The Joy of Beethoven

By Rich Lowry

http://nypost.com

December 25, 2013

In a season of joy, it is worth dwelling on and marveling at the world’s anthem of joy, arguably the best piece of music ever written, which hasn’t lost its power to astound after nearly 200 years and, as long as there is such a thing as civilization, never will.

It is, of course, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Everyone knows the unforgettable melody of its “Ode to Joy,” the fourth movement that sets to music a poem by Friedrich Schiller. Performances of the symphony always feel like an event.

When the Berlin Wall fell, it was natural that Leonard Bernstein turned to the Ninth at the celebration.

The man who gave us this hymn of affirmation and possibility could be nasty and arrogant. But he was a towering musical genius who left to posterity incalculable gifts.

Music historian Paul Lang says of Beethoven that “there is still no department of music that does not owe him its very soul.” The great composer would have expected as much.

In all of his letters, Mozart never referred to himself as an artist. Beethoven considered himself an artist with a capital “A.” He evangelized for the importance of music in general and himself in particular.

Listening to his work, it is hard not to conclude that he got his place in the firmament exactly right.

Beethoven began composing the Ninth in 1818, when he was ­already deaf, but had thought about setting Schiller’s poem to music as far back as the early 1790s. The symphony premiered in Vienna in 1824.

The story goes that Beethoven was on stage beating the time and, with his back to the audience, couldn’t hear the applause. A singer turned him around so he could see the rapturous reaction.

The first three movements are brilliant enough — shimmering to life from nothingness at the beginning in what has been compared to the Creation story, then delivering crashing drama — but the fourth is a revelation. Soaring and haunting, it builds toward the entry of the baritone soloist: “O friends, not these tones. But rather, let us strike up more pleasant and more joyful ones.”

A chorus erupts, singing “Joy! Joy!” The singers praise “joy, beautiful spark of divinity” and tell of how “all mankind become brothers,” and exult, “Be embraced you millions/This kiss goes to the whole world.”

These sentiments, uncontroversial if not banal today, had a political point. Dismayed by the ascendancy of reaction in Europe, Beethoven meant the symphony to be an enduring expression of his faith in democracy and the brotherhood of man.

But it is more than that.

“Joy is beautiful because it provides harmony,” Schiller wrote of his poem. “It is ‘god-descended’ because all harmony is derived from the Master of Worlds and flows back to him.”

The ode declares, “Brothers — above the starry canopy/A beloved father must surely dwell.” Beethoven biographer Lewis Lockwood notes how the composer brought the religious message to the fore “as part of the great synthesis in which humanity’s ideal state can be found only by reaching toward the heavens to find God.”

It is a testament to Beethoven’s achievement that his masterpiece is familiar to the point of ubiquity — the anthem of the European Union no less — yet still ­vital.

A new documentary, “Following the Ninth,” traces its impact on people around the world. A few months ago, “60 Minutes” did a segment on a plucky, against-the-odds symphony orchestra in the desperately poor Congo.

Its rendition of the “Ninth” is ragged, but heartfelt and as moving as anything ever performed in Vienna.

The music historian Harold Schonberg writes of the Ninth Symphony, “The music is not pretty or even attractive. It is merely sublime.”

The Ode to Joy asks, “Do you sense the Creator, World?” It is the miracle of the Ninth that, at the height of its power, it almost compels the listener to answer “Yes!”

Photo: Getty Images

The sledgehammer justice of mandatory minimum sentences

By George F. Will, Published: December 25 E-mail the writer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

Federal Judge John Gleeson of the Eastern District of New York says documents called “statements of reasons” are an optional way for a judge to express “views that might be of interest.” The one he issued two months ago is still reverberating.

It expresses his dismay that although his vocation is the administration of justice, his function frequently is the infliction of injustice. The policy of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses has empowered the government to effectively nullify the constitutional right to a trial. As Lulzim Kupa learned.

Born to Albanian immigrants, he was convicted in 1999 and 2007 of distributing marijuana. Released from prison in 2010, he again engaged in trafficking, this time with enough cocaine to earn him charges involving a sentence of 10 years to life. On March 5, 2013, prosecutors offered this: In exchange for a guilty plea, he would effectively be sentenced within the range of 110 months to 137 months — but the offer would expire the next day. Kupa rejected the offer, so on March 15 prosecutors filed a “prior felony information,” a.k.a. an 851 notice, citing the two marijuana convictions. So, 10 days after saying a sentence of perhaps less than eight years (assuming good time credits) would be appropriate, prosecutors were threatening a sentence of life without parole. This gave him no incentive to plead guilty.

