Emunah Magazine

Rabbi Shmuley appears on the talk show to discuss the latest events facing the middle east.

Here is a video blog update from our very own Emuna Online columnist Eliyokum Hakohen, enjoy.

Here is a video blog update from our very own Emuna Online columnist Eliyokum Hakohen, enjoy.

Considering Adolf Hitler’s global name recognition – after all, politicians from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez are compared to the Austrian-born Fuehrer every day – it’s surprising more companies haven’t discovered him as an advertising draw. Well, it’s not really that surprising, considering the issues of taste and basic common sense, let alone laws banishing his image and symbols from the public arena in many countries. But it’s springtime for Hitler again, because now the island of Sicily is testing the Fuehrer’s viability as a poster child – for jeans!

Last week in Palermo, the Sicilian “New Form” fashion chain store hung a series of new 18-foot posters displaying the dictator wearing a pink uniform and a heart-shaped symbol on the armband in place of the Fuehrer’s trademark Swastika. The slogan? “Change your style. Don’t follow your leader.”

As cited in the Corriere della sierra over the weekend, Daniele Manno, who is the head of Zerocento, the advertising agency responsible for the posters,explained his new campaign by saying “we have ridiculed Hitler in a way that invites young people to create their own style and not to be influenced by their peers.” The campaign, which began weekend before last and has been gaining notoriety ever since, is aimed at twenty-somethings, who have already finished school and supposedly know all about Hitler and his policies. Manno points out that his agency is an equal opportunity offense-giver, since it intends to unveil a set of new posters bearing the face of Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

But not everyone on this island, which endured both Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s Nazis, is laughing. Rosario Filoramo, a city councillor for the centre-Left Democratic Party, has lodged a formal protest with Palermo’s mayor,Diego Cammarata: "The use of an image of a person responsible for the worst chapters of the last century is offensive to our country's constitutional principles and to the sensitivities of citizens," he said. Italy’s partisan movement has protested, and ordinary citizens have appealed directly to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano to have the offending posters removed – all to no avail.

Now I’ve been to Sicily, and the day I stepped off the plane in Palermo I couldn’t help noticing the Hitler beer and the Mussolini T-shirts they sell in the town’s many tourist traps. I also discovered pretty quickly that there were two kinds of shops: the ones where the owners had icons of the Virgin Mary and/or Italian saint Padre Pio in a place of honor on a shelf above the counter, and those with a lovingly polished bust of Il Duce himself. (Many Sicilians recall how Mussolini suppressed the Mafia during his long rule, for which they remain forever grateful to the dictator's memory.)

But that’s Sicily for you. Somehow I doubt the posters – and the jeans – will catch on in many places in the USA. Until they do, I’m sticking to Levis. You might want to do the same.

Emuna Magazine is happy to have renowned rabbi, author and blogger Rabbi Shmuley Boteach join our editorial staff.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is host of the award-winning national TV show, Shalom in the Home on TLC. He is also the international best-selling author of 22 books, including his most recent work, The Michael Jackson Tapes (Perseus Books). His book Kosher Sex was an international blockbuster, published in 20 languages, and his recent books on the American family, Parenting With Fire and Ten Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children were both launched on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In 2008, Rabbi Shmuley served as Oprah’s marriage, parenting, and relationships expert on her “Oprah and Friends” national radio network, hosting the daily ‘Rabbi Shmuley Show.’ In 2007, Rabbi Shmuley was labeled “a cultural phenomenon” and “the most famous rabbi in America” by Newsweek magazine, and in 2007, 2008, and 2009 was named as one of the ten most influential rabbis in America. Also in 2007, Rabbi Shmuley was honored by The National Fatherhood Initiative, receiving their most prestigious award for his efforts on Shalom in the Home to promote the importance of a caring father in the contemporary family. Rabbi Shmuley has also been named by Talkers Magazine as one of the hundred most important radio hosts in America.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

In 1999, just days before the millennium, Rabbi Shmuley won the highly prestigious “Preacher of the Year” Award from the London Times, setting a record for the most points ever garnered in the competition’s history. Rabbi Shmuley also publishes a weekly syndicated column for which, in 2005, he was awarded the American Jewish Press Association’s highest award for excellence in commentary.

In 2008, Rabbi Shmuley became one of five finalists for Brandeis University’s ‘Bronfman Visiting Chair in Jewish Communal Innovation’ for his proposal ‘Bringing Judaism Into The Mainstream.’ The proposal is an extension of This World: The Jewish Values Network, the organization he founded and chairs which aims to bring Jewish values to mainstream American culture via the media, politics, and the arts. As part of This World, in 2008 Rabbi Shmuley launched the national family dinner initiative ‘Turn Friday Night Into Family Night,’ which has garnered support from every corner of American society.

Rabbi Shmuley first came to world attention through his founding of the Oxford University L’Chaim Society, an organization of Oxford students that within three years of its founding in 1988 had become the second largest student organization in Oxford ’s history. At the University, where Rabbi Shmuley served as Rabbi to the students for eleven years, he played host to, and debated, some of the world’s leading thinkers, statesmen, and entertainers including Mikhail Gorbachev, Professor Stephen Hawking, Shimon Peres, Deepak Chopra, Benjamin Netanyahu, Elie Wiesel, Yitzchak Shamir, Prof. Richard Dawkins, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Simon Wiesenthal, and Prof. Colin Blakemore, to name but a few.

Hailed by Dennis Prager as ‘possessing one of the most fertile minds of our generation,’ Rabbi Shmuley has written many best-selling books including Wisdom, Understanding, Kosher Adultery , Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments , Face Your Fear , the critically-acclaimed Judaism for Everyone , The Private Adam , his critique of American celebrity culture , and his review of Oxford history and life, Moses of Oxford , Vols. I & II. His book Why Can’t I Fall in Love was a finalist for the 2002 Books for a Better Life Award, and in April 2005 Rabbi Shmuley published Hating Women: America ’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex . In 2007, Rabbi Shmuley published his monumental study of the American masculinity, The Broken American Male and How to Fix Him.

Many of Rabbi Shmuley’s books have been serialized in major international publications and have been translated into languages ranging from Japanese, Thai, Czech, Chinese, and Italian, to Dutch, German, Russian, and French.

Rabbi Shmuley is a highly sought-after television and radio guest, having appeared on shows ranging from The Today Show to The View to The O’Reilley Factor to Good Morning America, and nearly everything in between. He was also the subject of a full-length BBC documentary, Moses of Oxford. He has been profiled in many of the world’s leading publications, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The London Times, The L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.

Engaged in such a wide range of endeavors, it is no wonder that Salon.com wrote that “Boteach has his scholarly finger on the pulse of the nation.”

Rabbi Shmuley is married to his Australian wife, Debbie, and they have nine children.

His website is www.shmuley.com

Books by Rabbi Shmuley

The Michael Jackson Tapes (Perseus Books, 2009)
The Blessing of Enough (Sony, 2009)
The Kosher Sutra (HarperOne, 2009)
The Broken American Male, And How to Fix Him (St. Martin’s Press, 2008)
Shalom in the Home (Meredith Books, 2007)
Parenting with Fire: Lighting up the Family With Passion and Inspiration (Penguin Press, 2006)
10 Conversations You Need to Have With Your Children (HarperCollins, 2006)
Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex (HarperCollins, 2005)
Face Your Fear: Living with Courage in an Age of Caution (St. Martin’s Press, 2004)
The Private Adam: Becoming a Hero in a Selfish Age (HarperCollins, 2003)
Judaism For Everyone: Renewing Your Life Through the Vibrant Lessons of the Jewish Faith (Basic Books, 2002)
Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with your Spouse (Adams Media, 2002)
Why Can’t I Fall in Love?: A 12-Step Program (HarperCollins, 2001)
The Psychic and the Rabbi: A Remarkable Correspondence (Sourcebooks, 2001)
Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments (Broadway, 2000)
Kosher Emotions (Hodder & Stoughton, 2000)
Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy (Doubleday) 1999)
Wrestling with the Divine (Jason Aronson, 1995)
Moses of Oxford: A Jewish Vision of a University and Its Life, Volumes One and Two (Andre Deutsch, 1994)
Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge (Jason Aronson, 1993)
The Wolf Shall Lie with the Lamb (Jason Aronson, 1993)
Dreams (Bash Publications, 1991)

By Amil Imani

America is a nation and an ideal, birthed by a group of visionaries that gave it the Constitution to nurture it and protect it. What makes America, America the Beautiful, more than just a blessed land is our legacy, the Constitution. Sadly, the Constitution also makes for America the Vulnerable by enshrining freedom that enables the malevolent to subvert and destroy America from within. You, the voter, are the guardian of the Constitution. Your vote determines the health and survival of America.

