The New Meretz?

You have probably heard the new fashionable slogan holding that Fifty is the new Thirty, The idea is that what with rising life expectancies and advances in health, 50 is the start of "middle age" like 30 once was.

It occurred to me that the new Israeli version of this statement is "The Israeli Labor Party is the new Meretz." You see, the Israeli Labor Party under Ehud Barak in current polls is showing up with about an 8% support rate among the Israeli electorate, equal to about 10 seats in the Knesset out of 120. That is about what Meretz used to poll back when it was at the height of its popularity.

I guess Meretz is the new Matzpen (tiny Israeli Maoist faction in the 70s)...

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

Prof. Raphael Walden Rushes to the Service of the Anti-Semites and Israel Bashers

To the Right - the staged fraud:
By now, everyone knows about the infamous "Mohammed a-Dura" incident. This was the event in which a French television crew staged a fake death of a Palestinian boy, pretending to be shot by Israeli gunfire in a firefight with terrorists, dying in his father's lap like a Palestinian Pieta figure taken down from the cross. He became the overnight symbol of Palestinian "martyrdom," a child gunned down by Israel. The Iranians made him a state icon and Arab students at Israeli universities display him in their pro-terrorism campus activities. Of course, in the sense that it was all fake, a-Dura really WAS indeed the appropriate symbol for Palestinian "martyrdom."

The entire a-Dura Gaza incident was staged and faked by the France 2 television crew, as the media later proved and as a French court officially declared. Among those helping to expose the lies was a young French Jew named Phillippe Karsenty. He was then sued by the French TV station for "libel' but eventually won in court. For details, see this. This did not stop the usual Jewish leftists from denouncing Karsenty. Leftist Larry Derfner from the Jerusalem Post said that Karsenty and people like him are mentally ill and are equivalent to the 911 "deniers," those who say the US government itself blew up the WTC buildings. Derfner did not issue an apology after the French court declared Karsenty was entirely correct.

By now, numerous excellent articles have exposed the whole story. In French, the best may be this. In English, this may be the best.

But there is one aspect of the case that has NOT been widely exposed. That is the collaboration by Prof. Raphael Walden with the French television station's fraud and cover-up. Walden is a far-leftist anti-Zionist medical doctor with specialty in surgery, at Tel Hashomer hospital. He is active in the pro-terror anti-Israel propaganda group "Doctors for Human Rights," a group once run by anti-Semite Neve Gordon and which does not believe that Jews should be entitled to any human rights. He is also the son-in-law of Shimon Peres and often described in the press as Shimon Peres' personal physician. He signs all the usual leftist proclamations . His email is Raphael.Walden@sheba.health.gov.il .

Ben-Dror Yemini this week described the role of Walden in the French forgery in his weekly column. Walden prepared a professional medical report that backed the lies and fabrications of the French TV station and the attempt to "prove" the Arab propaganda version of the a-Dura shooting, based on the injuries to a-Dura's father. Only problem is that the good doctor never examined the a-Dura father and based his expert conclusions on some paperwork he got from a Jordanian office. A different Israeli doctor who DID examine the poppa, Dr. Yehuda David, discovered that all the injuries the father was claiming to have suffered when his son was pretending to be shot were in fact injuries from at least 8 years earlier.

More about Walden's toadying for the French TV station and his attempt to defend the lies about the a-Dura "killing" can be read here, by an Arab propaganda news service.

Sir Shimon?

The media are filled with reports that Shimon Peres is about to be knighted in Britain by Queen Elizabeth.

This of course is the same Shimon Peres who forced Israel to commit Oslo and who is morally responsible for the two thousand or so Israelis murdered by his Oslo "peace process."

I have only one question: when Peres is knighted by the queen, can I hold the sword?

McCain For President

The Jewish Press heartily endorses John McCain for president of the United States.

