Category Archives: News

A World of Wastage

The recent rioting in my home town Baltimore brought two memories to mind.  One was the 1968 riots, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.  I was fourteen, and while we lived several miles from where that violence transpired, it affected Jewish-owned stores in the inner-city, and it taught those of us who were born after the Second World War that malevolence and mayhem remained, unfortunately, alive and well.

Ostensibly, the recent rioting was a reaction to the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, whose spinal cord was nearly severed when in custody. Peaceful marches to protest that death were understandable, and in fact took place.  (The death was eventually ruled a homicide by Baltimore State’s Attorney.)  But then legions of young black men, many of them apparently high schoolers, began taunting and attacking police, setting fires and looting stores.  Most telling were the delighted smiles on many looters’ faces, indelibly captured on film. If Mr. Gray was at all in the minds behind the faces, he had been grossly obscured by something else, an ugly anarchistic glee.

The rioters’ small minds weren’t likely capable of appreciating the irony of their actions.  Not only the self-evident irony that they were destroying their own neighborhood (including a senior citizens residence under construction).  But also the irony of the fact that the image they projected to the world is precisely what feeds negative preconceptions about black men, of whom Mr. Gray was only the most recent to die as a seeming result of police actions.

That’s what Elizabeth M. Nix, assistant professor at the University of Baltimore and co-editor of the book “Baltimore ‘68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City,” told an interviewer, she is “nervous about”: “more violent images, more reasons for people to stereotype us.”

Baltimore’s mayor and Mr. Gray’s mother strongly decried the rioting.  A lawyer speaking for the dead man’s family said baldly that the rioters “dishonored Freddie’s legacy.”  And President Obama succinctly characterized the rioters “who tore up” Baltimore as “criminals and thugs.”

Only the ethically unbalanced could (and did) try to justify the Baltimore violence.  Could there, though, be something for those of us who would never think of committing burglary or arson to glean from the visceral disgust we felt at the rioters’ actions?

That question brings me to the second thing I was reminded of by the wanton destruction in Baltimore: the Sefer Hachinuch’s words on bal tashchis, offered in connection to the prohibition against cutting down a fruit tree during a siege (mitzvah 529).  The Baal HaChinuch (in loose translation) writes:

“Included in the prohibition is the destruction of anything for no reason… The way of meticulously religious Jews is to love peace and to rejoice in the welfare of others… they will not destroy even a grain of mustard… and any destruction that they see causes them pain … Not so evil people, cohorts of demons, who rejoice in the destruction of the world…”

“Rejoice in destruction” well characterizes the Baltimore rioters.  But we might ponder the positive example the Baal HaChinuch provides. For the Torah bar here is a high one.

Ours is a world of wastage.  Not only grains of mustard but unimaginable amounts of perfectly serviceable food are daily relegated to the garbage dump.  And it’s not only storekeepers and caterers (both of which are often required by law to dump past-prime produce) but all too many of us who see the value of things only in dollars, cents and convenience.  Why bother “recycling” that leftover challah into a kugel for next week when kugels will be on sale at the store?  Why freeze those leftover broken hamburgers when they don’t look appetizing and, anyway, the Nine Days are coming?  Why make the effort to ascertain whether those items are really chametz when it’s so much easier to just toss them as part of our “spring cleaning”?

And who among us thinks – as my mother, a”h, who was more keenly attuned to the import of bal tashchis than most of us, did – of using a plastic or foam cup more than once?  And when do we toss items of clothing – when they are in fact worn out, or when we simply fancy a change.

Admittedly, it’s odd to be stirred to such thoughts by the Baltimore rioting. Intentional, wanton destruction, after all, is a far cry from simple thoughtless wastage.  But lessons for our own lives can lie in unexpected places, and we do well to try to find them

© 2015 Hamodia

Inform or Incite?

Many who recognize the evil that permeates radical Islam likely felt a reflexive satisfaction at the recent ruling of U.S. District Judge John Koeltl that New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority cannot reject an anti-Islamist advertisement.

The ad, created by the “American Freedom Defense Initiative” (AFDI), presents a keffiyeh-wrapped head of a man, only his eyes showing, next to the words: “Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah,” a quote attributed to Hamas television.  Below that is the legend: “That’s his Jihad. What’s yours?”

That final phrase is a pointed parody of a Muslim advocacy group’s ad campaign several years ago to try to detach the word “jihad” from its “holy war” connotation.

