Mr. Happy Good News

The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies BESA https://besacenter.org/

The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies BESA https://besacenter.org/

Rabbis for Hamas

By Dr. Asaf Romirowsky 26May2021 https://besacenter.org/rabbis-for-hamas/

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,051, May 26, 2021

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Ever since the 1960s, the Western academy has been churning out “scholar-activist-warriors” who carry the mantle of activism in lieu of scholarship. The result is generations of well-meaning yet ill-informed and brainwashed students, especially with regard to the Middle East. So warped are the perceptions of Western academics of both Israel and its enemies that even American Jewish rabbinical students are effectively shilling for an Islamist terror organization committed to killing Jews wherever they are.


These flags are flags of the Nazi Youth Organization "Hitler-Jugend", regional branch of Palestine. The historical context to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini."

These flags are flags of the Nazi Youth Organization “Hitler-Jugend”, regional branch of Palestine. The historical context to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini.”

JerusalemCats Comments:

These are your future Reform, Conservative “rabbis”!!!
Do you want them to teach your children?
A School is connected to a Congregation or a Rabbi. What does the Non Torah Congregation or Rabbi Teach? New Reform curriculum: Further alienating Jews from Israel? Since their Congregation or Rabbi have taught them how NOT to be a Jew they mess up on Birthright. Then their College fills them with hate about the Land of Israel and the Jews living there. Jews Lead Israel Boycott on US Campuses, Progressive Jews and the ‘Israeli Problem’,

They have been CONNED by the Leftist all their lives:

FLOTILLA: We Con the World Behind the Headlines: The seizure of the Gaza flotilla


The recent flare-up between Israel and Hamas once again forced American Jews to pick sides: Israel versus their universal ideals, which they see as incompatible with the Zionist enterprise. A case in point: a group of American rabbinical students enrolled in non-orthodox institutions issued a public letter accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on American Jewish communities to hold Israel accountable for its alleged “violent suppression of human rights.”

 

In many ways, these rabbinical students are a microcosm of young American Jews who see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the American prism of race compounded by the formula of diversity, equity, and inclusion that is dominant in American society today. It also coincides with today’s quasi-religious practice of being seen doing acts of “justice” rather than participating in worship or prayer.

 

The rabbis-to-be state in their letter, “Our institutions have been reflecting and asking, ‘How are we complicit with racial violence?… And yet, so many of those same institutions are silent when abuse of power and racist violence erupts in Israel and Palestine.” All of this begs the question—do these caring individuals understand what Hamas is and what it stands for?

 

An offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood as it proudly pronounces in its Charter, Hamas has always been very clear about its goals and methods. A glance at the Hamas Charter makes them explicit: the Islamic Resistance Movement “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine,” “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it,” and “Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.”

 

Lest any of that fail to clarify the group’s mission, the Charter makes the following unequivocal statement:

 

[T]he Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

 

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”

 

Hamas Political Bureau nember and former Interior Minister Fathi Hammad recently called on the “People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels. With those five shekels, you will humiliate the Jewish state.”

 

The future American rabbis embody apathy, religious ignorance, and the deliberate substitution of “social justice” for traditional Jewish liturgy. This accounts for their decline in engagement with Israel. These liberal and American instincts highlight the danger of placing antipathy toward the Jewish state of Israel at the center of religious belief. The growth of disdain and guilt regarding Israel within American Jewry is particularly acute on the cultural left, which is trying to grapple with what Zionism means to them, their children, and their grandchildren in the absence of any strong feelings about Judaism or fellow Jews.

 

The misplaced sense of guilt is deliberately amplified by statements emanating from members of the pro-Hamas “squad,” such as Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who stated, “Too many are silent or dismissive as our U.S. tax dollars continue to be used for this kind of inhumanity. I am tired of people functioning from a place of fear rather than doing what’s right because of the bullying by pro-Israel lobbyists. This is apartheid, plain and simple.”

 

She latter stated at a rally in front of the US State Department, during which she accused Israel of engaging in “ethnic cleansing,” that “What they are doing to the Palestinians is what they are doing to our Black brothers and sisters here. As you all are marching for freedom of Palestine, please know that you must be marching for everybody’s freedom. It’s all interconnected.”

 

Young American Jews in particular wrestle with Zionism, which in the 21st century has become a source of debate, controversy, embarrassment, and guilt as they try to come to terms with the activities of the Jewish state and its elected officials. Consequently, many seek to detach themselves from what used to embody the core of modern Jewish identity.

 

Historically, from the pre-state era through the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, there was an appreciation of Israel—not only as the fulfillment of the ancient longing for return, but also as a haven. In the aftermath of the Holocaust the threat of annihilation was understood to be real. Zionism was viewed as part and parcel of American Jewish identity, especially in the years leading up to 1967. There was no contradiction between being a liberal American and a Jew.

 

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis expressed this well:

 

Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism… There is no inconsistency between loyalty to America and loyalty to Jewry. The Jewish spirit, the product of our religion and experiences, is essentially modern and essentially American…Indeed, loyalty to America demands rather that each American Jew become a Zionist. For only through the ennobling effect of its striving can we develop the best that is in us and give to this country the full benefit of our great inheritance.

 

Today, in contrast to Brandeis, the ideology of liberal groups is more Marxist than democratic, aiming for “equity” rather than equality. So in Marx’s footsteps they create social revolutions through identity politics and do their best to undermine the American value structure. So far, this effort has been unsuccessful, given that the US is still grounded in nationalistic anchors that are absent in Europe.

 

But sturdier Zionist anchors are needed within the Jewish community to overcome self-reproach over Israel’s existence. Collective historical memory is lacking from today’s discourse on Zionism, especially in America. While there are Zionists on the left and right who still appreciate Jewish history and believe in Jewish destiny, Zionist renewal outside Zion is needed.

View PDF Click to download PDF file   Click to Download the .pdf report 2051-Rabbis-for-Hamas-Romirowsky-final

Asaf Romirowsky is executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and a senior non-resident fellow at the BESA Center.


Sources: Click to Download the .pdf Rabbinical and Cantorial Students Appeal to the Jewish Community with the names of the signed Students and Colleges.

Senior Hamas Official Fathi Hammad To Palestinians In Jerusalem: Buy 5-Shekel Knives And Cut Off The Heads Of The Jews

May 07, 2021 https://www.memri.org/tv/snr-hamas-official-fathi-hammad-urges-people-jerusalem-cut-off-heads-jews-knives-day-reckoning-moment-destruction

 

Ford Fischer-tweet-12May2021-Rashida Tlaib Palestinian incitement

Ford Fischer-tweet-12May2021-Rashida Tlaib Palestinian incitement

 

Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs logo

Weapons prepared on the Mavi Marmara (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)

Weapons prepared on the Mavi Marmara (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)

Behind the Headlines: The seizure of the Gaza flotilla

31 May 2010 https://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/issues/pages/seizure_gaza_flotilla_31-may-2010.aspx

Overnight (30-31 May), Israeli naval personnel boarded a flotilla of six vessels attempting to violate the maritime blockage on Gaza. Militants onboard the Mavi Marmara attacked Israeli naval personnel with live fire and light weaponry including guns, knives and clubs.

Overview of Israel Navy Interception of Mari Marmara – 31May10

Seven Israeli soldiers were injured as a result of the extremely violent ambush, two of them seriously while three are in moderate condition. Nine militants aboard the ship were killed. Those vessels that reacted peacefully to the operation were escorted unharmed to Israel, as had happened with previous vessels that tried to violate the maritime blockade. – IDF forces: “We came to speak, they came to fight.”

 

Weapons recovered on the Mavi Marmara (Photos: IDF Spokesperson)

Weapons recovered on the Mavi Marmara (Photos: IDF Spokesperson)

 

 

Several facts are already clear:

The intent of the militants was violent, the methods they employed were violent, and unfortunately, the result was violent.

The attack on the Israeli soldiers was premeditated. The weapons used had been prepared in advance. Huwaida Arraf, a flotilla organizer, foreshadowed the violence with her statement that: “They [the Israelis] are going to have to forcefully stop us.” Bulent Yildirim, the leader of the IHH, one of the primary organizers of the flotilla, announced just prior to boarding: “We are going to resist and resistance will win.” The militants whipped up the boarding crowd by chanting “Intifada, intifada, intifada!”

Close-Up Footage of Mavi Marmara Passengers Attacking IDF Soldiers (With Sound)

Video taken by IDF naval boat shows the passengers of the Mavi Marmara violently attacking IDF soldiers who were trying to board the ship after having sent repeated requests for the boat to change course.

 

It should be noted that the Turkish organizing group, IHH, has a radical anti-Western orientation. Alongside its humanitarian activities, it supports radical Islamic networks such as Hamas, and at least in the past has supported global jihad elements, such as al-Qaeda.

 

Israel was justified under international law in acting against the flotilla. A state of armed conflict exists between Israel and the Hamas regime that controls Gaza. Hamas has launched 10,000 rockets against Israeli civilians. At present, it is engaged in smuggling arms and military supplies into Gaza, by land and sea, in order to fortify its positions and continue its attacks.

 

Under international law, Israel has the right to protect the lives of its civilians from Hamas attacks. Consequently, it has undertaken measures to defend itself, including the imposition of a maritime blockade to curb Hamas rearmament. Israel cannot allow a sea-corridor to open to Gaza, a corridor which would allow weapons and terrorists to freely enter the Strip.

 

The flotilla organizers made clear that their primary goal was to target the maritime blockage. Greta Berlin, a flotilla spokesperson, told AFT news-agency on 27 May that “this mission is not about delivering humanitarian supplies, it’s about breaking Israel’s siege.” This fact is demonstrated not only by their words, but by their actions. Flotilla organizers turned down repeated Israeli offers to land the vessels in the Israeli port of Ashdod, and to transfer their aid through the existing land crossings, in accordance with established procedures.

 

Moreover, while the organizers claim to have humanitarian concern for the residents of Gaza they did not have similar concerns for the fate of the abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, and when asked, refused to make a public call to allow him to be visited in Gaza by the Red Cross.

 

Under international maritime law, when a maritime blockade is in effect, no vessels – either civilian or enemy – can enter the blockaded area. In line with Israel’s obligations under international law, the ships participating in the protest flotilla were warned time and again that a maritime blockade is in effect off the coast of Gaza.

 

When it became clear that the protest flotilla intended to violate the blockade despite the repeated warnings, Israeli naval personnel boarded the vessels of the flotilla, and redirected them to Ashdod. Due to the desire to avoid casualties and operational needs, including the large number of vessels participating in the flotilla, it was necessary to undertake measures to enforce the blockade a certain distance from the area of the blockade.

 

The soldiers who boarded the vessels did not carry arms openly, but were met with a violent ambush. Two soldiers were shot, one was stabbed and others were injured as they were set upon with clubs, knives, axes and heavy objects. They were in mortal danger and had to act accordingly in self-defense. …

 

Weapons Found on the Flotilla Ship Mavi Marmara Used by Activists Against IDF Soldiers

During a search aboard the maritime vessel Mavi Marmara, IDF forces uncovered a cache of weapons including many knives, slingshots, rocks, smoke bombs, metal rods, improvised sharp metal objects, sticks and clubs, 5KG hammers, firebombs and gas masks in case IDF forces fired riot dispersal means at the activists as they violently attacked the soldiers. These weapons were used against Israeli Navy personnel as they attempted to board the ship.

 

The flotilla’s cargo was off-loaded in Ashdod and the humanitarian items transferred overland to the Gaza crossings in accordance with standard operating procedures. The participants of the flotilla who need assistance are being treated in Israeli medical facilities. The rest will be subjected to immigration procedures applicable in cases of attempted illegal entry.

 

* * *

Flotilla leaders stated on Sunday (May 30) that violence was premeditated:

 

The organizers of the Gaza flotilla announced in advance their intention of using violence against Israeli forces if the latter tried to prevent the ships from reaching Gaza. This intention was expressed in interviews given by the head of the IHH, Bulent Yildirim, to Turkish television stations on the last night of the voyage, as the ships approached the coast. Following are two examples. The interviews can be find in the archive of the IHH website: http://tinyurl.com/IHHViolence

The Mavi-Marmara flotilla to Gaza attacks Israeli Navy 31May2010

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israpundit-org-logo

The real reason for Western support of the Palestinian Arabs

 

What actually binds these groups together is an ultimately incomprehensible animus against Judaism and the Jewish people.

By Melanie Phillips 15October2021 https://www.israpundit.org/the-real-reason-for-western-support-of-the-palestinian-arabs/

 

(JNS) Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States who is now a candidate to head the Jewish Agency, has rightly said that the decline in support for Israel among American Jews has reached a crisis point. The Jewish Agency, he said, “needs to bring young American Jews back from the brink.”

 

However, the Jewish Agency won’t address this problem by simply tackling American Jews. The roots of this crisis are broader and deeper.

 

At a conference at the Al Quds University in Ramallah in June, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas delivered a recorded speech with the title, “The Zionist Narrative: Between Reversal and Cancellation.”

 

In a piece for the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser has written that Abbas “proudly noted” in this speech that international public opinion had recently undergone a gradual shift towards accepting the Palestinian Arab narrative.

 

As Kuperwasser wrote, this “narrative” is a tissue of demonstrable and idiotic lies designed to promulgate the fiction that the Palestinian Arabs are the true inheritors of the land of Israel rather than the Jews.

 

But as Kuperwasser also observes, the Palestinian position is that the Jews of Israel must return to the places from where they allegedly came—not the land of Israel, their actual original homeland, but Europe, where they were scattered in exile, persecuted and murdered in great number.

 

“The narrative,” he writes, “also emphasizes that the Palestinian struggle is national and Islamic at the same time and ultimately states that in light of all this, all of Palestine is included, and Israel should not be recognized in any way as the nation-state of the Jewish people, which, at any rate, does not exist. At most, it is possible to temporarily accept the existence of an ‘Israeli people’ which is a new concept referring to Israel as the state of all its citizens.”

 

And this narrative also holds that no one has the right to object to the Palestinian Arabs’ use of terrorism to achieve their aim of annihilating Israel and driving the Jews out.

 

So the claim made by the Palestinians’ supporters that they are backing a state of Palestine side by side with Israel is totally contradicted by the Palestinians’ own exterminatory narrative.

 

Kuperwasser rehearses all this because he is appalled at the behavior of Israel’s defense minister, Benny Gantz, who has promised a “loan” to the P.A. Kuperwasser says this is a “circuitous deal that makes Israel’s protests about the P.A. paying terrorists’ salaries ridiculous in the eyes of the world and Israeli law.”

 

The broader question, though, is how Western liberals in general can support such an obviously odious, bigoted and murderous Palestinian agenda.

 

The latest such useful idiot is the bestselling novelist, Sally Rooney. She has refused to have her new novel published by Modan, the Hebrew-language Israeli publisher of her first two books, because she supports a cultural boycott of Israel.

 

Rooney happens to be Irish; and the Irish Republic—one of the most anti-Israel countries in Europe—is a boiling cesspool of Jew-bashing.

 

The dogged British anti-Semitism researcher David Collier has just published a 202-page report in which he chronicles horrific anti-Jewish attitudes in Ireland driven from the top down by Irish politicians and echoed by journalists, academics and other cultural leaders.

 

There are many plausible explanations for this Israel animus in Ireland and the West. Ireland sees itself as the victim of English colonialism and so identifies with the Palestinians’ false narrative of Jewish colonialism.

 

Rooney is a self-confessed Marxist. Israel is being demonized through a perfect intellectual storm: a combination of Marxist identification of capitalism with oppression; liberal internationalist hostility to the Western concept of the nation-state; and the Palestinian propaganda program cooked up in the 1960s with the former Soviet Union to turn the Arab war of annihilation against Israel into Israel’s oppression of the newly-minted “Palestinians.”

 

This propaganda narrative is now the signature cause of “progressive” folk who astoundingly therefore make common cause with deeply regressive Islamists, who endorse throwing gay people off rooftops and stoning women to death.

 

What actually binds these groups together, however, is a deadly animus against Judaism and the Jewish people.

 

The Palestinians’ hatred of Israel is based on hatred of the Jews founded upon Islamic theological sources. Medieval and Nazi-style anti-Semitism pour out of the P.A. in an unstoppable torrent.

 

Even those Palestinian Arab supporters who harbor no ill-will towards Jews as people therefore promote a Palestinian narrative that is based on Jew-hatred. So it’s no surprise that threaded through pro-Palestinian western discourse are unambiguous anti-Semitic tropes.

 

The deeper question, though, is why it’s always the Jews who get it in the neck from so many different groups. No other people has ever had this experience.

 

Many decent folk in the West who know nothing about Judaism or Jewish history simply cannot understand why anti-Semitism, which they don’t understand at all, takes up so much global energy.

 

Many Jews ask themselves the same question. In an anguished piece for Tablet, the Reform Rabbi Amiel Hirsch writes: “Of all the savageries in the sordid history of human affairs, what explains the singling out of the Jews for unique odium? … No other supremacist ideology is as singularly fixated on one group of people. It is not only the hatred of a Jew. Many antisemites have never met a Jew in their lives. It is the obsession with Jewry, the Jewish people” as “… the source of evil in the world.”

 

Again, there are many obvious explanations. These include jealousy of the “chosen people,” a term that is widely misunderstood; cultural suspicions fueled by observant Jews keeping themselves apart; the Jew-hatred embedded in dominant interpretations of Christianity and Islam over the centuries.

 

But the Jews were singled out long before Christianity and Islam. They have always been used as society’s scapegoats. The question is why?

 

The point is that anti-Semitism isn’t just a form of prejudice or racism. Plenty of other people are victims of that. Anti-Semitism is qualitatively different—and ultimately mysterious.

 

For there is no other people which is obsessively demonized and delegitimized by double standards, systematic falsehoods and being airbrushed out of its own history. No other people has been subjected to the repeated aim of eradicating it from the face of the earth, to the general indifference of everyone else. No other group has been the victim of a mindset that ascribes to people who form some 0.2 percent of the global population the malign power of a conspiracy to manipulate the world.

 

And it’s this uniquely deranged, paranoid and incomprehensible mindset that’s been given rocket fuel by the Palestinian Arab narrative.

 

For people don’t care about the Palestinians. What does animate a terrifying number of their supporters is a deep desire for the Jews to vanish from their world. Palestinianism is not just about the eradication of Israel. It has weaponized Israel against the Jewish people.

 

Many Jews are frightened of acknowledging the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Partly, this comes from a principled concern not to denigrate the suffering of others. Partly, lining up Jewish suffering alongside that of others is a panicky attempt to prevent the world from abandoning the Jews once again. Mainly, though, it comes from a deep reluctance to acknowledge the uniqueness of the Jewish people out of fear that this will increase anti-Semitism.

 

The result is now all around us. For without acknowledging the uniqueness of the Jews and the uniquely unhinged animus against them, there is scant chance of increasing public understanding of Judaism, anti-Semitism and the State of Israel.

 

This is the nettle, however difficult and painful, that the Jewish Agency should now grasp.

 

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.

 

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Mr. Happy is not happy about all the fighting between Jews! We need to care for each other! I don’t care who you are. Don’t start Cat Fights over power or self honor or avoda zorah! Love your fellow Jew!

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Kotel Rabbi: Please Don’t Fight Here

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Rabbi asks “zealots on both sides” to take their discord elsewhere.

Gil Ronen, 25April2013 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/167482

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovich, Rabbi of the Kotel and Holy Sites, issued a call Thursday not to turn the Kotel into a place of discord.

 

Rabbi Rabinovich reacted to a decision by the District Court Judge, to ask the Attorney General for his opinion on the ruling regarding the demand by the Women of the Wall to pray in the Women’s Section in ways that are not acceptable to the Orthodox stream.

 

“The Kotel is the last unifying place that we have left,” he said in a statement. “It is easy to set the Kotel Plaza alight with the fire of discord. It is much more difficult to find the middle ground, which will enable everyone to continue to feel that they belong and are wanted at the Kotel.

 

“I implore the state authorities and the silent majority, which holds the Kotel dear to its heart, to prevent zealots from all sides from turning the Kotel Plaza into a place of strife between brothers,” the Rabbi added.

 

Judge Moshe Sobel ruled Thursday that by donning a tallit, or prayer shawl, and reading the Torah in the Kotel Plaza, the Women of the Wall are not disobeying the High Court’s ruling.

Comments:
aakov says: BS”D I did some research & found that my suspicions are correct. WOW’s founders & leaders are “reform” (read deform) & “conservatives plus a fake orthodox woman or 2 (maybe lesbie’s?). The facebook blog of 1 of them shows definite “reform” anti-Torah tradition direction; e.g. objection to the states current standing that only orthodox conversion is legit, & posted a photo of a reform fake convert woman very immodestly “dressed” hugging her would be groom to try to prove the “injustice” of refusing marriage license to her. One must keep in mind that the founder of the “reform” movement was mocked by his xtian priest friends who told him to decide whether he wants to be a Jew or a xtian, his 2 daughters converted out & married xtians, of his followers so many became xtians that of them there were 10,000 pastors or priests by WW2. The reform clichee’ of “be a Jew at home & a human being outside” was used by the nazis as “proof” that “the Jews admit they are not humans”. Also the “chief rabbi” of the re/deform movement was the power behind stopping Roosevelt from lifting the immigration quota for European Jews during the Holocaust! He feared an influx of Torah life Jews would ruin his power/money base.So with roots like that what can on expect the results to be??

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JerusalemCats Comments:

The Women of the Wall are not Jewish. Just like the Evangelicals practice replacement theology, they also practice replacement theology with their statement of “that G-d “rejected” them (the religious people) and using the Meron tragedy as proof that “G-d no longer wants their way.” The Government gave them the 450-square-meter platform section called Ezrat Yisrael which they do not use which is in the Robinson’s Arch section outside the Security Gates of the Kotel (Western Wall).

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Fights break out at Western Wall

Women of the Wall arrive to hold monthly prayer session, are entangled in disagreements.

Arutz Sheva Staff , 11June2021 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/307894

Women of the Wall (WOW) on Friday morning arrived at the Western Wall to hold a prayer session in honor of the start of the new month of Tamuz, together with “Rabbi” Sergio Bergman, President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ).

 

The women were stopped at the security gate to the Western Wall after they attempted to bring a Torah scroll into the plaza, to use for a bat mitzvah girl who had arrived together with them.

 

The Western Wall has its own set of Torah scrolls and does not allow any scrolls to be brought in from outside.

 

After WOW left the Torah scroll at the gate, the women claimed that a group of men began cursing and pushing them, while taking a suitcase with prayer books, breaking it, and ripping the prayer books.

 

Leah Aharoni, founder of Women For the Wall (a traditionalist organization promoting the preservation of the status quo at the Western Wall), who was also at the Western Wall at the time, said that there was “violent pushing and grabbing” and that a WOW leader screamed “at the top of her lungs” at religious people at the Wall, claiming that G-d “rejected” them and using the Meron tragedy as proof that “G-d no longer wants their way.”

 

Aharoni also said that one of the WOW women “violently pushed and grabbed” her, and only police involvement prevented actual injury.

 

Yochi Rappaport, WOW CEO, said: “The traditional public understands that we are close to achieving our goal – equal prayer at the Western Wall – and is worried about losing their monopoly on Judaism. For 32 years already, Women of the Wall has been fighting to free the Western Wall, and we will not cease until we reach our desired equality.”

 

The Western Wall Heritage Foundation said: “The Western Wall Heritage Foundation is dismayed at the agitated spirits. Western Wall stewards did everything they could to separate those fighting and to calm the atmosphere. The Western Wall Heritage Foundation calls to remove all disagreements from the Western Wall Plaza, and to preserve the site as one which is unifying.”

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The unused Reform area of the Kotel,Ezrat Yisrael, is now Orthodox. The whole reform protest is just politics.

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Orthodox prayer at the ‘Reform’ section of the Kotel

New initiative to pray and learn Torah at the Ezrat Yisrael plaza, complete with a partition.

Yehonatan Gottlieb, 15July2021 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309931

Orthodox prayer in the Ezrat Yisrael

Orthodox prayer in the Ezrat Yisrael

In the last few days, activists from the Joint Committee for the Sanctity of the Kotel have been arriving at the Kotel Hama’aravi (Western Wall), along with several rabbis, to pray the afternoon and evening prayers (Minchah and Maariv) at the Ezrat Yisrael section at the site.

 

Several years have passed since the site was designated as a place for those who wish to pray without division between men and women, but the site is almost always empty, with religious and secular Jews alike opting to pray at the main prayer section.

 

The activists have been bringing with them a makeshift mechitzah (partition) made of canvas that they erect to separate between men and women, which has infuriated the Women of the Wall, even though this feminist, leftist group always conducts its prayer services in the women’s section of the main plaza, where its ultimate objective is to see the mechitzah there torn down.

 

In addition, every evening Torah classes are being held in the Ezrat Yisrael section, which is located in the southern part of the plaza. This Thursday night, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the dean (rosh yeshivah) of the Ateret Kohanim yeshivah, will be giving a Torah class. Those giving classes in recent days have included Rabbi Moshe Ben Abu and Rabbi Meir Ne’eman.

 

According to the activists, “We understand that the Kotel is one of the main objectives of those who want to change the nature of the State of Israel. The battle over the Kotel is really a battle over the character of the State – whether it will remain a Jewish state or whether it will become a ‘state of all its citizens.’”

 

“The Kotel is ours, too,” they add. “Especially now, when all those associated with the Reform are celebrating what they see as their victory and planning their next moves to undermine Judaism – conversion, religious courts and more – it’s vital that we stop them in their tracks and act, here at the Kotel, in order to prevent Reform elements from gaining control over this holy site and over other places that are central to Judaism.”

 

Oren Henig, head of the Liba Center, an organization that is dedicated to enhancing the Jewish character of the State of Israel, stated: “At a time when a left-wing government established by [Prime Minister Naftali] Bennett together with [Yair] Lapid, [Mansour] Abbas, and [Arab Labor MK Ibtisam] Mara’ana, is selling out the state to the Reform movement, we at the Liba Center are calling on everyone to whom Judaism is important to arrive here and strengthen our hold over the Kotel and protect its sanctity.”

 

As noted above, the Women of the Wall are incensed at this new initiative. “It is inconceivable that we should accept the violence and incitement created by these extremist Religious Zionist elements in their disgusting power grab over the Ezrat Yisrael.”

 

According to them, “The Liba Center, Chotam, and other such extremist organizations who call themselves the Committee for the Protection of the Sanctity of the Kotel, are doing exactly the opposite of protecting its sanctity. They are debasing the sanctity of this holy place and behaving in exactly the opposite way to what they should have learned from history – from the events that led up to the destruction of the Holy Temple, times of baseless hatred among the Jewish People.

 

“We are appealing to whoever is responsible for ensuring order and preventing violence at the Western Wall to do what they should be doing, and prevent the holding of prayers at the Ezrat Yisrael. Those making decisions at the site and anyone who has eyes in his head should learn from this event, as well as from the violent occurrence that happened on Rosh Chodesh Tammuz, when extremists tore the pages out of prayer books belonging to the Women of the Wall. They have to realize who are the people really making the disturbances there, inciting and committing acts of violence – and who are the people who only want to pray there in their own way.”

 

In their response to the latest developments, Tenuat Ne’emanei Torah ve’Avodah issued a statement: “Instead of working toward unity among Jews and bringing them closer to G-d, these organizations are trying to forcibly gain control over the Ezrat Yisrael that was established in order to provide a place for those who want to pray in their own manner. It is sad to see ‘Protecting the sanctity of the Kotel’ turning into a protest in the form of Torah classes. We hope that this issue of the Kotel will be resolved in a manner that invites every Jew to connect with G-d in his own way.”

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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

‘Reform: Destruction unfolding in our times’

In weekly class, Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem says Reform movement is worse than Holocaust deniers.
Mordechai Sones, 05September2017 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/235085

 

Jerusalem Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar today (Tuesday) slammed the Reform movement following the Supreme Court petition they submitted to revive what is known as the Western Wall deal. The deal would expand the existing mixed gender prayer area at the site, join the entrances to the traditional and mixed prayer areas and create a committee for administering the Wall which would include non-observant Jews.

 

“I learned that there was a hearing regarding the Western Wall, the petition of the ‘accursed villains’ who are perpetrating every transgression in the world against the Torah … they marry gentiles with Jews, they have neither Yom Kippur nor Shabbat, but they want prayer … One shouldn’t think for a minute that they want to pray. What they are after is to desecrate the sacred,” he said in his weekly shiur Torah class), as quoted by the haredi news website Kikar Hashabbat.

 

“[This continued] until G-d intervened and canceled the previous bad plan; but the Reform movement sat idly by. The court took over the matter and warned them to implement the plan and if not, the court would rule. It was foreseeable and predictable. We said publicly that this silence reveals a prior agreement.”

 

He explained that the Reform movement is worse than Holocaust denial in his eyes for denying even more of Jewish history. “They are trying to blind the public and say that ‘the haredi extremists invented it (halakha)’. It’s exactly like Holocaust denial. They scream, ‘Why in Iran are there Holocaust deniers?’ They deny more than the Holocaust … They deny the Temple, all the Mishnaic sources and all the Talmudic tractates that speak of the men’s sections and the women’s sections. Is that something anyone doubts? Did we invent this ourselves?

 

“It is a destruction that is being created in our time; destruction, real destruction, but just as we didn’t give up after the destruction itself for almost 2,000 years, we have not given up because of them, nor are we afraid of them.”

 

He also criticized the Supreme Court. “It’s always seeking equal rights. Equality is a good thing, but equal rights can be taken to extremes … We see where it leads; even in security matters many countries are destroyed in the name of holy equality. But what does equality have to do with this? Is the Western Wall an object that belongs to us? It has no owner, not the government, not the court, and not the rabbi of the Western Wall. It is holy to God.”

 

JerusalemCats Comments:
The Reform in their 1885 Pittsburgh Platform formally rejected the Torah of Israel and Israel both as a State of Israel, The People of Israel and the Land of Israel:
Para.#4 “We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.”
Para.#5 “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”.
Relatively few Israeli Jews identify with either Conservative (2%) or Reform (3%) Judaism
http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/comparisons-between-jews-in-israel-and-the-u-s/.
What they are doing is pure Hatred of the Torah Jews.

The Significance of Living in the Kings Palace -64- HaGaon Rabbi Yaakov Hillel

Parsha Shlach:The sin of the Spies, The Land of Milk and Honey. Walk around the Land and Look at the Land of Israel.
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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

MK Litzman: ‘Bennett is Reform, I won’t shake his hand’

MK Yakov Litzman says coalition is ’embarrassment,’ ‘shameful,’ says he doesn’t regret calling PM Naftali Bennett a ‘Reform’ Jew.

Ben Shaul , 30June2021 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309025

 

MK Yakov Litzman Flash 90

MK Yakov Litzman Flash 90

Two weeks after he called Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett a “Reform Jew,” MK Yakov Litzman (United Torah Judaism) does not regret his words.

 

“I made a mistake,” Litzman told Kikar Hashabbat. “I made a mistake in that when Bennett gave me his hand, when once again he would make this mistake of going with [Yesh Atid Chairman MK Yair] Lapid, like he told me, ‘I’m the first one to work with him, at a time when others didn’t.’ I think that it’s an embarrassment and shameful to sit in a coalition such as this.”

 

Litzman added that he does not plan to cooperate with the coalition behind the scenes.

 

“I don’t think that what’s forbidden to do in public is permissible to do in secret,” he said. “What’s not allowed is not allowed – not in public and not quietly. I say out loud what I have to say about other people – for better or for worse.”

 

Explaining that Bennett and Lapid are the same, Litzman said: “Lapid wants public transportation on Shabbat (the Sabbath) – so do you. Lapid wants Reform conversions? So do you. Lapid wants civil marriage? So do you. What’s the difference between you? The fact that you wear a small kippah (skullcap)? So take it off. That’s what I said, and I stand by every word that I said. It’s a fact that even now, he hides his small kippah.”

 

When asked if he believes Bennett is truly Reform, he said, “Yes, I said that.”

 

When asked if he would greet MK Gilad Kariv (Labor), a Reform “rabbi,” in the halls of the Knesset, Litzman said: “Greet him? Greet him? You’ve gone completely mad.”

 

Later, he was asked if his policy of ignoring people extended to Bennett as well. To this Litzman said, “Definitely yes. Yes. It’s simple. I don’t understand the question at all.”

 

This is just one reason that the reform movement is hated so much

Mark Zuckerberg the Founder, Charman and CEO of Facebook, he is the Poster-child of the reform movement. Mark Zuckerberg was raised a reform Jew and is married to a Shiksa (non Jew)[Possible a Chinese Communist military intelligence case officer?] and look at all the antisemitism and terror he is supporting via Facebook.

Let us say what no one is saying – Big Tech Hates Jews

 

UNRWA teacher Hiba Yassin's Facebook page:"The #intifada of Ramadan" (meaning July 2014. Yes, UNRWA teachers were calling for a new intifada last year too,)

UNRWA teacher Hiba Yassin’s Facebook page:”The #intifada of Ramadan” (meaning July 2014. Yes, UNRWA teachers were calling for a new intifada last year too,)

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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef: ‘There are two types of Aliyah’

Chief Rabbi exceptionally publishes video explaining: ‘There are those who aren’t Jews and even develop anti-Semitic feelings.’

Mordechai Sones, 07January2020 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/274243

 

Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef

Chief Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef

 

The Chief Rabbi of Israel, the Rishon L’Tziyon Rabbi Yitzchak Yosef posted a video this evening with a conciliatory message to the immigrant community from Russia.

 

“As you know, there are two types of Aliyah that emigrated from the Soviet Union,” Rabbi Yosef began, “there is the blessed emigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who gave their souls in the Soviet Union, they and their fathers and all those prisoners of Zion, who sanctified G-d’s Name and came here to Eretz Yisrael and we receive them with love and great affection.

 

“But there is another Aliyah, we will not deny it, an Aliyah of those of non-Jews, not only non-Jews (whoever isn’t Jewish must be loved and respected, as all were created in G-d’s Image), but there are those who are not Jewish and even develop hatred for Judaism, for everything sacred, of which we spoke that many such instances have unfortunately arisen and caused all sorts of terrible incitement against Judaism. But those who made Aliyah, Prisoners of Zion and hundreds of thousands of Jews who made Aliyah in self-sacrifice, we love and respect them,” the Rabbi emphasized.

 

“I urge all Russian immigrants not to accept the incitement that some people have made following my comments and exploit it for political interests – they are inciters and demagogues; don’t pay any attention to them,” Rabbi Yosef added.

 

At the conclusion, the Rabbi noted, “Let the truth be known: We love them and I bless all the immigrants that they be blessed from Above and ascend higher and yet higher, they will have blessing and success and may G-d fulfill their wishes for good and blessing Amen and Amen.”

 

 

Click to download PDF file Click to download http://www.jerusalemcats.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Chief-Rabbi-Yitzchak-Yosef-There-are-two-types-of-Aliyah.mp4

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An Open Letter To The World by Rabbi Meir Kahane

An Open Letter To The World by Rabbi Meir Kahane (Z”L)

 

An Open Letter To The World by Rabbi Meir Kahane (Z”L) Hebrew Subtitles

An Open Letter To The World.

Dear World,

It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you are upset over us here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry and outraged. Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it is the brutal repression of the Palestinians; yesterday, it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph, and who therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.

 

Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we the Jewish people upset you. We upset a German people, who elected a Hitler and we upset an Austrian people, who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations – Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Romanians.

 

And we go back a long, long way in history of world upset. We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki, who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders, who on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. We upset, for centuries, a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through Inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

 

It is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you – in a manner of speaking – and establish a Jewish State. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you, and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you and thus love you – and have you love us? And so we decided to come home, to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

 

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you.

 

You are upset that we repress the Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.

 

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.

 

Dear world, why did the Arabs – the Palestinians – massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you, World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews – was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset then?

 

The Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who – when they had all the territories they now demand be given them for their state – attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of “idbah-al-yahud” – “Slaughter the Jews!” that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream – destroy Israel.

 

What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today – but we should not “repress” them. Dear world, you stood by the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.

 

And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well – think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

 

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

Bav Mair Kahane (Z”L)
May G-d avenge his blood.
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Morton Klein: Jonathan Neumann’s Epic Takedown of ‘Tikkun Olam’

By Morton Klein 16 Aug 2018 https://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2018/08/16/jonathan-neumann-tikkun-olam/

Jewish Voice for Peace

Jewish Voice for Peace

Jonathan Neumann’s new book, “To Heal the World?: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel,” is an important examination of the distorted theology employed by the radical left to lead many Jews astray.

Neumann describes how radical Jewish leftists distorted and turned a minor phrase, “tikkun olam” (repairing the world), into a left-wing political “social justice” universalist theology that is hostile to Israel and traditional Judaism, and which sympathizes with the Jewish people’s enemies.