Then, however, they immediately proposed another plea agreement involving about nine years’ imprisonment. Given a day to decide, he acted too slowly, so prosecutors again increased the recommended sentence. Finally, Kupa caved: “I want to plead guilty, your Honor, before things get worse.” If, after the 851 notice, he had insisted on a trial and been found guilty, he would have died in prison for a nonviolent drug offense. He is 37.

Tyquan Midyett, a high school dropout from a broken home and foster care, began using marijuana at 14. He was 26 when he was arrested for selling less than four ounces of crack. Because this was his second offense, the best he could do pleading guilty was a 10-year sentence. When he hesitated, the government gave him a date to agree or it would file an 851 notice, which would double the mandatory minimum to 20 years. He went to trial, was convicted and is serving 240 months for an offense that, without the escalating coercions aimed at a guilty plea, would have received a sentence of 46 months to 57 months.

In 2008, an 851 notice was filed against Charles Doutre, based on two prior convictions for distribution of $50 worth of drugs and simple possession of drugs. The judge who was required to sentence him to life in prison said, “I’ve imposed a life sentence six times, and it was for a murder each time.” Doutre is 32.

Eleven years ago, Dennis Capps, 39, a methamphetamine addict, pleaded guilty to two instances of trafficking involving a quantity of drugs he could hold in his hand. He conquered his addiction for a long time, then relapsed, and in this year was convicted of another drug offense. Because he insisted on a trial, the government filed an 851 notice. He was convicted and is serving life without parole.

Kenneth Harvey was 24 in 1989 when he committed a crack cocaine offense. He had two prior offenses that qualified as felony drug convictions even though they were not deemed serious enough for imprisonment. They, however, enabled the government to make an 851 filing. He will die in prison. Harvey is 48.

Thousands of prisoners are serving life without parole for nonviolent crimes. Gleeson, who is neither naive nor sentimental (as a prosecutor, he sent mobster John Gotti to die in a supermax prison), knows that most defendants who plead guilty are guilty. He is, however, dismayed at the use of the threat of mandatory minimums as “sledgehammers” to extort guilty pleas, effectively vitiating the right to a trial. Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions are without trials, sparing the government the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Mere probable cause, and the meager presentation required for a grand jury indictment, suffices. “Judging is removed,” Gleeson says, “prosecutors become sentencers.” And when threats of draconian sentences compel guilty pleas, “some innocent people will plead guilty.”

Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Sens. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are questioning the regime of mandatory minimum sentences, including recidivism enhancements, that began with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. Meanwhile, the human and financial costs of mass incarceration mount.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

Ruth Marcus: Justice served on ‘stop and frisk’ and mandatory minimum policies

George W. Will: Leahy and Paul plan on mandatory sentencing makes sense

Egypt Declares Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Group

Posted By Ryan Mauro On December 26, 2013 @ 12:51 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

http://www.frontpagemag.com

The Egyptian government formally labeled the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group on Christmas, banning all of its activities including protests. The Obama Administration, advised by Brotherhood-friendly groups in the U.S., is unlikely to follow in Egypt’s footsteps in calling a spade a spade.
The announcement came after the government blamed the Brotherhood for the suicide bombing of a police station in Mansoura. No proof was offered of Brotherhood involvement. A pro-Al-Qaeda group named Ansar Jerusalem, based in the Sinai Peninsula, took credit.

That didn’t stop local protestors from immediately rallying against the Brotherhood, s effigies of the group’s leaders and attacking property owned by a Brotherhood member. The Egyptian public as a whole remainshostile to the Brotherhood and loyal to the military, with about half the population wanting the group outlawed. Another poll taken in August showed that almost 70% want it banned from politics.

The Brotherhood may or may not be involved in that specific bombing in Mansoura, but that doesn’t mean it is peaceful. It has threatened to form a rebel armed force. After the Egyptian military’s crackdown on the Brotherhood began, Egyptians outraged by the response of the U.S. government and media posted eye-opening videos showing Brotherhood members threatening violence, attacking Egyptian security forces and churches, and putting children at risk for the sake of propaganda.

In addition, Brotherhood preachers continue to instigate violence in Egypt and abroad. The organization knows what it’s doing. Why officially engage in violence when individual members and Salafist allies will do so on their own accord, leaving room for deniability?

The labeling of the group as terrorists comes as the government prosecutes former President Morsi and many other Brotherhood operatives. Morsi is accused of involvement in a “terrorist plan” begun in 2005 to send Brotherhood fighters to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for training by Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Obama Administration has decided to swim against the regional anti-Brotherhood wave, cutting aid to Egypt’s government and siding with the Brotherhood. The result is a realignment in alliances that pushes the Arab world into the arms of Russia.

It is extremely unlikely that the U.S. State Department will similarly designate the Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, even though it meets the qualifications. It is more likely that the administration will condemn Egypt’s latest action.

