Meanwhile, the hearings go on

The New Neo Posted on by

With or without witnesses:

Three witnesses ordered to testify Tuesday before a House committee investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server asserted their constitutional rights against self-incrimination and did not appear or refused to answer questions.

Bryan Pagliano, the former State Department computer specialist tasked with setting up Clinton’s server, did not attend the Republican-led hearing. His attorney said in a letter to the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee that Pagliano will continue to assert his constitutional right not to testify…

Two officials from Denver-based Platte River Networks appeared before the committee but invoked their constitutional right not to testify. Bill Thornton and Paul Combetta were excused from the session. In June 2013, after Clinton had left office, the server was moved from her Chappaqua, New York, home to a data center in northern New Jersey, where it was maintained by the Platte River Networks.

One witness, Justin Cooper, a former White House aide to President Bill Clinton, is answering the committee’s questions. Chaffetz said Cooper purchased the first server used by Clinton and registered the clintonemail.com domain name. Cooper also helped set up Clinton’s mobile communications.

Cooper told the committee that he did not have a security clearance during the period he was performing this work.

Well, why would he need a security clearance? After all, there was never anything classified on the server (do I need a sarcasm tag there?).

I don’t think many voters are following the details of this story, though. I think that by this time most people have a sense of the general picture and have made up their minds about it. Hillary’s supporters feel that it’s all a politically-motivated tempest in a teapot, or else they think she handled it badly but they forgive Hillary anything because she’s a Democrat running against the Demon Donald. Those who oppose Hillary consider this just part of a bad pattern that’s been going on with her for many, many years.

Sniper story

The New Neo Posted on by

This story could be turned into a movie. It already seems like a movie in terms of the distance, and the timing of the rescue:

A sharpshooter killed a top ISIS executioner and three other jihadists with a single bullet from nearly a mile away ”” just seconds before the fiend was set to burn 12 hostages alive with a flamethrower, according to a new report.

The British Special Air Service marksman turned one of the most hated terrorists in Syria into a fireball by using a Barett .50-caliber rifle to strike a fuel tank affixed to the jihadi’s back, the UK’s Daily Star reported Sunday…

Just before the sniper rescue operation outside of Raqqa, Syria, “the SAS team moved into an overwatch position above a village where they were told the execution was going to take place,” a source told the Star.

“Up to 12 civilians were going to be murdered ”” eight men and four women.

“The executioner gave some sort of rambling speech .”‰.”‰. then when he finished, the SAS sniper opened fire,” the source said.

The captives were then rescued by British and US special forces.

And I must say that it made me think of this scene from “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” a movie that a lot of people dislike but that I think is a masterpiece:

Hillary’s pneumonia: coughs, lies, and videotape

The New Neo Posted on by

First, let’s talk about pneumonia itself: it doesn’t necessarily mean a person is old and/or otherwise sickly. For example, my son had it in his teens, and gave it to his father and me, and we were all pretty sick although no one needed hospitalization and all of us recovered nicely. I was in my forties at the time. And I’ve known plenty of other relatively young people who’ve had it.

But Hillary Clinton isn’t in her forties. And even before this she had already been perceived as sickly, with a lot of speculation for years about what disease or conditions she might actually have. Plus, she’s already perceived as being a liar. Both of those problems came to the fore in her recent near-collapse at the 9/11 anniversary ceremony. It’s the lead story all over the place, and you don’t want that sort of thing to be the lead story during a campaign.

The timeline goes like this:

On Sunday, Clinton abruptly left a Manhattan ceremony marking the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A video shows her shakily stumbling while trying to get into a van to leave. The candidate’s physician later offered this explanation: Clinton has had an allergy-related cough for some time, and during an examination on Friday, the Democratic nominee was diagnosed with pneumonia, put on antibiotics, and told to take time out to rest. She became overheated and dehydrated during Sunday morning’s event, which led her to collapse. She’s now home in Chappaqua and on the road to recovery.

In addition, between her near-collapse and the announcement that she’d had a diagnosis of pneumonia recently, the campaign put out that her condition was from “overheating.” As lies (or half-truths?) go, it wasn’t even a good one, because the temperature in New York on Sunday wasn’t all that hot. My guess, though, is that it probably would have sufficed as an explanation except for the fact that Clinton needed to take some days off because of the pneumonia, so some further word was required.