Senator McCain has long been the poster boy for what's made America great. He heroically served our nation in the Vietnam War, doing what he was called on to do and going well beyond, incurring great personal suffering and deprivation he could have avoided simply by trading on his family connections. For five years he famously declined to abandon his fellow prisoners and end his travail. In a time of political pandering and rank opportunism, Sen. McCain's courage, integrity and fortitude are traits to be treasured in a national leader.

And in a period of corrosive inter-party political strife, Sen. McCain offers a solid record of bipartisanship. Indeed, his failure to regularly follow the Republican Party line often drew the ire of President Bush and Republican congressional leaders.

Plainly, Sen. McCain has demonstrated he has the leadership skills key to lead our nation at a time of great testing. He is also persuasive on the issues and was actually highly thought of even in Democratic circles until Barack Obama made it the linchpin of his campaign to try to persuade voters of a direct link between Sen. McCain and the policies of President Bush - particularly with regard to the war in Iraq and the current economic crisis - and therefore a shared responsibility.
The New York Daily News, even while endorsing Sen. Obama, heaped great praise on Sen. McCain, calling him an "outstanding" senator, a man of character, a man of "courage in the face of torture," "dead on" right on Iraq, the soul of bi-partisanship, and "tough minded" on foreign affairs and military issues.

But while the paper acknowledged "there is no question [Sen. McCain] would bring change," it lamented that "McCain's misfortune is that he is the standard bearer of a party whose leadership, starting at the top, ran the U.S. onto the rocks."

But let's look at this notion of shared responsibility.

Sen. Obama makes the point that Sen. McCain supported the invasion of Iraq while he himself spoke out against it from the beginning. Yet whatever one thinks of President Bush's foreign policy, including the war in Iraq, the fact is there has not been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. Yes, there have been more than 4,000 American deaths in Iraq, and each loss is a great tragedy in itself, but there were nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11.

Without question the war in Iraq, which drew Al Qaeda into an arena where America's military power could be most effectively deployed against the terrorist infrastructure, palpably disabled the ability of Islamic extremists to coordinate large-scale attacks on the American continent. And it should not be forgotten that Sen. McCain had long criticized President Bush for not putting enough American power on the ground.

Sen. McCain is also being linked to the current economic downturn, again because both he and President Bush are Republicans. But as documented by the release of Sen. McCain's correspondence file on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, it was Sen. McCain who had long been drawing attention to the excesses of the two agencies which contributed so greatly to the current economic meltdown.

More pointedly, consider the following excerpts from a front-page story in Sunday's New York Times about the role of Henry Cisneros, President Bill Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development, in the mortgage debacle:

"As the Clinton Administration's top housing official in the mid-1990's Mr. Cisneros loosened mortgage restrictions so first-time buyers could qualify for loans they could never get before.... While Mr. Cisneros says he remains proud of his work...[he] acknowledges that "people came to homeownership who should not have been homeowners...."

Homeownership has deep roots in the American soul. But until recently getting a mortgage was a challenge for low-income families. Many of these families were minorities, which naturally made the subject of special interest to Mr. Cisneros, who, in 1993, became the first Hispanic to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He had President Clinton's ear...." [Emphasis added]

If anything, President Bush inherited a mess left by President Clinton. By what stretch does one then lay this on Sen. McCain simply because he is a Republican?

But it is not only Sen. McCain's positives that commend him to voters as their choice on November 4. Unfortunately, there is also the matter of Sen. Obama's glaring negatives, some of which are quite alarming.

As The Jewish Press and others have pointed out, there is a rather disturbing dimension to Sen. Obama. Although he has succeeded in denying public access to much of his past relating to his work as a community organizer and his connection to the radical advocacy ACORN group, what we do know speaks volumes of where his views are grounded.

For more than 20 years he turned to the virulently anti-American and anti-Israel churchman Reverend Jeremiah Wright for counsel and advice. He has explained away Rev. Wright's diatribes as an understandable reaction to the black experience in America.