Telling quote, clever ad.  And, according to Judge Koeltl, within AFDI’s rights to run.

The MTA had notified AFDI that it would not accept the ad (one of four that the group purchased space for on the sides of New York buses) because it could incite violence.  A simpleminded Muslim, the MTA claimed, might misunderstand the ad’s true message and be inspired by its quote to kill Jews.  Rejecting that argument, Judge Koeltl noted that the ad had had no such effect when it ran in San Francisco and Chicago in 2013; and he ruled that “Under the First Amendment, the fear of such spontaneous attacks… cannot override individuals’ rights to freedom of expression.”  (The MTA has a month to appeal his decision and has said that it will reject all political ads.)

Judge Koeltl, apparently referencing a disclaimer to accompany the ad, also said he believes the MTA underestimates “the power of counter-advertisements to explain that the MTA does not endorse the ad…”

The person behind AFDI is activist Pamela Geller.  She is, laudably, committed to exposing Islamist extremism.  But she has also given ample cause to doubt her judgment. She has written, for example, that “Hussein” – her way of referring to President Obama – “is a muhammadan [sic]. He’s not insane … he wants jihad to win.”

And she responded to criticism leveled at her by several prominent Jewish organizations by labeling them “Dhimmi Jewcidals” and contending that they are worse than “the Judenrat [which] didn’t protect and defend the Nazis’ war on the Jews [but only] went along… They didn’t advance and promote it.”

She also is planning a contest for the best cartoon of the founder of Islam. The “Draw the Prophet” event is scheduled for May 3, in the same Garland, Texas location where a Muslim group held a solidarity conference in January.  If she imagines that non-radicalized Muslims will not be insulted by her contest, she has a formidable imagination.

And the AFDI ads, although their points are valid ones, present several problems.  First, they are read by many as implicating not only those who use their religion to spew hatred and wreak mayhem but all Muslims. Ms. Geller denies that accusation, but it’s not an unarguable one.

Secondly, while the ads aren’t likely to be misunderstood as encouraging violence against Jews, they are entirely likely to foster ill will among Arabs and Muslims – against Ms. Geller and, perforce, all defenders of Israel in general, who will be seen, fairly or not, as her enablers.

Thirdly, the same First Amendment right that permits the AFDI ads permits potential ads portraying Israel as a murderous, fascist state, or Jews as nefarious would-be world-domineering devils.  Those contentions may be lies but such false speech is arguably free speech too.  Does Ms. Geller really want to risk igniting an ad war?

To be sure, there is a need to call attention to the evils of Islamism and to try to undermine anti-Israel sentiment, but attempting to do so with inflammatory ads on the sides of buses may not be the most effective way to advance those goals. Or the right way.

Informing is one thing; incitement, another.

A spokesman for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t mince words.  “These anti-Islamic ads,” she said, “are outrageous, inflammatory and wrong… While those behind these ads only display their irresponsible intolerance, the rest of us who may be forced to view them can take comfort in the knowledge that we share a better, loftier and nobler view of humanity.”

That loftier and nobler view of humanity may or may not be justified.  But that’s not the issue.  The issue is  whether ads like AFDI’s help or hinder the goal of winning hearts and minds.

The answer seems obvious.

© 2015 Hamodia

Shooting From the Heart

Although blacks constitute approximately 13% of the American population, the FBI reported in 2013 that 38.5% of people arrested for violent crimes were African-Americans.

Statistics like that one, coupled with a largely unsavory urban black culture (not to mention what passes in some circles for black leadership), predisposes many of us to assume the worst about all blacks – or, at very least, to be sympathetic to law enforcement officers in their dealings with black suspects.

And, as a result, many white Americans tend to be wary of claims that black Americans are unfairly singled out by police for arrest, mistreated and even killed without justification.

So when, in 2013, George Zimmerman, a volunteer with a local “Neighborhood Watch” in Sanford, Florida, was acquitted by a jury of shooting to death Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black youth whom Mr. Zimmerman was following (against orders from a dispatcher to not do so) and with whom he got into an altercation, many of us felt that the volunteer’s claim that he killed the youth in self-defense was plausible, if not probable.  The subsequent protests over the killing were regarded by many as an indefensible rush to judgment.