Not only are the visuals terrible, but as with many things it’s the coverup that is the bigger problem, although in this case the thing itself is a problem too because it feeds into the pre-existent narrative of a sick and vulnerable older person:

As I wrote at the outset of this post, this sort of thing isn’t necessarily a sign of age or of general infirmity. But it looks like it is, and it could be, and there’s no particular reason to trust the campaign that covered it up in the first place. It’s understandable that they wouldn’t have wanted to announce it unless they had to (and I’m not at all sure that most campaigns wouldn’t also have covered it up). And yet the omission came back to bite them, hard.

First, there is fact of the illness itself. Then, the Clinton campaign’s secrecy about it. Next, the bad visuals and the videotape, followed by the lie about overheating and then the belated disclosure of the illness. All of this doesn’t exactly engender trust, either in Hillary’s general good health or her general veracity. It also indicates she doesn’t know how to pace herself.

And although Donald Trump is even older than she, he’s been perceived as more hale and hearty and may indeed be so. We don’t know, because we’ve never seen his medical records and he’s known for lying, too, but there’s no reason not to believe him in this case.

Campaigns are almost indescribably grueling. I have no idea how any of them do it, including the young ones. But the presidency is very grueling, too, and health and stamina is required. We’ve had plenty of ill presidents, though, and for some of them the extent of their health problems have been covered up (Roosevelt’s disability and Kennedy’s adrenal disease come to mind). That was then, though, and this is now, and medical coverups are frowned upon.

The bottom line, of course, is how this will affect the election. I cannot imagine it will help Hillary. But how much will it really hurt her? I also can’t imagine her supporters defecting to Trump for this reason, but it’s that vast middle group of “undecideds” who might think twice because of this.

[NOTE: It’s unclear whether Clinton has viral or bacterial pneumonia, and I doubt it matters all that much in terms of the political consequences of the story. Each are relatively common and usually not all that serious. Clinton was given antibiotics, which indicates it was more likely bacterial pneumonia. But it is my understanding that sometimes antibiotics are given as a preventative against a bacterial overlay even when someone has viral pneumonia.

Trump has announced that he will release “the numbers” from a recent physical of his.]

9/11: Fifteen years

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is an updated version of an earlier post.]

On 9/11’s 10th anniversary I wrote a post that contained this observation:

For those of us who were grownups when 9/11 happened, it’s also been transmuted””not to something that was always there, but to something that’s been incorporated into our view of the world. We’ve all done that differently. But for us, the shock and surprise and horror reoccurs (to a somewhat diminished extent, of course; there’s no shock like the first shock) whenever we see the footage, or when we think””really really think, without the protective shield of familiarity””of what actually happened on that day.

I believe that, in the five years that have passed since I wrote those words, 9/11 has been transmuted into something that was always there, something that no longer surprises.

The reason for that is that so very much has happened since I wrote those words five years ago. When I wrote that 10-year anniversary piece in September of 2011, the US was poised on the brink of Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq, which he was determined to accomplish against the opinion and advice of every military adviser. In the five years since that withdrawal, ISIS has risen up in the vacuum that was left, and it has wreaked horrors on civilian populations, barbarities that are of enormous scale and magnitude even compared to 9/11 and which have reverberated around the world with images of sadistic violence. Does anyone doubt for a single moment that the killers would wreak a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand 9/11s on us if they could?

And then there was the Iran deal, debated in a Congress that seemed powerless against a president bound and determined to sell our country out to a regime that is worse than Saddam Hussein’s and more implacably our enemy and the enemy of the world. And two scant months from now we face an election that pits two of the worst—perhaps the two very worst, as far as I can tell—presidential candidates in American history against each other.

I could not have made up such a scenario back when 9/11 happened. And yet here we are.

The anniversary of 9/11 is a very solemn day. Today, when I say that “there is less shock and no surprise,” I mean no disrespect or belittling of the terrible event that was 9/11. That horror is just as horrible, and perhaps even all the more horrible knowing the point we’ve reached now. The 9/11 dead are still dead, their families still bereft, the 9/11 perpetrators still vile, the 9/11 heroes still heroic. We need to remember them and to bow our heads in grief, and in prayer if we are religious people.

There are young voters now who were only six years old on 9/11. What do they remember? Is the day something they accept, part of the landscape of what seems ordinary to them? There are teenagers who weren’t born yet. Some of them are the children of people who died on 9/11 and whose wives were pregnant at the time—over 100 of them.