He also worked closely for years with the notorious William Ayres, Jr. on reforming educational policy, though Mr. Ayres's stated mission is to employ education to cleanse America of its many alleged sins.

From where we sit, Sen. Obama emerges as a representative of the radical left, which does not accept the notion of American exceptionalism and the presumptive validity of American tradition. We recall his gratuitous ridicule of those middle Americans who, supposedly out of frustration, "cling to their religion and their guns."

We fear Sen. Obama is not intent on merely changing this or that policy but the system in its entirety.

This strain emerges also in the area of international affairs. His observation that the leaders of Hamas support him because they expect him to abandon President Bush's "cowboy diplomacy" reflects the view that perhaps our enemies have a point and America is to be blamed for most of the world's problems. This was underscored when he said he would negotiate with such leaders as Iran's Ahmadinejad "without preconditions."

And then there are the insults to our intelligence he regularly delivers. When he immediately backtracked from his declaration that he supported an "undivided Jerusalem" as the capital of Israel, he explained that he only meant it shouldn't be divided by fences. He has also regularly played the race card by asserting that Sen. McCain would resort to claiming that he, Sen. Obama, doesn't look like others who have run for president.

To criticisms of his relationship with Rev. Wright, Sen. Obama claimed he wasn't present on those occasions when Rev. Wright spilled his venom. He initially said of his contacts with William Ayres that they were minimal, and later that he thought Mr. Ayers had "been rehabilitated" - despite the fact that Mr. Ayres regularly bemoans his failure to have planted more bombs during his terrorist heyday.

Perhaps among the most troubling things about Sen. Obama was his recent comment to the now famous "Joe the plumber." When "Joe" asked him why he planned to raise taxes on him, Sen. Obama responded: "It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody that is behind you, that they have a chance for success too. I think that when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

This a radical departure from mainstream thinking in our country. It is one thing for the government to provide for the less fortunate and for those in dire need. It is quite another to embrace a scheme to arbitrarily redistribute the wealth from the get-go in order to institutionally equalize the situation of all Americans.

In addition to the concerns we have as Americans about Sen. Obama's decidedly leftist predilections, those of us with a particular interest in Israel are troubled by the prospects of an Obama presidency. His political bent, facile changes of position and overall failure to stick to his word make us leery of the reliability of his oft-stated commitment to the Jewish state. We have no such hesitancy about Sen. McCain.

Playing the Race Card

With less than a month left before the elections, The Jewish Press Editorial Board wonders, who is it exactly that's using race as an issue in the presidential campaign.

The significance of race in the presidential campaign is undeniable - but not in the manner Barack Obama and his supporters would like us to think. The fact is, it was race that propelled Sen. Obama to the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, as he received more than 90 percent of the African American vote in the primaries.

Yet this level of near unanimous support in the black community has never been characterized by the media as a form of racism, even though it plainly reflects widespread decision-making based solely upon race. In the early going, Sen. Hillary Clinton was running well ahead of Sen. Obama among black voters, but the instant Sen. Obama proved himself to be a viable candidate, the black vote moved en masse to him form Sen. Clinton.

That is what it is. What truly matters are the efforts of the Obama camp to thwart legitimate criticism by planting the specter of racism. If Sen. Obama is to be believed, the fact that he is African-American means the very same criticisms that would be deemed legitimate if directed at a white candidate are off limits when it comes to him. Since last week, this effort to immunize Obama has picked up steam.

When he was first criticized for his longtime association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright over the latter's cursing from the pulpit the United States, Israel and white people in general, Obama himself made the issue one of race and not his judgment in associating with a virulent America-basher and bigot. In a long speech, he traced the history of race relations in this country and tried to explain away Rev. Wright's rants as a reasonable, if wrongheaded, reaction to it.

