Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg Reflects on the news, Torah, Israel

Martin luther King and israel

2012-01-21T08:51:00.001-06:00

January 16, 2012

MLK on Peace, Israeli Security and Anti-Zionism

In light of the tendency by some propaganda films and anti-Israel speakers to posthumously enlist Martin Luther King, Jr., for their attacks on the Jewish state, it's worth noting what the civil rights hero actually felt about Israel and its situation.
Those who knew King well have recalled his strong support for Israel, his understanding of the links between Israeli security and peace, and his opposition to anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
Rep. John Lewis, in his own right a leader in the civil rights movement, wrote an Op-Ed in 2002 describing King's "special bond with Israel":

During his lifetime King witnessed the birth of Israel and the continuing struggle to build a nation. He consistently reiterated his stand on the Israeli-Arab conflict, stating "Israel's right to exist as a state in security is uncontestable." It was no accident that King emphasized "security" in his statements on the Middle East.
On March 25, 1968, less than two weeks before his tragic death, he spoke out with clarity and directness stating, "peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality."
During the recent U.N. Conference on Racism held in Durban, South Africa, we were all shocked by the attacks on Jews, Israel and Zionism. The United States of America stood up against these vicious attacks.
Once again, the words of King ran through my memory, "I solemnly pledge to do my utmost to uphold the fair name of the Jews -- because bigotry in any form is an affront to us all."

The Op-Ed also pointed out that King was clearly against against attacks on Zionists. Lewis wrote that "During an appearance at Harvard University shortly before his death, a student stood up and asked King to address himself to the issue of Zionism. The question was clearly hostile. King responded, ‘When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism.'" (This is not to be confused with a widely circulated hoax letter said to be written by King.)

Clarence B. Jones, a friend and advisor to King, likewise recalled King's opposition to anti-Zionism. "I can say with absolute certainty that Martin abhorred anti-Semitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism," he explained in a 2008 Op-Ed. Jones elaborated on that point in What Would Martin Say?, a book he co-authored with Joel Engel. Mainstream reporters, he argues, have given a pass to anti-Semitism by black leaders like Al Sharpton because they buy the rationale that Israel's existence is a provocation to Arabs. "Martin, for one, could see this coming after the Six-Day War in 1967, which is why he warned repeatedly that anti-Semitism would soon be disguised as anti-Zionism."

While King would surely support better circumstances for both Israelis and Palestinians, it seems clear that he was unambiguously opposed to the Israel-bashing that counts as pro-Palestinian advocacy today. His strong statement about Israel's right to exist suggests he recognized the centrality of this issue to the conflict. And judging by his views on anti-Zionism, he would be outraged by the idea that an avowed anti-Zionist like Omar Barghouti, who openly calls for replacing Israel with a state in which Jews will be a minority, pretends King would back boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

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www.converttojudaism.net

Palewstine was

2012-01-20T15:37:00.003-06:00

This certificate is from a Palestine company 1944 that changed its name to israel 1948. It was a jewish compamny. My dad's name is on the certificate

iran's danger

2012-01-20T13:22:00.001-06:00

Reality Check: Shorter and Shorter Timeframe if Iran Decides to Make Nuclear Weapons - David Albright, Paul Brannan, Andrea Stricker and Andrew Ortendahl
Some have sought to downplay Iran's nuclear progress by emphasizing that Iran has not yet "made the decision to build a nuclear weapon." But this does not accurately portray the real concern about Iran's nuclear program and progress since Iran has already made a series of important decisions that would give it the ability to quickly make nuclear weapons.
Iran's strategy of "nuclear hedging," or developing the capability to rapidly build nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, is laid out in the evidence of work on nuclear weaponization, particularly efforts to make specific nuclear components, contained in the November 2011 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards report on Iran. If Iran's ability to quickly build nuclear weapons increases during the next few years, this will only shorten the period of time between taking a decision to build a bomb and constructing one. (Institute for Science and International Security)

The Mortal Threat from Iran - Mark Helprin
Without doubt, Iran has long wanted nuclear weapons - to deter American intervention in its and neighboring territories; to threaten Europe; to respond to the former Iraqi nuclear effort; to counter the contiguous nuclear presences in Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. in the Gulf; to neutralize Israel's nuclear deterrent; to lead the Islamic world; to correct the security imbalance with Saudi Arabia; and to threaten the U.S. directly. In the absence of measures beyond pinpoint sanctions and unenforceable resolutions, Iran will get nuclear weapons, which in its eyes are an existential necessity.
Accommodationists argue that a rational Iran can be contained. Not the Iran with a revered tradition of deception; that during its war with Iraq pushed 100,000 young children to their deaths clearing minefields; that counts 15% of its population as "Volunteer Martyrs."The writer is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. (Wall Street

2012-01-20T04:39:00.001-06:00

mortal threat from Iran

2012-01-18T07:32:00.001-06:00

WSJ: The mortal threat from Iran

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FROM:

Ed Lasky

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edlasky@att.net

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012 7:37 PM

Message body

The difference between the NYT and the WSJ. Over the weekend, the Times ran two columns in their editorial section. One told Netanyahu not to strike Iran; the other said the situation with Iran can be resolved by having a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East (meaning Israel is stripped of its nuclear shield while its adversaries continue their programs in secret-much easier to do that in dictatorships and closed-societies).

The Mortal Threat From Iran

Iran can sea-launch from off our coasts. Germany planned this in World War II. If cocaine can be smuggled into the U.S. without interdiction, we cannot dismiss the possibility of an Iranian nuke ending up in Manhattan.

By MARK HELPRIN

To assume that Iran will not close the Strait of Hormuz is to assume that primitive religious fanatics will perform cost-benefit analyses the way they are done at Wharton. They won't, especially if the oil that is their life's blood is threatened. If Iran does close the strait, we will fight an air and naval war derivative of and yet peripheral to the Iranian nuclear program, a mortal threat the president of the United States has inadequately addressed.

A mortal threat when Iran is not yet in possession of a nuclear arsenal? Yes, because immediately upon possession all remedies are severely restricted. Without doubt, Iran has long wanted nuclear weapons—to deter American intervention in its and neighboring territories; to threaten Europe and thereby cleave it from American interests in the Middle East; to respond to the former Iraqi nuclear effort; to counter the contiguous nuclear presences in Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. in the Gulf; to neutralize Israel's nuclear deterrent so as to limit it to the attrition of conventional battle, or to destroy it with one lucky shot; to lead the Islamic world; to correct the security imbalance with Saudi Arabia, which aided by geography and American arms now outclasses it; and to threaten the U.S. directly.

In the absence of measures beyond pinpoint sanctions and unenforceable resolutions, Iran will get nuclear weapons, which in its eyes are an existential necessity. We have long known and done nothing about this, preferring to dance with the absurd Iranian claim that it is seeking electricity. With rampant inflation and unemployment, a housing crisis, and gasoline rationing, why spend $1,000-$2,000 per kilowatt to build nuclear plants instead of $400-$800 for gas, when you possess the second largest gas reserves in the world? In 2005, Iran consumed 3.6 trillion cubic feet of its 974 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves, which are enough to last 270 years. We know that in 2006—generation exceeding consumption by 10%—Iran exported electricity and planned a high-tension line to Russia to export more.

Accommodationists argue that a rational Iran can be contained. Not the Iran with a revered tradition of deception; that during its war with Iraq pushed 100,000 young children to their deaths clearing minefields; that counts 15% of its population as "Volunteer Martyrs"; that chants "Death to America" at each session of parliament; and whose president states that no art "is more beautiful . . . than the art of the martyr's death." Not the Iran in thrall to medieval norms and suffering continual tension and crises.

Its conceptions of nuclear strategy are very likely to be looser, and its thresholds lower, than those of Russia and China, which are in turn famously looser and lower than our own. And yet Eisenhower and Churchill weighed a nuclear option in Korea, Kennedy a first strike upon the U.S.S.R., and Westmoreland upon North Vietnam. How then can we be certain that Iran is rational and containable?

Inexpert experts will state that Iran cannot strike with nuclear weapons. But let us count the ways. It has the aerial tankerage to sustain one or two planes that might slip past air defenses between it and Israel, Europe, or the U.S., combining radar signatures with those of cleared commercial flights. As Iran increases its ballistic missile ranges and we strangle our missile defenses, America will face a potential launch from Iranian territory.

Iran can sea-launch from off our coasts. Germany planned this in World War II. Subsequently, the U.S. completed 67 water-supported launches, ending as recently as 1980; the U.S.S.R. had two similar programs; and Iran itself has sea-launched from a barge in the Caspian. And if in 2007, for example, 1,100 metric tons of cocaine were smuggled from South America without interdiction, we cannot dismiss the possibility of Iranian nuclear charges of 500 pounds or less ending up in Manhattan or on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The probabilities of the above are subject to the grave multiplication of nuclear weapons. Of all things in respect to the Iranian nuclear question, this is the most overlooked. A 1-in-20 chance of breaking a leg is substantially different from a 1-in-20 chance of dying, itself different from a 1-in-20 chance of half a million people dying. Cost drastically changes the nature of risk, although we persist in ignoring this. Assuming that we are a people worthy of defending ourselves, what can be done?

Much easier before Iran recently began to burrow into bedrock, it is still possible for the U.S., and even Israel at greater peril, to halt the Iranian nuclear program for years to come. Massive ordnance penetrators; lesser but precision-guided penetrators "drilling" one after another; fuel-air detonations with almost the force of nuclear weapons; high-power microwave attack; the destruction of laboratories, unhardened targets, and the Iranian electrical grid; and other means, can be combined to great effect.

Unlike North Korea, Iran does not yet possess nuclear weapons, does not have the potential of overwhelming an American ally, and is not of sufficient concern to Russia and China, its lukewarm patrons, for them to war on its behalf. It is incapable of withholding its oil without damaging itself irreparably, and even were it to cease production entirely, the Saudis—in whose interest the elimination of Iranian nuclear potential is paramount—could easily make up the shortfall. Though Iran might attack Saudi oil facilities, it could not damage them fatally. The Gulf would be closed until Iranian air, naval, and missile forces there were scrubbed out of existence by the U.S., probably France and Britain, and the Saudis themselves, in a few weeks.

It is true that Iranian proxies would attempt to exact a price in terror world-wide, but this is not new, we would brace for the reprisals, and although they would peak, they would then subside. The cost would be far less than that of permitting the power of nuclear destruction to a vengeful, martyrdom-obsessed state in the midst of a never-subsiding fury against the West.

Any president of the United States fit for the office should someday, soon, say to the American people that in his judgment Iran—because of its longstanding and implacable push for nuclear weapons, its express hostility to the U.S., Israel and the West, and its record of barbarity and terror—must be deprived of the capacity to wound this country and its allies such as they have never been wounded before.

Relying solely upon his oath, holding in abeyance any consideration of politics or transient opinion, and eager to defend his decision in exquisite detail, he should order the armed forces of the United States to attack and destroy the Iranian nuclear weapons complex. When they have complied, and our pilots are in the air on their way home, they will have protected our children in their beds—and our children's children, many years from now, in theirs. May this country always have clear enough sight and strong enough will to stand for itself in the face of mortal threat, and in time.

Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, the novels "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt) and "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt).

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

www.converttojudaism.net

Lessons learned from death

2012-01-13T21:29:00.002-06:00

I officiate at funerals and always learn valuable life lessons. Lessons learned recently

1. Woman under 50 dies from complications of lifelong debilitating disease. Our normal reaction would be to be daunted to say the least at the prospect of living with this. It did not stop her. She had no regrets. She lived life to the fullest. Did not let her disease stop her. Average lifetime expectancy when she was born was 13 and today is mid twenties. She saw her extra years as a blessing.