9/11 was not like Gettysburg. It was not a battle where soldiers died; it was a sneak attack on civilians going about their daily lives, although many who died were in the line of duty as police or firefighters. On the 9/11 anniversary we honor and mourn them all, every single one. But I want to paraphrase the closing of the Gettysburg Address and add:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us””that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain””that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom””and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I cannot escape the thought that it is more threatened than ever before in my lifetime. Perhaps there have been bigger threats in the past: the Civil War, the Depression, World War II. But I know how those came out. I don’t know about this one.

[ADDENDUM: Here is the story of my personal experience on 9/11 and its immediate aftermath.]

Hillary and the Trump-voter “basket of deplorables”

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems the big news today is Hillary’s comment about the “ists” and “ics” of Trump’s supporters:

“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton said. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”

She added, “And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.”

Clinton then said some of these people were “irredeemable” and “not America.”

She described the rest of his supporters as people who are looking for change in any form because of economic anxiety and urged her supporters to empathize with them.

The Democratic nominee made similar comments in an interview Thursday with an Israeli television station. But when they were widely reported Friday night, Trump and Republicans quickly pounced on the remarks, which drew comparisons to President Barack Obama’s comments about clinging to “guns and religion” at a 2008 campaign fundraiser and Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark in 2012.

And then there was today’s partial walkback:

“Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” Clinton said in a statement in which she also vowed to call out “bigotry” in Trump’s campaign.

It’s worth reading the entire CNN article for the reactions of various people to the remarks. Trump showed his political savvy by pouncing on them; we already know he’s good at political combat. Hillary has an interesting dilemma here: how to capitalize on the white supremacist element supporting Trump without insulting the Trump voters as a whole, those she wants to win over. That’s why the “half” part of her accusation matters, and it’s why she explicitly tried to undo that part without withdrawing the charge as a whole.

There is truth in the assertion that some of Trump’s supporters are bigots. Even the right (and that includes me) has written about the phenomenon. And there is much consternation about the possibility of feeding and empowering that segment, a consternation that I share. But no one has any idea what the numbers are, and it is virtually certain it doesn’t begin to amount to half of his supporters (not that it would need to amount to half to be a dangerous element to encourage).

Saying “half” was a faux pas, and Clinton must have gotten feedback that it was or she wouldn’t have tried to take it back. Saying “half” does indeed have a similar effect that Romney’s “47%” did, and that’s not a good effect on a campaign. It is also interesting that both statements were made at fundraisers (Romney’s, however, was supposedly private). In both cases the candidates were arguing that that percentage (over 50% of Trump voters in Hillary’s case, and 47% of all voters in Romney’s) were votes that were lost to the speaker’s party. Hillary, however, went even further and said that some were “irredeemable,” and her referring to a “basket” of them has the not-altogether-subtle connotation of something to throw away.

Clinton also listed a string of types of bigotry she alleges that these Trump supporters exhibit, not just the white supremacy aspect: “Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” Let’s take them in order:

(1) racist—An obvious reference to the white supremacists. But instead of saying “white supremacists,” she says “racists” in general, which is more global and could be considered to refer to all people who voted against Obama. That was an argument that’s been used since the 2008 campaign—that any objection to Obama or his policies is by definition racist.

(2) sexist—This seems a reference to the idea (about which I wrote an entire post yesterday) that a vote against Hillary is the vote of a sexist.

(3) homophobic—I care almost nothing about Hillary’s sexuality and ordinarily don’t post speculation about it, but I’m certainly aware of the rumors, and I wonder if this remark feeds into it if some people thing she’s saying that being against her is being against gay people. Maybe yes, maybe no. But she certainly seems to be saying that being against the principles she’s now for such as gay marriage (although just a few short years ago she too said she was against it) is by definition homophobic.

(4) xenophobic and Islamophobic—Both of these charges would be an insinuation that to be against illegal immigration and amnesty or against taking in Syrian refugees is to be xenophobic. I wrote an entire post on why that is a mistaken assertion. A hardline on terrorism is also often taken to be a symptom of “Islamophobia.”

If Hillary wants to woo people over to being Hillary voters, these generalized accusations are not a good idea. Whether or not Hillary explicitly says that half of Trump’s supporters fall into these categories and are “irredeemable,” she is implying that these are common motivations for the people who may not vote for her, and that anyone who doesn’t vote for her runs the danger of falling into one of these classifications.

This works (as I wrote yesterday) when preaching to the liberal choir, which she was doing when she made the remarks at the fundraiser. But it runs the risk of alienating a lot of voters she needs to come over to her side, Independents and moderate Democrats who have been considering voting for Trump. They might resent being called “irredeemable” racists, sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and the catchall “you name it.”