The State Department says there are three criteria a group must meet to be designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

First, the group must be foreign. The Brotherhood’s home base is in Egypt. Its International Organization reportedly moved to Tunisia. Turkey has become its “regional hub” and senior leaders are hosted in Qatar. Check.

Second, it must threaten U.S. nationals or national security, including the American economy. Its regional ambitions for a Caliphate undoubtedly threaten U.S. security. As for nationals, the Brotherhood has justified attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also steadfastly supports the terrorism of Hamas and other groups against U.S. allies.

In August 2012, I had an intriguing exchange with the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter account. It started off with insulting me as “delusional” and a “scaremonger.” It later posted an article arguing that it opposes violence. I asked whether there were exceptions, such as for U.S. soldiers.

“Unless if they were aggressors and invaders of our lands no matter what nationality? Of course,” was the response.

I followed up by asking if the staging country of the “aggressors and invaders” would be an acceptable target in that scenario. The answer was, “yes, according to International Law, it’s an act of war.”

Of course, the Brotherhood regularly slams the U.S. and its allies as “aggressors and invaders.” Therefore, as the Brotherhood indirectly admitted, the U.S. can be considered a legitimate target.
Thirdly, to qualify as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the group must “engage in terrorist activity or retain the capability and intention to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism.”

That’s easy. Hamas is labeled a Foreign Terrorist Organization and Hamas’s charter states that it is the Palestinian “wing” of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas changed its name in December 2011 to clarify that it is a “branch” of the Brotherhood. There is even video of Hamas leaders publicly pledging allegiance to the Brotherhood and, specifically, to its jihad.

Brotherhood apologists will argue that the group is not operationally supportive of Hamas terrorism, only ideologically. This is false. For example, the Treasury Department designated the Union of Good as a terrorist entity for financing Hamas. It is led by Yousef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Brotherhood.

Israeli aircraft have conducted numerous airstrikes on Iranian rocket shipments to the Gaza Strip through Sudan and Egypt. Hamas does not have an independent structure in Egypt. It is obvious that the Brotherhood networks in Egypt helped manage this route.

It was also proven in court that the Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure in America is guilty of terrorist activity by financing Hamas. The Holy Land Foundation was a key U.S. Muslim Brotherhood component, managed under the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee, until it was shut down in 2001 for financing Hamas.

When the Holy Land Foundation was found guilty in court in 2008, the Muslim Brotherhood was essentially found guilty. The two are one and the same.

Other U.S. Brotherhood components like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust were labeled unindicted co-conspirators in the trial. In 2009, Judge Solis upheld the labels because of “ample” evidence linking the unindicted co-conspirators to Hamas and the overall terrorism-supporting Brotherhood infrastructure.

Federal prosecutors separately confirmed the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement in terrorism in a 2007 court filing. It stated:

From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists…the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.

The Muslim Brotherhood fulfills all three requirements to be labeled a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department.

There are three reasons why this has not happened: The Brotherhood’s lobby, ignorance and fear.
The political influence of the Brotherhood lobby is enormous. President Obama even addressed the annual convention of a U.S. Brotherhood entity in September. It continues to advise the administration, just as it did the two before it. The impact can even be seen on the Department of Homeland Security.

The lobby’s influence triggers the second factor: Ignorance. Politicians, media figures, even counter-terrorism personnel are left in the dark.

Then, there’s the third factor: Fear. Designating the Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization would be messy.

Dozens of mosques and Islamic centers would be raided and the most powerful Muslim-American organizations would be shut down or, at least, publicly investigated. The outcry of “Islamophobia” would be louder than ever as news cameras repeatedly aired footage of federal agents entering mosques.

The global Brotherhood apparatus would go into anti-American overdrive and some of those refraining from violence would reconsider. It would spark outrage from Muslim governments and organizations around the world, especially from “ally” Qatar and NATO member Turkey.

None of these excuses are acceptable. If a group qualifies as a terrorist organization, it needs to be treated as such, regardless of convenience. The facts speak for themselves: The Muslim Brotherhood is a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

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Today's Tune: Johnny Cash & Family - 1977 Christmas Show [Complete]

Persecution at Christmastime

Middle Eastern Christians wonder, “If they kill us all, would Western Christians do something then?” 

By Nina Shea

http://www.nationalreview.com

December 24, 2013

During this holy season, Christians turn their thoughts to that first Christmas and to the early Christians. This year, we should prayerfully reflect on the fact that those church communities founded by Thomas, Mark, Paul, Andrew, and the other disciples of Jesus, communities that have remained faithful for 2,000 years, are now suffering mightily for their faith.

The reason is religious persecution. Christians will always be persecuted, the Scriptures tell us, but the unbearable scope of this wave is due to burgeoning extremism within some Muslim sectors. It now poses an existential threat to Middle Eastern Christians — though it is not limited to the Middle East.