 

Neumann explains that “tikkun olam” theology is relatively new, and is not grounded in traditional Judaism or an honest reading of Jewish sources. “Tikkun olam” is never mentioned in the Torah/Bible. The left takes occasional, insignificant mentions of the words “tikkun olam” in other Jewish writings out of context and reinterprets them.

 

For instance, a prayer (the “Aleynu“) that expresses the hope that G-d will establish his kingdom over the whole world, and that one day everyone will praise G-d and obey G-d’s laws, is reinterpreted by the left as a call for man to engage in left-wing political activism.

 

Neumann recounts how the Jewish Reform, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements have rejected traditional Judaism in favor of universalist, left-wing “social justice.” However, their departure from tradition repelled some Jews who had a connection to or understanding of traditional Judaism. Thus, leftist leaders adopted a different approach: They falsely and deceptively claimed that revolutionary, left-wing “social justice” was really always part of the Jewish tradition. Thus “tikkun olam” theology was adopted by the liberal Jewish movements, and succeeded in turning many American Jews against the actual teachings of their own faith, and against the Jewish state.

 

Tikkun olam” theology fixates on the Biblical creation story to support universalism above all else. Under this theology, there is nothing unique about, or even a need for, the Jewish people, because everyone came from the same creator.

 

Tikkun olam” theology virtually ignores the pivotal event in Jewish tradition: G-d’s revelation on Mount Sinai and gift to the Jewish people of the Torah – the source of the Jewish people’s unique role in the world, and of the obligations to follow G-d’s commandments. By following G-d’s commandments, including rebuilding and living in the G-d given Land of Israel, the Jewish people becomes an inspiration and blessing to the entire world. That is the traditional understanding.

 

But “Tikkun olam” theology transforms uniquely Jewish events in the Bible into a secular revolutionary “social justice” creed that fits into liberation theology. For instance, Neumann explains that the traditional meaning of the Exodus is “the divine rescue of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, and the Revelation of the Torah and the covenant struck between G-d and the Jewish People at Mount Sinai, beginning the tale that sees the Israelites return to and inherit the Land of Israel-as G-d pledged to the patriarchs.”

 

However, the Jewish leftist “social justice” reinterpretation of the Exodus deletes G-d’s role and the Jewish people’s unique experience. The left transforms the story of “Exodes” and the “Promised Land” into mere metaphors for any supposedly politically “oppressed group” and their “liberation.” The left substitutes godless “revolutionary struggle” for G-d’s outstretched hand, which brought about the Jewish people’s redemption from Egypt. The left rewrites the conclusion of the Passover service, or “Seder,” turning “Next year in Jerusalem” into “Next year, liberation of [pick a supposedly oppressed group championed by the left]!”

 

Neumann provides the fascinating example of the left’s radical alteration of the beloved, traditional Seder song, “Dayenu.” Dayenu’s traditional lyrics thank and praise G-d for his many blessings. For generations, Seder attendees have sung that any one of G-d’s blessings would have been sufficient (“Dayenu”), and yet G-d gave us more, and more.

 

By contrast, the unappreciative leftwing “Freedom Seder” version of the song deletes G-d, and ungratefully says that each enumerated accomplishment “would not be sufficient,” demanding more revolutionary struggle on behalf of various purportedly oppressed groups – many of whom are hostile to, or outright enemies of the Jewish people.

 

Neumann’s book also discusses how the left cherry-picks and distorts the prophets’ ethical messages, to denigrate traditional Jewish rituals and practices. The “tikkun olam” left ignores that the prophets sought to have the Jewish people observe both ethical and ritual Jewish laws.

 

Neumann also points to the hypocritical double standard of “social justice “Jewish leftists, who exalt all diversity of “all other faiths and cultures except Judaism. The Jewish people alone must become obsolete. (These Jewish liberals would not dare to tender such an offensive assessment to other minority communities; it is a sign of their pathology that they do so to their own.)”

 

Bizarrely, Jewish leftists condemn pro-Israel positions and Jewish traditions, while giving a “free pass” to radical Islamists, Israel haters and Jew haters.

 

A recent example was when Reform movement head Rick Jacobs and other leftists condemned of Israel’s innocuous nation-state law, even though Israeli law continues to protect minority rights. Meanwhile, some on the Jewish left remain silent about the real discriminatory laws and practices of numerous Islamist countries.

 

Neumann notes that many rank-and-file liberal Jews, who have been taught “tikkun olam,” are well-intentioned. However, he goes on to explain:

But noble intentions alone do not a holy people make. However noble the motive of American Jews, their pursuit of tikkun olam is a betrayal of the traditional faith of their people. That faith holds that through Abraham’s Jewish progeny all the peoples of the earth will be blessed (Gen. 22:18). Jews and non-Jews alike should be alarmed by the prospect of tikkun olam succeeding in assimilating the Jewish People into all of humanity, for then that blessing will be no more.

Neumann also describes various radical organizations’ and rabbis’ role in promoting far left, hostile-to-Israel “tikkun olam” philosophies and agendas. These lef-wing groups include: Americans for Peace Now (APN), Bend the Arc (chaired by George Soros’ son Alexander Soros); Breaking the Silence (which falsely accuses the Israel Defense Forces of war crimes); J Street U; the radical, antisemitic Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP, a leading promoter of anti-Israel boycotts); the New Israel Fund (funded leading anti-Israel boycott groups); Jews for Racial and Economic Justice; The Forward; Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine; the Reform Action Center; and T’ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights).

 

Individual Jewish leftwing radicals discussed by Neumann include: Judith Butler, Arthur Waskow, Peter Beinart, Noam Chomsky, Michael Lerner, Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Samuel Norich, Michael Walzer, and others. Barack Obama’s use of “tikkun olam” to provide Jewish cover for his radical, anti-Israel policies is also described.

 

Neumann also discusses how the left reinterprets the story of Joseph into advocacy for government control and redistribution of resources – when in fact the story actually depicts how government control led to enslavement of the Jewish people (and others).

 

My organization, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), is particularly pleased with Mr. Neumann’s book, because ZOA has often pointed out how anti-Israel radical Jewish leftists grossly distort and twist Jewish tenets, traditions, and holidays into pretexts for harming the Jewish state, the Jewish people, the pro-Israel community, our Christian friends, and Muslim reformers.

 

ZOA’s free online book, “J-Street Sides with Israel’s Enemies & Works to Destroy Support for Israel,” has an entire chapter entitled “J Street Subverts Real Jewish Values and Traditions,” which documents how J Street ignores the Jewish laws authorizing the right of self-defense; falsely claims that appeasement is a “Jewish value” by picking a sentence out of context to reverse the meaning of the actual text; and falsely claims that Torah values support giving Palestinian Arabs a state, when the full Torah passage (Deuteronomy 20:10-20) reveals that a peace offer to an enemy does not involve giving an enemy a “state,” but rather an opportunity to live peaceably, and states that if an initial peace offer is rejected, the Jews must crush that enemy and end its terror once and for all.

 

ZOA’s chapter also described how J Street subverts the meanings of Yom Kippur, Passover, and Hanukkah.

 

Neumann’s book is thus an extremely important contribution towards understanding the same distortions of Judaism and authentic Jewish values that the pro-Israel community, including ZOA, has been battling.

 

Neumann’s book will surely enlighten anyone who wonders why so many Jews have been coopted by the anti-Israel radical left. I highly recommend it.

Morton A. Klein is the national president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA). A national Jewish weekly named Mort Klein as one of the five most influential Jewish leaders. Another Jewish weekly named Klein one of the top dozen Jewish activists of the twentieth century. Follow him on twitter @mortonaklein7 or at www.zoa.org

 

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JerusalemCats Comments: When the REAL Rabbis and Torah Sages say “Don’t do something!” they know what will happen. When you listen to the reform/conservative rabbis that say that it is OK; this is what you get: A 79% intermarriage rate, the total lack of any kind of Jewish Education in Jewish Schools, and the Avodah Zarah of the “Tikun Olam” philosophy. The result of all this is the total destruction of the Jewish community in America and anywhere the reform are at. But is this not that what the reform want. For the Jews to die out and just be Americans or whatever of stead of being Jews living in their homeland of Israel and worshiping their God, Hashem.Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

American Jews are signaling their own dire straits

American Jews are decoupling, not only from their brethren and the idea of a coherent Jewish people, but also from reality itself. Op-ed.

Douglas Altabef, 16July2021 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/310007

Anyone looking for conclusive evidence that the American Jewish community is in a dangerous tailspin might just have found his smoking gun.

 

A recently released survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute found that 25% of the surveyed American Jews said that Israel was an “apartheid state,” and 22% believed that Israel was committing genocide of the Palestinian Arabs.

 

There has already been significant speculation about the credibility of this survey, its sample, its methodology and the agenda of this who undertook the survey. Ironically, the implication is that the survey was conducted by a Left wing organization, presumably with the idea of conveying a message that American Jews are really not supportive of Israel.

 

“Today it is Israel, tomorrow will it be Jewish Peoplehood, and the following week, might it not be Judaism?”

However, if this was the case, the survey said far more about those who conducted it, and yes, the respondents, than just a way to show disapproval of Israel. There is no way to contextualize this survey, no way to explain away its sample base or methodology that doesn’t change the unmistakable conclusion: American Jews are decoupling. They are decoupling not only from their brethren and the idea of a coherent Jewish people, but also from reality itself.

 

This latter situation is truly frightening for what it says about the ability of American Jews to sustain themselves going forward. How will they maintain their sense of identity, assuming they seek to do so, when they are buying whole hog into the “big lie,” and exhibiting a mass application of the Stockholm Syndrome (the identification with one’s own oppressors).

 

The Jewish People has always been challenged both by the prevailing big lie, and the willingness of many of our brethren to throw in the towel and to join the ranks of our oppressors. However, these challenges were largely exhibited during periods of intense persecution, where it became irresistible for many Jews to just stop being marked for isolation, oppression and even death.

 

Fortunately, no such pressures exist in America for its Jews today; nevertheless, there has been an astounding willingness to believe the most vicious accusations and calumnies about Israel.

 

Perhaps, however, there are greater than seemingly evident pressures on American Jews, ones that they might not want to acknowledge, but pressures nevertheless to conform, adopt and subscribe to certain narratives and perspectives.

 

Given how factually moronic the idea of Israel as an apartheid State is (since the purported victims are not even part of the State, but rather are a foreign population whose leadership has adopted an eliminationist policy towards Israel), one is forced to conclude that this judgment represents the parroting of the condemnations of Israel’s bitter enemies on the American Progressive Left.

 

As a famously skeptical and analytical people, American Jews would be thought to be reluctant to buy into such condemnation in the absence of clear and convincing evidence.

 

Unless.

 

Unless the facts really do not matter, but what actually matters is who is making the accusations, and the power and influence that they hold over vast swaths of the American Jewish community.

Simply stated, it seems clear that for an enormous number of American Jews, being aligned with the Progressive focus on intersectionality and its approved list of victims and oppressors is more important, far more important, than a willingness to defend one’s own.

 

What, one must wonder, could make so many Jews so willing to condemn their own, other than a fear of their own cancellation? This is perhaps the real story behind this survey, the power of the Progressives to ostracize those who would disagree, would buck the narrative and demand the right to support Israel while still extolling Progressive principles.

 

This power is reflected in American Jews’ simultaneous adoption of truly scurrilous, vile and dehumanizing accusations, and their making common cause with those who are not interested in justice or human rights, but rather, the elimination of Israel.

 

How did we get to this point? What has happened to have led to such a colossal betrayal, such a self-destructive untethering? Where has the leadership, the adults in the American Jewish room, been? Where are all the Birthright alumni who, having seen the amazing reality of Israel for themselves should be in a position of input and influence?

 

What other self-destructive admissions and confessions will American Jews be willing to make in order to keep from being devoured by the new Jacobins, the voracious Progressives?

 

Today it is Israel, tomorrow will it be Jewish Peoplehood, and the following week, might it not be Judaism? Jews are successful, therefore privileged and closet supremacists. Jews are insular, therefore chauvinistic and exclusionist.

 

Does anyone doubt that this is the logical progression, the next stops along the slippery slope that is surrendering one’s own identity in the hope of…what? Who would want to be a member of the Progressive club, if the price of admission was self-abnegation and de-legitimization?

 

Ultimately, for many of the surveyed respondents, and presumably for large segments of the American Jewish community, being Jewish is an accident of birth, or a vestige of one’s ancestry, rather than an animating and directing part of one’s life.

 

For many, being Jewish means being moral and pursuing social justice: tikkun olam. However, since you don’t have to be a Jew to be moral or to pursue justice, there seems to be a question as to why one should even bother with the Jewish angle, particularly in the face of condemnation from those who one wants to be accepted by.

 

For a great many years, many industry analysts predicted the bankruptcy of General Motors. To them it was like watching a train wreck in super slo-mo, an inevitability that took years and years to play out, but ultimately happened.

 

Sadly, that seems to be the story of a great deal of the American Jewish community. Progressives did not undo American Jewry. American Jews are undoing themselves, having abandoned Jewish particularity and tradition, and being embarrassed to say that God exists, only to find themselves defenseless when called upon to account for their Israeli counterparts.

 

Israel is just the first marker down the slope of the disappearance of the American Jewish community. Anti-Semites will not subvert American Jewry. The Jews will do it to themselves.

 

Douglas Altabef is the Chairman of the Board of Im Tirtzu, Israel’s largest grassroots Zionist organization, and a Director of the Israel Independence Fund. He can be reached at dougaltabef@gmail.com

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Reform’s Last Gasp

By Yonoson Rosenblum | 10March2021 https://mishpacha.com/reforms-last-gasp/

Making a religion less demanding decreases both its meaningfulness and its attraction

 

At the end of a recent Zoom presentation on Israel’s chareidi community to the Chicago Jewish Federation, the question was asked: Whom do you define as a Jew?

 

That question comes up every time one addresses a mainstream group of older Jews. Behind it lies another question, sometimes stated explicitly and sometimes not, but the pain of which is never far from the surface: Are you telling me that after a lifetime of contributions to the Federation, of support for Israel, that my grandchildren are not Jewish?

 

I always try to acknowledge that pain before explaining why, even if it were in my power — which it most certainly is not — I would oppose any change to the halachic definition of a Jew as one born to a Jewish mother or converted according to halachah. The implicit message of all attempts to hold all those descended from Jews within the fold by definitional legerdemain or minimal standards for conversion is: Whatever you do, no matter how far you, or your father strayed, you’ll always be one of us. And the effect of that message can only be to further trivialize Judaism and decrease its significance in the eyes of those who are halachically Jewish.

 

Subsequent to that presentation, I found confirmation for my thesis that making a religion less demanding decreases both its meaningfulness and its attraction in two powerful articles. The first, by Yuval Levin, “The Case for Wooden Pews,” contemplates the plummeting attachment to traditional religious institutions in America, even as the percentage of Americans who describe themselves as “highly religious” remains the same.

 

The common response to the loss of membership in religious institutions is “to emphasize commitments to justice and to deemphasize specific strictures on personal behavior,” to make religion more consonant with “a culture of choice and self-expression.” But that approach, writes Levin, fails to understand what people seek in religion: “Religious institutions need to show not that they are continuous with the larger culture but that they are capable of addressing its deficiencies — that they can speak with legitimate authority and be counted on to do the work of molding souls and shaping character.”

 

That is why “observers of modern democracy since Alexis de Tocqueville have noted that in free societies it is precisely the moral and religious institutions that hold firm to orthodoxy and not those that seek modernization and accommodation which have proven most attractive — thanks in no small part to their countercultural character.” In that vein, a Pew Research study conducted nearly a decade ago found 110,000 American Jews identifying as Orthodox who were not raised in Orthodox homes.

 

Both progressives on the Left and libertarians on the Right, writes Levin, assume a human person already formed, requiring only liberation. But traditional religion has always taken a more skeptical view of the human person as imperfect and unformed.

 

The greatest contribution that religion can make, he argues, is to return to the business of saving souls, not to serve as a stage for political theater. And while running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters have some civic utility, religion’s highest function is offering “access to the fullest truths about our world.”

 

The massive cultural conflict in America, according to Levin, reflects a “crisis in meaning.” Thus the secularized, but quasi-religious, “accusations of wickedness, calls for redemptive deliverance, persecutions of heretics and demands for purification.”

 

In that context, religion performs its highest civic function by modeling the “kind of communal life shared by those with common religious convictions.” Such communities offer an alternative to our endless culture wars. “An attractive community, which provides a venue for genuine flourishing, can change minds better than an argument can. A way of life can be persuasive… But such community life requires healthy institutions that attract our loyalty and devotion, and can make real demands on us,” Levin concludes.

 

HISTORIAN GIL TROY’S personal account of the failure of the mid-century Conservative Judaism in which he grew up provides a close-up view of what becomes of a religious movement that ignores Levin’s strictures. “The lightweight Judaism most Conservative Jews chose to absorb,” he concludes, “lacked enough gravity to anchor kids and grandkids.”

 

While it professed to be a halachic movement, sociologist Marshall Sklare describes in his book Conservative Judaism the silent pact between rabbis and their congregations not to speak about Jewish law. “Binding Jewish law,” according to Troy, morphed into “pick-and-choose Jewish folk law. G-d became a pen pal at best, never a police officer nor a higher authority.” The “elective traditions” that kids raised in Conservative homes chose to observe might be many things — “fun, lovely, meaningful — everything but sanctified by G-d.” As for prayer, writes Troy, “we learned communal singing, not what it means to commune with G-d.”

 

Though the Conservative movement claimed the allegiance of 40 percent of American Jewry throughout the second half of the 20th century, by 2006 that figure was 33 percent. And then it cratered. By 2017, it was half that — 16 percent. The attempt to sprinkle a “few Jewish fragments,” in Troy’s words, into an otherwise busy “real life” had failed dramatically.

 

And if that was true for the Conservative movement — the observant branch of heterodoxy — how much more so for Reform. For a while, its parallel decline was obscured by the tendency of Jews asked about their religious identity to use “Reform” as a synonym for minimal. But “unaffiliated” or having “no religion” has long since become the fastest growing segment of the non-Orthodox Jewish community. The median age of Reform Jews in 2013 was 54, and at the movement’s national convention that year, the head of the movement admitted that 80 percent of the youth were lost by the time they graduated high school.

 

IT IS IN THE CONTEXT of the rapid decline of the heterodox movements in America that this week’s decision of the Israeli High Court — recognizing Reform and Conservative conversions performed in Israel under the Law of Return — must be understood.

 

Desperate to retain any semblance of relevance, the heterodox movements have set their sights on Israel. As a Forward headline after the 2013 Reform convention read: “Reform Movement Seeking to Stem Decline, Eyes Religious Pluralism in Israel.”

 

The Israeli High Court decision is the culmination of nearly 20 years of litigation by the heterodox movements. For the first time, it places the movements in Israel on a par as “recognized communities” with their counterparts abroad, whose conversions the High Court long ago ordered the Interior Ministry to recognize. At one level, the decision was inevitable, given the religious parties’ repeated failures to amend the Law of Return to read “conversion according to halachah.”

 

As an immediate matter, the ruling will have little practical effect. As mentioned, foreign converts of the heterodox movements are already recognized for purposes of the Law of Return. And the hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish immigrants from the FSU in the 1990s have all obtained citizenship under other provisions of the Citizenship Law. Thankfully, the Court did not presume to direct the Chief Rabbis in matters of halachah.

 

“… a recent survey by Panim, a pluralistic institution, found that only 0.4 percent of parents of children in the secular schools identify with one of the heterodox movements.”

On the other hand, we should not be complacent about the long-range impact of the legitimization of the heterodox movements in Israel. Under the “pluralism” budgets of the WZO, KKL, and Jewish Agency, the Reform and Conservative movements receive tens of millions of dollars annually, and much of that will be spent in Israel. The movements have already made significant inroads into the public schools, even though a recent survey by Panim, a pluralistic institution, found that only 0.4 percent of parents of children in the secular schools identify with one of the heterodox movements.

 

Once, secular Israelis said, “The shul in which I do not daven is Orthodox.” But that was long ago. Many of the founding generation were in rebellion against their religious upbringing. But they at least knew the difference between Judaism and ersatz imitators. Not so today.

 

Still, the heterodox movements will fail in Israel for the same reasons they failed in America. They can provide a venue for a bar mitzvah, but not an answer to questions of the meaning of life or why the collective existence of the Jewish People matters. The answers to those questions lie in the Torah.

 

But to continue the spread of Torah, the Israeli Torah community must redouble efforts to reach out to as many Jews as possible and develop meaningful relationships with them. And it must provide a model of religious communities that can attract in the manner described by Yuval Levin above. Neither condition is a given. And neither condition will be fulfilled unless we make them priorities as individuals and as a community.

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 852. Yonoson

 

Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com

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Sidebar: A School is connected to a Congregation or a Rabbi. Who are you connected to?
Questions to ask your “Rabbi” or Principal: How many members or former Students have make Aliyah? How are you actively promoting Aliyah? What about Palestinians, BDS and the “West Bank”?

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Pro Israel Bona Fides at issue in lawsuit between Jewish School and Parents

Pro-Israel Bona Fides at Issue in Lawsuit Between Jewish School and Parents

In an ugly lawsuit between a Jewish school and parents, a partner shul weighs in to give its “pro-Israel” hecksher.

By Lori Lowenthal Marcus 17 Adar I 5776 – February 26, 2016 -https://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/pro-israel-bona-fides-at-issue-in-lawsuit-between-jewish-school-and-parents/2016/02/26/

North Carolina is currently the site of one of the saddest public chapters of Jews and Jewish institutions turning on each other.

 

A family left a Jewish day school because the school is not pro-Israel and instead harbors wildly anti-Israel administrators and teachers. In turn, the school insists it is pro-Israel and that the parents, who departed before the school year began, should have paid the full year’s tuition for their two children, as they were required under the contract they signed.

 

The school is suing the parents for breach of contract.

 

The parents, confident that they were justified, turned to the media to draw attention to what they see as a shanda: a Jewish school employing anti-Israel agitators. The school in turn has enlisted the other Jewish communal organizations in the area, as well as parents and parents of alumni, to publicly defend the school and criticize the defecting family.

 

Ugly does not begin to cover it.

 

The Lerner School (until very recently the Sandra E. Lerner Jewish Community Day School) brought its breach of contract claim against Dr. Guy and Sloan Rachmuth in North Carolina state district court, located in Durham.

 

Much has already been written about this battle, including at FrontPage and, more recently at JNS.

 

The motivating factor which led the Rathmuchs to withdraw their children from the school before the start of term in 2014 was their realization that the school is not, as they had been promised, pro-Israel.

 

Local Jewish communal leaders responded by claiming that from their personal experience, that claim is false, almost laughably so. But this is no laughing matter.

 

One of the strongest voices in this chorus of Lerner School support comes from Rabbi Larry Bach of Judea Reform Congregation, which is located on the same campus as the Lerner School. Bach explained that it has an “ongoing partnership with Lerner, which includes “sharing space and resources.”

 

On Feb. 17, Rabbi Bach wrote a letter to his Judea Reform congregants in support of the Lerner School position. That letter has been distributed beyond the congregation, as testament to the Lerner School’s pro-Israel bona fides. He wrote that he was “incredulous at the charges leveled against the school,” and that “nothing that I’ve seen of the school comports with the story being told by its detractors.”

 

He also wrote:

My brief experience is nothing compared to the connections many of you have. Judea Reform members are proud parents and former parents, founders, teachers and administrators, and benefactors. We at JRC are proud of our ongoing partnership with Lerner, which manifests in sharing space and resources, and in other ways, big and small. I look forward to a deepening relationship with Lerner, both personally and between our two institutions, in the years ahead.

Just a reminder: the Rachmuths serious disagreement with the Lerner School was that it was not supportive of Israel, and that instead its position towards Israel, as evidenced by its hiring of anti-Israel faculty and members its own administration, made it an environment in which their children could not be educated. The basis of the family’s counterclaim against the school is for “unfair and deceptive trade practices,” based on promises made by the school specifically about its pro-Israel positions.

 

So it is relevant to consider what goes on in the Jewish congregation next door, which has a “partnership” with Lerner, including “sharing space and resources, and in other ways, big and small,” specifically regarding Israel.

A quick scan of the temple’s speakers and presentations brings one up short. The Judea Reform website reveals a particular orientation regarding Israel, but it isn’t close to what either Lerner is claiming or what the Rachmuths were allegedly promised by its school partner. In fact, every topic that has anything to do with Israel is one-sided against the Jewish State.

The speakers and organizations range from the Jewish world’s center far left to simply further and further left until you finally get to a “leading Muslim public intellectual” who was brought in from the Duke Islamic Studies Center to speak about the “Intersection of Spirituality and Social Justice,” by exploring Rumi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rabbi Heschel.

 

A J Street speaker is the authority in Judea Reform’s “Standing up for Israel” program.

 

But wait: Judea Reform held an Israel Discussion Series in the 2014/15 school year. That sounds promising. Until you look at the topics and who covered them.

 

On Feb. 21, 2015, Prof. Sarah Shields of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spoke at Judea Reform. Her topic was: “Before 1948: the History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” Shields was described by her students as “stridently anti-American and anti-Israel,” and “unbalanced.” She was one of four UNC professors to sign a petition to boycott Israeli academic institutions during the summer of 2014.

 

On Aug. 23, 2015, Marty Rosenbluth, who is described as “Amnesty International’s Country Specialist for Israel and the Occupied Territories for more than a dozen years,” gave a talk. The topic of Rosenbluth’s talk was “Balance of Fear: Can We Use a Human Rights Approach to Frame the Israel-Palestine Discussion?” You can just imagine who was framed by that talk.

 

Amnesty International accused Israel of committing war crimes in Lebanon and in Gaza. In 2006, Rosenbluth defended AI’s claims on the anti-Israel radio program “Democracy Now.” Rosenbluth is listed as an advisor by the Muslim American Society, an American offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

A little over a month later, Judea Reform presented Sandra Korn to lead a discussion about “Open Hillel: On Red Lines in the Jewish Community.” Korn was “involved in the Open Hillel Campaign” at Harvard. Open Hillel, of course, is the effort of college students to overthrow the requirement that Hillel events be supportive – or at least not openly destructive – of Israel.

 

October’s fare in Judea Reform’s Israel discussion series brought Shai Ginsburg to speak about “Old and New Maps the Holy Land, and the State of Israel.” In the fall of 2014, Ginsburg, along with other members of the Jewish Studies department of nearby Duke University, wrote a letter to the school paper denouncing the upcoming Hillel’s “Israeli Shabbat: Bedouin Style,” and urging its cancelation. Why? Because, they wrote, “As you may know, there is a long history of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian, Arab, and/or Bedouin culture.”

 

In November, Temple Judea Reform invited in a member and “summer organizing intern for Jewish Voice for Peace,” Jade Brooks, to speak on the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions 101: A Global Movement for Justice.

 

In other words, Judea Reform brought in a promoter of BDS, from the single most anti-Israel “Jewish” group in the country, to educate their community about why doing harm to Israel qualifies as a “movement for justice.”

 

The final topic in Judea Reform’s “Israel Discussion Series” was about “preventing violent extremism in America.” But this was not about attacks on the pro-Israel population or even simply American Jews. Instead it focused on “Anti-Islamic Bigotry.”

 

So Temple Judea Reform’s entire “Israel Discussion Series” gave the podium to not even one speaker or presentation other than Israel-bashers — with a small dose of criticism for “islamaphobia” added in for flavor. Given the intimate relationship between shul and school, this record should give great pause to those who took comfort in its rabbi’s vouching for the pro-Israel position of the Lerner School.

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Jewish Day School Drops Controversial Suit Against Family That Protested Its Israel Policies

by Andrew Pessin   APRIL 14, 2016 8:12 PM https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/04/14/jewish-day-school-drops-controversial-suit-against-family-that-protested-its-israel-policies/

A Jewish day school in Durham, NC, has dropped its lawsuit against a couple who withdrew their children in protest over what they felt was the institution’s growing antagonism to Israel, The Algemeiner has learned.

 

The Lerner School sued Sloan and Guy Rachmuth for breach of contract in the fall of 2014, after they decided not to send their children back after the summer and refused, according to the school, to pay what was owed under an enrollment contract signed six months earlier. The Rachmuths subsequently countersued for fraud, claiming that the school had falsely portrayed itself as pro-Israel, as reported by The Algemeiner.

 

“We are pleased that public pressure has finally forced the Lerner School’s hand in dismissing their lawsuit against our family,” Sloan Rachmuth told The Algemeiner, adding,

 

After we found, to our astonishment, that the only Jewish day school within a 50-mile radius employed prolific anti-Israel boycott activists as teachers and administrators, the school initiated what amounts to legal bullying as part of a larger attempt to silence our speech about our legitimate concerns.

The teacher Rachmuth was referring to was an Israeli expatriate who had signed an open letter claiming that “the state of Israel commits war crimes and tramples over human rights;” had openly worked with groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP); and had posted a photo of herself on the Jewish Voice for Peace Facebook page condemning Israeli “oppression” and supporting a boycott of Israel. (The teacher’s contract was not renewed the following year, as reported by The Algemeiner.)

 

The administrator Rachmuth was referring to — who is still employed by the school — was active in Jews for a Just Peace, a group that often joined forces in protesting Israeli policies with SJP, the Palestinian Solidarity Movement and others. The administrator also supported a campaign demanding the end of US military support of Israel, and had written a Master’s thesis on “Palestinian Identity” that spoke harshly of the “oppressive impact of Israeli retaliations on the Palestinian populace” and “Israeli policies of collective punishment.”

 

The presence of these individuals, plus a number of other incidents (as reported in The Algemeiner and Jewish News Service), convinced the Rachmuths that the school did not share their values and was a bad fit for them.

 

“When it became clear that the school was not interested in responding to our complaints, we asked to leave quietly and quickly,” Sloan Rachmuth explained. “But rather than acknowledge our legitimate concerns, the school chose to pursue an aggressive campaign against us.”

 

She said it appeared that the school had adopted a strategy “to defame and harass our family into submission. School administrators … repeated slanderous claims that we were liars, bigots, and scofflaws. As such, we have been incorrectly portrayed as villains who want to destroy an innocent school and have become an object of scorn in the community where we run a business and raise our children.”

 

She also said that her and her husband’s countersuit, for fraud, still stands.

 

According to the court filing, the suit was “dismissed without prejudice,” which means that the Lerner School could, if it wishes, reinstitute it.

 

In response to The Algemeiner’s request for comment, the school replied with a statement that read, in part:

 

Over the past year, we have seen a simple contract dispute thrust the school, Lerner families, local rabbis and congregations, and the local community at large into a very public, difficult, and politically-charged situation. For reasons we do not understand, individuals outside our community, who had no knowledge of or experience with Lerner, chose to lodge baseless and disrespectful charges against the school and members of our faculty and staff.

 

We have decided that we will not continue to allow others to use the Lerner School to further their own political agendas.

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Birthright Drops Reform Program, Claims Kids Prefer Orthodox Tours

By JNi.Media 9 Kislev 5778 – November 27, 2017 http://www.jewishpress.com/news/jewish-news/chabad-2/birthright-drops-reform-program-claims-kids-prefer-orthodox-tours/2017/11/27/

Birthright Israel summer of 2016

Birthright Israel summer of 2016

The Reform movement is no longer certified as a trip provider for Birthright, according to a Judy Maltz report in Haaretz Sunday (How Orthodox Groups Are Taking Over Birthright, and Using It to Target Young U.S. Jews). Not on religious or political grounds, God forbid, but because they have been unable to deliver the goods – in this case, fresh eyed Jewish American kids eager for their free summer trips to Israel.

 

Mind you, we are not talking about a few hundred college kids staying on a kibbutz. Birthright may be the most successful Diaspora Jewish youths project since the Hashomer HaTzair educational farms in pre-war Poland. According to Birthright CEO Gidi Mark, his program brought 48,000 Jewish kids ages 18 to 26 to Israel in 2017, making the group’s overall total since its inception to more than half a million Diaspora Jews who have experienced Israel at the age when such direct and powerful adventures leave the deepest marks.

 

But not through the Reform movement, apparently.

 

“We worked very hard with them to increase the numbers,” Gidi Mark told Maltz, “but unfortunately they could not meet our minimum and, from now on, they will have to send [their] participants through other trip organizers.”

 

Maltz offers even more earth shattering figures about the resounding advantage of observant program providers over their Reform counterparts in igniting excitement in the heart of young US Jews:

 

The overwhelming majority of Birthright kids are not Orthodox Jews – only an estimated 5% observe halacha at home – but Orthodox trip providers for the program account for almost 25% of the overall enrollment. But wait, there’s more: while the Reform movement has been unable to recruit its own kids, to the point of being dumped from the project – a full third of the kids who take the Birthright trips come from Reform homes.

 

“You need to ask the participants who go with the other trip providers why they prefer them, and you need to ask the Reform movement – and the Conservative movement, which was also a trip provider until about 10 years ago – why they are not attracting enough participants,” the Birthright CEO told an astonished Maltz.

 

Maltz largely blames two factors for Birthright’s sway to the right: the program’s big donors who used to be pluralist Jews have been replaced by decidedly rightwing philanthropists; and Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry is investing $66 million in an initiative to boost the religious identity of US Jewish college students – supporting distinctly unabashed Orthodox groups such as Chabad and Aish Hatorah.

 

Reform cleric Rick Jacobs, leader of the Union for Reform Judaism, the culture hero in the war to capture advantageous real estate in front of the Wailing Wall, also wails that “millions of Israeli tax dollars are being spent now on strengthening ultra-Orthodox institutions on campuses that bring Birthright travelers to Israel.”

 

And if that travesty is not enough, Jacobs adds, “When Birthright participants return from their trips with these providers, there are lots of efforts made to get them to explore a more traditional way of Judaism – and that is something that should not be ignored.”

 

Maltz quotes a Reform cleric who used to work on campus for Hillel, who complained: “The Orthodox organizations are extremely good at relationship-building with the students. They also have lots of money. When I used to have to scrape and borrow to make things happen at our campus Hillel house, it was often dumbfounding to me how easily Chabad could pull things off.”

 

Yoav Schaefer, who was raised in Santa Barbara, California, made Aliya in 2006, enlisted as a Lone Soldiers in the IDF, and today lives in Jerusalem and serves as an intern for MK Einat Wilf (Labor), speaks frequently in Israel and North America about Israel, Zionism and his experience in the IDF, and attributes the rising power of Orthodox groups in recruiting Jewish college kids for Birthright to “the increasingly complicated relationship of the progressive Jewish movements – especially the Reform and Conservative – to Israel.” This while the Orthodox movements “remain steadfast in their support for Israel and the policies of the current Israeli government.”

 

And so, according to Schaefer, a poster boy for the Jewish American left’s past relationship with the Jewish State, the growing ambivalence of the Reform and Conservative establishment in America about Israel is reflected in their growing inability to appeal to their youth to go spend a fun ten days on the shores of the Mediterranean.

 

It also stands to reason that kids from Reform and Conservative homes who are still excited about Israel would not even consider going there using the services of movements that are at war with the Jewish State’s government. It just wouldn’t occur to them.

 

Maltz concluded her report with a statement from Birthright, saying, “Since inception, Birthright Israel has welcomed participants from all denominational backgrounds and our goal is to reach as many eligible young adults as possible. Our operation is based on allowing trip organizers to handle recruiting, offering a wide array of trip options encouraging applicants to select trips based on their preference. We trust our participants to choose the trip and trip organizer that best suits their needs.”

 

All of which suggests the problem is not with Birthright or, if we may speculate, Orthodox groups that support Birthright.
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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Birthright co-founder: Don’t criticize Israel on our nickel

Birthright Israel co-founder Charles Bronfman says young Jews are free to criticize Israel, but not while enjoying a free trip.
JTA and Arutz Sheva Staff, 09/08/18 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/250258

Birthright Israel co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Charles Bronfman said on Wednesday that young Jews are free to criticize Israel, but not while enjoying a free trip, JTA reported.

 

“If people want to call Israel names and say bad things about the country, they certainly have the right to free speech. But they don’t have the right to do it on our nickel,” he was quoted as having told Haaretz in an interview.

 

His comments came after at least two groups of American Jews visiting Israel on the 10-day trip left the tour to join leftists groups on visits to Palestinian Arabs. The walk-offs reportedly were encouraged by the leftist American-Jewish group IfNotNow.

 

The young Jews who walked off the trip and some others who remain on them are critical of what they say is Birthright’s failure to deal with Israel’s alleged “occupation” of Judea and Samaria. Some have complained that maps handed out to participants do not draw a proper distinction between Israel and Judea and Samaria.

 

Bronfman said in his interview with Haaretz that participants on Birthright can extend their trip and join any kind of group they want or travel on their own to areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

 

“If they want to go to the West Bank or Gaza, they are certainly free to go,” he was quoted as having told Haaretz.

 

“What is not fair is making a big tzimmes while the trip is on. Frankly, I just don’t think that is fair to their fellow participants,” added Bronfman.

 

He noted that the Birthright experience includes four hours devoted to discussing the situation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as impartially as possible.

