Category Archives: News

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

Thanks (I think), New York Times

I can’t say with any certitude that my repeatedly bugging of the New York Times’ public editor (who sent the criticism to a different department — which never responded to me) had anything to do with it.  Or that my opinion piece last year (at http://hamodia.com/2014/08/06/ugly-times/ ) did.

But I’m happy to report that the “Times Journeys” offering of a tour to Israel with the theme “The Israeli-Palestinian Conundrum” seems to no longer feature Hanan Ashwari (who David Harris once said “is to truth what smoking is to health”) as one of its resident experts for the tourists.  (The come-on is at http://www.nytimes.com/times-journeys/travel/israeli-palestinian-dialogue/ .)

But it never hurts to be a squeaky wheel (and to encourage  others to squeak along); sometimes one may get the grease.   One thing is certain: every proper hishtadlus is worth the time and trouble.

And thanks, New York Times, if you did, for taking the criticism seriously.

Zoned Out

Challenging “pre-owned” and “correctional institution” for first place in the delicate euphemism rankings is “sensitive urban zones.”

That phrase, having barged into the news cycle in recent weeks, is the translation of “Zones Urbaines Sensibles,” a designation long used in France to describe neighborhoods characterized by high unemployment, high rates of public housing and low educational attainment, many if not most of the areas populated for the most part by Muslim immigrants.

It was the characterization of such areas in Western Europe as “no-go zones,” first by Fox News and then by Louisiana governor and presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal, that propelled “sensitive urban zones” into the news.

After terrorism analyst Steve Emerson contended on Fox News that “There are actual cities [in Britain] like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” British Prime Minister David Cameron waxed apoplectic, and the network apologized repeatedly.  Similar claims about “no-go” neighborhoods in France prodded Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to announce that the City of Light would be suing Fox. “The image of Paris,” she huffed, “has been prejudiced, and the honor of Paris has been prejudiced.”

A day after those apologies, Mr. Jindal told CNN that “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home…” and added, “I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here. Pretending it’s not here won’t make it go away.”

There are indeed Sharia courts in some Western European countries, including England, where “Muslim Arbitration Tribunals” resolve civil and family issues through Islamic law.  There are also, l’havdil, batei din in our own communities that arbitrate disputes and rule on halachic questions.  Allowing religious communities to address legal issues among their willing members should not threaten anyone.  Multi-cultural democratic societies rightly respect religious communities’ right to practice their faiths, including to arbitrate religious matters and disputes among their members.  Thus, Mr. Jindal’s conflating of arbitration courts with incubators of terrorism is misguided and dangerous.

Equally misguided and dangerous, though, is the contention, much bellowed of late by the media, that “no-go” zones don’t exist in Western Europe.  The designation need not mean lawless, rebellious enclaves.  But it describes something real.

Neighborhoods that incubate the sort of evil that exploded in France mere weeks ago – and that has exploded so many times before – are indeed threats to civilized society.  Such areas breed and attract disaffected Muslims, often petty criminals seeking glory, like the brothers who massacred 17 people earlier this month.  Or the British soldier hacked to death by two Islamists in 2013.  Or the scores of other Islamist terrorist “incidents” in both countries over the years.  The “no-go” neighborhoods, whatever one chooses to call them, nurture such people’s malevolence, and send them on their wicked ways.

In Britain, one such enclave spawned a (now banned) group called “Muslims Against the Crusades,” which pledged to turn 12 British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into autonomous Islamist enclaves operating entirely outside British jurisprudence.

Political commentator Daniel Pipes conceded that France’s “sensitive urban zones” are, “in normal times… unthreatening, routine places.”  He adds, though, that “they do unpredictably erupt, with car burnings, attacks on representatives of the state (including police), and riots.”

Such neighborhoods may not have seceded from their countries, as has been implied by some overreaching pundits and politicians.  But they are viewed by police, other emergency services and the public as dangerous places.  Because they are.  Dangerous not only to visit but to society at large, because of the hatred and violence regularly preached and promoted there.  Cancer cells can bide their time too.

After Fox News aired its reference to “no-go” zones, a French comedic program mocked the assertion in a video.  Two “correspondents” pretending to be American journalists ventured into a Muslim neighborhood and, in slapstick fashion, cowered when they spied a couscous restaurant and then fell to the ground in fright at the sound of a jackhammer.

The host of the program wouldn’t take credit for causing Fox’s apology.  But he said that “The important thing is that we really had fun.”

It’s nice that he had fun.  After the horrors of past weeks, Frenchmen deserve some comic relief.  But should the comedian happen to find himself for some reason in a Zone Urbaines Sensibles, and heard a loud, explosive noise, he will do well to, in all seriousness, drop quickly to the ground.

© 2015 Hamodia