At an address this month in Rome before Georgetown University’s Religious Freedom Project, Archbishop Louis Sako of Baghdad, the Chaldean Catholic patriarch of Babylon,expounded on this development:

For almost two millennia Christian communities have lived in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. . . . Unfortunately, in the 21st century Middle Eastern Christians are being severely persecuted. . . . In most of these countries, Islamist extremists see Christians as an obstacle to their plans. Some nations, dominated by extremist ideas, do not want so-called “Arab Spring” democracy. Freedom and pluralism are dangerous to them and their goals.

On December 17, Britain’s Prince Charles, after visiting Middle Eastern churches in London, made a similar point: “Christians in parts of the Middle East are being deliberately targeted by Islamist militants in a campaign of persecution.” This observation was considered so extraordinary it made headlines in Britain.

The Islamist religious-cleansing campaign is now acute in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, countries that are home to three of the four Mideastern Christian communities of significant size. New data released by the United Nations Committee for Refugees estimates that 850,000 Christians have fled Iraq since 2003, meaning that as few as 250,000 might remain. Syrian Christians have well-founded fears that this is now their fate, too. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of oppressed Egyptian Copts are hedging their bets and buying houses in Georgia, Cyprus, and the United States.

The voices of the persecuted are searing. In addition to relating the horrors they face, they frequently raise another problem, their abandonment by the West. “We feel forgotten and isolated. We sometimes wonder, if they kill us all, what would be the reaction of Christians in the West? Would they do something then?” Archbishop Sako asks.

Congress’s impassioned champion of religious freedom, Representative Frank Wolf of Virginia, speaks frequently about his own frustration that Western leaders are silent about this immense human-rights crisis. “We’re seeing the destruction of Syrian Christianity. The road to Damascus, the very road where Paul found Jesus, may be the one that passes close by Maaloula,” he emphasized in a recent conversation with me. He was referring to the historic Christian town recently laid siege by jihadists and from where a dozen Orthodox nuns were taken hostage this month.

A few days ago, I received a message from Rima Tüzün of the European Syriac Union. Like the Iraqi archbishop, she voices palpable despair:

Kidnapping, killings, ransom, rape . . . 2013 is a tragedy for Christians in Syria. All Syrians have endured great suffering and distress. The Christians, however, often had to pay with their lives for their faith. Our bishops and nuns have been kidnapped, our political leader killed by torture. After our Christian villages have been occupied, our churches have been destroyed and even mass graves were found in Saddad. Referring to latest information from December 16th: Two thousand Christians are hostages in the hands of the Islamists. On Saturday night rebels of Al-Nusra occupied the Christian city Kanaye, region Idlib. Since then, the Christian residents of Kanaya are being held hostages. The Islamists have put [to] the Christians the alternative: Islam or death. Why [is] the West just watching?

Many Middle Eastern Christians are leaving, and some are now refugees twice over. This month, my Smith College alumnae magazine features Taleen Dilanyan, a Smith sophomore majoring in chemistry. In 2006 she fled her homeland of Iraq to Syria, only to have to flee again five years later, from Syria to Massachusetts. “I’m thankful for each day that I’m living here and not having my life threatened,” she says. Like many Americans, her classmates have little awareness of the ongoing religious persecution in that part of the world and are surprised that she, or any of her compatriots, could be Christian. “People assume I’m a Muslim because I’m Iraqi,” she notes.     

It has been a hard year for Egypt’s Copts, too. My colleague Egyptian analyst Samuel Tadros concluded that last August’s mass attacks against Egyptian churches have been the single largest onslaught against the Copts in 700 years. There were other firsts as well, such as the first assault against Cairo’s St. Mark’s cathedral, seat of the Coptic pope, while inside a funeral was being held for four Copts murdered by a mob that had been incited by a rumor of blasphemy.

The Copts’ problems did not end with the military ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood government. On December 10, Bishop Angaelos of the Coptic Orthodox Church testified before the Africa Subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives that the attacks by “radical elements in society” are “increasingly disturbing” because they “are not merely on individuals but on the Christian and minority presence in its entirety.”

Eradicating the entire Christian and Jewish, Baha’i, Mandean, Yizidi, and other minority presence — this pattern has now spread beyond the Arab countries to other regions. It has been catastrophic for churches in parts of Africa. Churches of all faith traditions are deliberately targeted; Pope Francis calls this “the ecumenism of blood.”