America is defined by the last phrase of our national anthem: The land of the free and the home of the brave. Freedom, in all its forms, is our greatest legacy, which this nation has bravely fought many wars on many fronts to preserve against the unceasing assaults of totalitarianism of all stripes. Time and again, the flowers of our nation bravely sacrificed their lives to protect freedom and liberty.
In the not too distant past, we fought and defeated Nazism and Fascism in Europe and Imperialism in the Far East. Before the nation could have a respite, the flame of international communism raged, consumed many parts of the world in its fire, and posed a great threat of scorching our land. Yet, we did not waiver, did not appease, and did not surrender. We stood and fought the scourge of communism on multiple fronts, not knowing we would have to fight communism yet again, but this time, inside the United States.

America is not perfect. No human enterprise ever is. Yet, America is the closest country to a true abode of peace in the broadest sense. And it is Americans, overwhelmingly “infidels”, who make America what it is. While America opens its doors to the poor, the hungry and the oppressed of the world, Americans open their hearts to the less fortunate people of various lands by their unsurpassed generosity. No nation gives more aid to international charities, as percentage of its gross domestic products, than the American people. It is sad to watch those people to whom we have opened our pockets now biting the hands that fed them.

Currently, America is faced with the insidious, multifaceted, and most deadly threat of Islamism. Since Islam has been around for centuries, there is a tendency to ignore or even deny the threat it poses to humanity. Various concessions are made, some of them as good faith offerings and some in the hope of placating the Islamists. Yet, concessions to threats are appeasements. And appeasements have never solved any problems. They only whet the appetite of the aggressor, give it more power, and make it even more dangerous.

And appeasement comes in many forms. When our leaders, for instance, call Islam a great religion, they are appeasing, if not lying outright. We the people elect our leaders and we hold them accountable and to be honorable. Using their voices to call a most deadly threat to everything we cherish a great religion, legitimizes Islamofascisim, on the one hand, and infuses the rest of us with a false belief.

We must go by the facts on the ground and not by rhetoric. Islam is not a great religion. It is overloaded by those who would make it a dangerous religious cult of hate and violence, intent on ruling the world under the Ummah with its barbaric Sharia laws.

Calling Islam a great religion and misrepresenting it is not simply a harmless gesture of goodwill and peacemaking. This is fueling the fire that has every intention of consuming us. Therefore, it is imperative that we choose our elected officials with great care. We must entrust the reins of our nation to the hands of a person of impeccable integrity who is unconditionally loyal to the Constitution, who does not sacrifice principles and truth at the altar of expediency, and who is not shrinking from what he must do to ensure our nation’s survival in the face of internal and external assaults.

In our representative democracy, citizens exercise their power through the ballot box. Hence, when you vote for America, you vote for our freedom as well as for the aspiration of all people who yearn to free themselves from the yoke of religious totalitarianism.

In the last presidential election, Americans elected an enigmatic man to preside over their lives. This president is taking down America faster than the speed of light. The voters were told, yet they decided to change America, perhaps for good. President Obama , instead of glorifying America at every chance he gets, he does the opposite and sings the praises of Islam. He calls it a great religion. It has been reported that some of his closest White House advisers are Muslims. At times he seems to be a weak and indecisive politician who doesn’t seem to firmly believe in the ideals of democracy and liberty. He, as a most powerful political leader, unfortunately doesn’t always champion democracy. At best, he seems to be a strict pragmatist with a focus on the short term results.

In the last election, some Americans simply forgot their duties as American citizens. But, the good news is, the November 2010 federal election is upon us, which will be for Senate and House of Representatives. But, this time around you mustn’t be fooled or mesmerized by any Slick Willy who promises everything, yet won’t deliver a thing. When the barbarians are already inside our fortress, it is suicidal to run and hide in the cellar. Islamists are not at the gate anymore waiting to enter. They already have breached the fortress of America in significant numbers. They are working inside the system now. They are waiting for the opportunity to fully open the rest of the gate to their jihadist brethren and make the land of the free a graveyard of Islamic slavery.

First things first, our highest priority is the preservation of this nation of the free. We have done what it took in the past and we must do what it takes now and in the future to safeguard liberty. Next to stopping illegal immigration , which is devouring America, is defeating the encroaching Islamism. This is the greatest challenge for this generation of Americans. We must meet the threat and defeat it. The alternative is to suffer the fate of the Europeans, many of whom are voting with their feet, fleeing to other lands and abandoning their ancestral homes to the Islamists.

Don’t be fooled by the accusations that the incurably sick Leftists at home and America’s ill-wishers abroad level at this country. America is not perfect. Yet, it is the very best hope for a humanity struggling to find its humanness. America is worth defending. Vote for the candidate who is not appeasing the Islamists for some extra-votes. Vote for the candidate who is willing to fight Islamism and isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade.

Islamists are Islam’s locomotive that takes the wrecking-ball Islamic train on its demolition course. Islam and democracy are incompatible. As democracies practice their magnificent accommodating belief, they knowingly or unknowingly lay the track for the advancing train wrecking that is Islam. We, in the United States of America must resist Islamism while it is still gathering momentum, unless we wish to end up in the same fix as the Europeans.

Islamism threatens to set a new record for brutality, contrary to the contention that there is no reason to worry about it. Jihadist Wahabism’s tentacles are reaching out from its cradle in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf Arab Emirates. The Petrodollar flush Sunni zealots are liberally financing mosques, madresehs (Islamic indoctrination schools), Islamic centers at universities, front organizations and lobbyists to promote the Wahhabi virulent Islamism in every part of America. That makes America the Vulnerable.

Just listen to top President Obama’s adviser (useful Idiot) John Brennan who talks about his love for “al-Quds and trying to appease his Muslim audience. “It wasn’t enough that President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan gave a speech which-possibly for the first time in U.S. history-gave a government definition of a religious practice, endorsing Jihad as a noble pursuit. Without knowing very much about the Middle East, Lebanon, Iran, Islamism, or even his supposed subject of expertise, terrorism.”

What can be done? Is there a way of resisting and reversing the imminent Islamic assault on our most cherished right of liberty? It’s time to stop just crisscrossing the Internet with emails whining about Obama; it is time for effective action…effective, lawful action. Here are some suggestions.

• Become an active worker of liberty, instead of passive non-caring devil-may-care nihilists. Many Europeans are already paying the price of non-caring complacency as Islam is rapidly gaining greater and greater power and casting its suffocating pall on their lives.

• Get involved with your local representatives and try to wean them away from Islam by pointing out how the Imams at mosques, this nest of terror, spew hate, intolerance and violence every chance they get against America and our way of life. But be very serious of warning them about a defunct ideology of intolerance, backwardness and death.

• Use the political process, while it is still responsive to the demands and wishes of freedom-loving people, by supporting laws that guard freedom and reject those that infringe on liberty.

• Actively support political candidates who are deeply committed to the tenets of freedom, not political correctness.
• Run for office, any office. Encourage your friends and other liberty advocates to pitch in and help in any way they can.

• Hold to account those politicians who sell themselves to the Islamists and promote Islam. These for-hire politicians will do anything they can to keep their position and benefit from the generous financial backing of the Islamists.

• Be an active educator by informing others about the creeping danger of Islamism. Islamism is seriously eroding the very foundation of liberty by a variety of means. Powerful moneyed Islamic organizations threaten anyone who dares to criticize Islam with ruinous lawsuits and even death.

• Resist the flourishing of mosques (especially building a grand mosque or as I call it, The Center for Islamic Terrorism at ground zero) and Islamic schools. Mosques and Islamic schools are not for worshiping a loving God and for enlightening minds. They are incubators of Islamic bigotry and myopia.

• Contribute money, small or large amounts, to causes and individuals who are fighting to preserve liberty. As the old saying goes, freedom is not free.

In short, liberty is your most prized possession and democracy is the shield that protects it. Yet, this shield of democracy is making America the Vulnerable and needs to be repaired and strengthened on a regular basis. I am calling on you, the individual freedom-loving person, to play your part in the defense of freedom, not only for your own sake, but also for mine and all others who cherish this precious blessing of life.

Today CNN broadcast an intriguing feature about Zablon Simintov, the last Jew living in Afghanistan. The report had a lot to say about Judaism, Afghanistan…and CNN itself.

Afghan Jewry may go back as far as the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Captivity 2,700 years ago, and several of the country’s main tribes claim descent from King Saul. Afghanistan’s Jewish community can look back upon at least 800 years of tradition, including both happy and downright terrifying times. In the late 19th century it counted some 40,000 members, a number that dropped to a mere 5,000 by the mid-20th century due to the Afghan government’s anti-Semitic policies. Most Afghan Jews headed for Israel after 1948 and nearly all of the remainder fled when the Soviets invaded in 1979. The last families dribbled away steadily until now only Levin is left. He returned to Kabul during Taliban rule in the 1990s and has been living in Kabul’s sole local synagogue ever since.

