Open Season On Jews

You think what's happening in Sderot, where Jews are being torn apart by crudely designed rockets on an HOURLY basis, isn't lighting a fuse under anti-Semites all over the globe, including within the two "great democracies"--UK and USA?

Exhibit A: Russian-Jewish oligarch Roman Abramovich who spends most of his time in London, owns and operates one of England's top soccer teams-CHELSEA FC. In late 2007, Abramovich fired his high-priced Portuguese coach and brought in, Avraham Grant, one of Israel's top coaches. The initial anti-Semitic firestorm that was in part stoked by the British media, died down the minute Grant's team started winning consecutive matches. In fact, Chelsea is having a very good season and at press time was in 3rd place in the UK's top division. However, in recent days Grant and his actress wife Tzofit have been verbally and physically threatened by a hard core group of anti-Semitic Chelsea fans. When Chelsea lost a relatively unimportant local match to rival Tottenham Spurs (a team whose fans ironically call themselves "Jews", because of the veteran Jewish ownership of the team and large Jewish fan base) last week, Grant received an envelope with a mysterious powder, threatening letter attached. While Scotland Yard might be investigating this incident, no one in the British political and security hiearchy seems to be in a rush to arrest people even though these rabidly anti-Semitic fans aren't exactly running from the authorities.

Exhibit B: It's been said that "white men" can't dunk a basketball. Perish the thought that an all-Jewish boys high school basketball squad has been beating the tar off of public and Christian high school teams across Colorado. However, there are miracles in metro Denver. Now, just as the Herzl/Rocky Mt. Hebrew Academy is thisclose to qualifying for a regional championship, the Colorado High School Athletic Association refuses to change the playoff schedule to accommodate Herzl Academy's Sabbath (non-playing) needs. The acrimony has gotten so bad that state politicians are looking to step into the picture and help the Herzl squad. If anything, Coloradon politicians don't want the moniker-'We're Rocky Mountain High On Anti-Semitism.'

What Buckley Believed

In tribute to William F. Buckley, founder and editor of National Review, who died today.

One of best and most succinct (and most inspirational) statements in defense of the existence of God that I've come across, was on a segment entitled 'This I Believe' on NPR's Morning Edition:

How Is It Possible to Believe in God?

(As heard on NPR's Morning Edition, May 23, 2005. )

"I've always liked the exchange featuring the excited young Darwinian at the end of the 19th century. He said grandly to the elderly scholar, 'How is it possible to believe in God?' The imperishable answer was, 'I find it easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop.'

That rhetorical bullet has everything -- wit and profundity. It has more than once reminded me that skepticism about life and nature is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious -- indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief -- how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration -- near infinite -- of natural impulses? Yes, on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?

The skeptics get away with fixing the odds against the believer, mostly by pointing to phenomena which are only explainable -- you see? -- by the belief that there was a cause for them, always deducible. But how can one deduce the cause of Hamlet? Or of St. Matthew's Passion? What is the cause of inspiration?

This I believe: that it is intellectually easier to credit a divine intelligence than to submit dumbly to felicitous congeries about nature. As a child, I was struck by the short story. It told of a man at a bar who boasted of his rootlessness, derisively dismissing the jingoistic patrons to his left and to his right. But later in the evening, one man speaks an animadversion on a little principality in the Balkans and is met with the clenched fist of the man without a country, who would not endure this insult to the place where he was born.

So I believe that it is as likely that there should be a man without a country, as a world without a creator."

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"Washington firmly believed that God controlled human events. In both his public and private writings, he repeatedly discussed how God providentially helped the United States win its independence against incredible odds, create a unified country out of diverse and competing interests, establish a remarkable constitution, and avoid war with European powers that still had territorial ambitions in North America. " – Dr. Gary Scott Smith on George Washington and Faith.

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"Given the chance, I’d ask the creators of Israel Apartheid Week whether they care about any of Israel’s many positive achievements. If they would rather not take the time to research it, I’d be happy to tell them that Israel is the only country in the region to outlaw “honor killings”; that Israel recognizes fifteen different religions and even allows Arabic to be an official language of the state, on par with Hebrew; that Israel offers legal protection against discrimination and hate crimes regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or political party. " – Elke Weiss discussing Activism on college campuses.