No one wants to be called names. No one (or very few) wants especially to be called these names, and especially if in that person’s heart he/she knows that’s not at all the reason he/she is supporting or considering supporting Trump. Clinton tried to finesse that problem by also referring to people supporting Trump because of economic anxiety, and saying they are the ones with whom her supporters should empathize. But I don’t think that dividing Trump’s supporters neatly in half on the basis of “good guys = the economically insecure; bad guys = everyone else” does the trick, because she’s already given us that string of adjectives that could be interpreted as implicating anyone who’s against gay marriage or unrestrained immigration as a person with an evil and perhaps deplorable heart.

Clinton would do well to avoid demonizing Trump supporters (or those even considering supporting him) at all if she wants to win some of them over. If she wants to talk about this issue, she could refer only to the small but rabid group of white supremacists who also support him, emphasize their dangerousness, and leave all the rest of it out. But she can’t resist generalizing, because these accusations are memes the Democratic Party has been riding on successfully for a long time.

Trump tweeted in response:

Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!

And this tweet of Trump’s was (in my opinion) the especially smart one in the tactical sense:

While Hillary said horrible things about my supporters, and while many of her supporters will never vote for me, I still respect them all!

Whether it will end up mattering I do not know. But this exchange shows how things could start swinging in Trump’s favor.

Obama on Hillary’s qualifications

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I have to admit I’m cheating a little here, because Obama was actually talking about how wonderful he is (a topic dear to his heart), and it was before Hillary ever went to work for him as Secretary of State.

On the other hand, he was talking about Hillary. The quote appeared in this post of mine from April of 2008., and it’s from a statement Obama made in San Francisco in answer to a question about what qualifications he was looking for in a running mate:

I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I’m not as expert on. I think a lot of people assume that might be some sort of military thing to make me look more Commander-in-Chief-like. Ironically, this is an area—foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags ‘I’ve met leaders from eighty countries’–I know what those trips are like! I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then–you go.

You do that in eighty countries—you don’t know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa–knowing the leaders is not important–what I know is the people. . . .

I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college–I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . .

Of course, we all know how that’s worked out.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Go here for the greatest not all who wander are lost necklace currently available on the market and reasonably priced.

I thought that was such an odd juxtaposition—“not all who wander are lost necklace” that it seemed the usual spambot gibberish, although I’m familiar with the saying “not all who wander are lost.” But necklace? I started to wonder. Do such necklaces really exist?

And so I Googled it—and sure enough, here they are. They’re sold even on Amazon, so if you happen to be a Tolkien fan or your sweetie is and you think it’s just the thing, then here you go, you can order it through neo-neocon.

necklace

How’s that for the ability to turn a spambot into an advertising pitch for myself? Who says I’m deficient at monetizing this blog?

By the way, here’s the Tolkien poem from Lord of the Rings:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

The first line is a variant and rearrangement of the proverb “All that glitters is not gold”, known primarily from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” resulting in a proposition bearing a completely different meaning: Aragorn is vastly more important than he looks. The second line emphasizes the importance of the Rangers, suspiciously viewed as wanderers or vagabonds by those the Rangers actually protect from evil. Lines three and four emphasize the endurance of Aragorn’s royal lineage, while five and six emphasizes its renewal. They can also be seen to represent a spark of hope during a time of despair and danger.

“A spark of hope during a time of despair and danger”—not a bad token for our times.

[NOTE: Come to think of it, wouldn’t that necklace be more thoughtful if it had a real compass and not a fake one? Found one! But alas, it lacks the quote.]

Hillary and the “woman president” thing

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article by Peter Beinart in the Atlantic which is exactly the sort of thing I expected more of from liberals and the left this election cycle. It explains anti-Hillary sentiment as being motivated by the fact that she’s a woman. It’s almost exactly parallel to those articles before and during Obama’s presidency that framed objections to him as racism.

Both arguments are similar in that they dismiss the incredibly glaring flaws of each candidate (or in Obama’s case, president)—flaws that have nothing to do with race or gender—as being of no relevance in explaining what really causes all the vociferous criticism to be directed at them.

Beinart’s article captures the flavor of this sort of thing quite well:

Standard commentary about Clinton’s candidacy””which focuses on her email server, the Benghazi attack, her oratorical deficiencies, her struggles with “authenticity”””doesn’t explain the intensity of this opposition. But the academic literature about how men respond to women who assume traditionally male roles does. And it is highly disturbing.