Simintov, a former carpet merchant whom his neighbors simply call “the Jew,” has been something of a global celebrity since the start of the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan and particularly since the death of eighty-year-old Ishaq Levin, Afghanistan’s second-last Jew, with whom the younger man had uneasily shared quarters in the dilapidated synagogue. “He was a very bad man who tried to get me killed,” Mr Simintov told the London Times upon the hated Levin’s death in 2005. “Now I am the Jew here, I am the boss.” Part of the conflict between the two men concerned the synagogue’s Torah. Levin supposedly told the Taliban that it was 400 years old and worth a fortune. The Taliban promptly confiscated it, and Simintov has been trying to get it back ever since. “They should cut his hand off,” he says of the Taliban official, whom he now suspects is being held at Guantanamo Bay. Among other tiffs, Levin and Simintov denounced each other to the Taliban authorities as Mossad spies, which got them beaten with rifle butts and landed them in jail for a time.

The hard-drinking Simintov has been the subject of several newspaper stories and a British play. Despite his rough exterior, he considers himself religious. He prays everyday and keeps kosher, slaughtering animals himself with special permission granted by the nearest rabbi, who resides in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. So far he has no intention of moving to Israel to rejoin his wife and two daughters in Holon, whom he hasn’t seen since his last visit there over a decade ago.

It’s easy to see why an infotainment operation like CNN would feature an anecdote like this. It’s the sort of human interest story that warms the heart of every Afghan War supporter. Doesn’t it prove that the US Army has once more brought the blessings of liberty to a benighted corner of the globe? But the pugnacious Simintov is anything but a pro-war poster child – a fact that CNN just so happened to leave out of its report. In fact, in a 2007 interview he said he preferred both the communist and Taliban regimes to the Karzai government, which he calls a “mafia regime.” It seems that agents of the American-sponsored Karzai administration confiscated $40,000 in carpets, leaving the once-wealthy merchant “poor as a dog” and dependent on handouts from Jewish groups abroad and from his Muslim neighbors. Still, he isn’t budging from his synagogue. It sounds like you gotta be pretty tough to be the last Jew in Afghanistan – and breathtakingly uncurious to work for CNN.

Below is the CNN Video

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Word on the street is that the bomb placed in Times Square, near the
headquarters of Viacom, which owns Comedy Central, may be in response to a
South Park episode that portrayed the prophet Muhammad in a bear costume. If
true, and some fanatical Muslims believe that people ought to die because of a
couple of jokes on a TV show, then it’s another nail in the coffin of the
public’s respect for the usefulness of religion.

Indeed, this is religion’s summer of discontent. Humankind’s most
powerful impulse, to approach the divine, is being undermined by the
directionlessness of today’s great faiths. From ongoing violence in the name of
Islam, which is the most serious of all modern religious sins, to priestly
pedophilia, to the evangelical fixation on gay marriage to the near exclusion
of everything else, to Judaism’s impotence in purging materialism from its
community, mainstream religion is being discredited, becoming increasingly
irrelevant to the lives of modern men and women.

The main reason for the deterioration of modern faith is not its sins
of commission, but its sins of omission. People can forgive scandal in religion
so long as, the rest of the time, religion guides and inspires them. But
secular people today see religion’s main goal today as self-perpetuation, more
concerned with its timeless institutions than with the pressing needs of its
flock.

Last week I met with Pope Benedict in Rome after his Wednesday
audience, arranged by Gary Krupp of the Pave the Way Foundation. The substance
of the meeting received significant media play because of what I asked of the
Pope. In essence, I pressed the pontiff, who graciously received me, to join in
creating a global family dinner night on Fridays, something we have already
begun with our ‘Turn Friday Night Into Family Night’ initiative. I presented
the Pope with a dual-time Phillip Stein watch and told him it was set to the
time zones of Rome and Jerusalem, signifying my desire to have him focus on
Israel and the threat the Jewish people face from Iran who, with openly seek to
wipe Israel off the map. And second, the dual clock face is symbolic of my
request that he take the lead in our global campaign by calling upon all the
world’s parents to give their children two uninterrupted hours every Friday
night, inviting two guests, and discussing two important subjects with their
children.

He nodded his assent and repeated twice, ‘We will work together.’

When the papal meeting was over we met with Walter Cardinal Casper,
President of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity. I continued my pitch,
now with the Cardinal, for the importance of the worldwide Church partnering
with us to create an international family dinner night. The Cardinal, a close
friend of Pope Benedict for more than forty years, strongly endorsed the idea
and related his memories of family dinners with his own parents.

I made the case to the Cardinal that the pedophile priest scandal had
significantly undermined the Church’s standing as a champion of family. Many
influential American commentators were now skewering the Church for being an
all-boys club, run by men who do not marry and who had, in the imagination of
some, been prepared to sacrifice the welfare of children in order to protect the
reputation of the Church. What better way to reverse this perception than to
use the full power and reputation of the Church to address children’s core
needs, namely, receiving the love and attention of parents.

Would this not be a new and positive narrative of the Catholic Church
as a champion of family, giving productive and useful advice as to how to
reinvigorate the parent-child bond?

There are two kinds of children. One who receives time and love from
their parent as a gift, and the other who receives it, if at all, as something
that must be earned. The former grows up steady and sturdy like a cedar,
fortified by the ongoing validation given to him by doting parents. The other
becomes a crowd-pleaser, riddled with insecurities, always feeling that there
is nothing especially worthy about him and that he needs to perform and produce
in order to become special. I asked the Cardinal to help us populate the world
with the first kind of child.

Within the Vatican hierarchy I encountered priests who were all-too-eager
to discuss the current controversies facing the Church and who understood the
need for the Church to re-emerge as a global champion of family. With the
Church operating the world’s largest network of schools, hospitals, and
orphanages, it is crucial that it also reach everyday mothers and fathers who
are struggling to raise purposeful children in a world that celebrates
narcissism and fame.

For many people religion offers ritual but no wisdom, dogma but
practically no self-help. And all the splendors of the Vatican will not save
the Church from being anything other than a wonderful tourist destination if it
doesn’t take the initiative and teach people to master life.

The irrelevance of modern religion is something being felt worldwide.
Europeans especially have no time for religion. Secular Israelis feel the same.
Religion for them is a form of OCD, forever concerned with meaningless minutiae
while life’s larger issues remain unaddressed. In Israel religion is viewed as
a parasite, living off the hard work of the secular people who built the state.
Religion is the Yeshiva which teaches meaningless texts while refusing to serve
in the army.

But if religion is inevitably destined to be consigned by modern
Westerners to the ranks of the useless, then why are sophisticated and highly
educated people turning in their tens of millions to the Dalai Lama as their
hero? It remains a striking phenomenon that people who work on Wall Street and
go to Harvard believe in a man who dresses in a sheet and believes he is the
incarnation of earlier spiritual teachers. The reason: the Dalai Lama addresses
modernity’s greatest problem. We’re sinking in a morass of materialism that is
suffocating our spirit and he shows you the way out.

The Pope has the largest microphone to the world and with it the
greatest opportunity to heal marriages which are struggling to remain intact
and children who are in pain over lovelessness and neglect. An international
family dinner night would be a huge step toward religion becoming vital again
and toward the Catholic Church being seen in its true light, as a faith that is
focused on protecting children and cherishing family.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network. On
May 14th he will publish Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life. Go to www.fridayisfamily.com
to sign up your family as part of a global dinner initiative.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
*Follow

*Buy
Rabbi Shmuley’s newest book THE KOSHER SUTRA at http://tinyurl.com/koshersutra
*Join
the national “Turn Friday Night Into Family Night” initiative.
Go to www.FridayisFamily.com.
*See
Shmuley on the web at www.Shmuley.com

All the media attention swirling around supposed death threats against the makers of South Park over a caricature of the prophet Mohammed overshadowed another press story last week that might have a lot more to tell us about relations between the Muslim world and the West.

Back in 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten famously published a series of cartoons poking fun at Mohammed, which led to a global backlash resulting in the boycott and destruction of Danish products and over a hundred lost lives. A few months later a Pan-Arabist and anti-Zionist organization in Holland calling itself the Arab European League published its own set of cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust on its website in order to illustrate “the double morals of the West during the Danish cartoon affair.” The group wrote among other things:

1- The issue for us is not about depicting the prophet or any other theological consideration. It’s about stigmatizing a whole population of more than one billion Muslims through portraying their symbol as being a terrorist, megalomaniac, misogynic and a psychopath. This is Racist, xenophobic and calling for hatred against Muslims.

2- We do believe in Freedom of speech but we think that respecting sensitivities and being constructive is also an added value to a democratic society. We are against laws oppressing any form of expression no matter how appalling it is. Nevertheless, we condemn the selective indignation of Europe’s intellectual elite and population. When anti-Muslim stances are made or published this is perceived as freedom of speech and cheered and supported but when other sensitive issues to Europe like the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, homosexuality, sexism and more are touched, Europe’s elite is scandalized.

