Reviews for Demographic History of Massachusetts: An Original Anthology

The average rating for Demographic History of Massachusetts: An Original Anthology based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-10 00:00:00 Knut Fredrik Kopperud This book reveals the inside story of Ariel Sharon's groundbreaking law suit against Time magazine for the lies that they printed against him, accusing him of baring responsibility for the raid by Christian Phalangists into the Palestinian bases of Sabra and Shatilla. It was a case where Sharon took up not only his own cause but also the cause of Israel and the Jewish people, for many years unjustly and cruelly maligned by the world media. Sharon took legal action against Time for their lies and was victorious. We certainly need to use this precedent again, to take action against some of the media in the world today in their massive hate and blood libel campaign against Israel and the Jewish people. Of course one cannot take legal action against every vicious slur and lie against Israel in the world media, because they appear every day in thousands of sources. But I would certainly recommend a few suits against some of the more vicious anti-Israel media organizations to prove that we will and can fight back against the anti-Israel media industry. Uri Dan was by Sharon's side throughout the entire sage from the funeral of cruelly murdered Christian Lebanese patriot Bashir Gemayel, where he was alleged to have discussed avenging Gemayel's foul murder with his father Sheik Pierre Gemayel. Lebanon had long been a base for the PLO's terror network. The PLO had set up a state within a state in Lebanon, effectively occupying another people's land. They murdered tens of thousands of Christian Lebanese, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, together with the Syrians and Lebanese Muslims. The author does not in this volume mention the 1976 massacre at Damour, where hundreds of Christian Lebanese men, women and children were butchered by PLO terrorists. But many more innocents were murdered in this massacre, than in the raids by the Phalangists into Sabra and Shatilla. Of the 460 Muslims killed in Sabra and Shatilla, only 35 were women and children. 425 where men, terrorist combatants, 300 of them Palestinians and 100 of them Muslim Lebanese, the remainder being terrorist volunteers such as Iranians, Syrians and Algerians. Far less innocents died here then in Damour. And yet Damour is forgotten, while Sabra and Shatilla are forever hyped up to this day. In essence the raids into Sabra and Shatilla by the Lebanese Christians were a kind of long awaited retribution for the years of living and being subjected to genocide, under the ruthless yolk of the PLO. In the typical fashion of the left wing media in painting those who fight back against Marxist and Islamic terror as the villains, lawyer for Time, Thomas Barr accused the Gemayels and the Christian Phlangists of being "Fascists" and "murderers" and "a gang of murderers, rapists, who destroyed a way of life, who massacred civilian populations almost routinely". This in fact more accurately describes the media darlings the PLO. The Christian Phalange were defending their way of life and their people against the ethnic cleansing by the Palestinians, Muslims and Syrians. Basically the prejudice by the media against Lebanon's Christian minority is the same as the media's prejudice against Israel. They do not care about the rights of minorities in the Middle East such as minorities in the Middle East and North Africa such as the Jews, Christian Lebanese, Kurds, Druze, Berbers, Copts , Assyrians, Chaldeans, Yazidis, Black South Sudanese, Bahais, Zoroastrians etc. Sharon also defended against the libel against Israel concerning the 1953 raid by the IDF against terrorist forces based at Kibiya in 1953, another hyped up event that has been exploited for years by anti-Israel propagandists. Kibiya had been used as a base for Arab terror attacks on Israel, in which many Jewish women and children were murdered, for years. As Sharon described during the court proceedings: "Kibiya is about 20 miles northwest of Jerusalem, and about a mile and a half, maybe, from Israel's 1967 borders. It is a village a few miles from a a small Israeli town called Yahud. Between the 10th and 15th of October '53. Arab terrorists who came from Kibiya went into the small town of of Yahud and threw hand grenades onto the bedroom of an ordinary civilian family. It was a deliberate attack. A mother and her two small children were killed. One of them was a girl . Her name was Shoshanna". Sharon continued to outline attacks by Arabs into Israel in which women and children were murdered, before outlining the true events at Kibiya where terrorist bases were targeted by Israelis. The Israelis risked their own soldiers, as has happened so many times, to save Arab civilian life, checking and rechecking that there were no women and children there before taking action against the terrorists and even rescuing several Arab children, who had been caught in the crossfire, from the rubble. Compare this to the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaskai and the British bombings of Dresden, in which millions of women and children died. No army has ever been more ethical in trying to avoid the loss of innocent life than the Israelis and against an enemy that specifically targets Israeli women and children. This book significantely details the proceedings of a trial in which Sharon took a stand against the demonization of not only himself, but also of Israel and the Jewish people.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-30 00:00:00 Albert Roitfarb The eighth of the nine volumes of Father Copleston's history, this covers nineteenth and early twentieth century British philosophy, with an "epilogue" on Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers to bring it up to the present of the book. (It actually ends with an "appendix" on John Henry Newman, which lets you know where the author is coming from.) The volume begins with Bentham and the Utilitarians, followed by a few empiricists such as Herbert Spencer, and ends with Peirce, James, Dewey, Moore and Russell, in each case with related philosophers of the same "movement". In between, however, about half the book covers very minor figures, the British idealists (e.g. T.H. Greene, F.H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, etc.), who have already been totally forgotten and whom even a philosophy major would probably have to google. Copleston himself, despite his affinity as a Catholic for idealist philosophy that takes religion seriously, admits their relative unimportance, and the treatment is somewhat perfunctory and repetitious; he says almost the same thing about many of them in more or less the same words, makes the same arguments for and against, and in general if this hadn't been written before the computer era I would say he used "copy" and "paste" a good deal. The result is probably the least interesting of all the volumes. Of course, this may also be because I knew more about the later philosophers, having taken a course in Peirce, James and Dewey and read a good deal of Russell, for example, and Copleston's treatment is not as insightful as when he is talking about mediaeval or early modern philosophy. This volume especially toward the end is also full of statements that begin, "the present writer does not intent to assert. . ." and distances himself from whatever he is arguing for or against in the philosophers he is writing about; perhaps his duties as a Jesuit priest weigh more heavily when he is talking about still current ideas. In short, not as good as his earlier volumes and certainly there are better treatments of the major figures, but I am glad I read the sections on the minor ones because these are not anyone I will ever actually read, even if my lifetime should be extended by a another century or so.