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“Even though Olmert has repeatedly confirmed his willingness to negotiate Jerusalem and create a Palestinian state, Rabbi Yosef continues in his support for the prime minister. He told Olmert the day before the release of the Winograd Report, “Fear not, and do not be dismayed, for I am with you.”’ – Daniel Tauber explains Shas and the Golden Calf

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“As with anything related to the Middle East, even a simple board game garners controversy: Jerusalem was the only city to be listed without a country since, according to reports, many complained about the political implication. However, following pressure from the public and the Israeli consulate, all country names were removed from the list.” – Ita Yankovich with Monopolizing Jerusalem

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“When we went to school, our building was primitive and inconvenient. We all lived simple lives – that’s how people lived then. The spiritual aims are still the same, but now they have beautiful buildings. We didn’t have uniforms – we didn’t need them – everyone dressed very simply, without making others feel uncomfortable. Today we need the uniforms. We lived simply then. We made our own fun; nothing we did was hard for our parents to afford. Now, all the trips and activities cost a lot of money. But the spiritual aims are still the same, Am Yisrael Kodesh, as they should always be.” – Mrs. Tzertel Kenner

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“Carter sounded a similar tone in an earlier lesson: “It’s hard for us to even visualize the prejudice against gentiles when Christ came on earth. If a Jew married a gentile, that person was considered to be dead. If a Jew went into the home of a gentile, that Jew was considered to be what? Unclean, and had to go through a religious ceremony to become cleansed again so that they could even worship in the Temple.” – Jimmy Carter’s Distortions.

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And the Cold Nights Without Baseball, Jerusalem Vantage Point, & Dallas, Texas.

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Wonder of Wonders, Bibi Saying all the Right Things, and Falafel Break before Pesach.

Happy Reading!

Israel Prize Disgrace

The Olmert Government has decided to give the Israel Prize this year to Israel's worst academic leftist McCarthyist, Zeev Sternhell. That spelling of his name is not a joke, he really spells it like that.

Sternhell is a far-leftist political scientist at the Hebrew University. He has devoted much of his career at painting Israeli non-leftists as violent fascists who should be suppressed and denied freedom of speech. Sternhell was one of the promoters of the leftist McCarthyism against anti-Oslo dissidents, especially after the Rabin assassination by Yigal Amir. Sternhell considers all non-leftist Israelis to be fascists. The fact that a leftist extremist is to be awarded the Israel Prize by the Olmert government states volumes. The committee that nominated Strenhell was headed by Shlomo Avineri, a one-time (??) hard-core Marxist from the same department as Sternhell who had been thought to have moved towards the Zionist center.

Aside from his McCarthyism, Sternhell is also known for some other things. Wikipedia reports: 'Sternhell was taken to court by Bertrand de Jouvenel, a French philosopher and political economist, in 1983, after Sternhell published his work Ni Droite, ni gauche (Neither Right nor Left). Jouvenel sued Sternhell on nine counts, and Sternhell was subsequently convicted in France for defamation. In his book, Sternhell accused Jouvenel of having had Fascist sympathies. Convicted on two counts, Sternhell did not need to retract his remarks from the book however.' Strenhell is also the leading academic proponent in Israel of 1930s style Bolshevik central planning.

Edward Said, Columbia University's professor of terror, praised Sternhell in Al-Ahram, May 21, 1998. In Said's immortal words, Sternhell "author of a very important recent book on the myths of Israeli society (the main ones of which -- that it is a liberal, socialist, democratic state -- he demolished completely in an extraordinarily detailed analysis of its illiberal, quasi-fascist, and profoundly anti-socialist character as evidenced by the Labour Party generally, and the Histadrut in particular)."

Sternhell wrote in the Davar newspaper in 1988: "In the end we will have to use force against the settlers in Ofra or Elon Moreh. Only he who is willing to storm Ofra with tanks will be able to block the fascist danger threatening to drown Israeli democracy."

In the Haaretz newspaper, in 2001, Sternhell said: "There is no doubt about the legitimacy of [Palestinian] armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements, and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line."

[Hat tip: ]

Shas, Sans The Gemara

It's no secret that Israel's Orthodox political factions do not send their best and brightest talmidei chachamim to sit in the Knesset. More often than not, a sizeable majority of Orthodox Knesset members are what one would dub "street smart" rather than being "book smart."

However, in the case of the once vaunted Shas Sephardic Party, the holy moniker "SHAS" (shisha sidrei mishna) shouldn't even be thought of when mentioning both Shas Knesset members or senior party officials.

Many upper echelon Shas politicos are chozrim b'teshuva (or baalei teshuva) having alledgedly chucked their chequered backgrounds for the holy life. Yet, during the past year alone several Shas Knesset members and high-ranking officials have found themselves under investigation for a series of alleged criminal offenses that have embarrassed both party leader Eli Yishai and the party's spiritual mentor-Harav HaGaon Ovadia Yosef.