2. 90+ year old man dies. No gossip, never said bad word about anyone, treated all with respect, had wit humor,

3. 88 year old woman dies. I asked what special Jewish traditions she observed. No joke, they said every holiday she insisted on serving pork.

4. man in 70s dies. Went to every ball game his sons ever played. No jewish practices. Turns out one son now lives down the block of my first congregation in Brooklyn, belongs there and sends their kids to the Jewish day school there where his wife is on the Board. Son told me his deceased father would find it amusing that now his attendance at grand children's events would now also include leading services and reading torah

5. Eye of the beholder, A family was hoping to have a 94 year old rabbi who had married the deceased to his surviving widow years ago and told the family this. They did not tell the grandchildren he was unavailable and I , 55 years old, was officiating. The granddaughter walked in anmd remarked to her father that i looked pretty good for 94.

2012-01-12T09:38:00.001-06:00

Intro to Shemote www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2012-01-09T04:40:00.000-06:00

Is the exodus true?

2012-01-09T04:39:00.001-06:00

Tenth Tevet Fast

2012-01-05T08:51:00.001-06:00

Today is fast day daylight hours mourning Jerusalem wall breach 2500 years ago by ancient Iraqis (Babylonia). This time the breach is happening through BDS Boycott Divest and Sanction and terrorism threats

Tenth of Tevet - Fast Day Marks Siege of Jerusalem
This Thursday, 10 Tevet, Jews fast in commemoration of the start of the siege of Jerusalem by Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar.
By Hana Levi Julian
First Publish: 1/5/2012, 9:56 AM

Walls of Jerusalem at night
Walls of Jerusalem at night
Israel news photo: courtesy of Chabad.org

The supermarkets may still be full of shoppers preparing for the advent of the coming Sabbath on Friday, but Thursday is not going to be a day in which observant Jews will be filling the kosher restaurants -- at least, until after sundown.

On the Jewish calendar, this Thursday is the tenth day in the Hebrew month of Tevet -- the anniversary of the date on which the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar began his deadly siege of Jerusalem in the year 425 BCE. We mark the day by fasting from just before sunrise, until nightfall, and add the Selichot and other special supplements including a special Torah reading to the daily set of prayers. It is one of four fast days commemmorating the stages of the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples.

Two other sad events were recorded by the Talmudic sages as having occurred on the tenth of Tevet, one the death of Ezra the Scribe who led the revival of Jewish adherence to the Torah when the Jews returned from Babylon to build the Second Temple. The other event is the translation of the Torah into Greek, known as the Septuagint, considered an event to mourn as well.

Israel's Chief Rabbinate connected current Jewish mourning to the date and designated the Tenth of Tevet to serve as a "general Kaddish day" for victims of the Holocaust, many of whom were murdered on dates lost in time, and whose day of martyrdom is thus unknown.

It took Nebuchadnezzar 30 months to breach Jerusalem's thick stone walls, but he finally managed it on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Tammuz, in the year 586 B.C.E (some claim it was in 420 B.C.E).

Only one month later, on Tisha B'Av -- the ninth of Av -- the Holy Temple was destroyed for the first time, and the Jewish People were sent out into exile to Babylonia for the next 70 years. The prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations to memorialize the tragedy.

The Second Temple was built when the Jews were allowed to return by Cyrus the Great and destroyed in 70 C.E. by the Romans, also on the 9th of Av. Remnants of the Holy Temples still remain -- one outside retaining wall of the Second Temple is today referred to as the Western Wall, or the Kotel, or Wailing Wall -- the place where Jews weep for its destruction.

The Temple Mount, over which such controversy with the Waqf Islamic Authority has raged for so many years due to its unwillingness to allow Jews to even murmur a prayer on the grounds, is the site of the Temple and its "holy of holies," an area which only the High Priest could enter on Yom Kippur. There is ongoing controversy over where exactly on the Mount this was located, so that prominent rabbis, among them the late Chief Rabbi Avraham Cahane Shapira of Merkaz Harav Yeshiva, forbade ascending the Mount. Others, who feel the location is known, stress that it is important to show Jewish presence on the Mount.

The Islamic clerics who now inhabit the area, and deliver sermons in the Al Aqsa mosque built on the site, periodically express their intense fear of the day that a Third Holy Temple will rise from the site, and make enormous efforts to prevent at all costs the possibility that the Jews will help bring this about.

Words of inspiration and arousal to repentance are delivered on fast days by prominent rabbis in Jewish communities around the world. They urge their followers to reflect on the tragic events of our history and to be motivated, encouraged and inspired to improve their ways in order to shape events to bring a better future and the rebuilding of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.net
www.converttojudaism.net

Glenn Beck, 400 rabbis and Soros

2012-01-04T20:49:00.001-06:00

onathan Ginsburg
Just because 400 rabbis say, does not make it so. I have watched much of Glenn Beck's shows, listened to him in person, and am clear he is one of Jews and Israel's best friends in the world today

Will 400 Rabbis Condemn Soros for Comparing Fox News to the Nazis?
Alana Goodman | @alanagoodman 02.21.2011 - 2:44 AM

Recently, a George Soros-funded group called Jewish Funds for Justice issued a public letter from 400 Rabbis denouncing Fox News and Glenn Beck for using Nazi imagery to characterize ideological adversaries during broadcasts.

Will the same group now speak out against Soros’s new allegations that Fox News is using Nazi tactics?

Here’s an excerpt from Soros’s tirade against Fox News on CNN Sunday morning:

“Well, look, Fox News makes a habit — it has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them,” Soros said. “And you wouldn’t believe that an open society and a democracy, these methods can succeed. But, actually, they did succeed. They succeeded in — in Germany, where the Weimar Republic collapsed and you had a Nazi regime follow it. So this is a very, very dangerous way of deceiving people.”

In the Jewish Funds for Justice letter repudiating Glenn Beck – which was published in the Forward and the Wall Street Journal – the group unequivocally criticized the use of Nazi and Holocaust comparisons to smear political opponents.

“In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed,” the organization wrote. “But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only ‘left-wing rabbis’ who think so.”

In the aftermath of the anti-Beck letter, several Jewish leaders suggested that the Jewish Funds for Justice campaign was politically motivated because it only targeted conservatives. A Jewish Funds for Justice communications official told me she was aware of Soros’s remarks, but was unable to provide comment on them as of the time of this posting.

2012-01-04T19:24:00.001-06:00

Most important issue of the age-Iran and the election

2012-01-04T17:54:00.000-06:00

On the single most important issue of the age, Santorum is by far the best, Obama bad, Paul a nightmare-Iran and a nuclear weapon
Santorum On His Plan To Attack Iran: ‘We’re Trying To Prevent A War’

By Ben Armbruster on Jan 4, 2012 at 10:41 am

The GOP presidential nomination’s newest “not-Romney” alternative Rick Santorum said last Sunday that a military strike is part of his plan in how he’d deal with Iran and its nuclear program should he become president. “You would order air strikes if it became clear that they were going to [get nuclear weapons]?” NBC’s David Gregory asked. “Yes, that’s the plan,” Santorum said.

Glenn Beck yesterday on his radio show asked Santorum about that comment, seeming a little concerned. “There’s a strong part of me that says enough of the wars,” Beck said, saying he was “playing devil’s advocate.” But the former Pennsylvania senator said an attack on Iran would serve to prevent a war:

BECK: There’s a strong part of me that says enough of the wars. Enough of the wars. What are fighting, five wars right now?

SANTORUM: We’re trying to prevent a war. We’re trying to prevent the most nefarious regime in the entire world, you know this is the equivalent of al Qaeda, it’s maybe even worse than al Qaeda being in control of a country with enormous resources and capability.

BECK: This is Hitler.

SANTORUM: We’re trying to prevent them from having the fail safe so they can go out and rein terror around the world.

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

Why the US Needs Israel www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2012-01-04T13:36:00.001-06:00

Commentary Dec 2011
How Israel's Defense Industry Can Help Save America
Arthur Herman — December 2011

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Kibbutz Sasa sits one mile from Israel’s Lebanese border. Founded in 1949, it is the site of the tomb of the second-century rabbi Levi ben Sisi. It hosts groves of fruit trees and a dairy farm and has 210 members. Kibbutz Sasa is also the home of the main factory of Plasan, a company that started out making hard plastic containers like garbage cans in 1985. For four years now, American soldiers have driven more safely in Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to Kibbutz Sasa and Plasan’s CEO, Dani Ziv.

It was Ziv who, in the 1980s, urged the company to take up the manufacture of protective ballistic vests for soldiers and police. In 1989, Plasan won its first contract to make body armor for the Israel Defense Forces, and then for IDF vehicles. When war came to Afghanistan and then Iraq, orders went through the roof, especially from the United States. Plasan’s profits soared some 1,500 percent, from $23 million in 2003 to $330 million in 2007. Today they stand at over $500 million, with 90 percent of the company’s orders coming from Europe and the United States.

Plasan specializes in a very dense plastic composite product that affords ballistic protection without significantly adding to the weight of the vehicle. “Their work is exceptional,” says a senior Israeli defense industry executive about Plasan. “To convince the U.S. military that you are a reliable outfit is no mean feat. They did it all alone, without any help from a former ambassador or defense ministry director general.”

Plasan-armored mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) have been serving in Afghanistan since August 2009, and contractor Oshkosh Company has another 8,800 on order. In 2009 Plasan even opened a factory in Bennington, Vermont, to do the work for its American contract. But while the 350 or so workers there are American, the technology is decidedly Israeli.

That applies to an even smaller company in Netanya, Israel, called Camero. Its engineers have come up with a way to use ultra-wideband wireless transmissions to see through walls—literally—and detect armed men and explosives on the other side. The Xaver 400 is barely the size of a laptop computer, but it’s dramatically shifting the odds in urban fighting in favor of the technology user, whether he’s an IDF soldier or a United States Marine. Indeed, in December 2010, one of Camero’s top clients became the Department of Defense.

What’s happening at Plasan and Camero is part of a silent revolution sweeping the defense establishments of the United States and Israel. After decades of being the Pentagon’s dependent in terms of military technology, Israel’s defense industry is now gaining a competitive advantage over its overregulated, bloated and lethargic American rival. Indeed, the United States is becoming one of its best customers. Goliath is finding shelter under the shield of David.

This situation is fraught with irony. It’s not only that America is now fighting the kind of wars Israel has been fighting for decades—small-scale, low-intensity, against an elusive terrorist enemy—and needs the skills and equipment Israel has to offer, including remote-detection devices such as unmanned drones, an area in which Israel has been on average 10 years ahead of the curve. Nor is it simply the fact that as U.S.-Israeli relations have cooled during the Obama years, Israelis are realizing that a strong and independent high-tech defense sector may be more crucial to Israel’s future than relying on U.S. help.

The Israeli way of doing defense business is changing the shape of the military-industrial complex. Smaller, nimbler, and entrepreneurial, Israel’s defense industry offers a salutary contrast to the Pentagon’s way of doing things. With the spending and budget crisis in the United States already putting immense pressure on the Pentagon, with all-but-certain declines in the percentage of the U.S. economy that will be devoted to defense in the coming decade, a second “revolution in military affairs” is going to be necessary. We are going to have to get more for less—much less. Israel points the way.

A good example coming from the more expensive end of the military-technology spectrum involving high-tech missiles is Rafael Advanced Systems. They’re the Israeli makers of the Iron Dome missile defense system, built to protect Israeli towns from mortars, rockets, and 155-millimeter artillery shells. Each Iron Dome unit fires four to eight missiles and is equipped with a Battle Management computer system designed by another Israeli company, MPrest Systems. It’s an all-weather mobile system with a range of 70 kilometers (about 43.5 miles).