 

“I don’t see the issue not being addressed,” he said.

 

Before one of the walk-offs from the trip, far-left anti-Israel activists from the IfNotNow organization attempted to recruit Birthright participants departing from New York’s Kennedy Airport.

 

Birthright-Taglit aims to connect young Jews to the state of Israel and their Jewish identity through a free ten-day tour of the country.
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israellycool-logo https://www.israellycool.com/

israellycool-logo https://www.israellycool.com/

 

The Real Reason They Walked Off: I Know Because I Was One of Them

By Lex – August 24, 2018 http://www.israellycool.com/2018/08/24/the-real-reason-they-walked-off-i-know-because-i-was-one-of-them/

Many people have cited many different ideas as to why young Jews are turning away from Israel, epitomized by the proliferation of groups like #IfNotNow (INN) and Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP).

 

Most have blamed the drastic shift in Jewish teachings, the “watering down” of the Jewish identity to one thing: Tikkun Olam (repair the world), most notably in reform congregations, which are increasingly distancing themselves from Israel and supporting groups like JStreet, with leader Rick Jacobs sitting on the board. A recent blog post in the Times of Israel placed all the blame on that, but I think it’s only part of the story.

 

If the watering down of Jewish practice, increased intermarriage, and the emphasis on Tikkun Olam were entirely to blame, then we would have seen this transformation happen as early as the late 1960’s. But indeed, in the 1960s and 70s, Zionism was considered cool, even a bona fide social justice movement. Volunteering on a kibbutz was considered the epitome of living the socialist dream and strongly encouraged. Even though the UN turned on Israel, most notably with the “Zionism is Racism” resolution in 1975, anti-Zionism was still relegated to the margins, especially among young Jews. Yet the “Judaism is Tikkun Olam” belief was all the rage during the hippie years.

 

The explosion of anti-Zionist Jewish groups didn’t happen for another 40 years.

 

Indeed, it is a fairly recent phenomenon of the late 2010s. The year I graduated from Columbia, in 2016, was the first year JVP was in operation. INN wasn’t even on the radar until after I graduated.

 

The oft-mentioned dilution of the Jewish identity indeed set the stage for this radical transformation of young Jewry, but I think the explanation is far simpler than that. The watering down of Judaism in a desperate attempt to keep it relevant for the younger generations as synagogue attendance plummeted was the substrate. However, in order for the reaction to happen, which changed the entire “substance” of young Jewry, we needed a catalyst. So, what was it?

 

1. Following the Trends

The truth is, in recent years, anti-Zionism has become a zeitgeist of the late 2010s, a fashion trend, kind of like how #BlackLivesMatter was a trend of the early 2010s. Indeed, I think the Palestinians piggybacking on BLM was the smartest thing they did and, in my opinion, was a huge catalyst for this massive shift in the younger generation.

 

But to truly understand this paradigm shift, you have to understand the psychology behind it. Teens and young adults want to fit in and be considered cool. anti-Zionism has recently trickled down into the mainstream through the likes of major mid- to late-2010s influencers like Zayn Malik and the Hadid sisters. Magazines like Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Elle, among others, are publishing anti-Israel articles written by Palestinian-American women, because those magazines set and follow the trends, and anti-Zionism is a trend.

 

2. The Only Way of Tikkun Olam

 

Among a subset of the more erudite individuals, the “eager beavers”, so to speak, SJW is “in.” They’ve taken over student governments and most of the “student role model” positions. So ambitious students with their eyes on these positions, or those virtue-signalled into wanting to bring about “change” to “make the world better” by their peers and professors, look up to these students. Jewish students, who are raised on the Tikkun Olam doctrine as being what Judaism is all about, gravitate towards the those who claim they are doing just that.

 

3. Fitting In

Since they want to fit, and SJW is their trend, they have to tow the party line. anti-Zionism is a huge part of the party line among SJWs, who see Jews not a historically oppressed, but as rich, powerful, and white (more than 80% of American Jews are Ashkenazi) as per the Jewish American stereotype. That stereotype, projected onto Israeli Jews, in concert with cries from “Palestinian civil society” decrying their “occupation” “colonialism” and “oppression,” creates an image of the Big Bad Rich White Jew tormenting innocent People of Color. This phenomenon was exacerbated when supporters of the Palestinian cause did the most brilliant thing they could have ever done: they jumped on the intersectionality bandwagon, citing their guru, Edward Said. Since then, being anti-Zionist has been seen as equally mandatory as supporting gay marriage, as much a part of the package they must accept to fit in. And so they, like I did as a college student, desperately looked up anti-Zionist arguments in hopes that one would stick. And since these arguments have gotten much more clever, sophisticated, and professor-approved as time went on, especially as more intersectional groups take on the cause, it’s harder to stay away.

 

4. Because Everybody’s Doing It

 

The “apartheid wall” at Columbia had a dozen organizations on it last year – including the black, Latino, Native American, Arab, and Asian students organizations, the queer alliance, feminist groups fighting sexual assault, the student workers union, environmental groups fighting against climate change and the keystone pipeline, and so many more popular student clubs – it’s safe to say that students will feel that not supporting the Palestinian cause means not standing with marginalized groups, or means being racist, or not caring about the environment, or not into helping the underdog, in other words – heartless. And nobody wants to be heartless. When I was a student at Columbia, the list of endorsements was less than half that. One of the major strategies of anti-Israel groups is to make it appear as if their cause is far more popular than it is – to give the illusion that “everybody’s doing it, so why not you?”

 

5. And Now They’re Stuck…

 

If you want to fit in with the SJW crowd, who paint themselves as the only people who care about making a difference, the only people with ambition and heart, you have to accept the entire package, otherwise you can’t possibly be accepted as a real SJW. You can never accept the more powerful group in a conflict. You must support the group with more melanin no matter what. It sounds dumb at face value because it is – but these SJWs have thousands of pages of readings from famous philosophers and theorists to back up their views, taught and supported by their professors whom they assume are the knowledge Gods. And since the SJW profs speak up and the non-SJW profs don’t, you have an imbalance of what these students are exposed to. So once these students are stuck in the SJW vortex it’s hard to get out, they would have to both restart their social lives from scratch, be labeled a bad person, and even put their grades at risk! Nobody wants that, so they don’t even bother to LOOK at alternative views. This is why so many of them are in favor of censorship – they are petrified that if they are ever exposed to these views that are contrary to the views of their group, that their intellectual honesty and integrity (which they are actually taught in college) might force them to see a more nuanced view – or even change their views entirely – and lead them to lose all their friends and even identity. And they’d rather not go there. They’d rather stick their fingers in the ears, sing la la la, and pretend opposing views don’t even exist. Because if they existed, they would have to consider them.

 

6. Being “Powerful” Has a Price of Admission

 

Just as whites have to denounce colonialism excessively in order to gain admission to the clique, if you’re Jewish, you have to work extra hard to prove you’re anti-Zionist to gain their approval. One of the things you can do is walk off a birthright trip or be active in JVP/SJP to avoid accusations of dual loyalty. So these kids did it for adoration and admiration, for the approval of the SJW clique, whom they know they have to work extra hard to prove their anti-Zionist identity to because of their Jewish background. I once asked a leader of an SJW organization why she thinks Jews are considered powerful despite centuries of oppression. She said, “look around you, look at the names on the buildings at this university, look at Israel brutally oppressing Palestinians, you have your answer.”

 

To sum it all up, anti-Zionism is a new trend, and these young Jews are part of a larger “clique” whose price of admission is being anti Israel, among several other beliefs. All they need to do is hold onto these beliefs and presto – they have a warm and loving group of friends for life! These kids are constantly trying to gain mega brownie points and hero status among their clique so they do things like #INN. Once they are in, they can’t get out without losing their entire social life, and as Jews they have to work extra hard to “prove themselves.” So for many young Jews, the pressure is on.

 

Jerusalem Cats Comments: So if you don’t have a Jewish Education and a Jewish Tradition growing up in a Jewish household celebrating the Shabbat and ALL the Jewish Holidays (not just a quick Passover Seder), how do you know what being Jewish is? No wonder these kids will gravitate to anything but real Judaism. They were raised as Jews-In-Name-Only without the true meaning of what being Jewish is. Judaism is not “Just the Holocaust”, getting Drunk on Purim and a quick Passover Seder. You have a rich 3400 year history to learn and enjoy.

 

sheeple, Think!

sheeple, Think!

sheeple

shee·ple
noun informal derogatory
plural noun: sheeple
people compared to sheep in being docile, foolish, or easily led.
“by the time the sheeple wake up and try to change things, it will be too late”

 

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https://www.jpost.com/

Birthright CEO addresses alienation from Israel by Diaspora youth

Gidi Mark says the trip is not designed to deal with political issues

Jeremy Sharon
28December 2018 https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Birthright-CEO-addresses-alienation-from-Israel-by-Diaspora-youth-575649

The Birthright Israel program has had tremendous success in the nearly 19 years since it was founded in 1999, bringing hundreds of thousands of young Jews from North America and across the Jewish world to Israel to bolster their Jewish identity and connection with the Jewish state.

 

In total, some 600,000 young Jewish men and women from the Diaspora have been on the free 10-day trips Birthright provides, constituting an impressive 7.5% of the global Jewish population outside of Israel.

 

And research demonstrates that participants in Birthright trips have an increased affinity to Israel and are more inclined to find a Jewish spouse, raise their children Jewish and get involved in Jewish communal activity.

 

This summer, there were 32,400 Birthright participants from across the Jewish world, along with 6,500 Israelis participating in the tours, while another 15,500 Diaspora Jews will participate in tours during the winter season.

 

A 7% drop in numbers is expected for the 2018 winter season over the 2017 figures, although this is a far smaller decrease than has been reported.

 

But two challenges have surfaced of late. The first is the troubled relationship between the Israeli government and the Diaspora Jewish leadership over some key issues relating to the state’s Jewish identity that have blown up over the last couple of years, over the Western Wall, conversion, and similar issues.

 

The second, a direct challenge to Birthright, has been a campaign led by a left-wing Jewish group protesting against what it sees as Birthright’s failure to sufficiently address Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and its control of the West Bank, during its tours.

 

SPEAKING WITH The Jerusalem Post before the current winter season of Birthright trips began, Birthright director Gidi Mark talks about how more than 100,000 Israelis have participated in the tours alongside the participants from the Diaspora, and emphasizes the importance of creating this mass of Israelis who have friends and direct connections to Jews and Jewish communities abroad.

 

He also addresses the walkout demonstrations that gained significant media coverage and were seen as a symptom of alienation from Israel among liberal-minded Diaspora Jewish youth.

 

Several Birthright groups during the course of this summer were, to all intents and purposes, infiltrated by activists from the IfNotNow organization, who during the course of their trip declared that they were dissatisfied with how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was discussed and demonstrably walked out.

 

They were filmed by co-activists and the event was live-streamed on social media for maximum effect, after which they went to participate in activities relating to Palestinian life in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

 

And there was a similar incident earlier this week in which IfNotNow activists were removed from a tour while trying to discuss the security barrier with their tour guide and filming him during the discussion.

 

IfNotNow has described the trip as “a bribe” to Jewish youth by Birthright’s benefactors, especially Sheldon Adelson, a patron of the Israeli and American right-wings, whereby they are given a free trip to Israel to bolster their Jewish identity and connection to Israel but are shielded from the realities of Palestinian life, and thus they ignore a critical issue that the Jewish state is caught up in.

 

First and foremost, Mark insists, Birthright is an educational organization dedicated to providing an educational experience to its participants, and is not designed to deal with political issues.

 

“We refuse to turn Israel into something which is 99% political and 1% Jewish life,” he says.

 

And, he argues, the organization seeks to be as inclusive as possible, and must take into account all sides of the political map, not just one perspective.

 

But he also seeks to put the issue into perspective, pointing out that out of the approximately 40,000 participants in the summer tours, just 13 engaged in a walkout, on just three separate occasions.

 

“This was mainly a media-directed provocation. The press took this anecdote of the 13 and wrote more reports on them than the 40,000 other participants,” he says somewhat indignantly.

 

He declines, however, to venture an opinion as to how reflective of Diaspora Jewish youth the IfNotNow walkout demonstrators are.

 

Nevertheless, he insists said that concerns regarding the conflict with the Palestinians are also addressed during Birthright tours, despite claims to the contrary.

 

“We show their point of view, just like we show the opposite side as well; we present the spectrum that reflects the Israeli consensus and the massive distances [between them],” he says.

 

Birthright’s critics argue that the trips do not focus enough on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Mark insists that the organization dedicates “a fitting proportion of time to the issue which is appropriate for an educational experience.”

 

And, he insists again, Birthright is about Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish state, and does not have political goals.

 

“We very much do not want to turn Birthright into a political experience,” he says. “With all due respect, if they want to organize their own groups, they can do so, but they can’t come to us and demand that we do the programs they want. They can’t hijack an educational program and say ‘We want to turn it into a political program.’”

 

Mark says there are two hours of time on Birthright trips dedicated to discussing the conflict, but beyond that opines that participants often have the most in-depth conversations on big issues during the travel time on the tour buses between stops, which he says amounts to some 40 hours over the 10 days, with the Israeli participants and the tour guides on the trip.

 

“The biggest way participants can understand what is happening here is through interacting with Israelis, and often the most important communication is informal discussions on the bus with Israelis on the program, and among themselves, where every topic is discussed, and there’s no censor.”

 

Nevertheless, Jewish youth in North America, Birthright’s biggest target audience, are largely liberal-oriented and increasingly are concerned with Israeli rule in the West Bank, the enlargement of settlements and the treatment of the Palestinians.

 

Critics of Birthright have argued that by giving the conflict scant attention, the program will become less relevant for Jewish youth who often connect their Jewish identify to liberal notions of social justice.

 

Mark responds by saying that Birthright has developed hundreds of niche tours, including those that deal with Israeli societal issues and include meeting with Israeli Arabs and other sectors of the population, as well as LGBT groups, all-women tours, needs-based groups such as those for people with physical and mental disabilities, and many others besides.

 

“There are many groups which come to Israel in the role of fact finders and similarly where the majority of their agenda is political issues. Someone who wants a political group can go on Google and find lots of such groups, and they are welcome to go on them,” says Mark sharply.

 

Birthright has also started to actively deal with the “walkout” phenomenon. Those who left tours during the summer were required to pay for their plane ticket back home, and new clauses were inserted into the contract for the winter season warning of possible consequences for participating in a demonstrative walkout.

 

The new clause states: “Efforts to coerce, force or suppress opinions, hijack a discussion or create an unwarranted provocation violate Taglit-Birthright Israel’s founding principles and will not be permitted.”

 

Mark does not directly relate to the new clause, but opines that the walkouts are “preplanned provocations” and says that “someone who wants to be a provocateur needs to pay for his ticket himself.

 

“We pay fully for the tours which we receive from very generous donors so that someone can fulfill their right for an educational experience in Israel. If someone wants to say they don’t want to have this educational experience but, rather, wants to exploit it for a political provocation, I’m not willing to give him a free plane ticket.”

 

AWAY FROM the issue of the walkouts, Mark is eager to emphasize the contribution of Birthright to building bridges between Israelis and Diaspora Jews, specifically by having a smaller number of Israelis participate in every trip alongside the participants from abroad.

 

In total, some 100,000 Israeli youth have been on Birthright trips, 90,000 of whom were still in the army and on a sanctioned break from their IDF service, as part of a deliberate policy of affording young Israelis the opportunity to get to know Jews from abroad.

 

“When Birthright began nearly 19 years ago, there were very few Israelis who knew Jews from the Diaspora,” says Mark.

 

“They are target No. 1 as much as the others. They are not ‘accompanying’ the others or security staff, they are participants. Their need for familiarity with a Jewish experience is no less for them than those coming from abroad.”

 

Mark says that there are now some 9,000 Israelis participating every year in Birthright trips, “a division, in the army’s terms,” he quips.

 

Despite the negative headlines about a rupture between Israel and the Diaspora, be it due to the actions of the government on religion and state, or a perceived divergence of values between Israelis and Diaspora Jews, Mark insists that claims there is a disconnect are not accurate.

 

“There has never been a situation in which 100,000 Jews living in Israel had at least one friend living abroad, and 600,000 Jews in the Diaspora who had at least one friend in Israel,” he said of the sheer mass of Birthright participants from Israel and the Jewish world abroad.

 

Mark argues that many of the Israeli participants are already entering public service and will positively impact the way the state relates to and deals with its brethren abroad.

 

He talks of the “development of a quiet reality” in spite of “headlines which sometimes are taken out of proportion,” and says that Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora can learn from one another’s successes.

 

“We shouldn’t turn this into a war. There isn’t a war. Both sides have great strengths, and both sides can learn from each other and improve. We’re not perfect here, and they are not perfect there.

 

“We should never forget that we came from the same nuclear family, and every contact between Israelis and Diaspora Jews is crucial.

 

“Birthright has made a living bridge, spanning continents, which 700,000 people have crossed, and this has never happened before.”

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https://www.jpost.com/

If not now, then when?

Over the past two decades, the major disputes among and within American Jewish groups have revolved around two main issues.

By Caroline B. Glick
June 7, 2018 22:41 https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/If-not-now-then-when-559456

In the past month, the leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements in America have taken steps that change the basic contours of their movements.

 

These steps portend disaster for them and for their members.

 

Over the past two decades, the major disputes among and within American Jewish groups have revolved around two main issues. First, they faced the challenge of skyrocketing intermarriage and assimilation rates among non-Orthodox Jews and the concomitant dwindling of membership rates in non-Orthodox religious institutions.

 

Second, major American Jewish groups have had to deal with the challenge of Jewish anti-Israel groups. Some of them, like Jewish Voice for Peace, exist to serve as fig leaves for antisemites. Some, like J Street, were formed to legitimize anti-Zionism among American Jews and push mainstream Jewish groups away from their traditional support for Israel.

 

Over the past few weeks, the leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements have chosen to deal with these challenges by delivering their flagship institutions – and through them, their movements – into the hands of Jewish antisemites. That is, they have placed their movements on the fast track to self-destruction.

 

On May 14, Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles held its annual graduation ceremony. HUC, with its campuses throughout the US and Jerusalem, is the flagship institution of the Reform movement. HUC ordains Reform rabbis, cantors and professionals. Its curriculum and priorities determine the direction of the entire movement.

 

This year, HUC’s leadership conferred an honorary degree on novelist Michael Chabon and asked him to deliver the annual commencement address.

 

HUC’s decision to honor Chabon was shocking in and of itself. Chabon is an outspoken hater of Israel and Israeli Jews. His books Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union are, each in their way, major assaults on Israel’s very right to exist, not to mention on the inherent morality of its existence.

 

So by inviting Chabon to speak, HUC wasn’t merely inviting a “controversial” speaker – it was inviting a speaker who openly hates Israel.

 

Side Note: How My Graduation Was Ambushed http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/234346/my-graduation-was-ambushed/

An Israeli woman named Morin Zaray, who was celebrating her completion of an MBA in nonprofit management, appears to have been the only one who demonstratively objected to Chabon’s speech:

 

As I heard Chabon’s simplified takedown of my country, the room began to spin. I turned back to look at my brother, who served in a combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces. He looked sick to his stomach. I got up from my seat and approached my family. . . . I felt ashamed for being part of this gathering, ashamed that many in the audience were just nodding at this reductionist view of a multilayered and complicated country. . . . Standing outside, I was nearly brought to tears as I heard the crowd of Jews give Chabon a thunderous applause.

 

At the commencement, while he laced his address with Israel hatred – and a particularly vicious abhorrence for Jews who live beyond the 1949 armistice lines – Chabon did not focus his remarks on the Jewish state.

 

Most of his speech was a diatribe against Judaism. Chabon began his speech with an assault on endogamous marriages. When a Jew marries a Jew, he explained, they create “a ghetto of two.”

 

The Jewish marriage ceremony is hateful because “it draws a circle around the married couple, inscribes them – and any eventual children who come along – within a figurative wall of tradition, custom, shared history, and a common inheritance of chromosomes and culture.”

 

In contrast, intermarriage “is the source of all human greatness.”

 

Judaism is hateful in Chabon’s views because it is all about drawing lines, distinctions and boundaries. And he thinks boundaries and lines – up to and including the separation of the heavens from the earth – are evil.

 

Chabon took his audience on his journey from Jew to anti-Jew and explained that it would be no tragedy at all if Judaism would disappear altogether.

 

In his words, “On the day that the last Jewish couple dies, after watching their children marry Hindus, Lutherans, atheists, Sunnis, Buddhists, the fault for that extinction will lie squarely with Judaism itself – and not because Judaism failed to enforce its teachings against intermarriage but because it was necessary… to have such teachings in the first place. Any religion that relies on compulsory endogamy to survive has, in my view, ceased to make the case for its continued validity in the everyday lives of human beings.”

 

The pinnacle of Chabon’s anti-Jewish screed to newly ordained Reform rabbis revolved around his revulsion at the Passover Seder. Insisting that the whole story of the Children of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt and subsequent liberation was a lie (“It seems pretty clear that we just made the whole damn thing up”), he explains that God is immoral because he hardened Pharaoh’s heart, “ensuring the slaughter of thousands of innocent Egyptian boys.”

 

And of course, Israel is the evil, modern equivalent of Pharaoh’s Egypt.

 

Chabon then exhorted the new Reform religious leaders that their job is to transform Judaism into Chabon’s image. They must essentially completely reject its teachings. They must reject Israel. They must transform Judaism into something indistinguishable from the radical leftist mélange that inhabits Chabon’s hometown of Berkeley, California.

 

When a few Jewish writers condemned the HUC for inviting Chabon, the college’s interim president Rabbi David Ellenson and the dean of its Los Angeles campus Joshua Holo published an article where they did more than just defend having provided an antisemite with their most prestigious platform in the name of open discourse and diversity – they defended Chabon’s positions.

 

In their words, “Chabon… articulated deeply Jewish and Zionist commitments (not merely abstract or literary in nature, but specifically religious, communal and even tribal).”

 

If there was ever a better articulation of “white is black and black is white,” it’s hard to think of one.

 

Chabon articulated a deep desire to destroy Judaism and Zionism and replace them both with anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism, in the name of destroying the tribe, community and religion through intermarriage.

 

By defending Chabon’s message, and pretending it was the opposite of what it was, Ellenson and Holo adopted it as HUC’s message.

 

Chabon’s message is now the position of the Reform Movement.

 

This brings us to the Conservative movement.

 

Last week, the radical group IfNotNow held a workshop in Boston for young activists who will work this summer as counselors at Jewish summer camps affiliated with Reform and Conservative Judaism. Several of the participants will work as counselors at the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah.

 

Camp Ramah, whose eight-week session costs nearly $10,000 per camper, is one of the most important institutions in the Conservative movement. With nine camps throughout the United States, 9,000 campers a year and some 200,000 alumni, Camp Ramah has played an outsized role in engendering and maintaining Jewish identity, Zionism and communal attachment and commitment among young American Jews.

 

Aside from sports, drama and other standard summer- camp fare, campers at Ramah have daily Hebrew classes and Torah classes. The camps are kosher and keep Shabbat. Israel and Zionism have always played central roles as well in Ramah’s daily routine.

 

According to the JTA write-up, IfNotNow’s workshop was the brainchild of a Camp Ramah alumna. Its goal is to bring the group’s ideology into Camp Ramah.

 

IfNotNow met with Ramah Director Rabbi Mitch Cohen in March. Several workshop participants have been hired by Ramah.

 

The very fact that IfNotNow members have been hired by Ramah means that the camp – and through it, the Conservative movement – has embraced Israel hatred, and indeed, hatred of Judaism, as a legitimate position.

 

IfNotNow is a spin-off of J Street. It was formed during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. Its members organized violent protests outside the offices of major Jewish groups in New York and Boston demanding that they end their support for Israel and support Hamas terrorists.

 

IfNotNow members said kaddish for Hamas terrorists.

 

The group has placed the cessation of US support for Israel among its top goals.

 

After Protective Edge, the group expanded its writ from disseminating hatred for the world’s biggest Jewish community to more generic hatred of all things Jewish.

 

In 2016, for instance, IfNotNow began presiding over Passover “Seders.”

 

In an extraordinary expression of contempt for the Jewish religion, the group’s “Seders” are a reification of Chabon’s antisemitic aspirations. Israelites are replaced with the Palestinians. Pharaoh is Israel.

 

In 2016, the group stepped into the national spotlight when one of its founders, Simone Zimmerman, was appointed to serve as Democratic primary candidate Senator Bernie Sanders’ coordinator for Jewish outreach.

 

Zimmerman’s appointment was short-lived. Within two days, senior Jewish officials decried her appointment, once her Facebook posts filled with vitriol and hatred for Israel and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (and Hillary Clinton) were exposed in the press.

 

Over the past few months, stories have trickled out about IfNotNow’s plan to bring its hatred for Israel and Judaism into the mainstream. And now, the Conservative movement has opened its front door to IfNotNow’s anti-Jewish Jewish professionals.

 

It is hard to overstate how disastrous are HUC’s adoption of Chabon’s antisemitism, and the Conservative movement’s welcome mat for IfNotNow. Once you allow antisemites to take root in your movement, you lose the ability to exist.

 

You cannot justify your right to exist because the antisemites to whom you just opened your doors are proof that you don’t mean it; they exist to destroy you, and you just accepted them as legitimate, even desired members.

 

When the leaders of the Reform and Conservative movements embraced Chabon’s anti-Judaism and IfNotNow’s anti-Judaism, they announced that they have not merely chosen – in the face of their existential crisis of assimilation and attrition – to self-destruct.

 

They have chosen to do as much damage as possible to the rest of the Jewish world as they walk themselves into extinction, secure in the warm embrace of their antisemitic ideologues.

 

There is one silver lining to this terrible development.

 

Whereas the leadership of these massive movements of non-Orthodox American Jews may have decided to embrace antisemitism and antisemites, a significant portion of their membership have no interest in joining them. Now that the Reform and Conservative movements have embraced antisemitic voices and ideals, these committed Jews are increasingly recognizing that they have no place in the movements they have belonged to all of their lives.

 

They are and will, in ever increasing numbers, continue to look for a new way to express and live Jewish lives.

 

In an interview with Makor Rishon last week, Deputy Minister Michael Oren presented a proposal to bring ten thousand non-Orthodox American Jews to Israel on aliya every year. Oren recommends that Israel provide financial and other incentives to young non-Orthodox Jews to come to Israel. Aliya, he explains, is the surest way to prevent intermarriage and assimilation. “Someone who makes aliya settles here, marries and starts a family, [and] will most likely have Jewish kids.”

 

Oren noted that the Reform and Conservative movements “set a goal to preserve the Jewish people, number- wise and value-wise, in light of the challenge of the modern world,” a goal they are failing to meet.

 

Now that these movements have abandoned this goal in favor of the morass of “miscegenation” and a reinvention of Judaism as the anti-Judaism Chabon upholds and IfNotNow embraces, it is Israel’s duty to take it on.

 

There are a number of explanations for the Reform and Conservative movements’ decision to destroy themselves by embracing antisemitic Jews and their messages of hatred. But understanding their decision is not the most pressing challenge that Israel and the non-Orthodox Jews of America, who do not accept this decision, face. The most urgent order of business is to minimize the damage they can cause Israel and maximize the number of American Jews who will not go down with them.

 

www.CarolineGlick.com

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Michael Chabon’s Sacred and Profane Cliché Machine

By Elli Fischer | June 13, 2018 https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3239/michael-chabons-sacred-and-profane-cliche-machine/
Michael Chabon’s Sacred and Profane Cliché Machine


In the institution’s most controversial graduation ceremony since the infamous “Trefa Banquet” in 1883, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Michael Chabon took the podium at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles and exhorted his audience to “knock down the walls.” This meant, first and foremost, Israeli security checkpoints and barriers, but by the end of the talk, Chabon had extended his demolition to-do list for these future rabbis and Jewish communal professionals to seemingly all rituals and expressions of Jewish difference, and perhaps—he wasn’t quite sure—Judaism itself.

 

No doubt, HUC expected an edgy talk from Chabon. After all, he and his wife, fellow novelist Ayelet Waldman, recently teamed up with the far-left Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence to lead a group of writers to the West Bank, then published a book of their essays, many of which can be fairly described as gullible anti-Israel agitprop. In the inevitable damage-control statement afterward, Interim President David Ellenson and Dean Joshua Holo described the institution as an “energetic, fearless marketplace of ideas,” but they clearly weren’t quite expecting this. Nor is a commencement ceremony really the time for energetic debate. Indeed, an Israeli woman named Morin Zaray, who was celebrating her completion of an MBA in nonprofit management, appears to have been the only one who demonstratively objected to Chabon’s speech:

 

As I heard Chabon’s simplified takedown of my country, the room began to spin. I turned back to look at my brother, who served in a combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces. He looked sick to his stomach. I got up from my seat and approached my family. . . . I felt ashamed for being part of this gathering, ashamed that many in the audience were just nodding at this reductionist view of a multilayered and complicated country. . . . Standing outside, I was nearly brought to tears as I heard the crowd of Jews give Chabon a thunderous applause.

 

Watching or reading the address as published in Tablet Magazine makes it clear that his argument was not only political. Chabon took special aim at Jewish divisions and distinctions—between the sacred and the profane, the clean and unclean, and especially between Jew and Gentile. “An endogamous marriage,” he said, “is a ghetto of two,” so he no longer hopes that his children will marry Jews. Nor does he any longer find value in the many Jewish practices he mentioned from the Passover Seder to community eruvin.

 

As Sylvia Barack Fishman, Steven M. Cohen, and Jack Wertheimer wrote, it is tempting to ignore this all as “performance art of a personal psychodrama in a public setting,” but “Chabon’s ideas have cachet, especially in culturally and political progressive bubbles,” and these ideas undermine the viability of American Jewish life. Fishman, Cohen, and Wertheimer focused on Chabon’s indifference to, if not promotion of, intermarriage, particularly to this audience. As they noted, “only one-fifth of recently marrying Jews raised in Reform families married other Jews,” and “only 8% of the grandchildren of the intermarried are being raised in the Jewish religion.

 

The problem with Chabon’s ideas is more than demographic. His discomfort with Israel’s security barriers and Jewish marriage are really specific applications of a desire to erase anything that distinguishes one group from another:

 

I abhor homogeneity and insularity, exclusion and segregation, the redlining of neighborhoods, the erection of border walls and separation barriers. I am for mongrels and hybrids and creoles, for syncretism and confluence, for jazz and Afrobeat and Thai surf music, for integrated neighborhoods and open borders and the preposterous history of Barack Obama. I am for the hodgepodge cuisines of seaports and crossroads, for sampling and mashups, pastiche and collage. I am for ambiguity, ambivalence, fluidity, muddle, complexity, diversity, creative balagan.

 

This is the theme that binds Chabon’s entire address, and he riffs on it in virtually every paragraph. Interweaving his own Jewish journey with historical musings, he reaches the conclusion that Judaism has survived because of its willingness to erase “old lines and boundaries” and reinvent itself, its “opening our minds to the ideas, and our ears to the music, and our mouths to the languages, and our bellies to the kitchen-wisdom of the people living on the other side of whatever boundary line we chose, in our collective wisdom, to ignore.” Or, as Chabon’s character Archy Stallings says in Telegraph Avenue, “Creole . . . means you stop drawing those lines. It means Africa and Europe cooked up in the same skillet.”

 

In his commencement speech this exilic hybridity is where it’s at, though Chabon doesn’t worry much about what being “cooked up in the same skillet” meant historically for Jews (or Creoles). When he describes sitting at the Seder table thinking about how Judaism has changed and how it must change again, he thinks of “when the great Temple rose in Jerusalem, when it was destroyed and our history became a history of exile,” but our return to the land goes unmentioned. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s character Meyer Landsman says:

 

I don’t care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son’s throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. . . . My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag.

 

As the late literary critic D. G. Myers wrote, “in this view Zionism represents a betrayal of Jewish history and exile is the proper Jewish condition.” Chabon’s problem with the State of Israel goes well beyond his critique of certain state policies and settler communities. Any particular nation (but especially the Jews), any particular religion (but especially Judaism), anything that makes us uniquely us is an enduring source of shame. Chabon would rather be part of, and rather his children marry into, “the tribe that sees nations and borders as antiquated canards.”

 

A mishnah in Bava Batra describes two neighbors, a beekeeper and mustard farmer, who must keep the bees and plants away from one another. Honey mustard is a great flavor, but if you turn the bees loose on the mustard plant you ruin both, because they have to develop independently with their own integrity. Chabon forgets that “mashups, pastiche and collage” require difference. Hybridity is not merely about the amount of common genetic material of sexual partners. Homogeneity and heterogeneity are not literally about genetic haplotypes but are metaphors for considering sameness and difference.

 

Consequently, Chabon’s paean to mongrels and hybrids does not make note of something to which the Jewish tradition, with all its attention to differences, devotes a veritable library: There are different kinds of mixtures. The core of the rabbinic curriculum is all about ascertaining which ingredients retain their identities in mixtures—by imparting flavor, by stabilizing the whole, or because of their intrinsic significance—and which are batel, null, deemed to no longer exist.

 

This body of learning pertains first and foremost to milk and meat and pots and pans, but it is predicated on underlying ideas about individual and group identity: How does a small minority retain its identity when mixed with an overwhelming majority? How do different ingredients absorb and impart flavor to the whole? When does a mixture cease to be the sum of its ingredients and become a new entity?

 

Chabon expresses discomfort with “monocultural places” with “one language, one religion,” but the application of these words to Judaism is simply astonishing. Virtually every Jewish community in history has developed its own dialect. There are five Judeo-Arabic dialects alone. There is a dizzying variety of Jewish culture and multiform expressions of Jewish religiosity. Chabon, however, has no access to this amazing, diversity because he speaks no Jewish language. One is reminded of Edelshtein’s complaint about American Jewish writers in Cynthia Ozick’s classic story “Envy; or Yiddish in America”:

 

You have to KNOW SOMETHING! At least the difference between a rav and a rebbeh! . . . Their Yiddish! One word here, one word there. Shikseh on one page, putz on the other, and that’s the whole vocabulary!

 

Chabon writes “I ply my craft in English, that most magnificent of creoles,” as if speaking English, with all its layers and loan words, makes one multilingual all by itself. Perhaps sensing this, he adds: “my personal house of language is haunted by the dybbuk of Yiddish.” Alas, it is a small dybbuk (the one Edelshtein noticed) and not very frightening—or knowledgeable.

 

Consequently, even as Chabon celebrates even the most superficial cross-cultural fusion, the Judaism he describes is suburban, third-generation American Judaism, a monolingual, monocultural, monochromatic (but not necessarily monotheistic) sliver of the totality of Jewish experience.

 

Chabon singles out the Shabbat eruv for ridicule three times in his speech. For him, an eruv is just another boundary, another way for Jews to mark who is in and who is out. But the word literally means “mixture” or “combination.” The legal theory behind it is that many different private and semiprivate domains can be combined into a single household so that one can carry things from one to another on Shabbat. Creating an eruv involves negotiation with all those, including non-Jews and nonobservant Jews, who share that space. The “walls” of the eruv are, in fact, generally not walls at all. They are comprised only of posts and wires, on the premise that two posts with a lintel form a doorway. The eruv circumscribes a community with walls that are entirely doors.

 

Shouldn’t this be exactly what Chabon wants? Doesn’t an eruv demonstrate that a Jewish enclave can be open and permeable in either direction? The very idea of a wall made of doors undermines Chabon’s dichotomies. It reflects a different sort of boundary-making, one that is inclusive and open to mixing and merging and combining. Alas, “You have to KNOW SOMETHING!” Instead, all Chabon sees, all he wants to see, is that the eruv divides the inside from the outside and is therefore abhorrent; living in an eruv and living in Hebron—it’s all the same. No need to make distinctions.

 

Hebron, a small and heavily fortified Jewish community with a violent history, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, exemplifies for Chabon, all that is wrong with particularist Judaism. This, for him, is the reductio ad absurdum of Judaism’s “giant interlocking system of distinctions and divisions,”—between Jew and non-Jew, man and woman, kosher and treif, pure and impure. In fact, though he doesn’t mention it, it was in Hebron that the “sandal-wearing idiot” Abraham was commanded to mark his particularism—his particular mission, his particular covenant with God—on his body.

 

In one very important respect, though, Chabon makes an important point that some of his critics fail to acknowledge. He writes: “Any religion that relies on compulsory endogamy to survive has, in my view, ceased to make the case for its continued validity in the everyday lives of human beings.” He is absolutely right. Ideally, Jewish marriages should arise out of the love between two people who speak a common Jewish language, celebrate and mourn according to the same calendrical rhythm, and participate in a shared culture. Judaism survives thanks to the depth, beauty, and complexity of its traditions, not because of hysterical demands for in-marriage between indifferent Jews. Once Judaism has been watered down and thinned out, policing the boundaries of the community can only go so far.

