I respectfully recoil from asserting a Jewish angle in every story (although JTA effectively finds it). Although everything in HKBH”s world may unfold with a purpose to help the Jewish People to perfect our souls, not everything arises from someone thinking about “The Jews.” Edward VIII did not abdicate the throne after ten months because he was infatuated with the chance to marry a woman who had divorced a Jew. (Wallace Simpson had divorced Ernest Aldrich Simpson. His father, Ernest Louis Simpson, had changed his surname from Solomon. Always the Jews.)
This guy was a nut. He merits the privilege, by dint of his own hard efforts, of being deemed by all of us a 100% nut. He may have had an interface with an extremist hate group because they hate Latinos or African Americans or even people from the planet where Loughner perhaps thinks he comes from.
It does not help us or abet the truth to find a Jewish angle in this if there honestly is none. Giffords is a Jew because a Reform rabbi married her to an astronaut named Kelly?
This maniac, Loughner, loved Mein Kampf? Well, he also loved Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan. http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-lee-loughner-2011-1 My mind can be changed, but I am not persuaded that this is about Jews. Nor is it about American politics. It is about a nut.
It is not about the Tea Party any more than John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan because of Democrat rhetoric that demonized Reagan in the day. Hinckley wanted to impress a fictional character protrayed by Jodi Foster in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Our present maniac, Loughner, wanted to change the currency or English grammar. Really. It is like the guy who killed Allard K. Lowenstein – he had been very close to Lowenstein but became a paranoid-schizophrenic. Much as some people needed to find a Jewish angle, or blame the Republicans for prosecuting the Vietnam War in the face of Lowenstein’s principled objections, the bottom line behind Lowenstein's murder was that that his assassin was a nut. Charles Manson’s extended family did not slaughter Sharon Tate because she was married to a Jewish filmmaker.
Representative Giffords’s mother, Gloria Fraser, was a Christian Scientist. In 2001, at age 31, Giffords began identifying with the paternal side of her ethnicity. The interesting thing, though, is that her Jewish paternal-line grandfather, Akiba Hornstein, had changed the family surname to “Giffords” in order to hide their Jewish identity. Now, with Hornstein’s presumably non-Jewish granddaughter tragically shot by a nut, some in the American Jewish media race to turn her tragedy into an act of anti-Semitism. The Hornsteins can run, it seems, but they can’t hide.
Although Loughner may indeed have been motivated by anti-Jewish animus, I am skeptical. Give the crazy man his due – he is just plain insane.
Showing posts with label Media Bias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media Bias. Show all posts
Monday, January 10, 2011
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
The Flotilla of the Damned:
Who in the world runs private “supply ships” through naval blockades?
When mass murder was rampant in Rwanda, did the “International Solidarity Movement” run supply flotillas? What would Kamal Ataturk have done if a civilian flotilla were sent to Armenia while the Turks were committing genocide there? When President John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba, would anyone have tried running a flotilla through to Havana? If they had, what would the U.S. Navy have done if they refused to stop? Has anyone tried running a parade of boats to Guantanamo Bay to assure that America’s Gitmo prisoners are well provided for? If America ultimately maximizes sanctions against Iran, blockading Ahmadinejad’s ports, how will we respond to flotillas seeking to ram through?
Israel seems positioned as the target of every bully or wannabe-tough-guy who wishes to dabble in social justice. She is perceived as the kid with thick-framed glasses whose lunch money is easiest to steal. For left-anarchist groups like the International Solidarity Movement, Israel is the target for a radical-chic war game, perhaps to alleviate students’ residual stress from just-completed final exams. Many of them may have been unaware that the International Solidarity Movement is a front group created by Palestinian Arabs, funded by Palestinian Arabs, with direct ties to Arab terrorists. Even so, a hint of the flotilla’s unilaterally hostile agenda against Israel should have been apparent when ISM leaders refused a plea from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, to transmit a letter and package to him if they arrived in Gaza.
Israel disappointed the naifs who were lured by ISM as window dressing for the flotilla confrontation. Israel is a real country with real people who have real hopes for happiness and real aspirations for peace. Her borders are open to tourists. Her cafes and night clubs are vibrant and safe. People in her land – even outsiders – can think what they want, say what they want, even politically mobilize as they want. They have protests running all over the country. Try that in Iran.
When three youngsters inadvertently hike into Iranian territory, they end up in prison – and they remain incarcerated there for a year and more. Two American journalists journey into North Korea, and promptly are locked up in jail, unable to leave until an American President personally flies in to beg the country’s dictator personally to free them. An American journalist travels into Pakistan to conduct an interview and is butchered by Moslem fanatics. An American innocent goes into Iraq and gets himself beheaded by Islamofascists.
As juxtaposed against the real murderous oppressors of the world, Israel seems a safe place to bring one’s Berkeley activism onto the world scene for a week on the high seas after final exams. No one tells the American activists that those “freedom songs” the ringleaders are singing in Arabic actually are lyrics about massacring Jews. Unknown to the volunteers, the “peace activists” already have armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, slingshots and marbles, and firebombs for the real action they are planning for the cruise. Instead, the naïve board the flotilla, cheerfully thinking: “Let’s run through a naval blockade today – won’t that be fun?”
Well, no, that won’t be fun. Israel’s neighbors have forced her to learn to survive amid a sea of hostility, surrounded by more than twenty countries that want to destroy her. Her border problems are not illegal immigrants trying to run a porous fence from one side, while people on the other side bring in all these dimes that jam up vending machines. Rather, she is bordered by the worst gang of murderous cutthroats to have run a polity since, perhaps, Attila the Hun. For Hamas, death is an industry.
Hamas runs Gaza. They are so murderous that terrorists from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang have fled. The nominal “President” of the “Palestine Authority,” Mahmoud Abbas stays out of Gaza because he expects he will get butchered there if he shows up. In Gaza, the internationally outlawed Hamas terror organization rules the streets, arbitrarily tortures and takes Arab Moslem opponents off to their deaths, and rules a veritable Gangland.
Hamas came into power because Israel, in one of its idyllic moments, opted unilaterally to “take a risk for peace” and abandoned all Israeli assets and properties in Gaza, forcibly uprooted and removed all Israeli citizens resident there, even dug up deceased Jews for reburial outside Gaza, and handed Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas. He lost it soon after to the Hamas thugs, as they seized power and killed Abbas’s own terrorists. Hamas then converted the Gaza region into an armed camp.
Hamas receives international funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros – and the money goes disproportionately for weapons like the rockets that Hamas incessantly shoots into Israel. To get even more weapons, Hamas has constructed a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels beneath its border with Egypt and even taxes weapons smugglers for the privilege. They need those tunnels because even Egypt has to blockade Gaza.
Israel is compelled to blockade Gaza at this time. Countries like Syria and Iran already supply deadly military weaponry to Nasrallah’s Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Having shot at Israel everything they had in 2006, Hezbollah finally sued for a truce when she ran out of weapons. Israel was assured that an emergency United Nations peacekeeping force would enter the terrain, and Hezbollah would not be re-supplied. Yet, today, Hezbollah has restocked so completely, with the aid of Iran and Syria, that she is more heavily armed than she was in 2006.
Israel cannot control the borders throughout Lebanon and therefore is stymied in relying on the United Nations to do what the UN never could achieve. By contrast, Israel can prevent Gaza from being stockpiled similarly, and she is obligated to protect her citizens.. In January 2002, a cargo ship the Karin-A, sailed for Gaza, ostensibly loaded with civilian supplies – food, flowers, children’s books. When Israel’s navy boarded the ship in the Red Sea, they instead found the vessel loaded chock-full with rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles. That is why Israel blockades and needs to blockade Gaza.
Even so, despite nonsensical slanders against Israel, ample food supplies are evident throughout Gaza. Medical supplies get through. So do fancy restaurants and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
When college youngsters decide that it would be romantic to get out their Ché Guevara t-shirts and play “freedom fighter” – maybe even get some great cell phone photos for friends, some great tweets, and even a “How-I-Spent-My-Summer” experience to “ace” a college termpaper back home for their class in “The Politics of Liberation” – they need to understand that Israel is not on summer break.
Next time, try Darfur.
When mass murder was rampant in Rwanda, did the “International Solidarity Movement” run supply flotillas? What would Kamal Ataturk have done if a civilian flotilla were sent to Armenia while the Turks were committing genocide there? When President John F. Kennedy blockaded Cuba, would anyone have tried running a flotilla through to Havana? If they had, what would the U.S. Navy have done if they refused to stop? Has anyone tried running a parade of boats to Guantanamo Bay to assure that America’s Gitmo prisoners are well provided for? If America ultimately maximizes sanctions against Iran, blockading Ahmadinejad’s ports, how will we respond to flotillas seeking to ram through?
Israel seems positioned as the target of every bully or wannabe-tough-guy who wishes to dabble in social justice. She is perceived as the kid with thick-framed glasses whose lunch money is easiest to steal. For left-anarchist groups like the International Solidarity Movement, Israel is the target for a radical-chic war game, perhaps to alleviate students’ residual stress from just-completed final exams. Many of them may have been unaware that the International Solidarity Movement is a front group created by Palestinian Arabs, funded by Palestinian Arabs, with direct ties to Arab terrorists. Even so, a hint of the flotilla’s unilaterally hostile agenda against Israel should have been apparent when ISM leaders refused a plea from the parents of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006, to transmit a letter and package to him if they arrived in Gaza.
Israel disappointed the naifs who were lured by ISM as window dressing for the flotilla confrontation. Israel is a real country with real people who have real hopes for happiness and real aspirations for peace. Her borders are open to tourists. Her cafes and night clubs are vibrant and safe. People in her land – even outsiders – can think what they want, say what they want, even politically mobilize as they want. They have protests running all over the country. Try that in Iran.
When three youngsters inadvertently hike into Iranian territory, they end up in prison – and they remain incarcerated there for a year and more. Two American journalists journey into North Korea, and promptly are locked up in jail, unable to leave until an American President personally flies in to beg the country’s dictator personally to free them. An American journalist travels into Pakistan to conduct an interview and is butchered by Moslem fanatics. An American innocent goes into Iraq and gets himself beheaded by Islamofascists.
As juxtaposed against the real murderous oppressors of the world, Israel seems a safe place to bring one’s Berkeley activism onto the world scene for a week on the high seas after final exams. No one tells the American activists that those “freedom songs” the ringleaders are singing in Arabic actually are lyrics about massacring Jews. Unknown to the volunteers, the “peace activists” already have armed themselves with metal pipes, baseball bats, slingshots and marbles, and firebombs for the real action they are planning for the cruise. Instead, the naïve board the flotilla, cheerfully thinking: “Let’s run through a naval blockade today – won’t that be fun?”
Well, no, that won’t be fun. Israel’s neighbors have forced her to learn to survive amid a sea of hostility, surrounded by more than twenty countries that want to destroy her. Her border problems are not illegal immigrants trying to run a porous fence from one side, while people on the other side bring in all these dimes that jam up vending machines. Rather, she is bordered by the worst gang of murderous cutthroats to have run a polity since, perhaps, Attila the Hun. For Hamas, death is an industry.
Hamas runs Gaza. They are so murderous that terrorists from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah gang have fled. The nominal “President” of the “Palestine Authority,” Mahmoud Abbas stays out of Gaza because he expects he will get butchered there if he shows up. In Gaza, the internationally outlawed Hamas terror organization rules the streets, arbitrarily tortures and takes Arab Moslem opponents off to their deaths, and rules a veritable Gangland.
Hamas came into power because Israel, in one of its idyllic moments, opted unilaterally to “take a risk for peace” and abandoned all Israeli assets and properties in Gaza, forcibly uprooted and removed all Israeli citizens resident there, even dug up deceased Jews for reburial outside Gaza, and handed Gaza to Mahmoud Abbas. He lost it soon after to the Hamas thugs, as they seized power and killed Abbas’s own terrorists. Hamas then converted the Gaza region into an armed camp.
Hamas receives international funds in the hundreds of millions of dollars and euros – and the money goes disproportionately for weapons like the rockets that Hamas incessantly shoots into Israel. To get even more weapons, Hamas has constructed a labyrinth of subterranean tunnels beneath its border with Egypt and even taxes weapons smugglers for the privilege. They need those tunnels because even Egypt has to blockade Gaza.
Israel is compelled to blockade Gaza at this time. Countries like Syria and Iran already supply deadly military weaponry to Nasrallah’s Hezbollah, along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Having shot at Israel everything they had in 2006, Hezbollah finally sued for a truce when she ran out of weapons. Israel was assured that an emergency United Nations peacekeeping force would enter the terrain, and Hezbollah would not be re-supplied. Yet, today, Hezbollah has restocked so completely, with the aid of Iran and Syria, that she is more heavily armed than she was in 2006.
Israel cannot control the borders throughout Lebanon and therefore is stymied in relying on the United Nations to do what the UN never could achieve. By contrast, Israel can prevent Gaza from being stockpiled similarly, and she is obligated to protect her citizens.. In January 2002, a cargo ship the Karin-A, sailed for Gaza, ostensibly loaded with civilian supplies – food, flowers, children’s books. When Israel’s navy boarded the ship in the Red Sea, they instead found the vessel loaded chock-full with rockets, grenades, and anti-tank missiles. That is why Israel blockades and needs to blockade Gaza.
Even so, despite nonsensical slanders against Israel, ample food supplies are evident throughout Gaza. Medical supplies get through. So do fancy restaurants and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
When college youngsters decide that it would be romantic to get out their Ché Guevara t-shirts and play “freedom fighter” – maybe even get some great cell phone photos for friends, some great tweets, and even a “How-I-Spent-My-Summer” experience to “ace” a college termpaper back home for their class in “The Politics of Liberation” – they need to understand that Israel is not on summer break.
Next time, try Darfur.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
The Judicial Panel That Ordered 40,000 California Prisoners Released Was Lop-sided and Will Be Overruled
A federal judicial panel recently ordered California to release some 40,000 prisoners over the next two years, if prison medical conditions do not improve markedly. In all the reportage on the remarkable ruling, the media missed one telling point:
All three jurists on that particular panel regularly judge from the more extreme side of the liberal bench. Two of them, District Judges Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson, are Jimmy Carter appointees with long and distinguished extreme liberal records on the bench. The third, federal appellate judge Stepehen Reinhardt, is among the most extreme liberal judges on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thus, news was made when, by the luck of the draw, a judicial panel was composed of three judges way-out-left.
No media attention was paid to the probability that such an extremely one-sided panel would be declared "tilt" on appeal.
The odds are overwhelming that a more balanced federal appellate panel will overturn the extreme ruling which, if impelemented, would convert California life overnight into scenes from a horror movie. If not overruled en banc, one would expect that the panel would be overruled by an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, unless the Supreme Court denies certiorari. But this one seems too important to be left unaddressed on appeal.
All three jurists on that particular panel regularly judge from the more extreme side of the liberal bench. Two of them, District Judges Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson, are Jimmy Carter appointees with long and distinguished extreme liberal records on the bench. The third, federal appellate judge Stepehen Reinhardt, is among the most extreme liberal judges on the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thus, news was made when, by the luck of the draw, a judicial panel was composed of three judges way-out-left.
No media attention was paid to the probability that such an extremely one-sided panel would be declared "tilt" on appeal.
The odds are overwhelming that a more balanced federal appellate panel will overturn the extreme ruling which, if impelemented, would convert California life overnight into scenes from a horror movie. If not overruled en banc, one would expect that the panel would be overruled by an appeal to the United States Supreme Court, unless the Supreme Court denies certiorari. But this one seems too important to be left unaddressed on appeal.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Israeli Public Relations: Road to Nowhere and Friendly Fire in the P.R. War
It took me forty years to figure it out, but I think I finally have figured out that Israel is not going to win any PR wars. The best we can hope for is that Fox News remains the way it is, along with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Until Israel gives up Judea, Samaria, and half of Jerusalem, she will not win any PR wars. Only after she does so will she enjoy the great-and-enduring PR gains she previously has enjoyed when she showed courage and magnanimity by giving up Yamit . . . and the Sinai . . . and her toe-hold in Southern Lebanon . . . and Gaza . . . and by signing the Oslo Accords . . . and by allowing Arafat to establish a Palestinian Authority with its own independent newspapers, television and radio, and school text books.
Each of those P.R.-winning concessions turned the tide and won Israel demonstrable and enduring worldwide enthusiasm. . . . at least for a week or two.
That kind of PR boost in world attention all-too-often seems associated with pictures from Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald when the respective Allies Forces liberated the camps. That is quite a price to pay for world sympthy. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth a thousand souls?
Still, it seems useful to try to explain the truth, to try the clarify the facts, if only to give some encouragement and chizuk to those comparatively few who incline to hear the truth. There is a measure of chizuk in knowing that we are right and that the whole world is wrong. (Sure, it is better if we are right, and the whole world is equally right, and we all are in synch. But if Israel is going to stand alone among the nations of the world, it still is a nice chatzi-nechamah to know, at least, that she is right.
An effort at public relations just seems the right exercise. Much as we do kiruv r'chokim, knowing that -- even when we chart successes in bringing r'chokim to Torah -- there is so much traffic going the other direction, too. Still, one does what one must do.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the PR war is not winnable on the large scale. The nations are not motivated as much by "Right and Wrong" as they are motivated by what is best for them. Outside America, we see it everywhere. And, frankly, America has been the source that has pressured Israel to retreat from Sinai in 1956, to retreat from Yamit/Sinai/South Lebanon/Gaza, to sign Oslo, to move "kadimah" towards a "roadmap" to abandon Yehudah, Shomron, and East Yerushalayim. That is America -- Israel's best friend.
It is important that we not kid ourselves. Israel's "great friend" George W. did tremendous damage to Israel's security posture during his second term by pressuring her into insane concessions to appease oil interests, "our friends the Saudis," etc. The regular bombing of Sderot and the Hamas seizure of Gaza is the result.
But we fight the fight for truth because, oh, we may as well. Not because we will accomplish anything macrocosmic, but our friends do benefit from the truth. It helps Fox News, George Will, Cal Thomas, Mark Steyn (not Jewish), a few others among them, Martin Peretz, and Krauthammer and Jeff Jacoby to have access to truth data from which to write.
And it is a good exercise to fight for the truth. Truth muscles are rarely exercised enough.
To be sure, if we don't do it, no one else will -- least of all, the Israelis. The Israelis send us, in 99% of the cases, the most useless political hacks for their public relations. People who barely speak English (and thank G-d that they are so hard to understand!), who make the most inane arguments, people whose twenty years' dutiful service in Israel in one or another political party's inner circle, pushing papers from right to left, receive the game-show-like reward -- first prize : an appointment as an ambassador or a consul-general in America. These are people who come to an audience of the best American legislators who support Jewish rights to Yesha . . . and argue with them for an hour to modify their position to support a "Two-State Solution."
The mindless equations of israeli public relations. Never sending Ethiopian Jews to present Israel's story to African Americans.
Rarely, if ever, sending successful American olim back, with their American-accented English, to explain the case for Israel in America's mama-loshon. Instead, we are sent one after another common hack, with a thick foreign accent, with barely any concept in public relations.