For the Pentagon, developing and deploying a major new system like this can take more than a decade. By contrast, the Israel Defense Ministry gave Rafael the contract for Iron Dome in 2007, and by March 2009 the system was fully ready for testing. The first true shoot-down test had to wait until July that year. More tests followed in 2010, and by March 2011 Iron Dome was declared operational and has been deployed in towns near the Gaza strip to protect against Hamas’s attacks.

To intercept bigger ballistic missile, Israeli Aerospace Industry (IAI) developed the Arrow antimissile system in cooperation with the United States as part of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. The agreement to build Arrow came in 1989. The first missile, the Arrow 1, got its first test launch in August 1990. Less than four years later came its first test interception.

Although Arrow began as an American-Israeli joint initiative, the irony is that Israel’s interest in developing Arrow sprang from the failure of American-made Patriot antimissile batteries to intercept Scud missile attacks during the First Gulf War. Arrow relies on a coterie of Israeli companies to provide the interception system’s components. Elta, a division of Israel’s biggest private arms firm, Elbit Systems, provides the Green Pine early-warning radar. Tadiran (another Elbit division) makes the Communication, Control, and Command center. IAI devised the Hazelnut launch controls. Altogether, they have constructed one of the world’s most sophisticated defense systems. In 1995 the Arrow 1 was replaced with an even faster, more lethal version, Arrow 2, which, according to its developer, Dov Raviv, has a 90 percent probability of knocking out a ballistic missile—and can tell a warhead from a decoy.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency considers itself fortunate when it gets any successful missile shoot-downs from its land-based system. The first successful test interception from the American version of Star Wars came in August 2005—more than 10 years after the Israelis had done the same thing. Now Israel is looking to sell Iron Dome in the United States. And Rafael’s American marketing partner? Raytheon, the same company that developed the Patriot.

For decades Israel has been seen as the United States’ junior partner in all matters military and strategic. American defense companies were the unquestioned leaders in developing sophisticated modern weaponry, while Israelis focused on more standard items such as small arms (the classic Uzi) or weapons built to suit their unique battle conditions (the Merkava tank). The Patriot missile deployment in the First Gulf War only reinforced the perception that Israelis needed American military technology, and American military aid, in order to survive. Now it may be Israeli technology, in the shape of Iron Dome and Arrow, that ends up defending American cities instead.

The changing situation has also affected the American attitude to technology transfers between the two allies. General Uzi Eilam, former head of the Israeli weapons research-and-development agency MAFAT, remembers that when F-15s and F-16s from the United States arrived in Israel, “they came with systems in locked boxes, which we were not allowed to open.” The rule was, the closer the Israelis were to attaining the same technical breakthrough, the more willing the United States would be to share the technology. Today the Pentagon is speeding up the cooperation process, if only to prevent Israeli advances from heading them off at the pass.

It is striking how the Israeli defense sector keeps steadily leapfrogging from one challenge to the next. This is especially true for the acid test of any strong defense industry: foreign sales. Ten years ago Israel ranked 15th. In 2007 it surpassed the United Kingdom to rank fourth, behind the United States, Russia, and France. The day when it takes France’s place is not far off.

This is a remarkable achievement for a country of some six million people that is treated as a virtual pariah by much of the world. But virtual is the mot juste—for even though Turkey virtually froze relations with Israel two years ago, it’s still among Elbit’s best customers.

Of course, it will be a long time before America’s defense establishment, with its huge government-supported research-and-development resources and armies of engineers, will be outmatched by Israel’s. It is also true that Israel’s military doesn’t use big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft, and nuclear submarines that are the major money pits of Pentagon procurement; nor does it maintain the kind of global presence that requires them. Israel also spends much more of its GNP on defense (roughly 6.7 percent), and having a conscript army avoids the high personnel cost problems that are the fastest growing expense of our all-volunteer force. Nor can it be denied that much of Israel’s high-tech weapons success has come with America paying a large portion of the research-and-development bill, as with both Iron Dome and Arrow. Still, that money is looking less and less like a way to prop up a beleaguered ally, and more and more like a capital investment in future systems for ourselves.

How the Israeli defense industry, with a fraction of our capitalization and far fewer workers and engineers, has managed to move ahead at a time when our biggest defense contractors seem stalled offers some important lessons for a Pentagon beset by cost overruns and shrinking budgets. Indeed, learning from the Israeli way of doing things just might make the difference between a leaner, meaner U.S. military and hollowed-out collapse.

_____________

Israeli defense companies owe their success to a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic factors. Having to fight for survival has always tended to focus Israeli energies and concentrate efforts. Terrorist-launched missiles raining down on civilian neighborhoods remain merely a conjectural possibility in the United States, but not in Israel. There is little margin for error in making major decisions about what kinds of weapons to develop and invest in, and even less for needlessly dragging out the timeline for the development of weapons systems that may be vital to national existence.

Another advantage is that virtually everyone working for an Israeli defense firm has served in uniform. As Dan Senor and Saul Singer note in their book Start-Up Nation, thanks to military conscription, the Israeli Defense Forces—-“particularly elite units in the air force, infantry, intelligence, and information technology arenas”—have been the spawning ground for a myriad of Israeli technological companies. And the IDF experience has also led some of Israel’s best minds toward designing and developing military technologies.

Indeed, it’s difficult to find a defense engineer or executive who doesn’t have some battlefield experience to draw upon. “We know what it means to sit in a military vehicle,” a Plasan employee told a reporter in 2008, “what it’s like to hit an explosive device or take a burst of gunfire.” It’s not unusual for a defense company engineer called up for reserve service to find himself at the controls of a weapons system he himself designed.*

Other habits from the IDF experience rub off as well. One is its bias against hierarchy. In sharp contrast to the Pentagon, junior officers enjoy more responsibility and feel free to challenge their superiors. As Senor and Singer note, that makes for a chain of command flexible enough to adapt to unexpected changes and opportunities, whether it’s on the battlefield or in the boardroom.

Another is a bias toward improvisation. Virtually every piece of equipment purchased from the United States, from F-16 fighter planes to Blackhawk helicopters, goes through immediate changes by its personnel and crews to fit Israeli battle conditions. When this happens in the American military (as when American soldiers in Iraq began self-armoring their thin-skinned Humvees), the result is confusion and panic. But accepting the reality of on-field modification means Israeli designers don’t have to worry about a weapon system that anticipates every contingency. They know the users will take care of minor problems along the way, which speeds up both development and deployment time—and gives important feedback for future improvements. It also reduces learning curves and provides unexpected opportunities for making lemonade from lemons.

A good example is the Lavi in the 1980s. Israel’s Air Force was determined to get its own attack fighter after years of modifying American or French planes. Jointly funded by the U.S. and Israeli governments, produced by defense giant IAI and nicknamed the Lavi, the plane took four years and billions of dollars to develop—until the program was cancelled in 1987, in large part because the Pentagon became worried that it was funding a plane to rival its own top export fighter, the F-16.

The cancellation sent shockwaves through the Israeli Defense Ministry: Some still say the decision was a mistake. But “the project drove the whole industry towards the cutting edge of technology,” notes defense analyst Yiftah Shapir, no fan of the Lavi. “We still sell the sub-systems that were developed [specifically] for the Lavi,” especially in computer avionics (some of them are in the unmanned airborne vehicles, or UAVs, Israel makes for customers such as India, China, and Turkey). In addition, the 1,500 engineers working on the sophisticated Lavi systems soon found jobs in other Israeli defense companies, taking their experience and expertise with them.

In short, what would have seemed a failure and giant waste of money to a risk-averse Pentagon and its congressional overseers became the springboard for still bigger advances, including, in 1988, the launching of Israel’s first communications satellite in space.

The Lavi project and the space shot set the stage for the next major step for the Israeli defense industry, its radical reorganization in the 1990s. A combination of downsizing, deregulation, and privatizing forced the country’s major defense contractors to start thinking about new ways to make money, as well as weapons, and to see the high-tech frontier as an opportunity to get the jump on big international competitors, including the United States.

_____________

As the 1980s ended, the Israeli defense industry found itself bloated, overregulated, and too costly, like the rest of Israel’s economy. The end of the Cold War forced change. Foreign buyers had liked Israeli defense products because they had been battle-tested against the Soviet-built systems of Israel’s Arab antagonists. With the end of the Soviet threat, that marginal advantage vanished. Israeli companies saw American defense firms, flush from the success of Desert Storm, grabbing those contracts instead.

From 1985 to 1995 Israel’s defense spending fell by 37 percent. Declining global demand was matched by falling domestic demand, while a dysfunctional corporate culture made it hard for Israel’s major government-owned firms to adjust. If Israel’s ability to develop and produce its own weapons was to survive, a drastic change in how companies operated and what they made had to take place.

Major firms had to downsize their workforce and excess capacity; many smaller companies disappeared in a wave of consolidations. Elbit Systems emerged as a major contractor after absorbing smaller high-tech rivals like Elisra and Tadiran and old-line companies like Soltam Systems (founded in 1950), which made advanced artillery and mortars.

As part of a larger shift of Israel’s economy to a more deregulated model, there was also a wave of privatization of government-owned enterprises. Rafael Advanced Systems, which had been a research lab working at the behest of the Israeli Defense Ministry, spun off as a private company. Other government-owned companies like IAI were encouraged to spin off separate commercial projects from their defense units, even when the research and development had begun in those divisions. After some false starts, most of those spin-offs have done well; and as defense exports rose, the commercial exports of spin-offs rose even faster.

This was the other leg of the 1990s reorganization. It became clear that while Israel defense companies would continue to make Israel-specific weapons systems, there was a real future for the Israeli defense industry in the global marketplace, especially in the high-tech area that included retrofitting and upgrading older platforms built by the Cold War giants, Russia and the United States. Having a diversity of customers, beyond the IDF, would not only lower production costs and enhance economies of scale, it would also stimulate more technical innovation and more opportunities to sell Israeli products.

The result was a steady climb in Israeli exports, starting in 2000 and then breaking through in 2007, when Israeli arms sales abroad passed the $4 billion mark. Elbit, the maker of the Arrow, saw a 38 percent growth in revenue in that year alone. In 2009, Israel’s defense exports reached $6.9 billion; in 2010, $7.2 billion. With defense budgets declining worldwide in 2011, those numbers may be hard to surpass. But the Israeli way of doing defense business is here to stay.

Reorganization did not come cheap. In the end, Israeli taxpayers had to put up some $3 billion, the equivalent of one-third of the 2001 defense budget, to pay for the overhaul. The investment paid off. As Giora Eiland, one of Ariel Sharon’s national-security advisers, puts it, Israel found the right balance between, on the one hand, government support and oversight and, on the other, private creativity and incentive, including encouraging independent research and development. When the country needs big conventional platforms like planes and helicopters and submarines, it buys overseas and then modifies the purchases to fit IDF systems and battlefield profiles. When the IDF needs high-tech weaponry, Israelis develop it themselves with an eye toward commercializing it abroad.

That has caused some friction with Israel’s big brother. The United States views the advance of the Israeli David with some trepidation, especially when sales might mean transfers of sensitive technology. When Israel tried to sell four $250 million Phalcon early-warning systems to China, the Pentagon and Congress blocked the sale. When Israel agreed to upgrade the Harpy UAVs it had sold Beijing back in the 1990s, the United States retaliated by downgrading Israeli participation in the F-35 program.

On the other hand, American defense companies are increasingly seeing cooperation with Israel as the key to their own future. In addition to Iron Dome, Raytheon has signed on with Rafael Advanced System for development of another antimissile missile, the so-called Magic Wand or David’s Sling. A two-stage interceptor, the Magic Wand is designed to take out the long-range rocket and cruise missiles possessed by Hezbollah. To Raytheon, the Israeli technology is helpful for its own future systems; for Rafael, the deal with Raytheon is largely a way to get U.S. funding. The technology they have; it’s the money and customers they need.