 

The challenge facing American Judaism is not Chabon’s challenge, to choose openness and hybridity over closed religious borders, but it isn’t really choosing distinctiveness over assimilation either. The challenge is closer to Edelshtein’s: We must choose knowledge over ignorance. The result will be a creative, confident Judaism that is not afraid of encountering and absorbing from other cultures and is willing to influence them in turn—a robust Jewish community surrounded by walls that are doors.

 


Read this article online at: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/3239/michael-chabons-sacred-and-profane-cliche-machine/

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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Judeo-progressive liberalism is the new religion of the Reform Movement

Progressive liberalism took the Judaism out of the Reform Movement The lesson? We must inoculate ourselves with a Torah social culture.

Dr. Chaim C. Cohen, 03August2021 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/311112

A ‘New School’ of Reform rabbis, under 45, are creating a new religion that is not Judaism

 

I grew up feeling comfortable in a Reform Temple. I was active in its educational and youth activities. Almost all of my friends felt very alienated from the Temple, but I often felt at home there. In fact, from 1969 thru 1972 I spent three years studying at the Reform rabbinical school- Hebrew Union College (HUC) .In the fall of 1972 I left because, after years of spiritual searching, I decided I wanted the real thing and decided to live the life of an Orthodox Jew.

 

Last week I decided to ‘return to my roots’, and sat for three hours in the library of the Jerusalem branch of HUC (where I studied for a year in 1970-71). Out of intellectual and sociological curiosity I wanted to update myself on ‘what 2021 Reform Judaism is really about’. On internet sites I had been following news bits about trends in the Reform Movement, but I now wanted, first hand, to get a deeper, more objective understanding of its current character. I used my time to read their rabbinic journals on the topics of Reform conversion, Reform ‘religious law and ritual’, and skimmed the library’s recently acquired books on the Israel-Arab conflict.

 

I left after three hours quite depressed and shocked. The updated version of Reform “Judaism” was more progressively radical than I had imagined. Reform rabbis under the age of 45- 50 are creating a new religion that is simply not Judaism.

 

The Reform Movement throughout its almost 200 year history promoted a version of Judaism that was basically atheistic humanism clothed in an outer garment of some basic Jewish religious ritual and teachings taken from our Biblical prophets. But the Reform ‘Judaism’ now being created by younger clergy is a new religion that is simply fundamentalistic, progressive liberalism dressed in the skimpiest bikini of Jewish religious tradition.

 

This updated, sad inquiry only made more starkly clear that liberal post modern society is beset by a by a rapidly spreading epidemic virus of progressive liberalism . Jews who want to remain true to their religion must inoculate themselves with a vaccination of a Torah based social culture.

 

The ‘Old School’ of Reform Judaism

 

Up until 40 years ago- the end of the 1970’s- ( until we start reaching 40-70% rates of intermarriage) Reform Jews were all ethnic, halakhic Jews (with two Jewish parents).They were second-third generation American Jews who wanted to assimilate and ‘economically succeed’ at almost any price. Yet, as second-third generation American Jews, they still felt a fairly strong inner need to maintain an ongoing bond with their ethnic past, and wanted their main primary social relationships to be with other Jews. They were avid consumers of secular Jewish social culture (humor, recreation, and food, food,food).

 

And Reform Jewish Temples existed to provide these second –third generation Jews with a Jewish social gathering place that met such needs. For example your average Reform Temple tried to provide youth activities, a Sisterhood, a Men’s Club, sometimes a gym and pool, Friday night Oneg Shabbat, High Holiday services, weddings, funerals, and bar/bat mitzvas with Jewish outer trappings, and hopefully a charismatic rabbi who gave short, exciting sermons on social justice, and maybe also was a good pastoral counselor. Reform Temples provided all of these social services demanding absolutely no personal commitment to any form of ongoing religious practices. The Reform Movement thus provided good, healthy, institutionalized ethnic Jewish socializing with only the barest trappings of religious tradition, and absolutely no spirituality (which is why I left). ’Old School’ Reform Judaism was the good life.

 

And from 1955-60 until 1995 there was a tremendous demand among third generation American Jews for the highly ethnic, pseudo religious services of Reform Temples. American Conservative Judaism hit its hey day from 1950 to 1970 and then declined, and Reform represented the face of the vast majority of American Jews from 1970 till twenty years ago. For American Jews for whom even the Reform Temple was ‘too religious’ there ethnic Jewish socializing in Jewish Community Centers, Jewish country or beach clubs, or Jewish hotels.

 

Despite its highly diluted, non demanding form of religious practice I would still hold that the Reform Movement was Jewish in the same way that the Jewish Bund, secular Jewish socialists or Zionists, and Yiddish culturalists were Jewish, for the simple sociological reason that the members of these social organizations still had two Jewish parents (up until the mid 70’s) and thus were halakhically Jewish. Also they still possessed a strong ethnic identity. “Old School” Reform Jews were still generationally close to their ethnic immigrant past (up until the 70’s there were still grandparents who had ‘just gotten off the boat’, and for whom Yiddish was their ‘mamalashon”)

 

The 2021 ‘New School’ of Reform ‘Judaism’- a new religion, Judeo Progressive Liberalism (JPL)

 

Older Reform rabbis may deny it, but the Reform Judaism described above (the one within which I grew up) is DEAD, RIP. It has been killed by

 

1) intermarriage rates of up to 70- 80% amongst the offspring of the second-third generation Reform Jews described above

 

2) the growing secularity and deinstitutionalization of post modern society, and now most significantly,

 

3) the epidemic virus of progressive liberalism.

 

The 2021 version of progressive liberalism is a highly ideological, sect-like, secular religion that has ‘kidnapped’ the ‘Old School’ Reform Judaism described above. The progressive liberalism of 2021 has transformed “Old School” Reform Judaism into a new, non Jewish religion, one I will term for this article Judeo Progressive Liberalism (JPL).

 

Judeo Progressive Liberalism is a non-Jewish religion because its canons actively deny three basic tenets of the Jewish religion. JPL actively

 

1) denies the historic peoplehood of the Jewish people,

 

2) it actively denies the priority and superior religious legitimacy of the two gender-two parent family, and

 

3) it ignores even the possibility of a metaphysical spiritual dimension to our lives. JPL is almost exclusively focused on the ‘this- world’ question of ‘social ‘justice’.

 

JPL’s denial of Jewish peoplehood:

 

‘Old School’ Reform Judaism was based on an ethnic sense of peoplehood. And Orthodox- Rabbinic Judaism requires for conversion an exclusive, lifelong commitment to see one’s personal destiny fatefully bound up with the historical-divine destiny of the most persecuted people in human history, the Jewish People.

 

In contrast to “Old School Reform’ and Rabbinic Judaism, the religion of Judeo Progressive Liberalism preaches the radical liberal creeds of inclusiveness, diversity and intersectionality, all of which forcefully act to deconstruct the social phenomenon of peoplehood.

 

In practice, all one needs to become a convert to JPL is to attend a few communal-religious ‘happenings, (like a Friday night Sabbath meal), take a 12 week course on Jewish history and religion, read three books on Judaism, dip into a mikvah attended by a Reform rabbi, and you are now “Jewish’. You are allowed, and even encouraged, to mix your new-found Jewish self identity with-other previous ethnic –gender identities (thus practicing the pseudo ‘mitzvot’ of inclusiveness and diversity).

 

Most significant, it makes no difference if your adoption of this partial Jewish self-identity becomes transitional to a certain life stage. For example, if you have a Jewish partner and divorce, move to a place where there is no Reform congregation or if your Reform rabbi is boring, or if you lose interest in social justice activism, you are free to ‘revoke’ your ‘conversion’ without guilt. Progressive liberalism treats ‘being Jewish ’as an individual, life stage-self identity ‘trip’. “Being Jewish’ is individualhood and not peoplehood, and in this way JPR imitates Christianity, and has very little empathy for Zionism.

 

JPL is creating a gentile, ‘mixed multitude’ (erev rav) like the one that accompanied the Jewish people when they left Egypt. Around 60- 70% of the participants in Reform Temples are not halakhically Jewish.

 

The ‘rabbi’ is not allowed to talk against intermarriage because, one, it is useless and irrelevant given the Reform norm of intermarriage, and, two, it will hurt the feelings of a majority of the congregation.

 

Judeo progressive liberalism’s denial of Jewish familyhood:

 

The Jewish people have survived and have been spiritually creative during 2000 years of cruel exile because of the health and strength of the two parent-two gender Jewish family. Gentile history books repeatedly testify that Jewish families were characterized by their unique, high level of marital fidelity.

 

However, today in the JP Reform Temple it is forbidden to espouse and teach the superior, religious legitimacy of the traditional two parent-two gender family mode. It is strictly forbidden. If you do so you will be accused of the cardinal sin of ‘racist’ homophobia. A disproportionate percentage of younger Reform ‘rabbis’ and rabbinical students are not two- parent, two gender oriented in their personal family. Urban Reform Temples tend to attract participants who do not benefit from being a part of multi- generational, two parent-two gender family.

 

Please understand. I am not judging the legitimacy or social benefits of family models that differ from the Jewish model. I am, however, arguing that you can not call such models ‘religiously Jewish’. When alternative familyhood models are actively promoted and defended in the JPL Temple, they are simply creeds and canons of a new and different religion – the religion of Judeo progressive liberalism.

 

Judeo progressive liberalism ignores or denies the metaphysical, spiritual dimension of religious worship

 

Throughout history Judaism based its religious worship on the absolute premise of establishing a relationship with a spiritual, metaphysical Divine Presence Who intervenes in history on a personal and covenantal level

 

In contrast, the JPL religion ignores the question of a metaphysical Divine presence in this world, and its ‘theology’ focuses almost exclusive the question of social justice, mistakenly called ’tikun olam’. It defines ‘social justice’ as working to achieve a more equitable distribution of material resources and social power structuralism among oppressed minority groups. It selectively quotes Biblical passages to root this social philosophy in the Jewish religious tradition. Heavily influenced by postmodern moral relativism, and a Cultural Marxism that focuses on man’s more basic (lower) drives of materialism and sexual identity, JPL simply ignores metaphysical questions.

 

“Old School” Reform Judaism also taught a very humanistic, almost atheistic definition of Divine presence. It also very heavily focused on the goal of ‘social justice’. For example, fifty years ago when I attended the Reform rabbinical school maybe only ten percent of the faculty believed that a Jew could have a personal relationship with a Divine Presence. Fifty years ago already my Reform Temple hosted leaders of the Black civil rights movement during Sabbath prayers and we all sang together the hymnal ‘We Shall Overcome’.

 

However, the difference between ‘Old school’ Judaism and Judeo progressive liberalism is that fifty years ago American society was still more religious, and less secular, in its outlook and makeup. The question of a Divine Presence, and Jewish prayer, at least preoccupied and bothered Reform rabbinic leaders. They debated the question, even if their answer was minimalistic.

 

Today the world is more secular and the question of a metaphysical Divine Presence does not seem to be a real issue for JPL religious leaders. According to JPL, the ‘Divine’ is understood as a strong subjective, individual commitment to go beyond one’s self centeredness, and devote oneself, with significant personal sacrifice, to the task of creating a more equitable, just society.

 

Again, I do not argue that this cannot be considered a legitimate deserving postmodern theology. I just argue that it is just far, far removed from our Jewish religious tradition. I have the feeling that for ‘Old School’ Reform Judaism the ‘question of G-d’ was a real living dilemma, and for Judeo progressive liberalism it is not even a question.

 

Conclusion: We must inoculate ourselves against the virus of 2021 progressive liberalism and inoculate ourselves with a Torah social culture

 

I have related in detail the very sad story of progressive liberalism’s hijacking of the Old School Reform Movement and transforming it into a new, non Jewish, religion in order to promote the dangerous power of progressive liberalism. Just as it has hijacked the academia, the media, the Democratic Party, and now many corporate boardrooms, progressive liberalism has also successfully taken the last vestige Judaism out of Reform Judaism.

 

As detailed above, progressive liberalism is a real threat to the most basic elements of traditional and religious Judaism. And we must combat it and protect ourselves, with vigor and determination. We must create and promote a Torah social culture. This means building a personal, family, social, work, recreation and art, and national life that is based not only doing mitzvot, but also bringing the social cultural content of the mitzvot to all areas of our daily life.

 

Progressive liberalism is on the rampage. Torah Jews must also be creative and proactive in promoting a life of Torah.

 

Dr. Chaim C. Cohen, whose PhD. is from Hebrew U., is a social worker and teacher at the Hebrew Univ. School of Social Work, and Efrata College. He lives in Psagot, Binyamin.

JerusalemCats Comments:

The Reform in their 1885 Pittsburgh Platform formally rejected the Torah of Israel and Israel both as a State of Israel, The People of Israel and the Land of Israel:

Para.#4 “We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.”
Para.#5 “We recognize, in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect, the approaching of the realization of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men. We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”.

Relatively few Israeli Jews identify with either Conservative (2%) or Reform (3%) Judaism.
http://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/08/comparisons-between-jews-in-israel-and-the-u-s/

To compare the reform conversion to the Orthodox conversion is like comparing a first aid course to Medical School. 10 – 1 hour classes in reform vs. 2 years, 6 hours a day, 6 days a week in a proper Orthodox conversion, living in the Orthodox community, with many Orthodox Rabbis teaching everything and a lot of hands on learning. Such as how to keep a Kosher home, Bake Challah, Tefillin, Raise Jewish Children, Build a Succah, and so on.

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Elder of Ziyon logo http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

Elder of Ziyon logo http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

 

Urgent advice to my fellow Jews (Vic Rosenthal)

November 16, 2017 Elder of Ziyon Vic Rosenthal’s Weekly Column http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2017/11/urgent-advice-to-my-fellow-jews-vic.html

 

Right now, today, is a critical point in Jewish history. Maybe you don’t think so, because it’s easy to be distracted by the small stuff. But we need to step back and look at the forest instead of the trees.

 

Israel, a Jewish state reborn after almost two millennia, is facing a real threat to its survival – perhaps as great or greater than at any time since 1948. The threat is from Iran, which a) has taken control of Lebanon and built a massive rocket and missile installation aimed at our critical infrastructure, b) has achieved strategic dominance of critical territory in Iraq and Syria, will soon have its own troops and proxy militias on our Syrian border as well (with the acquiescence of the US and Russia), and c) either already has or could presently have nuclear weapons.

 

Iran’s enmity to Israel is a result of religious dogma, and of Iran’s determination to dominate the Mideast and become a world superpower by defeating the US. In the past few years it has moved steadily toward its strategic goals, which include eliminating the Jewish state that it sees as both an outpost of the US and the major obstacle to its local ambitions.

 

Some day historians will ask why an American president, Barack Obama, did so much to help one of America’s most dangerous enemies – and also to hurt the Jewish people. But that’s not my subject today.

 

At the same time that the Iranian threat grows, there is a pandemic of Jew-hatred spreading throughout the world. Europe at times seems to have regressed to pre-WWII conditions or worse, with Jews caught between re-empowered right-wing Jew-baiting, fierce Islamic hatred, and left-wing “intersectional” antisemitism. Similar phenomena exist in the US, although less severe so far – except possibly on university campuses.

 

But while some European Jews are starting to worry about their future, in America and in Israel – where they absolutely should know better – they are acting irrationally, busying themselves with trivia or even doing exactly the opposite of what’s needed to ensure their survival and that of the Jewish state and people.

 

To European Jews – and here I include the UK – I have a simple message: get out. The natives don’t like you (they never did, as Herzl noticed), and Islamification is proceeding apace. It can’t get better, only worse. I would like to see you make aliyah, but I understand the economic realities, and also the risk from the coming Mideast war. This is a decision you will have to make yourselves.

 

The US and Canada together have about half the world’s Jews, 90% of these are non-Orthodox, and the majority of them don’t have a clue about Jewish history or the Jewish state and the conflicts and issues surrounding it. They are geographically far from the Middle East, and can’t read Jewish texts or anything else in Hebrew. For most of them, their Judaism has become attenuated and even replaced by a form of liberal humanism that makes them blind to the dangers they face and drives them away from the Jewish state. For these Jews I have several messages, depending on which of several groups they fall into.

 

To the supporters of J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, the New Israel Fund, and so on: if you still have positive feelings about the Jewish people, please believe me that you are not doing it any favors, and find some other cause – helping the homeless in your own country is a good one – that will allow you to feel good about yourself without hurting your people.

 

To those who think that it is their duty to make Israel a better place by activism on behalf of Jewish pluralism, improving the treatment of our Arab citizens, protecting the rights of illegal immigrants or Palestinians, or even promoting the (impossible) “two-state solution:” please understand that you know less than nothing about these issues; and the fact that your parents were Jewish does not give you the right to intervene in our affairs. If you want to change things here, then make aliyah, vote, and send your kids to the army. Otherwise leave us alone.

 

To those that think that they are making things better by engaging in interfaith dialogue with Muslims, fighting “Islamophobia,” and favoring increased immigration from Muslim countries, you are being used. Don’t complain when the US and Canada have the same problems as Europe….

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Tzipi Hotovely on i24NEWS: Most American Jews don’t understand Israel

Posted 22November2017 i24NEWS English “THE RUNDOWN | Tzipi Hotovely on i24NEWS: Most American Jews don’t understand Israel”

Tzipi Hotovely on The Rundown says most American Jews do not understand Israel because they have never sent their children to fight for their country and do not know how it feels to be attacked by rockets.

Israel, Reform Jews, Army Draft, Wester Wall, Hillel, Princeton University,

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Commentary Magazine-logo https://www.commentarymagazine.com/

Commentary Magazine-logo https://www.commentarymagazine.com/

U.S. Jews and Israel’s Right to Be Heard

What’s so threatening about mainstream Israeli opinion?

U.S. Jews and Israel’s Right to Be Heard

Kotel

Kotel

The growing divide between Israeli and American Jews was a major topic of conversation at this week’s annual meeting of the Jewish Federations of North America. It was also the topic of a lengthy feature in Haaretz, which largely blamed the Israeli government. Inter alia, it quoted former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro as saying, in reference to that majority of American Jews who identify as non-Orthodox and politically liberal, “There is an idea that has some currency in certain circles around the Israeli government that says, ‘You know what, we can write off that segment of American Jewry because in a couple of generations their children or grandchildren will assimilate.’”

 

I agree that the idea of writing off this segment of American Jewry has some currency in Israel. But in most cases, it’s due less to fantasies about liberal Jews disappearing than to a belief that Israel will have to do without them whether it wants to or not, because liberal Jews can no longer be depended on for even the most minimal level of support. And by that, I don’t mean support for any specific Israeli policy, but for something far more basic: Israel’s right to be heard, by both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.

 

Nothing better illustrates this than recent decisions by two campus Hillels to bar mainstream Israeli speakers from addressing Jewish students. At Princeton, it was Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, and at Stanford, it was a group of Israeli Arab veterans of the Israel Defense Forces. I can understand Hillel refusing to host speakers from the radical fringes. But how are Jewish students supposed to learn anything about Israel if campus Hillels won’t even let them hear from representatives of two of the country’s most mainstream institutions – its elected government and its army?

 

Both Hillels later termed their decisions a “mistake” – most likely under pressure from Hillel International, whose CEO, Eric Fingerhut, was the lead author on Princeton Hillel’s apology. But that doesn’t change the fact that at two leading universities on opposite sides of the country, the Hillel directors, both non-Orthodox rabbis, initially thought canceling the speeches in response to progressive students’ objections was a reasonable decision. Princeton’s Julie Roth thought it completely reasonable to deny her students the chance to hear an official Israeli government representative try to explain the government’s policies. And Stanford’s Jessica Kirschner – backed, incredibly, by the university’s “pro-Israel” association – thought it completely reasonable to deny her students the chance to hear from non-Jewish Israelis who don’t agree that Israel is an apartheid state.

 

American Jewish rabbis and lay leaders obviously have the right to disagree with Israeli policies. But how is any relationship possible if one side won’t even allow the other to be heard? Gagging and boycotts Israel can get from its enemies; it doesn’t need American Jews for that. So if Israel can’t even rely on them to enable interested students to be exposed to mainstream Israeli views, what exactly are they contributing to the Israel-Diaspora relationship? And why, under these circumstances, should Israel have any interest in accommodating their concerns about, say, prayer arrangements at the Western Wall?

 

Moreover, consider who did step in to allow the Princeton and Stanford speeches to take place as planned – the Orthodox Chabad movement, which, on both campuses, volunteered to host the speakers on very short notice. If Orthodox groups are the only ones in America these days even willing to provide a venue for Israelis who deviate from progressive orthodoxy, why wouldn’t Israel give greater weight to Orthodox views than non-Orthodox ones?

 

Nor is this problem limited to college campuses. The most salient example – one worth revisiting precisely because both sides consider it a turning point in the relationship – was the dispute over the Iranian nuclear deal.

 

Given the almost wall-to-wall Israeli consensus that the deal was dangerous (despite deep disagreements over how best to oppose it), many Israelis felt no less betrayed by American Jewish support for the deal than many American Jews felt when Israel reneged on the Western Wall compromise two years later. As former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren told Haaretz, “We went to American Jews and told them that the Iran deal endangers 6 million Jews in Israel, and that it’s not an American political issue, but rather, a matter of Jewish existence, and I don’t need to tell you what happened.” Indeed, absent that sense of betrayal, I suspect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have been more willing to rebuff ultra-Orthodox pressure over the Western Wall.

 

But policy disagreements I can accept, even on issues of existential importance. What I found far more troubling was liberal American Jews’ reaction to Netanyahu’s efforts to lobby against the deal, which Haaretz reporter Judy Maltz accurately described as follows: “Considering that 70 percent of American Jews had voted for Barack Obama, Netanyahu’s efforts to lead a revolt against him were seen by many in the Jewish community as unconscionable.” Indeed, many prominent American Jews vociferously objected to Netanyahu’s speech to Congress against the deal, using terms like “humiliated” and “angered” to describe their feelings. Yet somehow, I haven’t heard a word from them against European leaders’ efforts today to lobby Congress to defy President Trump and preserve the deal.

 

In short, many liberal American Jews didn’t just oppose the Israeli government’s policy, they even objected to the government’s efforts to publicly advocate for its chosen policy. Effectively, they declared that Israel had no right to make its views heard in America if doing so discomfited them.

 

Many liberal Jews remain staunch supporters of Israel. Yet the ranks of the Roths and Kirschners seem to be growing every year. And though Israel and Diaspora Jewry can survive disagreements about policy, if liberal American Jews aren’t even willing to hear what Israeli Jews think, and provide a platform for others to hear it, the relationship will be over. I continue to think that would be tragedy. But you cannot have a relationship with people who don’t even acknowledge your right to speak – even if those people are your family.

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carolineglick-com-logo

Tzippy and the Iceberg

11/10/2017 http://carolineglick.com/tzippy-and-the-iceberg/

Tzipy Hotovely

Tzipy Hotovely

 

Princeton University Hillel’s last minute decision on Monday to cancel Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipy Hotovely’s scheduled address was the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

 

The iceberg itself was revealed the next day on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2016. The bill is intended to facilitate the fight against antisemitism on campuses by requiring university authorities to refer to the State Department’s definition of antisemitism when they consider whether harassing acts were “motivated by antisemitic intent.”

 

Nine witnesses appeared before the committee. Five supported the legislation. Four opposed it.

 

The State Department’s 2010 definition of antisemitism was formulated to fight what is referred to as “the new antisemitism.” Unlike the antisemitism of the first half of the 20th century which was directed against Jews as individuals, antisemitism today is increasingly expressed as hatred of Jews for their support for Israel – the collective Jew.

 

The State Department’s definition of Jew-hatred includes the delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist, demonization of the State of Israel, including by likening it to Nazi Germany, and the use of double standards to judge Israel’s actions. It also defines as an expression of Jew-hatred the allegation that Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to their countries of citizenship.

 

US Jewish organizations have repeatedly asked university officials to use the State Department’s definition of antisemitism as a basis for judging allegations of antisemitic attacks and harassment against Jewish students. Most universities have refused.

 

Passing the bill into law is urgent. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt noted in his congressional testimony, attacks against American Jewish students rose 59% in the first nine months of 2017 in comparison to the same period in 2016.

 

Despite the increase in antisemitism, four witnesses on Tuesday – all Jewish – insisted the bill is unnecessary. Two of the bill’s opponents are Jewish studies professors.

 

Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University and the president of the Jewish Studies Association, argued that while there are acts of antisemitic harassment on campuses, these acts have not “created a climate of fear that impinges upon Jewish students’ ability to learn and experience college life to the fullest.”

 

Barry Trachtenberg, holder of the Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, took things a few steps farther. Trachtenberg not only disputed that there is a problem with antisemitism on college campuses. He rejected the State Department’s definition of antisemitism.

 

Trachtenberg said that it is legitimate to compare Israel to Nazi Germany. He said that it is legitimate to reject Israel’s right to exist. And he claimed erroneously that a central tenet of Zionism is that Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to their countries of citizenship.

 

The two other witnesses who opposed the law, Kenneth Stern from the Rosenberg Foundation and Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the non-Jewish PEN America Center, both couched their opposition to the civil rights bill as support for freedom of speech.

 

Stern, Trachtenberg and Nadell cited a Stanford study of campus antisemitism to support their claim that antisemitism on campuses is not significant enough to warrant the proposed legislation.

 

The study, published in September by a team led by Prof. Ari Kelman, an associate professor of education and Jewish studies at Stanford, concludes that US Jewish students do not feel threatened by antisemitism on their campuses. The study also claimed that insofar as discussions of Israel are concerned, Jewish students are equally offended by Israel advocates and Palestinian supporters. In the study’s words, “They are turned off by the tone of that debate on both sides.”

 

As Kelman admitted and Nadell acknowledged, Kelman’s study has no scientific value whatsoever.

 

Its data are based on a statistically insignificant, deliberately non-representative sample of non-affiliated Jews on five California campuses. That Nadell, Trachtenberg and Stern all used a worthless study to justify their opposition to the antisemitism bill indicates they deliberately distorted the nature of the problem of antisemitism on campuses to block passage of the bill.

 

Kelman’s and Trachtenberg’s work to belittle the bigotry plaguing Jewish students on campuses is in line with their political activism. Kelman is a member of the Academic Council for Open Hillel.

 

Open Hillel is a pressure group that demands that Hillel permit activities supportive of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement to be carried out under its aegis.

 

Trachtenberg signed a petition advocating an academic boycott against the Hebrew University. He has signed petitions vilifying Israel organized by the antisemitic Jewish Voices for Peace BDS group.

 

As the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who testified in favor of the bill, said having Trachtenberg testify is “like inviting people from the Flat Earth Society to a hearing about NASA.”

 

This brings us back to Princeton and Rabbi Julie Roth, the Hillel director who disinvited Hotovely.

 

Like Kelman and Trachtenberg, Roth also has a public record. As Yisrael Medad reported in The Times of Israel, Roth is a member of the New Israel Fund, which supports BDS.

 

Her husband, Rabbi Justus Baird, is an active member of J Street and Rabbis Without Borders. The couple has donated to the BDS group T’ruah.

 

As David Bedein reported at Arutz 7, Roth has a record of canceling pro-Israel events. In 2009 she canceled a talk by Nonie Darwish, a former Muslim Israel advocate.

 

In an open apology to Hotovely published on Wednesday in The Jerusalem Post, Hillel International’s President Eric Fingerhut and Roth insisted that her treatment was “an isolated incident.”

 

But a similar incident occurred just weeks ago at Stanford Hillel.

 

Stanford’s Hillel canceled a scheduled event with Reservists on Duty, an Israeli anti-BDS group that brings IDF reservists to US campuses. Last month’s event was supposed to feature non-Jewish IDF reservists, who came to Stanford to share their military experiences.

 

Like Hotovely’s speech at Princeton, the Reservists on Duty event at Stanford was held at Chabad House after Hillel boycotted it at the last minute.

 

Fingerhut and Roth pointed to Hotovely’s speeches at New York University and Columbia University this week as proof that they are not discriminating against her. Yet according to a senior Foreign Ministry source, ministry staffers had to fight to get those events scheduled. And once they were scheduled, Hillel refused to widely publicize Hotovely’s speeches.

 

Only 10 students were invited to attend her lecture at Columbia. And only 40 students attended her unpublicized event at NYU.

 

Hillel’s desire to make light of its discrimination against center-right Israelis is eminently sensible.

 

The vast majority of American Jews support Israel. It wouldn’t do for pro-BDS Hillel directors to parade their hostility to the Jewish state in public.

 

It makes much more sense to simply block pro-Israel speakers from appearing on campuses.

 

Likewise, Jewish radicals who oppose civil rights protections for Jewish students beset by antisemites who express their Jew-hatred as anti-Zionism are reasonable to pretend that they are simply freedom of speech champions.

 

After all, professors like Trachtenberg who call for the boycott of Israeli universities while claiming that Zionists are inherently disloyal to their countries of citizenship wouldn’t want to be accused of trucking in antisemitism.

 

The fact that Hillel directors like Roth and radical professors like Trachtenberg, Kelman and Nadell do not reflect the views of the wider Jewish community or even of the Jewish students on their campuses does not mean that they do not pose a grave threat both the American Jewish community and to Israel.

 

These radical Jews who have attained positions of power in the Jewish community harm the American Jewish community and Israel is significant ways.

 

First, by pretending that it is legitimate to block senior Israeli officials from addressing students, they block US Jewish students from basic knowledge about Israel and the views of the majority of Israelis who democratically elect their representatives.

 

Second, by permitting the slander of the likes of Hotovely and Reservists on Duty, these campus Jewish leaders and professors cultivate ignorance among Jewish students while emptying the term pro-Israel of all meaning. In in their zeal to promote anti-Zionist libels and activism, they empower ignorant students to blithely and falsely slander Hotovely and other senior officials as “racists.” By extension, they libel the entire nation of Israel whose citizens democratically elected their Knesset representatives and government.

 

If these actions continue, a significant diminishment in levels of support for Israel among American Jews can be expected in the years to come.

 

Most perniciously, in pursuit of their agenda, these radical Jewish leaders and academics seek to deny adequate civil rights protections for American Jews. By claiming that the most significant form of antisemitism on college campuses – antisemitism rooted in hatred of Israel and its supporters – is not antisemitism, and by lobbying to prevent the Antisemitism Awareness Act from being passed into law, they are working to undermine the civil rights protections of American Jewry.

 

As these events unfold, these radical forces in the community are also seeding their ranks in leadership positions in the community.

 

For instance, in September, backed by deep-pocketed donors, BDS activist David Myers was appointed head of the Center for Jewish History in New York.

 

Myers is a member of several BDS groups including Jewish Voices for Peace, J Street, the New Israel Fund, and If Not Now. Kelman and other anti-Zionist Jewish academics applauded his appointment.

 

Myers’ animosity toward Israel is reflected in his scholarship. Justifying anti-Zionism is a major focus of his work. He has authored sympathetic articles about the anti-Zionist Satmar Hassidic sect.

 

When considering how to stem the growing power of anti-Israel and antisemitism-enabling Jews in the American Jewish community, it is worth considering the response to Myers’s appointment.

 

When the Center for Jewish History announced his hiring, a small coalition of pro-Israel activists organized protests against it. True, the demonstrations failed to cancel his appointment. But the instinct that informed them was correct.

 

Israel advocates – supported by the Israeli government – should oppose the hiring and advocate the firing of anti-Israel activists in major Jewish groups. For instance, following her discriminatory treatment of Hotovely, Israel should demand that Hillel International fire Roth and replace her with a pro-Israel Jewish professional.

 

So, too, Trachtenberg and professors like him who truck in antisemitic propaganda masquerading as academic research should not be given a free pass.

 

Pro-Israel activists should file complaints with his university for his advocacy of antisemitic positions is sworn congressional testimony.

 

The abuse Hotovely endured this week was a symptom of a much larger problem. A small but powerful minority of American Jews seeks to silence Israeli voices, as part of a larger movement to deny civil rights protections to pro-Israel American Jews. To defeat these efforts both the symptom and the disease must be fought relentlessly.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

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JewishPress-Logo

Hillel At Princeton: On the Roof?

ByYisrael Medad– 20 Heshvan 5778 – November 8, 2017-https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/my-right-word/hillel-at-princeton-on-the-roof/2017/11/08/

The 19th Knesset swearing in ceremony at the Knesset Plenom in Jerusalem. In the picture, MK of Halikud Beiteinu Party, Tzipi Hotovely (center).

The 19th Knesset swearing in ceremony at the Knesset Plenom in Jerusalem. In the picture, MK of Halikud Beiteinu Party, Tzipi Hotovely (center).

The 19th Knesset swearing in ceremony at the Knesset Plenum in Jerusalem. MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud)Photo Credit: GPO

Most of us have heard, or should have, of the adventures of Hillel the Elder on a roof on a snowy night. As recorded in Yoma 35b

Hillel the Elder every day he used to work and earn one tropaic, half of which he would give to the watchman at the house of study; the other half he used on food for himself and the members of his household. One day he was unable to earn anything, so the watchman at the house of study did not let him in. He then climbed [to the roof] and hung on, sitting over the opening of the skylight, so that he could hear the words of the living God from the mouths of Shemaiah and Avtalion. It is said that the was a Sabbath eve in the winter solstice, and snow came down on him from heaven. When the dawn rose, Shemaiah said to Avtalion, “Brother Avtalion, every day this house is bright with light, but today it is dark. Is the day cloudy?” When they looked up, they saw the figure of a man in the skylight. They climbed to the roof and found Hillel, covered with three cubits of snow. They removed the snow from him, bathed and anointed him, and, as they seated him in front of an open fire, they said, “This man deserves to have the Sabbath profaned on his behalf.”…

Hillel of Princeton seems to be stuck up on a roof.

 

The bare facts about the Hotovely-Princeton Hillel Affair are known.

 

Protests from a dovish Jewish campus group, the Alliance of Jewish Progressives (AJP) caused the Hillel of Princeton University to cancel a scheduled talk by Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely that was to take place this past Monday evening at the last moment. Chabad picked up the talk.

 

The protest went public in a letter published in the campus daily. Afterwards, AJP claimed they were only upset that proper procedures for inviting guests to events of the Center for Jewish Living were not followed through on,but were quite forthright that

 

We firmly reject the CJL’s choice to host a racist speaker like Hotovely while it continues to quiet progressive voices.

While Deputy Minister Michael Oren demanded a boycott, I tweeted him

 

No, more should come until the Hillel staff there is removed

At the campus newspaper article I commented that its content is what someone has called an “Reality inversion alert” –

 

You write:
“Hotovely’s alarming vision for the future of the region is coupled with a complete rejection of Palestinian history and connection to key sites such as the Haram al-Sharif [Temple Mount].”But it is the Muslims, from the Mufti to Arafat to Abbas who reject any Jewish claim to or identity with Mount Moriah, the First and Second Temples, the attempt to build a Third Temple in 363 CE or anything Jewish about Jerusalem. Have the signees ever studied anything about Jewish history…Do they possess knowledge or slogans? Outlook or out-of-touch? This is all so embarrassing for we Jews who, of whatever political stripe, at least actually know something of what we speak and write.

I added that

 

throwing around a charge of “racism” really gets one no where when, on the record, the most racist element in the conflict are Arabs who wish to deny a ethnic national community any political, civil and human rights the international community recognized and guaranteed consistently since 1917

A late-burner was the AJP post-event claim that they were misunderstood:

 

MK Hotovely clearly misunderstands the intricacies of the Princeton Jewish community and the aims of our protest. Our Hillel’s response to the concerns of progressive Jewish students does not constitute a “liberal dictatorship.” Rather, the events of the past two days show the CJL’s commitment to more equitable standards of inclusivity and diversity.

But they weren’t. They clearly sought to shut her down,

 

“We firmly reject the CJL’s choice to host a racist speaker like Hotovely…”

and succeeded, while claiming all they wanted was for the rules for inviting speakers, the “Israel policy”, by applied equally.

Be that as it may, what raised eyebrows even more was AJP’s claim that a Jewish Agency shaliah was somehow involved. They published

 

On the evening of Nov. 5, in an email to students and members of the community who planned to attend an address by Tzipi Hotovely, a member of Israel’s Knesset, Rabbi Julie Roth, the executive director of the Center for Jewish Life, and the CJL Israel Fellow, Lior Sharir, announced they would be postponing Hotovely’s visit to the CJL pending further review by the Israel Advisory Committee.

 

Yigal Palmor left a comment at my Facebook post, writing:

 

We’ve checked and I can confirm that any suggestion that the Shaliach was behind the cancellation is *untrue*. Hillel have published an apology and it clearly shows this had nothing to do with the shaliach…the Shaliach had nothing to do with the cancellation.

I should trust him as he is, after all, Director of Public Affairs and Communications at The Jewish Agency for Israel. I did ask him if he would call out AJP as liars. I am still waiting.

 

What is even more intriguing than an Israeli-funded shaliah quashing a government minister’s right to free speech is the role of Rabbi Roth. Could she not have simply picked up a phone and within 5-10 minutes received a confirmation that Ms. Hotovely’s right to appear at Hillel is approved? Did she really think Hotovely is a racist and her arrival should be stymied by rules?

