Newspaper Page Text
The ADVANCE, October 18, 2023/Page 6A
Stye Aiiuancg
OPINIONS
“I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his repute for the freedom to think,
And when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t’other half for the freedom to speak.”
-James Russell Lowell
editorials
I Am a Jew
By Ben Shapiro
I am a Jew.
Those have been
the words of the Jew
ish people for three
millennia.
Those were the words of the men,
women and children of Masada.
Those were the words of the followers
of Bar Kochba.
Those were the words of Jews in
Granada in 1066 and the Rhineland in
1096 and Khmelnytsky from 1648-1657
and Kishinev in 1903, in Hebron in 1929.
Those were the words of Jews in Aus
chwitz and Treblinka.
Those were the words of Daniel Pearl.
Those are my words, too.
They are the words of my parents, my
wife, my children.
Over the weekend, my people were at
tacked. Murdered. Mutilated. Our women
raped. Our children kidnapped.
This has happened millions of times
before, to millions of Jews. Jew-hatred ex
ists because evil exists. Because there are
people who have, for all of human history,
hated the Jews and sought to strike at them
while they are weak. Who have blamed the
Jews for their own problems, who have
crafted complex conspiracy theories about
the supposed power of the Jews, who have
sought to destroy the Jews.
From Pharoah to Haman. From Hitler
to Hamas.
The words of the Nazis are indistin
guishable from the words of the Hamas
charter. The chain is unbroken. And for
two millennia, since the destruction of the
last Jewish dynasty in the holy land of Is
rael, those Jew-haters were ascendant.
No longer. That is the promise of the
State of Israel.
Never again.
The Jews will not stand by and be mur
dered. They will not leave their Biblical
homeland. They will not surrender. They
will be strong and courageous, as Joshua
said three thousand years ago.
Israel is indispensable. Its presence is a
miracle, its strength a gift.
Thank God for the State of Israel.
There are those who say that anti-Zion
ism is not antisemitism. Tell that to the
dead women and children in Sderot. Tell
that to Hamas, who proclaim in their char
ter: “Israel will exist and will continue to
exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it
obliterated others before it.”
There are those who say that the Israeli-
Arab conflict is a “cycle of violence.” Only
the morally blind and obtuse could ever say
such a thing.
Look at the videos. Look at the pic
tures.
That is what evil looks like.
LOOK.
Look, because this is what moral equiv
alence brings. Rape of women. Kidnapping
of children. Murder of hundreds of inno
cents, including full families.
For decades, we’ve been told that to
look evil in its face was somehow unsophis
ticated. That to pretend evil away was an
act of intellectual virtue. That to cater to
evil, to concede to evil, was the pathway
toward a better world. It was all a damned
lie.
LOOK.
There are those who proclaim the com
plexity of it all. Those people are fools.
What’s worse, they are enablers of evil, fel
low travelers, justifiers of the worst human
rights violations on the planet, from target
ing civilians to hiding behind them.
Do not turn away.
LOOK.
This was the worst week for Jews since
the Holocaust.
Do not turn away.
LOOK.
Look it in the face. I know that you will.
I know you will because I am a Jew, and
because I am an American.
Americans love justice. Americans love
good. Americans resonate to the book of
Psalms, that says, “Hate evil, those who love
the Lord.”
Hate evil. And fight it. Americans al
ways have, and they always will.
I know we will.
Ben Shapiro, 39, is a graduate of UCLA and
Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro
Show," and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a
three-time New York Times bestselling author; his
latest book is "The Authoritarian Moment: How
The Left Weaponized America's Institutions
Against Dissent." To find out more about Ben
Shapiro and read features by other Creators
Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate website at www.creators,
com.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM.
Scanning the Negatives
Smile! Snap!
Over decades
family pictures fun-
neled down to me
because I'd take
them. I saved them
in envelopes, then
boxes.
B e -
tween my
mother and grandmother,
many were identified and oth
ers guessed at.
An example was Margaret
McWilliams McClure, who was
bom in Antrim, Northern Ire
land, in 1813. She and her large
family migrated to America in
November of 1815, and we
know the date because her sis
ter, Mary Jane, was born on the
ship on the North Atlantic.
Margaret married Hugh
McClure and they had eleven
children, five of whom migrated to Texas,
two went to Florida.
Margaret's daughter Mary Elizabeth
“Lizzie” McClure married James Wood-
dall, who died in 1897 in Campbellton,
Georgia.
There are two pictures my mother be
lieved to be Lizzie at different ages.
The matter was settled by scanning the
pictures to reveal that the woman was
wearing the same alligator tooth necklace
in both images. It was likely a favorite gift
from one of her Florida brothers.
The oldest picture I have is of Lizzie's
grandmother Elizabeth McMillian, who
was born in Ireland in 1795 and helped her
husband, William, populate Georgia, Flor
ida, and Texas with all those McClures and
related to everybody else.
In the image she is dressed typically as
an Irish woman of that era, including a
small lace cap.
When I watch people capturing cell
phone videos and images of an event, two
things come to mind.
First, they are missing the
excitement of the moment. Sec
ond, digital images are volatile
and easily lost. Film, even video
tape, has a long life span, but
images and video stored on a
chip or as a data file are fragile.