One of those customers is the United States. Elbit makes 80 percent of the IDF’s UAVs and trails behind only the United States in the global marketplace for the craft we now all know as drones. Israel is not a player in the U.S. market—yet. “I don’t know why they don’t simply import UAVs,” says Elbit CEO Joseph Ackerman, including, of course, his own.

It seems a good question. And since the United States has emerged as Israel’s single biggest arms customer in the last decade, with systems like Iron Dome and David’s Sling on the way, surely drones won’t be far behind.

_____________

So does the future of American security have “Made in Israel” stamped on it? In one sense, it already does. At the Plasan plant in Kibbutz Sasa, the hallways are covered with poster-size copies of thank-you notes from American GIs. One of them is signed by Brian, an Army sergeant serving in Afghanistan who wrote that the Plasan armor saved him from a bullet that would have blown off his head if it had gone through the door.

“American soldiers come up to us at exhibitions, and tell me that they won’t get into any vehicle that’s not been armor-protected by Plasan,” a Plasan employee says. To date, there’s not been a single soldier killed by fire while in a vehicle that we armor-protected.”

The idea of Americans protected by Israel, however, may have broader applications than vehicle armor or antimissile defense, or even weapons systems in general. It could extend to the entire way Israeli military contractors give far more bang for the buck—and all with a Defense Ministry supervisory force of fewer than 300 people. Our Pentagon, by contrast, relies on some 30,000 bureaucrats to do the same oversight—the equivalent of two full Army divisions.

Of course, Israeli companies take advantage of their niche selection and their concentration on the high-tech sector, with its relatively expensive development curve but low production costs, and ability to skip the big-ticket platforms. But can anyone doubt that if Dani Ziv or another Israeli defense contractor were asked to build the next-generation aircraft carrier, it would cost far less than the $1.3 billion currently slated—and be delivered much more quickly? With the final cost of our coming fleet of F-35 fighters approaching $1 trillion, it seems a highly relevant question.

While the number of Pentagon bureaucrats continues to grow, the number of American students graduating with engineering degrees is steadily falling to less than 5 percent of the world’s total (China graduates more than half). Right now America’s leading defense contractors spend twice as much on lawyers than they do on research. There is a very real danger that in the next decade, if they are asked to arm America for the next major strategic challenge, as they did in the 1980s and again after 9/11, U.S. defense contractors will be unable to meet it. It’s time for the Pentagon and the American defense industry to develop a new way of doing business. They must look to Israel.
Footnotes

* Streamlining that process is the Israeli Defense Ministry’s Talpiot unit, which targets very talented youths, some when they are in high school, for training in both high technology and military science, and on the necessary connections between them, before putting them into service with the IDF. Talpiot creates “a group unmatched anywhere in the world,” George Gilder writes in The Israel Test—with “its students designing [weapons] systems for 10 years before entering college” and with its former alumni serving as an unprecedented talent pool for Israel’s own defense companies.
About the Author

Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Built the Arsenal of Democracy that Won World War II, which will be published by Random House in April.

New fantastic find www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2012-01-02T13:12:00.000-06:00

Amidst the endless crises of the Middle East, the most significant events for the Jewish people are sometimes overlooked, their full importance only realized months or years later.

This was the case with the initial unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and may well prove to be the case with a recent archeological discovery in Afghanistan: an ancient genizah of reportedly immense significance.

A genizah is a repository for documents which, according to Jewish law, cannot be disposed of except by burial, usually because they contain the name of God, which is considered too sacred to be burned. They are of enormous importance to the study of Jewish history, since they often preserve documents of great importance.

In addition, because a community often used the same site as a genizah over a long period of time, the documents contained therein will be from many different time periods, providing insight into different historical periods in a single find, which is often unusual in archeology.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the find has already aroused a firestorm of interest in the academic world.

“We know today about a couple of findings,” Haggai Ben-Shammai, Professor Emeritus of Arabic Language and Literature at Hebrew University was quoted as saying. “In all, in my opinion, there are about 150 fragments. It may be the tip of the iceberg.”

The scrolls... date from around 1,000 years ago and are in Arabic, Judeo-Arabic and ancient Persian.

Texts said to be found include an unknown history of the ancient kingdom of Judea, passages from the book of Isaiah and some of the works of Rabbi Saadia Gaon, a medieval sage.

The first of these finds has the potential to be a truly epochal discovery. Outside of the Bible, we have no extensive histories of the Judean kingdom, and for the Hellenistic era we have only one: that of Josephus, which has long been regarded as problematic by scholars.

The other reported finds are hardly of less importance. Fragments of Isaiah from a thousand years ago could shed new light on the history of the Tanach and its transmission, and many of the works of Saadia Gaon - the founder of Jewish philosophy - have been lost. Should these newly found works contain be previously unknown, they could completely revolutionize the study of Jewish history and theology.

This proved to be the case after the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, which contained documents that permanently changed our understanding of Jewish history. Most famously, Maimonides' "Epistle to Yemen," which gave new insight into the great theologian's views on messianism and into the previously obscure history of the Jews of Yemen.

Jews and pigskin www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-31T16:22:00.001-06:00

Facebook question I received
So I make leather bags and such for a living and I have run into a problem maybe you could help me with. Some of my customers want to have pigskin as lining for some of my products. Is there any such law that forbids me from using pigskin or touching it?

answer-similar Question:

It says in the Torah that one should not touch the carcasses of swine. Does this mean that we should not wear Hush Puppy shoes (made of pigskin) or play football or rugby with a ball made of pig skin?

Answer:

In short, there is no prohibition against using or touching such items. Here's the longer version of the answer:

I am assuming that you are taking the prohibition against "touching" a pig – or any non-kosher animal for that matter – from Leviticus 11:8, where it states: "You shall not eat of their flesh, and you shall not touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you." Understanding this verse in its most literal sense leads one to the conclusion that it is forbidden to touch any part of a non-kosher animal's carcass.

Rashi, the classic commentator to the Scriptures, foresaw this misunderstanding. He explains that this verse is referring only to the three pilgrimage festivals – Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot – when all Jews were required to maintain a state of ritual purity in order to be allowed entry into the Holy Temple and be present when their festive sacrifices were offered.1 During the rest of the year, there is no prohibition against coming in contact with animal carcasses.

Now, the above is true regarding the flesh of the animal. Animal hide, however, does not carry impurities, especially when it is tanned.

So, when the Temple is rebuilt, I guess we might find some people ascending on their pilgrimage to the Temple wearing their Hush Puppies—though all shoes are forbidden on the actual Temple Mount. And I should also mention that according to the Midrash, pig will be a kosher animal when Moshiach comes. But that's a discussion all for itself...

I hope this helps,

Rabbi Shmuel Kogan,
Chabad.org

2011-12-27T18:16:00.001-06:00

Big development in Talmud

2011-12-27T17:21:00.000-06:00

After 1,500 Years, an Index for the Talmud

Librado Romero/The New York Times
Daniel Retter, a lawyer from the Bronx, has compiled what his publisher says is the first widely accepted index to the Talmud. Here, he leads a class on the Talmud.
By JOSEPH BERGER

The Talmud is a formidable body of work: 63 volumes of rabbinical discourse and disputation that form Judaism’s central scripture after the Torah. It has been around for 1,500 years and is studied every day by tens of thousands of Jews. But trying to navigate through its coiling labyrinth can be enormously difficult because the one thing this monumental work lacks is a widely accepted and accessible index.

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Mr. Retter said he was frustrated that he could not find a guide to the 1500-year-old Talmud.
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But now that breach has been filled, or so claims the publisher of HaMafteach, or the Key, a guide to the Talmud, available in English and Hebrew. It was compiled not by a white-bearded sage, but by a courtly, clean-shaven, tennis-playing immigration lawyer from the Bronx.

The index’s publisher, Feldheim Publishers, predicts it will be snatched up by yeshivas and libraries, but more important, it will be a tool for inveterate Talmud students — and there are plenty of those. Feldheim’s president, Yitzchak Feldheim, said the first printing of 2,000 books — a market test — sold out in a few days here and in Israel. More printings have been ordered.

The index has 6,600 topical entries and 27,000 subtopical entries that point students to the treatises and pages of text they are seeking. In these passages, sages analyze matters like whether one can remarry a former wife after she has been betrothed to another, or how one should handle a lost object found in a garbage heap. The index guides the student to significant laws about Sabbath and daily observance, as well as maxims, parables, commentaries and Talmudic personalities.

The index, which costs $29.99 in English and $24.99 in Hebrew, represents seven years of work, but do not ask Daniel Retter why he undertook it, unless you have a spare hour. His answers are as meandering and as twisting as the Talmud itself, with pathways leading to byways leading to offshoots that sometimes end in cul-de-sacs. Along the way, his voice sometimes rises and falls in Talmudic singsong, and his eyes glitter with delight at the saga’s oddities.

“My father was a man of letters,” he begins, then describes how his father, Marcus, had been dedicated to Talmud study during an epic life in which, as a child, he escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransports that rescued Jewish children from Germany and took them to British havens. He brought his family, including Daniel, to New York from London in 1949. (With his dry wit, Mr. Retter noted that his father had literally been a man of letters, since a dozen of his had been printed in The New York Times.)

Daniel Retter, 66, attended a yeshiva, enrolled at City College at night while studying Talmud in the daytime, then studied at Brooklyn Law School during the day while digesting Talmud at night. He married another lawyer, Margie, an advocate for abused women seeking Jewish divorces; they raised four children and ended up in Riverdale, where he continued his Talmudic explorations.

“I can’t waste a minute,” he said in an interview at the Manhattan offices of his law firm, Herrick, Feinstein. “If I’m on the immigration line waiting for a client to be called, I study the Talmud.”

But a puzzle nagged at him. He and other students sometimes needed help tracking down a specific passage, law or topic, or the thoughts of sages like Hillel and Shamai. Most of the time the student consults a loftier scholar.

“For the life of me,” Mr. Retter said, “I could not understand why the Talmud did not have an index.”

One 50-year-old translation of the Talmud, by Soncino Press, has an index, but its pages do not match those of the standard Aramaic text used by most students hunched over their dog-eared volumes. More recent English translations are either not indexed or have not been completed. For three decades, Talmud students have been able to use a Nexis-like CD search engine, the Responsa Project, created by Bar Ilan University in Israel, that locates words by frequency and proximity. But like Google, it often produces irrelevant hits. Bar Ilan officials acknowledged that the CD had one major disadvantage: it cannot be accessed on the Sabbath, when much learning takes place. It also costs $790.

Mr. Retter said he believed that the Talmud, whose compilation was completed in the year 540, “was designed to be mysterious, designed to be locked — I call it the ‘book of mystery.’ ”

“The Talmud was written in exile, and it was the thread that kept Jews together,” he said. “It had no punctuation, no paragraphs. It was a book that was to be transmitted orally from father to son.”

Until 1445, the concept of an index was meaningless, since books were not being printed. But in the 16th century, the first editions of the Talmud were published in Antwerp, Belgium; the Vilna edition, printed in Lithuania in the 19th century, standardized pagination. One effort to help students navigate the Talmud, Mesoras HaShas, provided cross-references alongside the Aramaic text toward similar ideas elsewhere in the Talmud. But, Mr. Retter wrote in his introduction, “it was not an index as that word is commonly understood, because one had to know the location of the initial reference to find the others.”

Rabbi Benjamin Blech, professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University, said the rabbis believed that study should not be made too easy. “We want people to struggle with the text because by figuring it out you will have a deeper comprehension,” he said. “They wanted a living index, not a printed index.”

Nothing satisfied Mr. Retter’s needs. As he said: “I’m a lawyer, and if I want to know the law, I look it up in an index.”

Before he went — Talmudists should pardon the expression — whole hog, he took his wife’s advice and sought the approval of great sages so the work would be credible. HaMafteach includes letters of endorsement from a dozen, including Yisrael Meir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. Mr. Retter also recruited Rabbi Elchanan Kohn, a recognized Israeli Talmud scholar, as his editor.