(…)

5- Arabs and Muslims are facing occupation on the hand of the west, oppression on the hand of the dictators often supported by the west and aggressive colonization by the Zionist and appartheid state of Israel. Adding symbolic offence to factual aggression is responsible for the tension that we are witnessing today. Any attempt to understand the cartoon’s issue out of the current international context is completely missing the point.

A Hague-based group calling itself the “Center for Information and Documentation Israel” then filed a formal complaint in Amsterdam, saying that the publication of the Holocaust cartoons was “a nightmare for the thousands of Jewish victims of the Holocaust who are still alive.” The AEL in turn argued it was merely going after the West’s own “sacred cows,” referring to a disclaimer it had posted stating that “in our cartoon campaign we do not endorse any anti-Semitic, homophobic or sexist stands. All we are trying to do is to confront Europe with its own hypocrisy using sarcasm and cartoons.”

Last Thursday a Dutch court ruled in the AEL’s favor, stating that “The context in which this cartoon was published takes away from its criminally offensive nature.” So that appears to be that.

So, are you shocked and appalled and already heading out the door for the nearest courtroom? Or, like me, are you merely surprised at how weak and downright incomprehensible they are? I mean, I’ve seen far better on the pages of (junior) high school newspapers! It beats me why anyone would bother taking these guys to court – couldn’t the money be better spent on giving them a couple of drawing lessons?

And yet – that’s also how I felt about the original Mohammed caricatures. While I will always support a free press as far as I have to go to protect it, it’s a totally non-negotiable issue, the Danish campaign – which was intended as a deliberate provocation – always seemed petty and mean-spirited to me, and the global reaction was a foregone conclusion. There was certainly nothing about those spectacularly unfunny drawings that could ever deserve the name “comics,” and the same goes for the AEL’s trashy Holocaust caricatures. You see, genuine comics charm and delight us. They make us laugh as they teach us about human nature. Thoughtful strips like Doonesbury and Peanuts, and clever political cartoons by such skilful artists as Pat Oliphant and Tom Toles – as hard-hitting as they sometimes are – enrich our lives while exercising our smile muscles. And then there’s the kind of toilet graffiti that tears down and demeans – and no one so much as the “artist” who sprays his or her message out into the world like an unpleasant body odor. And that’s the kind of “comics” I’m talking about here. They just aren’t funny.

Okay, I’m going into utopian mode now. Be sure to close the skylight before I head off through the roof! But it seems to me that if we could somehow harness the power of comics to laugh at our own foibles and take the occasional jab at our respective holy cows – just as Daniel Barenboim is using the power of classical music to bring Israeli and Palestinian young people together in his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra – we would all be a lot farther ahead than we are at the moment.

A while back an old comedian explained to me the difference between German humor and Jewish humor. In German humor, he said, you always need a victim. Whether it’s Jews or Poles or blondes, somebody has to bleed. In Jewish humor, by contrast, you always make fun of yourself. Guess which kind is funnier…?

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Since the public announcement of my upcoming meeting with Pope Benedict this Wednesday at the Vatican, courtesy of my friend Gary Krupp, many of my close Jewish friends have expressed not approval but disappointment. ‘They blamed the pedophile priest scandal on Jews and compared the attacks on the Church to anti-Semitism. How could you, Shmuley?’ ‘The Pope was in the Hitler Youth and he wants to make Pope Pius XII, who never condemned the holocaust, into a saint.’ ‘The Church has always been anti-Semitic. You’re being used.’

Pope Ratzinger

Come now. Jewish insularity is the ultimate obstacle to the dissemination of Jewish values, while Jewish contempt for the non-Jewish world because of its past immorality and Jew-hatred is itself immoral and hateful. Pope Benedict is being kicked to the curb in nearly every part of the world. But I as a Jew do not forget that for all his failures in properly handing the abomination of pedophile Priests, for which the Church must atone and repent, Benedict has been a great friend to the Jewish community, visiting an unprecedented three Synagogues in four years as well as the State of Israel. And whom does it benefit to see a mighty Church fall? The millions of orphans the Church tends to worldwide? The schools it runs and the pupils it teaches? The hope its Priests give to the poor, especially in the third world?

I have been one of Pope Pius XII’s foremost critics in the entire world. But Benedict is not Pius and before we holler for his demise let’s recall that as the Cardinal Secretary of State he did more to extend the Church’s hand in friendship to other people’s and faiths than nearly anyone who preceded him.

There is much in Jewish law and tradition that could bring healing to the Church, beginning with the Jewish laws of modesty and sexual seclusion. In Judaism a man and woman who are not married are not allowed to be in a locked room together. When I was Rabbi to Michael Jackson I took this law and applied it his special circumstances. I told him that the only way he could rehabilitate his reputation, after the pedophile accusations against him, was to quite simply foreswear ever being alone with a child. I even grabbed Michael’s shoulders and made him promise me he would never seclude himself with a child not his own. And for the two years we were close to he stuck to the script. When he and I launched our initiative to help children, the focus was on working with their parents to prioritize their kids, rather than with the kids themselves. It wasn’t until Michael stupidly disregarded this simple advice and decided to share a bed – however platonically – with a young child and then brag about it on international TV that he was arrested and started the inexorable decline that ended in his death a few years later.

The Church should embrace the same straightforward rule. No priest should be allowed to be in alone with a child. Period. If a Priest needs to speak to a child alone, the door must never be locked and there must always be the possibility that they can be intruded upon by outsiders. If they walk in a park, it cannot be one that is empty of people. This way we’ll know that any Priest who breaks the guidelines will be punished whether or not they abuse a child. It would significantly curb the potential for any act of child molestation and might even discourage pedophiles from entering the priesthood in the first place.

But more importantly, it’s time for Jews and Catholics to work together to promote new values in America. While our country is gripped in an epidemic of materialism and an orgy of greed, the only values religion seems to talk about is opposition to gay marriage and abortion. But the emphasis on the negative is not going to create much that is positive. We need values that promote family, strengthens marriage, inspires selflessness in children, and advances the cause of a purposeful life that makes us less obsessive about money and career.

This is why I wish to discuss with Pope Benedict the Catholic Church getting behind our ‘Turn Friday Night into Family Night’ initiative, the push for a global family dinner night. Imagine if all the world’s families – Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Atheist, Agnostic – sat down every Friday night and embraced our ‘Triple Two.” Parents giving their children two uninterrupted hours every Friday night, inviting two guests to teach the children sharing and hospitality, and discussing two important subjects rather than a movie or celebrity gossip. And Friday night is the one evening that unites all. It’s sacred already to Jews and Muslims. Up until Second Vatican Council it was a night where Catholics were forbidden to eat meat. And for the non-religious it’s the beginning of the weekend and sets the tone the activities that will follow. If the family gets together on Friday night, chances are they’ll do more stuff together on Saturday and Sunday as well.

This is the right time for the Catholic Church to own a global family dinner night. The pedophile priest scandal has reinforced the conclusion of some that the Church is an old boys club that at best makes concessions to the weakness of human nature by allowing men and women to marry. The ideal, however, is celibacy and childlessness. The Church must return to its previous posture as a champion of family and what better way than to mandate that all Catholic families worldwide do as Jesus did. Put the worldly stuff away on Friday nights and consecrate it as an evening of holiness and togetherness.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network. His major book on the universal Jewish values that can enrich the lives of every man and woman, Renewal, will be published by Basic Books on May 14th. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.

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By Susan Danseyar

Brookline, MA — Grunie Uminer said she realizes more than ever that God is the prime mover in this world, putting people into circumstances and places that can bring about unimagined results and change one’s reality.

“You never know who you are taking and interacting with,” said the Brookline resident. “You might be talking to your cousin, relative or even royalty.”

Grunie Uminer and Natalie Naiman stop for a photo outside the Chabad Center, where they recently discovered they are long lost cousins, on Sunday afternoon, April 18, 2010.

Uminer knows this firsthand after recently meeting relatives she never knew she had, more than seven decades after her Russian ancestors were scattered across the former Soviet Union. Her long-lost cousins came from all over the world and greeted each other for the first time in February at the International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Women Emissaries in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The reunion came about after a seemingly unrelated event occurred about a month before in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Boris Plaksin was observing the anniversary of his father’s death at the local Chabad house. The rabbi asked Plaksin his Hebrew name so he could be called up to the Torah. When Plaksin said it was Dovber Mendel, the rabbi became intrigued.

“It was a distinctly Hassidic name and the two talked about it,” Uminer said. Plaksin revealed his mother’s maiden name was Duchman, whereupon the rabbi said he recognized it as that of a nurse at a summer camp where his mother worked years before in the United States. He told Plaksin the nurse came from a family with Chabad emissaries around the world.