Over the past few years, political scientists have suggested that, counterintuitively, Barack Obama’s election may have led to greater acceptance by whites of racist rhetoric. Something similar is now happening with gender. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is sparking the kind of sexist backlash that decades of research would predict. If she becomes president, that backlash could convulse American politics for years to come.

It’s no mystery what the point of this all is: to discredit the relevant arguments against Hillary (and against Obama before her) and label their opponents as sexist (Hillary’s) or racist (Obama’s). The approach is simplicity itself, really.

Does it work? I don’t know. My guess is that it’s mostly preaching to the choir.

I’ve actually been struck by how little real concern there seems to be these days about having a female president per se. That doesn’t mean that Hillary isn’t pilloried in ways that target her as a female (her sexuality, her looks, her voice, to name a few). But to me that seems to be the result of the Hillary-disapproval, not the cause of it, because there are a wealth of substantive issues and there’s plenty of history in her life that would be more than sufficient to explain about 99% of the hatred expressed towards her.

[NOTE: There’s also an interesting and somewhat parallel argument that sometimes goes on with Trump supporters making accusations towards Trump detractors. No, it’s not an allegation that they hate men in general (although I’ve read that too), but that they hate Trump in particular because he’s a macho alpha male and they are alpha-male-haters (I took up the Trump-as-alpha-male question some time ago, here).

One more thing—of course misogynists do exist who don’t want a woman president, just as there are racists who didn’t want a black president. But that hardly represents the bulk of people who have objected to and criticized either Hillary or Obama.]

A parasite is named in Obama’s honor

The New Neo Posted on by

And it’s not the first:

Baracktrema obamai isn’t just any parasite. It’s so distinctive that it represents not just a new species but an entirely new genus…

B. obamai is a flatworm that infects black marsh turtles and southeast Asian box turtles in Malaysia…[It] is able to penetrate the circulatory system of a turtle host and deposit dozens of eggs in the small blood vessels inside turtle lungs, according to the study…

The idea of naming a parasite after the 44th president of the United States came to Platt after he learned that he was the fifth cousin, twice removed, of Barack Obama, the study explained. Platt said their common relative was a man named George Frederick Toot, who lived in Middletown, Pa., from 1759 to 1815.

This isn’t the first parasite to be named in Obama’s honor. In 2012, a team of researchers from the University of New Mexico, Oklahoma State University and the University of Hamburg in Germany christened a hairworm species Paragordius obamai because it was discovered about 12 miles from where the president’s father was raised in Kenya. P. obamai infects crickets, not humans, and is the first hairworm of its type known to reproduce asexually, according to a report in the journal PLOS ONE.

Scientists have also named a fish (Etheostoma obama), a trapdoor spider (Aptostichus barackobamai), a lichen species (Caloplaca obamae) and an extinct insect-eating lizard (Obamadon gracilis) after the current commander in chief.

Lest you think this is something singular, Obama is not the only president with creatures named after him. For example, we have a beetle species named after George W. Bush:

Naming species after celebrities is one seriously effective way for scientists to draw attention to taxonomy. Giving species a famous name for more public interest is “shameless self-promotion,” says Quentin Wheeler, the director of the International Institute for Species Exploration in Arizona…

Scientists are given free rein with naming, as long as they abide by guidelines set by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. The rules for patronyms–or scientific names in honor of people–do not limit which names are used. They just provide a uniform naming method. In general, an animal species ending in ‘i’ is named after one man. The ending ‘ae’ is for species named after one woman; ‘orum’ is reserved for species named after couples. Plant species operate under slightly different rules because the gender of the species must match that of the genus.

It’s not just presidents. At the link there’s a list of famous people who have had species named after them. My favorite may just be Sylvilagus palustris hefneri, a marsh rabbit (Hugh Hefner).

Christ in the stranger’s guise

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently something reminded me of a book I had first read back in the 1980s, one I would recommend to everyone. It’s called Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, and it’s quite different from most Holocaust literature:

An important work of scholarship and a sudden clear window onto the heretofore sealed world of the Hasidic reaction to the Holocaust. Its true stories and fanciful miracle tales are a profound and often poignant insight into the souls of those who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis and who managed somehow to use that very suffering as the raw material for their renewed lives.