Only rarely did Israel give her supporters a chance to work in America with people who spoke American English -- Golda and Bibi. Both were so successful that they became Prime Ministers. A third guy, Abba Eban, spoke English so beautifully that people who heard him supported Israel even though they (like he) barely knew what he was talking about.
The lesson: send people to America who lack clever political acumen, who barely can speak English, and with thick accents at that.
The most common causes of "friendly fire" casulaties in the PR war.
Each of those P.R.-winning concessions turned the tide and won Israel demonstrable and enduring worldwide enthusiasm. . . . at least for a week or two.
That kind of PR boost in world attention all-too-often seems associated with pictures from Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald when the respective Allies Forces liberated the camps. That is quite a price to pay for world sympthy. One picture may be worth a thousand words, but is it worth a thousand souls?
Still, it seems useful to try to explain the truth, to try the clarify the facts, if only to give some encouragement and chizuk to those comparatively few who incline to hear the truth. There is a measure of chizuk in knowing that we are right and that the whole world is wrong. (Sure, it is better if we are right, and the whole world is equally right, and we all are in synch. But if Israel is going to stand alone among the nations of the world, it still is a nice chatzi-nechamah to know, at least, that she is right.
An effort at public relations just seems the right exercise. Much as we do kiruv r'chokim, knowing that -- even when we chart successes in bringing r'chokim to Torah -- there is so much traffic going the other direction, too. Still, one does what one must do.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the PR war is not winnable on the large scale. The nations are not motivated as much by "Right and Wrong" as they are motivated by what is best for them. Outside America, we see it everywhere. And, frankly, America has been the source that has pressured Israel to retreat from Sinai in 1956, to retreat from Yamit/Sinai/South Lebanon/Gaza, to sign Oslo, to move "kadimah" towards a "roadmap" to abandon Yehudah, Shomron, and East Yerushalayim. That is America -- Israel's best friend.
It is important that we not kid ourselves. Israel's "great friend" George W. did tremendous damage to Israel's security posture during his second term by pressuring her into insane concessions to appease oil interests, "our friends the Saudis," etc. The regular bombing of Sderot and the Hamas seizure of Gaza is the result.
But we fight the fight for truth because, oh, we may as well. Not because we will accomplish anything macrocosmic, but our friends do benefit from the truth. It helps Fox News, George Will, Cal Thomas, Mark Steyn (not Jewish), a few others among them, Martin Peretz, and Krauthammer and Jeff Jacoby to have access to truth data from which to write.
And it is a good exercise to fight for the truth. Truth muscles are rarely exercised enough.
To be sure, if we don't do it, no one else will -- least of all, the Israelis. The Israelis send us, in 99% of the cases, the most useless political hacks for their public relations. People who barely speak English (and thank G-d that they are so hard to understand!), who make the most inane arguments, people whose twenty years' dutiful service in Israel in one or another political party's inner circle, pushing papers from right to left, receive the game-show-like reward -- first prize : an appointment as an ambassador or a consul-general in America. These are people who come to an audience of the best American legislators who support Jewish rights to Yesha . . . and argue with them for an hour to modify their position to support a "Two-State Solution."
The mindless equations of israeli public relations. Never sending Ethiopian Jews to present Israel's story to African Americans.
Rarely, if ever, sending successful American olim back, with their American-accented English, to explain the case for Israel in America's mama-loshon. Instead, we are sent one after another common hack, with a thick foreign accent, with barely any concept in public relations.
Only rarely did Israel give her supporters a chance to work in America with people who spoke American English -- Golda and Bibi. Both were so successful that they became Prime Ministers. A third guy, Abba Eban, spoke English so beautifully that people who heard him supported Israel even though they (like he) barely knew what he was talking about.
The lesson: send people to America who lack clever political acumen, who barely can speak English, and with thick accents at that.
The most common causes of "friendly fire" casulaties in the PR war.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Mumbai (Bombay) Massacre of Jews
Not all Jews, even the Torah-observant Jews among us, even Chassidic Jews, count themselves as Chabad Jews. There are doctrinal differences, sometimes very significant, that individuate Chabad from the larger normative Orthodox community. Particularly, there are real issues of profound halakhic significance concerning the place of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the constellation of great Torah leaders of the past generation. For an overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jews, particularly in communities where yeshivas proliferate and Torah learning dominates Orthodoxy, the roles of late Torah giants like HaRav Aharon Kotler, HaRav Moshe Feinstein, HaRav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, and HaRav Eliezer Shach – and, yibadel l’chaim, HaRav HaChacham Ovadia Yosef – overshadow the role of Rav Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Likewise, in the Chassidic world.
Nevertheless, virtually each and every one of us has been at some end-of-the-earth place where even MasterCard/Visa is not accepted, but where a Chabad House exists to provide a kosher meal, a local Jewish resting place, an address for Shabbat. No matter where in the world you are, there is a decent chance that you can catch a Mincha or a Torah reading on Shabbat morning at a local Chabad House, where one or another darling rabbinical couple will be there. When traveling through Oklahoma, my family knew it could stop for Shabbat in Oklahoma City because the local Chabad couple was hosting Shabbat meals. Others have told me their stories, from Hong Kong to Thailand. And for so many people who today are members of shuls like Young Israel of Orange County, their first step into normative Torah practice took place at a Chabad House or at a campus Chabad.
Rabbi and Rebbetzin Holtzberg and their Mumbai Chabad House were just the quintessence of that image we have. Just looking at the photos, these were such beautiful young people who had just begun their life’s journey together, contributing so powerfully at a time when more Westerners are traveling to India as participants in the burgeoning global economy. Americans, Israelis, and others travel to India when their jobs compel them to do so, and – as with those compelled by the need to earn a living by traveling occasionally to Hong Kong or other such places – there is the Chabad presence to assure that Shabbat can be celebrated, that kosher food can be found, and even (thanks to Rav Holtzberg, who also slaughtered kosher meat) that kosher meat could be had.
It is the paradox of the Jewish experience in history that we so uniquely among peoples get caught in others’ cross-fires. The Christian Crusaders, en route to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel Moslem Saracens – it had nothing to do with Jews – stopped along watering holes throughout Europe to massacre whole Jewish bystander communities. Three centuries later, as a bubonic plague took hold throughout Europe – it had nothing to do with Jews – insane justification somehow was found to murder one-third of our people there. Three centuries later, Bogdan Chmielnitzki and the Cossack Massacres reflected Cossack poverty in Eastern Europe – it had nothing to do with Jews. Three centuries later, Hitler, the Nazis, and their European confederates perpetrated the Holocaust in the aftermath of Germany’s financial collapse post-WWI. That collapse really had nothing to do with Jews; it was the result of brutally punitive terms of surrender foolishly and cruelly imposed against Germany by the victorious and imperial-colonialist British and the French.
Not to mention medieval expulsions from lands as gentle as France (1182, 1306, 1394) and England (1290), the persecutions of Mashad, the mellahs of Morocco and the ghettoes of Italy, the June 1941 Iraqi Shavuot Pogrom after the fall of the Golden Square. In all these insane outbursts of anti-Jewish hate and murder, we were pedestrians, bystanders. We had nothing to do with the issues. We were just standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change.
And now it is a dispute between Pakistani Moslems and Indian Hindus regarding suzerainty over Kashmir. It is an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with Jews. (Ask the average Jew his thoughts about Kashmir, and he will tell you that he cannot afford it and buys sweaters made from Shetland wool instead. We do not know what it is, where it is, and -- maybe the ultimate indicator -- it is so far off our radar and alien to our world that there is not even a Chabad in Kashmir.) So these horrible IslamoNazi thugs and goons perpetrated these terrible murders in Mumbai targeting Jews in general, and this wonderful young couple in particular.
From these things come many tears, but great responses come, too. We may be certain that a much bigger, much stronger, far more widely visited-and-utilized Chabad House will rise in Mumbai. We may be certain that plenty of Chabad young Rav-and-Rebbetzin couples will step forward to serve there. And we may be certain that every Jew will feel, for years to come, that she must make a pilgrimage at least once to that Chabad House, even if she has never been to Jerusalem or to Oklahoma City.
Things happen for reasons. Bad things sometimes happen for the purpose of laying foundations for great things. As Rav Avigdor Miller brings out, all of our Patriarch Yaakov’s setbacks in his relationship with Esav were necessary for the expansive formation of a Jewish People. Had Yaakov emerged from the womb first, there would have been no animus when he duly received a first-born’s bracha. Had his father, Yitzchak, had better eyesight, there would have been no animus. Had there been no animus, Yaakov would not have been compelled to flee home for Charan. If Yaakov had not fled home, then his parents presumably would have done for him as Avraham did for Yitzchak: sending out a messenger to Charan to find him a wife. The messenger would have come back with one wife, not two.
If the messenger had come back with Leah, there would have been no Rachel and no children born to Rachel: no Yosef, no sale to Egypt, no subsequent relocation of the Jewish People to Egypt for the slavery, the Aseret HaMakot (the Ten Plagues), the Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim (the Exodus), and the receiving of the Torah at Har Sinai. There also would have been no Benjamin born – so no King Saul, no Mordechai to save the Jews in Persia, no component alongside the tribes of Yehudah and Levi to comprise the Jewish People during our long Second Exile.
And if, instead, the messenger had come back with Rachel rather than Leah, there would have been no Leah-as-Wife, so no children born to Leah. Thus, no Levi, so no Moshe and no Aharon, no tribe to stand alone for G-d at the time of the Golden Calf, no Pinchas and no Eliyahu, no Chashmona’im and no Maccabees. And there would have been no Yehudah, so no Nachshon ben Aminadav to jump in first and begin Hashem’s process of splitting the Sea, no Elisheva to marry Aharon, no Calev ben Y’funeh to stand with Yehoshua for G-d’s word at the time of the m’raglim (the spies), no David HaMelekh, so no Moshiach.
But history is fact beyond "what-if." So there, in fact, was animus and hate. Yaakov came out second, and Yitzchak’s eyesight was impaired. Rivkah knew the plan because Hashem had revealed to her, but not to Yitzchak, Yaakov’s superior destiny. And, as a result, Yaakov ultimately had to flee for his life, and he ended up with two wives rather than one, along with children from Bilhah and Zilpah.
That is how setbacks work for Jews. One must wait twenty years (as during Yaakov’s sojourn with Lavan), and sometimes 200 years or even 2,000 years, to know how it all will play out. And this tragedy in Mumbai that has no words for its pain is not the final word on how the result of this incident will play out. May it be for a blessing, and may the memories of the holy martyrs, Rav and Rebbetzin Holtzberg, be for a blessing and inspiration to all of us.
Nevertheless, virtually each and every one of us has been at some end-of-the-earth place where even MasterCard/Visa is not accepted, but where a Chabad House exists to provide a kosher meal, a local Jewish resting place, an address for Shabbat. No matter where in the world you are, there is a decent chance that you can catch a Mincha or a Torah reading on Shabbat morning at a local Chabad House, where one or another darling rabbinical couple will be there. When traveling through Oklahoma, my family knew it could stop for Shabbat in Oklahoma City because the local Chabad couple was hosting Shabbat meals. Others have told me their stories, from Hong Kong to Thailand. And for so many people who today are members of shuls like Young Israel of Orange County, their first step into normative Torah practice took place at a Chabad House or at a campus Chabad.
Rabbi and Rebbetzin Holtzberg and their Mumbai Chabad House were just the quintessence of that image we have. Just looking at the photos, these were such beautiful young people who had just begun their life’s journey together, contributing so powerfully at a time when more Westerners are traveling to India as participants in the burgeoning global economy. Americans, Israelis, and others travel to India when their jobs compel them to do so, and – as with those compelled by the need to earn a living by traveling occasionally to Hong Kong or other such places – there is the Chabad presence to assure that Shabbat can be celebrated, that kosher food can be found, and even (thanks to Rav Holtzberg, who also slaughtered kosher meat) that kosher meat could be had.
It is the paradox of the Jewish experience in history that we so uniquely among peoples get caught in others’ cross-fires. The Christian Crusaders, en route to liberate the Holy Land from the infidel Moslem Saracens – it had nothing to do with Jews – stopped along watering holes throughout Europe to massacre whole Jewish bystander communities. Three centuries later, as a bubonic plague took hold throughout Europe – it had nothing to do with Jews – insane justification somehow was found to murder one-third of our people there. Three centuries later, Bogdan Chmielnitzki and the Cossack Massacres reflected Cossack poverty in Eastern Europe – it had nothing to do with Jews. Three centuries later, Hitler, the Nazis, and their European confederates perpetrated the Holocaust in the aftermath of Germany’s financial collapse post-WWI. That collapse really had nothing to do with Jews; it was the result of brutally punitive terms of surrender foolishly and cruelly imposed against Germany by the victorious and imperial-colonialist British and the French.
Not to mention medieval expulsions from lands as gentle as France (1182, 1306, 1394) and England (1290), the persecutions of Mashad, the mellahs of Morocco and the ghettoes of Italy, the June 1941 Iraqi Shavuot Pogrom after the fall of the Golden Square. In all these insane outbursts of anti-Jewish hate and murder, we were pedestrians, bystanders. We had nothing to do with the issues. We were just standing at the corner, waiting for the light to change.
And now it is a dispute between Pakistani Moslems and Indian Hindus regarding suzerainty over Kashmir. It is an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with Jews. (Ask the average Jew his thoughts about Kashmir, and he will tell you that he cannot afford it and buys sweaters made from Shetland wool instead. We do not know what it is, where it is, and -- maybe the ultimate indicator -- it is so far off our radar and alien to our world that there is not even a Chabad in Kashmir.) So these horrible IslamoNazi thugs and goons perpetrated these terrible murders in Mumbai targeting Jews in general, and this wonderful young couple in particular.
From these things come many tears, but great responses come, too. We may be certain that a much bigger, much stronger, far more widely visited-and-utilized Chabad House will rise in Mumbai. We may be certain that plenty of Chabad young Rav-and-Rebbetzin couples will step forward to serve there. And we may be certain that every Jew will feel, for years to come, that she must make a pilgrimage at least once to that Chabad House, even if she has never been to Jerusalem or to Oklahoma City.
Things happen for reasons. Bad things sometimes happen for the purpose of laying foundations for great things. As Rav Avigdor Miller brings out, all of our Patriarch Yaakov’s setbacks in his relationship with Esav were necessary for the expansive formation of a Jewish People. Had Yaakov emerged from the womb first, there would have been no animus when he duly received a first-born’s bracha. Had his father, Yitzchak, had better eyesight, there would have been no animus. Had there been no animus, Yaakov would not have been compelled to flee home for Charan. If Yaakov had not fled home, then his parents presumably would have done for him as Avraham did for Yitzchak: sending out a messenger to Charan to find him a wife. The messenger would have come back with one wife, not two.
If the messenger had come back with Leah, there would have been no Rachel and no children born to Rachel: no Yosef, no sale to Egypt, no subsequent relocation of the Jewish People to Egypt for the slavery, the Aseret HaMakot (the Ten Plagues), the Y’tzi’at Mitzrayim (the Exodus), and the receiving of the Torah at Har Sinai. There also would have been no Benjamin born – so no King Saul, no Mordechai to save the Jews in Persia, no component alongside the tribes of Yehudah and Levi to comprise the Jewish People during our long Second Exile.
And if, instead, the messenger had come back with Rachel rather than Leah, there would have been no Leah-as-Wife, so no children born to Leah. Thus, no Levi, so no Moshe and no Aharon, no tribe to stand alone for G-d at the time of the Golden Calf, no Pinchas and no Eliyahu, no Chashmona’im and no Maccabees. And there would have been no Yehudah, so no Nachshon ben Aminadav to jump in first and begin Hashem’s process of splitting the Sea, no Elisheva to marry Aharon, no Calev ben Y’funeh to stand with Yehoshua for G-d’s word at the time of the m’raglim (the spies), no David HaMelekh, so no Moshiach.
But history is fact beyond "what-if." So there, in fact, was animus and hate. Yaakov came out second, and Yitzchak’s eyesight was impaired. Rivkah knew the plan because Hashem had revealed to her, but not to Yitzchak, Yaakov’s superior destiny. And, as a result, Yaakov ultimately had to flee for his life, and he ended up with two wives rather than one, along with children from Bilhah and Zilpah.
That is how setbacks work for Jews. One must wait twenty years (as during Yaakov’s sojourn with Lavan), and sometimes 200 years or even 2,000 years, to know how it all will play out. And this tragedy in Mumbai that has no words for its pain is not the final word on how the result of this incident will play out. May it be for a blessing, and may the memories of the holy martyrs, Rav and Rebbetzin Holtzberg, be for a blessing and inspiration to all of us.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Obama's "Wonderful Young Pastor" Conducting a Sabbath Service
Maybe Not an Obama Nation -- But an Abomination: Obama's "Wonderful Young Pastor"
As you know, one of the Presidential candidates is a member of Trinity United Church in Chicago. After the Reverend Jeremiah Wright recently retired from the pulpit and into his multi-million-dollar mansion, paid for by the parishioners whom he exhorted to reject middle-class values, a new minister was named. Barack Obama has praised The Rev. Otis Moss, the new spiritual leader of the church where Obama is a member, as “a wonderful young pastor.”
I have never attended a church service. I just know what goes on in shuls. But this Youtube video of what the Reverend Otis Moss brought into his church on a recent Sunday is absolutely shocking to those of us who associate prayer services and worship with something very different. The video runs three minutes, and it is instructive beyond words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H11x6bMu4Y
As you know, one of the Presidential candidates is a member of Trinity United Church in Chicago. After the Reverend Jeremiah Wright recently retired from the pulpit and into his multi-million-dollar mansion, paid for by the parishioners whom he exhorted to reject middle-class values, a new minister was named. Barack Obama has praised The Rev. Otis Moss, the new spiritual leader of the church where Obama is a member, as “a wonderful young pastor.”
I have never attended a church service. I just know what goes on in shuls. But this Youtube video of what the Reverend Otis Moss brought into his church on a recent Sunday is absolutely shocking to those of us who associate prayer services and worship with something very different. The video runs three minutes, and it is instructive beyond words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H11x6bMu4Y
Pastor John Hagee: Thank You from a Rabbi
A media firestorm erupted last week against Pastor John Hagee of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas.
In the aftermath of revelations regarding Barack Obama’s controversial intimate relationship of twenty years with The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the media have raised questions about John McCain’s endorsement by Pastor Hagee. The media critically have reported that Pastor Hagee calls the Catholic Church a “whore” and that Pastor Hagee has justified Hitler’s Holocaust as G-d’s plan for returning the Jews to Israel. Seeking to avoid further controversy, Sen. McCain has separated himself from Pastor Hagee, and the pastor has withdrawn his endorsement to quiet the media frenzy.
In a similar vein, the media are reporting that Pastor Rod Parsley, a televangelist based in Columbus, Ohio, who also had endorsed McCain, has spoken against the Moslem religion. To avoid the media firestorm generated by an endorsement from a Protestant theologian who rejects Islam, Sen. McCain has stepped away from Pastor Parsley’s endorsement.
I have considered what Pastor Hagee has written and said. He theologically disagrees with the Catholic Church. Well, of course he does. He holds different set of beliefs. But he has never used the terminology ascribed to him by the media in the way that the media suggest. And I am buttressed in my certainty that the media have it wrong because I know Pastor Hagee's support for Israel and for the Jewish People -- and they have it so wrong on that one, too.