And last year, when Eric Garner, who was illegally selling individual cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner, died after being put in a chokehold by police, it seemed self-evident that the overweight and asthmatic black man’s death was unfortunate but didn’t negatively reflect on the officer who applied the chokehold and who ignored Mr. Garner’s 11 wheezy pleas that “I can’t breathe.”  When a grand jury declined to indict the officer, that judgment seemed vindicated.

It was also last year that a grand jury elected to not indict Ferguson, Missouri policeman Darren Wilson, for killing Michael Brown, a black youth, in the line of duty; and the U.S. Justice Department declined to prosecute the officer for a civil rights violation. There were widespread protests over that killing, but also a widespread sense that the reaction then, too, had been misguided, and the protesters’ claims of police racism unjustified.

Then, though, came the blatantly racist e-mails exchanged by various Ferguson court and police employees, which led the Justice Department to assert “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson Police Department that violates the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, and federal statutory law.”  Mr. Wilson was not personally implicated in that ugliness, but the culture of bias clearly existed.

And now we are confronted with the case of Walter Scott, the 50-year-old unarmed black man stopped by a North Charleston, South Carolina police officer for driving with a broken taillight.  Mr. Scott was shot in the back and killed when he fled (presumably, according to reports, because he feared being taken into custody over missed child support payments).

Of all the recent cases, this is the only one where we needn’t – indeed, cannot – rely for judgment on either our preconceptions or anyone’s word.  A bystander’s cellphone video of the incident shows the policeman, Michael Slager, aiming and shooting at Mr. Scott’s back multiple times.

And there’s audio, too, of Mr. Slager telling someone, presumably his wife, that he had killed somebody who had “grabbed my Taser” – the stun gun used to subdue people engaged in violence or resisting arrest.  In the video, the policeman is seen calmly taking something from his patrol car, walking over to the man he had just shot to death and dropping the object near his body.

Mr. Slager is charged with murder.

There are, I think, two takeaways from the most recent story.  One is something the alleged murderer discovered in a this-worldly way but that believing Jews know well in a more profound one: “There is an eye that sees and an ear that hears” – and, of course, “all your deeds are recorded…” (Avos 2:1).

The other is that, while it’s only human to harbor preconceptions, it’s important to realize that presumptions can be wrong, and to recognize that racial prejudice, like religious prejudice, exists, and can lead to terrible things. Yes, most police are upstanding public servants who would never mistreat any citizen.  But by the same token, most blacks are law-abiding citizens.  There are black criminals, to be sure; but there are also trigger-happy racist cops.

And if any group should be rightly disturbed by the specter of innocent people being killed by armed authorities, it should be one that has been victimized by hatred and violence over most of recorded history.

© 2015 Hamodia

And In Third Place…

And so the horse trading begins.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has gotten down to the nitty-gritty business of cobbling together a government coalition.  Particularly attractive stallions, thankfully, will be the religious parties, the Prime Minister’s “natural partners,” as he calls them, although, apparently unnaturally, he jettisoned them the last time around.  Their being in Bibi’s good graces (for now) is happy news.

What many may not see as happy news is the remarkable fact that, after Likud and the Zionist Union (Hamachaneh Hatzioni), the third largest winner of votes was… the “Joint List” (Hareshima Hameshutefet) – the new Arab party, comprised of four previous Arab parties.

No one is concerned that the Joint List’s 13 seats will make it an attractive partner to a Likud-dominated government – or, for that matter, any government.  Nor would the Joint List itself consider being part of either.  Its very essence is oppositional.

The genesis of the Joint List, though, holds some irony; and its success, perhaps, something positive.

The impetus for the joining together of the four Arab parties, representing utterly disparate, contradictory, ideologies – communism, feminism, Islamism, and Palestinian nationalism was legislation passed last year raising the electoral threshold from 2% to 3.25%, or at least four seats.  None of the Arab parties saw themselves as viable in that calculus.  So they decided on a sort of multiple-wives marriage of necessity.  And ended up with more seats than their combined catch in 2013.

The irony?  The law that brought them together was pushed through by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose own party, Yisrael Beiteinu, scored only six seats this time around, less than half of the Joint List.

The head of the Joint List, lawyer Ayman Odeh, somehow managed to herd the cats that comprise the list. He also strikes a moderate, unflappable pose.  In a campaign ad, he appears at a Jewish family’s Shabbos table, after the mainstream party candidates have burst in and made their cases.  They leave when Mr. Odeh enters and, smiling, he says to the Jewish family, “We all live in the same building together and we all want the same thing: Equal rights, peace and quiet.”

