Obscene Sarkozy Photos

As you know, an international diplomatic scandal was created when the Daily Mail in the UK published photos of the new wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy as she emerged from the mikva. Oh, the humanity. Well, I opened the page out of academic curiosity, and you will see that the REALLY obscene objectionable photo to which I refer is this one.

I reproduce it here:

Kneeling To Obama

Was there ever any doubt that liberal journalists and media outlets would swoon over whatever Barack Obama would say in response to the controversy concerning his relationship with his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Liberals just have too much invested in the storyline of a post-racial, biracial healer whose mission it is to set our house in order after the unspeakable depredations of the George W. Bush years.

The fact that there even was an Obama/Wright controversy owed less to the supposedly vigilant mainstream news media than to the doggedness of conservative bloggers, websites and Fox News. Stories of Wright’s racist, anti-American worldview had been circulating for at least a year, but it was only when videos showing Wright in all his vicious glory began to surface all over the Internet that even the most faithful media Obamaniac had to acknowledge the Illinois messiah might have some serious explaining to do.

Obama had barely finished delivering his much anticipated March 18 address on race before the tearful encomiums began coming. Hearts racing, pundits and editorial writers competed with each other in the prostration sweepstakes.

“Profile in courage,” gushed The New York Times. “Clear, nuanced and brilliantly honest,” trilled journalism professor James Klurfeld in Newsday. “An extraordinary moment of truth-telling,” gasped the Washington Post. “One of the most impressive presidential candidates in years….We have been asked to reflect in the most serious ways about the role that race plays in the life of our country,” cheered political science professor Alan Wolfe in The New Republic.

“Perhaps the most thoughtful and sophisticated oration on race ever delivered by an American politician,” marveled New York Observer reporter Steve Kornacki. “This searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime,” sobbed Andrew Sullivan, the high profile blogger and magazine writer long besotted with Obama.

Lost in all the sticky-sweet commentary coming from the precincts of the liberal-left was the stark fact that Obama only gave the speech because his previous equivocations and outright lies would wash no more, and that the address raised almost as many questions about his relationship with Wright as it purported to answer.

Obama’s ability to deliver a sweet speech was never in doubt. His judgment and honesty were, and on those counts he hardly acquitted himself with honor.

Conservatives were, predictably, considerably less taken with Obama’s Big Speech.

“Were my rabbi to gloat that America got its just desserts on 9/11,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby, “or to claim that the U.S. government invented AIDS as an instrument of genocide, or to urge his congregants to sing ‘God Damn America’ instead of ‘God Bless America,’ I would know about it straightaway, even if I hadn’t been in the sanctuary when he spoke. The news would spread rapidly throughout the congregation, and in short order one of two things would happen: Either the rabbi would be gone, or I and scores of others would walk out, unwilling to remain in a house of worship that tolerated such poisonous teachings. I have no doubt that this would be true for millions of worshipers in countless houses of worship nationwide.”

Wrote radio host and columnist Michael Medved: “In his speech, Obama suggests that his fellow citizens recoiled against Reverend Wright only because they failed to understand that his bitter rage stemmed from centuries of oppression and injustice. ‘The fact that so many people [said Obama] are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.’

“Does Obama decry, or encourage that segregation? If he condemns it, then why would he maintain a long-term commitment to a purposefully segregated, race-based congregation that elevates a mystical sense of ‘blackness’ above Christianity, Americanism or common humanity?”

In his weekly New York Times column, William Kristol suggested that, contrary to the call by liberals for more talk on race, the country would do better to take a break from what in actuality has been a decades-long national obsession with the subject.

Kristol hit on something articulated by few (if any) other commentators. It’s not that we haven’t had a discussion on race in recent years – sometimes it seems like we can’t think or talk of anything else – it’s that the conversation has been so relentlessly one-sided, with liberal, politically correct pieties elevated to received wisdom while blacks (Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas) who refuse to toe the NAACP-approved line are marginalized or worse.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"It was surprising that a dean at Columbia, himself a historian and even a former president of the American Historical Association, should appear so unfamiliar with the basic facts about Nazi Germany. Yet evidently Coatsworth needed to be reminded that Hitler’s 1930’s included, among other things, the widescale imprisonment and murder of dissidents; the banning of opposition newspapers and political parties; mass burnings of books by Jews and other “subversive” authors; the Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their rights; the Kristallnacht pogrom that devastated German Jewry; the annexation of Austria; and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia." – The more things change, the more they stay the same. Read Rafael Medoff’s front page essay on Columbia University and Hitler.

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"What we as white Americans, and certainly Steyn as a white Anglo-Canadian, overlook, is that Wright isn’t a liability where blacks are concerned. In fact, he’s an important asset. Wright confirms Obama as an “authentic” black man. Wright helps Obama win the black votes he needs to win the election." – David Isaac, Morton Klein and Ira Heller voice their opinions on the Obama/Wright controversy.

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"One might wonder about the need for introducing a document that was not signed by couples in prior generations. The answer lies in the diminished coercive authority enjoyed by batei din in our time. In earlier generations, a bet din had full coercive powers as Jews were granted judicial autonomy by the local authorities over internal religious matters. No one would dare challenge a bet din’s ruling in those bygone days." – Rabbi Chaim Jachter discusses the Halachic Pre-Nup.