I have written Pastor Hagee today a brief e-mailed communication. I share with you my brief note, which appears below my signature block. I also share with you Pastor Hagee’s statement (both in his words and in his voice) – and his Church’s response – to Pastor Hagee’s public statement in response to the media frenzy. You can read and hear it at: http://www.jhm.org/ME2/Sites/dirmod.asp?sid=&type=gen&mod=Core+Pages&gid=47BEB58F9EF24337835DB74C0E0760D9&SiteID=4AC79C9B25B24DF3AF21C42311BE3921
Pastor Hagee’s message runs maybe four minutes, and I am struck particularly by the Church congregation’s impromptu response to one particular statement towards the end of his message. These are Christians in San Antonio, Texas.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
Irvine, CA 92612
http://www.ravfischer.com/
ravfischer@sbcglobal.net
In the aftermath of revelations regarding Barack Obama’s controversial intimate relationship of twenty years with The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the media have raised questions about John McCain’s endorsement by Pastor Hagee. The media critically have reported that Pastor Hagee calls the Catholic Church a “whore” and that Pastor Hagee has justified Hitler’s Holocaust as G-d’s plan for returning the Jews to Israel. Seeking to avoid further controversy, Sen. McCain has separated himself from Pastor Hagee, and the pastor has withdrawn his endorsement to quiet the media frenzy.
In a similar vein, the media are reporting that Pastor Rod Parsley, a televangelist based in Columbus, Ohio, who also had endorsed McCain, has spoken against the Moslem religion. To avoid the media firestorm generated by an endorsement from a Protestant theologian who rejects Islam, Sen. McCain has stepped away from Pastor Parsley’s endorsement.
I have considered what Pastor Hagee has written and said. He theologically disagrees with the Catholic Church. Well, of course he does. He holds different set of beliefs. But he has never used the terminology ascribed to him by the media in the way that the media suggest. And I am buttressed in my certainty that the media have it wrong because I know Pastor Hagee's support for Israel and for the Jewish People -- and they have it so wrong on that one, too.
I have written Pastor Hagee today a brief e-mailed communication. I share with you my brief note, which appears below my signature block. I also share with you Pastor Hagee’s statement (both in his words and in his voice) – and his Church’s response – to Pastor Hagee’s public statement in response to the media frenzy. You can read and hear it at: http://www.jhm.org/ME2/Sites/dirmod.asp?sid=&type=gen&mod=Core+Pages&gid=47BEB58F9EF24337835DB74C0E0760D9&SiteID=4AC79C9B25B24DF3AF21C42311BE3921
Pastor Hagee’s message runs maybe four minutes, and I am struck particularly by the Church congregation’s impromptu response to one particular statement towards the end of his message. These are Christians in San Antonio, Texas.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
Irvine, CA 92612
http://www.ravfischer.com/
ravfischer@sbcglobal.net
Dear Christians United for Israel:
I am a Jew. I am not only a Jew but a
Rabbi. I am not only a Rabbi but an Orthodox Rabbi. My rabbinical credentials
are solid, and I am established within my professional bodies, including the
Rabbinical Council of America, the Rabbinical Council of California, and the
Board of Rabbis of Orange County, California. Of course, because those bodies
include rabbis of widely divergent views on virtually all issues, I write only
for myself.
I write to express my strongest support for Pastor Hagee
during this time of pain for him, as he is criticized by a Left-inspired
communications media desperately struggling to sanitize the Obama-Wright
relationship. I understand what Pastor Hagee has said about the Holocaust and
the return of Jews to the Holy Land. I have quite different a theological "take"
on the matter, but Pastor Hagee's view actually is compatible with certain
Jewish rabbinical scholars and Torah authorities, including the author of Em
Ha-Banim S'meichah.
I understand Pastor Hagee's words. I understand
the sentiment and motivation behind his words. And I will have him in my prayers
this weekend as he endures the travails and suffering that come with an
hypocritical Left-induced media that cannot individuate between Pastor Hagee, a
loving man of G-d who speaks the truth of scriptures as he believes them, and
The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a vicious and angry hate-monger whose message of
hate against America, against Israel, and against the Jewish People is offset
only by the kind words he speaks for Louis Farrakhan and those who would damn
the land that I love.
Rabbi Dov Fischer
We're Right and The Whole World Is Wrong
We're Right, the Whole World's Wrong
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)
The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.
We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?
After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?
The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?
The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.
We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?
Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.
We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.
Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.
We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.
Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.
Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."
From The Forward (April 19, 2002)
"The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don't think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong."At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?
— Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General, speaking in Madrid, Spain
The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.
We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration?
After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us?
Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?
The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?
The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan.
Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.
We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs.
Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?
Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.
We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.
Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what.
We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria.
Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.
Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, an attorney, is a board member of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation-Council's Jewish Community Relations Committee and national vice president of the Zionist Organization of America. He is the author of "General Sharon's War Against Time Magazine."
Drill for Oil: Caribou Won't Mind; But OPEC Will
On Caribous and Freedom
From National Review Online (June 21, 2002)
An important opinion poll published this past week corroborates the revealing lyrics of the most important country music song of the past year. The implications are scary and underscore that we have nothing to fear but the knowledge of nothing itself. This national “knowledge of nothing” threatens our vital homeland security interests, our energy independence, and the future of freedom.
I fell in love with country music in 1993, during a trip from Los Angeles to Louisville. By Nevada, I was hooked on Garth Brooks. By Cheyenne, I was buying my first pair of cowboy boots. By Kentucky, I was fixated on George Jones. Through the years of my country music epiphany, Alan Jackson consistently has produced extraordinary works, mixing gorgeous melodies with down-home lyrics that speak to the soul of Middle America and reflect her character. Perhaps better than any other balladeer, he captured the essence of September 11 in his blockbuster “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” In that song, he repeats a chorus that says more than he may realize:
I’m just a singer of simple songs.I’m not a real political man.I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell youThe difference in Iraq and Iran.
The lyrics in Jackson’s chorus are striking. If there were something embarrassing in Middle America about not knowing the difference between Iraq and Iran, Jackson and his record company presumably would have omitted his confession -- or affirmation -- of ignorance.
There is particular irony in the lyricist’s choice of countries. Although Iran and Iraq are spelled almost identically, and therefore may have seemed confusingly alike to Americans forty years ago, they have emerged as two of the most evil Moslem countries. Along with Saudi Arabia's government, which raises its children to hate America viscerally and which supplied 15 of the 19 suicide bombers of September 11, Iran and Iraq despise America. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sponsored the Iranian “students” who held 52 Americans hostage for fourteen months, and Saddam Hussein has challenged our national security for a decade. Both Saddam and the deceased Khomeini symbolize Islamist hate of America. Therefore, despite the similarity in spelling Iraq and Iran, it would seem that Americans by now would know their Ayatollah from their Saddam.
Yet this past week, the Pew Research Center reported new polling results finding that only 21% of Americans follow international news closely, while fully 65% respond that they lack the background to follow overseas news. Despite September 11, Afghanistan, Arab Moslem suicide terrorists, and Kashmir, it seems that most Americans, like Alan Jackson, are not sure they can tell the difference between Iraq and Iran.
The social critic H.L. Mencken wrote that democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. However, Alan Jackson’s soul-searing song provides impressionistic confirmation that the American people do not even know what we want outside our borders and possibly lack the critical background to participate in the great debate over foreign policy. That ignorance of what lurks outside -- the knowledge of nothing -- imperils our nation. Such ignorance allowed the Democratic leadership this spring to deter legislation that would have opened a minuscule part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) region to oil drilling. Now, that same national knowledge of nothing passively abides a new suggestion in Washington to establish a “temporary” Arafat terror country in the Middle East.
We Americans consume a quantity of fuel for our home comforts, our travel, and our industry. Whether the oil is drilled in Alaska or Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia, it will be demanded and therefore drilled, causing what pollution it will cause. In ANWAR, oil exploration may -- or may not -- disrupt the Porcupine caribou, an elk-like animal, but such drilling would be intensely scrutinized and legislatively regulated. By contrast, drilling for the same quantity of demanded oil in any other oil-producing country would proceed with ecological abandon. For example, Saudi Arabia may ban Christian oil drillers from setting foot in Mecca or celebrating Christmas, but they will not enforce EPA standards.
As our nation compromises aspects of our financial and political independence, by standing on line for overpriced Saudi oil, in deference to the caribou, too many among us know preciously nothing about why we risk aspects of our security and financial independence. Ask your neighbor whether “caribou” is animal, vegetable, or mineral. Yet, by passively delimiting exploratory access to our expansive domestic oil sources without concomitantly reducing our energy demand to accommodate Tom Daschle’s concern for the caribou, we partly finance the economy of a country like Saudi Arabia that breeds in its children a deadly hatred against our civilization of freedom.
Ironically, Porcupine caribou herds have increased three-to-seven-fold since oil drilling first was authorized in the Prudhoe Bay area of Alaska. Proposed new drilling would take place only on 2,000 acres of land - an area less than 0.01 percent of ANWAR’s 19.6 million acres. The new oil production could replace thirty years of American imports from Saudi Arabia . And that is why, with Congressional by-elections set for this fall, the Bush Administration should be educating the public to understand what the Senate blocked this spring.
At the same time, maybe Washington itself needs to learn more -- about oil, about terror and freedom. It is terribly disturbing that a Republican conservative Administration, with such ostensibly sensible instincts against terror after September 11, now contemplates a proposal for creating a “temporary” terrorist country in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. If we give Arafat a country, after two years of choreographed suicide bombings starring the children he has educated with his schools, textbooks, summer camps, and communications media, we deliver to him and to all Islamists the message that suicide bombings work. That they get our attention, and they get results.
With a country of his own, Arafat would train thousands more children to murder Americans, to aspire for the glory of death while butchering a Christian or Jewish infidel. With a “temporary country,” Arafat would get a military. He could import the kinds of fifty-ton boat shipments of explosives that have been barred until now. With hundreds and thousands of pounds of C-4 plastics explosives, for example, Arafat would have enough to blow up American targets, too.
In a world of Islamist terrorist regimes like Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Libya, is the State Department concerned that we don’t have enough of them already? Do we need to create a new base for harboring and training Al Qaeda murderers? And for a President Bush who essentially warned the world to read his lips -- that, if you are not with America in fighting against terror, then you are with the terrorists -- well, haven't we learned that Americans want their President George Bushes to stand by their most solemnly uttered pledges?
For those of us Americans who merely are hummers of simple songs -- but who darn well “know the difference in Iraq and Iran” -- it ultimately devolves on us to overcome the nation’s greatest threat to homeland security: a national ignorance of foreign affairs and the blissful knowledge of nothing.
From National Review Online (June 21, 2002)
An important opinion poll published this past week corroborates the revealing lyrics of the most important country music song of the past year. The implications are scary and underscore that we have nothing to fear but the knowledge of nothing itself. This national “knowledge of nothing” threatens our vital homeland security interests, our energy independence, and the future of freedom.
I fell in love with country music in 1993, during a trip from Los Angeles to Louisville. By Nevada, I was hooked on Garth Brooks. By Cheyenne, I was buying my first pair of cowboy boots. By Kentucky, I was fixated on George Jones. Through the years of my country music epiphany, Alan Jackson consistently has produced extraordinary works, mixing gorgeous melodies with down-home lyrics that speak to the soul of Middle America and reflect her character. Perhaps better than any other balladeer, he captured the essence of September 11 in his blockbuster “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?” In that song, he repeats a chorus that says more than he may realize:
I’m just a singer of simple songs.I’m not a real political man.I watch CNN, but I’m not sure I can tell youThe difference in Iraq and Iran.
The lyrics in Jackson’s chorus are striking. If there were something embarrassing in Middle America about not knowing the difference between Iraq and Iran, Jackson and his record company presumably would have omitted his confession -- or affirmation -- of ignorance.
There is particular irony in the lyricist’s choice of countries. Although Iran and Iraq are spelled almost identically, and therefore may have seemed confusingly alike to Americans forty years ago, they have emerged as two of the most evil Moslem countries. Along with Saudi Arabia's government, which raises its children to hate America viscerally and which supplied 15 of the 19 suicide bombers of September 11, Iran and Iraq despise America. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sponsored the Iranian “students” who held 52 Americans hostage for fourteen months, and Saddam Hussein has challenged our national security for a decade. Both Saddam and the deceased Khomeini symbolize Islamist hate of America. Therefore, despite the similarity in spelling Iraq and Iran, it would seem that Americans by now would know their Ayatollah from their Saddam.
Yet this past week, the Pew Research Center reported new polling results finding that only 21% of Americans follow international news closely, while fully 65% respond that they lack the background to follow overseas news. Despite September 11, Afghanistan, Arab Moslem suicide terrorists, and Kashmir, it seems that most Americans, like Alan Jackson, are not sure they can tell the difference between Iraq and Iran.
The social critic H.L. Mencken wrote that democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. However, Alan Jackson’s soul-searing song provides impressionistic confirmation that the American people do not even know what we want outside our borders and possibly lack the critical background to participate in the great debate over foreign policy. That ignorance of what lurks outside -- the knowledge of nothing -- imperils our nation. Such ignorance allowed the Democratic leadership this spring to deter legislation that would have opened a minuscule part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) region to oil drilling. Now, that same national knowledge of nothing passively abides a new suggestion in Washington to establish a “temporary” Arafat terror country in the Middle East.
We Americans consume a quantity of fuel for our home comforts, our travel, and our industry. Whether the oil is drilled in Alaska or Saudi Arabia, Venezuela or Russia, it will be demanded and therefore drilled, causing what pollution it will cause. In ANWAR, oil exploration may -- or may not -- disrupt the Porcupine caribou, an elk-like animal, but such drilling would be intensely scrutinized and legislatively regulated. By contrast, drilling for the same quantity of demanded oil in any other oil-producing country would proceed with ecological abandon. For example, Saudi Arabia may ban Christian oil drillers from setting foot in Mecca or celebrating Christmas, but they will not enforce EPA standards.
As our nation compromises aspects of our financial and political independence, by standing on line for overpriced Saudi oil, in deference to the caribou, too many among us know preciously nothing about why we risk aspects of our security and financial independence. Ask your neighbor whether “caribou” is animal, vegetable, or mineral. Yet, by passively delimiting exploratory access to our expansive domestic oil sources without concomitantly reducing our energy demand to accommodate Tom Daschle’s concern for the caribou, we partly finance the economy of a country like Saudi Arabia that breeds in its children a deadly hatred against our civilization of freedom.
Ironically, Porcupine caribou herds have increased three-to-seven-fold since oil drilling first was authorized in the Prudhoe Bay area of Alaska. Proposed new drilling would take place only on 2,000 acres of land - an area less than 0.01 percent of ANWAR’s 19.6 million acres. The new oil production could replace thirty years of American imports from Saudi Arabia . And that is why, with Congressional by-elections set for this fall, the Bush Administration should be educating the public to understand what the Senate blocked this spring.
At the same time, maybe Washington itself needs to learn more -- about oil, about terror and freedom. It is terribly disturbing that a Republican conservative Administration, with such ostensibly sensible instincts against terror after September 11, now contemplates a proposal for creating a “temporary” terrorist country in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria. If we give Arafat a country, after two years of choreographed suicide bombings starring the children he has educated with his schools, textbooks, summer camps, and communications media, we deliver to him and to all Islamists the message that suicide bombings work. That they get our attention, and they get results.
With a country of his own, Arafat would train thousands more children to murder Americans, to aspire for the glory of death while butchering a Christian or Jewish infidel. With a “temporary country,” Arafat would get a military. He could import the kinds of fifty-ton boat shipments of explosives that have been barred until now. With hundreds and thousands of pounds of C-4 plastics explosives, for example, Arafat would have enough to blow up American targets, too.
In a world of Islamist terrorist regimes like Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Libya, is the State Department concerned that we don’t have enough of them already? Do we need to create a new base for harboring and training Al Qaeda murderers? And for a President Bush who essentially warned the world to read his lips -- that, if you are not with America in fighting against terror, then you are with the terrorists -- well, haven't we learned that Americans want their President George Bushes to stand by their most solemnly uttered pledges?
For those of us Americans who merely are hummers of simple songs -- but who darn well “know the difference in Iraq and Iran” -- it ultimately devolves on us to overcome the nation’s greatest threat to homeland security: a national ignorance of foreign affairs and the blissful knowledge of nothing.
The West Bank: A Land Without a Name
Land Without a Name: The West Bank
From National Review Online (May 23, 2002)
The recent landslide vote of the Israeli Likud party, completely rejecting an Arab country west of the Jordan River, reflects the mindset of the largest political party in Israel today. And there is good reason for that position — the land of Judea and Samaria, birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, does not necessarily belong to the Arab Islamic world.
It is instructive that the Arab world does not even have a name for the land. Think about it. "Palestine" is a name that the ancient Romans gave the Land of Israel after that now-vanished empire destroyed the last breaths of Jewish freedom in the Holy Land in 135. The Romans renamed the cities and the land to excise all memory of the stubborn Jewish patriots who had defied the empire from within the Holy Land. So, Jerusalem became Aelonia Capitolina. Shechem became Naples. (Naples later became Nablus.) And the country itself was renamed "Palestine" for the Biblical people who preceded the Jews — the Philistines.
For all the centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, long after Arabs invaded the area to conquer at the point of a sword, the land of Judea and Samaria never became an Arab territorial entity. By the 20th century, with the rise of political Zionism and the establishment by the League of Nations of a "Palestine Mandate," administered by Britain, the Jews still were the "Palestinians." Thus, the predecessor of the Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. The predecessor of the United Jewish Appeal was the United Palestine Appeal. Even the American support group for Menachem Begin's nationalist Irgun underground called itself The American League for a Free Palestine. It sounded right to 1960s film viewers when Ari ben Canaan, Paul Newman's character in Exodus, spoke of a Jewish yearning for "Palestine." That's not ancient history; it was still that way during the Kennedy years.
The Arabs have names for countries like Syria, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, Libya, and Kuwait. They even have two countries named Yemen. But through all of recorded time they never have had a name for the land of Judea and Samaria. "The West Bank"? Such a name describes Jersey City, lying on that bank of the Hudson. Santa Monica, perhaps, is a more elegant bank, east of the Pacific. And we may note Louisville, reposing on the south bank of the majestic Ohio River. These are cities, not countries.
But "The West Bank"? In 1964, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, it was eponymously created to liberate "Palestine" — namely, the country of Israel — from Haifa to Tel Aviv to the Negev. The Palestine Liberation Organization had no interest in the occupied part of the Kingdom of Jordan that lay west of the Jordan River. PLO. terrorists did not murder Jordanian children, as they did Israelis. They did not hijack Jordanian airplanes. They did not murder Jordanian Olympians. They had no interest in the land without a name. To this day, the logo of each and every Palestinian "activist" group, groups ranging from Hamas to Islamic Jihad to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Fatah, all depict the map of a "Palestine" that is identical to pre-1967 Israel — no "West Bank."