 

Rabbi Roth is active in the New Israel Fund.

 

She’s #163 on this petition and #1868 on this one. She has full free speech. Even progressive free speech. And she has unique insight into other radical groups as her husband is Rabbi Justus Baird who has written:

 

The Torah was received in the diaspora. Most of Jewish history was lived out in the diaspora. Diaspora Judaism deserves a foundational, equal place in the self-identity of the Jewish people, right alongside the Jewish state.

That is, I should stress, a legitimate opinion. It is also radical and skewed, but that’s my opinion. The Diaspora, I think, does not deserve, in Judaism, equality to Israel.

 

He’s with Rabbis Without Borders. They, at least, hold to the principle that a Rabbi should “strive[s] to be aware of the partial truth in a view with which we deeply disagree”. He is on the Rabbis & Cantors Board of J Street. He identifies with T’ruah and he and his wife have donated a sum of between $1,00-$2,499 to the group.

 

T’ruah promotes positions – and I don’t know if one would term them mainstream, radical, progressive or extreme – that include that they

 

advocate for an end to the military occupation of the West Bank and an end to the continued expansion of the settlements that extend this occupation, that infringe on the human rights of Palestinians, and that compromise the safety and security of Israelis…We urge all members of the North American Jewish community to engage in debate and disagreement for the sake of greater truth, justice, and peace.

That sounds to me a little like…Tzipi Hotovely and her predicament which someone termed an example of moral panic by left-wingers.

 

And at T’ruah they

 

are concerned about efforts to shut out a growing segment of our community based on their support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Despite our disagreements with this movement, we believe that the Jewish community is strengthened by vigorous debate on issues that are vital to the well-being of Israel and the worldwide Jewish community.

That sounds very much like support for AJP.

 

He was a supporter of Linda Sarsour as published here at TOI:

 

“Anyone who has worked closely with Linda knows that she has a deep love for and appreciation for Judaism and Jews,” he said. “Linda and I don’t agree on everything about Israel, Palestine or about other issues, and that is OK with me. I fully support CUNY giving a pubic platform to Linda Sarsour, and I think its graduates have a lot to learn from her voice.”

Hillel has apologized. But I still cannot figure out Rabbi Roth’s role in all this. Was she too busy?

 

Why didn’t she convene the committee to obtain approval prior to the protest? Why couldn’t she do that in a quick round of phone calls after the AJP protest? She is signed on the ‘apology’ that notes Hotovely’s appearance cancellation was done

 

because it had not been reviewed by the Center for Jewish Life’s Israel Advisory Committee, which is designed to review and facilitate a broad range of Israel programming throughout the year…This was not a good enough reason to postpone the event… we should have engaged a broader range of students in this program from the beginning…

I am sorry but that sounds very weak and less plausible each time I read it. Was there any doubt in Roth’s mind that Hotovely should be a welcome guest? Or does she think providing her a platform, perhaps, should be debated? Did she really think she was a racist and that AJP had the power over her to stop the event? Does she agree with her husband that the Diaspora is at a level of offsetting Israel?

 

Why hasn’t AJP been called out on suggesting Sharir was not involved? Did they lie or what? Why haven’t we heard of an investigation or a review of what occurred? Will Rabbi Roth be censured or found innocent of any possible wrongdoing?

 

Until Next Year in Jerusalem?

(with thanks to AB)

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Tzipi Hotovely with American now Israeli IDF Lone Soldiers formerly from America celebrating Thanksgiving

Tzipi Hotovely – ציפי חוטובלי November 24 at 3:52pm ·

לפני שבת אני רוצה לשתף אתכם ברגע אחד משמח שהיה לי אתמול בתוך כל הסערה.

קיבלתי הודעה שאמרה:

“ציפי שלום. אני וחבריי חיילים בודדים מארה”ב. רצינו לשתף אותך עכשיו בארוחת חג ההודיה שלנו בקיבוץ מגן כדי שתראי כ-50 אמריקאים צעירים שמשרתים/שירתו שירות מלא בצה”ל.”

אור בעלי הצטרף אלי ונסענו אליהם. פגשנו קבוצה נפלאה של חיילים וחיילות משוחררים שעשו עלייה. דיברנו בפתיחות על איך שהם רואים את הדברים שאמרתי, ומה לדעתם צריך לעשות כדי לתת להם תחושה של בית. הם גיבורים גדולים. אני מצדיעה להם.

בסוף שבוע שבו נושא יהדות התפוצות וישראל הפך רלוונטי מתמיד ביקשתי מהם להיות שגרירים שלנו ביצירת הגשר החשוב בין ישראל ליהדות ארה”ב.

שבת שלום.

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Rabbinical organization: Reform doesn’t represent Diaspora Jews

Coalition for Jewish Values welcomes appointment of Tzipi Hotovely as Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Minister.

Arutz Sheva Staff, 07January2020 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/274230

Hotovely Flash 90

Hotovely Flash 90

The Coalition for Jewish Values, representing over 1000 traditional rabbis in matters of public policy, today welcomed the appointment of Israel’s Deputy Minister Tzipi Hotovely as Minister of Diaspora Affairs, and rejected complaints regarding her appointment from Reform Rabbi Rick Jacobs, head of the Union for Reform Judaism. Ms. Hotovely made headlines in 2017 by pointing out that American Jews affiliated with the Reform movement “don’t know how it feels to be attacked by rockets” and have “quite comfortable lives,” and that the reason an egalitarian prayer section at the Western Wall remains empty is because they “are not even interested in going to the Western Wall.” Rabbi Jacobs complained that Ms. Hotovely “demonstrated woeful ignorance and disdain toward diaspora Jewish life,” and said that “asking Tzipi Hotovely to be Minister of Diaspora Affairs is like appointing a pacifist to be Minister of Defense.”

 

“Asking Rabbi Rick Jacobs for input on Israel is like asking a plumber a question on neurosurgery,” said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, President of the CJV. “The Reform movement has turned against Israel and lost its core audience, and the reason he dislikes Ms. Hotovely is that she is too perceptive and honest about the true state of American Reform movement. Barely 15% of American Jews are affiliated with the Reform movement; they are woefully ignorant about Judaism and Israel’s struggle for survival, less and less interested, and, tragically, disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage. Among Jews who invest, visit, and encourage their children to study or live in Israel, the selection of Ms. Hotovely to head the Diaspora Affairs Ministry will be a very popular choice.”

 

The CJV noted that the Reform movement opposed moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem without a “comprehensive plan for a peace process,” thus holding Israel hostage to an intransigent Palestinian Authority, and similarly opposed recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights. When the US reversed a hostile anti-Israel policy and recognized the legality of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, Rabbi Jacobs improbably asserted that this move would hurt the fight against BDS and further delegitimization of Israel. Rabbi Rick Jacobs similarly claimed it was wrong for Israel to bar US legislators who employ Anti-Semitic tropes and seek Israel’s destruction. Yet Reform leaders have demanded that Israel make changes to its religious practices to conform to failed American Reform standards, and even construct a section for mixed prayer at the Western Wall — though the current facility, as Ms. Hotovely noted, goes unused.

 

“Having previously worked with Ms. Hotovely, including during previous visits to the United States,” said Rabbi Dov Fischer, Western Regional Vice President of the CJV, “we know her to be remarkably attuned to Jewish life in the Diaspora. As the child of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, she knows that the Diaspora is larger than one country and than one religious stream within it. She knows the challenges facing Jews in communities outside Israel. She is inspiring, sensitive, and deeply intelligent, and we welcome her selection as Israel’s new Minister for Diaspora Affairs.”

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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Anatomy of a smear

It would be edifying if Israelis truly understood what is happening in American Jewish life and paid less attention to the instigators of insincere indignation, such as those who smeared Hotovely. Netanyahu should have supported her.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, 26/11/17 07:19 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/21318

Tzipy Hotovely

Tzipy Hotovely

As if on order, no sooner had I written “Life with a Smear” when we were presented with a real life example of a smear – a deliberate and conscious attempt to manipulate and distort the words of a public figure in order to shame her, force an apology, get her fired and ruin her life and career – all for the purpose of gaining some petty, partisan, political advantage.

 

The other day, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely purported to “disrespect” and “outrage” “all of American Jewry” (these are actual quotes from her critics) by articulating basic truths of which all American Jews are aware. Asked why there is a disconnect these days between much of American Jewry and Israel on diplomatic issues, and how such matters as the “Kotel” controversy have angered such a large part of American Jewry, she answered that Israel is the homeland of all Jews, “of all streams,” and every Jew should come live here and thereby influence Israeli society. But, she added, most American Jews are “not understanding the complexities of the region,” as they are –and here are the phrases that allegedly ticked off the self-appointed leaders of branches of American Jewry that are in such a steep decline – “people that never send their children to fight for their country, most of the Jews don’t have children serving as soldiers, going to the Marines, going to Afghanistan, going to Iraq. Most of them have quite comfortable lives. They don’t know how it feels to be attacked by rockets.”

 

If we parse her words fairly and objectively, it is clear that her sentiments are true and indisputable. Most American Jews do not have children serving as soldiers, Marines, in Afghanistan or Iraq. That is obvious, and I would speculate that most American Jews don’t even know someone who serves in the American military or served in Iraq or Afghanistan. (I do – a young former congregant was a Marine who fought during some of the harshest combat in Fallujah, Iraq, and I was proud to officiate at his wedding at which he wore his full dress uniform, replete with sword, and of course a good number of chaplains.) But most don’t, and that is true today of most Americans.

 

This is not because American Jews are selfish, uncaring, unpatriotic or disloyal. In truth, we are underrepresented in the American military according to our percentage of the population, but that has to do mostly with the underrepresentation of particular socio-economic brackets in the American military and the underrepresentation in the military of sections of the country where most Jews live. The higher socio-economic bracket to which one belongs and the more liberal the area of the country in which one lives, we find the lower the rate of participation in the military. This is true for Jews and non-Jews. We can quibble whether this should be so but not whether it is so. It is, and so it has been since the United States abolished the draft 45 years ago. (Parenthetically, only 25 % of the current members of Congress have served in the military, compared to close to 80% of the congressmen in the 1970’s.)

 

What Tzipi Hotovely said is absolutely true.

 

But this is how a smear works: Rick Jacobs, the leader of Reform Judaism who has become an open foe of a strong, proud, traditional Israel, castigated her for being “ignorant and ill-informed,” because, as he said, “my father served with distinction” in the American army. Indeed – we honor his father’s service! – but she did not say that Jews have never served in the American military (“never send” is not the same as “never sent,” and even that phrase was clarified), but rather that most Jews “don’t” serve in the American military. Note the verbal legerdemain – pretending her remarks were a blanket statement about the past rather than a comment on the present. That is rank dishonesty, and he should be ashamed of himself for engaging in it.

 

The point is not whether his father served or even whether he served (I assume he didn’t; he and I both came of age after the United States switched to an all-voluntary military). When there was a draft, Jews were drafted and served like any other citizen; American Jews fought in World War II in a greater proportion than our share of the population. I’ve walked the grounds of the American military cemetery at Normandy. The Stars of David that mark the graves of the dead American-Jewish soldiers stand out, if only because the thousands of crosses are arranged so neatly. But they are there, in almost every row. She was speaking about current events, how most American Jews today are detached from a military life, and how that surely taints their views on Israel where fighting in the military in an existential conflict that will not end is part of life and the expectation of almost every teenager. And she is correct – so correct that I would be curious to learn how many of her critics, or her critics’ children, have fought in the American military.

 

Here’s another shameful smear: the accusation that she was disrespecting all those young American Jews who go to Israel and enlist in the IDF. Again – smear. Distortion. Misrepresentation. Lie. And this is how it works – did she mention lone soldiers? Did she mention the IDF? Of course not. Look at both her words and the context. In our community, many dozens of youngsters over the years have enlisted in the IDF, and we are proud of all them. But have any of them fought in Afghanistan or Iraq? Not to my knowledge…   So this is a blatant effort to willfully distort her words. She made no reference to the IDF – so how can she be accused of disrespecting those who fight in the IDF? But this is how the smear game works – more verbal sleight-of-hand – denouncing someone for what was said and is true by attributing to them things that were not said and are false.

 

Quote marks top

The officialdom of the heterodox movements is uncomfortable, even resentful, of a successful woman who is proudly Jewish, proudly religious, proudly traditional, proudly Israeli and proudly right-wing.

Quote Marks Bottom

There are two real problems at play here, and Minister Hotovely is responsible for neither of them. The officialdom of the heterodox movements is uncomfortable, even resentful, of a successful woman who is proudly Jewish, proudly religious, proudly traditional, proudly Israeli and proudly right-wing.  She undermines several of their persistent narratives about Orthodoxy and traditional life in Israel. Seeing the Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel wearing a shaitel must gall them. Too bad – for them.

 

And the bigger problem is this: with the heterodox movements in a free fall, both in terms of raw numbers as well as influence in American politics because of the persistent liberal bias, they need an enemy to energize their base. They need to periodically – these days, it’s every few weeks – find a scapegoat, an accusation, an insult or a cause to get their people riled up. It can be the Haredim to whom they attribute all sorts of mischief and ill-will. It can be the Kotel, where suddenly – literally, suddenly, after many decades – the status quo of exclusively traditional prayer bothers them. It is as if they woke up one day and realized – or contrived – that the status quo must bother them. It can be the non-acceptance of their conversions, their rabbis, or their modes of worship in one form or another. It can be the growth of the settlements or a forceful response to Arab terror or Gazan rockets. But it is always something.

 

That is why even an apology from Tzipi Hotovely, which she proffered because that is the way the smear game is played (and shame on the Prime Minister for not standing behind her), will not suffice for the complainants. They want her and her kind out! It is not her but what she stands for that irritates them. She is a constant reminder of what they too could have – with their children and grandchildren – if only they would return to the honest study of Torah and the true observance of mitzvot. That is why they seem to be perpetually aggrieved and always cross about something going on in Israel.<

 

When many Israelis speak of “American Jewry,” they conjure to themselves a benign image of Jews who proudly love and support Israel, feel a deep emotional bond, and constitute a solid bloc of the type of encouragement and cooperation that one can expect from family. Would that it were so – but those days are long gone, sadly. Most American Jews today are unaffiliated – they do not identify as Orthodox, Reform or Conservative. They don’t feel that bond with Israel that their parents and certainly their grandparents did, most by far have never even visited Israel, and the ranks of American Jewry (including the heterodox movements) have been decimated by intermarriage that has obviously sapped their identification with Jews and the Jewish State. And the heterodox movements are permeated with Western ideas and values that occasionally conflate with Jewish ideas and values, but not always, and they can by and large no longer tell the difference.

 

The cause of Israel struggles today on college campuses because too many young Jews are cut off from their Jewish identity. The more the Jew is disengaged from Judaism, Torah, mitzvot and Jewish values, the more he or she will be disengaged from Israel. It is a tragic but accurate formula – that is why Minister Hotovely was banned by a “Jewish” group from speaking at Princeton – but there is little that Israel can do to reverse that trend. Identification and support for Israel will result from an enhanced sense of Jewish identity but those young Jews who are estranged from Israel have already embedded another identity and set of values and priorities. That is what has to be reversed and at this the heterodox movements are ill-equipped as they have long fostered an alienation from Torah.

 

That is why they force themselves to be outraged, manufacture slights and insults, and are avid players of the “Gotcha Game,” in which they monitor every single word of their targets in order to find the one word that they can wrench from context, cast in the most negative light or otherwise twist and falsify – all so that they can show relevance to their dwindling flock and their fellow travelers in the secular media. This is the smear game in action.

 

It would be edifying if Israelis truly understood what is happening in American Jewish life, paid less attention to the instigators of insincere indignation, and more attention to those Jews whose Jewish children and grandchildren will be building Torah, supporting Israel, making aliya and preserving the future of the Jewish people. And, of course, it would be an absolute delight if all Jews – of every stripe and background – did the same, and in so doing brought the era of redemption closer.

Rabbi Pruzansky is spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun of Teaneck, New Jersey, and the East Coast Regional Vice-President and Senior Rabbinic Fellow of the Coalition for Jewish Values

 

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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Esther Piekarski

Posted 19June2018 Arutz Sheva:

Esther Piekarski is a Chabad emissary in Tel Aviv, Israel where she teaches brides and grooms as well as in numerous seminaries. She is also a well-renowned international speaker. “The Ten Commandments of Marriage” By Esther Piekarski as told to Rishe Deitsch

Women are in charge of Kashrut. The Home,
Feminist have “Lack of Happiness”. The “Rebbe” is Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson ZT”L of Chabad
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Will black be the answer to US Jews’ diaspora blues?

9 December 2018 Melanie Phillips https://www.melaniephillips.com/black-answer-us-jews-diaspora-blues/

In a recent speaking tour in the US, I kept coming across Jews who were consumed by anxiety that so many of their young people were turning against Israel.

 

I had encountered such anxiety on previous trips, but this time it was worse than ever before.

 

Their children, they said, were being hoodwinked by bigoted hostility to Israel — wildly ridiculous lies and libels that they were choosing to believe because these formed the default anti-Zionist narrative on campus.

 

What was to be done to reverse this, the parents repeatedly asked.

 

I told them something that many didn’t want to hear but which I believe to be an inconvenient truth. Young American Jews are turning against Israel principally because they are disconnecting from Judaism.

 

And the reason for that is their parents are generally disconnecting from Judaism, largely because of the impact of the progressive denominations to which some three quarters of American Jews subscribe and which are telling them that liberal universalist values are authentic Jewish values.

 

But they are not. They are, in fact, inimical to Judaism. The community’s secular religion of tikkun olam, or supposedly Jewish social justice, is a fraud.

 

As Jonathan Neumann puts it in his excellent book To Heal the World?, American Jews have been led to believe that “the purpose of the Jews in the world is to campaign for higher taxes, sexual permissiveness, reduced military spending, illegal immigration, opposition to fracking, the banishment of religion from the public square and every other liberal cause under the sun — all in the name of God”.

 

It’s not Jewish, just, or even very social, constituting a mish-mash of Marxism, moral relativism and paganism.

 

So three-quarters of American Jews have contracted a kind of religious auto-immune disease, which has caused them to junk the stuff that will protect their spiritual health while eagerly embracing the stuff that will destroy it.

 

They really, really didn’t want to hear that. Nor, I suspect, dear readers, do many of you.

 

So you may like to look away now. Because there’s worse.

 

I asked a rabbi what could be done to pull American Jews back from the edge of the cultural precipice on which they are teetering. His answer was startling — and brutal. “Just give me Yavneh”, he said.

 

This was a reference to Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai who, as the Romans prepared to destroy Jerusalem in 70 CE, chose not to try to save the city and the Temple but instead asked the Roman general merely to give him the Yavneh yeshivah and its sages.

 

The request was granted. Yavneh duly became the spiritual centre of the Jewish people and ensured its survival.

 

The point was that ben Zakkai realised the behaviour of the Jews in Jerusalem — led by zealots who had destroyed their food supplies in the belief that God would save them from the Roman advance — was dooming the entire Jewish people to destruction.

 

What the rabbi in America meant was that he had given up on the wider American Jewish community. No longer would he even attempt to persuade them they were on the path of communal self-destruction. They would never listen or change.

 

Within a fairly short time, given the accelerating rate of intermarriage and assimilation, that part of the community would have effectively disintegrated. But spiritually, ethically, Jewishly, it was already lost.

 

In dramatic contrast, the much smaller Orthodox community was growing by leaps and bounds. So all efforts, he said, needed to go into supporting and financing that Orthodox world, because that’s where the Jewish diaspora future lay.

 

Take, for example, the great yeshivah in Lakewood, New Jersey. Founded in 1943 with 13 students, it now has an astonishing 6,700 students and has transformed the entire town, formerly known only for chicken farming.

 

Some 70 per cent of Lakewood’s residents are now Orthodox Jews. In the last 18 years its population has more than doubled, making it the fastest growing and seventh largest town in New Jersey.

 

So, said the rabbi, the American Jewish community wasn’t doomed at all. It would just be smaller and look very different. It would be a remnant. But like Yavneh, the quality of that remnant would be all that would matter.

 

I told you it was brutal. But value judgements aside, it’s hard to fault his logic.

 

So will black be the answer to America’s diaspora blues?

 

Jewish Chronicle
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Elder of Ziyon logo http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

Elder of Ziyon logo http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

The Future of Israel and of The Jewish Diaspora May Be Tied To Hebrew (Daled Amos)

 

daled amos

daled amos

 

May 29, 2018 http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-future-of-israel-and-of-jewish.html

On January 31, 1961, Yaacov Herzog – the Israeli ambassador to Canada at the time – debated the historian Arnold Toynbee at the B’nai B’rith Hillel House in Montreal. He was responding to a lecture Toynbee gave just a few days earlier at McGill University, where Toynbee questioned the right of the Jewish People to even have a state. In his writings, Toynbee characterized the Jews as a “fossil” civilization.

 

Rabbi Yisroel Meir Lau told a story that characterized one aspect of Herzog’s rebuttal of Toynbee’s claim that Jews are not a nation.

 

Let’s summarize the first part of the story:

 

An Olympic aircraft lands at Athens airport – and one of the passengers is Socrates.

 

Since ancient Greek is not the same as modern Greek, a translator is needed.
Socrates wants to see the Acropolis – but it is in ruins.
So is the Temple of Zeus.
No Neptune, Mars, Aphrodite, or Helen. Only Christianity.
There are no longer countries under Greek rule.
The only thing modern Greece has in common with the Greece of Aristotle or Plato is geography.

 

Meanwhile, an Alitalia flight stops at an airport near Rome – and Julius Caesar gets off the plane.

 

Latin and Italian are different, so a translator is needed.
Caesar wants to go to the Temple of Jupiter.
They offer instead to take him to the Vatican.
The current Pope is from Argentina, before that from Germany and before that from Poland. Not Italian
No Jupiter. No Colosseum either.
And no Roman Empire.

 

Here is the rest of the story in full:

At Ben Gurion airport, a customs officer welcomes an elderly man with a white beard: “Shalom Aleichem!”
The man answers, “Aleichem Shalom. My name is Moshe.”
“Really? I’m also Moshe! I was born in Tbilisi, Georgia.”
“And I was born in Egypt.”
“Did you visit Israel before?”
“Unfortunately never.”
“So it’s not your homeland.”
“This is my homeland. I personally know of the Divine promise. Are you Jewish?”
“Of course I’m Jewish. Ani Mosheke m’Gruzia.”
“I’d like to sightsee, but I didn’t take along Tefillin. Do you perhaps know where I can get tefillin?”
“Tefillin? I’ll give you mine.”
“You have tefillin?”
“Of course I have tefillin. I davened Shacharis an hour ago.”
“You also have a tallis with tzitzis?”
“Of course!”
“Do you have a quiet place for me to pray?”
“Sure! We have shuls here in the terminal. Sefard and Ashkenaz.”
“And what Nusach is your Torah scroll?”
“Nusach???!!! We all have the same Torah, each word carefully transcribed back to Moshe Rabenu!”

Same religion. Same language. Same homeland. Same commandments. Same faith. If this is not a nation, what is? [emphasis added]

 

About that language, Hebrew.
Hebrew has been reestablished as our language, just as Israel itself has been reestablished as our land.

 

And like the land and the people, Hebrew is also special.

 

In 2007 on the 150th birthday of Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, David Hazony wrote about one aspect of the uniqueness of Hebrew, about how compact it is (the word “is” does not even exist in Hebrew). Hebrew also you to say in just a few words what can require sentences to say in English. The long history of Hebrew as the language of the Prophets is an unending source of idioms and ideas.

 

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda working on his dictionary. Public domain

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda working on his dictionary. Public domain

Hazony describes how Hebrew has grown from a restricted language, comparable to Latin. It was used in the synagogue, to understand texts and in conversation only when Jews from different countries needed to bridge the language gap.

 

Yet today the State of Israel thrives on that same ancient — and not so ancient — tongue.

 

Caroline Glick is best known for her writing and opinions on matters of politics and foreign policy. But Glick sings the praises of the Hebrew language as well:

The density of meaning in Hebrew is a writer’s dream. Nearly anyone can imbue a seemingly simple sentence with multiple, generally complementary meanings simply by choosing a specific verb, verb form, noun or adjective. These double, triple and even quadruple meanings of one word are a source of unbounded joy for a writer. To take just one example, the Hebrew word “shevet” means returning and it also means sitting. And it is also a homonym for club – as in billy club – and for tribe.

 

In 2005, the IDF named the operation expelling the Israeli residents of Gaza and Northern Samaria “Shevet Achim,” or returning or sitting with brothers. But it also sounded like it was making a distinction between tribesmen and brothers. And it also sounded like “clubbing brothers.”

 

As this one example demonstrates, one joyful consequence of the unique density of the Hebrew language is that satirical irony comes easily to even the most dour and unpoetic writers.

 

And discussing Hebrew, of course, brings Glick back too to talking about Israel:

 

But the experience of speaking in Hebrew and of living in Hebrew is incomplete when it is not experienced in Israel. It is one thing to pray in a synagogue in Hebrew or even to speak regular Hebrew outside of Israel. The former is a spiritual duty and a communal experience. The latter is a social or educational experience. But speaking Hebrew in Israel is a complete experience. Hebrew localizes Jewishness, Judaism and Jews. It anchors us to the Land of Israel. Taken together, the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel stabilize a tradition and make the Jewish people whole.

When it comes to Israel, Hebrew is unifying as well.
Not just among Jews.
It may be one of the avenues of breaking barriers between Jews and Arabs in Israel as well:

 

Hebrew is alive and well. At least in the Arab and Druze communities. For students from those sectors, the Hebrew language has become the new business administration – a social and professional catapult to get ahead and succeed in life. The sticklers add Hebrew literature, too. It’s a triumph of practicality over ideology. The traditional attitude that language is part of national identity and that to study Hebrew is to cross the line, has given way to the quiet conquest of the Hebrew Language Department – at the University of Haifa by Arabs from the north and at Ben-Gurion University by Bedouin from the south. The graduates are almost always assured of a teaching job, which brings with it a livelihood, honor and prestige, relatively speaking. Hebrew is obligatory in every Arab and Bedouin elementary and high school, and good teachers are in high demand.

But ironically, if Hebrew can be a tool for the unity of Jews and Arabs in Israel, it may also illustrate the disunity among Jews in Israel and those in the Diaspora.

 

Hillel Halkin wrote 10 years ago that historically Hebrew was the “Jewish lingua franca” until modern times: “a Jew with a reading knowledge of Hebrew—and only such a Jew—had access to the thought and creativity of Jews everywhere.”

 

The change came towards the end of the 19th century. In 1896, Ahad Ha’am started publishing his review Hashiloah, he did it in Hebrew.

 

Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginsberg). Public domain

Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg). Public domain

He considered it the natural language of the Jews – in any other language, the periodical would be understood by Jews in some countries, but not in others.

 

Ahad Ha’am’s confidence, however, was misplaced. By the time Hashiloah was founded, Hebrew as an international language was steeply on the decline, and the journal folded after several years—the very years, it so happened, in which the spoken Hebrew revival was taking root in Palestine. As for American Jewry, by the time Ahad Ha’am died in 1927 it had its own literary review, the Menorah Journal, which would have embodied Ahad Ha’am’s editorial vision almost entirely were it not for the fact that it was in English. Most of its readers could not read Hebrew at all. They were the first of the new audience of American Jews for whose benefit the great Hebrew-English translation enterprise of the last 50 years has taken place.

 

Here, then, is a great historical irony. As long as Hebrew was the first language of no educated Jew in the world, it was the second language of every educated Jew; now that it has become the mother tongue of millions of Jews in the state of Israel, it has largely ceased to be studied by Jews elsewhere. It has in effect been demoted to a Judeo-Israeli, a new Jewish regional speech. In both relative and absolute numbers, far more Israeli and Palestinian Arabs now have a working command of it than do American Jews. [emphasis added]

 

If an Eldad the Danite were to turn up today, Hebrew would not get him very far. It is in English that Jewish travelers speak to Jews in foreign countries; in English that Jewish scientists in Russia e-mail to their Jewish colleagues in France and Jewish professionals in Argentina write to Jewish counterparts in Great Britain; and in English that our contemporary Eldads—peoples in remote regions making claims to ancient Israelite roots—enter into contact with the world’s Jews.

 

Rabbi Lau’s story would have gone differently if Moshe had gotten off the plane in the US instead of in Israel.

 

At the same time that Hebrew has become the spoken language of Jews (and Arabs) in Israel, it has become a foreign language among Jews outside of Israel, in a way that it was not before.

 

Many do not speak it.
Do not understand it.
And some may not even recognize it.

Also writing 10 years ago in The Forward, Philologos writes about the possibility that the slow adoption of Hebrew by the Arabs could lead, in a generation or two, to the integration of Arabs within Israel.

But the bigger question remains.
What will the Jewish community outside of Israel, in the US and elsewhere, look like in 2 generations?

Original Comments:

steelraptor from Saturn

I know a lot of Israeli Jews who rank ben-Yehuda as a genius on a par with Einstein. At first I thought they were being ridiculous, but now I know what they mean. Of course the father of the new Hebrew was a different kind of genius, and you can’t compare the 2. But in terms of Yehuda’s impact, the necessity of what he did, its cultural ramifications, he is on a par with Einstein re cultural genius and its applicability to Jews. Although of course it doesn’t make sense to compare.

Toynbee was a typical Jew hating Brit intellectual.

JH Miasku

For those looking to brush up their Hebrew over morning coffee, I’d like to advertise the Hebrew Duolingo exercises (and the associated Memrise vocabulary review). In my opinion, this is the best the internet has to offer in these sorts of things, and the Hebrew course is the best one of the Duolingo language courses, mostly due to the work of unpaid volunteers.

https://www.duolingo.com/co…
https://www.memrise.com/cou…

If you’re starting out with Duolingo, make sure to read the technical notes about how to optimize your keyboard.

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As for the risks living in Israel with Hamas, Fatah (PA) and the other crazies;

To quote General George S. Patton

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his. “

“You (the Arabs) have a choice , The peace of prosperity or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours”

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The Israel-Palestinian Peace Process Has Been a Massive Charade

So long as Palestinian rejectionism runs rampant, debates about one-, two-, and three-state solutions are for naught.

Daniel Pipes April 10 2017
About the author
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.


Palestinians burning placards bearing the Israeli flag in 2016 in Gaza. MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images.

Palestinians burning placards bearing the Israeli flag in 2016 in Gaza. MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images.

Daniel Polisar of Shalem College in Jerusalem shook the debate over Palestinian-Israeli relations in November 2015 with his essay, “What Do Palestinians Want?” In it, having studied 330 polls to “understand the perspective of everyday Palestinians” toward Israel, Israelis, Jews, and the utility of violence against them, he found that Palestinian attackers are “venerated” by their society—with all that that implies.

 

He’s done it again with “Do Palestinians Want a Two-State Solution?” This time, he pored over some 400 opinion polls of Palestinian views to find consistency among seemingly contradictory evidence on the topic of ways to resolve the conflict with Israel. From this confusing bulk, Polisar convincingly establishes that Palestinians collectively hold three related views of Israel: it has no historical or moral claim to exist, it is inherently rapacious and expansionist, and it is doomed to extinction. In combination, these attitudes explain and justify the widespread Palestinian demand for a state from “the river to the sea,” the grand Palestine of their maps that erases Israel.

 

With this analysis, Polisar has elegantly dissected the phenomenon that I call Palestinian rejectionism. That’s the policy first implemented by the monstrous mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, in 1921 and consistently followed over the next near-century. Rejectionism demands that Palestinians (and beyond them, Arabs and Muslims) repudiate every aspect of Zionism: deny Jewish ties to the land of Israel, fight Jewish ownership of that land, refuse to recognize Jewish political power, refuse to trade with Zionists, murder Zionists where possible, and ally with any foreign power, including Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, to eradicate Zionism.

 

The continuities are striking. All major Palestinian leaders—Amin al-Husseini, Ahmad al-Shukeiri, Yasir Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Yahya Sinwar (the new leader of Hamas in Gaza)—have made eliminating the Zionist presence their only goal. Yes, for tactical reasons, they occasionally compromised, most notably in the Oslo Accords of 1993, but then they reversed these exceptions as soon as possible.

 

In other words, the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” that began in 1989 has been a massive charade. As Israelis earnestly debated making “painful concessions,” their Palestinian counterparts issued promises they had had no intention of fulfilling, something Arafat had the gall publicly to signal to his constituency even as he signed the Oslo Accords, and many times subsequently.

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Elder of Ziyon logo http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

Elder of Ziyon logo http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/

 

Arab Bank turning away Palestinian terror (and potential terror) accounts out of fear of lawsuits

By Elder of Ziyon 20January2020 http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2020/01/arab-bank-turning-away-palestinian.html

Arab Bank

Arab Bank

Just yesterday I reviewed “Harpoon,” the account of how Israel was going after terrorists by going after their sources of money, and how lawsuits against banks that paid terrorists were a very effective method of doing exactly that.

 

Here are excerpts of a Mondoweiss article published just now that shows that this works:

 

Palestinian community orgs and ex-prisoners say the Arab Bank is closing their accounts

 

When [Aida Youth Center (AYC)’s Anas Abu Srour] asked why the account was being closed, Abu Srour said he was told it was an “internal policy” decision. “They refused to elaborate more than that,” he said.

 

The incident with the AYC came just a few days after a class action lawsuit was filed against the Jordan-based Arab Bank by the families of Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks.

 

The plaintiffs, numbering over a thousand Israelis, are suing the bank for NIS 20 billion ($5.8 billion) in compensation, claiming the bank “knowingly supported and financed terror groups that carried out attacks that claimed hundreds of lives,” the Times of Israel reported in December.

 

The suit claims that the Arab Bank played an integral role in the attacks, knowingly funding individual Palestinian attackers as well as organized groups.

 

Mondoweiss learned that the incident with the AYC was not an isolated event, and that in recent months the Arab Bank has reportedly been closing the accounts, or refusing to open new accounts, for other community-based organizations, former Palestinian prisoners, and the families of Palestinians killed by Israelis.

 

30-year-old Ahmad Salah from the al-Khader village, was recently notified that his application to open up an account with the Arab Bank was denied.

 

Salah, a former prisoner, wanted to switch from his current bank to the Arab Bank, which has a branch that is closer to his home.

 

“When I returned two weeks after applying to check on my status, the employee checked my file, and he suddenly became shy, as if he was ashamed,” Salah told Mondoweiss.

 

The employee asked Salah to take a seat, and his manager would come to explain the situation to him. When the manager arrived, Salah was shocked to hear his answer.

 

“The manager came and told me ‘we can’t open an account for you because you were in Israeli prison,” Salah recounted. “I asked, ‘what does this have to do with anything?’ This is a Palestinian bank, not an Israeli bank.”

 

Salah alleges that the manager told him the bank was “having a lot of issues in court with the Israelis,” and due to pressures from the Israeli government, couldn’t “take the risk” of opening an account for someone with his profile.

This is the best article I’ve ever read at Mondoweiss.

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The Finger of Hashem

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Metaphor for Middle East history: Palestinian rioters roll burning tires at Israelis, set own factory on fire

Posted by Monday, February 26, 2018 https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/02/metaphor-for-middle-east-history-palestinian-rioters-roll-burning-tires-at-israelis-set-own-factory-on-fire/

“one flaming tire had other plans and changed direction, rolling directly into a nearby plastics factory”

 

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB

We probably shouldn’t laugh about this, because there’s some innocent Palestinian plastics factory owner who no longer has a business.

 

But then again, there’s something about this story that serves as a somewhat humorous metaphor for the Middle East dispute.

 

Via The Times of Israel, Palestinians Accidentally Burn Down Own Factory:

Palestinian protesters in the West Bank inadvertently burned down a local factory this week while confronting IDF soldiers near the West Bank city of Nablus.

According to Hadashot news, protesters in the Nablus-area village of Beita on Sunday were clashing with IDF soldiers, and rolled burning tires in their direction.

But one flaming tire had other plans and changed direction, rolling directly into a nearby plastics factory.

The building went up in flames and the factory was completely destroyed.

The report said Israeli firefighters arrived at the scene to help Palestinian Authority responders put out the fire.

This appears to be an image of the fire:

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Twitter

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Twitter

 

The Qusra Now Facebook page has several photos of the fire, which they blame on the Israelis:

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 5

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 5

 

 

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 4

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 4

 

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 3

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 3

 

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 2

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 2

 

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 1

Palestinian rioters set own factory on fire Qusra-FB 1

 

 

The Mossad (parody account) is giving its agents the day off after this feat:

The Mossad-tweet-25February2018-Palestinian rioters rolled a flaming tire at Israeli soldiers

The Mossad-tweet-25February2018-Palestinian rioters rolled a flaming tire at Israeli soldiers

 

And the jokes keep on rolling in:


— The Mossad: The Social Media Account (@TheMossadIL) February 25, 2018

The Mossad-The Social Media Account-25February2018-tweet-Palestinian rioters rolled a flaming tire at Israeli soldiers

The Mossad-The Social Media Account-25February2018-tweet-Palestinian rioters rolled a flaming tire at Israeli soldiers

And the jokes keep on rolling in:

The Mossad-The Social Media Account-tweet-25February2018-How many factories can the Palestinians burn down with a misplaced tire 365 in a Goodyear

The Mossad-The Social Media Account-tweet-25February2018-How many factories can the Palestinians burn down with a misplaced tire 365 in a Goodyear

 

Is it possible that the Israelis somehow took control of the tire and made it turn in a different direction?