To make matters worse, those Shas Knesset members or senior ranking officials who haven't been targeted for investigation have made utter fools of themselves in front of the Knesset and the mass media by paskening (uttering halachic edicts) as to why the Almighty is punishing Eretz Yisroel. Those Shas officials who have uttered these ridiculously divisive "divinely inspired" edicts, probably couldn't pass a farher (Talmudic spot test) in front of Rav Yosef.

There was a time when the Shas Party served a vital function in Israeli society. Secular Ashkenazic business and political factions made life miserable for poor Sephardic immigrants.

Ironically, this form of racism is still practiced today by many Haredi Orthodox Ashkenazic educators who have established anti-Sephardic "quotas" within their booming girls high school and seminary school systems. However, on the flip side, the upper crust of Sephardic society including some Shas Party officials, send their sons to elite Haredi Ashkenazic yeshivot, which has angered Rav Ovadia Yosef's sons and rightly so. In this case, the Haredi Ashkenazi yeshivot will only accept the "best and brightest" of the Sephardic elite.

Rav Ovadia Yosef's sons are also at the forefront of challenging Eli Yishai and his cadre of political clowns to leave PM Ehud Olmert's government before the Israeli leader gives away the heart and soul of the Jewish people-JERUSALEM.

Then again, many Shas Knesset members might have been absent from school when their rebbes gave shiur about the holy city. In fact, many of them probably never attended a religious school to begin with.

Shas, sans the Gemara...

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"And all these Jewish comedians and actors grew up in Europe or were yeshiva boys when they first started. Even if they weren’t frum, they were living in a Yiddish community. Woody Allen says in a documentary that he wasted his time in cheder. The point, though, is that he went to cheder." - Thoughts on being a Jewish comedy writer in Hollywood.

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"The fate of the land of Israel rests with the nation of Israel. The corruption of Israel’s political leaders, among other things, may make it easy for pessimism to seep into one’s soul. Pessimism, however, is the early precursor of resignation, and we Jews have but one homeland in this not always hospitable world." - Sara Lehmann wondering about Apathy and Multitudes.

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"We’ll leave it to others to parse these statements, though it’s clear that something about Jerusalem is going on. That belief is only strengthened by a new poster that was distributed to all schools in Israel by the Education Ministry – a poster that features a severely compressed and doctored depiction of the Kotel and its surroundings. " - This week's editorial on Jerusalem.

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"Most of their neighbors were in the same stage of life. They helped each other make brissim for their newborn sons; they walked their children to kindergarten together and then waited at bus stops through elementary school. They took turns babysitting so each couple could have some private time, or attend a meeting without having to pay a sitter." - Making a difference in Karnei Shomron.

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And the loss of Rational Orthodoxy, an Interrupted Trip, and and answer to Can I Trust Him

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Kol Isha concert, Orange & Poppy Seed cookies, the Healing Power of Therapy.

Happy Reading!

Ben Gurion University Faculty Member Calls for Israel's Annihilation

Ben-Gurion University, sometimes called the "Bir Zeit of the Negev" because of the large number of anti-Israel "Post-Zionist" radical leftists on its faculty, now has a new achievement.

Anti-Israel extremist Neve Gordon is on the faculty there in the department of political science -- a monolithic far-leftist department in which no non-leftist is permitted to teach. Gordon is on leave this year at the University of Michigan, itself a bastion of Bash-Israel bigotry. Speaking at an anti-Israel rally that was part of "Israel Apartheid Week" there, Gordon called for a "one-state solution" in which Israel would cease to exist altogether. He also denounced Israel as a racist apartheid entity.

A University of Michigan student reports the event in details here:

The student reporting this concludes:

Neve Gordon is one of the biggest self-hating Jews I have ever seen. It is no surprise the University of Michigan hired him as a “Visiting Professor.” This University is really anti-Israel and that they had to hire a Jewish person to push the hatred on Israel and Jewish people. The last paragraph, I mentioned how he said Israel made “Jewish roads.” I had whole argument with him during lecture on this statement he made. He said that “Jews are the only ones who can travel without any difficulty, and that makes them Jewish roads.” Another person in the audience made a comment about this statement in his lecture, and he mentioned my “question from last Fall’s class.” Overall, if Ben-Gurion university keeps this man as a professor, they should be ashamed, and people should protest the university’s hiring policies.'

In the past The Jewish Press has reported on the extremist shenanigans at Ben-Gurion University, where churning out anti-Israel hate propaganda counts as scholarly research, and where extremists get hired and promoted on the basis of such agitprop.

The president of Ben Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, coddles the radicals and anti-Semites, collaborates with them, and "understands" them.