For many of the places that Yasser Arafat covets in Samaria and Judea, he uses the names of the Hebrew Bible. He claims Hebron (Genesis 23). He claims Bethlehem (Genesis 35). He claims Jericho (Joshua 5). His people burned down the Tomb of Joseph (Joshua 24). But he cannot use the Hebrew Bible's names for the land that the Christian Scriptures (Matthew 1), no less than the Torah, calls Judea — because it would sound ridiculous complaining that "the Jews have stolen Judea from the Arabs." Almost as silly as suicide bombers in Hamas calling themselves "good Samaritans."
There never — ever — has been an Arab Palestine west of the Jordan River. From 1948-1967, while Jordan's King Hussein illegally occupied the region in a temporary land grab that both the Arab and the non-Arab world rejected, no "Palestinian Arab" nation was created there. The city of Jerusalem was not elevated to any status or import. Rather, the land became desirable only after Israel liberated East Jerusalem and established itself in Judea and Samaria while fighting for its life in 1967. Indeed, as the Samaria-based Jenin refugee camp illustrates, Arabs encamped in the heart of Judea and Samaria still regard themselves as "refugees." Judea and Samaria is not their home, and their UNRWA refugee camp proclaims it. They do not want the "West Bank" for a homeland — they want a different "Palestine": Tel Aviv and Haifa.
There are now 200,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria, and another 200,000 Jews living in "Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem." They are not leaving any sooner than will the descendants of the Americanos who squatted on the Californios' land during the era of the 1849 Gold Rush. The Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo helped make the squatting in California irreversible. The Battle of the Alamo helped make the squatting in Texas irreversible. Both California and Texas came into being because brave and hearty American settlers created "illegal settlements" on "occupied land." Eventually, those illegal settlements became states in our Union. In the same way, the Likud Party Central Committee has reaffirmed that Judea and Samaria constitute the patrimonial heartland of a people that has no less right to be there than did the settlers hailing from Europe who planted themselves in Crawford, Texas.
The Likud Central Committee vote is a harbinger of a Jewish nation that is taking its patrimony off the chopping block. Perhaps Chairman Arafat should look to the Kingdom of Jordan for the land of his Palestine. That country, itself an historically recent creation, is built on 78 percent of the "Palestine Mandate." At least 1,700,000 Palestinian Arabs live in Jordan, more than in any other country. The queen is a Palestinian Arab. And the majority of all Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs. Why shouldn't King Abdullah offer territorial compromise, taking a risk for peace and making a gesture towards the queen? Yasser Arafat told President Clinton in September 1999 that he has proof there never was a Jewish Temple on the Jerusalem Temple Mount. Maybe it is time to apprise Arafat that, when he tells Americans there never were Jews at the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, he is denying not one but both prongs of our nation's Judeo-Christian heritage.
From National Review Online (May 23, 2002)
The recent landslide vote of the Israeli Likud party, completely rejecting an Arab country west of the Jordan River, reflects the mindset of the largest political party in Israel today. And there is good reason for that position — the land of Judea and Samaria, birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, does not necessarily belong to the Arab Islamic world.
It is instructive that the Arab world does not even have a name for the land. Think about it. "Palestine" is a name that the ancient Romans gave the Land of Israel after that now-vanished empire destroyed the last breaths of Jewish freedom in the Holy Land in 135. The Romans renamed the cities and the land to excise all memory of the stubborn Jewish patriots who had defied the empire from within the Holy Land. So, Jerusalem became Aelonia Capitolina. Shechem became Naples. (Naples later became Nablus.) And the country itself was renamed "Palestine" for the Biblical people who preceded the Jews — the Philistines.
For all the centuries of the Jewish Diaspora, long after Arabs invaded the area to conquer at the point of a sword, the land of Judea and Samaria never became an Arab territorial entity. By the 20th century, with the rise of political Zionism and the establishment by the League of Nations of a "Palestine Mandate," administered by Britain, the Jews still were the "Palestinians." Thus, the predecessor of the Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. The predecessor of the United Jewish Appeal was the United Palestine Appeal. Even the American support group for Menachem Begin's nationalist Irgun underground called itself The American League for a Free Palestine. It sounded right to 1960s film viewers when Ari ben Canaan, Paul Newman's character in Exodus, spoke of a Jewish yearning for "Palestine." That's not ancient history; it was still that way during the Kennedy years.
The Arabs have names for countries like Syria, Egypt, Oman, Qatar, Iraq, Libya, and Kuwait. They even have two countries named Yemen. But through all of recorded time they never have had a name for the land of Judea and Samaria. "The West Bank"? Such a name describes Jersey City, lying on that bank of the Hudson. Santa Monica, perhaps, is a more elegant bank, east of the Pacific. And we may note Louisville, reposing on the south bank of the majestic Ohio River. These are cities, not countries.
But "The West Bank"? In 1964, when the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, it was eponymously created to liberate "Palestine" — namely, the country of Israel — from Haifa to Tel Aviv to the Negev. The Palestine Liberation Organization had no interest in the occupied part of the Kingdom of Jordan that lay west of the Jordan River. PLO. terrorists did not murder Jordanian children, as they did Israelis. They did not hijack Jordanian airplanes. They did not murder Jordanian Olympians. They had no interest in the land without a name. To this day, the logo of each and every Palestinian "activist" group, groups ranging from Hamas to Islamic Jihad to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine to Fatah, all depict the map of a "Palestine" that is identical to pre-1967 Israel — no "West Bank."
For many of the places that Yasser Arafat covets in Samaria and Judea, he uses the names of the Hebrew Bible. He claims Hebron (Genesis 23). He claims Bethlehem (Genesis 35). He claims Jericho (Joshua 5). His people burned down the Tomb of Joseph (Joshua 24). But he cannot use the Hebrew Bible's names for the land that the Christian Scriptures (Matthew 1), no less than the Torah, calls Judea — because it would sound ridiculous complaining that "the Jews have stolen Judea from the Arabs." Almost as silly as suicide bombers in Hamas calling themselves "good Samaritans."
There never — ever — has been an Arab Palestine west of the Jordan River. From 1948-1967, while Jordan's King Hussein illegally occupied the region in a temporary land grab that both the Arab and the non-Arab world rejected, no "Palestinian Arab" nation was created there. The city of Jerusalem was not elevated to any status or import. Rather, the land became desirable only after Israel liberated East Jerusalem and established itself in Judea and Samaria while fighting for its life in 1967. Indeed, as the Samaria-based Jenin refugee camp illustrates, Arabs encamped in the heart of Judea and Samaria still regard themselves as "refugees." Judea and Samaria is not their home, and their UNRWA refugee camp proclaims it. They do not want the "West Bank" for a homeland — they want a different "Palestine": Tel Aviv and Haifa.
There are now 200,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria, and another 200,000 Jews living in "Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem." They are not leaving any sooner than will the descendants of the Americanos who squatted on the Californios' land during the era of the 1849 Gold Rush. The Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo helped make the squatting in California irreversible. The Battle of the Alamo helped make the squatting in Texas irreversible. Both California and Texas came into being because brave and hearty American settlers created "illegal settlements" on "occupied land." Eventually, those illegal settlements became states in our Union. In the same way, the Likud Party Central Committee has reaffirmed that Judea and Samaria constitute the patrimonial heartland of a people that has no less right to be there than did the settlers hailing from Europe who planted themselves in Crawford, Texas.
The Likud Central Committee vote is a harbinger of a Jewish nation that is taking its patrimony off the chopping block. Perhaps Chairman Arafat should look to the Kingdom of Jordan for the land of his Palestine. That country, itself an historically recent creation, is built on 78 percent of the "Palestine Mandate." At least 1,700,000 Palestinian Arabs live in Jordan, more than in any other country. The queen is a Palestinian Arab. And the majority of all Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs. Why shouldn't King Abdullah offer territorial compromise, taking a risk for peace and making a gesture towards the queen? Yasser Arafat told President Clinton in September 1999 that he has proof there never was a Jewish Temple on the Jerusalem Temple Mount. Maybe it is time to apprise Arafat that, when he tells Americans there never were Jews at the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, he is denying not one but both prongs of our nation's Judeo-Christian heritage.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Hollywood Isn't Fair to Jews Either
Counterpunch: Hollywood Isn't Fair to Jews Either
From the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 1990)
When African American filmmakers are upset about perceived inequities in Hollywood, they can blame the Jews. When a Christian (Nikos Kazantzakis) writes a sacrilegious novel about Jesus and a second Christian (Martin Scorsese) converts the book into a film, fundamentalists on the periphery still find an angle to blame the Jews.
They are lucky.
Whom shall the Jews blame for Hollywood's decades-long denigration of Jewish women and mockery of Jewish tradition? The Christians? The Japanese? The Mongolians?
Consider Hollywood's unique mistreatment of Jewish women. Michael Steadman of "thirtysomething" would not marry one. Stuart Markowitz of "L.A. Law" did not. Marty Gold, for all his Yiddish mumblings on "Anything but Love," will romance anyone but Jewish women. Even the pajama salesman portrayed by Jackie Mason, the man who wears his religion on his tongue, steered away from his TV mother's urgings to date one. (When he finally gave in, once, the Jewish woman was characterized as snorting like a pig whenever she laughed.) "Bridget Loves Bernie" was tame by comparison.
The big screen is the same. In "Exodus," Paul Newman's Ari Ben Canaan liberated Israel while romancing Eva Marie Saint's British shiksa on the side. Charles Grodin at least gives a Jewish woman a chance, marrying her in "The Heartbreak Kid," but she proves to be such a slob (she can't even eat an egg salad sandwich neatly) that he spends the rest of the film pursuing Cybill Shepherd's version of Nordic shiksa.
Robert Redford's Hubbel fares no better in "The Way We Were," suffocated by Barbra Streisand, his loud, pushy Jewish wife (who is a radical leftist to boot), struggling and finally succeeding in regaining his freedom from her clutches. Elliott Gould's story is the same in "Over the Brooklyn Bridge," as he battles off Carol Kane's sex-starved Jewish woman in favor of Margaux Hemingway's version of shiksa.
Even such sobering miniseries blockbusters as Gerald Green's "Holocaust" and Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" bear the Hollywood message. In both stories, the central Jewish family suffers annihilation in the Nazi death camps -- except for the one kin with the non-Jewish spouse.
Woody Allen's "New York Stories" vignette, to be sure, actually sees a Jewish male take a liking to a Jewish woman. But only after the canard of "The Jewish Mother" has been dragged through the mud and plastered across the sky, as she badgers her son to "make her happy" and give up the shiksa he prefers. Is Allen re-packaging "Annie Hall" -- or "Portnoy's Complaint"?
Yes, there are a few good Jewish women in the movies, so good that Jewish men deign to marry them: the women of "Fiddler on the Roof," "Hester Street," "Yentl" and "The Frisco Kid," for example. But all those films share in common an omnipresent romanticizing of an era long past, a nostalgic glimpse back to a different time and epoch. In the old days, we infer, there were such women. In the old days, tradition was, well, tradition.
But today's rabbi might just as well be the pervert in Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask)" or the Rabbi Huckelman of "Anything but Love" who plays offensive practical jokes on party-goers. When "L.A. Law" presents a man who performs ritual circumcisions, he is the butt of humor, being sued for slipping during the procedure -- a horrifying matter which neither I nor any of my rabbinic colleagues have ever encountered in our respective careers.
There has never been, not in the movies and not on television, so much as a single subplot focusing on a traditionally observant, yet culturally contemporary, Jewish family engaging modern American society, synthesizing their ancient traditions with the challenges of today. When the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of Americans who respect Jewish tradition watch "The Cosby Show" or "Amen," "A Different World" or "227," we are truly envious of our African American neighbors.
Not only do they get better treatment from Hollywood than do we. They even have a scapegoat. Whom shall we blame?
From the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 1990)
When African American filmmakers are upset about perceived inequities in Hollywood, they can blame the Jews. When a Christian (Nikos Kazantzakis) writes a sacrilegious novel about Jesus and a second Christian (Martin Scorsese) converts the book into a film, fundamentalists on the periphery still find an angle to blame the Jews.
They are lucky.
Whom shall the Jews blame for Hollywood's decades-long denigration of Jewish women and mockery of Jewish tradition? The Christians? The Japanese? The Mongolians?
Consider Hollywood's unique mistreatment of Jewish women. Michael Steadman of "thirtysomething" would not marry one. Stuart Markowitz of "L.A. Law" did not. Marty Gold, for all his Yiddish mumblings on "Anything but Love," will romance anyone but Jewish women. Even the pajama salesman portrayed by Jackie Mason, the man who wears his religion on his tongue, steered away from his TV mother's urgings to date one. (When he finally gave in, once, the Jewish woman was characterized as snorting like a pig whenever she laughed.) "Bridget Loves Bernie" was tame by comparison.
The big screen is the same. In "Exodus," Paul Newman's Ari Ben Canaan liberated Israel while romancing Eva Marie Saint's British shiksa on the side. Charles Grodin at least gives a Jewish woman a chance, marrying her in "The Heartbreak Kid," but she proves to be such a slob (she can't even eat an egg salad sandwich neatly) that he spends the rest of the film pursuing Cybill Shepherd's version of Nordic shiksa.
Robert Redford's Hubbel fares no better in "The Way We Were," suffocated by Barbra Streisand, his loud, pushy Jewish wife (who is a radical leftist to boot), struggling and finally succeeding in regaining his freedom from her clutches. Elliott Gould's story is the same in "Over the Brooklyn Bridge," as he battles off Carol Kane's sex-starved Jewish woman in favor of Margaux Hemingway's version of shiksa.
Even such sobering miniseries blockbusters as Gerald Green's "Holocaust" and Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" bear the Hollywood message. In both stories, the central Jewish family suffers annihilation in the Nazi death camps -- except for the one kin with the non-Jewish spouse.
Woody Allen's "New York Stories" vignette, to be sure, actually sees a Jewish male take a liking to a Jewish woman. But only after the canard of "The Jewish Mother" has been dragged through the mud and plastered across the sky, as she badgers her son to "make her happy" and give up the shiksa he prefers. Is Allen re-packaging "Annie Hall" -- or "Portnoy's Complaint"?
Yes, there are a few good Jewish women in the movies, so good that Jewish men deign to marry them: the women of "Fiddler on the Roof," "Hester Street," "Yentl" and "The Frisco Kid," for example. But all those films share in common an omnipresent romanticizing of an era long past, a nostalgic glimpse back to a different time and epoch. In the old days, we infer, there were such women. In the old days, tradition was, well, tradition.
But today's rabbi might just as well be the pervert in Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but Were Afraid to Ask)" or the Rabbi Huckelman of "Anything but Love" who plays offensive practical jokes on party-goers. When "L.A. Law" presents a man who performs ritual circumcisions, he is the butt of humor, being sued for slipping during the procedure -- a horrifying matter which neither I nor any of my rabbinic colleagues have ever encountered in our respective careers.
There has never been, not in the movies and not on television, so much as a single subplot focusing on a traditionally observant, yet culturally contemporary, Jewish family engaging modern American society, synthesizing their ancient traditions with the challenges of today. When the hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of Americans who respect Jewish tradition watch "The Cosby Show" or "Amen," "A Different World" or "227," we are truly envious of our African American neighbors.
Not only do they get better treatment from Hollywood than do we. They even have a scapegoat. Whom shall we blame?
Don't Call Me "Orthodox" -- Call Me "Observant"
On the Obsolescence of “Orthodoxy” and the Timeliness of “Observance”
We in the Observant community – my preferred term – historically have reflected, to our shame, a reduced sensitivity to the use of English language for transmitting values, ideas, and goals. “Colored People” started insisting on “Negro” as a transition to acknowledging a Peoplehood and abandoning an absurd term; they are not green, blue, or orange. Later, preferring to abandon the Spanish sobriquet for an American English term that paralleled the majority “White” culture, they moved to “Black.” And, for those among them who further sought to move away from defining-by-color and to define the group as an ethnic player alongside Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, and others, the term moved to “African American.” They stuck to their new term, and they have won, despite Americans’ preferences for reduced-syllabic terms.
When married and single women alike moved to “Ms.” from “Miss” and “Mrs.,” they used and revolutionized language effectively to impact on wider goals, forcing a new debate and discussion. The very term “Ms.” downgrades the importance of marriage as a defining ethic for women and has contributed, albeit in a small measure, to the societal chaos. They stuck to their guns, and they won. Similarly, homosexuals somehow persuaded society to adopt the term “gay” as both their adjective and their noun. They won, and that small change in denomination has had a profound impact on the wider discourse. With a term reminiscent of Stephen Foster lyrics and as flippant as “West Side Story”s lighter moments, the group has helped attain legislative advances in small part because it is easier to restrict homosexuals than to deny gay people. It just is.
Reform Judaism was a sophisticated term for its time in the 19th Century. It had not yet had time to be tested by time. As that ideology was tested over the next hundred years, a new self-descriptive emerged: “Progressive Judaism.” Meanwhile, “Conservative Judaism” adopted a term that, in its founding era, bore some real semblance to reality when its then-temperate agenda for change was contrasted alongside “Reform.” By today, the term is profoundly obsolete – there is nothing “conservative” about the movement, not in ideology, not in practice, not in politics – but the term effectively colors the discourse, obfuscating the reality of a movement that has adopted most of the past century’s Reform platform -- right down to questioning Ma’amad Har Sinai and, for that matter, increasingly denying even the belief that Jews were slaves in Egypt. In all fairness to the English language, "Conservative Judaism" actually is liberal Judaism. And Reform Judaism no longer is reforming anything, but progressing into new vistas.
We who observe the Torah mitzvot in the classic halakhic framework are called “Orthodox” because others who abhorred Torah Observant Judaism so denominated us. When we arrived in the West, we barely understood what they were calling us. Early immigrants from Russia during the 1881-1914 influx westward indeed seemed indistinguishable from the unshaved Eastern Orthodox Christian metropolitans whose caps are so similar to the “Chazan caps” of the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Remember the “Seinfeld” episode when George Costanza tries converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, hoping to marry a girl of that faith, and explains to the panel of clergy that he wants to join their group because he likes the hats?)
The term “Orthodox” – like “Colored People” and “Missus”-- comes from another era and defines us to our detriment in a way that withdraws the power and tool of language from our discourse. In reality, we are not “Orthodox.” If we were “Orthodox” – a word that conveys strict monolithic unilateralism – there would not be so many diverse variegations of our essence: Ashkenazic Lithuanian, Ashkenazic Hassidic (with all its multi-dimensional subgroupings), Sephardic Edot Mizrach, Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese, “Modern Orthodox,” “Black Hat,” etc. No, we are no more “Orthodox” than we are “Heterodox.”
Ultimately, as defining term for the 21st Century, we are best labeled “Observant.” That is the defining term that individuates us from “Reform” and “Conservative” and “Reconstructionist” and “Humanist” and “New Age.” Unlike all the others, we observe the Torah Laws according to the classic halakhic framework. We observe and adhere to the Shabbat laws down to the practices governing “borer.” We observe kashrut down to the practices governing Pat Yisroel (Pas Yisroel) and G’vinat Akum. We observe Taharat Hamishpakha down to the practices governing mokh dakhuk and hefsek taharah. And once we decide, across all lines of our polydoxy, as a movement of Torah Observant Jews to stop using the absurd term “Orthodox” and instead unilaterally to call ourselves “Observant,” we thereby will properly redefine in a respectful fashion the discourse with Reform/Progressive Jews, the profoundly liberal “Conservative” Jews, and all others who do not fall into the rubric of the classically halakhically Observant.