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"It should be noted that in betraying the word of her boss, Rice was amply assisted by the feckless Olmert-Livni-Barak government. In an effort to divert public attention from the government’s incompetent leadership during the Second Lebanon War, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his colleagues sought to shore up their support base among Israel’s leftist elites by renewing negotiations with Fatah." – Caroline Glick and a betrayal of Israel.
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"We, his three daughters, felt that constant sense of sadness as he quietly went about the task of living. He worked endless hours to support his family, but also as a means of escape from the agony of thought and remembrance. He spoke little, but his silence was pregnant with meaning. We knew that he loved us with all his being and would give the shirt off his back for us, but he found it difficult to emote or demonstrate that deep affection." – A tribute to a Last Survivor
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And, the loss of four great Jewish Leaders, Rearranging Deck Chairs, The Pesach Dilemma

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Defining Moments, Shabbat Friendly Hotel Suites, and Aliyah Journal

Playing Roulette With Aliyah

The lure of better paying jobs in the USA and UK, especially within the bio-tech, hi-tech and academic spheres has caused an exodus of brainpower from the Jewish State during the past 10 years.

To underscore just how ridiculously corrupt the" employment system" has become, Israel's Channel 10 TV revealed earlier this week that undercover "Shin Bet" agents, who are flying incognito aboard Israeli airliners to prevent a skyjacking by Islamic terrorists, are being paid the equivalent of 10 shekels an hour ($2.15) for their heroic services. This is how Israel's equivalent of the FBI treats its front-line secret soldiers? By comparison, a secretary with all of the right political connections, who might spend her day pouring coffee and flirting with powerful business and political leaders, can earn 100 shekels an hour. Not exactly a life or death job.

Realizing that a growing number of wealthy Israeli businessmen are also beginning to run from the high taxes and bureaucratic bungling, Prime Minister Olmert together with the morally bankrupt and financially reeling Jewish Agency have decided to put together a whole new aliyah incentive package to attract middle and upper class Americans, as well as expat Israelis back "home."

That's like putting a band-aid on a festering wound. Offering a decade's worth of tax breaks isn't what many Jews in the Diaspora are looking for. In fact, there are those of us who've already made aliyah who would have no compunction about suing the government if the "new tax incentives" aren't automatically passed down to the thousands of Anglos who've made aliyah during the past decade. The reason why aliyah to Israel from N. America and the UK has suceeded during the past 5 years can be traced directly to Nefesh B'Nefesh's "underwriting" of the aliyah experience, which has given many families a fighting financial chance to survive the first two years in the Jewish State. The Israeli government and the Jewish Agency have done everything in their power to roll back many of the financial and tax incentives during the same period.

Realizing the error of their ways, the Jewish Agency, whose officials are incredibly jealous of NBN's success, are trying to rectify the problem. However, many American philanthropic organizations in the USA are cutting back on their donations to the Jewish Agency, not just because of what's happening on Wall St. It has more to do with the way the Jewish Agency has been run over the years. As it is a quasi-governmental agency, it mirrors the largesse and the corruption that exists within Israel.

Olmert and the Jewish Agency might want to score public relations points with their new aliyah incentive package. But Americans and Israeli expats especially, understand and recognize that Olmert and his business and political "machers" are the ones responsible for the ridiculous state Israel finds itself in today. Almost no one will return "home" without the system being over-hauled from TOP to bottom. Pity the Shin Bet security agent who puts his/her life on the line every single day for $2.15 an hour.

Obama Unmasked

So Barack Obama, that much-heralded agent of change and ensign of hope, is desperately trying to come up with a believable explanation of what he knew and when he knew it – the what and when in this case referring to the anti-white, anti-U.S., anti-Israel invective spewed for decades by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor and spiritual adviser, the cleric who presided at the Obamas’ wedding and baptized their children, the Afrocentric radical who bestowed an award on Louis Farrakhan, the man Obama refers to as “family” and compared to a beloved “old uncle” as recently as three weeks ago, before the media finally, belatedly, made an issue of their relationship.

Rolling Stone magazine, which fawns over Obama nearly as incessantly as do MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, had the truth about Obama and his pastor a year ago, though of course it was packaged in as laudatory an article as possible, a lengthy essay originally titled “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama.” (Tellingly, in an obvious act of damage control, the article has been renamed “Destiny’s Child” in the magazine’s online archive.)

The Rolling Stone piece delves into the history of Obama’s church and quotes from one of Rev. Wright’s signature sermons, larded with anti-American calumny and the kind of profanity one doesn’t expect to hear from a pulpit on Sunday morning:

"We [the U.S.] are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS [caps in original]…. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God…. We care nothing about human life…. And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be Sick! OF THIS [EXPLETIVE]!"

The article’s author, Ben Wallace-Wells, had this to say of Obama and Wright:

" This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from….Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama’s life, or his politics. The senator “affirmed” his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a 'sounding board'….Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons.

" 'If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,' says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, 'just look at Jeremiah Wright.' "

Obama’s apologetics, disclaimers, rationalizations and what have you concerning Wright just don’t ring true – and are rife with internal contradictions. The author Gerald Posner, a liberal, outlined the problem at The Huffington Post:

"If the parishioners of Trinity United Church were not buzzing about Reverend Wright’s post-9/11 comments, then it could only seem to be because those comments were not out of character with what he preached from the pulpit many times before. In that case, I have to wonder if it is really possible for the Obamas to have been parishioners there – by 9/11 they were there more than a decade – and not to have known very clearly how radical Wright’s views were. If, on the other hand, parishioners were shocked by Wright’s vitriol only days after more than 3,000 Americans had been killed by terrorists, they would have talked about it incessantly. Barack – a sitting Illinois State Senator – would have been one of the first to hear about it…."