And in a debate, when Mr. Lieberman told Mr. Odeh that he should better be in Ramallah or Gaza and that “You’re not wanted here,” the Arab, who was born in Haifa, calmly responded to the Russian-born foreign minister, “I am very wanted in my homeland,” and went on to emphasize what he characterized as his party’s universalist and democratic message.

To be sure, some of the cats in his herd are anything but universalist or democratic. Which is why the Joint List’s campaign slogan was the soothing but hollow “The Will of the People.”

So what possible role could the Joint List play in the Knesset?  It will surely use its votes to oppose measures it sees as expansionist or anti-Arab.  But beyond those things, which the liberal parties will oppose no less, are there any other causes such a confederacy of incoherence might embrace?

Practically speaking, the Joint List’s fractious felines can probably come together on the issue of Arab poverty, and Israel’s insufficient assistance to that sector of its citizenry.

Israel ranks high among developed nations in the percentage of its citizens living in poverty.  Economist Paul Krugman attributes that in part to “policy choices: Israel does less to lift people out of poverty than any other advanced country.”

According to a 2013 National Insurance Institute report, the poverty rate among Israel’s Arabs – some 20% of the population – was 47.4%.

The same report estimates the poverty rate at the time among Israeli chareidim (approximately 10% of the population) at 66%.  Both communities’ high poverty can be attributed, at least in part, to low earnings and government cutbacks in child allotments.

So it might not be outlandish to imagine that, however either impoverished sector may feel about each other, both will vote to bolster any legislation put before the Knesset designed to assist poor families.  Stranger unplanned but de facto alliances have taken place.

For Jews who perceive Israel in nationalistic or religious colors, the emergence of an Arab party with 13 seats in the Knesset may seem like a violation of the idea of the state.  Those of us, though, who see Israel as a wonderful democracy and haven for Jews but who are not flag wavers or Yom Ha’Atzmaut celebrators  might dare to hope that the Joint List, the abhorrent nature of some of its members notwithstanding, might end up actually helping advance the Israeli societal good.

© 2015 Hamodia

Persian Diversion

It was a tad early for “Purim Torah,” but on Taanis Esther, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zari responded to a question from an NBC correspondent by insisting that Iran cares deeply for and is entirely protective of its Jews.

Asked about Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s recent assertion in his speech before the U.S. Congress that “Iran’s regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazis were a Jewish problem,” Mr. Zarif bristled and changed the topic to the Israeli leader’s citation in his speech to Megillas Esther.

“He even distorts his own scripture,” said the Iranian about the Israeli. “If – if you read the book of Esther, you will see that it was the Iranian king who saved the Jews.”  We needn’t engage Mr. Zarif on the finer points of the Purim story, but the question in the end, of course, isn’t what Achashverosh was or did, but what Iran is and does (and wants to do).

(Mr. Zarif, incidentally, also proudly cited Koresh, as having granted the Jews of his time permission to rebuild the Beis Hamikdash – apparently oblivious to the irony of the fact that the aforementioned edifice was to be built, and in time was built, in Yerushalayim.)

The Iranian foreign minister animatedly explained how “We have a history of tolerance and cooperation and living together in coexistence with our own Jewish people, and with – with Jews everywhere in the world.”  And he added, “If we wanted to annihilate Jews, we have a large number of Jewish population in Iran” who presumably could provide a convenient first stage opportunity.  But, Mr. Zarif went on to proudly state, Jews “have a representative in Iranian parliament allocated to them, disproportionately to their number.”

A recent CNN article happily swallowed that sunny Iranian party line, describing the Iranian Jewish community of Esfahan in warm and delicate tones.  It characterized the community’s members as happy, and interviewed several.  Not one of them had anything negative to say about the current Iranian regime, clear proof of its benevolence (or, perhaps, of the very opposite).

Esfahan Jewish community leader Sion Mahgrefte, the article noted, while he “declined to comment directly on political matters, especially in the current heated environment,” did assert that the members of his community felt very much at home in Iran.”  Puts one in mind of James Baldwin’s line about home being “not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

The NBC interviewer was, thankfully, less meek.  She presented Mr. Zarif with a statement made by Iran’s “supreme leader,” Sayyid Ali Khamenei, in which he declared: “This barbaric wolf-like and infanticidal regime of Israel which spares no crime [and which] has no cure but to be annihilated.”  “Can you understand,” the interviewer asked, “why Jews and others would take umbrage at that kind of language?”