And, with the term “Observant,” the O.U. does not even have to change its logo. The Union of Observant Jewish Congregations of America. Makes sense.
We in the Observant community – my preferred term – historically have reflected, to our shame, a reduced sensitivity to the use of English language for transmitting values, ideas, and goals. “Colored People” started insisting on “Negro” as a transition to acknowledging a Peoplehood and abandoning an absurd term; they are not green, blue, or orange. Later, preferring to abandon the Spanish sobriquet for an American English term that paralleled the majority “White” culture, they moved to “Black.” And, for those among them who further sought to move away from defining-by-color and to define the group as an ethnic player alongside Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, and others, the term moved to “African American.” They stuck to their new term, and they have won, despite Americans’ preferences for reduced-syllabic terms.
When married and single women alike moved to “Ms.” from “Miss” and “Mrs.,” they used and revolutionized language effectively to impact on wider goals, forcing a new debate and discussion. The very term “Ms.” downgrades the importance of marriage as a defining ethic for women and has contributed, albeit in a small measure, to the societal chaos. They stuck to their guns, and they won. Similarly, homosexuals somehow persuaded society to adopt the term “gay” as both their adjective and their noun. They won, and that small change in denomination has had a profound impact on the wider discourse. With a term reminiscent of Stephen Foster lyrics and as flippant as “West Side Story”s lighter moments, the group has helped attain legislative advances in small part because it is easier to restrict homosexuals than to deny gay people. It just is.
Reform Judaism was a sophisticated term for its time in the 19th Century. It had not yet had time to be tested by time. As that ideology was tested over the next hundred years, a new self-descriptive emerged: “Progressive Judaism.” Meanwhile, “Conservative Judaism” adopted a term that, in its founding era, bore some real semblance to reality when its then-temperate agenda for change was contrasted alongside “Reform.” By today, the term is profoundly obsolete – there is nothing “conservative” about the movement, not in ideology, not in practice, not in politics – but the term effectively colors the discourse, obfuscating the reality of a movement that has adopted most of the past century’s Reform platform -- right down to questioning Ma’amad Har Sinai and, for that matter, increasingly denying even the belief that Jews were slaves in Egypt. In all fairness to the English language, "Conservative Judaism" actually is liberal Judaism. And Reform Judaism no longer is reforming anything, but progressing into new vistas.
We who observe the Torah mitzvot in the classic halakhic framework are called “Orthodox” because others who abhorred Torah Observant Judaism so denominated us. When we arrived in the West, we barely understood what they were calling us. Early immigrants from Russia during the 1881-1914 influx westward indeed seemed indistinguishable from the unshaved Eastern Orthodox Christian metropolitans whose caps are so similar to the “Chazan caps” of the 19th and early 20th centuries. (Remember the “Seinfeld” episode when George Costanza tries converting to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, hoping to marry a girl of that faith, and explains to the panel of clergy that he wants to join their group because he likes the hats?)
The term “Orthodox” – like “Colored People” and “Missus”-- comes from another era and defines us to our detriment in a way that withdraws the power and tool of language from our discourse. In reality, we are not “Orthodox.” If we were “Orthodox” – a word that conveys strict monolithic unilateralism – there would not be so many diverse variegations of our essence: Ashkenazic Lithuanian, Ashkenazic Hassidic (with all its multi-dimensional subgroupings), Sephardic Edot Mizrach, Sephardic Spanish-Portuguese, “Modern Orthodox,” “Black Hat,” etc. No, we are no more “Orthodox” than we are “Heterodox.”
Ultimately, as defining term for the 21st Century, we are best labeled “Observant.” That is the defining term that individuates us from “Reform” and “Conservative” and “Reconstructionist” and “Humanist” and “New Age.” Unlike all the others, we observe the Torah Laws according to the classic halakhic framework. We observe and adhere to the Shabbat laws down to the practices governing “borer.” We observe kashrut down to the practices governing Pat Yisroel (Pas Yisroel) and G’vinat Akum. We observe Taharat Hamishpakha down to the practices governing mokh dakhuk and hefsek taharah. And once we decide, across all lines of our polydoxy, as a movement of Torah Observant Jews to stop using the absurd term “Orthodox” and instead unilaterally to call ourselves “Observant,” we thereby will properly redefine in a respectful fashion the discourse with Reform/Progressive Jews, the profoundly liberal “Conservative” Jews, and all others who do not fall into the rubric of the classically halakhically Observant.
And, with the term “Observant,” the O.U. does not even have to change its logo. The Union of Observant Jewish Congregations of America. Makes sense.
Leftist I.Q. Snobbery: They're Not Stupid, Stupid
They’re Not Stupid, Stupid: The Left’s I.Q. attack.
From National Review Online (May 31, 2002)
In his latest ad hominem-based syndicated article, the resident radical-Left opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer, mocked the intelligence of Attorney General John Ashcroft. In a vertical screed, Scheer wrote the following: Ashcroft is "not the sharpest [tool] in the shed." He "managed to lose a Senate race to a dead man." He "was not picked for his smarts." He is a "Keystone Kop in charge of law enforcement." And, in the most telling comment, "Perhaps it is just too difficult for a stern, God-fearing fundamentalist like the attorney general to fully anticipate the dark side of religion's wrath."
Scheer's writing reflects the polemic arrogance monopolized by a Left that is convinced its ranks are just too smart for conservatives to fathom and that conservatives are just too troglodytic to be liberal. Thus, as Paul Bacon has written, Gerald R. Ford was consistently mocked during his presidency as a bumbling and stumbling fool. (In fact, Ford played on two championship football teams at the University of Michigan, and his athletic dexterity was rewarded when he was named a college all-star. He simultaneously was named a Phi Beta Kappa at that top-ten college and went on to earn a Juris Doctor degree at Yale Law School, commonly regarded as one of the nation's two finest law schools.)
Liberal critics regularly mocked Ronald Reagan as a dumb actor who could not conceive an original thought but relied on cue cards. (This, despite Reagan having been elected president of a prominent union of exceptionally opinionated and discerning members, the Screen Actors Guild, and having served two terms as elected governor of America's most populous state.) The first President George Bush was the butt of the slogan: "It's the economy, stupid." And the current president, who earned his bachelor's degree at Yale and his M.B.A. at Harvard, is mocked for flubbing words and is depicted as lacking the intelligence a liberal would expect of a Democrat counterpart like, say, erstwhile journalism professor Al Gore. As for the only conservative president in the past half century who manifestly was smart, the liberals dismissed Richard Nixon's intelligence as "tricky."
By contrast, we were told that Jimmy Carter was not merely a peanut farmer but really a particularly brilliant man, studious and capable of grasping every detail of his office, and we were reminded constantly that Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar out of Yale. (Only two Democrats have held the presidency in the past 34 years, a sign of someone's intelligence.)
It is not clear why the Left is so smug about its supposed brilliance. Under Jimmy Carter, interest rates nearly hit 20 percent. Was the Left convinced that Gerald Ford, Carter's predecessor, maintained inflation in the four-percent range because he could not match Carter's ability to multiply mortgage rates by percentages five times higher? Moreover, under Carter, an antediluvian Islamic cleric held our entire nation hostage for so long that the Ayatollah's drama literally created a steady viewership over fourteen months for a new network television show, Nightline. The Carter years also saw the United States give up the Panama Canal, the Soviets invade Afghanistan and extend their hegemony into Africa, even prompting new Marxist rumblings in South America. In response, Carter pulled our Olympic athletes out of world competition to make a moral statement that he understood better than did a less sophisticated Leonid Brezhnev.
With Reagan the Actor, inflation plunged, the bond market revived, the economy boomed, the 52 hostages were freed bloodlessly from Iran, Libya's Col. Qaddafi was disabused of continuing his role on the cutting edge of state terrorism , the Sandinistas were stopped in Nicaragua, Communism was eradicated from Granada, and the evil Soviet Empire began to crumble from Africa to Eastern Europe to Asia. His successor, the first President Bush, finished the job of assuring Communism's demise, built an international coalition that freed Kuwait, nabbed Panamanian strongman Manual Noriega and closed down his national drug store.
For two years, from 1992-1994, the Clintons of Yale came to town. Perspicacious in their uniquely liberal way, they turned the armed forces into a social laboratory, failed miserably in an attempt to socialize healthcare, and brilliantly managed to achieve something that half a century of dummies could not even conceptualize: They inspired the American electorate to entrust both Houses of Congress to the Republicans. In time, the man whose haircut had stopped traffic at LAX airport was dismantling welfare as we knew it, cutting the deficit, preaching fiscal prudence, backing away from Joycelyn Elders after 15 months and Lani Guinier after what seemed like 15 days, and behaving himself — at least in public. Even so, in the one area that most dramatically remains the ultimate province of the Presidency — the role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States — this most brilliant of our recent presidents allowed Osama bin Laden to build an al Qaeda terror infrastructure.
It is difficult, then, to fathom why radicals on the Left think they are so much smarter than conservatives. Consider, for example, Scheer and Ashcroft. Ashcroft earned his undergraduate degree at Yale and then graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, one of the top-ranked and exclusive academic institutions in the country. Just to get admitted requires profoundly and consistently high college grades and a stellar score on the law-school admissions test. His father was a university president. Ashcroft coauthored two college textbooks. He managed to get elected to statewide office several times, including two terms as state attorney general, two terms as governor (prevented by term limits from seeking reelection again), and a term as United States senator.
But what of Scheer? He graduated City College of New York, a good school that my uncle attended, and then did graduate work at Syracuse University, where my very intelligent wife studied. And then he did more graduate work, in economics at the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. Ah-ha! That's what makes him smart enough to write a regular screed for the Los Angeles Times. But he never was elected a United States senator or a governor. He never engaged in or directed law enforcement.
And, judging from his mocking Attorney-General Ashcroft's "God-fearing fundamentalis[m]," Scheer presumably is too smart to fear G-d. It is hard to see why Ashcroft's love of Bible study should detract rather than augment his role in law enforcement. The Bible teaches respect for life and adherence to the social order. If anything, it is quirky that, under Ashcroft, the Justice Department has toed an annoyingly politically correct line against ethnic profiling at airports. With 15 Saudi Arabian males among the 19 terrorists of September 11 — and with all of them Arab Muslim men between ages 20 and 45 — the Justice Department absurdly endorses stopping elderly ladies for airport scrutiny, while others who would be stopped by El Al security officers merrily walk by, unchecked.
If political correctness at the airport is ludicrous, we still may take solace that our security lies in the hands of those not smart enough for Scheer, a commentator who equates Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Slobodan Milosevic. Writing in December 1990 from his Left lair at the redoubtable Los Angeles Times, Scheer described the secretary general of the Soviet Communist party: "Mikhail Gorbachev arguably has changed the world more dramatically and with less bloodshed than any leader since Christ." Less than a year later, Gorby, if not Scheer, had been recycled by forces for freedom. Still, it was refreshing seeing a breath of religion emanating from Mr. Scheer's pen.
From National Review Online (May 31, 2002)
In his latest ad hominem-based syndicated article, the resident radical-Left opinion writer at the Los Angeles Times, Robert Scheer, mocked the intelligence of Attorney General John Ashcroft. In a vertical screed, Scheer wrote the following: Ashcroft is "not the sharpest [tool] in the shed." He "managed to lose a Senate race to a dead man." He "was not picked for his smarts." He is a "Keystone Kop in charge of law enforcement." And, in the most telling comment, "Perhaps it is just too difficult for a stern, God-fearing fundamentalist like the attorney general to fully anticipate the dark side of religion's wrath."
Scheer's writing reflects the polemic arrogance monopolized by a Left that is convinced its ranks are just too smart for conservatives to fathom and that conservatives are just too troglodytic to be liberal. Thus, as Paul Bacon has written, Gerald R. Ford was consistently mocked during his presidency as a bumbling and stumbling fool. (In fact, Ford played on two championship football teams at the University of Michigan, and his athletic dexterity was rewarded when he was named a college all-star. He simultaneously was named a Phi Beta Kappa at that top-ten college and went on to earn a Juris Doctor degree at Yale Law School, commonly regarded as one of the nation's two finest law schools.)
Liberal critics regularly mocked Ronald Reagan as a dumb actor who could not conceive an original thought but relied on cue cards. (This, despite Reagan having been elected president of a prominent union of exceptionally opinionated and discerning members, the Screen Actors Guild, and having served two terms as elected governor of America's most populous state.) The first President George Bush was the butt of the slogan: "It's the economy, stupid." And the current president, who earned his bachelor's degree at Yale and his M.B.A. at Harvard, is mocked for flubbing words and is depicted as lacking the intelligence a liberal would expect of a Democrat counterpart like, say, erstwhile journalism professor Al Gore. As for the only conservative president in the past half century who manifestly was smart, the liberals dismissed Richard Nixon's intelligence as "tricky."
By contrast, we were told that Jimmy Carter was not merely a peanut farmer but really a particularly brilliant man, studious and capable of grasping every detail of his office, and we were reminded constantly that Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar out of Yale. (Only two Democrats have held the presidency in the past 34 years, a sign of someone's intelligence.)
It is not clear why the Left is so smug about its supposed brilliance. Under Jimmy Carter, interest rates nearly hit 20 percent. Was the Left convinced that Gerald Ford, Carter's predecessor, maintained inflation in the four-percent range because he could not match Carter's ability to multiply mortgage rates by percentages five times higher? Moreover, under Carter, an antediluvian Islamic cleric held our entire nation hostage for so long that the Ayatollah's drama literally created a steady viewership over fourteen months for a new network television show, Nightline. The Carter years also saw the United States give up the Panama Canal, the Soviets invade Afghanistan and extend their hegemony into Africa, even prompting new Marxist rumblings in South America. In response, Carter pulled our Olympic athletes out of world competition to make a moral statement that he understood better than did a less sophisticated Leonid Brezhnev.
With Reagan the Actor, inflation plunged, the bond market revived, the economy boomed, the 52 hostages were freed bloodlessly from Iran, Libya's Col. Qaddafi was disabused of continuing his role on the cutting edge of state terrorism , the Sandinistas were stopped in Nicaragua, Communism was eradicated from Granada, and the evil Soviet Empire began to crumble from Africa to Eastern Europe to Asia. His successor, the first President Bush, finished the job of assuring Communism's demise, built an international coalition that freed Kuwait, nabbed Panamanian strongman Manual Noriega and closed down his national drug store.
For two years, from 1992-1994, the Clintons of Yale came to town. Perspicacious in their uniquely liberal way, they turned the armed forces into a social laboratory, failed miserably in an attempt to socialize healthcare, and brilliantly managed to achieve something that half a century of dummies could not even conceptualize: They inspired the American electorate to entrust both Houses of Congress to the Republicans. In time, the man whose haircut had stopped traffic at LAX airport was dismantling welfare as we knew it, cutting the deficit, preaching fiscal prudence, backing away from Joycelyn Elders after 15 months and Lani Guinier after what seemed like 15 days, and behaving himself — at least in public. Even so, in the one area that most dramatically remains the ultimate province of the Presidency — the role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States — this most brilliant of our recent presidents allowed Osama bin Laden to build an al Qaeda terror infrastructure.
It is difficult, then, to fathom why radicals on the Left think they are so much smarter than conservatives. Consider, for example, Scheer and Ashcroft. Ashcroft earned his undergraduate degree at Yale and then graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, one of the top-ranked and exclusive academic institutions in the country. Just to get admitted requires profoundly and consistently high college grades and a stellar score on the law-school admissions test. His father was a university president. Ashcroft coauthored two college textbooks. He managed to get elected to statewide office several times, including two terms as state attorney general, two terms as governor (prevented by term limits from seeking reelection again), and a term as United States senator.
But what of Scheer? He graduated City College of New York, a good school that my uncle attended, and then did graduate work at Syracuse University, where my very intelligent wife studied. And then he did more graduate work, in economics at the Center for Chinese Studies at Berkeley. Ah-ha! That's what makes him smart enough to write a regular screed for the Los Angeles Times. But he never was elected a United States senator or a governor. He never engaged in or directed law enforcement.
And, judging from his mocking Attorney-General Ashcroft's "God-fearing fundamentalis[m]," Scheer presumably is too smart to fear G-d. It is hard to see why Ashcroft's love of Bible study should detract rather than augment his role in law enforcement. The Bible teaches respect for life and adherence to the social order. If anything, it is quirky that, under Ashcroft, the Justice Department has toed an annoyingly politically correct line against ethnic profiling at airports. With 15 Saudi Arabian males among the 19 terrorists of September 11 — and with all of them Arab Muslim men between ages 20 and 45 — the Justice Department absurdly endorses stopping elderly ladies for airport scrutiny, while others who would be stopped by El Al security officers merrily walk by, unchecked.
If political correctness at the airport is ludicrous, we still may take solace that our security lies in the hands of those not smart enough for Scheer, a commentator who equates Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Slobodan Milosevic. Writing in December 1990 from his Left lair at the redoubtable Los Angeles Times, Scheer described the secretary general of the Soviet Communist party: "Mikhail Gorbachev arguably has changed the world more dramatically and with less bloodshed than any leader since Christ." Less than a year later, Gorby, if not Scheer, had been recycled by forces for freedom. Still, it was refreshing seeing a breath of religion emanating from Mr. Scheer's pen.
Day Like Any Other:What in the World Was Going On?
A Day Like Any Other: What in the world was going on?
From National Review Online (May 15, 2002)
Sunday, May 5, 2002 -- it seemed a day like any other. The world was concerned about violence in the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell opined on talk shows that Israel must negotiate new agreements with Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Arafat has served more than 30 years at the head of an international gangster movement that invented both airplane hijackings and pedestrian suicide bombings. On September 11, 19 Arab Muslim terrorists, 15 of them Saudi Arabians, synthesized Arafat's two innovations at the World Trade Center towers and at the Pentagon. Arafat did not abandon terrorism even after being enticed, in 1993, with the sovereignty embodied in his Palestinian Authority. Rather, he spent the next eight years coordinating television images, radio announcements, schoolbooks, and summer camps to train a generation of schoolchildren to aspire to human sacrifice. But on that Sunday, as on any other day, Secretary Powell spoke of Arafat's potential as peacemaker.
Attention also focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who arrived in Washington, D.C., to show President Bush a 103-page dossier of documents uncovered during Israel's recent Operation Defensive Shield. The dossier proves Arafat's continued central role in directing and funding terrorism. The evidence is so damning that Arafat's spinmeisters have had to resort to calling it a forgery. They can fabricate no other defense.
That Sunday, the Western world and its news media focused on Israel-Arab tensions. The United Nations Security Council continued debating the "Jenin massacre" that several prominent Western newspapers and international human-rights organizations unanimously have determined never actually happened. News bulletins flowed, throughout the day, from the Bethlehem standoff over the release of several wanted gunmen — at least two of them terrorists who murdered an American architect. The terrorists were still holding monks, nuns, and a sacred church itself hostage.
But what in the world was going on? The question is literal. That is, what was going on elsewhere in the world, on this day that seemed like any other?