Some of Obama’s defenders have tried to make the case that there’s not much difference between Obama’s relationship with Wright and John McCain’s relationship with Rev. John Hagee, the controversial Texas pastor who recently endorsed the presumptive Republican nominee. To which John Podhoretz responded on Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog:

"Obama credits Wright with his religious awakening. Obama had Wright officiate at his wedding. And he donated $22,500 to Wright’s church in 2006. McCain has no personal relationship with Hagee whatsoever. Wright is one of Obama’s mentors…. The difference between Wright and Hagee is that while Hagee endorsed McCain, Obama has long endorsed Wright."

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

“On one particular night Beryl thought he’d reached the end of the line and that life as he knew it was over. A band of boors overloaded on food and drink had become increasingly disorderly. As he was wont to do at times, Beryl assertively bade them good night until he was left with but three drunkards to contend with.
To his horror, a brawl erupted and turned ugly. Beryl caught the glint of flashing knives amid the punches and blows, but before he could react, the ruckus was over and three bodies lay motionless before him. Beryl was numb with shock and fear, for the village elder was a brutal anti-Semite who would not hesitate to seize such an opportunity to fan the flames of his hatred.” Rachel Weiss with reasons to Never Forget.

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"Had American naval hero John Paul Jones declared to the attacking British in 1779 “I will not begin to fight”; had Winston Churchill stood in the House of Commons in 1940 and proclaimed “We shall not fight in the fields nor in the streets, we shall not fight in the hills; we shall surrender”; had Douglas MacArthur left Bataan in 1942 with the stirring words “I shall not return,” they would all be – justly – disreputable figures, scorned by their nations and forgotten by history. The battles they fought would have been lost. " – Rabbi Steven Pruzansky with the power of Words
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"Esther, on the other hand, wielded great influence without a hint of arrogance. Like Moshe, she was an unwilling savior, hand-picked by God to take on a role she neither sought nor desired. And yet she rose to the task with grace and judgment worthy of a seasoned leader.” Ziona Greenwald discusses Purim, Power and Politics

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“No matter how much we prepare and look forward to the joyous holiday of Purim, the day gets here, and somehow all our anticipation gets pushed aside. Both my husband and I often regretfully allow a tremendous amount of stress to invade the day. I know I’m not alone in this feeling. I’ve talked to my friends and they too seem to suffer from the rush of delivering numerous mishloach manos packages to all their friends and family.” – Lessons in Emunah

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“I can barely imagine the tremendous pressure and nisayon he had. When one chooses not to honor such a massive commitment, the opportunities rarely repeat themselves. He didn’t hesitate to see which way the wind was blowing, but cancelled the event immediately. This is a wondrous example of Kiddush Shem Shamayim B’Rabim, sanctifying Hashem’s Name publicly, one of the authentic lessons of Megillas Esther.” – Rabbi Moshe Meir Weiss with a Purim Message

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“Although many of his fellow Jews criticized him for this, claiming that he was inciting Haman, Mordechai remained steadfast in his opposition to Haman. While the majority of Bnei Yisrael felt that if they acquiesced to Haman’s demands he would leave them alone to function as a semi-independent religious community, Mordechai knew otherwise.” Rabbi David Hertzberg with Leadership Challenges for Purim

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”That Tzvia may be asking for trouble in refusing to cooperate may be true, although not uncommon among idealists. But where is the good sense of the police and courts, which should be acting like mature, responsible adults? Why punish her for what she thinks?” Moshe Dann with a Farce in the Courtroom. Update: Since we went to press Tzivya has been acquitted of all charges and released.
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And Purim Contest Winners, From the Archives of The Jewish Press, and Inquiring Photographer (Purimshpiel)

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Our monthly Health & Living Supplement – focusing on the Elderly, a new monthly column from the DA’s office, plus Rockland & Northern New Jersey, West Coast and Queens & Long Island.

Chag Purim Sameach and Happy Reading!

Obama Stays Close to Jeremiah Wright

So was Barack Obama rejecting or denouncing Jeremiah Wright today?

What Hillary Clinton should say in response to Obama’s speech:

“There will come a time in the coming four plus years when the next president will have to decide whether several divisions of the US Army will have to retreat from some province in Iraq or push forward; when the president will have to decide whether to help a declining US stock market with incentives or hold back; perhaps when the president will have to choose between three very qualified but quite different candidates to be a US Supreme Court justice. The time will come to take a stand, Mr. Obama, not just give a stirring speech.

“Today you had the opportunity to take a stand, a simple stand: to quit the church you have belonged to and make it clear that intolerance will not be tolerated—not just with words, but with actions. And you couldn’t do it. If you couldn’t simply quit a church, why should we have faith that as president you could do anything more than try to speak your way out of a crisis?”

Sleaze, Equivalence, Bias

(Pictured: Notorious 1982 New York Post headline. Twenty-six years later, the Post, with the exception of its pro-Israel editorial page, is still sleazy.)

A few observations on media coverage of last week’s Mercaz HaRav massacre:

● Every so often the New York Post reminds those of us who attempt to defend it – usually on grounds of its sound editorials or entertaining political coverage – that at bottom it really is just a sleazy tabloid.