 

Well, if they can use lizards, sharks, birds and other assorted animals for spying, how easy would it be to use their famous mind control techniques on a tire?

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נפל טיל היום ליד אריאל שרון / Today’s Israeli Irony: A Missile Falls Next to Ariel Sharon

15May2021 http://esseragaroth.blogspot.com/2021/05/todays-israeli-irony-missile-falls-next.html

מוצש״ק פר׳ במדבר תשפ״א

English follows the Hebrew.

לראשונה מיום חמישי – שוב מרכז הארץ על הכוונת, והפעם הטווח התרחב. בר”ג ההרוג מפגיעה ישירה. אש ונזק בטייבה, גבעת שמואל, ראשל”צ, חולון, ליד נתב”ג ושורת מוקדים. נפילות גם בכפרים פלסטיניים בשומרון. צה”ל הפיל מגדל מפורסם עם רשתות תקשורת בעזה, חמאס איים “להרעיד את תל אביב”. הג’יהאד האיסלאמי: “האויב ישלם מחיר גבוה”

יואב זיתון, אליאור לוי, אלי סניור, חסן שעלאן, סיון חילאי, אדיר ינקו, גלעד מורג ורועי רובינשטיין, 15.05.21

מעט לפני 14:00 שוב נשמעו אזעקות רבות, הפעם גם בשומרון, בעלי, וכן בטייבה – שם נרשמה נפילה. סביב 14:10 נורה מטח נוסף, ואזעקות נשמעו גם באלפי מנשה וקרני שומרון. במקביל המשיך הירי לדרום, לעוטף עזה ולאשדוד ואשקלון.

בגבעת שמואל נפגעו כמה בניינים וכלי רכב עלו באש. אחרי המטח הראשון – עשן היתמר ליד נתב”ג ובראשון לציון, ליד איקאה. נפילות של חלקי טילים או מיירטים נרשמו בין היתר בחולון, גבעת שמואל, בית דגן, יבנה, מושב גינתון, כפר חב”ד, ליד ניר צבי ובשדות דן…

…נפילת טיל בחניית המתנ”ס בגבעת שמואל (המשך…)

אהוד אולמרט, אריאל שרון, שמעון פרס (קדימה) ~תשפ״א
Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert (Kadima) c. 2005

אהוד אולמרט, אריאל שרון, שמעון פרס (קדימה) ~תשפ״א Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert (Kadima) c. 2005

אהוד אולמרט, אריאל שרון, שמעון פרס (קדימה) ~תשפ״א Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert (Kadima) c. 2005

עשר אגורות (2¢):

היום בשבת נכנסתי לממ״ד פעמיים בשכונה שלי שבמרכז הארץ.
באחת הערים שבמרכז,גבעת שמואל, דיווחו שנפל טיל בחניית המתנ”ס. אבל לא דיווחו שהחנניה הזו גם החנייה של מרכז לתרבות ואומנות הצמוד למתנ״ס. ועל שם מי קוראים למרכז הזה שבגבעת שמואל?
על שם אריאל שרון, רה״מ לשעבר שבשנת תשס״ה/2005 הנהיג את הממשלה בגירוש כמעט 10,000 יהודים מהביתם ומאדמותם שבעזה וצפון השומרון.
מה אתם אומרים על זה? איזה מקריות, נכון?
לא נראה לי.
מרכז אריאל שרון לתרבות ואומנות, גבעת שמוא Ariel Sharon Center for Art and Culture, Givat Shmuel

מרכז אריאל שרון לתרבות ואומנות, גבעת שמוא Ariel Sharon Center for Art and Culture, Givat Shmuel

בסרטון הבא מופיעים ציטוטים של חברי הכנסת (תשס״ה/2004), כולל שאול מופז, יובן שטייניץ, ורה״ש הנוחחי בנימין נתניהו, בדיונים על תכנית ההתנתקות תכנית גירוש היהודים של רה״מ לשעבר אריאל שרון. הדוברים הציעו תוצאות מאוד חיוביות אם התכנית תצא לפועל.

ח״כ אופיר פינס-פז אפילו הודה לרה״מ שרון שבנו שיתגייס עוד מעט לא יצטרך לשרת ברצועת עזה.

עכשיו כולנו יודעים שהם צדקו.

 

Politicians: “There is No Threat of Rockets from the Disengagement”

 

YNET: One killed in Ramat Gan as heavy rocket barrage fired at central Israel
Rockets also land in Taibeh, Rishon Lezion, Givat Shmuel and close to Ben-Gurion; buildings hit in earlier attack on Be’er Sheva as south endures morning of strikes on sixth day of fighting; IDF pounds Gaza from land and air

Ynet | Updated: 05.15.21 , 14:40

A man was killed Saturday afternoon in a rocket strike on the city of Ramat Gan as dozens of rockets were fired at the center of the country, targeting the greater Tel Aviv area and Ben-Gurion Airport.

 

Sirens sounded across the region, including in Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Rishon Lezion, Yavne, Ramat Gan, Bat Yam, Holon, Petah Tikva and Ramat HaSharon as well as in the West Bank settlement of Eli, north of Jerusalem…

 

…Another rocket struck Givat Shmuel, close to Ramat Gan, causing damage to buildings and setting a car on fire. (cont.)

Esser Agaroth (2¢):
Today on Shabbat afternoon, I had to go into the bomb shelter room twice, in my Tel-Aviv suburb. Thank goodness I was able to get some sleep the last two nights. I wish I could say the same for my fellow Jews in the South of Israel.

 

In one of these suburban cities, Givat Shmuel, it was reported that from the barrage of missiles launched from Gaza missile fell in the parking lot of the town’s community center. What was not reported was that this is the same parking lot for the adjacent center for culture and art. And for whom do you suppose this center for culture and art. is named?

 

It is named for Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister, who in תשפ״א/2005, led the Israeli Government’s deportation of almost 10,000 Jews from their homes and lands in Gaza and in the northern Shomron (Samaria).

 

Please tell me that you can see the irony in this.
Now watch the video above which is a compilation of quotes from Members of Knesset, including Shaul Mofaz, Yuval Sheinitz, and current Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, during discussions of Ariel Sharon’s “Unilateral Disengagement” Jewish Expulsion Plan. Those speaking offered predictions of positive results from implementing the plan.

 

MK Ofir Pines-Paz even thanked PM Ariel Sharon that his son who was soon enlisting in the IDF would not have to serve in the Gaza Strip.

 

What do you say about that?

 

Yes, I know this is from Arutz 7. But when they’re right, they’re right.

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Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Watch: Warned to evacuate before bombing, Gazan says: We want to die

“This is how we reveal your cruelty,” Gazan tells IDF representative.

Arutz Sheva Staff , 21May2021 https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/306581

In a video of an audio recording published on Sky News Arabic and tweeted by Israeli-Arab social activist Yoseph Haddad, a shocking conversation can be heard between an IDF representative (speaking in Arabic) and a resident of Gaza.

 

Following its usual practice, the IDF informed residents of a building of its intention to bomb it, and warned them to evacuate in advance. In the event that phone calls and text messages are insufficient, the IDF sometimes “roof-knocks,” dropping a small explosive device on the roof to scare people into leaving.

 

This time, the IDF representative calling came up against stubborn resistance to the idea of evacuation:

 

Emily Schrader-tweet-19May2021 Gazan says: We want to die.

Emily Schrader-tweet-19May2021 Gazan says: We want to die.

 

IDF: “Listen, we are going to bomb the building.”

Gazan: “You want to bomb? Bomb whatever you want.”

IDF: “No brother, we need to do everything we can so you don’t die.”

Gazan: “We want to die.”

IDF: “But you have a responsibility for the children’s lives.”

Gazan: “If the children need to die, then they’ll die.”

IDF: “G-d forbid, G-d forbid. What, do you want to die?”

Gazan: “This is how we reveal your cruelty.”

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[To the “Naysayers” who say: “We must do what the Goyim(Nations) want or they will embargo us!”. Just look at what we went through already, we prospered and grew.]

Remembering the hard times predating the startup nation

Exhibit at a Tel Aviv museum presents the period of rationing and restrictions of Israel’s first decade through rare photos, films, texts, documents.

By Rachel Neiman August 13, 2018, 7:00 am https://www.israel21c.org/remembering-the-hard-times-predating-the-startup-nation/

Under austerity, Israelis stood in line for hours to purchase basic products with ration coupons. Photo credit: GPO

Under austerity, Israelis stood in line for hours to purchase basic products with ration coupons. Photo credit: GPO

This year’s celebrations of the State of Israel’s 70th anniversary have focused justifiably on the startup nation’s great successes. Little has been written about the hardscrabble early years, the post-War of Independence austerity regime of the 1950s, when the newly established nation had no credit line and was on the verge of bankruptcy.

 

A new exhibition, “The Zionist Side of the Coin,” at the Discount Group’s HerzLilienblum Private Museum in Tel Aviv, examines the economic challenges faced from 1949 to 1959, when newborn Israel enforced a tzena (Hebrew for “austerity”).

 

Those years of rationing and other economic measures are presented through rare photographs and films, texts and documents.

 

Sponsored by the Discount Bank Group, the museum covers the Israeli banking sector and Tel Aviv nostalgia, and is fittingly located adjacent to the street where black-market money-changers once plied their trade.

 

“The Zionist Side of the Coin” exhibit presents examples of the locally manufactured goods produced under the aegis of the Ministry of Rationing and Supply. Photo: courtesy

“The Zionist Side of the Coin” exhibit presents examples of the locally manufactured goods produced under the aegis of the Ministry of Rationing and Supply. Photo: courtesy

What were the circumstances that gave rise to such measures? In a paper published by The Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal entitled, “Unexceptional for Once: Austerity and Food Rationing in Israel, 1939–1959,” researcher Guy Seidman describes the economic situation of the young state of Israel as “under exceptional pressure and near financial collapse.”

 

“As the grueling War of Independence came to its slow end by July 1949, with separate armistice agreements signed with most Arab nations, the country’s recovery was further slowed by an enormous influx of immigrants. It was widely understood that the government would have to declare an economic emergency situation in the country.”

 

“Given the time pressures and the familiarity with the British austerity scheme enforced before Israel’s establishment, the government chose to continue the use of the mandatory emergency legislation of 1939.”

 

Under the British Mandate, Seidman points out, “the mandatory legal regulatory scheme put in place in Palestine was part of the food control scheme also put into effect throughout the entire British empire.”

 

In early 1949, the government established a Ministry of Rationing and Supply, in charge of rationing food, clothing and all essential provisions, and going after black marketeers.

 

A food controller posted at the market to settle small complaints on the spot. Photo: GPO

A food controller posted at the market to settle small complaints on the spot. Photo: GPO

Life under austerity was not easy. The Ministry of Rationing and Supply created a “basket” of basic products, such as sugar, oil, bread and margarine, which could be purchased only in authorized stores.

 

Coupon books allocated the type and amount of food and clothes to be consumed. People stood in line for hours to obtain goods — if they were available.

 

According to local historian David Sela, curator of the wonderful Nostalgia Israel website, the austerity regime “turned every neighborhood grocery store into a government agency because every citizen had to register at the store, after which every family received a ration coupon book.”

 

People tried to stay on the grocer’s good side; one argument could mean getting a half-loaf of bread instead of a whole one.

 

In a television interview given during the 2011 butter shortage, Sela told stories about the truly hard times.

 

“The allocation per person was 1,600 calories per day only. There was a strict directive. They brought in an international expert whose guidelines were: decide how the amount a person could consume each day without starving to death. And the allocation was a half loaf of bread per person, per day, 60 grams of corn, of rice, of legumes, but only 0.75 grams of meat per month.”

 

An entire industry of ersatz products was developed: chicory tablets replaced coffee, soup cubes instead of chicken soup, powdered eggs and milk instead of the real thing. According to Sela, “There wasn’t any fruit so they manufactured a compote that was reminiscent of the taste of fruit. A factory was set up precisely for this purpose.”

 

The ministry also determined import volume, the supply of raw materials and goods to trade and industry, and managed agricultural and industrial production and export. The goal was to strengthen local production and export, reduce and perhaps even prevent the state’s dependence on foreign imports, and reduce its dependence on foreign currency.

 

In 1949, the government established a Ministry of Rationing and Supply. Photo credit: The Israel Internet Association via PikiWiki

In 1949, the government established a Ministry of Rationing and Supply. Photo credit: The Israel Internet Association via PikiWiki

This led the ministry to expand the basket of basic products to include utilitarian furniture, clothing and footwear – all of which could be purchased if one had enough coupons.

 

To combat profiteering, the Ministry of Rationing and Supply implemented strict enforcement measures, a system of inspectors and special courts, a propaganda campaign, and assistance from the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) to search vehicles and confiscate illegally procured goods.

 

Sela: “A black market developed in which you could buy things under the table. Whoever had a cousin or a relative living on a kibbutz was set for life. ‘Children of the cream’ — those were the kibbutzniks. The expression came into being because if you were a kibbutznik then you had access to cream.”

 

Golda Meir with children in Israel, 1950. Photo by Teddy Brenner

Golda Meir with children in Israel, 1950. Photo by Teddy Brenner

Throughout the austerity period, unemployment was high and inflation grew. On the positive, side, austerity enabled the state to preserve an adequate standard of living while at the same time integrate and resettle more than 700,000 Jewish refugees from Europe and the Arab world.

 

Seidman: “Gradually, as the economic situation improved and the emergency scheme’s failings began to outweigh its benefits, public pressure brought about the dissolution of the austerity regime. The Rationing and [Supply] Ministry was disbanded in late 1950, and the responsibility for rationing was transferred to other government ministries. From 1952 on [when the reparations agreement with Germany was signed], the austerity regime was gradually rolled back. By 1959 the Israeli government decided to formally end the austerity regime entirely.”

 

Items displayed in “The Zionist Side of the Coin” exhibit at the HerzLilienblum Museum in Tel Aviv. Photo: courtesy

Items displayed in “The Zionist Side of the Coin” exhibit at the HerzLilienblum Museum in Tel Aviv. Photo: courtesy

The HerzLilienblum Museum exhibit stresses the amazing nation-building efforts conducted during those years: loans were secured for infrastructure development (electric and other power stations, roadwork, communications systems, etc.), and the foundations of social legislation were laid (laws governing national insurance, work hours, maternity leave and more).

 

Another part of the exhibit is devoted to the creation of Israel’s currency. In February 1948, the British cut off the Israeli pound from the pound sterling market – a move that could have created monetary uncertainty. In a brave move — given that Israel’s independence had not yet been declared — the monetary infrastructure for the future state was created, and the Anglo-Palestine Bank (later renamed Bank Leumi) issued the new Israeli pound (also called “lira”).

 

There are also examples of the locally manufactured goods produced under the aegis of the Ministry of Rationing and Supply: school notebooks, “Flit” mosquito sprayers, washboards, and the ubiquitous Wonder Pot, which served as an all-purpose stovetop oven for all new immigrants.

 

Their nostalgic charm aside, the poverty of these items reinforces the exhibit’s message about the social and economic phenomenon that, only 70 years on, is a thriving, modern state of Israel.

 

Discount Group – HerzLilienblum Private Museum is located at the corner of Herzl and Lilienblum streets in Tel Aviv. Visits by appointment. For information, click here.

 

[Remeber this is Anti-Semitism]

Beyond Charlottesville – Canary Mission

Beyond Charlottesville from Canary Mission on Vimeo.

Why Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism

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https://www.janglo.net/

https://www.janglo.net/

Here is what Hatzalah volunteers in Sderot were doing last night while rockets rained down

Zev Stub 09 August 2018 https://www.janglo.net/index.php?option=com_adsmanager&page=display&catid=99&tid=450950#.W2w1NO0yGFI.facebook

 

Last night, United Hatzalah volunteers, like many of the residents of Sderot and the other towns in the Gaza periphery, were up all night due to a constant barrage of rocket fire from Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The rocket fire was meant to kill them, their children and their families. 15 people were injured and dozens more suffered from emotional or psychological shock and distress.

 

Two of the volunteers who served the communities in and around Gaza in their time of need last night wrote their thoughts on the events that transpired.

 

United Hatzalah volunteer EMT Yaakov Bar Yochai in Sderot wrote:

 

It’s just after 7:30 p.m. and I am getting ready to go to a social event at the home of a good friend of mine from work. He lives in the nearby city of Netivot. That is when I hear the first siren wail. The red alert siren sounds and I don’t have time to make it to a protective shelter when a massive explosion erupts from somewhere behind me. It is very clear that the rocket fired from Gaza has hit something in the city and that it exploded very close to my house. I contact United Hatzalah’s National Dispatch and Command Center in Jerusalem and try to gather information about where exactly the rocket exploded. From what they tell me, the rocket exploded the next street down from my home.

 

I rush over on my ambucycle, and just seconds later I arrive at a scene of total chaos. I see a man bleeding from cuts that he sustained in his arm when pieces of shrapnel from the rocket struck him. When I finish treating him, I see that a number of people are suffering from emotional shock and I begin treating and stabilizing them. From there I am dispatched by the Command Center to another location in the next neighborhood where another rocket exploded after striking a direct hit in the courtyard of a house. I treat more people suffering from shock.

 

More sirens begin to sound, and I realize that it will likely be a very long night. I jump from location to location, wherever the rockets fall, treating the people who suffered physical and emotional injuries and comforting others who are suffering from stress reactions. I, together with my team of volunteers in the city, spend the entire night treating people. My friend heard what was happening in the city, and understood that I wouldn’t be coming. He tried calling but I was to busy to answer. I sent him a message letting him know that I was okay and that I will speak with him later in the week, but for now, there was work to do.

 

The night carries on. The rockets continue to fall. The Iron Dome intercepts some, but not nearly enough. Rockets fall, people get hurt, and I rush to the scene to help them. This was the pattern of my night, just like it was a few weeks ago, the last time Hamas decided to fire rockets at us for a day straight, and just like it has been, on and off for the past 12 years.

 

The clock turns over and suddenly it is 4:10 a.m. on Thursday morning. Where did the time go? I walk into my house in order to sleep for a bit before I have to get up to pray in the morning and then go to work. I don’t even make it to the bedroom, rather I collapse on my sofa.

 

But our enemies have different plans. Another siren sounds and another rocket falls. They don’t want us to sleep and they don’t want us to work. They want to eradicate us entirely. But I, together with my fellow first responders at United Hatzalah, will do everything we can to make sure that the people who live here are safe and receive the treatment they need when they need it.”

 

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Happy Birthday CIA: 7 Truly Terrible Things The Agency Has Done In 70 Years

by Tyler Durden Sep 19, 2017 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-19/happy-birthday-cia-7-truly-terrible-things-agency-has-done-70-years

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

On Monday, President Trump tweeted birthday wishes to the Air Force and the CIA. Both became official organizations 70 years ago on September 18, 1947, with the implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.

 

After spending years as a wartime intelligence agency called the Office of Strategic Services, the agency was solidified as a key player in the federal government’s operations with then-President Harry Truman’s authorization.

 

In the seventy years since, the CIA has committed a wide variety of misdeeds, crimes, coups, and violence. Here are seven of the worst programs they’ve carried out (that are known to the public):

 

1.Toppling governments around the world

The CIA is best known for its first coup, Operation Ajax, in 1953, in which it ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, reinstating the autocratic Shah, who favored western oil interests. That operation, which the CIA now admits to waging with British intelligence, ultimately resulted in the 1979 revolution and subsequent U.S. hostage crisis. Relations between the U.S. and Iran remain strained to this day, aptly described by the CIA-coined term “blowback.”

 

But the CIA has had a hand in toppling a number of other democratically elected governments, from Guatemala (1954) and the Congo (1960) to the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973). The CIA has aimed to install leaders who appease American interests, often empowering oppressive, violent dictators. This is only a partial list of countries where the CIA covertly attempted to exploit and manipulate sovereign nations’ governments.

 

2. Operation Paperclip

In one of the more bizarre CIA plots, the agency and other government departments employed Nazi scientists both within and outside the United States to gain an advantage over the Soviets. As summarized by NPR:

 

The aim [of Operation Paperclip] was to find and preserve German weapons, including biological and chemical agents, but American scientific intelligence officers quickly realized the weapons themselves were not enough.

 

They decided the United States needed to bring the Nazi scientists themselves to the U.S. Thus began a mission to recruit top Nazi doctors, physicists and chemists — including Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the rockets that took man to the moon.

They kept this plot secret, though they admitted to it upon the release of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America by Annie Jacobsen. In a book review, the CIA wrote that “Henry Wallace, former vice president and secretary of commerce, believed the scientists’ ideas could launch new civilian industries and produce jobs.”

 

They praised the book’s historical accuracy, noting “that the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was headed by Kurt Debus, an ardent Nazi.” They acknowledged that “General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviets, was hired by the US Army and later by the CIA to operate 600 ex-Nazi agents in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany.”

 

Remarkably, they noted that Jacobsen “understandably questions the morality of the decision to hire Nazi SS scientists,” but praise her for pointing out that it was done to fight Soviets. They also made sure to add that the Soviets hired Nazis, too, apparently justifying their own questionable actions by citing their most loathed enemy.

 

3. Operation CHAOS

The FBI is widely known for its COINTELPRO schemes to undermine communist movements in the 1950s and anti-war, civil rights, and black power movements in the 1960s, but the CIA has not been implicated nearly as deeply because, technically, the CIA cannot legally engage in domestic spying. But that was of little concern to President Lyndon B. Johnson as opposition to the Vietnam war grew. According to former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner, as documented in his extensive CIA history, Legacy of Ashes, Johnson instructed then-CIA Director Richard Helms to break the law:

 

In October 1967, a handful of CIA analysts joined in the first big Washington march against the war. The president regarded protesters as enemies of the state. He was convinced that the peace movement was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He wanted proof. He ordered Richard Helms to produce it.

 

Helms reminded the president that the CIA was barred from spying on Americans. He says Johnson told him: ‘I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs…’

Helms obeyed. Weiner wrote:

 

In a blatant violation of his powers under the law, the director of central intelligence became a part-time secret police chief. The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos. It went on for almost seven years… Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.”

According to Weiner, “the agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over America.” Because they could not draw a “clear distinction” between the new far left and mainstream opposition to the war, the CIA spied on every major peace organization in the country. President Johnson also wanted them to prove a connection between foreign communists and the black power movement. “The agency tried its best,” Weiner noted, ultimately noting that “the CIA never found a shred of evidence that linked the leaders of the American left or the black-power movement to foreign governments.

 

4. Infiltrating the media

Over the years, the CIA has successfully gained influence in the news media, as well as popular media like film and television. Its influence over the news began almost immediately after the agency was formed. As Weiner explained, CIA Director Allen Dulles established firm ties with newspapers:

 

Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.”

He continued:

 

It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information…The men who responded to the CIA’s call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Life, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader’s Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.”

The CIA’s influence had not waned by 1977 when journalist Carl Bernstein reported on publications with CIA agents in their employ, as well as “more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

 

The CIA has also successfully advised on and influenced numerous television shows, such as Homeland and 24 and films like Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, which push narratives that ultimately favor the agency. According to Tricia Jenkins, author of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film & Television, a concerted agency effort began in the 1990s to counteract negative public perceptions of the CIA, but their influence reaches back decades. In the 1950s, filmmakers produced films for the CIA, including the 1954 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

 

Researchers Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, whose work has been published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, say their recent Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that the CIA — along with the military — have influenced over 1,800 films and television shows, many of which have nothing to do with CIA or military themes.

 

5. Drug-induced Mind control

In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with drugs to determine whether they might be useful in extracting information. As Smithsonian Magazine has noted of the MKUltra project:

 

The project, which continued for more than a decade, was originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology. It ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.”

Further:

 

The intent of the project was to study ‘the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,’ according to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977. The project was conducted in extreme secrecy, Turner said, because of ethical and legal questions surrounding the program and the negative public response that the CIA anticipated if MKUltra should become public.

 

Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could:’ ‘promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;’ ‘render the induction of hypnosis easier;’ ‘enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;’ produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients– ‘people who could not fight back,’ in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.

 

Further, as Weiner noted:

 

Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York Hotel.”

Weiner added that senior CIA officers destroyed “almost all of the records” of the programs, but that while the “evidence that remains is fragmentary…it strongly suggests that use of secret prisons for the forcible drug-induced questioning of suspect agents went on throughout the 1950s.

 

Years later, the CIA would be accused of distributing crack-cocaine into poor black communities, though this is currently less substantiated and supported mostly by accounts of those who claim to have been involved.

 

6. Brutal torture tactics

More recently, the CIA was exposed for sponsoring abusive, disturbing terror tactics against detainees at prisons housing terror suspects. An extensive 2014 Senate report documented agents committing sexual abuse, forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, waterboarding them so severely it sometimes led to convulsions, and imposing forced rectal feeding, to name a few examples. Ultimately, the agency had very little actionable intelligence to show for their torture tactics but lied to suggest they did, according to the torture report. Their torture tactics led the International Criminal Court to suggest the CIA, along with the U.S. armed forces, could be guilty of war crimes for their abuses.

 

7. Arming radicals

The CIA has a long habit of arming radical, extremist groups that view the United States as enemies. In 1979, the CIA set out to support Afghan rebels in their bid to defeat the Soviet occupation of the Middle Eastern country. As Weiner wrote, in 1979, “Prompted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter signed a covert-action order for the CIA to provide the Afghan rebels with medical aid, money, and propaganda.

 

As Weiner detailed later in his book:

 

The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who doled out the CIA’s guns and money favored the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.”

Though some speculate the CIA directly armed Osama bin Laden, that is yet to be fully proven or admitted. What is clear is that western media revered him as a valuable fighter against the Soviets, that he arrived to fight in Afghanistan in1980, and that al-Qaeda emerged from the mujahideen, who were beneficiaries of the CIA’s program. Stanford University has noted that Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian cleric, “established Al Qaeda from the fighters, financial resources, and training and recruiting structures left over from the anti-Soviet war.” Much of those “structures” were provided by the agency. Intentionally or not, the CIA helped fuel the rise of the terror group.

 

Weiner noted that as the CIA failed in other countries like Libya, by the late 1980s “Only the mujahideen, the Afghan holy warriors, were drawing blood and scenting victory. The CIA’s Afghan operation was now a $700-million-dollar-a-year-program” and represented 80% of the overseas budget of the clandestine services. “The CIA’s briefing books never answered the question of what would happen when a militant Islamic army defeated the godless invaders of Afghanistan,” though Tom Twetten, “the number two man in the clandestine service in the summer of 1988,” was tasked with figuring out what would happen with the Afghan rebels. “We don’t have any plan,” he concluded.

 

Apparently failing to learn their lesson, the CIA adopted nearly the exact same policy in Syria decades later, arming what they called “moderate rebels” against the Assad regime. Those groups ultimately aligned with al-Qaeda groups. One CIA-backed faction made headlines last year for beheading a child (though President Trump cut off the CIA program in June, the military continues to align with “moderate” groups).

 

* * *

 

Unsurprisingly, this list is far from complete. The CIA has engaged in a wide variety of extrajudicial practice, and there are likely countless transgressions we have yet to learn about.

 

As Donald Trump cheers the birthday of an agency he himself once criticized, it should be abundantly clear that the nation’s covert spy agency deserves scrutiny and skepticism — not celebration.

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The Future Of The Third World

by Tyler Durden Aug 20, 2017 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-20/future-third-world
Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Acting-Man.com,

Decolonization

The British Empire was the largest in history. At the end of World War II Britain had to start pulling out from its colonies. A major part of the reason was, ironically, the economic prosperity that had come through industrialization, massive improvements in transportation, and the advent of telecommunications, ethnic and religious respect, freedom of speech, and other liberties offered by the empire.

Colonization_1945

Colonization_1945

 

 

The colors represent the colonies of various nations in 1945, and the colonial borders of that time – click to enlarge.

After the departure of the British — as well as the French, German, Belgians, and other European colonizers — most of the newly “independent” countries suffered rapid decay in their institutions, stagnant economies, massive social strife, and a fall in standards of living. An age of anti-liberalism and tyranny descended on these former colonies. They rightly became known as third-world countries.

 

An armchair economist would have assumed that the economies of these former colonies, still very backward and at a very low base compared to Europe, would grow at a faster rate. Quite to the contrary, as time went on, their growth rates stayed lower than those of the West.

 

Socialism and the rise of dictators were typically blamed for this — at least among those on the political Right. This is not incorrect, but it is a merely proximate cause. Clarity might have been reached if people had contemplated the reason why Marxism and socialism grew like weeds in the newly independent countries.

 

Was There a Paradigm Shift in the 1980s?

According to conventional wisdom, the situation changed after the fall of the socialist ringleader, the USSR, in the late 1980s. Ex-colonized countries started to liberalize their economies and widely accepted democracy, leading to peace, the spread of education and equality, the establishment of liberal, independent institutions. Massive economic growth ensued and was sustained over the past three decades. The “third world” was soon renamed “emerging markets.”

 

Alas, this is a faulty narrative. Economic growth did pick up in these poor countries, and the rate of growth did markedly exceed that of the West, but the conventional narrative confuses correlation with causality. It tries to fit events to ideological preferences, which assume that we are all the same, that if Europeans could progress, so should everyone else, and that all that matters are correct incentives and appropriate institutions.

Soviet era_ Major Newspaper headlines

Soviet era_ Major Newspaper headlines

 

 

The beginning and end of the Soviet communist era in newspaper headlines. The overthrow of Kerensky’s interim government was the start of Bolshevik rule. To be precise, the Bolsheviks took over shortly thereafter, when they disbanded the constituent assembly in in early 1918 and subsequently gradually did the same to all non-Bolshevik Soviets that had been elected. A little more than seven decades later, the last Soviet Bolshevik leader resigned. It is worth noting that by splitting the Russian Federation from the Ukraine and Belorussia, Yeltsin effectively removed Gorbachev from power – the latter was suddenly president of a country that no longer existed and chairman of a party that was declared illegal in Russia. [PT] – click to enlarge.

 

The claimed liberalization in the “emerging markets” after the collapse of the USSR did not really happen. Progress was always one step forward and two steps back. In some ways, government regulations and repression of businesses in the “emerging markets” have actually gotten much worse. Financed by increased taxes, governments have grown by leaps and bounds — not for the benefit of society but for that of the ruling class — and are now addicted to their own growth.

 

The ultimate underpinnings of the so-called emerging markets haven’t changed. Their rapid economic progress during the past three decades — a one-off event — happened for reasons completely different from those assumed by most economists. The question is: once the effect of the one-off event has worn off, will emerging markets revert to the stagnation, institutional degradation, and tyranny that they had leaped into soon after the European colonizers left?

 

The One-Off Event: What Actually Changed in the 1980s

In the “emerging markets” (except for China) synchronized favorable economic changes were an anomaly. They resulted in large part from the new, extremely cheap telephony that came into existence (a result of massive cabling of the planet implemented in the 1980s) and the subsequent advent of the new technology of the internet. The internet enabled instantaneous transfer of technology from the West and as a consequence, unprecedented economic growth in “emerging markets.”

 

Meanwhile, a real cultural, political, and economic renaissance started in China. It was an event so momentous that it changed the economic structure not just of China, but of the whole world. Because China is seen as a communist dictatorship, it fails to be fully appreciated and respected by intellectuals who are obsessed with the institution of democracy.

 

But now that the low-hanging fruit from the emergence of the internet and of China (which continues to progress) have been plucked, the “emerging markets” (except, again, for China) are regressing to their normal state: decay in their institutions, stagnant economies, and social strife. They should still be called the “third world.”

 

There are those who hold China in contempt for copying Western technology, but they don’t understand that if copying were so easy, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia would have done the same. They were, after all, prepared for progress by their colonial history.

 

European colonizers brought in the rule of law and significantly reduced the tribal warfare that was a matter of daily routine in many of the colonies — in the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Britain and other European nations set up institutional structures that allowed for the accumulation of intellectual and financial capital. Western-style education and democracy were initiated. But this was helpful in a very marginal way.

 

What is Wrong with the Third World

For those who have not traveled and immersed themselves in formerly colonized countries, it is hard to understand that although there was piping for water and sewage in Roman days, it still isn’t available for a very large segment of the world’s population. The wheel has existed for more than 5,000 years, but a very large number of people continue to carry water in pots on their heads.

 

Roman lead piping

Roman lead piping

 

Lead piping supplying water to homes already existed in Roman days, 2000 years ago.

 

Ljubljana wheel

Ljubljana wheel

 

The Ljubljana Marshes Wheel, which is more than 5,000 years old

 

Carrying pot of water, Maralwadi, Karnataka, India, Asia

Carrying pot of water, Maralwadi, Karnataka, India, Asia

There are easily a billion or more people today, who have no concept of either the pipe or the wheel, even if they went to school. It is not the absence of technology or money that is stopping these people from starting to use some basic forms of technology. It is something else.

 

 

Sir Winston Churchill, the war-time Prime Minister of Britain, talking about the future of Palestine said:

Sir Winston Churchill, the war-time Prime Minister of Britain

Sir Winston Churchill, the war-time Prime Minister of Britain

 

“I do not admit… that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race… has come in and taken their place.”

 

Cigar-puffing British war-time PM Winston Churchill was as politically incorrect as they come. If he were alive today, he would probably be labeled the newest Hitler by the press and spend 90% of his time apologizing. Perhaps we shouldn’t mention this, but there are many Churchill monuments dotted across Europe and one can be found in Washington DC as well (alert readers will notice that a decidedly non-triggered Washington Post fondly remembered Churchill as an “elder statesman” a mere 10 months ago; rest assured that won’t stop the social justice warrior brigade if they decide to airbrush him out of history). Just to make this clear, your editor is not exactly the biggest fan of the man who traded away half of Europe to Stalin because he felt he could “trust the Soviet communist government” and who was clearly a tad too enamored of war, a characteristic Robert Kaplan described in his strident, amoral pro-war screed Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos as follows: “Churchill’s unapologetic warmongering arose not from a preference for war, but from a breast-beating Victorian sense of imperial destiny…” Neither the breast-beating nor the sense of imperial destiny are really our thing, but we tip our hat to the man’s utter lack of political correctness and his associated willingness to offend all and sundry with a nigh Trumpian alacrity and determination. [PT]

 

On Islam, he said:

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist…”

 

Talking about India he famously said:

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

 

A remark often attributed to Churchill, although this remains unverified, has certainly stood the test of time so far:

“If independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low caliber and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles. A day will come when even air and water will be taxed in India.”

 

Europeans of that time clearly knew that there was something fundamentally different between the West and the rest, and that the colonies would not survive without the pillars and the cement European management provided.

 

With the rise of political correctness this wisdom was erased from our common understanding – but it is something that may well return to haunt us in the near future, as the third world fails to fulfill expectations, while people who immigrate to Europe, Canada, Australia and the US from there fail to assimilate.

 

The Missing Underpinnings: Reason And All That Depends On It

Until now, the hope among people in the World Bank, the IMF, and other armchair intellectuals was that once the correct incentives were in place and institutions were organized, these structures imposed from on high would put the third world on a path to perpetual growth. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

 

The cart has been put in front of the horse. It is institutions that emerge from the underlying culture, not the other way around. And cultural change is a process taking millennia, perhaps even longer. As soon as Europeans quit their colonies, the institutional structures they left started to crumble.

 

Alas, it takes a Ph.D. from an Ivy League college and a quarter of a million dollar salary at the World Bank or the IMF to not understand what the key issue with development economics and institutional failures is: the missing ingredient in the third world was and is the concept of objective, impartial reason – the basis of laws and institutions that protect individual rights.

 

This concept of reason took 2,500 years to develop and get infused into the culture, memes, and genes of Europeans — a difficult process that, even in Europe, was never fully completed. European institutions were at their root products of this concept.

 

Thomas Paine quote

Thomas Paine quote

 

 

A justly famous quote by Thomas Paine (a prolific writer with a side job as a founding father and revolutionary). Paine was deeply suspicious of self-anointed authorities, both of the secular and clerical variety, who in turn regarded him as dangerous. His writings inter alia provoked a so-called “pamphlet war” in Britain (it would be best if all wars were conducted via pamphlets). [PT]

 

Despite massive efforts by missionaries, religious and secular, and of institutions imposed on poor countries, reason failed to get transmitted. Whatever marginal improvement was achieved over 200 to 300 years of colonization is therefore slowly but surely undone.