Habila Adamu, a Christian businessman from Yobe in northern Nigeria, was the only man in his neighborhood to survive a Boko Haram massacre in 2012. Last month, brought to Washington by the Jubilee Campaign and brandishing x-rays and photos, he spoke of his ordeal to a Hudson Institute audience:

For the second time, they asked me “are you ready to die as a Christian.” And I told them, “I am ready.” But before I closed my mouth, they fired [shot] me through my nose and the bullet came out the back. I fell on the ground. The gunmen thought I was already dead . . . and cried out “Allah Akbar.” I told [my wife] that I am alive. . . . I asked her to look for help and she went out. She found that our Christian neighbors have been killed. We have one elder in my church, himself and his son were killed that night, including twelve others. . . . I am alive because God wants you to hear a message: Do everything you can to end this ruthless persecution in northern Nigeria.

 The Islamist extremist government of President Bashir, an indicted war criminal, for over two decades has visited unspeakable persecutions on the Sudanese Christians, who trace their country’s Christian origins to the biblically attested eunuch of Queen Candace (Acts: 26–27). Bashir regularly bombs Nuba Mountains civilians. In 1993, in a militant Islamization and Arabization campaign, he arranged a fatwa declaring the Nuba Muslims apostate and, along with the “infidel” Christians and traditional African believers, thus targets for death. Macram Gassis, bishop emeritus of the Catholic diocese of El Obeid, Sudan, has been a consistent voice for all the Nuba people. He writes that they “die for their languages, for their traditions, culture, and creed” and begins his prayer for blessing, “Lord Jesus, we come to you, we hold you by the hand, bruised, disfigured, maimed, and trembling by the explosions.”

Since March, in the Central African Republic, which is overwhelmingly Christian, the jihadist group Seleka has overthrown the secular government, has installed a Muslim one instead, and seeks to establish an Islamic state with the help of foreign fighters. According to international press reports, Christians have been treated mercilessly. Christian self-defense militias, called “anti-balaka” — or “anti-machete,” after the Muslim militants’ weapon of choice — formed a few months ago and engage in reprisal killings, which are condemned by the Catholic Church. In recent weeks, French- and U.S.-military-supported African Union troops have worked to quell the violence and disarm both groups. The following are excerpts adapted from letters, provided by the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need, that Abbot Dieu-Béni Mbanga, chancellor of the Catholic Archdiocese of Bangui, wrote on December 5 and 6:

Christians in the Archdiocese of Bangui went to sleep last night planning to get up today to join the diocesan pilgrimage to the Marian sanctuary at Ngukomba. It turned out very differently. The firing of weapons of war woke up all of Bangui. . . . 

By mid-morning, the parishes of St. John of Galabadja and Bangui’s Cathedral of Our Lady the Immaculate had taken in some 1,000 people. . . . The stream of people seeking shelter continued to grow in the afternoon, doubling in size, with their number tripling by nightfall. . . .
Those who have found refuge in Church buildings are not safe from bullets in the least, as attacks by Seleka militants are even penetrating these structures. . . .
The protestant church of Castors has taken in more than 1,000 people. . . . [There] a Seleka colonel named Bichara and his men entered the church and ordered only women and children to leave the church, the men having to stay inside. The men did not comply and decided to leave at the same time as the women and children. That is when Seleka forces opened fire on them, killing five men.

In a major address in November, Cardinal Timothy Dolan focused on persecuted Christians. He called for prayer and urged his listeners to “insist that our country’s leaders make the protection of at-risk Christians abroad a foreign-policy priority for the United States.”

Few have heeded his call. Representative Wolf’s bill for the creation of the office of a special envoy for religious minorities languishes in the Senate for a third year. Many more American voices — religious and political — are needed to raise awareness of this religious-freedom crisis of historic magnitude.

This Christmas, we can all do something. We can keep in mind Abbot Mbanga’s words regarding the persecuted: “I keep them in my prayers and commend them to yours: God may guard over each of them and protect them, just as He promised to all those belonging to His people: ‘The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace’” (Num. 6: 24–26).

— Nina Shea is director of Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom and co-author of Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/366956/persecution-christmastime-nina-shea

Book Review: 'No Ordinary Men,' by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern

The pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his lawyer brother-in-law worked together to resist the Nazis and help Jews escape Germany.

By 

ALEXANDER KAZAM

Dec. 18, 2013 6:42 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com

Though the Nazis never won an outright majority in the parliament of the decaying Weimar Republic, they received nearly 44% of the vote in the critical election of March 1933—a mandate that enabled Adolf Hitler's anointment as supreme leader. To some, however, the evil character of the Nazi regime was visible from the start. Among them were the young Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, the subjects of Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern's "No Ordinary Men." In this concise, engaging account, Ms. Sifton, an eminent book editor, and Mr. Stern, a distinguished historian of Germany, trace Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi's evolution from partaking in small acts of opposition to playing leading roles in the anti-Hitler resistance.

Bonhoeffer, a pastor, fought Nazi efforts to meld Protestant churches into a single "Reich Church." Dohnanyi, a lawyer in the military intelligence service, used his position to document Nazi crimes and save Jews while joining several plots to kill Hitler. Their paths of resistance intertwined when Dohnanyi recruited Bonhoeffer to the anti-Hitler conspiracy.