The Post relegated the Mercaz HaRav atrocity to page 23 in its March 7 issue. Not even a blurb on its front page, which was devoted to the bomb blast at the Times Square military recruiting station. Arguably a sound decision since it was a local story (although the bomb had gone off at 3:40 the previous morning and nobody was hurt). But here are just a few of the stories a reader had to make his way through to get to the article on the worst terrorist attack in Jerusalem in years:

Madonna’s work on a documentary about Africa (accompanied by the requisite photo of the pop star in all her vulgar glory); a local politician busted for DWI with a “mystery woman passed out drunk in the back seat”; the latest on the never-ending Obama-Clinton campaign skirmishes; four pages devoted exclusively to gossip (as opposed to the unlabeled gossip that takes up the bulk of the Post’s “news” pages); a piece on the feds busting a call-girl ring (the very one that reportedly counted among its clients the governor of New York, though that was not public knowledge at the time); and a story on the trial of a Los Angeles private eye titled “It’s Slime Time in H’wood Court.”

● For aficionados of moral equivalence, it was hard to top a March 8 Los Angeles Times story by staff writer Ashraf Khalil headlined “Across Divided Jerusalem, a Day of Grief.” All one needs to know about the rest of the lengthy article is how it began: “On different sides of this divided city Friday, grieving Israelis laid to rest their murdered sons while a Palestinian family grieved over the loss of the young man who killed them.”

● On The American Thinker website, novelist Gary Wolf had a fine piece on anti-Israel media bias, a phenomenon, he wrote, that “never ceases to amaze me. It must rank as one of the most curious sociopolitical phenomena of our era. The further the Palestinian Arabs move toward a barbaric Islamic theocracy, the deeper the support for them among the cadre of ‘progressive’ journalists.”

Echoing a point I made in a 2005 column titled “Passive Voice Genocide,” Wolf referred to the headline of an early Associated Press story on the Mercaz HaRav shootings – “7 Die in Shooting at Jerusalem Seminary.”

“Seven what – people? Jews? Martians?” Wolf asked. “And they are not killed, they simply ‘die,’ in the passive sense, as if from a stroke. The main reason why this is so insidious is that such language is never used when the enemies of Israel are the ones who die. One of the calling cards of the leftist journalism is that when Arabs die, you know how they died, who killed them…. If the sides were reversed, the headline would read, ‘Israeli extremist massacres 7 youths learning Koran at Gaza holy place.’ ”

As a postscript to his article, Wolf invited readers to “imagine what on-the-scene coverage of 9/11 might have looked like if the media’s anti-Israel bias were brought to bear”:

NEW YORK – Someone got behind the joystick of an airliner and leaned into it at the wrong angle, causing the plane to collide with a very tall structure in its path.

Rescue workers said that thousands of people, who happened to be physically present in the buildings, were dead. American police, FBI, and army officers allege that the person purposely flew the plane into the office building….

The New York plane crash came a day after North Korean President Kim Jong persuaded moderate Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to consider peace talks with the United States. The Iranian president nixed the idea after it was disclosed that the U.S. is the number one oppressor of Muslims worldwide.

John Q. Public, a passenger on the plane, could be heard over the cockpit radio in the seconds before the crash. “Stop the terrorists, stop the terrorists,” he shouted. Psychologists say that Mr. Public was suffering from temporary insanity caused by his imminent death….

The office building is the World Trade Center in the Wall Street quarter at the entrance of New York, a well-known workplace identified with capitalism, inequality, and exploitation of the Third World, particularly Muslims.

There were no plane crashes with Muslim pilots in 2001, though American police and military claim they had prevented several similar incidents.

Spitzer's Big Fall

One of the many lessons the Purim story teaches us is how fast and far the powerful can fall—brought down by a stumbling block placed in front of them by their own hand. Haman hanged from the very gallows he had prepared for Mordechai.

That’s one of the many thoughts that has crossed my mind since the Eliot Spitzer scandal broke. Behold, one of the most arrogant politicians of our time, who fashioned himself the righteous zealot rooting out corruption in high places, resigns in a mudbath of moral disgrace.

Lots of powerful people are arrogant—it’s not necessarily at odds with effective leadership. But the more arrogant one is, the greater the risk that he will begin to feel invincible, untouchable, incapable of losing his mantle. And then when he inevitably falls prey to his own greed, lust, or foolishness, the fall will be that much steeper.

Just two weeks ago, I attended a political function at which Spitzer appeared and offered remarks. He was greeted with the expected oohs and awe, and I admit that I myself was tickled to meet him. (I had actually met him once before at a law school function where his notecard-free address left me duly impressed.) And now! How much can change so quickly.