Plaksin told the rabbi his great-uncles were Chabad Hassidim in Russia, but he thought they died in the Holocaust. Even so, he called his great-niece, Ella Vorovitch. Vorovitch lives in Canada, where she is the rebbetzin (wife of the rabbi) at a Toronto Chabad and the editor of the Russian edition of Exodus Magazine, a publication of the Jewish Russian Community Center of Toronto.

Vorovitch began researching her ancestors and learned that her great-grandmother’s brothers had survived World War II and immigrated to the United States, where they fathered families who run Chabad houses all over, including Turkey, Morocco, China, Florida, Tennessee, Connecticut and New York.

Vorovitch’s great-grandmother was the sister of Uminer’s great-grandfather.

Since learning of the connection, Uminer has been able to piece together bits of information about her ancestors.

“No one talked about the Holocaust when Ella was growing up,” she said. “She would have done this research a lot earlier if she had any information.”

Most amazing to Uminer is that some of the people she recently learned she’s related to are those she was already in contact with through her work with Chabad Center in Chestnut Hill.

“When I realized that one woman and her family — who have been good friends of ours for a few years — attend services at our synagogue and are part of our community, and a second woman — who was our graphic designer for our community calendar for five years — are related to me, I honestly couldn’t believe it,” she said. “It teaches us to really respect each person and afford them dignity; they might end up being connected to us in ways we could never have imagined.”

And one of the distant cousins she recently realized is part of her family was Natalie Naiman, whom Uminer already knew.

“Last year, a couple of days before Passover, Natalie’s father, who had emigrated from Russia and was living in Utah, suddenly passed away,” Uminer said. “Natalie and her husband decided to bury him in Boston and called my husband [Rabbi Mendy Uminer] and asked him to officiate at the funeral. Little did we know that we were extending ourselves to a man we had never met, but who was from our family. We only found out almost a year later that he was my grandmother’s cousin.”

Source: Wicked Local

In a disturbing reversal of symbolism, Israeli extremists are defacing Palestinian property with the Jewish symbol
By Judy Mandelbaum

Time was when Nazis used to slather swastikas on synagogues and Jewish businesses to prepare the local population for expulsion or much worse. It’s sad that this sort of behavior persists around the world, as a new study by Tel Aviv University shows. But it’s even sadder to see Israelis regularly defacing Palestinian property with Stars of David with equal glee and with what appears to be the same brain-dead mindset.

Star Of David Is New Swastika?

Your local paper might not have covered it, but in the wee hours of Wednesday morning a gang of Israeli settlers attacked the West Bank village of Hawara. “Palestinians reported two torched cars on the village’s central road early yesterday,” Haaretz writes. “A small village mosque, used only on the weekend, had the word ‘Muhammad’ sprayed in Hebrew and a Star of David. Haaretz also found graffiti with the Jewish prayer ‘Praise be onto him for not making me a gentile.’” The attackers also took the opportunity to destroy some three hundred olive trees, a major source of local income.

In February of 2009, a Canadian writer by the name of Marcello Di Cintio witnessed how “earlier this week, the IDF raided Jayyous. Soldiers entered the village at night, seized about a hundred young men and penned them in the school gymnasium. The troops also occupied several village houses and spray-painted a Star of David over a pro-freedom mural on a school wall. The IDF took about a dozen men with them when they left, and the men are still in custody somewhere in Israel.”

According to the Maan News Agency, in December 2008, “Israeli settlers rampaged through five villages in the northern West Bank early on Tuesday, vandalizing mosques, attacking farms and harassing residents. In the villages of Yatma, Qabalan and As-Sawiya, south of Nablus, settlers slashed the tires of more than 20 cars and also set fire to thousands of shekels worth of straw bales, used as animal feed. In As-Sawiya, settlers wrote slogans insulting Islam and the prophet Mohammad on the walls of a local mosque. [S]ettlers painted a star of David and slogans such as ‘Death to Arabs’ on the village mosque.”

“On 19 March 2007, Israeli settlers illegally occupied an empty four-story Palestinian building,” the Electronic Intifada reported. “This multi-unit Hebron building is close to the Kiryat Arba settlement of 7000 residents and is strategically located to link Kiryat Arba to the smaller enclaves inside Hebron’s Old City. … Palestinians say that another settlement will lead to yet another checkpoint and tighter curfews, further isolating this part of the city. Already settlers have placed a wire at the entrance of the Palestinian house across the street to trip residents as they exit their home. They have stoned the house and spray painted a Star of David on the front door.”

Also in 2007, Tim McGirk blogged about his own experiences in the West Bank for Time Magazine:

Not long ago, I ventured into Hebron … I wanted to see what [the Palestinians] thought of their Jewish neighbors. On this street, winding up a hill, it was easy to spot the Arab houses. Their windows and doors were covered in metal grills to protect them from stones, rotten fruit and the occasional gunshot coming from settlers living across the road. Over the years, a few Jewish settlers had also been shot by Palestinian militants, and Israeli soldiers had cordoned off this section, emptying life from the heart of old Hebron. The Arab houses were easy to spot for another reason. The settler kids had spray-painted a Star of David on walls of all the Arab houses. A religious symbol used for intimidation. I found this disturbing, like seeing the Klu Klux Klan’s cross blazing on a black man’s lawn.

Blogging for the Madison Times, George Arida described a visit to Nablus in 2003:

We stopped at Joseph’s Tomb, a site of archaeological and religious significance. It also had military significance; the Israelis had bombed it over a year ago (the dome and outside walls were damaged) and then had later used it as a base of operations. The soldiers had left a spray-painted Star of David on the ancient stone wall. This spray-painted souvenir was left by the Israelis on the walls of many buildings in Nablus.

Israeli troops pulled out of the West Bank city of Ramallah in 2002. “The home of Hamdi Flaifer, 35, was in ruins after an Israeli search,” the New York Times reported. “Windows were broken, furniture was smashed, sofa cushions slashed, closets and cabinets were emptied onto the floor. Just outside his front door, Israelis had spray-painted a Star of David and a number, indicating to other Israelis that his house had been searched.”

The Mogen Dovid is a symbol that has experienced a roller coaster of shifting meanings over the centuries. The six-pointed star was a symbol known to many religious and spiritual traditions and only became firmly associated with Judaism and Zionism in the late nineteenth century. But its power as a Jewish symbol derives less from what Jews have done with it than from what anti-Semites have tried in vain to make it into. Storm troopers painted Stars of David on Jewish businesses during their boycott of Jewish shops in 1933. In September, 1941, SS leader Reinhard Heydrich signed a decree demanding that all Jews in German-occupied Europe wear a yellow star – first to shut them up as potential defeatists, and later to mark them for extermination. After the war the new State of Israel chose the Star of David as its national emblem. Thus it has gone from a symbol of pride to a symbol of shame and fear and then back again to a symbol of pride and endurance against impossible odds.

Will it return to being a symbol of shame and fear — perhaps permanently? With attacks like the ones I described above on the increase, and now that the Israeli military has approved plans that could lead to the mass deportation of tens of thousands of West Bank residents on short notice, Palestinians are increasingly experiencing the Star of David as a threat to their very existence. This should be a scandal to everyone who remembers what the star has meant in the past. My message to Israelis is simple: Stop doing this. NOW.

Source: Salon

ISRAEL=APARTHEID. THEY LOVE SAYING THAT.
HOW ONE STUDENT ON CAMPUS RESPONDS TO THE “HIP” ACCUSATION. LEARN WHAT TO SAY!

By Dina Kupfer

I read Ms. Fechtmann’s article with interest and felt compelled to share information straight on, without claiming stake in any side of the proverbial coin.

It is most puzzling that Ms. Fechtmann ignores the origin of the term “apartheid.” It is well-known that only by taking historical context into account can one get the full flavor of any given word, idiom, or quote. Wouldn’t it be bizarre to describe the recent Haiti disaster as a holocaust? Although it is true that there was “mass destruction and loss of life,” one can’t overlook the accompanying definition of “the mass murder of Jews under the German Nazi regime from 1941 until 1945.”

Similarly, back to apartheid, the first definition cannot be conveniently omitted. It reads, “(in the Republic of South Africa) a rigid policy of segregation of the nonwhite population.” Apartheid was introduced as a political platform for the National Party to systematize segregation from 1948 until 1994. Drawing from this precedent, the term apartheid today describes an official system that segregates, discriminates and oppresses others based on race, religion, gender, and sexuality.

Remarkably, that year of 1948 when apartheid became the founding principle of the 20 percent white minority mistreating the 80 percent non-white majority, Israel proclaimed its statehood and enacted a legal system granting political equality and civil rights for all its inhabitants. As per the Declaration of Establishment of State of Israel (written on May 14, 1948, the same night the U.S. recognized the State of Israel ), “it [the State of Israel] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” Furthermore, it goes on to say, “We appeal – in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months – to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”

Apartheid seeks to undermine political rights and civil rights. Apartheid permeates mundane life as an ideology and ferociously crushes self-determination. Let’s go through these characteristics of an apartheid regime and see where Israel stands with each.