The index’s potential market is sure to include the thousands of Jews who participate in Daf Yomi, the page-a-day cycle in which everyone studies the same daf — two actual pages — every day for seven and a half years, until all 5,422 pages are completed, when they begin all over again. Some 90,000 people are expected at the Daf Yomi graduation of sorts that will be held in August at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

If readers find any errors, the index provides a very contemporary way of making corrections that the ancient sages never foresaw and so could not have quibbled with: an e-mail address, errorsandcomments@hamafteach.org.

Don't believe lies that hamas will accept Israel www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-27T13:27:00.000-06:00

Hamas leader Haniyeh:
Goal is destruction of Israel in stages

Abbas:
Hamas agrees to '67 borders
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=6024

by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik

At a ceremony marking the 24th anniversary of the founding of Hamas, Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Ismail Haniyeh said that Hamas may work for the "interim objective of liberation of Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem," but that this "interim objective" and "reconciliation" with Fatah will not change Hamas' long-term "strategic" goal of eliminating all of Israel:

"The armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel]... We won't relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine."

Click to view

In his speech, Haniyeh also promised that Hamas will "lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine - all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah."

Two days later, contradicting Haniyeh's statements, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said that Hamas leader abroad Khaled Mashaal had agreed that:

- "There will be no military resistance."
- "The permanent solution is on the '67 borders."

According to Abbas, Hamas agrees to a permanent solution on the '67 borders. However, Haniyeh said that Hamas agrees to a temporary solution on the '67 borders as a first stage only.

For many years, the PLO promoted a "stages plan" that would first create a Palestinian state on the 1949 - 1967 armistice lines, and then work from that position to destroy Israel.

Senior Fatah official Abbas Zaki recently stated that this remains the goal for Fatah as well, but that "you can't say it to the world. You can say it to yourself."

Click to view

The following are longer excerpts of the statements mentioned above:

Speech by Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas at ceremony marking 24th anniversary of the founding of Hamas:
"We welcome you today, on this anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Resistance Movement - Hamas, as you renew the promise and oath of loyalty with Allah, with His Messenger and with His believers; you are renewing the loyalty to the blood of the Martyrs and the path of resistance and Jihad upon the blessed land of Palestine...
We say today, explicitly, so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine - all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah. We say with transparency and in a clear manner, that Palestinian reconciliation - and all sides must know this - cannot come at the expense of [our] principles, at the expense of the resistance. These principles are absolute and cannot be disputed: Palestine - all of Palestine - is from the sea to the river. We won't relinquish one inch of the land of Palestine. The involvement of Hamas at any stage with the interim objective of liberation of [only] Gaza, the West Bank, or Jerusalem, does not replace its strategic view concerning Palestine and the land of Palestine."

A New Light on hannukah

2011-12-25T14:53:00.003-06:00

Shedding New Light On Chanukah
58
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Judith Hauptman
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Judith Hauptman Special To The Jewish Week
The cruse of oil story that explains the origins of Chanukah has fallen into disrepute. Many people feel that it appeals to children only, because Chanukah for adults is about a military victory against overwhelming odds. The Babylonian Talmud, they say, composed the story to downplay the Maccabean triumph. But they are wrong. If we read the cruse of oil story in context, we will see how “authentic” it is, and what purpose its authors intended it to serve.
After the Babylonian Talmud notes which oils and wicks are appropriate for Shabbat lamps, it segues into a discussion of Chanukah lamps and how they are used (Shabbat 21b). For example: each home needs to light at least one lamp on each night of Chanukah; the lamp must be placed outside the door or, if the dwelling is upstairs, in a window facing the public way; one may not benefit from the light of a Chanukah lamp; it must be lit during the evening “rush hour.” The Talmud then asks, “What is Chanukah?” and launches into the famous cruse of oil story: when the Hasmoneans overpowered the Greeks and rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem, they found only one cruse of ritually pure oil, sufficient to burn in the Temple menorah for one day only, but — miraculously — lasted for eight. And so we celebrate Chanukah for eight days.
If we continue reading the Talmud’s discussion of Chanukah, we are surprised to find, just one page later (22b), another menorah story. It first appears in Sifrei Bemidbar (sec. 59), a midrashic text that predates the Talmud. Unlike the cruse of oil story, this one is little known. The Talmud asks, “Why does God need a menorah burning continuously in the Temple?” and answers that it informs all inhabitants of the world that the Shechinah, God’s presence, rests upon the people Israel. How is this so? Because every night the designated kohen would pour the same amount of oil into all seven branches of the Temple menorah. By the next morning, six of the flames would have gone out. But the seventh, called the Western lamp, would remain lit until the following evening when the kohen would come back to light the menorah. He would use the one remaining flame to kindle the six others. That is, the oil of the Western lamp lasted twice as long as it should have.
It cannot be a coincidence that two such similar stories about the Temple menorah appear so close to each other in the Talmud. It seems much more likely that, with just a little tweaking, the “miraculous menorah” story morphed into the Chanukah story, which speaks of the same menorah and the same phenomenon of “burning on empty.” If the cruse of oil story is an altered version of an older one, then we now have to ask: why did the rabbis do this? Why did they adapt the older story and add it to the report of the military victory?

A very likely reason for the rabbinic rewrite was to fight assimilation. The Babylonian Jews lived among Zoroastrians and hence saw everywhere, in this darkest month of the year, Zoroastrian holy fire, a key feature of that religion. By consciously adapting the old Jewish legend of a continuously burning Western lamp, by requiring Jews to place their Chanukah lamps on public display, and by forbidding them the use of the lamps for a practical purpose, the rabbis gave Babylonian Jews a way to light their own holy fires, at a time when the Zoroastrians were kindling theirs. For these Jews, Chanukah assumed added importance.
This new understanding of the cruse of oil story should resonate with Jews living in a Christian culture today. There is no denying that Christmas, with its twinkling lights and exchange of gifts, exerts a strong pull on many American Jews. Ramping up Chanukah with presents, songs, a chanukkiah for each person in the family, and even an electric menorah in the window, are contemporary responses to living in an open society. Some look askance at these new practices. But taking our cue from the rabbis of the Talmud, we should celebrate, not denigrate, the transformation of Chanukah from a minor to a major holiday. The cruse of oil story, therefore, is as “true” today as it was back then. No need to be embarrassed to tell it to our children and grandchildren, of whatever age.
Judith Hauptman is professor of Talmud and Rabbinic Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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Orthodox Rabbis

2011-12-25T14:53:00.001-06:00

Misguided Rabbinical Priorities
298
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Rabbi Mordechai Rackover is associate university chaplain for the Jewish community of Brown University. Twitter: @mrackover
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Rabbi Mordechai Rackover Special To The Jewish Week
Nowadays Orthodoxy is all about sex. Immodesty, promiscuity, homosexuality: the public discourse of the Orthodox Jewish world seems disproportionately to take place in the bedroom, the dressing room, and the closet.
Gender is also a related hot topic. What are women? What can and can't they do? What can they, but shouldn’t they? And what about men? Can men marry each other? Live together? Adopt children? Out of the closet? In the closet? On the bima? In the shul?
This discourse isn’t much of a conversation. Discourse comes from an Old French word and implies ‘back and forth’ – or, in the language of Talmud study with which all Orthodox rabbis are familiar, 'shakla ve-tarya,' give and take. But the public discourse of the Orthodox has become — proudly, defiantly, and almost by definition — all give and no take: an unending series of pronouncements and responses, murmurings, blog-posts, unending comment threads and online flame-wars. These "conversations" are merely the strident repetition of entrenched positions. More and more I understand the expression, “it’s like talking to a wall.”
While these non-conversations about sex and gender proliferate, the incidence of child rape, verbal and physical abuse of women, poverty, weakening schools and riven families, to name only a few crises, increases. Fewer children keep Shabbat and more adults work like dogs to send their children to day schools, sacrificing time they might otherwise actually spend with them.

Sex has nothing to do with most of the problems I’ve listed, and the energies that are put into hand-wringing and petition-signing over sexual ethics could be far better placed.
The case in point: recently Rabbi Steve Greenberg, who was ordained by Yeshiva University, subsequently came out as gay, and has argued that there is no contradiction between being gay and Orthodox, performed a wedding in which he sanctified the union of two men. The media reported that an Orthodox rabbi performed a gay marriage and all kinds of rabbis began talking to their favorite walls. Then a group of over one hundred rabbis got together to declare that this was not an orthodox wedding and that no such wedding was possible. Big News! The Torah and Orthodox understanding of Halakha prohibit gay marriage. Who knew?
An Orthodox rabbi myself, I happen to agree that this was not an Orthodox wedding. But I think these rabbis' response is a much bigger problem than two Orthodox gay men seeking a way to dignify their relationship through marriage.
Who do these rabbis think is listening? What compelled them to lash out? Do they anticipate an impending rash of orthodox gay marriages? Did their synagogue Executive Directors ask for guidance with all the calls to book gay weddings? Do they think that Jews to the left of Orthodoxy need to be reminded that the orthodox establishment considers them wrong?
These rabbis bang on their lecterns and chests and fight for attention to keep themselves in the center of attention: to declare that they are in charge and that they alone define Judaism. And in so doing, in drawing lines where no one is looking for them, they routinely miss the places that everyone is looking for wisdom and moral guidance in the problems they face in their actual lives.
We are bereft of relevant leadership and opinions that matter. In recent years we’ve watched as an increasing number of aspects of orthodox Jewish life have become narrower. Kashrut is beset with polarizing stringencies. Increasing swathes of public life (synagogues, buses, sidewalks, funerals) are becoming less hospitable to women. Conversion is a minefield and women remain bound in unwanted marriages by rabbis who refuse to respond.
And one hundred rabbis saw fit to speak out…on a marriage that no one that they are speaking to was likely even to have known about.
I believe Orthodoxy no longer exists as a coherent ideology. There are gangs of rabbis in different clubs. Sometimes they work together, sometimes against each other, depending on their interest of the moment. In the meantime they have so eroded their moral and legal footing that even the once faithful are falling away. So many people have gone down this path that even the fundamental practices of our faith have become twisted and unrecognizable. And here we are at another moment of niggling erosion where rabbis who could spend valuable time and energy have misplaced their power and in so doing lost a little more of what little relevance they may have left.
Email: rabbi@brown.edu

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Parasha Miketz summary www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-22T15:37:00.002-06:00

Parasha Miketz forgiveness www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-22T15:37:00.001-06:00

The various meanings of Chanukah www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-22T15:34:00.001-06:00

Play dreiydl www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-22T15:33:00.001-06:00

Light the menorah www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-22T15:31:00.000-06:00

another benefit of brit milah

2011-12-21T17:08:00.001-06:00

German scientists growing skin from baby foreskins

By Eric Pfeiffer
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By Eric Pfeiffer | The Sideshow – Tue, Dec 20, 2011
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The "Skin Factory" may soon replace all animal testing on cosmetics
No, this is not an ill-conceived sequel to an Ira Levin novel. Scientists at a laboratory in Germany have begun growing human skin from the cells of infant foreskins.
According to the German Herald, the "medical breakthrough" is being used to test cosmetics and other consumer products and could someday replace all animal testing. The so-called Skin Factory, at the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, takes foreskin cells donated to the project and uses them to grow the skin, according to spokesman Andreas Traube. More from the Herald:
Scientists extract a single layer of cells from each foreskin and then grow on layers of collagen and connective tissue in the Skin Factory, a sealed growing environment just seven meters, by thee meters, and three meters high and kept at a constant temperature of 37 degrees centigrade.
The scientists use the Skin Factory machine--some 22 feet long, 10 feet tall and 10 feet wide--to grow the new skin. Parents provide the scientists with permission before they are allowed to use the donated foreskins.
Once the cells are multiplied inside the machine, researchers then inject them into a gel that causes them to grow into a sheet that simulates the epidermis. The layers are then fused together, creating a replica of natural human skin.
Traube said the foreskin is taken from children aged 1-4, because the younger tissue has better research applications. "The older the skin is, the worse it performs," he said. According to the report, the cells taken from a single foreskin can produce test skin samples in six weeks. The success of the research has led the Skin Factory to consider expanding its efforts to commercial projects.
"It's logical that we'd want to take the operation to a bigger scale," Traube said. "In the future, there are all sort of possible applications for the Skin Factory like cancer research, pigmentation diseases, and allergic reactions."