He could not, of course, and insisted that “annihilating” a country of six million Jews (evocative number, that) is one thing; hating Jews elsewhere, something entirely another.  Slippery fish, that distinction between Jews and a country of Jews.

Iran’s Jews may not be overtly persecuted these days, but there are subtle sorts of repression too.  No Iranian Jew can dare speak up in defense of Israel in any way, for fear of his life.  And not long after the inception of the current “Islamic Republic,” the Jewish community’s leader at the time was arrested on charges of “corruption” and “friendship with the enemies of G-d” and executed.  Other Iranian Jews have likewise been executed over ensuing years for being “spies.”  (One wonders how thin the line is between being a Jew in Iran and a spy.)  Criticism of the Iranian policy of appointing Muslims to oversee Jewish schools, moreover, resulted in the shutting down of the last remaining Iranian Jewish newspaper, in 1991.

And so, Iran’s claim of love for its Jews, and some Iranian Jews’ claim to feel safe and protected, has to be taken with a grain, or perhaps a nuclear missile silo, worth of salt.  It is belied not only by Iran’s execution of Jews and its declared wish to annihilate a country with arguably more Jews than any other, but by the less guarded words of Iran’s allies and proxies.

Like Hassan Nasrallah, a leader of Hezbollah, the group conceived in 1982 by Iranian clerics and still funded by Iran.  “If they [Jews] all gather in Israel,” he said in 2002, “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

Thank you, Hassan, for your candor.

© 2015 Hamodia

 

 

 

Faithless Ferocity

Last month, a newly-married couple and the wife’s sister, upstanding citizens and model university students, were murdered by a neighbor of the couple’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

A heinous crime, to be sure, and it reverberated particularly loudly across the country and around the world.  Because the victims, Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, were Muslims with Middle-Eastern roots; and the alleged murderer, Craig Stephen Hicks, a middle-aged white man.

The suspected killer turned himself in to authorities and was duly indicted.  And while authorities said that their preliminary investigation indicated that a dispute over a parking space in the apartment complex where the victims and the alleged killer lived was the proximate cause of the murders, a multitude of Muslim voices wasted no time seizing on the tragedy as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Members of the victims’ family were the first to make the charge.  One tweeted, “My cousin, his wife and sister in law were murdered for being muslim [sic]. Someone tell me racism/hate crimes don’t exist. #MuslimLivesMatter.”

Personal grief can cloud judgment, and it’s understandable that a relative of the murdered young people might assume religious prejudice motivated their murderer.  But a slew of Muslim groups – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Universal Muslim Association of America (UMAA) – similarly rushed to imply that the murders were a hate crime, and called for a federal investigation

The idea of a “hate crime” as a distinct category is an odd one.  Most violent crimes, after all, are the product of one or another sort of hatred.  (And the emotionless hit man is arguably a worse criminal.)  But our society, in a laudable attempt to place opprobrium on racial and religious bias, has seen fit to create such a criminal category and endow it with special penalties.  Doing so has in fact had a positive educational effect.  And in the end, the F.B.I., federal prosecutors and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice announced they would indeed look into the motivation for the killings.

The widespread contention in the Muslim world that the victims were targeted because of their religion struck many as nothing more than a gambit to create a new narrative of Muslims being hunted down by bigots. Murders, after all, involving Muslims in this country – from the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shooting to Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon – have usually seen the Muslim in the perpetrator’s, not victim’s, role

For her part, the alleged murderer’s wife insisted that her husband supported liberal causes.  In fact, Hicks had apparently been vocally critical of opponents to the building of a mosque near Ground Zero.

“I can say with absolute belief,” she stated, “that this incident had nothing to do with… the victims’ faith, but… was related to a longstanding parking dispute that my husband had with the neighbors.”

There is, however, evidence that the recent slaying of the three innocents may in fact have been the product of religious bias – although not toward Muslims per se.

Because Mr. Hicks, the alleged murderer, seems to have harbored a deep dislike of… religion – all religion.  He had prominently posted his feeling that “I want religion to go away. I don’t deny your right to believe whatever you’d like; but I have the right to point out it’s ignorant and dangerous…”  He also posted a photo of a supplicant with hands clasped, with the comment “Praying is pointless, useless, narcissistic, arrogant and lazy; just like the imaginary god [sic] you pray to.”