Born in 1906, Bonhoeffer received a strong moral and intellectual upbringing from his father, Karl, an eminent Berlin psychiatrist, and his devout mother, Paula. The family had a notable independent streak; Paula chose to home-school their eight children in their early years. ("Germans," she observed, "have their backbones broken twice in life: first in the schools, secondly in the military.") One morning in 1922, Dietrich was in school when he heard "a strange crackling" from the street. It was the assassination of Germany's Jewish foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, a crime the Bonhoeffers recognized as an omen. "Only think of the trouble we shall have later with these people," Bonhoeffer's brother Klaus wrote.

Enlarge Image

No Ordinary Men

By Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern
(New York Review Books, 157 pages, $19.95)

Dohnanyi, the son of a famous Hungarian composer, was childhood friends with the Bonhoeffers and later married one of Dietrich's sisters. While Hans began a brilliant career as a lawyer in the German civil service, Dietrich gained renown as a young theologian. Influenced by the Swiss master Karl Barth, who rejected the historicism of much academic theology and emphasized the transcendence of God across time and culture, Bonhoeffer sought to develop an account of how the Christian church could exercise leadership in an increasingly chaotic society. He finished his dissertation at 25, studied with the theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr during a year abroad in America, and began lecturing at the University of Berlin in 1931.

Two years later, Hitler barred "non-Aryans" from holding positions in the civil service, the academy or the clergy. While most church leaders dithered, the 27-year-old Dietrich published an important essay, "The Church and the Jewish Question," that subtly challenged the legitimacy of Nazi rule and argued that the church must not only help "those who have fallen beneath the wheel" but "at times halt the wheel itself."

Over the next few years, Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern write, "virtually everything he did"—co-founding a league of anti-Nazi churches, developing relationships with Jewish and Catholic communities abroad—"set him against the Nazifying church authorities." By 1936 he was banned from lecturing at the University of Berlin. He retreated to the country estate of Finkenwalde, where he continued to mentor young pastors in secret and wrote a pointed tract called "The Cost of Discipleship." Two years later Finkenwalde was shut down on Heinrich Himmler's orders.

Meanwhile, Dohnanyi had become chief assistant to the minister of justice, a post that gave him invaluable cover and access to top-secret documents. As early as 1934, he began compiling records of Nazi atrocities, storing them in a safe at an army base outside Berlin. The events of Kristallnacht on Nov. 9, 1938—a spree of riots that destroyed more than 200 synagogues and led to the arrest of more than 30,000 Jews—only increased his determination to remain at the center of the resistance.

Dohnanyi came into contact with a circle of anti-Hitler army officers, and in 1939 he became a deputy in the Abwehr (military counterintelligence), a redoubt of anti-Nazi sentiment. Hans soon brought on board Bonhoeffer, who was to use his foreign contacts to gather intelligence for the resistance. Together they coordinated a daring rescue operation—brilliantly conceived by Dohnanyi—that allowed more than a dozen Jewish refugees to escape to Switzerland using false papers. Bonhoeffer called on Swiss friends, including Karl Barth, to help secure their passage.

It wasn't long, however, before the Gestapo had the pair in its sights, as more and more evidence linked them to the rescue operation and multiple failed attempts on Hitler's life. After they were arrested in early April 1943, their resistance took another form: withstanding isolation and harsh interrogations and refusing to name names. Both men found sustenance in their Bibles. And their families provided indispensable support, sending letters and packages with hidden messages that helped them coordinate their responses to questioning. Unbowed to the last, they were finally hanged in April 1945.

Among the books and films this story has inspired, Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern's narrative stands out for its elegance, brevity and measured tone: exciting but not sensational, moving but not sentimental, erudite but not academic. It is also enriched by the authors' connections to some of its central figures and events. Ms. Sifton is the daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mr. Stern fled Nazi Germany as a child in the 1930s.

Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi are sometimes celebrated as "martyrs." But in Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern's telling, the two men never allowed themselves to speak of their sacrifices that way. In Dohnanyi's more modest formulation, they had simply taken "the path a decent person inevitably takes." And yet, as the authors soberingly conclude, "so few traveled that path—anywhere."

Mr. Kazam, a former Tikvah Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, is a student at Yale Law School.

Hiding the Hacking

If your personal info is filched from the site, the government doesn’t have to tell you. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com

December 23, 2013

Christmas shoppers were stunned to learn last Thursday that computer hackers had made off with the names and other personal info of some 40 million Target customers. Some of the pilfered information is reportedly being sold on the black market, prompting JP Morgan Chase to limit purchases and cash withdrawals on debit cards owned by recent Target shoppers.