Malley's Disciples

(Pictured: Sen. Barack Obama with the Rev. Al Sharpton)

Recent news reports identifying Robert Malley as one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers took the Monitor back a few years, to the summer of 2001 when the previously obscure Malley was suddenly popping up all over the place, castigating Israel for the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000.

In early July of that year, The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Malley, who had served as a special assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs to President Clinton, that took issue with those who presumed to blame Yasir Arafat for the failure of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David and, later, Taba. (One of those blaming Arafat happened to be Malley’s own former boss, Bill Clinton.)

The following month, the liberal-left New York Review of Books featured a lengthy essay on the same theme by Malley and Palestinian academic/activist Hussein Agha.

(In a prime example of left-wing networking, London’s virulently anti-Israel Guardian carried a brief adaptation of the Malley-Agha essay, and Americans for Peace Now immediately gave it prominent placement on its website.)

Jumping aboard the Malley Express that summer was Deborah Sontag, who’d already demonstrated time and again throughout her regrettable stint as New York TimesJerusalem bureau chief that she was nothing if not an absolute sieve through which flowed any pro-Palestinian argument or viewpoint.

In an extraordinarily long July 26 article (which began on the Times’s front page and sprawled across two inside pages) Sontag, basing much of her account on Malley’s assertions, attempted to refute the (in her words) “simplistic narrative” that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s generous offers at Camp David had been rewarded with Palestinian intransigence and hostility.

(That theTimes chose to devote the sheer amount of space it did to Sontag’s seemingly endless editorializing disguised as reportage should have been enough to silence the few who still harbored doubts about the newspaper’s political agenda.)

Reaction to the Sontag piece was quick in coming, starting with the obligatory letters to the editor from pro-Palestinian Arabs, pro-Israel Jews, and self-hating Israelis and Jews (an over-used term to be sure, but how else to describe individuals who argue their enemies’ case better and with more passion than the enemies themselves?).

Detailed criticism of Sontag’s article also appeared on the Web and in various magazines and newspapers. One of the best was a withering analysis in The New Republic by Robert Satloff who opened on a sardonic note:

"Imagine The New York Times covering the sinking of the Titanic with only a passing reference to the iceberg. Absurd? Not really. On July 26 the nation’s newspaper of record devoted 5,681 words to a retrospective by Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag titled ‘Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed’ and mentioned the word ‘intifada’ just once.”

In Sontag’s view, wrote Satloff, “the failure of the peace process was due to bad chemistry (Barak chatting up Chelsea Clinton instead of Arafat at Camp David) and bad timing (Bill Clinton waiting too long to offer his own peace plan). In her telling, the Palestinian uprising is just part of the background landscape. But it is not just part of the background landscape. The uprising so transformed the Israeli-Palestinian political context that by the time the two sides were, in Sontag’s telling, agonizingly close, it no longer mattered .... But to discuss the intifada, its roots, and its impact would complicate Sontag’s tale of imminent peace gone awry, so she sets it aside…”

Satloff characterized Sontag’s article as the product of “lazy reporting, errors of omission, questionable shading, and an indifference to the basic fact that the Palestinian decision to wed diplomacy with violence, not American and Israeli miscues, damned the search for peace.”

This was hardly a surprise to regular readers of Sontag’s tendentious dispatches, just as it was no shock when the Israel-based journalist Judy Lash Balint reported earlier that year that at a special taping of Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” in Jerusalem, “several smartly dressed, attractive, young English-speaking Arabs made sure they saved a chair for New York Times bureau chief Deborah Sontag. When Sontag arrived, she was greeted with kisses by one of the young women in the group.”

Sontag’s massive piece of Malley-fueled revisionism was essentially her swan song as the Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief. She’s been writing for The New York Times Magazine since her return to the U.S. For his part, Malley has continued writing opinion pieces from a decidedly pro-Palestinian perspective and now, apparently, has the ear of the Democratic Party’s front-running presidential hopeful.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"And then there was the counting – every day the counting. Counting the number of rockets that fell on a particular day – 20, 30, 40, even 50; the number of people injured – one day 1, another 2, another 5; the number of people suffering from shock – one day 2, another day 5, another day dozens; the number of homes, buildings and cars destroyed, the number of businesses and lives ruined." - David Sultan with Fear and Faith in Sderot.

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"This, it seems to us, is the only reasonable explanation for Mr. Olmert’s behavior. A declaration of principles as opposed to a detailed agreement would enable the prime minister to make at least some headway with his vision of a divided Jerusalem while avoiding a domestic political firestorm. But unleashing the IDF against the Gaza rocketeers would put the kibosh on any negotiations with Mr. Abbas." - From our lead editorial.

