scene many years ago, many lives would have been saved.


"Killing Saddam now, however, for ordering the massacre at Dujail in 1982, means that he will not face justice for his greatest crimes: the so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s, the genocidal assault on the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s, and the slaughtering of the Shiite Arabs and Kurds who rose up against him, with American encouragement, in 1991."


Three thousand years ago, the death of a megalomaniac like Saddam would have permitted his successors to wipe clean the historical slate. Perhaps that's why history is filled with so many megalomaniacs.


Remembering Saddam's atrocities and holding to account the accomplices and apologists who helped him gain and retain power is the best way to prevent history from repeating. Which is why his regime's trial should go on, even though Saddam is dead.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Jonathan Gurwitz, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, is a co-founder and twice served as Director General of the Future Leaders of the Alliance program at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. In 1986 he was placed on the Foreign Service Register of the U.S. State Department.Comment by clicking here.

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© 2005, Jonathan Gurwitz

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