We can only speak for ourselves, but our revulsion with Rev. Wright and our related criticism of Sen. Obama had nothing to do with race. We were concerned about the content of the message, not the race of the messenger. What mattered to us was that the man who would be president identified someone like Jeremiah Wright as his long-time mentor and confidante and someone to whom he turned when in need of a sounding board.

Nor did race play a role in our dismay when Sen. Obama claimed he must have missed those weeks when Rev. Wright delivered his tirades. We were amazed that Sen. Obama would profess ignorance of what Rev. Wright was all about despite the latter's prominence as a leading advocate of black liberation theology, which was reflected in his sermons. Beyond the issue of judgment came the issue of, frankly, integrity. And this had nothing at all to do with race.

Back in July, we were aghast at Sen. Obama's out of the blue injections of race into the campaign in what seemed to us an effort to "salt the mines" in an effort to persuade voters to see racism in any criticism of him. Addressing an audience in Missouri, Sen. Obama made his notorious "dollar bill" observation:

Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, "he's not patriotic enough, he's got a funny name," you know, "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." [Emphasis added]

Did he mean that "they" have not yet tried any of the devices he lists or that "they" have tried but have yet to be successful in making "you" scared? Plainly the phraseology enabled him to get the negative comment out there without having to cite chapter and verse. Obama's camp tried to say he was talking about his age, not race.

Yet here are excerpts from two other speeches. In his Berlin speech he said,
"I know that I don't look like Americans who've previously spoken in this great city. The journey that led me here is improbable. My mother was born in the heartland of America, but my father grew up herding goats in Kenya. His father - my grandfather - was a cook, a domestic servant to the British."

And in July he told a Florida audience,
"It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they're going to run. They're going to try to make you afraid. They're going to try to make you afraid of me. He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black? "

So as we approach November 4, we can expect more reports from Sen. Obama's amen corner in the media like last week's AP claim that Gov. Sarah Palin's critique of Sen. Obama's longtime work with admitted terrorist William Ayres Jr. and her remark that Obama did not "see an America of exceptionalism" somehow "carried a racially tinged subtext."

Not to be outdone, Obama supporter Congressman John Lewis attacked both Gov. Palin and John McCain saying that they "are playing with fire." He said it reminded him of how the late George Wallace created an "atmosphere of hate" in which "four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."

Anyone listening to Barack Obama speak about foreign affairs has to be struck by the recurrent theme that a good part of the world's problems stem from how the United States has lorded it over other countries and that a leveling of the international playing field is called for. Where is the racism in saying that Sen. Obama's premise is wrong?

And no one really denies that Sen. Obama spent 10 years on various boards working closely with William Ayres, the former Weather Underground radical and now a leading advocate of using public education to alter traditional American approaches to political and economic power.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

More Tikkun Olam Paganism and Misrepresentation

The letter to the editor in this week's JP from Leslie Cohen Fargotstein of Memphis, TN, in which she demands that Jews vote for Obama as part of the realization of what she calls "Tikkun Olam," presents an opportunity to comment on the misuse of "Tikkun Olam" by assimilationist Jewish liberals (or "asslibs" for short).

Briefly the position of Tikkun Olam pagans can be summed up as follows:

1. All of Judaism reduces to the pursuit of "Tikkun Olam."
2. "Tikkun Olam" refers to the pursuit of "social justice," not to be confused with judicial justice.
3. "Social Justice" is synonymous with this week's liberal-leftist political fads.
4. Obama is an ultra-liberal. Therefore voting for him is the essence of Judaism.

The asslib pagans are wrong about everything. In particular, the truth is:
1. Judaism does not reduce to "Tikkun Olam," even if assimilationist liberals have never heard of any other concept within Judaism.
2. "Tikkun Olam" has nothing at all to do with "social" justice. It refers, firstly, to eliminating paganism from the world (making it ironic that pagans are so obsessed with misusing the term today), and sometimes refers to judicial justice, which should not be confused with "social" justice.
3. Social justice is NOT synonymous with liberal political fads. Liberal political fads generally foster social injustice.
4. It is a free country. You can vote for Obama if you want but do not misrepresent your doing so as being some sort of Jewish ethical imperative.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com

Judaism Lite—Just Add Water

Another entry under the “Curious things that land in my e-mail inbox” file:

The subject line of the message read: “Watch Live Kol Nidre Service Online!”