 

Without reason, subsidiary concepts such as equality before the law, compassion and empathy won’t operate. Irrational societies simply cannot maintain institutions representing the rule of law and fairness. The consequence is that they cannot evolve or even maintain institutions the European colonizers left behind.

 

Any institutions imposed on them — schools, armies, elections, national executives, banking and taxation systems — must mutate to cater to the underlying irrationality and tribalism of the third world.

 

Western Institutions Have Mutated

Education has become a dogma in “emerging markets”, not a tool; it floats non-assimilated in the minds of people lacking objective reason. Instead of leading to creativity and critical thinking, it is used for propaganda by demagogues.

 

Without impartial reason, democracy is a mere tribal, geographical concept, steeped in arrogance. All popular and “educated” rhetoric to the contrary, I can think of no country in the non-western world that did well after it adopted “democracy.”

 

The spread of nationalism (which to a rational mind is about the commonality of values) has created crises by unifying people along tribal lines. The most visible example is provided by events in the Middle East, but the basic problem is the same in every South Asian and African country and in most of South America.

 

India, the geographical entity I grew up in, was rapidly collectivized under the flag and the national anthem. It has the potential to become the Middle East on steroids, once Hindutava (Hindu nationalism) has become deeply rooted in society.

 

Assessing the Current Predicament

In Burma, a whiff of democracy does not seem to have inhibited a genocide perpetrated by Buddhists against the Muslim Rohingya. Thailand (which was not colonized in a strictly political sense) has gone silent, but its crisis continues.

 

Turkey and Malaysia, among the better of these backward societies, have embarked on a path of rapid regression to their medieval pasts. South Africa, which not too long ago was considered a first-world country, got rid of apartheid only to end up with something even worse.

 

The same happened with Venezuela, which was among the richer countries of the world in the not-too-distant past. It is ready to implode, a fate that may befall Brazil as well one day. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and East Timor are widely acknowledged to be in a mess, and are getting worse by the day.

 

Indonesia took a breather for a few years and is now once again in the thrall of fanaticism. India is the biggest democracy, so its problems are actively ignored by the Western press, but they won’t be for long, as India continues to evolve toward a police state.

 

Botswana was seen as one of the countries with the fastest and longest-lasting economic growth. What was ignored was the fact that this rather large country has a very small population, which benefited hugely from diamonds and other natural resources. The top political layer of Botswana is still a leftover from the British. The local culture continues to corrode what was left by them, and there are clear signs that Botswana is past its peak.

 

Botswana Capital

Botswana Capital

 

Part of the central business district in Gaborone, Botswana. Long time readers may recall an article we posted about 2.5 years ago: “Botswana – Getting it Right in Africa”. We are not sure if much has changed since then, but it is worth recalling that Botswana started out as the third-poorest country in Africa when it became independent in 1966 and is today one the richest. The very small population (by African standards) combined with the large income the country obtains from diamond mining no doubt played a role in this, but being rich in natural resources means very little per se. Botswana never fell for Marxism. When the country gained independence, its political leadership adopted democracy and free markets and never looked back. Botswana is a very homogenous society in terms of religious and tribal affiliations, which differentiates the country from most other former colonial territories in Africa. From our personal – admittedly by now a bit dated – experience, we can state that Botswana is the only African country in which one is unlikely to encounter any corruption – not even the lowliest government minion will ask for bribes as far as we could tell (in many African countries, officials begin demanding bribes the moment one wants to cross the border). Considering all that, we are slightly more hopeful about Botswana, but it is not an island. Deteriorating conditions in neighboring countries may well prove contagious at some point. [PT]

 

Papua New Guinea was another country that was doing reasonably well before the Australians left. It is now rapidly regressing to its tribal, irrational, and extremely violent norms, where for all practical purposes rape is not even considered a crime.

 

Conclusion: A Vain Hope

The world may recognize most of the above, but it sees these countries’ problems as isolated events that can be corrected by further impositions of Western institutions, under the guidance of the UN or some such international (and therefore “non-colonialist”) organization.

 

Amusingly, our intellectual climate — a product of political correctness — is such that the third world is nowadays seen as the backbone of humanity’s future economic growth. Unfortunately, so-called emerging markets are probably headed for a chaotic future. The likeliest prospect is that these countries will continue to cater to irrational forces, particularly tribalism, and that they will consequently cease to exist, disintegrating into much smaller entities.

 

As the tide of economic growth goes out with the final phase of plucking the free gift of internet technology nearing its end, their problems will resurface rapidly – precisely when the last of those who were trained under the colonial system are sent to the “dustbin of history”.

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95% of status quo scientists FAIL this simple SCIENCE QUIZ… (take it yourself and see why)

Saturday, March 25, 2017 by: https://www.naturalnews.com/2017-03-25-science-quiz-95-of-status-quo-scientists-fail.html

 

Business Man Science Math Equation Chalkboard Box Confusion Questions

Business Man Science Math Equation Chalkboard Box Confusion Questions

 

 

(Natural News) As an independent scientist and lab science director of a globally accredited analytical laboratory (CWClabs.com), I’ve come to discover that most “status quo” scientists are woefully ignorant about real science.

 

Most of what gets paraded around as “science” in our society is nothing more than corporate propaganda pretending to be science. This is where all the “fake science” lies come from that tell us glyphosate is harmless, GMOs don’t cause cancer, fluoride is wonderful to ingest and mercury in vaccines is safe to inject into children.

 

But as I’ve interacted with university laboratories, science paper authors and scientific “thinkers” across the realm of science, I’ve come to realize something truly astonishing: Most status quo scientists are clueless about reality. What they think they know is mostly pseudoknowledge that’s been pushed onto them by medical schools or industry propaganda (Big Biotech, Big Pharma, Big Ag, the cancer industry, etc.). They absolutely do not want anyone waking people up to legitimate, independent science that might question the false narratives of the status quo. (My own efforts to educate the public about real science are so successful that the biotech industry maintains a full-time “negative P.R.” firm whose entire mission is to discredit me personally by spreading obviously fictional accusations. That’s how desperate they are to silence independent scientists who are educating the public.)

 

But don’t take my word for what I’ve said above. You need to see for yourself how incredibly ignorant many status quo scientists really are.

95% of status quo scientists FAIL this simple science quiz

To demonstrate the astonishing ignorance of status quo scientists and doctors, I’ve created a science quiz, found below, that 95% of status quo scientists FAIL for the simple reason that they are dogmatists more than they are legitimate scientists.

 

For example, nearly all scientists ridiculously believe that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant. This has been taught to every scientist with such repetitive insistence that nearly all scientists now take the concept as a matter of faith. (Note the word “faith,” not “fact.”) Even scientists reading this will initially think I’m wrong and that they are right, because the false idea that “the speed of light is a constant” has been hammered into their brains from the very first day of academic science training.

 

Yet it turns out that the speed of light isn’t a constant at all. Not even in a vacuum. And to make sure nobody uncovers the truth about the variance in the speed of light, the NIST literally defines the speed of light using circular logic which references the speed of light itself as a factor in determining the speed of light (see the full mathematical explanation below). As a result, when NIST says the speed of light is a constant, it is the mathematical equivalent of saying X = X, which of course is always true, no matter what the value of X. Yet, in the real universe, the speed of light isn’t a constant as you’ll see below. (Right there, nearly 95% of status quo scientists fail the quiz.)

 

Any scientist who says the speed of light is always a constant in a vacuum is scientifically ignorant and has been living under a massive cover-up perpetrated by the status quo scientific community (read below for more details) which pretends that c is a constant. But that’s nothing more than fake science.

 

Check out the quiz for yourself. If you know any science friends or colleagues, give them this quiz and see if they get even a single answer correct. I’ve given this quiz to many scientists, and not a single person has answered every science question correctly. Most scientists fail every question here. Every single one.

 

What does that tell you about the sad state of the “scientific” establishment in society today? It tells you that much of what its members believe is pseudoscience.

The SCIENCE QUIZ that 95% of status quo scientists FAIL

Here’s the five-question quiz. Answers are below.

#1) TRUE or FALSE: In a vacuum, the speed of light is a constant.

#2) TRUE or FALSE: In mammals, the lungs produce enormous quantities of blood platelets.

#3) TRUE or FALSE: At over 400 ppm, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are now the highest they’ve ever been on our planet.

#4) TRUE or FALSE: Mercury is extremely toxic in the environment but totally safe when injected into children via vaccines.

#5) TRUE OR FALSE: Type-2 diabetes can be reversed and cured.

Answers are given below, with detailed scientific citations, charts and additional links for exploration. Most of the links you’ll find here are links to science publications recognized by mainstream science such as Science Daily and Science Alert.

 

Also, watch my new documentary here which explains how independent, grassroots scientists (like myself) are now taking back “science” from the corrupt, corporate poisoners who have infested the scientific status quo with twisted falsehoods and deliberate disinformation to suppress human knowledge:

 

 

ANSWERS to the science quiz that 95% of status quo scientists FAIL

#1) TRUE or FALSE: In a vacuum, the speed of light is a constant.

Correct answer: FALSE

The speed is not a constant. Even in a vacuum, it varies in two important ways.

 

First, the speed of light varies based on the structure of the light. As explained in an article on ScienceNews.org — a well-known publication of mainstream science — entitled Speed of light not so constant after all, “Researchers led by optical physicist Miles Padgett at the University of Glasgow demonstrated the effect by racing photons that were identical except for their structure. The structured light consistently arrived a tad late.”

 

The article, which cites the peer-reviewed science paper at this link, goes on to state:

 

“It’s very impressive work,” says Robert Boyd, an optical physicist at the University of Rochester in New York. “It’s the sort of thing that’s so obvious, you wonder why you didn’t think of it first.”

 

They call it “obvious” now, you see, yet nearly the entire status quo scientific community still believes in the falsehood that the speed of light is a constant.

 

The very definition of the speed of light is a circular logic science hoax

Even the ScienceNews.org article openly admits the definition of c (the speed of light) is a science hoax, saying, ” While measuring c was once considered an important experimental problem, it is now simply specified to be 299,792,458 meters per second, as the meter itself is defined in terms of light’s vacuum speed.”

 

Hold the presses! Do you grasp what Science Alert just admitted? They’re saying that the very definition of the speed of light is a hoax because it’s defined in terms of the time it takes light to propagate across one meter of space. Yet the meter is, itself, defined as how far light travels in a certain amount of time, which is itself derived from the speed of light.

 

Thus, the speed of light is quite literally defined as a circular logic science hoax… the equivalent of a dictionary’s entry for the word “tadpole” saying literally, “See tadpole.”

 

In essence, the scientific community has engaged in a massive conspiracy to conceal variations in the speed of light by defining the speed of light as a self-referenced term, in total violation of scientific rationality and honesty. Because of this arbitrary definition of the speed of light, any variations in the actual speed of light will be hidden from all scientists, by definition.

 

Pioneering science thinker Rupert Sheldrake explains the obfuscation in more detail in his must-read book, Science Set Free which challenges many assumptions of the dishonest scientific establishment and points to a possible cyclical variation in the speed of light:

 

Not surprisingly, early measurements of the speed of light varied considerably, but by 1927, the measured values had converged to 299,796 kilometers per second. At the time, the leading authority on the subject concluded, “The present value of c is entirely satisfactory and can be considered more or less permanently established.” However, all around the world from about 1928 to 1945, the speed of light dropped by about 20 kilometers per second. The “best” values found by leading investigators were in impressively close agreement with each other. Some scientists suggested that the data pointed to cyclic variations in the velocity of light.

 

In the late 1940s the speed of light went up again by about 20 kilometers per second and a new consensus developed around the higher value. In 1972, the embarrassing possibility of variations in c was eliminated when the speed of light was fixed by definition. In addition, in 1983 the unit of distance, the meter, was redefined in terms of light. Therefore if any further changes in the speed of light happen, we will be blind to them because the length of the meter will change with the speed of light. (The meter is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.) The second is also defined in terms of light: it is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of vibration of the light given off by cesium 133 atoms in a particular state of excitation (technically defined as the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state).

 

#2) TRUE or FALSE: In mammals, the lungs produce enormous quantities of blood platelets (yes, the LUNGS)

Correct answer: TRUE

Nearly all status quo scientists fail this question because they’ve been taught that blood is solely produce in bone marrow, while the lungs are solely engaged in respiration, they believe.

 

It turns out that’s wildly false, even according to mainstream science publications such as Nature. It turns out that in mice, the lungs produce more blood platelets than bone marrow — an idea that nearly all present-day doctors and scientists will immediately condemn as “fake news” until they are properly educated about biological reality.

 

Here’s an article in ScienceAlert.com — a well-respected mainstream science publication — that spells it out, entitled An Unexpected New Lung Function Has Been Found – They Make Blood:

 

In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals’ circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components.

 

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco also discovered a previously unknown pool of blood stem cells that makes this happen inside the lung tissue – cells that were incorrectly assumed to mainly reside in bone marrow.

 

Gee, do you mean to tell me that doctors and scientists didn’t already know everything? Do you mean to tell me that after hundreds of years of medical science, somehow nobody noticed that more blood cells are manufactured in the lungs than in bone marrow?

 

Say it ain’t so… that doctors don’t know everything and might still have something to learn about anatomy, physiology and biology!

 

Just in case you don’t believe Science Alert, Science Daily also covers the story at this link:

 

Using video microscopy in the living mouse lung, UC San Francisco scientists have revealed that the lungs play a previously unrecognized role in blood production. As reported online March 22, 2017 in Nature, the researchers found that the lungs produced more than half of the platelets — blood components required for the clotting that stanches bleeding — in the mouse circulation. In another surprise finding, the scientists also identified a previously unknown pool of blood stem cells capable of restoring blood production when the stem cells of the bone marrow, previously thought to be the principal site of blood production, are depleted.

 

#3) TRUE or FALSE: At over 400 ppm, carbon dioxide levels are now the highest they’ve ever been on our planet

Correct answer: FALSE

This question trips up the younger “scientists” — if you can even call them that — nearly all of whom have been wildly indoctrinated by the climate change science hoax into thinking that 400 ppm of CO2 is a global emergency that will spell doom for humankind.

 

The entire climate change narrative is just pseudoscience being pushed onto gullible scientists who believe anything if it’s stated to them by an apparent “authority.” Most status quo scientists, it turns out, are obedient conformists who have long lost any real ability to think for themselves. So they go along with the most absurdly false ideas like believing that CO is a “pollutant” when, in reality, it’s the molecule of life for food-producing plants, rain forests and even greenhouse plant production. Plants across the planet are, in reality, starving for CO2. Without CO2, we would all die and the global food web would immediately collapse.

 

The following charts show you something that most climate change proponents have simply never seen: The true history of CO2 level variation and global temperature variation throughout Earth’s known history.

 

This first chart reveals how atmospheric CO2 was at nearly 7000 ppm in the Cambrian period, over 4000 ppb during the Devonian period, over 2500 ppm during the Jurassic period and has plummeted to nearly its lowest point in Earth’s history today, at around 400 ppm.

 

At the same time, Earth’s average global temperature has gone through several cycles, varying roughly from 12 C to 22 C, and it currently stands at nearly its lowest average point in Earth’s history. (You can find dozens of different charts depicting the same data, by the way. This isn’t some secret archive of temperature and CO2 data.)

 

CO2 global temperature history chart

CO2 global temperature history chart

 

 

Yet when climate change alarmists show us charts that claim to show a catastrophic rise in CO2 levels, they zoom in to the scale of just a few centuries, wildly exaggerating a short-term rise to make it look like a catastrophic level of CO2 that’s never been witnessed before. Look at this chart, for example, from GSU.edu:

 

CO2 atmosphere 1750-2010

CO2 atmosphere 1750-2010

 

 

Source: GSU.edu

Notice anything fishy about the chart? While the age of planet Earth is billions of years, this chart only shows you 260 years of CO2 data. It also cuts off the entire Y axis of the chart below 270 ppm. That’s sheer intellectual dishonesty, because anyone can take any snippet of Earth’s temperature data and zoom in to create whatever visual effect they want. Using all the same data, I could show you a chart depicting a catastrophic global cooling emergency that looks just as visually convincing. It all comes down to which part of the data set you’re zooming in on.

 

When climate charts are artificially zoomed in to show you just the window of time they want you to see — without the greater context of the history of CO2 — that’s not science. It’s pseudoscience, which is exactly what “climate change” is based on.

 

Now, to demonstrate the kind of truly delusional thinking currently exercised by climate change “scientists” — if you can even call them that — I’m including a mind-blowing chart by John Englander, a “sea level rise risk” expert consultant.

 

This chart, which also shows the history of CO2 levels throughout hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history, disagrees slightly from the chart shown above, but it also shows the same general trend of very high CO2 in Earth’s past — 5000 ppm over 500 million years ago — plummeting to the lowest point on the chart, which is the 400 ppm of CO2 we have in the atmosphere today.

 

Now, in an amazing leap of delusional pseudoscience, Englander draws a completely arbitrary vertical burst of rising CO2 from the present point, accompanied by a provocative question, “Near Future Extinction?”

 

The intellectual dishonesty demonstrated here is not merely astonishing, but widely shared across the delusional “climate change” pseudoscience community, which has more in common with the Flat Earth Society than legitimate science. Englander’s painful attempt at making a point is that CO2 peaks have been temporally associated with mass extinction events, yet he points to quite literally the LOWEST point on the entire chart — the present CO2 level of 400 ppm — and magically cites that point as somehow being a “peak” that might lead to mass extinction. The total absence of logic and reason in this magical “extinction leap” is just staggering, yet it’s also quite indicative of the delusional thinking that’s commonplace among climate change pseudoscientists:

CO2 mass extinction chart-John Englander

CO2 mass extinction chart-John Englander

 

 

Source: http://www.johnenglander.net

But wait, there’s more!

 

Even if you focus the timeline to more recent millennia, it turns out that global temperature variation has experienced a roller coaster ride of peaks and valleys long before the combustion engine ever came along.

 

This temperature variation chart, created by climatologist Cliff Harris and meteorologist Randy Mann, shows temperature variations from roughly 2500 B.C. to present day. In this chart, you can see that the average global temperature was far warmer in 1100 B.C. than it is today. It also shows that the 1600s saw a very cold period — a “Little Ice Age” — which was temporally correlated with 90 large volcanic eruptions.

 

The conclusion from the chart is that “whenever solar radiation has DECREASED and volcanic activity has INCREASED, global temperatures suddenly plummet…”

 

global warming temperature swings

global warming temperature swings

 

When you’re looking at average global temperatures, by the way, it helps to have a wider view of Earth’s temperature history, so here’s a chart showing the Greenland Ice Core temperature data over the last 10,000 years:

 

Greenland Ice Core temperatures 10000 years

Greenland Ice Core temperatures 10000 years

 

Source: JoanneNova.com.au

As you can see from this “big picture” point of view, Greenland’s present average temperature is on the low side of this 10,000-year trend, which saw far higher temperatures just 3300 years ago. But dishonest climate change scare mongers zoom into this chart to show just the short-term rise on the lower right-hand corner of this chart. If you zoom in enough, you can make it look like Earth is undergoing a temperature apocalypse. But in reality, we’re actually still on the low side of the temperature scale.

 

Now, according to the pseudoscience of the climate change cultists, rising CO2 causes rising average global temperatures. This is an assumed matter of faith across the entire climate change narrative, it turns out. Because when you actually look at Earth’s history in terms of CO2 levels vs. temperature, there is virtually no meaningful causation correlation:

 

CO2 temperate correlation history chart

CO2 temperate correlation history chart

 

 

The conclusion from all this? First off, at just barely over 400 ppm, the current CO2 level in Earth’s atmosphere is, without question, close to the lowest it’s ever been in the history of the planet. There is no debate on this point, as even the climatologists have to admit that CO2 levels have been wildly higher in the past. Yet most “scientists” today ridiculously believe that CO2 has risen to alarming, historically high levels that are about to doom the planet. You hear this in the climate doom and gloom in the New York Times, Washington Post and other pseudoscience propaganda publishers.

 

Nearly everything that modern-day “scientists” are taught about climate change is factually false and lacking the full context of historical data which encompass CO2 and temperature trends throughout Earth’s history. The fact that both CO2 and average global temperatures were both much, much higher millions of years before modern civilization even existed is obvious proof that CO2 and temperature are driven by far more powerful forces than humankind alone. This is irrefutable unless someone abandons logic entirely.

 

#4) TRUE or FALSE: Mercury is extremely toxic in the environment but totally safe when injected into children via vaccines.

Correct answer: FALSE.

Again, nearly all status quo scientists fail this answer because they’ve been ridiculously told that methylmercury — usually the kind found in the environment — is extremely toxic, while ethylmercury — the form used in vaccines — is somehow inert and completely safe.

 

In truth, all forms of mercury are toxic to human biology, including organic, inorganic, elemental and mercury compounds. To believe that certain forms of mercury are harmless when injected into the human body is to exercise a kind of mercury denialism that, again, smacks of Flat Earth Syndrome.

 

If you know anything about mercury — and I know quite a lot about detecting mercury via ICP-MS instrumentation in the lab — you know that its electron orbital structure makes it extremely reactive to certain biological molecules. Although considered a “heavy metal,” its unique atomic structure and chemical properties allow it to easily replace or even displace nutritional elements in the body (such as zinc) while permeating tissues and crossing the blood-brain barrier where mercury damages neurological tissue.

 

One of the key CDC “researchers” who conducted so-called “scientific” research to prove that Thimerosal (the mercury preservative) is safe in vaccines is an international fugitive from justice named Poul Thorsen, who worked as part of the “vaccine deep state” that’s steeped in quack science and financial fraud. Working closely with the CDC and Emory University, Thorsen fabricated science studies, then eventually fled the country with millions of dollars in government research money. He remains at large to this day, and his studies are still widely cited by pro-vaccine mercury zealots who claim this international criminal can be trusted when it comes to his mercury science.

 

See the full web of CDC vaccine fraud in this PDF infographic from Natural News.

 

As further evidence of the mercury vaccine fraud that’s endemic to the scientific status quo, a science paper published in BioMed Research International found that over 165 scientific studies have found Thimerosal (mercury) to be harmful to human biology.

 

That same study also found “evidence of malfeasance” (i.e. science fraud) in the studies that claimed Thimerosal was safe to inject into children.

 

Robert F. Kennedy’s World Mercury Project “Thimerosal Myths Debunked” page gives a more detailed history of mercury in vaccines, including the little-known fact that mercury was NOT removed from all vaccines in the United States as it falsely claimed by so-called “doctors” who seem to know nothing about what’s really in vaccines. (Vaccines also contain human fetal cell lines and even African Green Monkey kidney cells, as is openly admitted by the CDC itself.)

 

In my ISO-accredited laboratory, which is audited every year for international accreditation, I have personally tested flu shots and found them to contain over 50,000 ppb of mercury, which is consistent with the known dose of 25 mcg of mercury administered at 0.5 mL per dose.

 

The EPA’s limit of mercury in public drinking water is 2 ppb, meaning that flu shots are injecting children (and pregnant women) with 25,000 times higher mercury concentrations than the legal limit of mercury in water set by the EPA. Even mercury in tuna fish — which has environmentalists extremely alarmed — is typically just 250 ppb.

 

Infographic: How Much Mercury is Really in a Flu Shot

Infographic: How Much Mercury is Really in a Flu Shot

 

#5) TRUE OR FALSE: Type-2 diabetes can be reversed and cured

Correct answer: TRUE

For decades, holistic health pioneers such as Dr. Gabriel Cousens have been reversing type-2 diabetes through diet alone. (He promotes a vegan diet based on a lot of juicing.)

 

Natural News has helped teach hundreds of thousands of type-2 diabetes sufferers how to reverse diabetes over the last 15 years, with countless testimonials sent to us by former disease sufferers who are now 100% cured and no longer need any insulin or medication whatsoever.

 

I even reversed by own borderline diabetes over two decades ago through simple changes in food and exercise.

 

Yet, to this very day, most doctors and “scientists” — if you can even call them that, again — insist that type-2 diabetes can’t be reversed and can only be “treated” with — guess what? — expensive patented medications that enrich the profits of Big Pharma.

 

Now, nearly two decades after pioneering holistic health doctors began teaching people how to reverse type-2 diabetes with a very high success rate, mainstream science now admits type-2 diabetes can be reversed.

 

Once again following in the footsteps of holistic nutrition pioneers like Natural News, Science Daily now covers the results of a peer-reviewed clinical trial originally published in The Endocrine Society.

 

Entitled, “Intensive medical treatment can reverse type 2 diabetes,” the article reveals how “Intervention induced several months of remission in up to 40 percent of clinical trial participant.”

 

Note carefully that, in accordance with the delusional myth of the medical status, Science Daily dares only describe the reversal of diabetes as a “remission” — that’s code for “any cure that medicine can’t explain.” But because type-2 diabetes is not an infection, a superbug, a parasite or a genetic mutation disorder, its entire definition rests on the identification of metabolic symptoms. When those symptoms are gone, the diagnosis is also gone. No symptoms means no diabetes, by definition, as the “disease” is simply a medical label assigned to an observable set of symptoms (such as cellular resistance to insulin, which can be readily reversed through exercise and nutrition).

 

So here we have another case where mainstream science is once again about 15 years behind the pioneering holistic health doctors who have been reversing type-2 diabetes for decades… often with a far higher success rate than the 40% cited in this science article. The reversals achieved through holistic health interventions are also permanent reversals of type-2 diabetes, not temporary “remissions.”

 

I have personally witnessed type-2 diabetes being 100% reversed in just four days at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Arizona. Literally in just four days on the Dr. Cousens protocol, individuals who were told they were insulin dependent for life were able to get completely off all insulin forever. No medication needed ever again. This was all accomplished with nothing more than food, nutrition, meditation, simple walking exercise and strategic calorie restriction. Astonishingly, most doctors are still completely ignorant of all this, remaining nutritionally illiterate and hopelessly incompetent when it comes to helping patients overcome type-2 diabetes.

 

Why isn’t this diabetes cure celebrated by the entire medical community? For all the obvious reasons, of course: Treating diabetes is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and all the corporations that profit from disease have no financial incentive to lose customers by teaching people how to cure their own disease without expensive chemical medications.

Vitamin C can also treat cancer stem cells

In addition to most scientists and doctors having no clue that type-2 diabetes can be reversed and cured using simple nutritional interventions, they also have no clue whatsoever that Vitamin C has been scientifically found to halt the growth of cancer stem cells, even working 1000% better than a common cancer drug.

 

Similar nutritional ignorance is found among doctors and scientists when it comes to the cancer reversal potential of vitamin D, or the anti-cancer effects of selenium, or even the ability of silica-rich mineral water to eliminate aluminum from the body and protect the brain from Alzheimer’s and dementia.

 

The weaker the “science,” the more aggressively people are attacked for questioning it

The primary assertion of today’s arrogant “scientists” is rooted in absurdity: It is the assertion that science alone has a unique and divine monopoly over facts, truth and knowledge. Under the cover of that delusion, the label of “science” is deployed to demand immunity against all questioning or skepticism, asserting that anything backed by “science” is beyond reproach.

 

A few centuries ago, the same assertion was demanded by the Catholic Church, which insisted that its beliefs were unassailable and rooted in divine truth (a truth, by the way, which only the High Priests could access, must like the high priests of scientism today). Anyone who questioned the Church was slandered and labeled a heretic. Yet today, “science” has taken over the role of the Church, demanding the same faith-based obedience to its twisted dogma while simultaneously discrediting and destroying anyone who dare question a single assumption of the “Church of Science.”

 

Just like the high priests of the Church, today’s arrogant status quo scientists claim that only they can access, interpret or gauge scientific truth, insisting that non-scientists have no right to even engage in discussions of science (or questioning science, an even more dire sin). Their ridiculous claim that “science is self-correcting” ignores the simple truth that any self-correcting system must embrace critical questions that challenge the current dogma… and modern science honors no such process, instead insisting that its truth is absolute and therefore can never be questioned. (Just try asking a vaccine pusher why they think injecting children with mercury is somehow okay, and you’ll get an earful of raving mad dogma in response.)

 

In effect, “Science” has become what the Church used to be: A self-reinforcing cabal of cultist dogmas parading around as absolute truth. That doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to be found in science — I use science myself in my environmental laboratory projects such as alerting to the world to high levels of lead in rice protein — but the use of the “science” label as a weapon to stifle dissent, silence skeptics and demand absolute obedience to conformist dogma is, at its core, no different from the intellectual tyranny of the once-dominant Catholic Church which absurdly claimed a monopoly on truth.

 

As this science quiz easily shows, even those who consider themselves to be informed adherents to science are often shockingly ignorant of reality. Their ideas on physics, medicine, chemistry and even cosmology can only be considered rudimentary at best — or even desperately conformist and therefore contradictory to the very tenants of legitimate science. The gaps in human knowledge over the recognized sciences are far larger than the areas filled in with conclusive knowledge. The total sum of human knowledge possessed today by the sciences is inconsequential compared to that which has yet to be learned, and in many ways, modern “scientists” are behaving in self-deluded patterns of thought that can be more accurately described as “scientific mysticism,” where mystical truths are “believed” as a matter of faith, then labeled “science” in an attempt to lend them credibility.

 

When modern scientists insist they already know everything there is to know about a given topic — we hear this in the “science is settled” fallacy — you know it isn’t really science at all.

 

The Health Ranger threatens the entire scientific establishment with a grassroots, people-based scientific REVOLUTION

As final proof of the dogma behind the scientific status quo today, bear in mind that I alone am routinely named the “most anti-science person on the internet” (by the negative P.R. firms hired by biotech companies to discredit grassroots scientists) and yet I engage in way-beyond-PhD-level science on a daily basis, developing new methods for mass spec analyses of food, dietary supplements and environmental samples for heavy metals, nutritive elements, pesticides, phytochemicals and more. My laboratory is internationally accredited far beyond the accreditation of most university labs, and I have singlehandedly analyzed and published a paper on the heavy metals analysis of over 600 municipal water samples from across the United States. Read my science paper in the Natural Science Journal at this link, which describes the ICP-MS analysis of these water samples.

 

I also pioneered a breakthrough LC/MS-TOF method for the quantitative analysis of cannabinoids with about about 1,000 times greater precision than the UV-DAD method currently used across the cannabis industry. You can read my CBD analysis method description at this link from CWC Labs, my privately owned independent laboratory.

 

By the way, just today I achieved a breakthrough in liquid handling automation systems which transforms about two months of calibration work into a 60-second test to almost instantly derive the liquid coefficient for extremely precise remote arm pippetting (with accuracy typically within +/- one microliter). I’ve recorded a podcast on that breakthrough and will be sharing that soon. It might even be turned into another published science paper to teach other scientists across the country how to more efficiently run liquid handling automation robot systems.

 

Stay informed on all my science innovations, published science papers, science breakthroughs and censored science documentaries at Natural News.

 

Recommended reading: Get the book Science Set Free by Rupert Sheldrake. It will forever wake you up to the truth about the fictions parading around as status quo “science” in our corporate-controlled world.

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Apple Warns iPhone Can “Interfere” With Cardiac Devices

by Tyler Durden 02July2021 – https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/apple-warns-iphone-can-interfere-cardiac-devices

Apple has released a long list of products it says should be kept away from implanted pacemakers and defibrillators because it may “interfere” with the medical devices.

“Many consumer-electronic devices contain magnets or components and radios that emit electromagnetic fields,” Apple said, adding that “to avoid any potential interactions with these types of medical devices, keep your Apple product a safe distance away from your medical device (more than 6 inches / 15 cm apart or more than 12 inches / 30 cm apart if wirelessly charging).” 

 

Apple doesn’t explain what could happen when its products come in close contact with pacemakers and defibrillators. Still, one could assume the worst circumstance could be the deactivation of a medical device and may result in death.

“If you suspect that your Apple product is interfering with your medical device, stop using your Apple product and consult your physician and your medical-device manufacturer,” the company warned. 

Here are the products Apple wants to keep away from your medical devices:

AirPods and charging cases

  • AirPods and Charging Case
  • AirPods and Wireless Charging Case
  • AirPods Pro and Wireless Charging Case
  • AirPods Max and Smart Case

Apple Watch and accessories

  • Apple Watch
  • Apple Watch bands with magnets
  • Apple Watch magnetic charging accessories

HomePod

  • HomePod
  • HomePod mini

iPad and accessories

  • iPad
  • iPad mini
  • iPad Air
  • iPad Pro
  • iPad Smart Covers and Smart Folios
  • iPad Smart Keyboard and Smart Keyboard Folio
  • Magic Keyboard for iPad

iPhone and MagSafe accessories

  • iPhone 12 models
  • MagSafe accessories

Mac and accessories

  • Mac mini
  • Mac Pro
  • MacBook Air
  • MacBook Pro
  • iMac
  • Apple Pro Display XDR

Beats

  • Beats Flex
  • Beats X
  • PowerBeats Pro
  • UrBeats3

Perhaps Apple’s warning comes as a new analysis in the American Heart Association Journal warns that certain Apple iPhones can cause significant issues with cardiac implantable electronic devices.

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More Lonely, Fewer ‘Friends’, Less Sex – Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation?

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

smartphone generation vombies

smartphone generation vombies

The Atlantic’s Jean Twenge asks the most crucial question of our age

“have smartphones destroyed a generation?”

Story by Jean M. Twenge https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

 

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

 

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

 

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens.

 

 

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

 

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

 

 

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

 

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

 

 

In the early 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of portraits at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. In one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks no older than 12 poses with a cigarette in his mouth. The rink was a place where kids could get away from their parents and inhabit a world of their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and make out in the backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers gaze at Yates’s camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if, perhaps especially if, your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones.

 

Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of Generation X, smoking had lost some of its romance, but independence was definitely still in. My friends and I plotted to get our driver’s license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood. Asked by our parents, “When will you be home?,” we replied, “When do I have to be?”

 

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

 

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school.” She finally got her license six months after her 18th birthday. In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

 

Independence isn’t free—you need some money in your pocket to pay for gas, or for that bottle of schnapps. In earlier eras, kids worked in great numbers, eager to finance their freedom or prodded by their parents to learn the value of a dollar. But iGen teens aren’t working (or managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.Of course, putting off the responsibilities of adulthood is not an iGen innovation. Gen Xers, in the 1990s, were the first to postpone the traditional markers of adulthood. Young Gen Xers were just about as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as young Boomers had been, and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But as they left their teenage years behind, Gen Xers married and started careers later than their Boomer predecessors had.Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

 

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

No Sleep iphone

No Sleep iphone

 

 

One of the ironies of iGen life is that despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone. She spent much of her summer keeping up with friends, but nearly all of it was over text or Snapchat. “I’ve been on my phone more than I’ve been with actual people,” she said. “My bed has, like, an imprint of my body.”

 

 

In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

 

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.

The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link five times a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook. The more they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.

 

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online. Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so. But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

 

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.) One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids’ growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

 

Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed. Then again, about four times as many Americans now take antidepressants, which are often effective in treating severe depression, the type most strongly linked to suicide.

What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.

 

This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”

 

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in the fact that they’re more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend to bully one another physically, while girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim’s social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.Social-media companies are of course aware of these problems, and to one degree or another have endeavored to prevent cyberbullying. But their various motivations are, to say the least, complex. A recently leaked Facebook document indicated that the company had been touting to advertisers its ability to determine teens’ emotional state based on their on-site behavior, and even to pinpoint “moments when young people need a confidence boost.” Facebook acknowledged that the document was real, but denied that it offers “tools to target people based on their emotional state.”

 

 

In July 2014, a 13-year-old girl in North Texas woke to the smell of something burning. Her phone had overheated and melted into the sheets. National news outlets picked up the story, stoking readers’ fears that their cellphone might spontaneously combust. To me, however, the flaming cellphone wasn’t the only surprising aspect of the story. Why, I wondered, would anyone sleep with her phone beside her in bed? It’s not as though you can surf the web while you’re sleeping. And who could slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone?

 

Curious, I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm clock). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of the night, they often ended up looking at their phone. Some used the language of addiction. “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,” one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Others saw their phone as an extension of their body—or even like a lover: “Having my phone closer to me while I’m sleeping is a comfort.”

 

It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around when most teens got a smartphone. Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived. A meta-analysis of studies on electronic-device use among children found similar results: Children who use a media device right before bed are more likely to sleep less than they should, more likely to sleep poorly, and more than twice as likely to be sleepy during the day.

I’ve observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad.

Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong ability to disrupt sleep. Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime. Watching TV for several hours a day is only weakly linked to sleeping less. But the allure of the smartphone is often too much to resist.

 

Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety. Again, it’s difficult to trace the precise paths of causation. Smartphones could be causing lack of sleep, which leads to depression, or the phones could be causing depression, which leads to lack of sleep. Or some other factor could be causing both depression and sleep deprivation to rise. But the smartphone, its blue light glowing in the dark, is likely playing a nefarious role.

 

The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it’s a policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.

 

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.