In South Africa, the non-white majority wrestled repression to regain voting rights and citizenship. In Israeli democracy, equal voting and political rights were always ensured (as quoted above) to the 20 percent non-Jewish minority. Israeli Arabs have been active in Israeli government from the very first Knesset (legislative branch of Israeli democratic parliamentarian government). There are currently thirteen Israeli Arab Knesset members, including a woman.

In the case of civil rights and mundane life, derogatory segregation restricted non-whites from restrooms, schools, beaches, trains, sports arenas, and restaurants. In contrast, freedoms and equality are protected by law in Israel. Asala Shahada, an Israeli Arab teenager, was awarded a gold medal in the Israeli Maccabiah sports tournament and said, “The Maccabiah belongs not only to all the Jews, but also to all the Israelis, and I am a proud Israeli.” Israel officially recognizes 15 religions, counting Islam, Druze and Bảha’is faith, and many Christian denominations such as Chaldaic. Unfortunately, Bảha’is followers are persecuted in Muslim countries and established headquarters in Haifa, Israel. And unfortunately, Christians are disappearing from the Middle East, except for in Israel, where the Christian community expanded four times its size from 1948 to 1998. Israeli law protects gays, women, and other minorities and defends freedom of speech, press, assembly and dissent.

Israeli Arabs make up 20 percent of the student body at Haifa University and 10 percent of its faculty. Two investigate journalists, one Jordanian and one Israeli, cooperatively wrote a recent op-ed on worldpress.org that provides the inside scoop on Israeli education, “In Israel, we learned that the education system is surprisingly in favor of teaching children Arabic and Islamic studies. Every Israeli student is obligated to learn spoken Arabic, and Islamic studies are optional.” (“Reaching across the Border” March 28, 2010) Education is perhaps the most revealing aspect of a society, indicative of its principles and ideology.

While the non-white South African majority was estranged and denied citizenship, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have never been citizens of Israel and do not want to be. They are a separate national group like Mexicans, Americans and Canadians, and have their own national movement for self-determination. After the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians formed their own government, the Palestinian Authority (PA) that operates civic society, including schools, police, and courts.

With regards to the limited Israeli administrations of the West Bank and Gaza (post 1967 when neighboring countries were mobilizing to invade and destroy Israel and Israel preempted in defense), the numbers are astounding: Infant mortality rates were lowered from 60 out of 1,000 to 15 births thanks to Israeli medical programs and childhood diseases (polio, whooping cough, measles, tetanus) were eliminated with their immunization programs. Life expectancy jumped up from 48 years in 1967 to 72 years in 2000. Standard of living for the Palestinians dramatically improved with steady electricity for 92.8 percent of the population up from 20.5 percent in 1967, 85 percent had running water up from 16 percent, 83.5 percent got gas or electric ranges for cooking up from 4 percent, and the same upward trend was discovered for cars, refrigerators, and televisions. There was a 102 percent increase in schoolchildren, 99 percent increase in the number of classes, and illiteracy rates of adults above age 15 dropped to a mere 14 percent (compare this to illiteracy rates of 61 percent in Egypt and even a low of 44 percent in Syria). No universities existed when Israel entered and by the 1990s, there were seven institutions.

Under the apartheid, the infamous “pass laws” were racially motivated to restrict non-whites, specifying where, when, and for how long they could stay in white neighborhoods. In the democracy of Israel, nothing ever separated Israel and the West Bank until 2003, when terrorism reached an unbearable level. Since its construction, the number of terrorist attacks has fallen by over 90 percent. Thus, although inconvenient, the fence and checkpoints have been serving their purpose of saving lives. Five to eight percent of the West Bank and less than one percent of Palestinians will end up on the Israeli side of the fence, which is 97 percent a chain-link and only about 3 percent (10 miles) is a concrete wall as protection from prevalent sniper shootings in those specific areas.

Many other democratic countries have constructed barriers to keep out illegal immigrants or terrorists, for example U.S./Mexico, Spain/Morocco, India/Kashmir, North/South Korea, and even the walls in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that divide the Protestants and Catholics.

Ishmael Khaldi, a Bedouin appointed as deputy consul of Israel for the Pacific Northwest in 2006, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle (“Lost in the Blur of Slogans,” March 4, 2009):

“I am a proud Israeli – along with many other non-Jewish Israelis such as Druze, Bahai, Bedouin, Christians and Muslims, who live in one of the most culturally diversified societies and the only true democracy in the Middle East. Like America, Israeli society is far from perfect, but let us deal honestly. By any yardstick you choose – educational opportunity, economic development, women and gay’s rights, freedom of speech and assembly, legislative representation – Israel’s minorities fare far better than any other country in the Middle East.”

Khaldi concluded his article writing, “If Israel were an apartheid state, I would not have been appointed here, nor would I have chosen to take upon myself this duty. There are many Arabs, both within Israel and in the Palestinian territories who have taken great courage to walk the path of peace. You should stand with us, rather than against us.”

Does this add up to an apartheid regime? What are the facts saying?

I feel sorry for the Palestinians and for the Israelis, especially for the children who suffer most while growing up in such an antagonistic environment. I want peace. I know, however, that to gain a realistic understanding of the complex Middle East issue, one cannot ignore the historical roots nor speak without facts– just as one cannot do that while writing up a research paper.

P.S. While doing my class readings, I just came across this in the textbook The United Nations and Changing World Politics that upholds the consensus regarding the apartheid definition, “Moreover, the United States at home engaged in its own version of apartheid (namely, legally sanctioned racial discrimination)…” The words “legally sanctioned” are apparently key to understanding the term.

By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

I was horrified to hear that there were South African Jews objecting to Judge Richard Goldstone attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Blocking a fellow Jew, let alone a grandfather, from a family’s religious celebration because of his opinions on Israel is disgraceful. I recall once that the Lubavitcher Rebbe said that any Synagogue that bars a fellow Jew from entry ought to be shut down. We’re not Hamas, Hezbollah, or Fatah. We don’t summarily execute compatriots accused of collaborating with the enemy, as these terrorist organizations do to innocent Palestinians. We don’t character assassinate them either or banish them from our communities. Rather, where fellow Jews, like Goldstone, are harsh critics of Israel, we show them respect and deference and then destroy not them but their arguments in the cold light of fact and reason.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

The Goldstone Report is a modern-day blood libel against the Jewish state and has been torn to shreds by expert international jurists, including Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard and Prof. Richard Landes, Director of the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. Among the many compelling arguments against Goldstone is the fact that his report failed to focus on Hamas initiating the war by firing thousands or terror rockets against Israeli cities, intentionally using women and children as human shields in order to draw Israeli attacks and then accuse them of killing civilians, and how Goldstone granted near-complete credulity to all Hamas claims while cynically deriding those of Israel. As Dershowitz expressed it, the Goldstone Report is ‘to any fair reader, a shoddy piece of work, unworthy of serious consideration by people of good will committed to the truth.’

But that does not make Goldstone an enemy of his people. Rather, I believe, Goldstone, like so many others, reactively chooses the side of the Palestinians not because he is a self-hating Jew but because he boorishly assumes that the weaker party in any conflict is necessarily the aggrieved party. During Israel’s invasion of Gaza to stop Hamas’ murderous rockets it was easy to look at Israel’s tanks and helicopters and view the Palestinians terrorists as helpless victims. By the same logic, however, the awesome military invasion of a million soldiers on the beaches of Normandy made the Nazis into peace-loving innocents, and American shock-and awe over Baghdad made Saddam into a blameless target.

Goldstone is a foolish ignoramus rather than a traitor to his people. We have to stop believing that anyone who is anti-Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. That misguided notion is what led Israel to have such abysmal PR in the first place, assuming as it did that since these critics have an innate hatred of Israel there was no reason to rebut their arguments. The toxic result is that Israel has tragically failed to promote the justice of its cause in a well-organized PR offensive and the Arabs, in the greatest PR coup in history, have somehow convinced the world that six million vulnerable Jews are opporessing five hundred million oil-rich Arabs.

Upon my last visit to South Africa on a book tour I was warmly embraced by the South African media who told me that ‘a Rabbi as open-minded and universal’ as me ought to be bold enough to criticize Israel’s ‘apartheid’ policies toward the Palestinians. Many black South Africans view Israel like the Boer and British Europenan colonizers who oppressed the indigenous population prior to Mandella’s presidency in 1994. I could have easily dismissed them as anti-Semites. But I knew in my heart they were decent, G-d-fearing people who had never heard a robust defense of Israel and I seized the opportunity on TV and radio to make Israel’s case.