In other words, although the circumstances of these stories are horrific, the people telling them are by definition survivors, and they interpret what happened to them through the prism of their religious faith. According to the author, who heard the tales from Holocaust survivors living in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, these stories have been substantiated in various ways and are not fiction. But they have a mythic quality of fable that might lead some readers to believe they are embellished. I certainly don’t know for sure, but I think they are probably mostly true, and at any rate they make for remarkable and very moving reading.

The tale I was thinking of the other day is that of 16-year-old Zvi Michalowsky. The story can be found online in its entirety here, but I’ll give an excerpt from it (I suggest you read the whole thing, though; it’s short). It begins in the Lithuanian town of Eisysky, when the Nazi occupiers had summoned the 4,000 Jews of the town and marched them to pits where they would be shot (this was very early in the Holocaust in the killing campaign known as the Einsatzgruppen which I’ve written about here):

Among the Jews that September 25, 1941, in the old Jewish cemetery of Eisysky was one of the shtetl’s melamdim (teachers), Reb Michalowsky, and his youngest son, Zvi, age sixteen. Father and son were holding hands as they stood naked at the edge of the open pit, trying to comfort each other during their last moments. Young Zvi was counting the bullets and the intervals between one volley of fire and the next. As Ostrovakas and his people were aiming their guns, Zvi fell into the grave a split second before the volley of fire hit him.

He felt the bodies piling up on top of him and covering him. He felt the streams of blood around him and the trembling pile of dying bodies moving beneath him.

It became cold and dark. The shooting died down above him. Zvi made his way from under the bodies, out of the mass grave into the cold, dead night. In the distance, Zvi could hear Ostrovakas and his people singing and drinking, celebrating their great accomplishment. After 800 years, on September 26, 1941, Eisysky was Judenfrei.

At the far end of the cemetery, in the direction of the huge church, were a few Christian homes. Zvi knew them all. Naked, covered with blood, he knocked on the first door. The door opened. A peasant was holding a lamp which he had looted earlier in the day from a Jewish home. “Please let me in,” Zvi pleaded. The peasant lifted the lamp and examined the boy closely. “Jew, go back to the grave where you belong!” he shouted at Zvi and slammed the door in his face. Zvi knocked on other doors, but the response was the same.

Near the forest lived a widow whom Zvi knew too. He decided to knock on her door. The old widow opened the door. She was holding in her hand a small, burning piece of wood. ” Let me in!” begged Zvi. “Jew, go back to the grave at the old cemetery!” She chased Zvi away with the burning piece of wood as if exorcising an evil spirit, a dybbuk.

“I am your Lord, Jesus Christ. I came down from the cross. Look at me – the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent. Let me in,” said Zvi Michalowsky. The widow crossed herself and fell at his blood-stained feet. “Boze moj, Boze moj (my God, my God),” she kept crossing herself and praying. The door was opened.

Zvi walked in. He promised her that he would spare from damnation both her family and her, but only if she would keep his visit a secret for three days and three nights and not reveal it to a living soul, not even the priest. She gave Zvi food and clothing and warm water to wash himself. Before leaving the house, he once more reminded her that the Lord’s visit must remain a secret, because of His special mission on earth.

Dressed in a farmer’s clothing, with a supply of food for a few days, Zvi made his way to the nearby forest. Thus, the Jewish partisan movement was born in the vicinity of Eisysky.

This story illustrates many things, among them (if you go to the link and read the beginning) the fact that some Jews were for armed resistance, including Zvi who ended up as a partisan. It also illustrates the combination of extreme resourcefulness and luck displayed by some survivors. And although it is tempting to offer swift and self-righteous condemnation to the people who closed their doors to Zvi, how many among us would have risked our lives and especially our family members’ lives (including children’s) to save him?

When I first read that story so many years ago, it gave me the chills. The simple religious woman’s powerful faith moved me, too. And the story reminded me in turn of this ancient Gaelic rune. The first time I was introduced to it was also in the 80s; it was called to my attention by a friend who was taking a course in literature. When I read the poem I got the chills, just as with the other tale. It was something about the archaic language and the sentiment, which although Christian (and I’m not) seems to me to be a general statement about the soul dwelling in every human being:

Christ in the Stranger’s Guise

I met a stranger yest’re’een;
I put food in the eating place,
Drink in the drinking place,
Music in the listening place;
And, in the sacred name of the Triune,
He blessed myself and my house,
My cattle and my dear ones,
And the lark said in her song,
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise;
Often, often, often,
Goes the Christ in the stranger’s guise.