University of California sociologist Reza Aslan notes that, among the population that calls itself “atheist,” there exists a subset of “anti-theists,” people – like authors Richard Dawkins (of whom Hicks, incidentally, was a fan) and Sam Harris – who actively deride belief and believers, who exhibit “a sometimes virulent opposition to the very concept of belief.”  And a subset of those anti-theists are militant, even violent.

Not long ago, President Obama dared to remind an audience that it’s not only Islam that has been invoked by evil people as justification for violence, but Christianity as well.  He referenced the Crusades, but could just as easily have made mention of Christian terrorism in India or Central Africa (or “Christian militias” in the United States).

The Chapel Hill murders should open our eyes further still, to the fact that there are evil, violent people not only in the Muslim and Christian (and Hindu and Buddhist) communities these days who invoke their faiths to justify murder and mayhem, but among the faithless as well.

© 2015 Hamodia

Sense and Centrifuges

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress is:

  1. A bald political move to shore up support for his candidacy in imminent Israeli elections.
  2. A misguided attempt to meddle in American partisan politics and embarrass President Obama
  3. A straightforward effort to express sincere concerns about the Iranian danger, and the conviction that any negotiations with Iran are inherently misguided.

My guess? A bit of “all of the above.”

There’s no doubt that Mr. Netanyahu’s presenting himself as a prophet before the legislature of the superpower ally of Israel (if not as leader of the Jewish People itself, a mantel he’s been donning of late) will help him in his reelection bid.  Or that he has often seized opportunities to express his dislike of Mr. Obama. (Yes, it’s mutual; kamayim hapanim lapanim…  “As water reflects a face, so the heart of a man to a man.” – Mishlei, 27:19.)

But only a hardened cynic would assume that Mr. Netanyahu’s concern about Iran is a guise, that his disdain for negotiations isn’t sincere.  It surely is.

But is it right?

For those who insist on seeing Mr. Obama as, at best, insufficiently concerned with Jews or Israel, the answer is clear.  Those would be the people who condemn Mr. Obama’s reluctance to use the word “Islam” when referring to Islamist terrorism, and reject his reasoning that doing so would alienate 1.5 billion Muslims.  And who seized on the president’s abysmal choice of adverb in a long interview, when he referred to “vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

Whether the president meant to say “wanton” or just didn’t realize what he was saying (which happens to many a speaker), a president has no excuse for imprecision.  The pouncing critics, though, ignored the fact that, in the wake of the attack, the White House called it a “violent assault on the Jewish community” and “the latest in a series of troubling incidents in Europe and around the world that reflect a rising tide of anti-Semitism.”  Those intractable critics of Mr. Obama surely reject, as a matter of principle, his strategy regarding Iran.

No one doubts that Iran’s leaders are evil men, and cannot be trusted.  How, though, to thwart their nuclear intentions?  Mr. Netanyahu insists that Iran must shut down all its centrifuges, the machines at the core of the uranium-enrichment process, something no one believes Iran will ever do.  The U.S. has chosen the path of negotiation (with, of course, verification, and likely some Stuxnet-style “alternate strategies” – one example of which was unfortunately uncovered by  the Russian firm Kaspersky Lab last week), carrying the big stick of sanctions, which is what brought Iran to the negotiating table in the first place.

If there were a practical option of just bombing Iranian nuclear sites to Islamic heaven, that would be the clear course of action.  Unfortunately, no such option exists, and such an attempt would inflame not only Iran but its proxies and its friends like Russia and China, likely ushering in World War III.

Mr. Netanyahu has been bristling at reports that the current state of negotiations will leave a large number of centrifuges operational.  But anyone who researches the subject will quickly learn that there are a number of factors, like how the machines are configured and what will happen to fuel produced by them, that render the number of centrifuges less than crucial.

Mr. Netanyahu is the face of Israel.  But he isn’t a nuclear expert.  (Recall his 2012 speech before the UN, where he held up a cartoon bomb and implied that by the following spring Iran would have nuclear weapons.)  Someone who is, though, is the retired head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, Uzi Eilam.  And Mr. Eilam favors the negotiations approach, and asserts that “Netanyahu and other politicians have instilled a terrible and unnecessary fear in the Israeli public.

Are he and Obama right?  Or is Bibi? I don’t know, but neither do the posse of pundits who wouldn’t know a centrifuge from a centipede but loudly declare that Obama can’t be trusted and that Bibi is, if not melech Yisrael, at least the wisest of men.