Perhaps there is a positive message here, another truth demonstrated by Megillat Esther: Even the most dire situation can turn around in the blink of an eye. What (and who) seems fixed in place one day can be uprooted the next; what’s up can come down, and down up. True in politics, and true in life. The Jewish People can attest to that.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"That 1929 massacre became the paradigm in the Arab world for removing Jews. Massacre them. Massacre them especially while they are at study in their religious schools. Massacre them today and it will lead to the Jewish evacuation of Jerusalem just as it led to the Jewish evacuation of Hebron in 1929." – Micah D. Halpern with The Link
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“In their place, we have inherited a new political leadership that is leading the people and the Land of Israel – with open eyes – like lambs to the slaughter. What are we doing in the face of attacks on Ashkelon and Sderot? We are reacting like lambs to the slaughter. We aren’t doing a thing. What other democratic country, let alone a dictatorial one, would put up with even one bomb on its sovereign territory and its citizenry? What other country would send its soldiers to be killed – like lambs to the slaughter – in order to decrease criticism of its policies, instead of wiping out the enemy?” – Dr. Chaim Shalem with Truth from the Land.
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“As a pulpit rabbi, I have provided dozens of affidavits to the Rabbanut attesting to the Jewishness of my members who were born Jews or who converted according to halacha and who wished to make aliyah or marry in Israel. And this is justly the province and domain of the Chief Rabbinate, and its legal authority under Israeli law. In this instance, the GPS makes the process easier, as participating regional batei din in the network of the RCA, under the auspices of the Beth Din of America, are pre-certified to have their conversions accepted by the Rabbanut” – Rabbi Steven Pruzansky and the RCA Geirus
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“Reflecting a startling demographic change in professional baseball, 16 of the top 20 prospects are white and American born; only two are African American, one is from Venezuela and the other hails from the Dominican Republic. (The starting lineup of the Tigers this year has two African American players and seven Latin American players. The best players in the Tigers’ minor league chain, however, are mostly white and American born.)” – Baseball’s Spring Training
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“Hunger Artist refers several times to the ultimate story of the triumph of order over human weakness: the Biblical tale of the binding of Isaac. In an interview, Jacobson said the book originated with the Akeidah and its parallels with her father’s ‘great hopes for his family’s suburban future’ and her own ‘sense of the ways in which a man’s own dreamed life can take precedence over everything else and make the emotional realities of his relationship to his children recede.’” – Menachem Wecker, Hungry for Literature.
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"Aside from the practical application of Torah law, the Torah is the spiritual blood for our hearts and the spiritual food for our souls. Among other things, it grounds us in emunah, defines an objective moral standard and provides for us a historical and metaphysical context to where we find ourselves on this third planet from the sun." – Why Torah is for Everyone.
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“It is interesting that nowadays when we say “a bachur,” it is a title of honor bestowed upon a boy who chooses to learn in yeshiva; thus, he is known as a “yeshiva bachur.” Now we know that there is another meaning to the title of bachur; namely the courageous bachelors who, two-and-a-half centuries ago remained staunchly committed to Yiddishkeit, sacrificing marriage and a family to remain true to our faith.” – Rabbi Moshe Meir Weiss at the Touro Shul.

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And South Florida, Desecration in Lejask, Fighting for Sderot

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Torah View From Zion, Im Yirtzeh Hashem by You, and The Story of Paula Lester.

Happy Reading!

Qassams, Grads & Groggers

Islamic terror organizations "study" the Hebrew calendar and adjust their wicked actions accordingly. Last Thursday evenings' Rosh Chodesh massacre in Jerusalem underscored this brutal fact. Unfortunately, the secular Israeli government can only react after a tragic terrorist action because it refuses to understand that the Jewish State is engaged in both a physical and spiritual battle against radical Islam.

Religious Jews understand that their radical Islamic enemies have studied basic Jewish rituals as part of their hate-filled indoctrination. Secular Jewish leaders are so "allergic" to the historical lessons contained in the Chumash, Gemara or Shulchan Aruch, that it is much easier for them to accuse knowledgable rabbinical scholars of "incitement to murder". Ignorance is bliss.

Last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak actually asked the Israeli Supreme Court if it was "legal" to fire artlillery rounds at civilian neighborhoods in Beit Hanoun and beyond, where Hamas and Islamic Jihad squads were using buildings as a cover to fire Qassams and Grads at innocent Jewish civilians in Sderot and Ashkelon. CHELM!

It didn't occur to Barak and PM Ehud Olmert that the Palestinians who lived in those buildings actually elected Hamas and encouraged their sons and daughters to join rocket squads and suicide bomber groups after the Jews withdrew legally and peacefully from Gaza nearly three years ago. Barak has to ask a Jewish Supreme Court for permission to protect Jews?

It made no difference to Barak or Olmert that rabbis from across the Ashkenazic & Sephardic spectrums told them that Jewish law permits Jews to take the battle to the enemy in any form, in order to prevent the slaughter of innocent Jews. Pre-emptive actions to protect Jewish life and sovereignty appear throughout the Tanach.

The fascinating Purim story ends with a detailed report of a pre-emptive strike by Persian Jewry against the allies of Haman based on a decree from Mordechai and Esther. If Mordechai and Esther had not acted, tens of thousands of Jews would have been slaughtered at the hands of Haman's murderous accomplices. In addition, there is every reason to believe that if Haman had been allowed to massacre the Jews in King Ahashverosh's provinces, Ahashverosh's descendants (Darius & Cyrus) would not have been in a position to allow the Jewish people to return to the Holy Land and begin the process of rebuilding the Second Temple. Mordechai and Esther pre-empted the altering of Jewish destiny, before the descendants of Amalek succeeded in their treacherous plan to wipe out the Jews once and for all.

Barak and Olmert are faced with the same equation, as a modern day Haman in Teheran, whose influence is as far and wide as Ahashverosh, seeks to erase Jewish destiny once more. Will they act in the manner of Mordechai or succumb to their daily "Abbott & Costello" routine?

Cheering the Murders of the 8 Yeshiva Children on Haifa U Chat List

This is NOT a spoof!

I thought you should see what sort of anti-Semitic hatred is being disseminated via the "ALEF" chat list, supposedly of Israeli academics, operating under the auspices of the University of Haifa. The following message cheering the attack on the yeshiva children was disseminated via this ALEF list on March 10 (the following is one long citation):

[alef] Arabs to the Gas Chambers, Medical experiments on Arabs - Mercaz
HaRav - a training centre for illegal occupation and murder
tony greenstein tonygreenstein at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 10 19:56:37 IST 2008
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I've just come across this excellent article from Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign on how the Yeshivah that was bombed last week is probably one of the most vile institutions one could imagine. A veritable centre of neo-Nazi or Judaeo Nazi ideas.