But at least Target informed its customers of the security breach, as it is required by federal law to do. HealthCare.gov faces no such requirement; it need never notify customers that their personal information has been hacked or possibly compromised. The Department of Health and Human Services was specifically asked to include a notification requirement in the rules it designed for the health-care exchanges, but HHS declined.

The Federal Register tells the tale about what happened on March 27, 2012, at a meeting on the issue.

At that meeting, two commenters asked HHS to ensure the exchanges would promptly notify affected enrollees in the event of a data breach or unauthorized access to the exchange’s databases. One commenter suggested that a full investigation be launched each time such a breach occurred, with the goal of holding hackers legally and financially accountable for breaking into the website.

According to a report by the group Watchdog.org, HHS responded: “We do not plan to include the specific notification procedures in the final rule. Consistent with this approach, we do not include specific policies for investigation of data breaches in this final rule.” In other words, the government doesn’t have to tell you about a security breach unless it decides it wants to — despite the fact that private companies are required to publicly disclose any incidents. State laws also require many of the 14 state-run insurance exchanges to disclose such information, but no such law exists for the federally run exchange, which 36 states rely upon.

The Watchdog report notes that it’s through state laws that we’ve learned the most about security problems in the exchanges. In September, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that “an official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it had mishandled private data.” A Minnesota insurance broker received an e-mail containing a trove of confidential information on more than 2,400 people, including their Social Security numbers and business addresses. A staffer at MNsure had accidentally sent the e-mail to him. “The more I thought about it, the more troubled I was,” Jim Koester, the recipient of the data, told the Star Tribune. “What if this had fallen into the wrong hands? It’s scary.”

Last July, Dave Jones, California’s insurance commissioner and a Democrat, expressed his concerns about inadequate security processes on his state’s exchange, one of the better-run ones. If unscrupulous people get hold of Social Security numbers, health records, or other private information of consumers “we can have a real disaster on our hands,” Jones told the AP. He has declined further comment since then.

In Florida, GOP governor Rick Scott is troubled that privacy guidelines will be ignored in the rush to try to enroll his state’s 3.5 million uninsured residents. He wrote to Congress this fall expressing worry that the thousands of “navigators” hired by private groups posed a possible security threat, given that they undergo no federal background checks: “As the push for ‘navigators’ to sign up Floridians on the federal health insurance exchange becomes more frenzied, the need to safeguard the personal information Floridians submit to the ‘navigators,’ and its use in a ‘federal data hub,’ is taking on paramount importance.” The workers the federal government hired to conduct the 2010 census were fingerprinted and underwent background checks. Not so the Obamacare “navigators.”

It’s not as if the Obama administration wasn’t notified of security concerns about its website. MITRE Corporation, an HHS contractor, alerted the agency that 19 unaddressed security vulnerabilities plagued the website before its launch on October 1. Last week, Teresa Fryer, the chief information-security officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), told the House Oversight Committee that she recommended that HealthCare.gov not launch on October 1 because of serious security concerns. “My evaluation of this was a high risk,” shetold the committee in a private interview. Tony Trenkle, the project manager for the website, declined along with Fryer to sign the Authority to Operate (ATO) license needed to launch the site, which is why it had to be signed by Marilyn Tavenner, the political appointee in charge of CMS. Trenkle retired on November 13 and has declined to talk with reporters. But Fryer said her own concerns about security remain unaddressed because there have been “two high findings of risk” — the most serious warning level — in tests conducted in just the past few weeks. A CMS spokesman says both problems have been resolved.

Few cyber-security experts I spoke with for this article have much confidence that the government will quickly or competently reveal any security breaches on HealthCare.gov. On October 30, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified under oath before Congress that “no senior official reporting to me ever advised me that we should delay” the launch of the website. But Fryer told the House committee that she had personally briefed Sebelius’s top aides on her findings on September 20, ten days before the site launched. While it may be true that Fryer and Trinkle don’t report directly to Sebelius, they both declined to sign off on the ATO needed to launch the site. At best, Sebelius has demonstrated a complete inability to follow or manage the security crisis, though it’s her responsibility to do so.

According to Bruce Webster, a consultant who has advised companies for 40 years on IT issues, the administration’s policy appears to be “security through obscurity,” a largely discredited approach. He told me:

They do not want to talk about their security measures; they do not want to talk about their security breaches; they do not want to inform affected citizens of compromised personal information. Their attitude reminds me of Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine as an AT&T operator back when AT&T had a monopoly: “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Congresswoman Diane Black, a Tennessee Republican, is fed up with the obfuscation and evasion surrounding HealthCare.gov. She has introduced the “Federal Data Breach Notification Act,” which would require that the Federal Trade Commission notify anyone whose personal information has been jeopardized. “The federal government imposes these same rules on the private sector, yet they have gone out of their way to avoid imposing this basic diligence on their own Obamacare exchange,” she told me.