The Jews are very similar to black South Africans, I told them. Long ago we too lived peacefully in our land, in Israel. The Holy Land, as the New Testament makes clear, had Jews and no Arabs. Then the Romans, a brutal, European occupier destroyed our Temple and took us as slaves to Europe where we lived under brutal oppression for millennia while praying thrice daily for a return to our ancient homeland. In the Arab countries where many migrated, Sephardic Jews lived under Arab governments where they were further treated like black South Africans, second-class citizens, denied basic human rights and required to pay jizyah, the Koran-obligated poll tax. My father who grew up in Iran, remembers the humiliation of having Islamic shopkeepers refuse to take money directly from his impure Jewish hands. Likewise, Ashkenazi Jews, like their black South African counterparts who were stuffed into townships, were placed into ghettos in Europe and forced to live apart. Finally, the flowering of modern nationalist movements enabled the Jews to begin leaving these lands en masse and returning to their indigenous, ancestral homeland.

But even amid the Jewish dispersion after Rome’s conquest, a minority Jewish population retained an uninterrupted presence is Israel for more than three thousand years. We did not colonize the land but were always a part of it. And when the waves of European Jews began returning to the land in modern times, the land was virtually desolate. The Zionist pioneers did the laborious work of draining the swamps and making the desert bloom.

Far from being a white, colonial settlement, the establishment of Israel is analogous to American blacks who had been forcibly removed from Africa and returned to create the nation of Liberia. The obscene comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa also ignores the fact that Israel is the first country in history to airlift tens of thousands of black men, women, and children from Ethiopia to become free and full citizens within its borders.

Finally, I told my listeners, black South Africans who inspired the world with their capacity for peaceful coexistence could not be more different to the Palestinians who have tragically embraced hatred and terrorism. Nelson Mandela rose to become the foremost statesman in the world with his message of forgiveness and reconciliation. Yasser Arafat fathered international terrorism and stole millions of dollars from his poverty-stricken people.

In stupidly shunning people like Judge Goldstone we in the Jewish community are alienating those who need the light of Jewish values most.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World: The Values Network. On May 14th he will publish his major work on Jewish values, Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life. www.shmuley.com

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By: Eliyokum Hakohen

Apparently people think that hating Israel is a new form of Anti-Semitism and that hating Jews is the old treacherous tale which never ceases to end well I must say you’re WRONG! I was just surfing youtube and I found some of the most atrocious comments about Jews I have ever seen in my life…ABOUT JEWS NOT ISRAEL. Currently it appears people don’t like being called Anti-Semitic, and they don’t want people to know that they dislike Jews, so they cleverly try to mask this hatred by saying that it’s Israel that they have a problem with, not Jews.

HHHMMM, so you mean to tell me that you have a problem with an army that drops leaflets which tell it’s enemies when they are going to drop bombs, you have a problem with a country who accepts 10,000 rockets on it’s civilians before actually engaging their enemy, you have a problem with a country who bows to world pressure and evicts it’s own citizens from land that eventually is used as sites for rocket attacks, you have a problem with a country that has offered a ridiculously generous peace to their enemies 5 times (all of which were flatly refused). This is the country you find uncivilized and filled with hatred?

The world hates Jews, and unforunately plenty of Jews hate Jews too (as a matter of fact as we now are counting hopefully every night Sefirat HaOmer one can only think… these people we mourn over died just because they hated their fellow Jew, imagine what could happen if we did not have self hatred among ourselves). Only someone who is blind and unwilling can’t see what’s going on in now. There have been Anti-apartheid rallies all over the world about Israel? Are you kidding me? Guess people don’t really care that the Muslims don’t pay taxes here (Israel), and they get benefits from the government, the soldiers and police do a greater amount of damage to their own people than to the Muslims, and only under Israeli sovereignty are they actually allowed to live as free people. I guess they also don’t want to hear that in every single poll of the Muslims who have an Israeli I.D. card, the overwhelming majority do not want the creation of “Palestinian” state. Why? In Israel they have jobs, they have a purpose, and they don’t have to live with the fear of a masked gunman coming to blow their heads off for playing music in their homes. They live better in Israel than in any Muslim country in the world…FACT.

Now I have a message to all the self-hating Jews out there. If you want to criticize Israel and have your garbage opinion of what goes on here then that’s fine, but until you actually come to Israel and especially to the “settlements” then shut your mouths, because you don’t have a clue how things work here. Jews are the ones that live in an apartheid state in Israel. Try living under the most radically left-wing Supreme Court, a media which constantly makes them out as the aggressor, and a police system which make the Jews the victims in Israel, not the rag-heads that have no business being here. Jews can’t even go to our own Holy Sites in peace because the pillars that rule Israel are more concerned with appeasing a Muslim president than they are taking care of their own people.

G-d is very explicit in the Torah when He says, “I shall curse those that curse you”, but the sad part is that our biggest enemy comes from within. Jews would rather get their news from a liberal like Anderson Cooper than from someone who actually knows what they are talking about. They would rather believe a group like “Peace Now” than actually come to Israel and form their own opinion, and the worst is that they would rather adhere to the codes of western society than to follow the only Divine Book that was given to us as a gift. Until Moshiach these things will continue to plague us, the subordinates that are the most pathetic will continue to do the most damage, and the ones who are the most righteous will continue to bear the biggest burden for the ignorance of others.
How can this possibly be fair? Very easily…G-d rewards people in this world so He can destroy them in the next. The people that deserve Divine retribution are the ones who have troubles and who are punished in this world. These smiling and arrogant Jews who think that they know what goes on in this world are the ones that B”H will spend an eternity of misery regretting that they never took the time to see Judaism and Israel for what it really is. So next time you see a Jew in “Peace Now”, just remember where he’s going, the next time you see a Jew who will vote for Obama again, just know where they will be going too, and the next time you hear anyone tell you that they are anti-Israel just know that person hates Jews…HATING ISRAEL AND HATING JEWS ARE ONE IN THE SAME.

by Amil Imani

The current Islamic regime under the mullahs has shown, on countless occasions, its contempt both in words and deeds for the memory of the founding father of Persia, Cyrus the Great, including flooding the plain which houses the King’s tomb, destroying the archeological sites of Pasargad and Persepolis, and harassing and intimidating those who would gather at the tomb of the enlightened king to commemorate the International Day of Cyrus the Great.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is staffed by devout Islamists that are determined to wipe out all traces of the pre-Islamic era. They aim to surpass every heinous crime committed for the past 1400 years by the Mohammedan followers. What is enshrined in the Cyrus Cylinder is unconditional respect for the complete rights of all the people of the world, an anathema to the Islamists’ credo.
I have come to the realization that it is not possible for a person to be a Muslim and live by the standards that the great king enunciated some 2500 years ago. Tolerating evil is not tolerance, it is a crime. That’s why Cyrus the Great clearly proclaimed that he would punish any official in his empire who did violate anyone’s human rights anywhere in his empire.

An illustration of the benevolent beliefs and practices launched by this unsurpassed historical figure goes back to the landmark action of King Cyrus the Great of Persia. The father of the human rights charter freed the “enslaved” Jews in Babylon and helped them go to their homeland, lead a peaceful life and worship their God without harming others or forcing them to become Zoroastrian. I learned from the great King how to be human and honor human rights. That’s what I have learned from the enlightened king and that is why I honor the great trailblazer of our ancient Iran. Human rights do not come with our birth certificates. People must defend this sacred right. And in my own humble way, that’s exactly what I am doing.

I hold Islam in violation of the sacred charter of Cyrus the Great by invading other lands, enslaving people, destroying their heritage and their way of life. I find Islam guilty of pursuing a multi-front attack, even to this day, on much of what is sacred to all civilized people. I consider Islam responsible for 1400 years of atrocities committed against my people. The litany of Islam’s wrong-doings is beyond the scope of this writing. Just look around you in the world and see the horrific things that true Muslims are doing, not only to the people they label infidel, but to their own various sects, under the misogynist, discriminatory banner of their belief.

Shamelessness, dissimulation, and all forms of deceptions and distortions seem be infused in true Muslims. Some, the brave few, manage to get a transfusion and replace the toxins in their systems. Most just plod along and don’t get all that concerned with the intricate issues of their religion, a sort of superficial affiliation that serves them in a complex way. Yet, others go the distance. These latter types do anything and say anything to keep the toxin intact in themselves and transmitting it to the next generation and all the people that they can infuse. That’s my take.

Millions of Iranians consider the mullahs, their lackeys and lobbyists as true enemies of Iran, the country of my birth. Let’s be clear, Iranians have never asked for charity from anybody, but all they are saying is that people and countries that are at clear risk from the mullahs ought to step to the plate and help the Iranians, in numerous effective ways to get rid of these usurpers, these religious fanatics who are hell-bent on promoting their deadly agenda. The Iranian people will assuredly dislodge these wolves and try them for their crimes with all due process, the due process that they have completely denied for the people of Iran for the past 31 years. But, tried they will be and they need help from our friends to destroy the common enemy before it escalates its bloodletting program, both in Iran and against Israel and eventually engulfing the entire world.