Tony Greenstein

Medical experiments on Arabs, Arabs to the gas chambers

Mercaz HaRav - a training centre for illegal occupation, murder and "Arabs to the Gas Chambers"


A Palestinian killed eight Israeli students in a settler movement training centre, in retaliation for Israel.s massacre of over a hundred Gazans, mostly civilians. Hundreds of the seminary students later chanted "Death to the Arabs" at the gates of their seat of learning. This was somehow missed by the BBC.

British prime Minister Gordon Brown, following Bush, hurried to condemn "the murders" of the Israelis at the settlers. training centre. This contrasts with his deep silence during Israel.s recent massacres in Gaza. The BBC would have us believe that Mercaz HaRav yeshiva is a normal school where 'religious students' pursue esoteric religious studies. In fact Mercaz HaRav is the main educational and training centre of the fanatical Israeli settler movement, Gush Emunim, what the British newspaper,The Independent, somewhat disingenuously calls the "controversial settler movement". Many Mercaz HaRav graduates fill the ranks of Gush Emunim, which organises attacks on Palestinians from Jewish-only military settlements across the West Bank as part of its declared aim of dispossessing Palestinians of 100% of Palestine.

The Mercaz HaRav yeshiva is based on contempt for all Gentiles, not only Arabs. The parent organisation, Gush Emunim, is heavily armed and carries out the most revolting crimes against innocent Palestinians across the West Bank. This writer has visited the Palestinian village of Yanun after settlers had washed their dogs in the Palestinians. drinking water. A Medieval ideology goes hand in hand with Medieval tactics - Hebron settlers poison village wells with putrescent chickens. They beat and shoot Palestinians, poison their sheep, generally act like the violent thugs they are. One well-known graduate of Mercaz HaRav, Rabbi Moshe Levinger who founded the colonies of ultras in Hebron was such a vicious psychopath towards Palestinians that he was even found guilty of killing a Palestinian by an Israeli court, for which he served three months in detention. Rabbi Levinger was also found guilty of unprovoked assaults on women and children, unusually, since the settlers enjoy complete immunity; many a Palestinian has been found guilty by the Israeli authorities of beating himself up in the vicinity of Jewish settlers.

Mercaz HaRav yeshiva was founded by Rabbi A.Y. Kook, and later led by his son, T.Y. Kook. The manner in which young minds are shaped at this Yeshiva can be guessed from one of A.Y.'s spiritual pronouncements, that "The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews . all of them in all different levels . is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle." Kook's classification of Palestinians as non-human allows the graduates of Mercaz HaRav to ignore those commandments that forbid stealing, murder and coveting.

Since non-Jews are similar to another species in the Kooks. world-view, the very notion of human rights governing the relations between Jews and others is naturally repugnant to his followers; human rights are definitely not on the syllabus at Mercaz HaRav. The Kooks' primitive god is similar to that of their American Christian fundamentalist counterparts. Both groups of fundamentalists believe that the coming of the Messiah is imminent (they disagree on whether this is a first or a return visit) but they agree that the normal forms of human decency are no longer in force. For reasons that need not concern us here, the beginning of the messianic age allows the activation of the rule, as expressed by another unlovely Gush Emunim Rabbi, Shlomo Aviner, that "While God requires other normal nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews."

The suspension of 'such laws' extends to non-Jews' right to live and breathe. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, another settler leader, asked pragmatically whether "If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save the Jew?" He replied in the affirmative, supporting an Israeli fundamentalist theology that should make anyone think twice before taking the kids on that beach holiday in Israel. Palestinians have to take Ginsburgh's ideas seriously, though, for the learned Rabbi leads a heavily-armed gang of settlers,14 past graduates of the classrooms of yeshuv Mercaz HaRav.

...

Mercaz HaRav graduates don't just believe they can use your, or any passing Palestinian's, liver. Gentiles can also be useful to science. The Israeli Attorney General was forced to intervene to bar Rabbi Lior's election to Israel's top religious body following concern over his public proposal to use captured Arab .terrorists. to conduct medical experiments.16 (Gush Emunim considers all Palestinians to be 'terrorists'.) Lior is reputed to be the top student of Kook fils. Note that Lior had to be barred by adminstrative methods after he had secured
enough votes from his supporters to secure a seat on Israel's Supreme Rabbinical Council.

...

The idea of using Arabs for medical experiments ought to be a clue to something bigger. Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, spell it out: "the similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism are glaring. The Gentiles are for the messianists what the Jews were for the Nazis." If you think that stealing peoples organs is just your average settler yeshiva ghoulishness, Gush Emunim settlers. idea of leisure time activities after yeshiva is out is to decorate Palestinian homes in Hebron with "Arabs to the gas chambers".

...

Jerusalem, like Palestine as a whole, is saturated with armed Jews, uniformed soldiers and police as well as gun-toting settlers. Both groups cooperate to control the Palestinian population, who are kept unarmed in order that they can be dispossessed. This dispossession is achieved by a combination of the illegal occupation's 'legal' means combined with the settlers. violent extra-legal actions. Any armed Palestinian is killed on sight. Jerusalem, like all of Palestine, pits Jewish supremacism and military power against a colonised population, whose anger at their status and hostility towards their occupiers and violators is natural and healthy. Should they kiss the whip held over their heads? Palestinians continue to resist and we should be inspired by their courage, fortitude and endurance against an enemy that threatens them openly with a 'Holocaust.'24

Alaa Abu Dheim killed eight students who were being trained to oppress and dispossess him, his family, his entire people. He was himself killed by an armed student. Abu Dheim's sister, Iman, said he had been deeply affected by the Israeli massacres in Gaza. She said her brother had told her "he wasn't able to sleep because of the grief". Rafael Eitan, a past Army Chief and Deputy Prime Minister explained the rationale behind Israel's incessant brutality:the crushing of the Palestinians. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle".