In Colombia, an internecine civil war continued on that Sunday. That war is not 19 months old, not 38 months old. Rather, it is 38 years old, and 3,500 civilians are murdered in its crossfire every year. On that Sunday — while the world fretted about a group of Arafat-backed gunmen hiding in the Church of the Nativity — a group of terrified mothers, young children, and babies fled desperately from terrorists to the sanctuary of a Catholic church in Bojaya, some 58 miles south of Quibdo, capital of the Colombian state of Choco. Hot on their trail were armed rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The United Nations had "alerted" the Colombian government several weeks earlier that terrorism could erupt near Quibdo. The world may have watched Israeli soldiers maintain guard patiently through the day, but no one seems to have noticed what happened at that other church, in Bojaya. There was no Vatican negotiator. International peace activists did not rush in to protect the noncombatants. No one spoke out or noticed as FARC rebels pounded the holy shrine, firing homemade mortars into the church, murdering at least 40 civilians. In all, 108 non-combatants were slain in Colombia that day. According to Colombian President Andres Pastrana, "What happened here was genocide on the part of the FARC." Indeed, it was a "Jenin massacre" and a "Bethlehem Church nightmare" rolled into one. But not a page-one story for Monday.
Perhaps no one at CNN or the Los Angeles Times — which has a photographer in the Church of the Nativity — stopped to ask why this civil war of daily massacres gets buried daily to make room for a hapless search in Jenin for a massacre that never happened. The United Nations, however, did note the Bojaya Church Massacre. But instead of assembling a fact-finding team, it opted literally for a press statement: "It is lamentable that the government authorities ignored the early warning." As of this writing, the Security Council has not yet dispatched Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Sadako Ogata, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or Martti Ahtisaari, former head of the European Union, to investigate. Because that Sunday was like any other day.
Alternatively, Kofi Annan's fact-finders could have been sent to the Sudan-Uganda border. Instead of searching for nonexistent mass graves in Jenin, they would have found a massacre in broad daylight today. A group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting for several years to replace Uganda's constitution with the Ten Commandments. Toward that end, they have massacred thousands of civilians and exiled hundreds of thousands of Ugandans from their homes. The conflict is barely reported. These Decalogue activists — many news organs refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists as "activists" — ironically have been supported through most of their insurgency by neighboring Sudan's Islamic theocracy, and they have based themselves there. However, under an agreement reached by Sudan and Uganda, on that Sunday it was the Ugandan government's turn to massacre the LRA, during a bloody incursion into Sudanese territory. In a quote that did not push Jenin off the front pages of any daily worth its newsprint, Ugandan Major Shaban Bantariza told reporters on the 5th: "We have killed these rebels. Their bodies are being picked from the bushes by our soldiers. We are counting them one by one and the number has now reached 50." Nigeria set out with greater expectations for a peaceful Sunday, marked by freedom's hallmark: democratic primary elections. Unfortunately, a disagreement arose in the city of Noj, some 200 miles northeast of the capital in Abuja — between the Yorubas of Eto-Baba in the south and the Beroms and Hausas of the north — over where to conduct the balloting. Soon, the vying factions of President Olusegun Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party flooded the streets to resolve the question with knives and machetes. At least 20 civilians were slain, many charred beyond recognition, and the city's chief medical officer, Daniel Iya, spoke of "mass casualties." For his own safety, however, he refused to disclose exact casualty numbers.
Algeria also had some election fallout on that Sunday. Elections were canceled in 1992, and the disgruntled have massacred 120,000 noncombatants since then, averaging a thousand murdered civilians a month. Over the past four months alone, while the world has searched for those 500 bodies Arafat's propagandists allege repose in Jenin, 400 civilians have been massacred in the open in Algeria. On that Sunday, 31 more innocents were slaughtered there by Islamic militants. Twenty were murdered in Ksar-Chellala, near the Tiaret region, about 212 miles west of the nation's capital. Eleven were slain in Tiaret. All fingers pointed towards the Armed Islamic Group, Algeria's premier Islamic terrorist gang, but no one claimed responsibility. Perhaps the United Nations will investigate soon.
What in the world was going on that Sunday? From the State Department to the United Nations, nabobs and pundits alike debated what to do about Jenin, Sharon, and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It was a day like any other day.
From National Review Online (May 15, 2002)
Sunday, May 5, 2002 -- it seemed a day like any other. The world was concerned about violence in the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell opined on talk shows that Israel must negotiate new agreements with Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Arafat has served more than 30 years at the head of an international gangster movement that invented both airplane hijackings and pedestrian suicide bombings. On September 11, 19 Arab Muslim terrorists, 15 of them Saudi Arabians, synthesized Arafat's two innovations at the World Trade Center towers and at the Pentagon. Arafat did not abandon terrorism even after being enticed, in 1993, with the sovereignty embodied in his Palestinian Authority. Rather, he spent the next eight years coordinating television images, radio announcements, schoolbooks, and summer camps to train a generation of schoolchildren to aspire to human sacrifice. But on that Sunday, as on any other day, Secretary Powell spoke of Arafat's potential as peacemaker.
Attention also focused on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who arrived in Washington, D.C., to show President Bush a 103-page dossier of documents uncovered during Israel's recent Operation Defensive Shield. The dossier proves Arafat's continued central role in directing and funding terrorism. The evidence is so damning that Arafat's spinmeisters have had to resort to calling it a forgery. They can fabricate no other defense.
That Sunday, the Western world and its news media focused on Israel-Arab tensions. The United Nations Security Council continued debating the "Jenin massacre" that several prominent Western newspapers and international human-rights organizations unanimously have determined never actually happened. News bulletins flowed, throughout the day, from the Bethlehem standoff over the release of several wanted gunmen — at least two of them terrorists who murdered an American architect. The terrorists were still holding monks, nuns, and a sacred church itself hostage.
But what in the world was going on? The question is literal. That is, what was going on elsewhere in the world, on this day that seemed like any other?
In Colombia, an internecine civil war continued on that Sunday. That war is not 19 months old, not 38 months old. Rather, it is 38 years old, and 3,500 civilians are murdered in its crossfire every year. On that Sunday — while the world fretted about a group of Arafat-backed gunmen hiding in the Church of the Nativity — a group of terrified mothers, young children, and babies fled desperately from terrorists to the sanctuary of a Catholic church in Bojaya, some 58 miles south of Quibdo, capital of the Colombian state of Choco. Hot on their trail were armed rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The United Nations had "alerted" the Colombian government several weeks earlier that terrorism could erupt near Quibdo. The world may have watched Israeli soldiers maintain guard patiently through the day, but no one seems to have noticed what happened at that other church, in Bojaya. There was no Vatican negotiator. International peace activists did not rush in to protect the noncombatants. No one spoke out or noticed as FARC rebels pounded the holy shrine, firing homemade mortars into the church, murdering at least 40 civilians. In all, 108 non-combatants were slain in Colombia that day. According to Colombian President Andres Pastrana, "What happened here was genocide on the part of the FARC." Indeed, it was a "Jenin massacre" and a "Bethlehem Church nightmare" rolled into one. But not a page-one story for Monday.
Perhaps no one at CNN or the Los Angeles Times — which has a photographer in the Church of the Nativity — stopped to ask why this civil war of daily massacres gets buried daily to make room for a hapless search in Jenin for a massacre that never happened. The United Nations, however, did note the Bojaya Church Massacre. But instead of assembling a fact-finding team, it opted literally for a press statement: "It is lamentable that the government authorities ignored the early warning." As of this writing, the Security Council has not yet dispatched Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Sadako Ogata, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or Martti Ahtisaari, former head of the European Union, to investigate. Because that Sunday was like any other day.
Alternatively, Kofi Annan's fact-finders could have been sent to the Sudan-Uganda border. Instead of searching for nonexistent mass graves in Jenin, they would have found a massacre in broad daylight today. A group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting for several years to replace Uganda's constitution with the Ten Commandments. Toward that end, they have massacred thousands of civilians and exiled hundreds of thousands of Ugandans from their homes. The conflict is barely reported. These Decalogue activists — many news organs refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists as "activists" — ironically have been supported through most of their insurgency by neighboring Sudan's Islamic theocracy, and they have based themselves there. However, under an agreement reached by Sudan and Uganda, on that Sunday it was the Ugandan government's turn to massacre the LRA, during a bloody incursion into Sudanese territory. In a quote that did not push Jenin off the front pages of any daily worth its newsprint, Ugandan Major Shaban Bantariza told reporters on the 5th: "We have killed these rebels. Their bodies are being picked from the bushes by our soldiers. We are counting them one by one and the number has now reached 50." Nigeria set out with greater expectations for a peaceful Sunday, marked by freedom's hallmark: democratic primary elections. Unfortunately, a disagreement arose in the city of Noj, some 200 miles northeast of the capital in Abuja — between the Yorubas of Eto-Baba in the south and the Beroms and Hausas of the north — over where to conduct the balloting. Soon, the vying factions of President Olusegun Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party flooded the streets to resolve the question with knives and machetes. At least 20 civilians were slain, many charred beyond recognition, and the city's chief medical officer, Daniel Iya, spoke of "mass casualties." For his own safety, however, he refused to disclose exact casualty numbers.
Algeria also had some election fallout on that Sunday. Elections were canceled in 1992, and the disgruntled have massacred 120,000 noncombatants since then, averaging a thousand murdered civilians a month. Over the past four months alone, while the world has searched for those 500 bodies Arafat's propagandists allege repose in Jenin, 400 civilians have been massacred in the open in Algeria. On that Sunday, 31 more innocents were slaughtered there by Islamic militants. Twenty were murdered in Ksar-Chellala, near the Tiaret region, about 212 miles west of the nation's capital. Eleven were slain in Tiaret. All fingers pointed towards the Armed Islamic Group, Algeria's premier Islamic terrorist gang, but no one claimed responsibility. Perhaps the United Nations will investigate soon.
What in the world was going on that Sunday? From the State Department to the United Nations, nabobs and pundits alike debated what to do about Jenin, Sharon, and Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It was a day like any other day.
Bob Dylan Song on the Middle East Crisis
I have just seen and heard this song. I am very surprised. A quarter-century of public Jewish life, if it has taught me anything, has taught me that large numbers of prominent American Jews in Hollywood and entertainment do everything they can do to hide their Jewishness. Yes, there are many others who are public about their Jewishness, but they typically offset it by acting with intensive political correctness, avoiding expressing straightforward support for Israel in her struggle for survival. Think of Steven Spielberg. So proud a Jew. The Jewish man in Hollywood who made "Schindler's List." The Jewish man in Hollywood who created a permanent Holocaust film archive project.
The Jewish mannin Hollywood who made "Munich."
Even at the telethons and pro-Israel programs where some of the Hollywood Jews show up, the pro-Israel sentiment is so wrapped in politically correct gobbledygook that, by the time the entertainer is finished talking, you don’t know whether he was speaking about Israel or global warming.
There are rare exceptions, of course, as there are exceptions to everything. For example, there is the well known actor who supports Jewish rights to live in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Well, actually not.
Or the fantastically famous singer who has identified unequivocally with Israel's rights. Oooops -- actually not.
Well, the famous Jewish author. Well – no.
Thus, I particularly would not have expected this song just released, apparently sung by Bob Dylan. His life has been a particularly strange journey, including a period in Christianity. Apparently, he now identifies again as a Jew. I use the adverb “apparently” because, well, it seems surprising.
This song clearly is not about global warming. More than 100,000 people have passed this around Youtube in the last few days. I share it with you.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WlHlXHimo_g (four-minute, thirty-second version)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RC_60b2NR1I (longer, ten-minute version)
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
Irvine, CA 92612
http://www.ravfischer.com/
ravfischer@sbcglobal.net
The Jewish mannin Hollywood who made "Munich."
Even at the telethons and pro-Israel programs where some of the Hollywood Jews show up, the pro-Israel sentiment is so wrapped in politically correct gobbledygook that, by the time the entertainer is finished talking, you don’t know whether he was speaking about Israel or global warming.
There are rare exceptions, of course, as there are exceptions to everything. For example, there is the well known actor who supports Jewish rights to live in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Well, actually not.
Or the fantastically famous singer who has identified unequivocally with Israel's rights. Oooops -- actually not.
Well, the famous Jewish author. Well – no.
Thus, I particularly would not have expected this song just released, apparently sung by Bob Dylan. His life has been a particularly strange journey, including a period in Christianity. Apparently, he now identifies again as a Jew. I use the adverb “apparently” because, well, it seems surprising.
This song clearly is not about global warming. More than 100,000 people have passed this around Youtube in the last few days. I share it with you.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WlHlXHimo_g (four-minute, thirty-second version)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RC_60b2NR1I (longer, ten-minute version)
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
Irvine, CA 92612
http://www.ravfischer.com/
ravfischer@sbcglobal.net
How Mahmoud Abbas Taught Arab Kids to Hate Jews
Sun 5/2/2004 8:56 PM
Palestinian Indoctrination to Children: Exceptionally Documented Video
http://www.isratv.com/video/filmpmwadsl.asx
I receive many e-mails of educational video clips regarding Israel. If you are as busy as I am, you probably find such clips too time-consuming and basic to justify watching them. On a typical busy day, these things are just-plain tedious. However -- one of my Shul members just sent me this 7-minute video clip from Itamar Marcus’s Palestine Media Watch, and it is an exceptional mini-documentary on what Arafat has done to a generation of Arab “Palestinian” children.
Marcus does not say so, but the conclusion I draw is that an entire generation of children has been poisoned. If there had been no Oslo Accord, and if Arafat had not been given the tools to indoctrinate a generation, there might have been a basis for hoping to make peace. But Arafat was given a nation, a national radio system, a national television system, and a national school system. With these tools, which Israel alone controlled before Oslo, he has mass-indoctrinated a generation of suicide bombers. There basically is no way to make peace with them now, nor for another 30-50 years. That is the Fruit of Oslo.
One approach is to give up and walk away, cut and run, hand Arafat the Gaza Strip and 95% of Judea and Samaria. Ariel Sharon, old and tired – or wily and cagy – opted for a wall and a plan to cut and run. The Labor Left – comprising maybe 30% of the Jews of Israel -- adopted it. As such, he passed the ball to the 60-70% of his Jewish countrymen who are perceived as the “nationalist camp.” He basically said, “Everyone in this country seems tired and ready to leave, so here is your chance to make it happen. Stop yelling at me. Our newspapers and media pundits tell me and the world that you want to give up Gaza and most of Judea and Samaria, so here it is. Unless you really want this country to hold on to Gaza and Judea and Samaria, we are cutting and running, just as the country’s newsmedia tell us you want us to do.”
He apparently convinced the White House that he had the votes to give it all up, much as Barak convinced Clinton that no one would make a big thing over East Jerusalem once Barak would decide to give it to Arafat . And today the most reliable opinion poll of all took place. It is clear that there really is an extraordinary majority among Jews in the country that is ready to draw the lessons of Oslo, long after Arafat is gone, long after Sharon is gone.
Find seven minutes and play the video clip. It is quite a thing to see. I had seen this before, in a longer version at a national banquet of Zionist organization of America; yet the seven minutes still was quite a thing to see.
Palestinian Indoctrination to Children: Exceptionally Documented Video
http://www.isratv.com/video/filmpmwadsl.asx
I receive many e-mails of educational video clips regarding Israel. If you are as busy as I am, you probably find such clips too time-consuming and basic to justify watching them. On a typical busy day, these things are just-plain tedious. However -- one of my Shul members just sent me this 7-minute video clip from Itamar Marcus’s Palestine Media Watch, and it is an exceptional mini-documentary on what Arafat has done to a generation of Arab “Palestinian” children.
Marcus does not say so, but the conclusion I draw is that an entire generation of children has been poisoned. If there had been no Oslo Accord, and if Arafat had not been given the tools to indoctrinate a generation, there might have been a basis for hoping to make peace. But Arafat was given a nation, a national radio system, a national television system, and a national school system. With these tools, which Israel alone controlled before Oslo, he has mass-indoctrinated a generation of suicide bombers. There basically is no way to make peace with them now, nor for another 30-50 years. That is the Fruit of Oslo.
One approach is to give up and walk away, cut and run, hand Arafat the Gaza Strip and 95% of Judea and Samaria. Ariel Sharon, old and tired – or wily and cagy – opted for a wall and a plan to cut and run. The Labor Left – comprising maybe 30% of the Jews of Israel -- adopted it. As such, he passed the ball to the 60-70% of his Jewish countrymen who are perceived as the “nationalist camp.” He basically said, “Everyone in this country seems tired and ready to leave, so here is your chance to make it happen. Stop yelling at me. Our newspapers and media pundits tell me and the world that you want to give up Gaza and most of Judea and Samaria, so here it is. Unless you really want this country to hold on to Gaza and Judea and Samaria, we are cutting and running, just as the country’s newsmedia tell us you want us to do.”
He apparently convinced the White House that he had the votes to give it all up, much as Barak convinced Clinton that no one would make a big thing over East Jerusalem once Barak would decide to give it to Arafat . And today the most reliable opinion poll of all took place. It is clear that there really is an extraordinary majority among Jews in the country that is ready to draw the lessons of Oslo, long after Arafat is gone, long after Sharon is gone.
Find seven minutes and play the video clip. It is quite a thing to see. I had seen this before, in a longer version at a national banquet of Zionist organization of America; yet the seven minutes still was quite a thing to see.
The Emptiness of Palestine Peace Treaties
Thu 4/25/2002 8:06 PM
Dusting Off an Historical Document
"Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed at Washington, D.C., on 28 September 1995," Article XIV (3), (4); Art. XXII (1), (2)
ARTICLE XIVThe Palestinian Police
1. The Council shall establish a strong police force. The duties, functions, structure, deployment and composition of the Palestinian Police, together with provisions regarding its equipment and operation, as well as rules of conduct, are set out in Annex I.
2. The Palestinian police force established under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement will be fully integrated into the Palestinian Police and will be subject to the provisions of this Agreement.
3. Except for the Palestinian Police and the Israeli military forces, no other armed forces shall be established or operate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
4. Except for the arms, ammunition and equipment of the Palestinian Police described in Annex I, and those of the Israeli military forces, no organization, group or individual in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip shall manufacture, sell, acquire, possess, import or otherwise introduce into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip any firearms, ammunition, weapons, explosives, gunpowder or any related equipment, unless otherwise provided for in Annex I.
CHAPTER 4- COOPERATION
ARTICLE XXIIRelations between Israel and the Council
1. Israel and the Council shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and shall accordingly abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other and, without derogating from the principle of freedom of expression, shall take legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups or individuals within their jurisdiction.2. Israel and the Council will ensure that their respective educational systems contribute to the peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to peace in the entire region, and will refrain from the introduction of any motifs that could adversely affect the process of reconciliation.
Dusting Off an Historical Document
"Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, signed at Washington, D.C., on 28 September 1995," Article XIV (3), (4); Art. XXII (1), (2)
ARTICLE XIVThe Palestinian Police
1. The Council shall establish a strong police force. The duties, functions, structure, deployment and composition of the Palestinian Police, together with provisions regarding its equipment and operation, as well as rules of conduct, are set out in Annex I.
2. The Palestinian police force established under the Gaza-Jericho Agreement will be fully integrated into the Palestinian Police and will be subject to the provisions of this Agreement.