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"The Jews of Hebron are neither tired of fighting nor tired of being courageous. As a non-Jewish visitor once told us: “Don’t worry – we read the end of the book already and you guys win!” We know that in the end we will win, because we know the secret of Jewish power and deterrence. " - Yossi Baumol on Hebron

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"Nevertheless, many shuls across the country have formed minyanim on Shabbat – when there is plenty of time to daven properly – with the ultimate aim of finishing quickly. Friday night services, instead of being inspiring and meaningful, become a race on getting done as quickly as possible. " - Rabbi Mordechai Weiss discussing the power of song.

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"But oral tradition and the seemingly favored view is that the Bene Israel descended from the Jews who fled in 175 B.C.E. from the Syrian/Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes. It is believed they were shipwrecked at Navgaon near the port of Cheul on the Konkan Coast, 30 miles south of Bombay. The seven male and seven female survivors then spread out to many of the surrounding villages in the Konkan. Most of them have surnames ending with “kar,” identifying the villages where they resided." - Ita Yankovich and Indian Jews

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And the Giants Super Bowl upset, All Choked Up, & Rebbetzin Jungreis.

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: The Jewish Hospital Chaplain, The First Days, and the Cutest Baby Contest winners

Happy Reading!

Israel's Untold Stories

Most Jewish-American newspapers barely scratch the surface when it comes to human interest stories about what is happening inside Israel on a daily basis. While The Jewish Press works hard to bring you all the "news that fits" about Eretz Yisrael, there are still some fascinating nuggets of info that can slip through the news cracks.

Here are two fascinating examples from opposite ends of the spectrum:

1-Despite a bevy of anti-Israeli news items in the Asian, European & Latin American newspapers and the growing number of unaffiliated Jews who supposedly are disconnecting themselves from the Jewish state, kibbutzim all over Israel are reporting that both gentiles and secular North American Jews are flooding them with requests for volunteer work.

Israel's Channel 10 News reported earlier this week that kibbutz representatives actually had to turn away dozens of volunteers from all over the world who wished to participate in the great kibbutz communal experience. The volunteers will do almost any kind of menial job, from picking fruit in the orchards to washing dishes in the kitchen.

" The only way to see, feel and understand what is happening in Israel on a daily basis is to come and experience for yourself. This is a wonderful opportunity for me," said one smiling Spanish-speaking volunteer, as he was washing dishes. The TV cameras also caught a kibbutz volunteer program manager telling two Korean tourists that they would have to wait a few months to volunteer because there was simply no room to house them at the moment. These volunteers represent Israel's secret public relations weapon.

2-Sderot's once bustling blue-collar business community is beginning to feel the horrifying economic impact of Qassam attacks. According to two Israeli business websites, Sderot citizens who were employed in local factories have lost 480 million shekels (over $100 million dollars) in income during the past two years. Many employees have either stayed away from work or strayed away from Sderot altogether as a result of the terrorist pounding the city has endured. The domino effect has forced 100 businesses (out of a grand total of 300 in the city), many of them small businesses (food & clothing stores, etc.), to close up shop.

Life in Israel, as we know it...

The Ron Paul Phenomenon

Ron Paul's chances of becoming president are virtually zero. The forty-two delegates he currently has will not get him the Republican nomination. Yet Americans should still study Paul and his positions because he is an interesting and unprecedented phenomenon.

In the fourth quarter of 2007 he raised more money than any of the other Republican candidates and broke the record for most money raised in a single day (six million). (John Kerry held the previous record.)

During that quarter he also received more military donations than did McCain, Huckabee and Romney combined.

His fan base is passionate and devoted; young voters are particularly attracted to him.

Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times recently reported that Paul "raised 61 percent of his funds from small-dollar donors, defined as those who gave $200 or less, compared to just 14 percent of Hillary Rodham Clinton's funds, 12 percent of Mitt Romney's funds and 8 percent of Rudy Giuliani's 2007 campaign funds."

Former advisor to the first President Bush, Doug Mead (who some credit for coining the term "compassionate conservative") recently wrote “...the words and arguments of Ron Paul are still resonating. They still hang over this election. They are haunting and troubling. They are producing blogs and papers and books and like Goldwater’s revolution they will one day very likely produce their own Ronald Reagan.”

Indeed, Barry Goldwater Jr. endorsed Paul for president.

After researching what Paul stands for, some may like him, others may hate him, and still others may be indifferent. But anybody who has garnered the incredible grassroots support that Paul has deserves much more serious attention than the neglect and ridicule much of the mainstream media has treated him to thus far.

The Quackery that Passes for Opinion at the Times

If the Times is at all curious why it was once losing Jewish readers in droves—and maybe still are—they need look no further than the center op-ed in yesterday’s paper.