Intolerant Jews on the left

2011-12-21T10:29:00.001-06:00

Intolerant bigoted anti simetic Jewish left
http://www.worldjewishdaily.com/toolbar.html?4t=extlink&4u=http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1035

Richard Baehr

Clueless Jews
It has been a startling week for the American Jewish community, and a revealing one. Most American Jews are politically liberal and secular. There is, of course, no crime or problem in being either. But blatant bigotry, close-mindedness, intellectual laziness and anti-Semitism, are attitudes or traits most liberal American Jews would say are associated with others, and certainly not with some of the leaders in their organizational world, or some of their “thought leaders” in their most respected media organs. Some events of this week suggest otherwise.

First we have the case of the Connecticut rabbi and Tim Tebow. If you are not in America, you may not be familiar with Tim Tebow. The second-year quarterback for the NFL’s Denver Broncos had a very successful career at the University of Florida, helping to win two national titles and winning the Heisman Trophy Award, given to the nation’s top player. There are plenty of athletes who are physically talented and are also viewed as leaders or winners for helping motivate other players on their teams to play harder and better. Tebow stands out from many other professional or collegiate stars because he is not only talented, a leader, a winner, and a motivator, but because he is also a visibly believing Christian. It is this last part that has led to the new phenomenon of “tebowing,” an imitation of Tebow kneeling to pray.

In the last few weeks, Tebow has become a much bigger story as his team has rallied to win six consecutive games, many of them in highly improbable fashion, none more painful to this author than Denver’s miracle victory over the Chicago Bears. It is not hard to understand that this linkage of a serious religious person and a football star would have lots of appeal in a country where football is the most popular sport and where religion matters more than it does in many other Western democracies.

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So along comes Rabbi Joshua Hammerman, a member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet and a columnist for The Jewish Week. Hammerman’s appalling, bigoted article denigrating Tebow and his supporters has now been removed from The Jewish Week’s website, and apologies have been offered by the journal and Hammerman. But the article has been preserved by other sites.

This is one particularly offensive part of the article:

”If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants. While America has become more inclusive since Jerry Falwell’s first political forays, a Tebow triumph could set those efforts back considerably."

Did you get all that? If the Broncos win the Super Bowl, all hell will break loose in America, as Tebow’s Christian warriors go on a rampage.

This week the Union for Reform Judaism held its biennial General Assembly. On the first day of the meeting, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Republican, gave an address in which he criticized the Palestinian Authority for its culture of worshipping terrorism and challenged its readiness for a state. But some attendees decided to boycott Cantor’s address. What was Cantor’s crime in their eyes? Simply put, he has conservative views.

“A number of participants could be heard outside the ballroom where Cantor was speaking discussing their choice not to attend his speech so as to not lend their support to his conservative views,” The Hill, a Congressional newspaper, reported.

Imagine having to at least give a hearing to an alternative viewpoint. Of course, tuning out conservatives is obligatory for some in the Reform movement, since the movement is far more about liberal politics at this point than about religion. When U.S. President Barack Obama spoke to the URJ event on Friday, he defended his record for enhancing Israel’s security, but the biggest applause lines concerned his pitch on social issues -- abortion, gay rights and the appointment of liberal judges.

This same week, the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College was in the news after the school turned down a donor who offered to fund a conservative scholar. While there might be reason to question a donor defining a viewpoint for a program, there already is a dominant, and largely unchallenged viewpoint at Hebrew Union, and that is that Judaism is all about fighting for social justice. Hostility to Israel is quite prevalent as well.

Many at the school, from administrators to professors to students (the future rabbis) simply have no interest in intellectual diversity. One area where such diversity of thought is frowned upon is Israel:

“While I loved my time there and deeply respected my professors, I found that HUC was not comfortable exploring or discussing anything politically that wasn’t Left,” said Rabbi Samantha Kahn, who received her ordination from Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles in 2011 and is now the assistant rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in Houston, Texas. “I definitely struggled with it, and I was hurt by the lack of openness and the anger toward positions of center and right when it came to Israel and foreign affairs.”

And then there is Thomas Friedman, America’s most overrated columnist and a fixture at the New York Times, where he has been pontificating for decades. The man who prefers the Chinese authoritarian economic model to that of Western democracies also loves to scold America for its wasteful energy consumption. But Friedman lives in a 10,000-square-foot home, leaving a carbon footprint almost as large as his self-regard.

This week, Friedman, a relentless critic of Israeli policy, at least under right-of-center governments, wrote what should be a career-ending column. In it, he argued that the Israel Lobby controlled the U.S. Congress (he stated that the members were bought and paid for), and that is why the House and Senate members cheered Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke earlier in the year. This is the kind of comment that warms the hearts of Professors Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer, but also brings good cheer to Patrick Buchanan, David Duke and other Israel-haters and/or anti-Semites whether on the Left or the Right.

Friedman is clearly frustrated that Netanyahu does not accept the fact that Thomas Friedman, more than anyone, knows what is good for Israel. Bibi is a repeat offender for Friedman, since he ignored the columnist’s advice in his first term in office as well .

The man who tried to sell the “Saudi peace plan” -- is the real story that Friedman was bought and paid for by the Saudis? -- does not seem to understand that members of Congress are pro-Israel because Americans are pro-Israel, as much now as ever before.

In addition, members of Congress see a lot more to like about Israel and its pluralistic, Western democracy, than they do in a movement which values the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews as more important goals than the creation of a new Palestinian state.

Finally, there is the case of New Yorker editor David Remnick. He is the author of a lengthy paean to Barack Obama, now filling remainder shelves at bookstores across America. Remnick earlier this year expressed his weariness about having to discuss Israel any more, and this week became apoplectic over Newt Gingrich challenging the narrative of a distinct Palestinian nationality.

Remnick went after Gingrich, but spent most of his time assaulting Joan Peters and her 1984 book “From Time Immemorial,” which argued that many Arabs moved to Palestine in the last century only after the Zionists began to move there in large numbers. Remnick attempts to diminish Peters’ work by scornfully pointing out that she was not a trained historian -- something he is not either, of course. Remnick’s hit job on Peters consists of a link to one critical article by Yehoshua Porath (who admits that there was Arab migration to Palestine during this period), and one quote from Daniel Pipes that is taken out of context (in fact, Porath credits Pipes with a favorable review of Peters’ book). Not surprisingly, Remnick neglects to link to attacks on the book by Edward Said, or Professor Norman Finkelstein, whose attacks on Peters have been never-ending and obsessive. It must be that Finkelstein’s reputation at this point is too damaged for Remnick to rely on him, and it is difficult, outside of New York Times editorial board meetings, to sell Said as a fair critic of anything related to Israel. There is no evidence that Remnick has ever read Peters’ book, and his critique is derivative, relying mainly on name-calling.

Remnick is not only not a historian, he is also not much of an editor. As New Yorker editor-in-chief, he has authorized and then approved of the “investigative” pieces of such notables as Seymour Hersh, who like Ron Paul, argues that there is no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons. Tina Brown tried to turn the New Yorker into Vanity Fair without the color photography. Remnick has pushed the New Yorker toward the print model of MSNBC.

In his book on Obama, Remnick avoided any serious investigation of any part of the Obama biography that might challenge the currently held views about the president and his background, still taken as gospel by so many of his worshippers in the media, and viewed by them as necessary to sustain his re-election bid. Is it any surprise that Remnick labels Gingrich and Peters as bigots, just as he renounces critics who challenge parts of Obama’s history as racists? If you disagree with David Remnick's view of the world, you must be intolerant and racist.

Taken as a whole, these items suggest a growing intolerance among those on the Left, who are quick to see this trait in their political enemies.

Richard Baehr is the co-founder and chief political correspondent for the American Thinker, and is a visiting fellow at the Jewish Policy Center.

rabbijonathangionsburg.info

Chunukah Christams dilemma

2011-12-21T07:36:00.001-06:00

Parasha miketz

2011-12-20T20:48:00.000-06:00

rabbijonathanginsburg.info

Insanity of Israel's conversion policies

2011-12-18T21:43:00.000-06:00

Israel says people converted by Chassidic Rabbis are not real Jews.

Published On Sunday, December 18, 2011 01:01:29 AM Yourjewishnews.com/Forward

Within the next few weeks Martina Ragachova could be deported from Israel — for being too frum.
Prague-born Ragachova, 37, moved to Israel a decade ago, and in 2004 converted to Judaism in the Bnei Brak rabbinic court of Nissim Karelitz, one of the world’s best-respected and most stringent Haredi rabbis. Karelitz was so moved by the genuineness of her commitment to Judaism that he knelt before her by way of congratulation.

Prior to this ultra-Orthodox conversion, Ragachova had applied to become Jewish in the modern-Orthodox state-run conversion courts. But they did not accept her application. So she took the private Haredi track.

She now has a conversion certificate that is accepted by virtually every rabbi in the world, in contrast to the state conversion she originally applied for, which is viewed with skepticism by large sections of the Orthodox community. But because she took her conversion into her own hands, Israel’s state rabbinate and Interior Ministry insist that she is not Jewish.
This means she cannot marry in Israel. When it comes to weddings performed in-country, the government recognizes only religious marriages. And for Jews, this means weddings officiated by Orthodox rabbis between individuals the government recognizes as Jews.

More immediately, it means that she could be deported because the Interior Ministry doesn’t consider her Jewish and will not grant her citizenship.

Until now, Ragachova has avoided deportation thanks to an injunction she obtained by going to court. Early next year, the Supreme Court will hear her case along with those of others in her situation.

If the court forces the state to recognize her conversion, as she is asking, the state’s monopoly on conversion will be over. If she is deported, there will be outrage in the Haredi community, which will see the ruling as an insult to one of its leading scholars.

“The conversion I passed is acceptable in every country in the world apart from Israel. It’s an absurd situation,” Ragachova told the Forward. She complained that she has been in limbo since her conversion due to her lack of citizenship. Until the court first considered her case in November, her lack of citizenship prevented her from working under the law. The temporary injunction she obtained now allows her to work during her case’s legal proceedings.

Ragachova’s case highlights a strange situation that has come about in Israel: Haredi conversion has become a relatively easy option for some who are prepared to follow an extra-stringent observant lifestyle.

Eleven years ago, the government faced resistance from within the rabbinate over its efforts to facilitate conversion for thousands of Russian immigrants and others who enjoy citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return on the basis of their Jewish family background — but who are considered non-Jews under Orthodox Judaic law. In response, the government set up a separate conversion operation under the Office of the Prime Minister to streamline their conversion.

These immigrants, for the most part, sought to become Jewish in order to become full-fledged members of Israel’s Jewish society, able to marry other Jews, be buried in Jewish cemeteries and enjoy full social acceptance. Under the plan, this new conversion body, which employed more lenient standards, was granted a monopoly over conversions for individuals living in Israel.

But this left out many individuals living legally in Israel on a long-term basis who, for one reason or another, are not citizens. These residents are barred from conversion unless they obtain special permission from an “exceptions committee” that meets rarely and gives no public account of its activities. Some people have not received a reply from the committee after a year after applying.

