Welcome to Read Between the Lines

Website of Leon Duval Blogger and Author

We live in a morse code age. Communication, even between adults, is often nothing but a symbol, an “emoji”. We are regressing, reverting to an age of hieroglyphics.  Truth however is elusive, often relative and buried within words, sounds, and images. When I read and write I look for truth by reading between the lines.

Looking back on nearly eight decades I can truly say that I have lived an interesting life. A drop out humanities student at age 19, I worked as a textile dyer, quality controller, cost accountant, professional accountant, management consultant and tertiary lecturer in the discipline of management accounting. I am also happy to say that I am still married to the same woman I first met as teenager and have two accomplished daughters who are married to accomplished husbands who gifted us with five marvelous grandchildren
I always loved reading and found history fascinating. When I retired from professional life and moved to Jerusalem, I finally had the time to devote to subjects I originally thought would be the means for earning my livelihood.
Along the way I was fortunate to be accepted as a guide for the Yad Vashem History Museum. As a result, I tend to focus a major part of my reading on Jewish history, not only the years 1939-1945, but going back over the thousands of years which are the unfolding Jewish story.
I also decided early on that I would like to tell others about interesting things I had read or was experiencing in this troubled but fascinating part of the world where we now live. I began writing a newsletter I named Yesterday Today and Tomorrow and this became a blog that appears on the platform of The Times of Israel.
I also wrote a book; it is called Read Between the Lines. You will find more information about the book and my blog below.

My first book

The Kindertransport project brought 10,000 unaccompanied German and Austrian children to Great Britain in 1939. Recent research has uncovered an inconvenient truth, many children suffered abuse, obstacles to integration when their stay became permanent, social estrangement, and forced conversions to Christianity.
One of those children, Martha Braun, was ripped from the embrace of a loving, supportive Hamburg family, and brought into the Manchester home of a first cousin. There she was subject to mental abuse, barred from attending school and made to become the household’s unpaid servant until, in her own words, “I escaped”.
The historical momentum that brought Martha to Manchester was set in motion over 100 years before her arrival. Elements within Germany began introducing a racial dimension to wide spread anti-Jewish sentiment, and the blood coursing through Jewish veins became an indelible stigma making them aliens within the society they were born into.
Martha’s story is not only about the destruction of one family, it is an insight into what can happen when society abandons the standards cementing morality into its social fabric. It is a story for today.

 

In Israel Read Between the Lines is currently only available from the author.

Enquiries should be addressed to

In North America Read Between the Lines is available from

Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.com.

In other locations Amazon is definitely distributing the book but you can also try Barnes and Noble.

If you have any difficulties in obtaining the book please communicate with the author at:

[email protected]

 

Read Between the Lines can also be purchased as an eBook from Amazon

My Blog which I confess is published infrequently is called

Yesterday Today and Tomorrow.

The title describes the subject matter, its about history and current affairs. 

At times the writing is serious but sometimes I have fun and it can be outrageous. 

The blog is published on the blog platform of The Times of Israel

Here is my latest Blog

Yesterday I went to a concert celebrating the music of the Beatles. For me it was an evening of nostalgia, for the hundreds of young children in the audience many jumping in their seats, clapping hands and swaying in time to the music, it was a happy and carefree hour and a half.

While it was fascinating to watch the music of my generation impact on 5- and 6-year-olds, it was also sad that the vision for a better world embedded in the lyrics of those songs is now but a forlorn hope. That music embraced the promise of a new era for humanity, a time of hope, of peace, of love, whatever that meant, and we debated this concept at length! On the 25th June 1967, many yesterdays ago, the Beatles sang “All you need is love” to an audience of 400 million, the song became an anthem, exhorting my generation to change the world, to make it a better place for all. Unfortunately, we failed.

So, if that was yesterday, what about today?

Today universities are frightening places, mindless thugs embrace the evil that is Hamas and Hezbollah, they chant its slogans of hate and parade its flags. The mindless thugs are so stupid, so lacking in intuition that they are incapable of understanding they have been turned into mere pawns recruited to spread radical Islam, a movement bent on destruction but masquerading as a champion for the national aspirations of a people who embrace a death cult.

It is not only in the universities; the violence of this death cult has metastasized into the streets of Western Europe, America, Canada, Australia New Zealand and South Africa. Unchecked, radical Islam is manipulating democratic privilege to destroy the cultural inheritance and freedoms that gave it refuge from the violence and suppression of the countries from which it had fled. Today, the Jews are its target, but that is only the beginning. If this cancer that is radical Islam is not totally excised and removed, it will destroy all the institutions upholding the freedoms and civilisation that were fought for, and should be cherished and protected by those who lead our Western democracies.

And today I watch with horror as the death cult that is Hamas celebrates the murders of Ariel and Kfir Bibas and their mother Shiri before handing them over to the Israel Defense Force representatives waiting to receive the bodies. Kidnapped from their home in October 2023, then taken to Gaza as hostages, 9-month-old Ariel, 4-year-old Kfir, and 32-year-old Shiri were murdered one month later. The bodies were supposed to have been handed over quietly, in private, but evil always relishes an opportunity to cause pain.

Forensic investigation has disclosed that the family was brutalized, murdered by hand, who or rather what puts its hands around the neck of a 10-month-old baby and chokes it to death. The perpetrators represent everything that is alien to our own cherished concepts of what it means to be human; we human beings celebrate life and living, this species celebrates death and dying.

And what about tomorrow, will it be more of the same?

Will we have to watch again and again as masked evil parades the coffins of our murdered people in front of the International Red Cross, masquerading the myth of how hospitable they have been to the starved physically and mentally abused hostages who yesterday had been imprisoned for 501 days.

Will the mindless thugs continue to dictate the tone of intolerance, hatred, and violence that is the reality engulfing the university campuses supposed to be fostering the next generation of leadership for our western world?

Will common sense return to dictate the policies driving public life? Is there still time to excise the cancer now inexorably destroying our western democracies; radical Islam, the fascist socialist left dedicated to creating a society that strives for mediocrity; or the radical fascism of the extreme right seeking a restoration of the Third Reich?

Will common sense prevail, will the leadership of the Western democracies finally take action and expel the evil that is radical Islam from their midst? Or will they just continue to embrace it, because it is a voting block facilitating electoral victory. Will western leadership wake up and finally understand that you cannot take a salt water crocodile to bed and cuddle up to it?

And finally, when will realisation come that Palestinian sovereignty is a myth, an elaborate con fabricated to keep millions of people in penury in order to deligitimise Jewish statehood. Since 1948 there has been opportunity after opportunity to take these people out of their wretchedness, but it has been refused. This is a classic case study of how leadership acting in its own interest took every opportunity to spit on every opportunity handed to them. The Palestinian leadership is corrupt, they have stolen billions of dollars in international aid and used it to support their own profligate lifestyles; to pay their own people to murder Israelis and become death cult martyrs; to turn their schools into factories of hate where children are taught to worship death; to manufacture rockets and build tunnels rather than build a society where their own people could lead normal fulfilling and productive lives.

I fear that the answer to all of these questions is no, the world will not understand, it is too obsessed with removing the threat the Jews pose to society. And, the inconvenient truth behind all of this. The mobs and their puppet masters beating the Palestinian drum actually don’t give a damn about the Palestinians, if they did, they would endeavor to transform them from refugees only capable of receiving handouts into a functioning community dedicating their lives to building rather than destroying. I will paraphrase a succinct observation made by Alan Dershowitz, “the only reason the mobs and puppet masters have embraced the Palestinian cause is because the Jews are on the other side”! 

Yesterday, you are so far away!