There Daniel Gavron tells us that all is merry and wonderful for Israelis in the merry land of Israel. You see, “virtually the entire world, including all the Arab nations…accept the existence of the State of Israel in 78 percent of the land of Israel.” (Fact-checkers, where are you? I know it’s an op-ed, but the facts in it should at least be, well, factual.)

And even though Ahmadinejad said those nasty things about destroying Israel, he doesn’t really mean it. Hezbollah is indeed “utterly hostile,” but way too busy to worry about Israel. And Hamas? Well, everyone knows that the truce it seeks is—I’m not making this up—“tantamount to de facto recognition.” Yes, in Israel the birds are chirping and the rainbow in standing tall.

Oh wait, a minute. A few paragraphs into the piece, Gavron says that things aren’t 100 percent perfect. There is a problem. Do you want to guess what that is? All the successful suicide bombings and hundreds of other attempts even in a post-Arafat Fatah (and most of these attacks and attempts coming from Fatah members)? No, not that. The constant rain of missiles on the Israeli city of Sderot? Nope. Try again. The UN and the international community’s continuing condemnation of everything Israel does? No, no, no.

The one and only problem in Israel is—wait for it—Israel’s settlements and other human rights violations against Palestinians.

Oh, what’s that you say? Too predictable. You’re right, and I bet you’ve cancelled your subscription.

An Israeli TV Dinosaur Retires

Heinz Kluger a.ka. Chaim Yavin, the "Walter Cronkite" of Israel's Channel One "Mabat" TV news program anchored his last broadcast earlier this week, a position he held for 40 years. Though he was considered the model for today's Israeli prime-time anchorman, Mr. Yavin was far from a "pareve" personality.

1-He held onto the position way too long, becoming a prime-time fossil in the process. As Channels 2 and 10 launched their American-style news broadcasts with two anchors (one man, one woman) and high-tech studios, Mr. Yavin's broadcasts dropped like a rock in the ratings, losing nearly 50% of viewers during the past 5 years.

2-At a time when Channel One, a quasi-government entity like the BBC and PBS, was losing tens of millions of dollars a year, Mr. Yavin continued to earn a hefty six-figure annual income (dollar wise). He never asked for a pay cut in order to preserve jobs at Channel One.

3-Mr. Yavin admitted earlier this week that he was proud of politicizing his broadcasts especially thosed that bashed the settlers and their settlement movement. He claims that this was the policy of Israel Radio as well. Which means, that Israel Radio, also owned by the Israeli government, encouraged the brainwashing of its listening audience.

Though Mr. Yavin was renowned for his feisty on-camera battles with former PM Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-Likud apparatchik Ehud Olmert, Yavin reveled in his own self-importance rather than presenting journalistic facts. If Yavin was the model for Israeli journalism, then he bears some responsibility for the low-level of Israeli journalism that exists in both the print and electronic media.

Respect for longevity is one thing. But warping the truth in order to stigmatize a group of pioneering Jews who only wish to live in peace and harmony within the borders of Eretz Yisroel is self-hating political advocacy, not journalism.

Shalom and good riddance, Chaim.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"An honest, healthy mind, fearless of consequences, cannot look at this spectacularly complex world, made up of spectacularly complex subatomic particles, interacting in spectacularly complex couplings, without concluding it was designed to be just what it is. End of conversation." - Another look at the debate on Creation.

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"In the past, candidates have avoided a few states where they felt they couldn’t compete with their one major opponent. Since the opponent would then win more or less “unopposed,” the media might not make much of that victory." - Harry Eisenberg on the Campaign that wasn't.

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"From his Christian faith, Bush draws the conviction that while freedom represents God’s gift to humanity, cruel and evil tyrants are capable of building hells that raze civilizations. As a (swashbuckling) Texan, he sees it as his responsibility to protect the good guys from the local bullies. On both counts, Ahmadinejad must be stopped." - Why President Bush may just shock us all.

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"Look for other cities to also set new attendance highs. Detroit is poised to top last year’s record mark of more than three million. Season ticket sales were cut off at 25,000 in January in order to accommodate groups and individuals for selected games. Baseball expects to set a new collective attendance high this year." - Irwin Cohen and the Baseball Insider

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And Mass Graves, Girl's Valor, and A Lighthouse in the Shidduch Sea

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Torah from Rabbi David Hollander, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, and Rabbi Moshe Meir Weiss.

Happy Reading!

The Ambivalent Candidate

I was recently asked to become a regular contributor to Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog (go to www.commentarymagazine.com and click on the word “Contentions” in the blog section of the home page).