 

I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on a generation of kids so accustomed to being wired at all times. My three daughters were born in 2006, 2009, and 2012. They’re not yet old enough to display the traits of iGen teens, but I have already witnessed firsthand just how ingrained new media are in their young lives. I’ve observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad. I’ve experienced my 6-year-old asking for her own cellphone. I’ve overheard my 9-year-old discussing the latest app to sweep the fourth grade. Prying the phone out of our kids’ hands will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my parents’ generation to get their kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to use their phone responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill in our children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

 

In my conversations with teens, I saw hopeful signs that kids themselves are beginning to link some of their troubles to their ever-present phone. Athena told me that when she does spend time with her friends in person, they are often looking at their device instead of at her. “I’m trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look at my face,” she said. “They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking at their Apple Watch.” “What does that feel like, when you’re trying to talk to somebody face-to-face and they’re not looking at you?,” I asked. “It kind of hurts,” she said. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation didn’t do that. I could be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”

 

Once, she told me, she was hanging out with a friend who was texting her boyfriend. “I was trying to talk to her about my family, and what was going on, and she was like, ‘Uh-huh, yeah, whatever.’ So I took her phone out of her hands and I threw it at my wall.”

 

I couldn’t help laughing. “You play volleyball,” I said. “Do you have a pretty good arm?” “Yep,” she replied.


This article has been adapted from Jean M. Twenge’s forthcoming book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

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The revolution that’s about to transform blood testing

Forget labs and microscopes: 3 Israeli startups aim to disrupt the field of blood testing using advanced technologies that give on-the-spot results.

By Abigail Klein Leichman August 13, 2018, 7:00 am https://www.israel21c.org/the-revolution-thats-about-to-transform-blood-testing/

 

blood vials

blood vials

 

Photo by Aleksandra Gigowska/Shutterstock.com

The way blood-cell counts and diagnostic blood tests are done hasn’t changed in years: Your blood gets drawn into one vial for each type of test and sent to a lab, where technicians prepare slides from each samples and examine them under a microscope. Results arrive in hours or days – and then only if you’re in a place with the necessary infrastructure.

Here ISRAEL21c takes a look at three Israeli startups aiming to revolutionize and democratize how blood tests are done.

RevDx by Engineering for All (EfA)

EfA Technologies won The Pears Challenge eHealth Venture competition in March 2018. Photo: courtesy

EfA Technologies won The Pears Challenge eHealth Venture competition in March 2018. Photo: courtesy

 

 

EfA Technologies won The Pears Challenge eHealth Venture competition in March 2018. Photo: courtesy

Engineering for All (EfA) is developing a handheld programmable device that performs automated blood analysis and diagnostics at the point of care.

 

RevDx (Revolution Diagnostics) is meant for anyplace without reliable access to a lab, electricity or Internet connection, says founder Yoel Ezra, former chief commander of an IDF technological unit.

 

The digital platform — combining opto-mechanics, electrochemistry and bioengineering technologies — will initially be programmed to do a blood count and diagnose malaria, two major identified needs. Future applications could support additional blood and urine analyses.

 

“My vision is that in a few years our product will be an essential tool in every healthcare worker’s bag for home visits, emergencies, point-of-care, remote locations and more,” Ezra tells ISRAEL21c.

 

The prototype RevDx handheld blood-test lab. Photo courtesy of EfA

The prototype RevDx handheld blood-test lab. Photo courtesy of EfA

The prototype RevDx handheld blood-test lab. Photo courtesy of EfA

A Pears Challenge 2017 Fellow, EfA was part of an Israeli startup delegation to India in September 2017 and won first prize in the eHealth Venture competition in March this year.

 

The startup also won first prize at the TechForGood Scaling SocialTech competition (November 2017) and at the digital health startup contest staged by Ernst Young and IBM in January. EfA also presented at Global Startup Talent@Taipei 2018 in June.

 

“We have received inquiries from countries such as Dubai, India, Ivory Coast, Portugal, Turkey, Sri Lanka and Nigeria,” says Ezra, who is talking to potential buyers and investors in both developed and developing countries. “There obviously is interest and a real need for high-quality, affordable, accessible lab tests.”

 

Based in Caesarea, EfA was cofounded in 2016 with Eli Mor and received a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority. Its medical adviser is Dr. Ami Neuberger, an infectious disease specialist at Haifa’s Rambam Health Care Campus. Ezra expects RevDx to be on the market in about two years.

 

“We are looking for funding to continue development of the prototype,” says Ezra. “Then we will do a field pilot project followed by clinical studies.”

 

When users reach a critical mass, EfA plans to offer real-time mapping of diseases to support epidemiological surveillance, outbreak control, pharmaceutical research and more.

 

For more information, click here.

Sonorapy

Sonorapy is developing a technology to replace standard diagnostic blood tests with a noninvasive soundwave diagnostic tool to detect pathogens (viruses or bacteria) from a single blood sample.

 

“Our product is a one-of-a-kind sensor that sends very high-frequency soundwaves into an organism and listens to the acoustic sounds resonating back. Each pathogen is known to have a unique sound signature but there was never a machine capable of reading them,” explains cofounder Noemie Alliel.

 

A unique algorithm will identify the pathogen using a massive database of harmonic resonance peaks for each disease. In seconds, easy-to-read test results will be available at the point of care.

 

Sonorapy’s device theoretically could even scan the patient’s body rather than a blood sample, making the diagnostic process 100 percent noninvasive.

Sonorapy’s device identifies pathogens by analyzing soundwaves. Photo: courtesy

Sonorapy’s device identifies pathogens by analyzing soundwaves. Photo: courtesy

 

Sonorapy’s device identifies pathogens by analyzing soundwaves. Photo: courtesy

The concept came from two aerospace engineers at Northrop Grumman in California, who met Alliel in flight school. She’s based in Tel Aviv while they’re in Los Angeles.

 

Following advice from experts, mentors and potential investors, Alliel and cofounder Robert Del Rio have decided to start by targeting the biodefense and epidemiology sectors.

 

“Infectious diseases are spreading more rapidly than ever before, and the Western world is concerned,” says Alliel.

 

“Troops on the field could be exposed to biological agents and it’s hard to diagnose there just based on symptoms. Current technologies compromise specificity, speed or cost. The Holy Grail is a solution that offers all three, and that’s what we are working on. This will disrupt the industry when it hits the market.”

 

Sonorapy was one of six Israeli startups handpicked by the US State Department and White House for the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University in California. It also took part in the BioStars accelerator run by Panacea Innovation in Oxford.

 

The founders still have a lot of R&D to do before making a proof of concept and raising money. They’re speeding up the process through partnerships with Israeli, British and American academic institutions. Alliel estimates the POC could be ready within six months after Sonorapy receives funding.

 

“Our goal is to get the same or better accuracy than if you send the blood samples to a lab,” she says.

 

For more information, click here.

 

Sight Diagnostics

OLO, an AI-based blood diagnostics device

OLO, an AI-based blood diagnostics device

Sight Diagnostics of Tel Aviv recently launched OLO, an AI-based blood diagnostics device that does lab-quality complete blood count (CBC) tests from finger prick samples at the point of care.

 

The OurCrowd portfolio company completed a 250-person clinical trial at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, leading to CE certification for OLO in the European Union.

 

CBC is the most common medical blood diagnostics test but it’s typically performed at a central lab instead of at the POC (doctor’s office or clinic), and results aren’t immediate.

 

Sight’s patented process for “digitizing” the blood sample into a set of specifically colored microscope images begins with placing the sample on a pocket-sized test cartridge and inserting it into the system. OLO then applies proprietary machine-vision algorithms to these images to analyze 19 CBC parameters. Results are delivered in just 10 minutes.

 

“The technology to provide full-spectrum analysis with only a finger prick of blood is seen by many as a holy grail in this space, and it’s no secret that others have tried,” said CEO Yossi Pollak, who cofounded Sight Diagnostics in 2010.

 

“After implementing our malaria-detection technology in India and several African countries and exceeding expectations in multiple clinical trials, we were encouraged to explore our technology’s ability to enter the $50 billion market of CBC testing.”

 

Sight has started US clinical trials to study OLO’s clinical performance and obtain FDA approval, with sites at Boston Children’s Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

 

“Previous blood analyzers aimed at in-office testing have involved clinical compromises and are difficult to operate or maintain,” said Dr. Carlo Brugnara, director of the hematology lab at Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. “OLO has the potential to deliver on the promise of accurate, comprehensive blood testing at the doctor’s office, even with a finger prick sample.”

 

For more information, click here.

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Unlike Theranos, startup’s blood test device ‘delivers on promise’ with FDA nod

Clearance follows US clinical trials that show Tel Aviv-based Sight Diagnostics’ product can do complete blood count in minutes, with lab-like accuracy, using pinprick of blood

By SHOSHANNA SOLOMON 5 December 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/unlike-theranos-startups-blood-test-device-delivers-on-promise-with-fda-nod/

 

A nurse taking a blood test, with the OLO device developed by Sight Diagnostics in the background (YouTube screenshot)

A nurse taking a blood test, with the OLO device developed by Sight Diagnostics in the background (YouTube screenshot)

 

Israeli startup Sight Diagnostics has received US Food and Drug Administration clearance to market a blood test device that can extract the results of a standard complete blood count test from just a drop of blood in minutes.

 

The FDA approval was given following clinical trials held at Boston Children’s Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center and TriCore Labs. The nod will allow hospital labs, diagnostic providers and outpatient clinics to use its OLO blood analyzer, Sight said in a statement.

 

Today, blood samples are taken from patients in medical centers and sent to centralized labs for analysis, in which — depending on the nature of the test requested – they are handled by either automated machines or professional lab technicians. Eventually, results are sent back to the referring physician.

 

These automated machines are expensive, and the processing of samples in labs is slow, said Yossi Pollack, the co-founder and CEO of Sight Diagnostics, which seeks to improve blood testing methods, earlier this year.

 

Sight Diagnostics – OLO Complete Blood Count device

OLO, an AI-based blood diagnostics device

OLO, an AI-based blood diagnostics device

Sight’s OLO is a new type of blood analyzer that promises the same accuracy as large laboratory machines but is cost effective and can be used at the point of care, giving physicians the results “in minutes,” the company said.

 

The complete blood count test (CBC) — which counts red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets in a patient’s sample — is one of the most basic, informative tests a doctor can conduct.

 

“The CBC is frequently used as a data point in determining whether an ailment is viral or bacterial,” said Dr. Carlo Brugnara, director of the Hematology Lab at Boston’s Children’s Hospital and professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, in the statement. “In rarer cases — involving acute leukemia, for instance — a CBC can make the difference between life and death.”

 

To use Sight’s product, the physician or nurse pricks the patient’s finger and places a drop of blood into a disposable plastic cartridge that is inserted into the OLO, which looks like a small home printer. The machine, equipped with a camera, takes thousands of images of the millions of cells within the sample. Software developed by the firm based on machine learning algorithms analyzes the images and provides the results in a printout or via email.

 

The team of Sight Diagnostics; Yossi Pollack, the co-founder and CEO is second from left (Courtesy)

The team of Sight Diagnostics; Yossi Pollack, the co-founder and CEO is second from left (Courtesy)

OLO’s FDA approval confirms its lab-grade performance using just two drops of blood — either a finger-prick or venous sample, the statement said. This, together with its compact size, makes the analyzer attractive in many clinical settings, the statement added.

 

“To treat children in our urgent care centers, a CBC is essential. OLO represents a major innovation in our laboratories’ CBC analysis,” said Dr. Steven Melnick, chief of Pathology at Miami’s Nicklaus Children Hospital, which is evaluating the technology. “At current volumes, we believe OLO will substantially reduce our costs.”

 

Sight’s success evokes the specter of another blood diagnostic firm — US-based Theranos, founded by Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos claimed it was able to perform a whole variety of blood tests — and not just the CBC analysis — using a small sample of blood from the finger, producing results in just a few hours and at a cheaper price than in labs.

 

But in 2018, the SEC charged Theranos, Holmes and a former company president with massive fraud following revelations by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou that questioned the validity of the firm’s technology, claiming the US firm was using hacked traditional blood testing machines to run its tests instead of its own devices and alleging that the company’s own machines might provide inaccurate results.

 

In the Theranos case, FDA investigators concluded that, at the time of their research, there was not strong enough proof that the device could do what it was said to be able to do, according to a report by Business Insider.

 

How does Sight differ from Theranos, The Times of Israel asked Pollack, the CEO.

 

“We do not have firsthand knowledge of the Theranos case — so we refrain from drawing any direct comparisons,” he said in an email message.

 

“Sight is a technology-first company,” Pollack added. “We are driven by evidence and science — obtaining regulatory support along every step of our journey. Our recent FDA 510(k) clearance, for OLO, followed extensive clinical trials conducted at Boston Children’s Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center and TriCore Labs.

 

“Furthermore, our latest product was developed following almost a decade of research, and was preceded by our malaria product, which conducted almost 1,000,000 tests in the field, across 24 countries.”

 

Sight started its work with a machine that detected malaria via a finger prick of blood. The firm launched its first product, Parasight, in 2015. The device has received the European Union’s CE mark of approval.

Ram Doolman, director of the Laboratories Division and the Automated Mega-Laboratory at Sheba Medical Center, Tel-Hashomer (Courtesy).

Ram Doolman, director of the Laboratories Division and the Automated Mega-Laboratory at Sheba Medical Center, Tel-Hashomer (Courtesy).

Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer will shortly start evaluating the Sight Diagnostic CBC analyzer in its lab, comparing its results with those of the Blood Counter DxH900 machine by Beckman-Coulter LTD which the lab generally uses, said Ram Doolman, director of the Laboratories Division and the Automated Mega-Laboratory at Sheba.

 

According to Sheba’s preliminary tests with the new technology, Sight’s solution “looks very promising,” Doolman told The Times of Israel.

 

“From what I know, Theranos never revealed its tech to anyone. They used to take the blood samples to their facility and issued the results without revealing the tech behind,” he said.

 

“To avoid similar analytical aberrations,” he said, labs must validate the technologies versus the original reference lab methods and see “if the results match the preliminary defined acceptance range.”

 

In general, “people should avoid companies that refuse to reveal their tech, even due to patent issues,” he added. In addition, he said, the Theranos claim that it could do all tests with just a small amount of blood was “not terribly credible from the beginning. Lab experts would suspect that it sounds too good to be true,” because different tests need different blood collections that need to be processed with “dissimilar anticoagulants.”

 

“Theranos never delivered,” and that was the alleged fraud, said Jon Medved, the CEO of OurCrowd, by phone. OurCrowd is a Jerusalem-based crowdfunding venture capital firm that invests in health technologies directly and via its Qure Ventures fund and its new Medtech fund.

 

Sight Diagnostics is one of the firms OurCrowd has invested in. “These guys are delivering,” he said, and the FDA clearance shows that the startup is “living up to its promise.”

 

The OLO analyzer is commercially available in Europe. Oxford University Hospital Trust is currently evaluating it in both its Surgical Emergency Unit and Oncology Clinic. Recently, Sight also initiated a pharmacy pilot program with major UK chain Superdrug to bring blood testing to its health clinics, the company said in its statement.

 

The Tel Aviv-based startup is also setting up partnerships in Africa, Asia, and South America, the statement said. The firm has been granted six US patents, with others pending, the statement said.

 

Sight also plans to ask the FDA to certify OLO for use in smaller practices and pharmacies in the United States, the statement said.

 

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The New Social Media: Alternatives To Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, And Other Big Tech Platforms

by Tyler Durden Tue, 10/23/2018 – 18:05 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-23/new-social-media-alternatives-facebook-youtube-twitter-and-other-big-tech-platforms

Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

 

Lately, I’ve written a lot about the alternative media purge and how Big Tech social media platforms are attempting to control the narrative, the elections, and public perception through censorship and financial blacklisting. Lots of people are ready to leave websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for less-censored pastures. But what are the social media alternatives that are currently available?

 

Here are some social media alternatives to check out.

 

Before we get into the alternatives, please understand that all of them will start small. None of them will be able to take on Big Tech without a lot of help and support. We’ve gotten used to free social media because the companies with whom we’ve dealt have virtually raped us, reading our so-called “private” messages, and pillaging our date to sell to the highest bidders. So really, it isn’t that free after all.

 

You probably won’t find your parents, your best friend from kindergarten, and your Aunt Suzie on these platforms – not yet, anyway. But what you WILL be able to do is speak without fear of censorship. You’ll be able to find your favorite alternative media sources there and find answers that simply aren’t supported by the mainstream.

 

The only way to change this dystopian atmosphere is to actually make changes ourselves. Go where the freedom is!

 

MeWe

MeWe calls themselves The Next-Gen Social Network. They raised $4.8 million and launched back in 2016 to take on Facebook and Twitter. They’re about 6 million members strong so far and Mark Weinstein, the founder, plans for it to be 500 million by 2022.

 

“In the future, MeWe will also revolutionize social media with decentralization, which will render Facebook’s spying and tracking data model completely obsolete,” Weinstein added, a comment that suggests he is indeed trying to replace Facebook. “Awareness around the world has never been higher regarding news feed manipulation and privacy infractions. Government regulations will never truly interfere with Facebook’s data collection model, evidenced in both California’s new 2020 privacy rules and Europe’s GDPR. But the free market can — and MeWe is here giving people great communication technology in a true multi-feature platform, with none of Facebook’s BS.” (source)

Go here to get a MeWe account.

Gab.ai

Gab.ai is a platform that is similar to Twitter. You have 300 characters with which to make your point. It has been called the Alt-Right’s social media alternative and although Gab itself doesn’t censor its users, Microsoft has threatened to take them down due to “hate speech.” A lot of folks who got banned, shadowbanned, or censored by Twitter are there.

 

Gab founder Andrew Torba feels that they aren’t being portrayed honestly in the media.

 

We survived a relentless and coordinated smear campaign by the dishonest mainstream media without any outside funding from advertisers or venture capitalists. Our community will continue to thrive and grow thanks to individuals from around the world who believe in putting people and free speech above politically correct corporate agendas.

 

Gab has always and will always be powered by you, The People. Gab is not just a social network, it’s a social movement. (source)

With any social network, what you see in your feed will depend on who your friends are and who you follow.

 

You can join Gab here.

Real.Video (Brighteon)

Real.Video was started by Mike Adams of Natural News in response to mass deplatforming on YouTube.

 

This is the YouTube alternative to give voices and free speech to those who are being systematically targeted and censored by YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter for essentially being a pro-Liberty person, standing up for America, standing up for the Bill of Rights or just basic human rights for that matter. (source)

Adams would know about censorship firsthand, since last year, Google delisted his site, Natural News, from its search engine results.

 

Real.Video is in the process of changing its name to Brighteon.com and hosts numerous videos that were banned by Twitter. It’s still in the developmental stages, so there’s an occasional glitch but thus far it has been a relatively smooth user experience.

 

Check out Real.Video/Brighteon here.

Mastodon

Another budding network is Mastodon, which has the tagline “Giving social media back to you.” It’s a free, open-source network, which means that developers can contribute to it because its design is publicly accessible.

 

Ultimately Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to all the commercial social network platforms, which means that no single company owns it or can monopolize your communication. (source)

 

I found it confusing to use (maybe you need to be more techy?) and was put off by the fact that I needed to log in via Twitter. Perhaps this is just so you can connect with the same people. It’s always worthwhile to look at your options. Mastodon was started by Eugen Rochko, who was fed up with the changes that Twitter was making that closely resembled the Facebook algorithms.

 

Last year, after Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological feed, Rochko began building the back end for what would become Mastodon. Instead of building a unified service, Rochko envisioned something more like email, or RSS: a distributed system that lets you send public messages to anyone who follows you on the service. Anyone can create a server and host their own instance of Mastodon, and Mastodon works in the background to connect them. (source)

Here’s a beginner’s guide to using Mastodon, and here’s where you can join.

 

If you can figure this out, maybe you can explain it to me?

 

Diaspora

Diaspora is a social network built on three cornerstones: decentralization, freedom, and privacy. To join Diaspora, you have to choose a “pod” which is a group of potentially like-minded people. Each pod is independently hosted which should lessen the likelihood of corporate censorship.

 

You can follow hashtags that interest you, and you can categorize people by how you know them (family, friends, work, etc.) Then you can control who sees the different things that you post.

 

Diaspora is decentralized which means no one person owns it. This means that it doesn’t have any form of advertisement and corporate interference. It also does not collect any of your data. When you create your account, you are responsible for your own data and retain the ownership of your personal data.

 

Unlike Facebook, Diaspora allows you to use whatever identity you want, so pseudonyms and nicknames are fine to display as your profile. (source)

 

Go here to find yourself a pod on Diaspora.

Or you can join an old-fashioned forum.

 

I know that personally, I’m not too jazzed about the learning curve of some of these new options and prefer the more familiar layouts of Real.Video (Brighteon), MeWe, and Gab. But honestly, people on social media can just be so horrible that Selco Begovic and I started an old-fashioned forum that is a throw-back to the 90s/early 2000s. I like forums because they’re familiar, comfortable, and they draw likeminded people together.

 

While there are tens of thousands of forums out there, if you are interested in freedom, self-reliance, and survival, I hope you’ll join ours. For privacy reasons, we ask you NOT to use your real name anywhere on the registration form. All we need is a real email address to send you password updates, etc.

 

Go here to join The Survival & Self-Reliance Forum with Selco and Daisy.

There are social media options.

 

Humans are social creatures. No matter how introverted we might be, we all seek connections with others. These days a lot of those connections are online. Thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier to find like-minded people. I personally have friends from around the world who I met online that I never would have crossed paths with otherwise.

 

Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have taken advantage of our desire to do this. They “hooked” people then they manipulated what the users would see with algorithms. They collected every word you ever typed on social media and made assessments about you so they could sell that information to advertisers. They made a fortune off of every person who ever used their services, and deep down in the fine print, people gave them permission to do so.

 

Now they’re trying to control the narrative by removing people who dissent against things like war, police brutality, and corrupt politicians.

 

If you’re looking for an alternative social media outlet, check out some of the options above. They won’t be able to take on Big Tech without us.

 

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Likely TIMELINE of events to take place from Sep. 20 to Jan. 20, covering vaccines, SCOTUS, Election Day, markets, terrorism and insurrection

20September2020 by: https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-09-20-timeline-of-events-sep-20-to-jan-20.html

 

(Natural News) What follows is a likely timeline of events to take place between now (Sep. 20, 2020) and Jan 20, 2021. Due to the extreme volatility of current events, almost no one dare make predictions these days, but this timeline is based on interviews with top law enforcement who have ties to federal agencies, with additional sources from the militia community as well as individuals close to the Trump administration.

 

This timeline, although subject to change, is our current best guess at how the moves on the chess board are likely to play out. It covers the SCOTUS nomination, Election Day, the Insurrection Act, left-wing terrorism, financial markets, election outcomes and more. There’s also a commendable overview of the coming chaos at this All News Pipeline story, which is worth checking out after you review the timeline below.

 

Here’s what I see as likely to play out, given the current best information:

 

Pre-Election Chaos: Sep 20th – Nov. 2nd

  • Left-wing insurrectionists will continue to ramp up their riots, resorting to increasingly violent and escalated attacks on law enforcement, federal buildings and conservative groups such as Proud Boys.
  • These attacks will almost exclusively take place in blue cities, in blue counties, in blue states. That’s because Democrats allow and even encourage these riots, while Republicans tend to shut them down with police action. Recent attempts by left-wing rioters to stage large events in red states (such as Texas) have been quickly shut down, and both Antifa and BLM terrorist organizations only have legal protection for their acts in areas where left-wing DAs will refuse to charge them with crimes.
  • Notably, a new surge of riots and violence will now take place due to the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the infanticide advocate who was a hero of the bloodthirsty Left because she protected their “right” to murder their own babies without legal consequences. As child murder is a core value of the demon-worshiping Left, they are infuriated over the thought that a foe of unlimited abortion might be appointed to the court.
  • We anticipate pro-abortion rioters and left-wing anarchists will specifically target the homes of GOP Senators, rioting outside their homes and threatening violence against them if they do not agree to delay any vote on a new Supreme Court justice until after January 20th. These riots have already begun against McConnell, but will expand to many other senators.
  • Importantly, President Trump will not take aggressive law enforcement action against terrorist uprisings before the election. Rules of Engagement with rioters will continue to be relatively passive, allowing rioters to escalate their tactics without much of a response from federal law enforcement. All this will change after the election (see below), but until then, America is going to have to endure 40+ days of chaos, arson, violence and illegal rebellion activity that will target Trump supporters, law enforcement, Christians and conservatives.
  • During this time, the US Senate will likely hold hearings for a new SCOTUS nominee but will not hold a vote before the election. The reason for this comes down to vulnerable Senate seats, where GOP members in tight races might be unable to hold their seats if they are forced to vote on a new SCOTUS nominee before the election.
  • The stock market will continue to trend upward during this time due to relentless money printing by the federal reserve. They will pull out all the stops to keep the markets going, even if it means directly purchasing equities. There will be a huge price to pay for all this money printing later, of course…
  • There is a strong possibility of a military conflict with China in the South China Sea area (near Taiwan) before the election. Pentagon forces are itching for war, and they want to stage a conflict there to open the coffers so that more money flows to weapons contractors who give kickbacks to top Pentagon officials.

Election Day

  • On Election Day, Big Tech will activate widespread censorship of nearly all conservative channels, blacklisting them from posting so that only pro-Biden conversations can take place online. Any who post in favor of Trump will be instantly banned.
  • The insurrectionist corporate media will gaslight the nation, declaring Trump isn’t winning even when he is. Any results that show Trump winning in a landslide will be dismissed as “early” disinformation, because of course the media has to give the Democrats enough time to counterfeit the fake ballots they need in the districts they need to try to steal the election.
  • As the elections get under way, the left-wing media will fake exit polls to try to establish that Biden is winning. This way, when Democrats counterfeit ballots, the stolen election results will match all the exit polls, and the media will claim it all checks out.
  • By the end of the day, Trump will be winning an electoral victory, but many swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania will deliberately delay the reporting of their results, claiming mail-in ballots will take “weeks” to count, so they will refuse to officially report any victory for Trump.
  • Throughout Election Day, the left-wing media will also robotically claim “voter suppression,” setting up the narrative that if Trump wins, he must have won by suppressing the vote of black people, because he’s a “racist,” of course.
  • Note: I will be covering Election Day events LIVE, in real time at my social media platform Brighteon.social, where you can follow me at: https://brighteon.social/@HealthRanger

Immediate Post-Election Action

  • Immediately after the election, Democrats will likely activate their full-blown chaos agenda to throw the country into mass chaos, making any accurate counting of remaining votes almost impossible. This will likely begin with so-called “Zero Day” attacks that target key US infrastructure, including the power grid, telecommunications, transportation and water supplies.
  • These attacks will plunge many areas of America into extreme chaos and lead to exploding crisis scenarios which will quickly escalate into panic among the populations of certain cities where the attacks are focused.
  • In concert with the Zero Day attacks, left-wing insurrectionists will be given the “go” signal to flood into the streets, violently attacking Trump supporters with the full forces of the weapons that have been smuggled into the hands of Black Lives Matter terrorists via communist China, which is providing heavy weapons to US insurrectionists (full-auto battle rifles, RPGs, mortars and more).
  • Within days, many of America’s streets will be full-blown active war zones. This will quickly force Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he will do, activating military assets which he has pre-positioned in 50 US cities, under the cover of “Operation Warp Speed” (the vaccine program).
  • From here, curfews will be enacted in many cities, and military personnel will quickly regain control of the streets. This will drive left-wing forces into guerrilla warfare mode, which will continue through January. In this mode, left-wing terrorists will resort to classic guerilla warfare tactics such as sabotage, politically targeted assassinations and bombings of key infrastructure. We are going to witness the radical Left descend into a full-blown militant insurrectionist force like the “Shining Path” in Peru, with kidnappings of the children of prominent conservatives, assassinations, bombings and more. It won’t take long for this to escalate.


PrepWithMike – THREAT analysis: Cities vs. suburbs vs. rural America

Post-election chaos: Nov, Dec, Jan

  • We anticipate several Democrat-run states flat-out refusing to certify results in favor of Trump no matter how long it takes. We are essentially going to witness acts of secession among several blue states, most likely California, Oregon and Washington.
  • During this time, legal battles will be raging at the local level all across the nation, with Trump’s legal team attempting to nullify fraudulent votes (and fake ballots printed up by the Dems), and Democrats trying to include all the fake votes they have fabricated after the election. The future of this nation will depend on the outcome of these legal battles, perhaps coming down to a single court in a single state that could determine the entire election.
  • The possibility of increased tension with China — perhaps via a proxy war involving Taiwan — is heightened during this time. Watch for a Navy vessel conflict of some sort.
  • We anticipate the US Senate voting to confirm a new Supreme Court justice fairly quickly after the election, most likely Amy Barrett. The fact that she is a woman will avoid the left-wing media’s usual fabrication of sex-related allegations against male nominees (Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, etc.), but they will find new ways to attack Barrett, mostly likely by attacking her religious faith. To the demons on the Left, a person of faith is seen as their mortal enemy.
  • By all measures, the Democrats will flat-out refuse to concede the election to Trump no matter what the votes say. Even if he is winning a 400-vote electoral landslide, they will claim he’s not “legitimate” and therefore they refuse to participate in the election outcome unless they win it.
  • We wouldn’t be surprised if some prominent Democrats attempt to split off and claim Biden is the legitimate president, asserting that Trump “stole” the election through whatever mechanism sounds good at the time. They may try to invoke a military coup against Trump or even physically overrun and occupy the White House to physically place Joe Biden inside that symbol of power.
  • During this time, we see a very strong role for militia groups nationwide in protecting local areas — and perhaps even the White House — against left-wing attempts to overrun and seize control by force. There will likely be standoffs and possibly kinetic engagements between militia forces and left-wing insurrectionists, although we would encourage patriotic Americans to allow the military to do its job and put down the insurrectionists using Insurrection Act powers under the direction of President Trump.
  • Also during this time, there will be the same battle over “faithless electors” that we saw after the 2016 election, where blue states try to force their Electoral College voters to vote against the will of the people, denying Trump the official Electoral College votes he needs to official claim a second term. However, recent court cases have ruled that in many states, these faithless electors are not allowed to simply vote whatever way they wish. So this effort will fail.
  • Importantly, the new SCOTUS justice will be sworn in during this time, granting conservatives a 6-3 majority (technically, only a 5-4 majority since Roberts is a compromised, blackmailed traitor who now votes against conservative principles). This will be key as it seems likely one or more local court decisions involving mail-in votes will end up in the hands of SCOTUS under emergency appeal, and the court ruling will be pivotal in deciding the accepted outcome of the election.
  • In the end, we currently give Trump a 70% chance of achieving victory after everything is said and done, which is a significant improvement over where he was in April of this year, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden’s 30% chance comes from the level of extreme organization of illegal ballot harvesting, voter fraud and ballot counterfeiting that is being carried out by the lawless Left, along with the coordinated censorship of nearly all pro-Trump voices across social media and Big Tech platforms.
  • During these months, we anticipate very high market volatility with several plunges in the markets as social chaos is unleashed across the country. The left-wing riots, infrastructure failures and general feeling of doom and gloom will put heavy downward pressure on the markets, and it wouldn’t be outlandish to expect a 30% correction in the Dow during this time (with perhaps a 40% correct in certain overvalued tech stocks). Gold and silver will skyrocket during all this chaos, as will prices of guns and ammo.
  • US military troops will maintain a heavy presence on the streets of left-wing cities (which is nearly every large city) in order to maintain law and order. To some people, America will begin to look like a war state under martial law, but in fact most conservatives will welcome the presence of the troops, given the extreme violence of the radical Left. Expect to see military roadway checkpoints in and around many US cities.
  • Expect continued shortages in food, products and consumer goods during this time. With infrastructure failures becoming more frequent, and left-wing terrorists targeting long-haul trucks and raiding retail stores, we will all be living through a time of extreme shortages and uncertainty.
  • The national economic will continue to crumble during all this, with sharp increases in joblessness and homelessness. Expect very long food lines across all 50 states, with tens of millions of Americans facing food insecurity as well as imminent homelessness if the federal ban on evictions is lifted.
  • Along with this, we expect a sharp increase in local crime as once-polite people turn desperate and begin looting and stealing in order to feed themselves and their families. Crimes of desperation will skyrocket.
  • Vaccines will begin to become available during this time, and the government may offer financial incentives for people to get injected. Given the economic collapse and desperation, many people will agree to the immunizations. Over the next few years, we will all come to learn how these vaccines ended up killing so many people, and rendering huge numbers permanently infertile (thereby achieving depopulation goals).

Inauguration Day: Jan 20, 2021

  • With Trump the likely winner of the election (see above), Inauguration Day will witness heavy protests by unhappy Leftists, and they will see this day as their last opportunity to try to overthrow the nation or go down in flames trying.
  • Here, the media will reveal their true treason against America, and they will denounce President Trump and his second term.
  • On this day, we expect many top Democrats and deep state traitors to flee the country, as their arrests will be imminent.
  • This may be the day that left-wing governors and traitors within the Pentagon declare war on America, setting off a full-blown civil war that could eventually see UN troops invading America and fighting on the side of Democrats to try to overthrow the US government and install their own president into power. We won’t know more about this dangerous dynamic until we see how the election plays out.

Post Inauguration Day

  • Assuming Trump wins the election, his second term sets off an epic fight to defend America by arresting and shutting down the treasonous actors, insurrectionists and deep state traitors who tried to overthrow this nation. We will see mass arrests of people like James Comey, John Brennan and perhaps even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama himself, one of the masterminds of the deep treason against America. California Gov. Newsom, a hardened mafia criminal, will also likely be arrested and charged with money laundering and sedition.
  • With Trump in power for a second term, the radical Left will go “scorched Earth” on America, activating every asset to destroy America’s infrastructure, poison water supplies, bomb buildings, burn cities to the ground and mass murder as many people as possible. This is the goal of Leftists: They HATE America and want to see it destroyed, and they know this is their last opportunity to bring the country down before they are exterminated and removed from power. Importantly, in Trump’s second term, the DNC will be disbanded and the Democrat party will implode.
  • Ultimately, we hope to see Trump ordering the military police arrests of Big Tech CEOs (while seizing tech companies), fake news media operatives (who are mostly working with China and the CIA), university professors who are terror recruitment operatives and the leaders of all the left-wing movements that are rooted in violence. Whether he pursues all this depends largely on how much outcry there is from conservative Americans against the terrorism and treason of the Left, so your voice will be important during this time.
  • If, on the other hand, Trump loses the election because Democrats have rigged it, we can expect a civil war to be well under way by this time, with any number of scenarios unfolding across the landscape of cities and states.
  • No matter who wins, we see America breaking apart by 2025, as lunatic left-wing Democrats are now flatly incompatible with civil society. They cannot function in a system rooted in fairness, free speech and equal protection under the law. They can only flourish under rigged, authoritarian systems rooted in government tyranny and the destruction of fundamental human rights such as the right to speak. Nearly all Democrats have been transformed into hate-filled, raging lunatics who cannot function under a system of law or reason. Thus, we don’t see California, Oregon and Washington wanting to participate in a future nation where their government tyranny is nullified by liberty. They may attempt to secede from the union, setting off regional civil war action in their own states as rural citizens face off against urban citizens to determine who controls the fate of their states.
  • America as we know it will cease to exist by 2025. Even if Trump wins, he will be the last President of the USA as we know it.
  • Sometime in 2021, markets will likely suffer a catastrophic correction. The social implications of this are beyond the scope of this report, but they will be enormous.
  • In the end, everyone will come to learn you can’t run an economy on fake currency and debt creation. This entire system is coming down, no matter who’s in the White House. They can only keep it afloat for a little while longer. But much the same is also true for China, and it’s actually going to be intiguing to see which nation’s financial system collapses first.

How to get prepared in the 40+ days remaining

  • First, download my free nine-hour audiobook, “The Global Reset Survival Guide” at GlobalReset.news (you are also free to share it with others).
  • Secondly, I will soon be posting another free audiobook called “Survival Nutrition” at SurvivalNutrition.com. It is due on Sep. 30th but may be delayed into the first week of October.
  • Thirdly, follow my new social media channel on Brighteon.social. My channel there is https://brighteon.social/@HealthRanger
  • Watch all the new videos at PrepWithMike.com – which teaches you how to prepare your firearms, red dot sights, emergency gear and more.
  • Stock up on food, firearms, ammunition, communications gear, water filters, off-grid gear and everything you think you might need to survive months (or years) of chaos and civil war. There are many scenarios in which civil war becomes the most likely outcome.
  • Bug out of the cities NOW, while you still can. You do not want to be left in any large city once all this gets under way.
  • Prepare for internet outages and sabotage. We are going to be posting an IP address soon that you can use to bypass DNS systems and access our websites even if global name servers go down.
  • Watch more preparedness videos at Brighteon.com. A channel there called Man Made Survival gives you a lot of good information. There’s also a channel called US Sports Radio that features a lot of tactical firearms training videos.
  • Read your Bible and pray for divine protection. We all need it.

Just 40+ days before CHAOS in America

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