The negotiations may well fail, which will trigger even harsher sanctions against Iran.  To some, that will be a good thing.  To others, an unrestricted Iran is cause for the deepest concern.

None of us can know whether or not to root for the negotiations’ success.  What we all can do, though, is be mispallel that this Adar will bring about a modern-day Purim miracle in the land of the original one, complete with gallows, these, hosting malevolent mullahs.

© 2015 Hamodia

In Praise of Brainwashing

A reference to a Shabbos seudah as “brainwashing.”  An attempt by a flag-draped man to enter a Montreal Jewish day school.  And a pre-school morah’s report.  All took place recently and, together, helped me better understand something fundamental about life.

The cynical reference to Shabbos was from a woman quoted in a book.  Sadly, she had left the Jewish observance of her childhood behind.

“My father was always tired and so was my mother,” she explained to the author. “They were fighting. We were fighting. And so there was not that kind of love and joy that makes the brainwashing really stick.”

The brainwashing.

On the very day that quote appeared in a book review, a man draped in a flag of Quebec

tried to enter a chareidi Jewish day school, Yeshiva Gedola, in Montreal, claiming that he wanted to “liberate” its students.

Wisely, the school’s staff did not allow the fellow into the building.  One staff member said “When I answered through the intercom, the man told me: ‘I want to talk to the children because they are imprisoned in this school… I want to liberate the children’.”

Liberate the children.

Two people with a similar perspective, that Jewish children who are raised in their ancestral faith are essentially being psychologically abused, their minds imprisoned, their brains, well, washed.

It’s not an uncommon way of looking at things, unfortunately, these days.  But it’s an ignorant one – quite literally: It ignores the most fundamental mission of any thinking, caring human being.

Does any loving parent – leave aside a Jewish one – allow a child to develop entirely on his own?  Un-“brainwashed” and “unimprisoned”?  Do any parents, no matter how “liberal” or “open-minded” they may be, leave their progeny to their own devices, always?  Children are, understandably, self-centered and, inevitably, somewhat uncivil and rudderless about how to interact with others and with the world.  A parent’s most important role, after providing a child physical nourishment and shelter, is to provide him what might be called ethical nourishment.

On, now, to the preschool morah.  The caregiver was reporting to the mother of a not-yet-3-year-old how her little girl was behaving within her group of pint-sized peers.  The morah recounted how some other toddlers in the group were “negotiating” which of them would occupy the only seat left around an activity table.  Little “Aviva” looked on at the commotion, assessed things, quietly walked across the room, retrieved another kiddie chair and brought it over, upending the need for any further “negotiations.”

To be sure, there are children, like Aviva, who are naturally good-natured.  But even they, and certainly less finely endowed kids, don’t just naturally develop concern for others, or for peace.  The pacifist and empathy muscles, so to speak, are there in all of us, but they need nurturing to develop and grow.  I know the little girl’s parents well, and that they invest much energy in raising their children to be decent human beings.  That’s the only way one has a shot, with Hashem’s help, at such results.

And Aviva’s parents, like most Jewish parents, are raising their children to be not just good people but good Jews, too.  They “brainwash” them by teaching them not only about middos tovos but about the timeless tradition that was handed down through the ages since Har Sinai, to their ancestors, then to those ancestors’ children, and then by those children, once grown, to their own.

In only a matter of weeks (forgive me for spilling the secret!), Jewish families around the world will be engaging in what is the year’s most potent “brainwashing,” as parents and children sit around their seder tables and recount their received testimony about Yetzias Mitzrayim.

The parents will, with the aid of the Haggadah, fulfill the mitzvah to recount that seminal event in Jewish history, and the children, kept awake (with candies and nuts and stunts, granted, not torture) will be brainwashed – that is to say, imprinted with information that will prove not only vital to their lives as strong and knowledgeable Jews, but vital to the entire world, whether that world knows it or not.

Surely the disillusioned authoress who had, nebbich, so deficient a Jewish upbringing, and the Fleurdelisé-draped crusader would not approve.  I won’t likely approve either of how they will raise their own children, presumably to follow in their “independent” footsteps.  Hopefully, those children will be independent enough to realize something their parents don’t: “Brainwashing” is just a hostile way of referring to education one doesn’t like.

© 2015 Hamodia