The blog’s list of past and present contributors includes, among others too numerous to mention, John Podhoretz and Norman Podhoretz, Edward Alexander, Hillel Halkin, Victor Davis Hanson, Joshua Muravchik, Peter Wehner and Ruth R. Wisse; needless to say, it’s an honor to be in such heady intellectual company.

The following was my maiden post for Contentions:

The amazing implosion of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign will be analyzed and argued about for years to come. The Monitor’s own take, hardly original and admittedly based on nothing more than informed speculation, is that he simply was ambivalent about the whole enterprise to begin with.

Anyone who witnessed Rudy’s unforgettable eight-year turn as mayor of New York knows that when Rudy really wants something, he’s tenacious and single-minded about getting it. He’ll fight anyone and anything standing in his way, conventional wisdom and political nicety be damned.

And that’s exactly the Rudy we didn’t see in this campaign, from his surprisingly languid acknowledgment to Larry King in Feb. 2007 that yes, he was in the race, to his strangely subdued performance in what turned out to have been his last presidential debate in Florida last week.

It’s been suggested, by some who harbored a certain level of skepticism about the depth of Rudy’s commitment to a presidential run, that perhaps Rudy thought a tentative campaign, particularly in a year that looked, at least early on, like a washout for the GOP, would raise his profile to an even higher degree and be beneficial for business – i.e., for Giuliani Partners and his already astronomical speaking fees.

Perhaps there’s some truth to that, but lacking access to the inner workings of his psyche, the Monitor can only go back to that earlier suggestion about ambivalence. Part of him liked the idea of being president, of attempting to replicate his success in New York on a national level, but another part of him wasn’t so sure. If the presidency were handed to him, yes – but the gritty day-to-day work of campaigning for office had never been his strong suit.

That much was obvious from his first, mistake-prone and unsuccessful run for mayor in 1989 as well as his victorious second effort in 1993. Andrew Kirtzman, in his highly readable and balanced book Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City, described candidate Giuliani on the campaign trail in 1993:

“Other politicians could lose themselves in the moment when working a crowd, but Giuliani never lost the look in his eye that said all this was a just a means to an end…. When he spoke before a crowd he didn’t romance them or flatter them or try to seduce them. Rather, he argued his case; a lawyer making his final summation. He was all prose and no poetry.”

In 1997, Rudy could have shut himself up inside Gracie Mansion and still won reelection, such was his record of accomplishment in his first term of office and the mediocre opposition he faced in Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger. So 1997 offered no real test of his campaigning skills.

But, certainly in retrospect, his short-lived run for U.S. Senate in 2000 was in many ways a precursor to his near-somnolent presidential bid seven years later. Kirtzman titles the chapter in his book about that campaign “The Reluctant Candidate” and describes the tenor of the campaign in the late winter and early spring of 2000 – before Rudy’s health and marital issues took him out of the running:

“…Giuliani had barely deigned to mount a campaign. While [Hillary] Clinton was well on her way to visiting all sixty-two of New York State’s counties, he’d hardly traveled outside the city. While she was honing her message, he’d barely issued a position paper. Inside his camp, meetings weren’t being held, polls weren’t being taken…. The mayor acted as though he were entitled to the Senate seat, and he didn’t seem to want it all that much.”

In The Prince of the City, his fine study of the Giuliani mayoralty, unabashed Rudy admirer Fred Siegel wrote of the widespread surprise at “Giuliani’s lukewarm approach to a Senate race that had much of the country abuzz.”

Giuliani, wrote Siegel, “seemed to want the job but only if it meant he didn’t have to miss too many Yankee games or campaign too often in the frigid areas of upstate.”

Sound familiar?

Candidate to Head Ben Gurion University?

Mykola Golavatiy, the Rector of a large university in Kiev, the Ukraine, the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management -- known in English by the acronym MAUP -- says that Jews are evil, academia should research their evil, Chabad is the evilest of all, anti-Semitism does not exist and is a fabrication. The Ukrainian National Conservative party, the most anti-Semitic party in the country, was founded by MAUP's president, Georgy Tchokin.

See this.

Dear Lord, do you realize what this means? It is only a matter of time before Mykola Golavatiy replaces Rivka Carmi as president of Ben Gurion University!

To Vote or Not to Vote…

Generally, I believe voting is not merely a right or privilege but a civic duty. I cast ballots in races local and national, highly contested and fairly predictable, primaries and general elections, and I nag my family members about going out to vote as well.