Israel's brutality towards Palestinians is a means to the Zionists' declared end, shared by dominant groups in both secular and religious camps, to dehumanise the .cattle., the 'cockroaches.' Israel was cleared for immigration in 1948 by terror, and is still to this day based on terror against the entire Palestinian people. ...
Mick Napier

(Mick Napier is Chair of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign,
affiliated to PSC-UK.)


---------------------------------
Want to tell the heads of Haifa University, through whose auspices and computer the above was disseminated, what you think of this?

To whom can you complain?

University of Haifa:
President of the University of Haifa
Prof. Aaron Ben-Ze.ev
University of Haifa
Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel
Tel: 972-4-8240101
Fax: 972-4-8240281
E-mail: abenzeev@univ.haifa.ac.il

Rector of the University of Haifa
Prof. Yossi Ben-Artzi
University of Haifa
Mt Carmel, 31905 Haifa Israel
Tel: 972-4-8240405
Fax: 972-4-8342101
Email: yossib@univ.haifa.ac.il

Chairman of the Board of Governors
Mr. Leon Charney
Law Office of Leon H. Charney
Broadway 1441
New York, NY 10018
Phone: 212-819-0994
E-mail: charney@lhcharney.com

University "Friends of" Offices Outside Israel are listed here:

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

"I applaud the act…The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a [expletive]. Now it’s coming back to the U.S. [Expletive] the U.S. – I want to see the U.S. wiped out.” – The stupidity of Bobby Fischer
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“I was not a co-founder, a board member, nor was I or am I in any way formally associated with the AAAN, which Klein could easily have ascertained from that group’s public records, were he a serious journalist. His entire ridiculous “story” falls apart at that point.” - Rashid Khalidi responds to last week’s front-page story
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"There were two types of rabbanim," said Boro Park rav Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum who has spoken to several of the ban’s signatories. "Some were against concerts altogether and some were specifically against turning a concert into a moshav leitzim [session of scorners]…. One performer [Lipa Schmeltzer, who doubles as a jokester], they felt, was making fun of rabbanim in a way that couldn’t be tolerated." – On the recent concert ban.
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“In an official clarification, the OU released a statement saying that while it abstained from the final vote endorsing a Palestinian state, the group still managed to insert into the resolution’s text a statement explaining that Israel’s repeated offers to establish a Palestinian state ‘have been met, time after time, by violence, incitement and terror’." – Aaron Klein reports on the Orthodox Union
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“Berger’s color scheme utilizes the seven colors of the spectrum, based on the Zohar, as a representation of the 10 sefirot (mystical aspects of God). “These paintings are in the metaphorical tradition of ma’asei merkava (Divine Chariot) rather than the realistic mode of the ma’asei Bereishit (Creation) which most art work emulates,” he explains. “To transliterate the Psalms from written poems to visual image was a difficult task. Just as each Psalm is different, so is each painting. And yet, as each Psalm is inherently connected to the other 149, so too a unifying element had to run through the 150 Psalm paintings, a task accomplished through careful observation.” – Acrylic Kabbalah
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And Rabbi Moshe Ausfresser, Understanding Sderot and General Grant’s Expulsion

Finally, exclusively in our print edition (available at newsstands or by calling 800-992-1600 ext. 344: Lethal Lady, Unto the Third Generation, and Honoring Your Parents.

Happy Reading!

Buckley and the Jews

(This is a somewhat expanded version of something I posted at Commentary magazine’s Contentions blog.)

Among his many other accomplishments, William F. Buckley Jr. made the conservative movement a far less forbidding place for Jews.

Conservatism in the early 1960’s was, fairly or not, largely defined in the Jewish mind as a downscale hothouse of paranoia, racism and resentment fronted by such figures as the Christian Crusader Rev. Billy James Hargis, the anti-Semitic columnist Westbrook Pegler and, of course, Robert Welch, whose John Birch Society was never officially racist or anti-Semitic but attracted a fair number of those who could accurately be classified as such.

By basically reading the more conspiratorial-minded organizations and polemicists out of mainstream conservatism (a story engagingly told by the liberal journalist John Judis in his 1988 biography William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives), Buckley made it that much more difficult for the media to portray the right as a redoubt of angry kooks and Kleagles.

His having done so no doubt smoothed the way for those liberal Jewish intellectuals who would eventually – and at first somewhat ambivalently – make their journey into the conservative camp.

A devout Catholic who wrote with remarkable frankness about the anti-Semitism of his own father, Buckley (who characterized anti-Semitism as an “awful, sinful practice”) always seemed comfortable around Jews. Indeed, several of the editors and writers who helped Buckley launch National Review were Jews; “without them,” wrote historian George Nash, “the magazine might never have gotten off the ground…”

Admittedly, my appreciation for Buckley’s role in making conservatism “safe” for Jews grew gradually over the years; for a time the Monitor even ascribed Buckley’s actions vis-à-vis the Birch Society not to altruistic motives so much as to his personal embarrassment at being lumped together with the Birchers every time the ADL did a study of right-wing extremism in the late fifties and early sixties.

I did find it disturbing that Joe Sobran, an editor at National Review who sometime in the mid-1980’s descended into the fever swamps of anti-Semitism and hasn’t emerged since, was allowed to remain on the magazine’s masthead for several years after Buckley denounced his writings on Jews and Israel.

Even Buckley’s celebrated statement in 1991 about Patrick Buchanan’s alleged anti-Semitism was, I felt, an artfully constructed study in ambiguity: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he said and did during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.”