Having a Jewish partner makes applying via the Conversion Authority harder, not easier. The non-Jewish partner of a Jew, whether that Jew is Israeli born or an immigrant, cannot apply to the exceptions committee until he or she has been married to the Jewish partner for a year-and-a-half or in a relationship for four years. Of course, the couple cannot get married in Israel unless they are both Jewish to begin with.

“I have 10 cases of people who want to convert and start a Jewish family, but they have to wait, and some are in their 30s and say their biological clocks are ticking,” said Seth Farber, a Modern Orthodox rabbi who is director of the nonprofit organization ITIM that advocates on behalf of conversion candidates.

By contrast, the conversion process under Karelitz is straightforward, and open to anyone he deems serious about becoming Jewish. Prospective converts study, according to an aide to Karelitz, until they know more Jewish law “than even the average yeshiva or seminary student.” When Karelitz finds them ready, he converts them.

The Beth Din Tzedek religious court in Bnei Brak, which Karelitz chairs, was converting only a handful of people when Ragachova turned to it. Last year, it converted more than 250.

The trend disheartens Farber. “It is unfortunate and ironic that more and more people are coming to us to help them go through ultra-Orthodox conversions because the bureaucracy is preventing them from converting through the State of Israel,” he commented.

If the prospect of deportation is daunting for Ragachova, it is terrifying for Raisa-Haya Sonin, 74, Israel’s most Haredi gentile. Sonin dresses and practices religion the way Haredi women do, and is very much part of the Orthodox community in the Orthodox stronghold of Bnei Brak. But the state and its official rabbinate consider her non-Jewish because she converted with Karelitz after moving to Israel from the Former Soviet Union. Because of this, the state also does not recognize her marriage. “It’s hard from a spiritual point of view,” said her husband Ilya Sonin, 76, who was born Jewish. “We are old, not strong, and I worry about what will happen if I die first, about her status here.”

Sonin knows that under Israeli law, she can stay in the country living with the
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man whom the state regards as her Jewish civil partner only as long as he is alive. But she cannot apply for citizenship herself. And if he were to die, she could be deported.

Asked about its position on private conversions and the forthcoming court case, the Interior Ministry gave a brief answer: “The principal position of the State of Israel in all these cases is not to recognize any private conversion that takes place in Israel.”
The Conversion Authority did not respond to requests for information on its position.

The religious-Zionist camp is watching the Ragachova case closely. Observing the popularity of Karelitz’s court, some prominent Zionist rabbis have started converting. Yisrael Rosen, a Conversion Authority judge until his retirement in June and a founder of the state conversion courts, opened a conversion court of his own in August. The court converts an average of one person a week — unrecognized by the state.

Farber said: “It is unjust that someone can convert overseas and be recognized by the Law of Return, but if they convert in Israel, the center of Jewish world, they cannot.”

see www.converttojudaism.net for our online progrAM

Gingrich points out FALSE narrative of Palestinians

2011-12-17T13:42:00.002-06:00

The Gingrich Syndrome

By: Yedidya Atlas

In 1949, Princeton University Press, published the Fifth Revised Printing, of the original 1943 history book “The Arabs: A Short History” by Professor Philip Khuri Hitti, Professor of Semitic Languages and Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages at Princeton University. Credited with almost single handedly created the discipline of Arabic Studies in the United States, Hitti, born in Ottoman Syria (now modern day Lebanon), was the preeminent scholar of Islam and the Arab world of his day.
It seems that some people (including some in the media) have short memories...
Ilana

A proponent of the Arab cause against the Jews and Zionism, Hitti was the first Arab to testify against the Partition Plan at the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, where he took Ben-Gurion to task for his testimony about “Palestine” (referring to the Jews). Hitti declared: “There is no such thing as ‘Palestine’ in history, absolutely not.” And in fact, in the aforementioned “The Arabs: A Short History” there is no mention of whatsoever of an Arab “Palestinian People” even though the particular volume in this writer’s possession was printed in 1966. Despite its numerous revisions, including after the founding the 1948 founding of the State of Israel, Professor Philip K. Hitti, a world renowned spokesman for the Arab cause for many years, made no revision to include the now oft-mentioned Arab “Palestinian People” in later editions of his book on Arab history.

In fact, the name “Palestine”, or “Palaestina” in Latin, originated in the second century C.E., after the Roman occupiers crushed the Jewish revolt of Bar Kochba. In an effort to subsequently wipe out Jewish connection to the Land, the Romans renamed the occupied Jewish Land of Israel as“Syria Palaestina” (after “Philistina” – the land where the Philistines, ancient enemies of the Jewish People, had dwelled in what is today Israel’s coastal plain and Gaza) and considered southern Syria, ruled by a Roman Governor in Damascus. Jerusalem was renamed “Aelia Capitolina”, Shechem, which had, like Jerusalem, been burnt to the ground and rebuilt by the Romans was renamed “Neapolis” (or “the New City” in Latin). Owing to the lack of the letter “P” in Arabic, “Palestine”, is today referred to by Arabs as “Filastin”, and the Arab name for Jewish Shechem, “Nablus” was another Arab mispronunciation of the Roman name Neapolis.

In brief, the name of the nationality of the so-called Arab “Palestinian People” is not even derived from their own language, Arabic. They have no distinctive national history, culture or even cuisine that distinguishes them from other Arabs in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt. No one can name the first, last, or any Arab Palestinian king, during the long centuries they falsely claim to have existed prior to the return en masse of the Jews to the Biblical Land of Israel in the past 200 years. Hence, Arab Palestinian national existence is demonstratively a recent development at best.

So the responses to the recent remarks of former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and current Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, regarding the historical bona fides, or lack thereof, of the “Palestinian People” is more telling than the actual remarks.
After all, what did he say?
“Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire until the early 20th century. I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israelnow since the 1940s, and it's tragic.”
Mr. Gingrich, who has a PhD. in history and taught it at the college level for a number of years prior to his decades long political career, has sufficient academic credentials for one to assume he has read at least a few serious books in his life on the subject, and can easily document the accuracy of his declaration. Moreover, as proven above, he didn’t say anything all that earth shattering per se.
The Palestinian Arab leadership, of course, challenged the veracity of the Gingrich remarks with the usual oft-repeated falsehoods:
"Our people have been here since the very beginning and are determined to stay on their land until the very end." And that Gingrich was “denying historical facts.” (Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad)
Also, of course, they labeled Mr. Gingrich, as “ignorant and racist” for challenging the politically correct albeit false Palestinian narrative.
Unsurprisingly, some media outlets attempted to undercut the historical accuracy of the Gingrich remarks. The Reuters report included the following paragraph:
“Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment in 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.”
The key words being, of course, “most historians” in an effort to convince the reader that Gingrich’s statement was really just politically motivated and not a well documented historical fact. In reality said “most historians”is really the politically correct wishful thinking of two of Israel’s leftist “new historians” Baruch Kimerling and Joel Migdal in their book “The Palestinian People: A History” (Harvard University Press, 2003). There they write:
“The tough rule and new reforms led to the 1834 revolt’s outbreak in the heart of the country, uniting dispersed Bedouins, rural sheiks, urban notables, mountain fellaheen, and Jerusalem religious figures against a common enemy. It was these groups who would later constitute the Palestinian people.” (pp.3-20, p.7)
The “common enemy” was the Egyptian forces led by Ibrahim Pasha that had conquered much of the country in 1830 from Ottoman rule. The baseless assertion that “these groups who would later constitute the Palestinian people” is vacuous at best, if not deliberate false propaganda to lend credence to the “Palestinian People” myth propagated by Israel’s enemies in an effort to challenge the well documented Jewish connection to the Land. And although even Kimmerling and Migdal don’t buy into the official false history of today’s Palestinian Arab propaganda machine, their book nonetheless, achieved its purpose since it gives Reuters and other media outlets the “academic” basis to muddy the waters of historical accuracy and give the false impression that these issues are in dispute and Mr. Gingrich and anyone who agrees with his statement is in the minority and assumedly with a politically motivated bias against the “poor Palestinians.”
Much has been written in the past week or so in defense of Mr. Gingrich’s historically accurate assertions by top columnists in both Israel and theUnited States, but what no one discusses is the “true sin” of Mr. Gingrich. It is not merely that he has publicly noted that the “Palestinian Arab emperor” has no clothes, but that he, who may well be the next president of the United States, has, in essence, argued that documented truth, and not a politically correct false version of a so-called narrative, should be the basis of the reality upon which negotiations take place. In brief, that the so-called “Israel-Palestinian Conflict” is not a level playing field with equal moral and historical claims to a “disputed” Land.
He didn’t challenge the rights of the parties to negotiate a solution acceptable to both parties. He simply asserted that truth counts in policy making. What a remarkable idea!
The criticism leveled at Mr. Gingrich by even his fellow Republican contenders is that by speaking the truth about an important subject, it is making today’s realpolitik approach to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, for example, more difficult – even for Israel! As if the Israeli position would not be strengthened by an American administration that would reject the false narrative of its enemies. Thus far, administrations that accept the Palestinian “Big Lie” invariably pressure Israel to make tangible and irrevocable concessions that threaten her very existence.

The logical extension of Mr. Gingrich’s “sin” is that not only should truth and morality be factors in making national policy, next he might suggest that political leaders should face reality and deal with it accordingly instead of making policy on delusional wishful thinking. Who does he think he is?
**************************************
The author is a veteran journalist specializing in geo-political and geo-strategic affairs in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Insight Magazine, Nativ, The Jerusalem Post and Makor Rishon. His articles have been reprinted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the US Congressional Record.

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com
www.converttojudaism.net

Nonsense from Deborah Lipstatdt

2011-12-16T17:41:00.001-06:00

Here is the jist of what was reported she said
(from Haaretz.com)http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/top-holocaust-scholar-blasts-holocaust-abuse-by-u-s-israeli-politicians-1.401821

"Renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt says that American and Israeli politicians who invoke the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes are engaging in “Holocaust abuse”, which is similar to “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust.In a hard-hitting interview with Haaretz, Lipstadt also lashed out at the "over-the-top pandering" of Republican presidential candidates, describing their fawning support for Israel as "embarrassing" and "unhealthy." Of last week’s appearance of the top Republican candidates at a Washington forum organized by the Republican Jewish Committee, she said: “It was unbelievable. It made me cringe. I couldn’t watch it.”...
“You listen to Newt Gingrich talking about the Palestinians as an ‘invented people’ – it’s out-Aipacking AIPAC, it’s out-Israeling Israel,” she said. .”There’s something about it that’s so discomforting. It’s not healthy. It’s a distortion,” she said.
The New York-born Lipstadt said that President Barack Obama’s “flatfooted” handling of Israel at the beginning of his term “gave an opening to Republicans in America and to ‘Republicans’ in Israel.” She said that “more and more Jews are scared and here’s someone [the Republicans, CS] who is going to protect them. It’s so over-the-top irrational.”

I say Thank God for these Republican candidates and their concern about Israel.

Why is this nonsense?
1. Obama is one of, if not, the worst president's ever in regardf to uisrael, endangering her security in many ways, including"
a. Pressuring only Israel about failure of the Palestinians to return to the table
b. saying zero about their continuing anti_Israel and anti Jewish efforts
c. Undermining Mubarak so now Egypt will turn anti Israel and jihadist
d. humilated Netanyahu then tried to sandbag him about indefensible borders
e. sends surrogates out to attack Israel etc
f. Wasted 2 years trying to talk to Iran aboutt heir nuclear weapon dresire, then has stalled on aggresive sanctions, and allowed Iran to capture our most sophisticated drone

Many very rationale Jews understand the stakes, and how dangerous another Obama term would be, and it is NOT irrational to use Holocaust imagery when talking about Iran nuclear bombs aimed at 6 + million Jews.