3. Except for the Palestinian Police and the Israeli military forces, no other armed forces shall be established or operate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
4. Except for the arms, ammunition and equipment of the Palestinian Police described in Annex I, and those of the Israeli military forces, no organization, group or individual in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip shall manufacture, sell, acquire, possess, import or otherwise introduce into the West Bank or the Gaza Strip any firearms, ammunition, weapons, explosives, gunpowder or any related equipment, unless otherwise provided for in Annex I.
CHAPTER 4- COOPERATION
ARTICLE XXIIRelations between Israel and the Council
1. Israel and the Council shall seek to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and shall accordingly abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other and, without derogating from the principle of freedom of expression, shall take legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups or individuals within their jurisdiction.2. Israel and the Council will ensure that their respective educational systems contribute to the peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to peace in the entire region, and will refrain from the introduction of any motifs that could adversely affect the process of reconciliation.
Israel's Incompetent Foreign Policy: Stop Blaming Others
Friday, May 30, 2003 9:35 AM
Stop Blaming Others for Israel’s Incompetent Foreign Policy
I think there comes a time when we have to stop blaming Bush or Clinton or Carter for Israeli Government decisions that are antithetical to Israel's interests.
For 36 years since 1967, Israel continually has pulled the rug out from under the feet of her strongest supporters in America. I remember when Jack Kemp was supporting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, even softly supporting annexation, then found himself being called for being more pro-Israel than the Israelis. When I was Likud National Director, I persuaded a very prominent and powerful Democrat Congressman in New Jersey to support Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. I persuaded a Republican from Michigan who was active in the Christian Right. Much like James Inhofe, that wonderful United States Senator from Oklahoma. We had Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate signing letters to the President of the United States, demanding that America move her Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and demanding that America recognize that Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, must never be divided. Then Ehud Barak remarkably placed on the table an Israeli readiness to give up the holiest parts of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. In one swoop, he made Jerusalem's strongest supporters in Washington look foolish. They had been unwilling to concede what the Israeli Prime Minister offered to give away.
There are voices and organizations in the United States that have fought the good fight for 36 years and that have, again and again, had the wind knocked out of them by the Israeli Governments they are trying to support and defend. For those of us who have argued for 36 years that Judea and Samaria is Jewish land, who have challenged through thick and thin any effort to characterize Yesha as "occupied," the comments by Ariel Sharon this week were sabotage. It is lovely that Sharon since has back-tracked from using the term "occupation" (a Page One lead story in the Los Angeles Times and other world papers) and now claims that he was "misunderstood" (an inside, Page Three story). He now tells us that, when he said the lands are "occupied," what he really meant was that they are "disputed." Yes, and when I give my credit card number on the phone and the expiration date and the shipping address, what I really mean is "I'm not buying anything, just thinking about it." I heard the tape of Sharon's comments in the original Hebrew, and so have all the Israelis who heard those same news reports and sound bytes, and so have all the Western media who had those statements explained and translated.
When the Israeli Cabinet, a cabinet dominated by Likud and parties to her Right, and formed after a landslide national rejection of Mitzna and Peres and Oslo and Barak and Labor, voted to recognize the "right" of Arabs to create an Arab country in Judea and Samaria, they took the wind out of the sails of Israel's strongest supporters everywhere.
There is an ongoing tendency among Israeli reporters and government spokesmen to whine and whine about the lack of support and backing in America. The fact is that, at the end of the day, no one is going to fight for someone else's interests harder than the principal fights for her own interests. With national elections coming up next year in America, with a quirky economy that can go either way, with an overwhelming sense of mistrust toward the Arab world, Americans today have no interest or stomach for seeing Israel pressured by the Bush Administration. The Democrats are gearing up to challenge Bush -- already they are starting their primary warm-ups, and the field of contenders is more jammed than the last few overcrowded Kentucky Derby races -- and all of them are vying to be maximally pro-Israel and to criticize Bush at every juncture, especially when raising funds among the Jewish donors who finance the Democrats. Meanwhile, for the first time since Reagan whipped Carter, Republicans have been eyeing major gains among Jewish voters, and the Republicans have been very sympathetic to Israel. So no one of import in either political party is looking right now to pressure Israel into doing anything that she does not want to do.
There was absolutely no fundamental momentum here in America right now, and none on the horizon for the next two years, to support any substantive pressuring against Israel. Maybe some newspaper editors are looking to bother Israel, but newspapers also are on the defensive right now. After Jason Blair and the Briggs guy that just quit the New York Times, polls show that Americans do not trust newspapers. One of the great stories of the Jason Blair caper has been that certain people, while reading the New York Times, would see themselves quoted in fabricated interviews – and they would not even bother calling the paper to correct the falsehoods because they figure that no one believes the newspapers anyway. So Israel could have withstood the newspaper editorials.
To the degree that the Bush-Rice "Road Map" seeks to mollify Arabs, the European Union, the Russians, and the United Nations, the fact is that Americans are a bit disgusted with the Arab world right now, post- 9/11 and post-Iraq. Americans are disgusted with much of Europe, with a focused animus towards France and Germany, in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Americans hardly are enamored with the Russians, and they despise the United Nations. So they could care less about "The Quartet." Indeed, the average American does not even know who his own congressional representative is or where half the nifty fifty states are. So no one cares about "The Quartet."
There was no need for Israel -- absolutely no need -- to adopt a single word or provision of the "Road Map." All of Israel's supporters were geared up for the good fight against this awful “Road Map,” and the fight looked much easier than the tough ones of the past. More, there was a Likud Cabinet in place. Even Christian America was gearing up. Just last night, while channel surfing on television, I saw Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club" lambasting Ariel Sharon and saying that it is religiously forbidden by Scripture for anyone to divide the land of Israel. He sat there, quoting Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – from the Book of Joel, a lesser-know volume in the "Trei Asar" -- the 12 "Minor Prophets." He, a Christian minister representing how-many-tens-of-millions of Christian backers of the Republican Party, reminding the Prime Minister of Israel that the Good Book forbids anyone even to speak of dividing the Holy Land.
Against this backdrop, the Israeli Government agreed to the unprecedented decision to validate the "legitimacy" of an Arab "state." (Note that they call it "state" – an unassuming polity like somewhere you incorporate a business (like Delaware), or somewhere you grow wheat (like Nebraska), or somewhere you grow old (like Florida) – but they mean "country," namely a polity somewhere that you develop nuclear weapons (like North Korea), or poison gas and weapons of mass destruction (like Iran or Iraq), or somewhere you institutionally massacre hundreds of thousands (like Rwanda or Congo or Cambodia).) And the Prime Minister further called Judea and Samaria "occupied." Amid all the Israeli "cleverness" of adopting 14 points of incoherence that theoretically will make a "Palestinian State" impossible to establish, the Israeli Cabinet pulled the rug out from under all its strongest American supporters.
Now they whine. Michael Freund writes an article in the Jerusalem Post, calling on American supporters of Israel to pressure Bush. Two days later, in the article I attach below that IMRA now is circulating, Caroline Glick whines in the Jerusalem Post about "Washington's betrayal."
Well, guess what? Include me out of this one. This is not about Washington's betrayal. Washington has been a great supporter of Israel, and this particular President has in many ways been particularly supportive. He single-handedly has driven Arafat into an oblivion that 40 years of Israeli leaders could not dream of. Bush literally knocked Arafat out of stage center. He excused Israel’s incursion into Jenin and backed Israel when she barred the United Nations hatchet squad from “investigating.” Yeah, OK, so he has white-washed Mahmoud Abbas, a terrorist and Hitler apologist. OK. Bush has the real problem that, after bypassing Arafat and insisting instead on the emergence of an alternative democratically elected “Palestinian” leader who has no ties to terrorism, he has learned that finding a “Palestinian” leader who never wasted blood is like finding an American who never wasted ketchup. So the best they can find is a terrorist in a suit, an enigma like a cat in a hat, with a nickname from the butchering underground: “Abu Mazen.” There’s no such thing in American reference. What? George “Baby Face” Washington? Abie “Six Fingers” Lincoln? Willy “Machine Gun” McKinley? Franklin “Bugsy” Roosevelt? We have no such reference basis for Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas.
But none of it really has to matter, because Abbas is almost dead. In a few years, when Mahmoud Abbas dies of old age or of the Palestinian reproductive malady of premature assassination, the stage is set for the next layer of chaos. So Bush is not the bad guy here. It’s his job to pressure Israel a little bit -- he has to do what he has to do -- because, hey, he did not run for Prime Minister of Israel. He is President of the United States. That’s his job. We pay him with American dollars (legally). So, hey, he has to play the game. And, in that role, he plays the game to keep the oil flowing in from Araby while the Democrats think they are protecting the caribou (who are freezing their antlers off in Alaska while searching for some nice warm oil pipelines to thaw out the chill), and he simultaneously keeps the channels open with the Europeans, the Russians, and the U.N. So Bush has to do what Bush has to do. He has to give Tony Blair something to show the House of Commons when the Arabists want to know why Britain was fighting Bush’s war in Iraq. So he plays the game, gives Blair a “Road Map,” and that way the belly-achers stop yelling “Bully! Bully!” and belching out those awful groans when they do that BBC show that we see on cable every Sunday night.
And, while Bush made a bit of noise, it was left open for Israel to do what she has to do. This one was easy. Yet the Likud Cabinet failed. So this is not about “Washington's betrayal of Israel.” It is about the Israeli cabinet's betrayal of the people who voted against Oslo, Peres, Mitzna, Barak, and all that jazz. And it is about the Likud’s betrayal of her strongest supporters everywhere in the world, Jew and Christian alike.
The whining is not persuasive this time, as we mark the 36th anniversary of Jerusalem's unification, a day that should be celebrated as Yom Yerushalayim. There are very few people who have defended Sharon as strongly as I have over the years. Literally, I am “the guy who wrote the book on Sharon.” And if Pat Robertson is quoting Jewish Scripture, I may as well paraphrase Dickens: We defeated the Ghost of Palestine Past. We defeated the Ghost of Palestine present. But Ariel Sharon and his Likud Cabinet have presented a Ghost of Palestine Future that leaves us wondering whether these are the images of what will be or only of what might be. Sharon is humbug.
Stop Blaming Others for Israel’s Incompetent Foreign Policy
I think there comes a time when we have to stop blaming Bush or Clinton or Carter for Israeli Government decisions that are antithetical to Israel's interests.
For 36 years since 1967, Israel continually has pulled the rug out from under the feet of her strongest supporters in America. I remember when Jack Kemp was supporting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, even softly supporting annexation, then found himself being called for being more pro-Israel than the Israelis. When I was Likud National Director, I persuaded a very prominent and powerful Democrat Congressman in New Jersey to support Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. I persuaded a Republican from Michigan who was active in the Christian Right. Much like James Inhofe, that wonderful United States Senator from Oklahoma. We had Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate signing letters to the President of the United States, demanding that America move her Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and demanding that America recognize that Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish People, must never be divided. Then Ehud Barak remarkably placed on the table an Israeli readiness to give up the holiest parts of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount. In one swoop, he made Jerusalem's strongest supporters in Washington look foolish. They had been unwilling to concede what the Israeli Prime Minister offered to give away.
There are voices and organizations in the United States that have fought the good fight for 36 years and that have, again and again, had the wind knocked out of them by the Israeli Governments they are trying to support and defend. For those of us who have argued for 36 years that Judea and Samaria is Jewish land, who have challenged through thick and thin any effort to characterize Yesha as "occupied," the comments by Ariel Sharon this week were sabotage. It is lovely that Sharon since has back-tracked from using the term "occupation" (a Page One lead story in the Los Angeles Times and other world papers) and now claims that he was "misunderstood" (an inside, Page Three story). He now tells us that, when he said the lands are "occupied," what he really meant was that they are "disputed." Yes, and when I give my credit card number on the phone and the expiration date and the shipping address, what I really mean is "I'm not buying anything, just thinking about it." I heard the tape of Sharon's comments in the original Hebrew, and so have all the Israelis who heard those same news reports and sound bytes, and so have all the Western media who had those statements explained and translated.
When the Israeli Cabinet, a cabinet dominated by Likud and parties to her Right, and formed after a landslide national rejection of Mitzna and Peres and Oslo and Barak and Labor, voted to recognize the "right" of Arabs to create an Arab country in Judea and Samaria, they took the wind out of the sails of Israel's strongest supporters everywhere.
There is an ongoing tendency among Israeli reporters and government spokesmen to whine and whine about the lack of support and backing in America. The fact is that, at the end of the day, no one is going to fight for someone else's interests harder than the principal fights for her own interests. With national elections coming up next year in America, with a quirky economy that can go either way, with an overwhelming sense of mistrust toward the Arab world, Americans today have no interest or stomach for seeing Israel pressured by the Bush Administration. The Democrats are gearing up to challenge Bush -- already they are starting their primary warm-ups, and the field of contenders is more jammed than the last few overcrowded Kentucky Derby races -- and all of them are vying to be maximally pro-Israel and to criticize Bush at every juncture, especially when raising funds among the Jewish donors who finance the Democrats. Meanwhile, for the first time since Reagan whipped Carter, Republicans have been eyeing major gains among Jewish voters, and the Republicans have been very sympathetic to Israel. So no one of import in either political party is looking right now to pressure Israel into doing anything that she does not want to do.
There was absolutely no fundamental momentum here in America right now, and none on the horizon for the next two years, to support any substantive pressuring against Israel. Maybe some newspaper editors are looking to bother Israel, but newspapers also are on the defensive right now. After Jason Blair and the Briggs guy that just quit the New York Times, polls show that Americans do not trust newspapers. One of the great stories of the Jason Blair caper has been that certain people, while reading the New York Times, would see themselves quoted in fabricated interviews – and they would not even bother calling the paper to correct the falsehoods because they figure that no one believes the newspapers anyway. So Israel could have withstood the newspaper editorials.
To the degree that the Bush-Rice "Road Map" seeks to mollify Arabs, the European Union, the Russians, and the United Nations, the fact is that Americans are a bit disgusted with the Arab world right now, post- 9/11 and post-Iraq. Americans are disgusted with much of Europe, with a focused animus towards France and Germany, in the aftermath of the Iraq War. Americans hardly are enamored with the Russians, and they despise the United Nations. So they could care less about "The Quartet." Indeed, the average American does not even know who his own congressional representative is or where half the nifty fifty states are. So no one cares about "The Quartet."
There was no need for Israel -- absolutely no need -- to adopt a single word or provision of the "Road Map." All of Israel's supporters were geared up for the good fight against this awful “Road Map,” and the fight looked much easier than the tough ones of the past. More, there was a Likud Cabinet in place. Even Christian America was gearing up. Just last night, while channel surfing on television, I saw Pat Robertson on "The 700 Club" lambasting Ariel Sharon and saying that it is religiously forbidden by Scripture for anyone to divide the land of Israel. He sat there, quoting Tanakh – the Jewish Bible – from the Book of Joel, a lesser-know volume in the "Trei Asar" -- the 12 "Minor Prophets." He, a Christian minister representing how-many-tens-of-millions of Christian backers of the Republican Party, reminding the Prime Minister of Israel that the Good Book forbids anyone even to speak of dividing the Holy Land.
Against this backdrop, the Israeli Government agreed to the unprecedented decision to validate the "legitimacy" of an Arab "state." (Note that they call it "state" – an unassuming polity like somewhere you incorporate a business (like Delaware), or somewhere you grow wheat (like Nebraska), or somewhere you grow old (like Florida) – but they mean "country," namely a polity somewhere that you develop nuclear weapons (like North Korea), or poison gas and weapons of mass destruction (like Iran or Iraq), or somewhere you institutionally massacre hundreds of thousands (like Rwanda or Congo or Cambodia).) And the Prime Minister further called Judea and Samaria "occupied." Amid all the Israeli "cleverness" of adopting 14 points of incoherence that theoretically will make a "Palestinian State" impossible to establish, the Israeli Cabinet pulled the rug out from under all its strongest American supporters.
Now they whine. Michael Freund writes an article in the Jerusalem Post, calling on American supporters of Israel to pressure Bush. Two days later, in the article I attach below that IMRA now is circulating, Caroline Glick whines in the Jerusalem Post about "Washington's betrayal."
Well, guess what? Include me out of this one. This is not about Washington's betrayal. Washington has been a great supporter of Israel, and this particular President has in many ways been particularly supportive. He single-handedly has driven Arafat into an oblivion that 40 years of Israeli leaders could not dream of. Bush literally knocked Arafat out of stage center. He excused Israel’s incursion into Jenin and backed Israel when she barred the United Nations hatchet squad from “investigating.” Yeah, OK, so he has white-washed Mahmoud Abbas, a terrorist and Hitler apologist. OK. Bush has the real problem that, after bypassing Arafat and insisting instead on the emergence of an alternative democratically elected “Palestinian” leader who has no ties to terrorism, he has learned that finding a “Palestinian” leader who never wasted blood is like finding an American who never wasted ketchup. So the best they can find is a terrorist in a suit, an enigma like a cat in a hat, with a nickname from the butchering underground: “Abu Mazen.” There’s no such thing in American reference. What? George “Baby Face” Washington? Abie “Six Fingers” Lincoln? Willy “Machine Gun” McKinley? Franklin “Bugsy” Roosevelt? We have no such reference basis for Mahmoud “Abu Mazen” Abbas.
But none of it really has to matter, because Abbas is almost dead. In a few years, when Mahmoud Abbas dies of old age or of the Palestinian reproductive malady of premature assassination, the stage is set for the next layer of chaos. So Bush is not the bad guy here. It’s his job to pressure Israel a little bit -- he has to do what he has to do -- because, hey, he did not run for Prime Minister of Israel. He is President of the United States. That’s his job. We pay him with American dollars (legally). So, hey, he has to play the game. And, in that role, he plays the game to keep the oil flowing in from Araby while the Democrats think they are protecting the caribou (who are freezing their antlers off in Alaska while searching for some nice warm oil pipelines to thaw out the chill), and he simultaneously keeps the channels open with the Europeans, the Russians, and the U.N. So Bush has to do what Bush has to do. He has to give Tony Blair something to show the House of Commons when the Arabists want to know why Britain was fighting Bush’s war in Iraq. So he plays the game, gives Blair a “Road Map,” and that way the belly-achers stop yelling “Bully! Bully!” and belching out those awful groans when they do that BBC show that we see on cable every Sunday night.
And, while Bush made a bit of noise, it was left open for Israel to do what she has to do. This one was easy. Yet the Likud Cabinet failed. So this is not about “Washington's betrayal of Israel.” It is about the Israeli cabinet's betrayal of the people who voted against Oslo, Peres, Mitzna, Barak, and all that jazz. And it is about the Likud’s betrayal of her strongest supporters everywhere in the world, Jew and Christian alike.