When it came to Israel, Buckley’s support may have been a little spotty during the state’s early years – in 1958, responding to what he took to be Israel’s slow response to an American request that U.S. military aircraft be permitted to fly over Israeli territory, he snappishly wrote, “If Internal Revenue started to disallow tax exemption of gifts to the United Jewish Appeal, Israel wouldn’t be able to pay the cable-cost of sassing our State Department” – but certainly by the mid-1960’s he was a consistent champion of the Jewish state, a position he maintained for the remaining four and a half decades of his life, despite occasional differences with Israeli policy.

In 1972 Buckley famously proposed that Israel become the 51st American state, pointing out that Jerusalem is no more geographically remote from Washington than Anchorage or Honolulu.

The arrangement, Buckley argued, would forever put to rest Israeli security fears: “If Israel becomes a part of the United States, there is no further question of attacking the state of Israel – as well attack the city of Chicago.”

To expedite statehood, Buckley wrote, a “resolution should be introduced in Congress and a national debate should begin. Put me down in favor.”

A fanciful notion, to be sure, and one that most Jews and Israelis (not to mention Americans) would dismiss out of hand. What cannot be dismissed as easily is the suggestion that without William Buckley, the political right might have remained an untenable – even an unthinkable – destination for those Jews who no longer could, in good conscience, remain faithful to the political faith of their fathers.

Who is a Jew?

One would think the answer to this question is simple – if your mother is Jewish, so are you. Judaism is matrilineal - in other words, determined by the mother. That’s why just having a Jewish sounding last name, means nothing.

So why the confusion? If your mother is Jewish...? Today, many who live outside the boundaries of Orthodoxy, (and sometimes even those who live within) are finding that its not so easy to prove that your mother was Jewish.

In a recent New York Times article, Gershom Gorenberg (sounds Jewish to me) details the story of Sharon, a 30-something Israeli woman who wants to marry her fiancé. Sharon’s problems begin when she goes to register at the Tel Aviv Rabbinate and she is told she must prove that she is Jewish.

While the story showcases the many obstacles in her path, it does end happily with a representative finding the proof – a copy of her grandmother’s matzeivah (gravestone), yarzheit cards from a Conservative synagogue and a picture of grandmother’s grandfather looking like the typical Eastern-European Jew with a white beard.

Coming from an ultra-Orthodox background, I have never thought about having to prove my Judaism, but if I did have to, it would be relatively easy. We have copies of my grandparents’ ketuvot, letters and sefarim written by great great grandfathers who were rebbes, many pictures and detailed lineage listings going back many generations.

It was the many generations past that struck me as I read this article. One of the final proofs Sharon would use to make her case was the picture of an ancestor.

I thought a lot about that grandfather. As he struggled through daily life in Eastern Europe – a life that included pogroms, poverty and most probably a very strong connection to Orthodox communal life, I can’t imagine he ever thought there would be a day that a grandchild of his would need to prove to an Israeli Rabbinate that she was Jewish. And if he would have thought of it, it would have caused him horror and tears.

One hundred years ago in Europe, no one ever wondered who was a Jew. It was simple to answer – if your mother was Jewish, so were you. And no one ever asked you to prove it.

Hebrew U's Timothy Leary Says Moses was a Druggie!

The Real Moses, a la Hebrew University?

Just when you think that Israeli academia could not possibly get any wackier than it already is, along comes Professor Benny Shanon, who teaches cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University, and declares that Moses was a drug addict.

Shanon is a chaired full professor at the Hebrew University who holds the Mandel Chair in Cognitive Psychology and Education. He is author of the 2002 book Antipodes of the "Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience," published by Oxford University Press.

Shanon reached this astounding serendipity on the basis of the "seeing the Sounds" phrase amidst the descriptions in Exodus of the sounds and smoke around Mt. Sinai at the giving of the Ten Commandments (or reserved recommendations, for those of you who are Reconstructionists). It all reminds him the experiences he had taking hallucinegenic drugs while trekking through the Amazon. No, not the book selling web site. Wondering what was being smoked on the Sinai mountain to make all the smoke?

That is not even the ONLY place in the Bible where Shanon finds evidence of Israelites taking psychodelic drugs. Jethro was a druggie also, scrounging about for those hallucinegenic mushrooms in the wilderness. It is almost as if Tikkun magazine had once been included in the text in between Exodus and Leviticus. Shanon is a bit of a Jewish Timothy Leary, and attributes "religion-like awakening" to all the nice drugs he started taking back in 1991. See this.

We have not yet recovered from the President and Rector of the Hebrew University defending the moonbat thesis that claimed that Jewish soldiers do not rape Arab women because the Jews are such racists. Now the Hebrew University needs to explain away THIS!

Letter from Olmert to Hamas Leaders

March 2, 08

Headline in today's Haaretz: "The Goal of the (Mini-mini) Operation is to Stop the Rocket Attacks on Ashkelon."

Letter to the Heads of the Hamas from Ehud Olmert:

Dear Comrades:

You really have to stop shooting rockets at Ashkelon. Why can't you just settle for shooting rockets at Sderot? If you'd only shoot at Sderot, we will go back to our policy of defeating you by turning the other cheek and waiting for you to run out of ammo. After all, Sderot does not count. But we have some friends and relatives in Ashkelon, so you really have to stop THAT!

So let's split the difference – you guys bomb Sderot all you want but leave Ashkelon and the kibbutzim near Gaza alone! Okay?

Your peace partner,

Ehud Olmert