But this Tuesday—Super Tuesday, that is—I’m not sure I’ll be heading to the polls. Here’s the dilemma: I am registered Democrat, mainly to be able to vote in New York’s closed primaries, but I do not care for either of the Democratic candidates. Obama has worrisome ties to Islam and to anti-Israel and anti-Semitic figures that he has not credibly repudiated. He also seems lacking in substance and statesmanship—his entire campaign is built around the vague rhetoric of “change.” Hillary, on the other hand, is a very smart cookie. A little too smart, I’m afraid, to be trusted. She is wily, calculated, a politician through and through.

Ordinarily, if you don’t like the candidates running in your party’s primary, it makes sense to vote for the weaker link—whomever will have less chance of defeating the other party’s candidate in the general election. But in this case, both Obama and Hillary are going strong, each having picked up some early state victories so far. It’s hard to identify an underdog (though I think Obama likes to paint himself as such).

So I don’t like the choices, nor do I have a strategic reason to vote in the primary. Should I sit it out? Or try to discern the more tolerable prospect between the two candidates?

In the meantime, the voting booth has already been set up in the lobby of my building. It taunts me every time I pass.

The Neglected Candidate: Ron Paul

Largely unmentioned in much of the presidential election discourse is Texas Representative Ron Paul. This despite the fact that he apparently is the most searched candidate on the Internet and that he recently set a fundraising record by raising six million dollars in a single day.

Who is Ron Paul?

On foreign affairs, he is a non-interventionist, believing that America should trade with everybody and have entangling alliances with none. He wants to shut down dozens of American bases around the world, which, he says, drain America's economy and does nothing to endear itself to the world.

Some have criticized his desire to cut off aid from Israel. But as Paul says, he plans on cutting off all aid to that region and, currently, the Arab states and entities receive three times what Israel gets.

Besides, Paul argues, Israel would be better off not being dependent on American aid. He believes, as I do, that Israel is too subservient to America and runs to seek America's permission for every war it fights and every peace deal it signs.

On the domestic front, Paul is a libertarian, which means that he maintains that aside from assuring the security of its citizenry and establishing courts of law, government should stay out of people's businesses.

He wants to abolish the IRS (the income tax only dates from the 1910's) and replace it with nothing. As a congressman he has never voted for a tax increase or for an unbalanced budget.

He also wants to let the young generation opt out of social security. To me, there is no greater insult than the government taking your own money away from you "for your own good." Paul doesn't discuss social security much nor does he discuss whether he favors eliminating the welfare state entirely or just vastly reducing it. (Perhaps this is because, as Paul has said, the president, as opposed to Congress, has little direct authority over these matters.) But as someone who formerly ran on the Libertarian ticket, his leanings should be clear.

What Paul is most famous for (among those people who have heard about him altogether, as the media have done a good job at giving him minimal coverage) is his opposition to the war in Iraq and his contention that America's presence in the Middle East fuels Al Qaeda's hatred of this country.

A long story needs to be told here, but for the present, voters should consider whether the Arab terrorists, however crazy they are, would have attacked America if we had stayed out of their affairs these past 50 years.

Some would argue that America needs to be involved in the Middle East to protect its interests. But was America's intervention in Iran in decades past to its benefit? Was its support of Saddam Hussein in his earlier years to its benefit? Is stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia to its benefit?

(Nonetheless, a decent counter argument can be made and that's why Paul's position on this subject is not one of my favorites.)

Concerning the Iraq War, voters should consider whether they really want American troops to continue to die for the next 100 years as McCain said may be possible.

And this leads me to a final aspect of Paul's philosophy which is of great appeal among supporters: his respect for the Constitution. If, he asks, the Iraq War was so important, why didn't Congress declare war as the Constitution instructs it to? Good question. On this issue at least, I think we can all say, "Amen."

The above represents the viewpoint of this author only. To see The Jewish Press's official endorsements for Tuesday's primaries, click here.

Shimon Peres Has a Mastermind Plan

To the right - Peres when he is not wearing his clown costume:

I have long believed that Shimon Peres is actually onto something. You see, he understands that part of anti-Semitism is the stereotype belief that Jews are smarter than other folks. So he has decided to end anti-Semitism once and for all by proving to the world that it is not so. Peres is famous for saying at the start of "Oslo" that he was more worried about the infiltration of cable TV into Israel than by the infiltration of terrorists. He is correct - he WAS more worried by cable TV.

Here is Uncle Shimi's
When asked by one of the youths what each of them could do, Peres replied: "Who here has heard about Facebook?" Nearly all in attendance raised their hands.

"You can fight anti-Semitism using social networks, like Facebook," he continued.

...

He is currently behind an initiative to install the world's first electric car network in Israel. He also maintains an active Web site and has a blog on the Web site of the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Peres does not have a Facebook profile, but Frisch said he is considering doing it.