And when was the last time you
looked at all the pictures on
your cell?
My Phillips family took
pictures of events and people.
When they couldn't take the
picture, they bought picture
post cards.
For years I wondered
what I'll eventually do with all those nega
tives. There are envelopes of film, thou
sands of frames, and I'm the only one with
an interest.
At last I found a remedy in a small
scanner ordered from Japan.
I can scan any negative I have including
color slides.
In museums and private collections,
we have a wonderful collection of images
of America beginning in the 1850's.
How we are going to gather and pre
serve America's picture book, images of
people and things now on cell phones is
anybody's guess.
joenphillips@yahoo.com
By Joe Phillips
Dear Me
Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie”
McClure wearing the
alligator tooth neck
lace.
mm
/\Q!JKTPNf^L.E
CAU^IUE
swm
FACTION.
mmn—■
Passed over for Nobel Prize
for literature again this year
Rats! Can
you believe it?
Once again I
have been
passed over for
the Nobel Prize
in Literature.
This is begin
ning to get on
my nerves.
Some guy
named Jon
Olav Fosse won it this year. As you
may know, the Nobel Committee is
located in Sweden and the award went
to a Norwegian. Am I am smelling a
little Scandinavian home cooking
here?
Admittedly a few Americans have
won over the years, like Ernest
Hemingway and William Faulkner and
— Bob Dylan? The Nobel Prize in
Literature? That’s like Pluto winning
Best of Show at the Westminster Ken
nel Club.
Maybe I should adopt the attitude
of Kandiss Taylor and refuse to con
cede. Taylor, an Appling County edu
cator, ran in the Republican guberna
torial primary against Brian Kemp in
2022 and amassed a whopping 3% of
the vote. She says the election was
rigged.
Had she been able to convince
Georgia Secretary of State Brad
Raffensperger to find her another
847,000 votes in the primary and been
elected governor, Taylor was going to
“stand up to the Luciferian Cabal” and
“bring the Satanic Regime to its knees.”
After that, maybe I could have sicced
her on the Nobel Committee. I am
having a devil of a time with that
bunch.
What did Herr Fosse do to get
what rightfully should have been
mine? According to the committee, he
was recognized for his “innovative
plays and prose which give voice to the
unsayable.”
Those guys should have checked
my email. My prose gets a lot of re
sponses that are unsayable and some
that are even unprintable. RITNOs
(Republicans in Trump’s Name Only)
think I am a Chardonnay-sipping, left-
leaning liberal weenie. Chardonnay-
sipping, left-leaning liberal weenies
think I am a rightwing subversive in
tent on overthrowing the government
and making Marjorie Taylor Greene
empress. As for me, I think both groups
share something in common. They
couldn’t spot a sense of humor with a
flashlight.
In announcing the award, Anders
Olsson, chairman of the Nobel com
mittee for literature, said of Fosse, “His
huge oeuvre, spanning a variety of
genres, comprises about 40 plays and a
wealth of novels, poetry collections,
essays, children’s books and transla
tions. Fosse blends a rootedness in the
language and nature of his Norwegian
background with artistic techniques in
the wake of modernism.” To which I
say, yada, yada, yada. My oeuvre may
not be as huge as his oeuvre but at least
I can sleep at night, knowing I’m not
blending my rootedness in the wake of
modernism. I do have my pride.
To the committee, my unblended
By Dick Yarbrough
rootedness happens to be in the lan
guage and nature of my Southern
background and if that gets your un-
derkladers in a knut, you can kiss my
majsmjol.
One of Fosse’s books described by
the committee as his magnum opus
— which I thought was a bottle of
champagne — contains no sentence
breaks (or as we pros in the trade call
it, sentence boundary disambiguation)
meaning it is not clear where sentences
begin and end. In my defense, I’ve
been doing that for years. In fact, I’m
not always sure where my thoughts
begin and end. Just ask the editor.
While Jon Olav Fosse is the fourth
Norwegian writer to get the Nobel lit
erature prize, he is the first who writes
in Nynorsk, one of the two official
written versions of the Norwegian lan
guage. I don’t know why that is such a
big deal. I write in Southern which is
the unofficial written version of all the
territory below the Mason-You-Know-
Who line. That’s a lot harder to under
stand than Nynorsk.
When we say we are going to carry
momma to the grocery store, folks
who speak English — the other unof
ficial language in our country — have
visions of us hefting the poor old lady
on our shoulders and carting her up
and down the aisles while she does her
shopping. And when we talk about fix
ing our dinner, they wonder what part
of the meal needs to be repaired? Bless
their hearts. Or as they say in Nynorsk
- Bla hjerter sine.
This is going to hurt awhile but I
am not giving up. In fact, this is really
about you. You deserve a Nobel Prize
Winner in Literature sharing his wit
and wisdom with you on these pages
each week. I feel your pain. And I
promise when I win, I will keep the $ 1
million that goes with the prize but I
will give you all the glory. After all, we
are a team.
You can reach Dick Yarbrough at
dick@dickyarbrough.com or at P.O. Box
725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.
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