Now, I thought to myself, Kol Nidre is recited on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, when TV and Internet are off-limits—so what could the message be talking about? Well, I naively assumed, it must be promoting a webcast from another time zone. Maybe Israel—Kol Nidre live from the Kotel? Yes, they’re seven hours ahead…

Alas, the benefit of the doubt was unwarranted. Here’s what the message went on to say:

“Watch live Kol Nidre Services on only JewishTVNetwork.com. October 8, 2008, 6 p.m. (PST). Jewish Television Network proudly presents a live webcast of Nashuva’s High Holy Day service. Nashuva is a soulful community of prayer in action. Join Rabbi Naomi Levy and the Nashuva band as they welcome the Jewish New Year with incredible music, words of wisdom, meaningful prayer, and meditation.”

In case you’re interested in attending live, the group (whose website opens with a photo of hordes of people—congregants, I suppose—streaming toward the beach) meets at the Brentwood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles.

Some connection to Judaism is probably better than none. But when the nature, focus, and content of a service bears so little likeness to Torah observance, it’s difficult to muster any respect.

Suggested Reading (I)

Here's a new feature to alert Jewish Press blog readers to feature articles and opinion pieces of interest to the community.

The first is an interesting feature in the Oct. 2 issue of the New York Times about several "members in so-so standing of Minneapolis’s smallish Jewish community" who test several pre-fab Sukkot.

Days of Awe

It isn't unusual to see a teenager with spiked or colored hair, wearing neatly tailored jeans walking into a Sephardic shul in Modiin on Friday night so he can pray to the Almighty. It also is not unusual for a secular Ashkenazic Bar Mitzvah boy to celebrate his entrance into Klal Yisroel by arriving at an Orthodox shul on Shabbat morning clad in a polo shirt and jeans.

Modiin is a city that has earned a stellar reputation for respect and tolerance of Jews, no matter what they look like or where they've come from. Both of the city's Chief Rabbis understand that its better to attract people of all ages to the synagogue by smiling and listening, rather than stigmatizing them. These are the seeds of kiruv throughout Eretz Yisroel, not just Modiin.

But it so happens that Modiin is a place where acceptance is the rule, not the EXCEPTION. Almost all of the funky-looking kids who religiously attend shul on Friday evenings attend secular public schools. Many of them actually put on tefillin in the morning before heading to the classroom. A few others wish to put on tefillin in their spare time between classes- in school.

However, one Modiin high school prinicipal caused a headline-making ruckus this past week, when she banned a student from donning tefillin with his friends, claiming that praying in school constituted a form of "coercion." Mind you, the youngster was not a member of Chabad or Shas.

He just wanted to spend a few personal moments speaking to the Almighty. But for this hard-core secularist principal, "G-d" has no place in a school that has been built within the Holy Land.
There is no true separation of "Church and State" in Israel. This student exercised his democratic right to pray within the realm of his free time. What one chooses to do with their free time is none of anyone's business, unless they are breaking the law.

During the past few months, there has been an outcry from a growing number of secular and traditional parents to the Education Ministry for systematically removing key Jewish history and basic Jewish law courses from the curriculum. In essence, the neo-secular Education Minister, Yuli Tamir, has slowly taken Judaism out of the classroom and tossed it in the garbage can. So is it any wonder why the Modiin principal was so outraged by the sight of a student actually trying to connect to the Almighty during Elul in the Holy Land? Some Jews actually prefer to wander aimlessly in the desert.

This Week @ www.jewishpress.com