If the House and Senate have any basic concern for the privacy rights of Americans, they will catapult her bill onto President Obama’s desk ASAP. It is horrible news that Target’s security vulnerabilities allowed hackers to filch the names and personal information of customers. But it will be even worse if the federal government can continue to keep people in the dark about its own security breaches, leaving many Americans with big, fat targets on their backs for identity thieves.

— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.

Ideas From a Manger

By ROSS DOUTHAT

http://www.nytimes.com

December 21, 2013

Caravaggio, Nativity with Saint Lawrence and Saint Francis, 268 x 197, 1600 (San Lorenzo, Palermo, stolen in 1969)

PAUSE for a moment, in the last leg of your holiday shopping, to glance at one of the manger scenes you pass along the way. Cast your eyes across the shepherds and animals, the infant and the kings. Then try to see the scene this way: not just as a pious set-piece, but as a complete world picture — intimate, miniature and comprehensive.

Because that’s what the Christmas story really is — an entire worldview in a compact narrative, a depiction of how human beings relate to the universe and to one another. It’s about the vertical link between God and man — the angels, the star, the creator stooping to enter his creation. But it’s also about the horizontal relationships of society, because it locates transcendence in the ordinary, the commonplace, the low.

It’s easy in our own democratic era to forget how revolutionary the latter idea was. But the biblical narrative, the great critic Erich Auerbach wrote, depicted “something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life.”

And because that egalitarian idea is so powerful today, one useful — and seasonally appropriate — way to look at our divided culture’s competing worldviews is to see what each one takes from the crèche in Bethlehem.

Many Americans still take everything: They accept the New Testament as factual, believe God came in the flesh, and endorse the creeds that explain how and why that happened. And then alongside traditional Christians, there are observant Jews and Muslims who believe the same God revealed himself directly in some other historical and binding form.

But this biblical world picture is increasingly losing market share to what you might call the spiritual world picture, which keeps the theological outlines suggested by the manger scene — the divine is active in human affairs, every person is precious in God’s sight — but doesn’t sweat the details.

This is the world picture that red-staters get from Joel Osteen, blue-staters from Oprah, and everybody gets from our “God bless America” civic religion. It’s Christian-ish but syncretistic; adaptable, easygoing and egalitarian. It doesn’t care whether the angel really appeared to Mary: the important thing is that a spiritual version of that visitation could happen to anyone — including you.

Then, finally, there’s the secular world picture, relatively rare among the general public but dominant within the intelligentsia. This worldview keeps the horizontal message of the Christmas story but eliminates the vertical entirely. The stars and angels disappear: There is no God, no miracles, no incarnation. But the egalitarian message — the common person as the center of creation’s drama — remains intact, and with it the doctrines of liberty, fraternity and human rights.

As these world pictures jostle and compete, their strengths and weaknesses emerge. The biblical picture has the weight of tradition going for it, the glory of centuries of Western art, the richness of millenniums’ worth of theological speculation. But its specificity creates specific problems: how to remain loyal to biblical ethics in a commercial, sexually liberated society.

The spiritual picture lacks the biblical picture’s resources and rigor, but it makes up for them in flexibility. A doctrine challenged by science can be abandoned; a commandment that clashes with modern attitudes ignored; the problem of evil washed away in a New Age bath.

The secular picture, meanwhile, seems to have the rigor of the scientific method behind it. But it actually suffers from a deeper intellectual incoherence than either of its rivals, because its cosmology does not harmonize at all with its moral picture.

In essence, it proposes a purely physical and purposeless universe, inhabited by evolutionary accidents whose sense of self is probably illusory. And yet it then continues to insist on moral and political absolutes with all the vigor of a 17th-century New England preacher. And the rope bridges flung across this chasm — the scientific-sounding logic of utilitarianism, the Darwinian justifications for altruism — tend to waft, gently, into a logical abyss.

So there are two interesting religious questions that will probably face Americans for many Christmases to come. The first is whether biblical religion can regain some of the ground it has lost, or whether the spiritual worldview will continue to carry all before it.

The second is whether the intelligentsia’s fusion of scientific materialism and liberal egalitarianism — the crèche without the star, the shepherds’ importance without the angels’ blessing — will eventually crack up and give way to something new.

The cracks are visible, in philosophy and science alike. But the alternative is not. One can imagine possibilities: a deist revival or a pantheist turn, a new respect for biblical religion, a rebirth of the 20th century’s utopianism and will-to-power cruelty.

But for now, though a few intellectuals scan the heavens, they have yet to find their star.

I invite you to follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/DouthatNYT.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 22, 2013, on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Ideas From A Manger.