The whining is not persuasive this time, as we mark the 36th anniversary of Jerusalem's unification, a day that should be celebrated as Yom Yerushalayim. There are very few people who have defended Sharon as strongly as I have over the years. Literally, I am “the guy who wrote the book on Sharon.” And if Pat Robertson is quoting Jewish Scripture, I may as well paraphrase Dickens: We defeated the Ghost of Palestine Past. We defeated the Ghost of Palestine present. But Ariel Sharon and his Likud Cabinet have presented a Ghost of Palestine Future that leaves us wondering whether these are the images of what will be or only of what might be. Sharon is humbug.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Anti-Orthodox Jewish Federation Census: Fuzzy Math
How the 2000 Los Angeles Jewish Federation Census Undercounted Orthodox Jews
The Jewish Federation's census of Los Angeles Jewryremains controversial. Even as the United States continues striving to count historically less visible demographic communities, the kinds of people whom Ralph Ellison might have called "Invisible People," our local Jewish census-takers fail to acknowledge that Torah-observant Jews weredramatically undercounted. The census alleges that Observant households have dwindled in the past two decades from 5.2 to 4.3 percent of Los Angeles Jewry. I refuse to be an Invisible Man in the Age of Lieberman. The "census" numbers are false. They are stuff and non-census.
First, the census was conducted by telephone interviews, demanding a documented average of twenty-six minutes perinterview. Questionnaires bore as many as 291 questions, including branching and modular components. As the Los Angeles Times often hasoften has appended to its published polls: "Poll results can be influenced by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented." Of more than 70,000 people called, only 2,640 were tallied.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of those reached by phone refused to sit for the half-hour interview. Population subgroups particularly disinclined to participate inexorably would have been undercounted.
Orthodox Jews with young children at home would be less inclined to sit for half an hour with a faceless phone interviewer from the Federation than would be, say, a Reform convert eager to be counted as a Jew. Similarly,senior citizens would have more time to schmooze for half an hour; younger people would have job and familial responsibilities, skewing the generational numbers and census age median. Who Knew?
Calls were made by Interviewing Service of America, a company that prominently advertises its specialty in polling the Asian-American community. The company represents commercially that it has a unique ability to count Chinese-, Korean-, Japanese- and other Asian-American communities because it has cultivated an expertise in that subgroup's demographic nuances, sensitivities, and in overcoming suspicious of interviewees. By contrast, when the same company polled citizens of western Tennessee in evening calls, the October 23, 1998 issue of the Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted the county transportation manager as acknowledging that "[w]e have had people call the hotline and say it is a scam and someone is just trying to find out where they live and where their children are, and similar things." Thus, we know from a documented 1998 census taken by the same interviewers around the same time that they were calling Jews in Los Angeles that, when they are not practicing their Asian-American expertise, they actually can scare large numbers of potential interviewees away from the phone. Who Knew?
In the Federation census, calls were made during dayand night hours. I assume that calls were not made on any weekday Jewish holy days because, otherwise, the census would be skewed ab initio. Even so, members of Sabbath-observant households do not sit on the phone twenty-sixminutes with census-takers on Thursday evenings. Every Sabbath-observant Jewish woman I know is busy on Thursday evening, and no Sabbath-observant Jewish man is going to sit on the phone half an hour on Thursday night with a Federation census taker. Just as Interview Service of America knowsAsian-Americans, a different polling company more sensitive to Jewish sensitivities would have known that about Sabbath observers. Who Knew?
In addition, Sabbath-observant families average morechildren per household than do non-observant families. Parents in households with several young children are less inclined to sit half an hour on a phone being interviewed by a Federation census-taker. By contrast, Reform converts, for example, are more inclined to be counted. It's fun -- theyget to be Jewish. Similarly, retired people have more time to talk. Thus, different groups have different motivations as to whether to participate,and motivation skews the demographic base polled by phone. Who Knew?
The census counted households, not individuals, further skewing results. The United States census does not counthouseholds. Household-counting is a methodology that structurally underreports the Torah-observant community because Observant Jews (1) number more people per household, but (2) comprise fewer households per capita.More people per household: (1) there are more children in Torah-observant homes; (2) Torah-observant Jews suffer a lower divorce rate (so there are more adults and children in the same one household); (3) more young Torah-observant adults remain with their parents longer. Fewer householdsper capita: (1) the lower divorce rate makes two adults more likely to comprise one household rather than two; (2) by discouraging our singles, especially daughters, from living away from parents, there necessarily are fewer Torah-observant households (because every single living alone in anapartment is a household); and (3) more conservative social practices among the Torah-observant encourage our singles to marry and unite households. Who Knew?
The census misleads further by attempting to comparetoday's gerrymandered numbers with those of twenty years ago. The new census polled exurbia, places way out in the sticks where Torah-observant Jews do not roam. Therefore, it is flawed when its analysts compare 1998 demographics with the 1977 numbers that polled only Jews in urban andsuburban communities. Of course the numbers will seem to dilute Orthodox Jews. And if the Los Angeles Jewish census this time were to include Idaho and Montana, it would appear that all Jewish groups are declining in numbers. Who Knew?
The census absurdly "finds" more than 5,000 African-American Jews in Los Angeles, a group that we are told is nearly one-quarter the population size of the Torah-observant. I lived among and celebrated Judaism with hundreds of Black Jews from Ethiopia in the Hadera absorption center in Israel in 1986. Since 1988, I have been speaking at synagogues, temples, and Jewish organizations throughout the city. There are not 5,000 Black Jews in Los Angeles. Who Knew?
The census invited interviewees to self-define their and their progenitors' Judaism. Thus, it reports that, among respondents who affiliate differently from their parents, 42% of children from Orthodox homes switched, and 10.8% switched to Reform. The census inherently fails to recognize that lesser educated, non-observant interviewees often erroneously characterize their progenitors' practice as "Orthodox" when it was not.
During ten years as a practicing pulpit rabbi in New York, New Jersey, and California, I often encountered young people who told me about their "Orthodox" parents or grandparents - describing people who had one set of dishes and flatware at home, ate shellfish, drove on Shabbat but who attended an Orthodox synagogue two hours on Yom Kippur and perhaps sent their children to an afternoon Talmud Torah Hebrew school run by an Orthodox shul. When such interviewees tell Interviewing Service of America -- specialists in the Asian-American community -- that they are Reform children of Orthodox progenitors, the statements are sociologically interesting but demographically irrelevant. Who Knew?
The census reports that twenty percent of the Los Angeles population is over 65. Many of our senior population arrived in Los Angeles as pioneers before Torah observance established institutional roots and a critical mass in the late 1970s and 1980s. The pioneers primarily were non-Orthodox. They arrived before mechitzah partitions were demandedand installed in several prominent Orthodox synagogues. Before the establishment of dozens of yeshivas that now dot Los Angeles. Before the explosion of a plethora of mikvahs, kosher restaurants, pizza stores. Think "Frisco Kid." Certainly, many of those abandoning Orthodoxy a century ago descended from Torah-observant grandparents from the "Old Country." Think "Hester Street." That twenty percent includes a disproportionate number of Reform residents who indeed come from Orthodox households. They are sociologically important, the era of Irving Howe's "World of our Fathers." However, such numbers utterly are irrelevant for charting demographic trends, and they mask the burgeoning impact of youthful Orthodoxy's birthrate in Los Angeles. Moreover, the Orthodox of twenty years ago qualitatively were less educated Jewishly, less pious, more willing toworship without a partition and to eat in halakhically challenged establishments. Today's Torah-observant community, educated at any of the booming yeshivas that burst at their seams and that continually expand intonewer, bigger buildings -- Emek, Yavneh, Hillel, Toras Emes, West Valley, YUHSLA, Valley Torah, Shalhevet, etc. - will not compromise on seating partitions, and they demand and patronize rabbinically supervised establishments. Who Knew?
If the quantitative number of Reform homes is lower now than twenty years ago, any effort to project denominational shifts from Orthodoxy to Reform necessarily is skewed because a perceived proportional increase of Reform Jews coming from observant homes more logically reflects the quantitative decrease through assimilation in the Reform population base of those coming from non-Orthodox homes. Do you see why?
The fewer quantitatively left from one group, the proportionally greater the presence of the other. Thus, if there used to be 100 Reform Jews, five from "Orthodox homes" and 95 from Reform homes, those from "Orthodox homes" would comprise 5% of the Reform group. If 50 of those from Reform homes have disappeared, marrying out and assimilating away, the same group hailing from "Orthodox homes" suddenly becomes 10% of the Reform group. But it is not that there are more Reform Jews coming from "Orthodox homes" -- just fewer people from reform homes staying in the fold. Who Knew?
Census calls were made as many as six times each to nearly 70,000 households. Of the 2,640 respondents who sat half an hour to answer their share of the 291 questions, 41% (1,080) were identified by random-digit dialing. Wealthier homes with more phone numbers available for modem, cellular, and multi-line communications would have been numerically overcounted beyond those with more modest spending on phone lines; Torah-observant Jews typically have tighter access to discretionary income. The other 1,560 respondents (comprising three-fifths of the poll database - 59%) were obtained from Federation lists. Under this "dual-frame sampling" process, the census numbers undercount discrete communities that participate less heavily in Federation-list organizations. By comparison, if 59% of the United States census were projected through dual-frame sampling from listsculled from those maintained by the United Way, the numbers would undercount certain discrete and insular minority groups who do not participate as cohesively in those charities. Who Knew?
And for explicit religious reasons, Orthodox Jews abhor being counted and consciously evade people-counters, whose efforts they deem repugnant to halakha, much as certain American population groups evade census-takers in mistaken fear that information as to their whereabouts will be shared with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Who Knew?
The census grossly undercounted Torah-observant Jews, demonstratively so, but its camouflaged flaws nevertheless offered an intellectually interesting opportunity to pinpoint. Sort of a "Where's Waldo" for the statistically curious. The same problems, in one form or another, have marred census efforts undertaken by other Federation counters in other cities. Until the Torah-observant community evolves the sophistication to recognize that the numbers consistently are skewed, that the methodologies inherently are faulty, that the skewing is part of a subtle agenda to steer away Federation funding from services and programs that serve the Torah-observant community, and that the solution for Orthodoxy is not rhetoric but statistical analysis and input not from Orthodox political scientists and medical doctors but from trained statisticians, the non-census will continue for another millennium.
The Jewish Federation's census of Los Angeles Jewryremains controversial. Even as the United States continues striving to count historically less visible demographic communities, the kinds of people whom Ralph Ellison might have called "Invisible People," our local Jewish census-takers fail to acknowledge that Torah-observant Jews weredramatically undercounted. The census alleges that Observant households have dwindled in the past two decades from 5.2 to 4.3 percent of Los Angeles Jewry. I refuse to be an Invisible Man in the Age of Lieberman. The "census" numbers are false. They are stuff and non-census.
First, the census was conducted by telephone interviews, demanding a documented average of twenty-six minutes perinterview. Questionnaires bore as many as 291 questions, including branching and modular components. As the Los Angeles Times often hasoften has appended to its published polls: "Poll results can be influenced by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented." Of more than 70,000 people called, only 2,640 were tallied.
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of those reached by phone refused to sit for the half-hour interview. Population subgroups particularly disinclined to participate inexorably would have been undercounted.
Orthodox Jews with young children at home would be less inclined to sit for half an hour with a faceless phone interviewer from the Federation than would be, say, a Reform convert eager to be counted as a Jew. Similarly,senior citizens would have more time to schmooze for half an hour; younger people would have job and familial responsibilities, skewing the generational numbers and census age median. Who Knew?
Calls were made by Interviewing Service of America, a company that prominently advertises its specialty in polling the Asian-American community. The company represents commercially that it has a unique ability to count Chinese-, Korean-, Japanese- and other Asian-American communities because it has cultivated an expertise in that subgroup's demographic nuances, sensitivities, and in overcoming suspicious of interviewees. By contrast, when the same company polled citizens of western Tennessee in evening calls, the October 23, 1998 issue of the Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted the county transportation manager as acknowledging that "[w]e have had people call the hotline and say it is a scam and someone is just trying to find out where they live and where their children are, and similar things." Thus, we know from a documented 1998 census taken by the same interviewers around the same time that they were calling Jews in Los Angeles that, when they are not practicing their Asian-American expertise, they actually can scare large numbers of potential interviewees away from the phone. Who Knew?
In the Federation census, calls were made during dayand night hours. I assume that calls were not made on any weekday Jewish holy days because, otherwise, the census would be skewed ab initio. Even so, members of Sabbath-observant households do not sit on the phone twenty-sixminutes with census-takers on Thursday evenings. Every Sabbath-observant Jewish woman I know is busy on Thursday evening, and no Sabbath-observant Jewish man is going to sit on the phone half an hour on Thursday night with a Federation census taker. Just as Interview Service of America knowsAsian-Americans, a different polling company more sensitive to Jewish sensitivities would have known that about Sabbath observers. Who Knew?
In addition, Sabbath-observant families average morechildren per household than do non-observant families. Parents in households with several young children are less inclined to sit half an hour on a phone being interviewed by a Federation census-taker. By contrast, Reform converts, for example, are more inclined to be counted. It's fun -- theyget to be Jewish. Similarly, retired people have more time to talk. Thus, different groups have different motivations as to whether to participate,and motivation skews the demographic base polled by phone. Who Knew?
The census counted households, not individuals, further skewing results. The United States census does not counthouseholds. Household-counting is a methodology that structurally underreports the Torah-observant community because Observant Jews (1) number more people per household, but (2) comprise fewer households per capita.More people per household: (1) there are more children in Torah-observant homes; (2) Torah-observant Jews suffer a lower divorce rate (so there are more adults and children in the same one household); (3) more young Torah-observant adults remain with their parents longer. Fewer householdsper capita: (1) the lower divorce rate makes two adults more likely to comprise one household rather than two; (2) by discouraging our singles, especially daughters, from living away from parents, there necessarily are fewer Torah-observant households (because every single living alone in anapartment is a household); and (3) more conservative social practices among the Torah-observant encourage our singles to marry and unite households. Who Knew?
The census misleads further by attempting to comparetoday's gerrymandered numbers with those of twenty years ago. The new census polled exurbia, places way out in the sticks where Torah-observant Jews do not roam. Therefore, it is flawed when its analysts compare 1998 demographics with the 1977 numbers that polled only Jews in urban andsuburban communities. Of course the numbers will seem to dilute Orthodox Jews. And if the Los Angeles Jewish census this time were to include Idaho and Montana, it would appear that all Jewish groups are declining in numbers. Who Knew?
The census absurdly "finds" more than 5,000 African-American Jews in Los Angeles, a group that we are told is nearly one-quarter the population size of the Torah-observant. I lived among and celebrated Judaism with hundreds of Black Jews from Ethiopia in the Hadera absorption center in Israel in 1986. Since 1988, I have been speaking at synagogues, temples, and Jewish organizations throughout the city. There are not 5,000 Black Jews in Los Angeles. Who Knew?
The census invited interviewees to self-define their and their progenitors' Judaism. Thus, it reports that, among respondents who affiliate differently from their parents, 42% of children from Orthodox homes switched, and 10.8% switched to Reform. The census inherently fails to recognize that lesser educated, non-observant interviewees often erroneously characterize their progenitors' practice as "Orthodox" when it was not.
During ten years as a practicing pulpit rabbi in New York, New Jersey, and California, I often encountered young people who told me about their "Orthodox" parents or grandparents - describing people who had one set of dishes and flatware at home, ate shellfish, drove on Shabbat but who attended an Orthodox synagogue two hours on Yom Kippur and perhaps sent their children to an afternoon Talmud Torah Hebrew school run by an Orthodox shul. When such interviewees tell Interviewing Service of America -- specialists in the Asian-American community -- that they are Reform children of Orthodox progenitors, the statements are sociologically interesting but demographically irrelevant. Who Knew?
The census reports that twenty percent of the Los Angeles population is over 65. Many of our senior population arrived in Los Angeles as pioneers before Torah observance established institutional roots and a critical mass in the late 1970s and 1980s. The pioneers primarily were non-Orthodox. They arrived before mechitzah partitions were demandedand installed in several prominent Orthodox synagogues. Before the establishment of dozens of yeshivas that now dot Los Angeles. Before the explosion of a plethora of mikvahs, kosher restaurants, pizza stores. Think "Frisco Kid." Certainly, many of those abandoning Orthodoxy a century ago descended from Torah-observant grandparents from the "Old Country." Think "Hester Street." That twenty percent includes a disproportionate number of Reform residents who indeed come from Orthodox households. They are sociologically important, the era of Irving Howe's "World of our Fathers." However, such numbers utterly are irrelevant for charting demographic trends, and they mask the burgeoning impact of youthful Orthodoxy's birthrate in Los Angeles. Moreover, the Orthodox of twenty years ago qualitatively were less educated Jewishly, less pious, more willing toworship without a partition and to eat in halakhically challenged establishments. Today's Torah-observant community, educated at any of the booming yeshivas that burst at their seams and that continually expand intonewer, bigger buildings -- Emek, Yavneh, Hillel, Toras Emes, West Valley, YUHSLA, Valley Torah, Shalhevet, etc. - will not compromise on seating partitions, and they demand and patronize rabbinically supervised establishments. Who Knew?
If the quantitative number of Reform homes is lower now than twenty years ago, any effort to project denominational shifts from Orthodoxy to Reform necessarily is skewed because a perceived proportional increase of Reform Jews coming from observant homes more logically reflects the quantitative decrease through assimilation in the Reform population base of those coming from non-Orthodox homes. Do you see why?
The fewer quantitatively left from one group, the proportionally greater the presence of the other. Thus, if there used to be 100 Reform Jews, five from "Orthodox homes" and 95 from Reform homes, those from "Orthodox homes" would comprise 5% of the Reform group. If 50 of those from Reform homes have disappeared, marrying out and assimilating away, the same group hailing from "Orthodox homes" suddenly becomes 10% of the Reform group. But it is not that there are more Reform Jews coming from "Orthodox homes" -- just fewer people from reform homes staying in the fold. Who Knew?
Census calls were made as many as six times each to nearly 70,000 households. Of the 2,640 respondents who sat half an hour to answer their share of the 291 questions, 41% (1,080) were identified by random-digit dialing. Wealthier homes with more phone numbers available for modem, cellular, and multi-line communications would have been numerically overcounted beyond those with more modest spending on phone lines; Torah-observant Jews typically have tighter access to discretionary income. The other 1,560 respondents (comprising three-fifths of the poll database - 59%) were obtained from Federation lists. Under this "dual-frame sampling" process, the census numbers undercount discrete communities that participate less heavily in Federation-list organizations. By comparison, if 59% of the United States census were projected through dual-frame sampling from listsculled from those maintained by the United Way, the numbers would undercount certain discrete and insular minority groups who do not participate as cohesively in those charities. Who Knew?
And for explicit religious reasons, Orthodox Jews abhor being counted and consciously evade people-counters, whose efforts they deem repugnant to halakha, much as certain American population groups evade census-takers in mistaken fear that information as to their whereabouts will be shared with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Who Knew?
The census grossly undercounted Torah-observant Jews, demonstratively so, but its camouflaged flaws nevertheless offered an intellectually interesting opportunity to pinpoint. Sort of a "Where's Waldo" for the statistically curious. The same problems, in one form or another, have marred census efforts undertaken by other Federation counters in other cities. Until the Torah-observant community evolves the sophistication to recognize that the numbers consistently are skewed, that the methodologies inherently are faulty, that the skewing is part of a subtle agenda to steer away Federation funding from services and programs that serve the Torah-observant community, and that the solution for Orthodoxy is not rhetoric but statistical analysis and input not from Orthodox political scientists and medical doctors but from trained statisticians, the non-census will continue for another millennium.
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