Iranians are dismayed by President Obama’s intent to make deals with these leaches and they would like to see the American people dissuade him from giving these murderers legitimacy. We do understand that self-interest is the motivating force for the individual and groups as well as nations. Thus, it is understandable that President Obama is taking serious steps to further America’s interest by negotiating with Iran’s Mullahs in the hope of stopping them from building nuclear weapons. This is an admirable objective. However, a number of troubling issues immediately come to mind.

For one, stopping the Mullahs from their pursuit of making the bomb is an unlikely possibility. It is an ineluctable fact. That achievement treats a symptom rather than eliminates the virulent disease of Shi’a’ Islamism. The best strategy that stands the greatest chance of success and entails the least risk of starting a cataclysmic chain reaction is for a “coalition of the willing,” to borrow a phrase, to rally behind the Iranian people.

President Obama is not a dictatorial leader like Iran’s so-called supreme leader Ali Khamenei. President Obama is elected by the people and he stands accountable to the people. Every American concerned about the well-being and security of the country should embark on a tireless campaign of convincing President Obama that a deal he aims to make with the illegitimate rulers of Iran is not worth the paper it will be written on.

It is, at best, appeasement to make any deals with the sworn enemy of the United States of America. How clearly and how often do the mullahs have to proclaim their irreconcilable and irreversible hostility toward the U.S. and Israel? These mullahs believe their own delusions of grandeur. They think that they can win their brinkmanship and they do firmly believe that they will outsmart America, rest of the world and will have their way. In the process, they are more than willing to do whatever services their objective, by any and all devious means. Dealing with the mullahs brings to mind the “peace in our time” that Chamberlin brought to England by his deal-making with the Fuhrer. Except that this time the stakes can be much higher and deadlier.

With respect to Israel, I have always said that the Israelis shouldn’t be trigger happy. If the hawks in Israel succeed in convincing the government to attack Iran’s facilities, it would be an answered prayer for the mullahs. My advice: Don’t do it. Don’t even think of doing it. Use all your power and influence to get the U.S. and its allies to move with serious extensive, crippling and immediate sanctions, in conjunction with counterrevolution, even if the duplicitous Russians and the conniving Chinese refuse to sign up in the effort. The slap-on-the-wrist type of sanctions is almost as bad as a military attack. It would give the mullahs more time to pursue their dream weapon.

We have invaluable allies on the ground in Iran. There are some 50 million Iranians who are the best hope of the world in that part of the world. These enlightened Iranians despise the Mullahs and have no animosity toward Israel or the United States. Most of these people are well-educated and smart and have broken away from the slavery and fraud of Islamism. They are in the best position to send the Mullahs packing for good. Instead of throwing a lifeline to the sinking ship of the Mullahcracy, we must act resolutely in doing everything non-violent to help them defeat the Mullahs. It is our best bet.

As I see things now, the house — the world — is being set on fire by the hordes of front-line jihadists and millions of Muslims, in one form or another, are forced to support these front-liners. The masses of Muslims are just as guilty as the front-liners. Without their support, much of it monetary, there won’t be enough jihadists to worry about. Keep in mind that money is the lifeblood of any movement. And the Islamist nations, sheiks and others have their treasuries filled to the rim with mindless and apathetic people like us who burn their oil and give them our money. These individuals and governments feel that it is their religious duty to channel much of this money to do the work of Allah and establish the pipe-dream of Caliphate in the world.

Presumably, we all agree that there are some fires in the house, but many appeasers don’t want me to cry at the top of my voice that it is a raging fire. They say that I might frighten the sleepers. Well, let me do that. It is better that I frighten and even insult people than they burn in the ever-escalating inferno. Islam is indeed a deadly social retrovirus. Telling people to take two aspirin and not worry about it is not the kind of medicine the world needs today.

The Islamdom is at a crossroad. Millions in Iran, a hugely important force of sustaining and fanning the Islamic fire, have already turned and are turning against Islam. They and the rest of the world need to hear the voices of secular decent people who are in league with them. I am sure you want to play your part in this honorable endeavor and lend your help to put Islam, the very spawning swamp of the deadly virus that makes for jihadists, out of business.

At middle age I have come to accept my limitations. Although I like to have an opinion on almost everything, I am conscious of the fact that I am not a legal scholar and do not understand all the complexities of the criminal case against Shalom Rubashkin, the former CEO of America’s largest kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors of Postville, Iowa.

But I am not a stupid man either. And I, and a heck of a lot of other fairly intelligent and educated people are scratching our heads as to why government prosecutors are requesting that Rubashkin, who has ten children, including an autistic son, and a reputation for enormous philanthropy, be given a life sentence in prison.

A life behind bars. The very words are ominous. Isn’t that reserved for society’s most heinous offenders? Life sentence has one conjuring images of rapists and murderers, international drug cartel kingpins and white-collar criminals guilty of gargantuan fraud, like Bernie Madoff.

What did Rubashkin do? After an INS raid on the plant that found hundreds of illegal immigrants, the company was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy and Rubashkin, who had already been arrested for employing illegals, was subsequently found guilty of defrauding a bank and producing false invoices in order to keep the business going. There is no insinuation that he did any of this for personal profit or gain. Unlike Madoff, he had no Hamptons estate, no fancy yacht, and no Manhattan penthouse. By all accounts he and his family lived in incredibly modest circumstances.

Obviously, the Rubashkin story has been an enormous embarrassment to the American Jewish community in general and orthodoxy in particular. The largest kosher meat plant in the country employing hundreds of illegal immigrants? Engaging in bank fraud in order to remain a going concern? Falsifying invoices and misleading lenders? These are serious charges that go against both terrestrial and celestial law and constitute actions that neither man nor G-d can condone. The expected flight of Jewish leaders and spokespeople from Rubashkin’s side ensued, whatever the injustice of his proposed sentence. We Jews are accustomed to run from scandal like the plague.
So let’s remove the smoke from this unsavory story and focus on truth.

Yes, we Jews unfortunately have our criminals. Yes, we orthodox Jews unfortunately have our felons. We’re human, too. We have people guilty of serious wrongdoing. And we too must confess our sins, repent of our actions, be punished for our crimes, and teach our children to always do better and never excuse our behavior. Our community need to know that no matter how important you believe it is for other Jews to eat kosher food, you cannot purchase that mitzvah at any price. You cannot be a good Jew if you are not an honest person. A religious obligation that comes through theft – even when your intention is to simply keep a business open so you can eventually pay off your loans – subverts all principles of religious morality.
Rubashkin is no hero. Whatever the nobility of his intentions, he is a poor example to religious youth. His behavior must and should be condemned. He has been found guilty of a crime and he must do the time.

But he is no monster either. Unlike Wall Street bankers, he did not bet the farm and other people’s deposits in order to buy himself a Ferrari. Unlike AIG executives, he did not cost the government billions in bailouts and then get a bonus. And while I, of course, understand that criminal conduct is infinitely more serious, so is prosecutorial overzealousness that borders on fanaticism.
The time that Rubashkin serves must be fair and just. This is America. Just as there is no room for toleration of criminal conduct, there is also no room for a lynch mob mentality. I realize I am not a lawyer. But I have enough sense to understand that a punishment of a few years in prison sets an unassailable example that criminal conduct is utterly inexcusable. Anything more than that for a crime of this nature gives the false impression that the American justice system is prejudicial and untrustworthy.

As for the outcry from the Hassidic community that Rubashkin is being treated unfairly and that his yarmulke and beard make for a prosecutorial bull’s-eye, I love America too much to believe any of it. This is the fairest, most decent country on earth. But I do believe it possible that when an overtly religious person perpetrates a crime – especially one that involves companies catering to religious needs – there is a feeling on the part of many that the hypocrisy mandates an even harsher sentence.

So let’s be clear.
This is not in any way analogous to other ugly religious stories dominating the news like pedophile priests. There is no suggestion that Rubashkin’s crimes be covered up. Less so is there any insinuation that Rubashkin be moved to another state where he can start up a new kosher meat plant. Rubashkin’s trustworthiness in the American Jewish community is finished.

But there is an insistence that he be treated like a human being. That it be taken into consideration that he has no prior offenses and that his company provided kosher meat to hundreds of thousands of people at affordable prices so that more Jews could observe their faith. That he and his family are legendary in the Hassidic community for their charitable giving, their hospitality, and their communal involvement. That Rubashkin himself devoted a substantial portion of his profits to funding a soup kitchen and supporting organizations like Collel Chabad that feed the hungry and the poor. To disregard all these considerations when it comes to sentencing is to disregard the universal belief that the good we do is not cancelled out by our horrendous mistakes.

I know my own limitations. Perhaps Rubashkin’s prosecutors ought to know theirs as well.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, host of TLC’s ‘Shalom in the Home,’ is the international best-selling author of 23 books, winner of the London Times Preacher of the Year, and winner of the American Jewish Press Association’s highest award for excellence in commentary. His website is www.shmuley.com.