As for Gingrich and Invented Palestinians, everyone else has to be PC but someone has to tel the truth. Everyone tiptoies about, afraid to speak the truth and the result? Absolutly zero evidence the Palestinians want any form of peace with a Jewish state,'
Lisptadt, for all her Holocaust knowledge, seems to have failed to learn the key lessons about paying attention when nazis say they want to kill you

Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg
www.rabbijonathanginburg.com

Tim Tebow and a Rabbi problem

2011-12-14T17:08:00.001-06:00

Vayeshev coat of many colors

2011-12-12T18:27:00.001-06:00

How Israel's Defense Industry Can Help Save America

2011-12-12T14:28:00.000-06:00

Observations:
How Israel's Defense Industry Can Help Save America - Arthur Herman (Commentary)
Kibbutz Sasa is the home of Plasan, which makes body armor for the Israel Defense Forces and for IDF vehicles. Today 90% of the company's orders come from Europe and the U.S. Plasan specializes in a very dense plastic composite product that affords ballistic protection without significantly adding to the weight of the vehicle.
Plasan-armored mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) have been serving in Afghanistan since August 2009, and contractor Oshkosh Company has another 8,800 on order. In 2009 Plasan opened a factory in Bennington, Vt., that employs 350 American workers.
An Israeli company called Camero came up with a way to use ultra-wideband wireless transmissions to see through walls - literally - and detect armed men and explosives on the other side. In December 2010, one of Camero's top clients became the U.S. Department of Defense.
Ten years ago Israel ranked 15th in foreign defense industry sales. In 2007 it surpassed the UK to rank fourth, behind the U.S., Russia, and France. The day when it takes France's place is not far off. This is a remarkable achievement for a country of some six million people.
At the Plasan plant in Kibbutz Sasa, the hallways are covered with poster-size copies of thank-you notes from American GIs. One of them is signed by Brian, an Army sergeant serving in Afghanistan who wrote that the Plasan armor saved him from a bullet that would have blown off his head if it had gone through the door.

The writer is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

Parahat vayeshev life advice

2011-12-12T08:59:00.000-06:00

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

Backing up Newt on the Invented palestinian people

2011-12-10T18:04:00.001-06:00

Sunday, September 11, 2011What Palestine?
Is the world just plain stupid?
An interesting questionnaire for Palestinian Advocates

By Yashiko Sagamori

If you are so sure that "Palestine, the country, goes back through most of recorded history," I expect you to be able to answer a few basic questions about that country of Palestine:

1. When was it founded and by whom?

2. What were its borders?

3. What was its capital?

4. What were its major cities?

5. What constituted the basis of its economy?

6. What was its form of government?

7. Can you name at least one Palestinian leader before Arafat?

8.. Was Palestine ever recognized by a country whose existence, at that time or now, leaves no room for interpretation?

9. What was the language of the country of Palestine?

10. What was the prevalent religion of the country of Palestine?

11. What was the name of its currency? Choose any date in history and tell what was the approximate exchange rate of the Palestinian monetary unit against the US dollar, German mark, GB pound, Japanese yen, or Chinese Yuan on that date.

12. And, finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its demise and when did it occur?

You are lamenting the "low sinking" of a "once proud" nation.. Please tell me, when exactly was that "nation" proud and what was it so proud of?

And here is the least sarcastic question of all: If the people you mistakenly call "Palestinians" are anything but generic Arabs collected from all over -- or thrown out of -- the Arab world, if they really have a genuine ethnic id! entity that gives them right for self-determination, why did they never try to become independent until Arabs suffered their devastating defeat in the Six Day War?

I hope you avoid the temptation to trace the modern day "Palestinians" to the Biblical Philistines: Substituting etymology for history won't work here.

The truth should be obvious to everyone who wants to know it. Arab countries have never abandoned the dream of destroying Israel; they still cherish it today. Having time and again failed to achieve their evil goal with military means, they decided to fight Israel by proxy. For that purpose, they created a terrorist organization, cynically called it "the Palestinian people" and installed it in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria. How else can you explain the refusal by Jordan and Egypt to unconditionally accept back the "West Bank" and Gaza, respectively?

The fact is, Arabs populating Gaza, Judea, and Samaria have much less claim to nationhood than that Indian tribe that successfully emerged in Connecticut with the purpose of starting a tax-exempt casino: At least that tribe had a constructive goal that motivated them. The so-called "Palestinians" have only one motivation: the destruction of Israel, and in my book that is not sufficient to consider them a nation" -- or anything else except what they really are: A terrorist organization that will one day be dismantled.

In fact, there is only one way to achieve peace in the Middle East. Arab countries must acknowledge and accept their defeat in their war against Israel and, as the losing side should, pay Israel reparations for the more than 50 years of devastation they have visited on it. The most appropriate form of such reparations would be the removal of their terrorist organization from the land of Israel and accepting Israel's ancient sovereignty over Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

That will mark the end of the Palestinian people. What are you saying again was its beginning?

Can this story be presented any more clearly or simply?

Vayishlach vdeo dvar 1

2011-12-08T22:24:00.001-06:00

on the parasha www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

2011-12-08T22:22:00.000-06:00

Israeli population from Richard Baehr

2011-12-08T14:38:00.000-06:00

Some very good news: The Jewish birth rate in Israel is now so high, that Jewish births as a percentage of all births in the country has risen by 7 % , from 69% to 76% in just a few years. The Arab birth rate continues to drop within Israel and the actual number of babies born to Israeli Arabs is also declining. The spurt in the Jewish birth rate is among all sectors of the population . Non-Orthodox Jews now have an average birth rate of 2.6 per woman of child bearing age, about a third higher than in any other developed nation. The overall birth rate is now just shy of 3. So much for the "demographic nightmare that Israel supposedly faces, that would force it to give up the West Bank.
http://tinyurl.com/7uw4p4a
The PA also grossly overstates their population in the West Bank and Gaza for political purposes. Yoram Ettinger , who knows a great deal about all of this demographic detail, will be in Chicago soon to speak on this.

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

2011-12-07T10:20:00.001-06:00

Obama the anti-Israel president

2011-12-07T08:26:00.001-06:00

how to light the menorah www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-06T13:38:00.001-06:00

Obama piling on Israel through surrogates www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-12-06T13:24:00.000-06:00

Has Obama Destroyed the Alliance?

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary 12.06.2011 - 12:34 PM

It’s been a difficult week for Israel. A trifecta of attacks on the foundation of the ties between the United States and the Jewish state in the past few days have exposed the ambivalent feelings of top Obama administration officials. If you add together recent statements by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman, it’s hard to blame Caroline Glick for claiming that “under Obama, the U.S. is no longer Israel’s ally.”
But it’s worthwhile pointing out that despite these ominous signals and the failure of the administration’s promises to stop Iran’s nuclear program, Obama is still operating under constraints that will make it difficult for him to further weaken the bonds that unite Israel and the United States. The offensive words uttered by Panetta, Clinton and Gutman, as well as previous actions by Obama, point more to their frustration with a situation in which they know they cannot teach Israel’s government the rough lesson they believe it deserves than anything else.
As Obama learned to his dismay this past spring when his intended ambush of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a visit to Washington backfired on him, the alliance with Israel isn’t a function of the whims of an individual president. From the first day he took office, Obama has been open about his goal of creating more distance between the U.S. and Israel than existed under his predecessors. That’s been a dangerous mistake that has destroyed what was left of the peace process and encouraged Israel’s foes to think its alliance with the United States is crumbling. That’s made the Middle East an even more dangerous place than it already was. But at the same time, due to the demands of Congress and key constituencies within the Democratic Party, the president has always been forced to maintain the security alliance that exists between the two nations. And in spite of Obama’s desire to help the Palestinians and his evident distaste for Israel, the so-called “diplomatic tsunami” that a Palestinian independence push at the United Nations was supposed to cause has fizzled.
To note these facts is not to dismiss the damage the fights picked by Obama (as well as Panetta’s attempt to blame Israel for its isolation by Islamists and Clinton for her slurs on Israeli democracy) have caused. But it must be understood their bristling resentment of Israel and Netanyahu is heightened by the fact that they know if they go further, there will be a terrible political reckoning. That’s why even as he chips away at the alliance, Obama must pay it homage and even be forced to claim, as he did last week, he is a good friend to the Jewish state. Such claims may be disingenuous, but like all forms of hypocrisy, they are, as the saying goes, the tribute that vice pays to virtue.
The reason why the pro-Israel consensus in the United States is so strong is that its roots are deep in our political culture and broader than just the Jewish vote or AIPAC. That’s what drives critics of the relationship like the Israel Lobby authors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer crazy. And it’s also why Obama administration officials who are for their own ideological reasons unhappy about having to help Israel despite their strong desire to smack it around, sometimes give vent to statements that would lead you to think the alliance is doomed.
It is true a second Obama administration would have considerably more freedom to apply pressure on Israel than it has had the last three years. That is something that should give Israeli leaders who are pondering their options on Iran as well as American supporters of the Jewish state something to think about. But as bad as things seem right now, it should be remembered that no matter what Obama, Panetta, Clinton and their underlings may think about Israel, they are keenly aware a full break with Israel is not something they can get away with.

long term good news about freeing ourselves from foreign energy

2011-12-04T18:38:00.001-06:00

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576638731600191382.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

Big Oil Heads Back Home

Energy companies are shifting their focus away from the Middle East and toward the West—with profound implications for the companies, global politics and consumers

For decades, its main stomping grounds were in the developing world—exotic locales like the Persian Gulf and the desert sands of North Africa, the Niger Delta and the Caspian Sea. But in recent years, that geographical focus has undergone a radical change. Western energy giants are increasingly hunting for supplies in rich, developed countries—a shift that could have profound implications for the industry, global politics and consumers.
· .

Driving the change is the boom in unconventionals—the tough kinds of hydrocarbons like shale gas and oil sands that were once considered too difficult and expensive to extract and are now being exploited on an unprecedented scale from Australia to Canada.
The U.S. is at the forefront of the unconventionals revolution. By 2020, shale sources will make up about a third of total U.S. oil and gas production, according to PFC Energy, a Washington-based consultancy. By that time, the U.S. will be the top global oil and gas producer, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia, PFC predicts.
That could have far-reaching ramifications for the politics of oil, potentially shifting power away from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries toward the Western hemisphere. With more crude being produced in North America, there's less likelihood of Middle Eastern politics causing supply shocks that drive up gasoline prices. Consumers could also benefit from lower electricity prices, as power plants switch from coal to cheap and plentiful natural gas.
And the change is reshaping the oil companies themselves, as they reallocate their vast resources to new areas and new kinds of fuel. Working in the rich world—with its more predictable taxes and investor-friendly policies—removes some of the risks about the big oil companies that worry investors, making them less vulnerable to the resource nationalism of petrostates like Russia and Venezuela.
"A company like Exxon Mobil can eliminate the technological risk" of developing unconventionals, says Amy Myers Jaffe, senior energy adviser at Rice University's Baker Institute. "But it can't eliminate the risk of a Vladimir Putin or a Hugo Chavez."
This new way of looking at risk is at the heart of the transformation. International oil companies traditionally face a choice: They can either invest in oil that is easy to produce but located in politically volatile countries. Or they can seek opportunities in stable countries where the oil is hard to extract, requiring complex and expensive production techniques.
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Bloomberg News (2); AFP/Getty Images (2)
Now, in a sense, the choice has been made for them. Big onshore fields in the world's most prolific hydrocarbon provinces are increasingly the preserve of national oil companies, state-owned behemoths like Saudi Aramco and Russia's OAO Rosneft and OAO Gazprom. For foreign majors like Royal Dutch Shell PLC and BP PLC, their former heartlands in the Gulf sands are now largely off-limits.
Shut out of the Middle East, they have responded with a huge push into new areas, both geographic and technological. Over the past few decades, they have built vast plants to produce liquefied natural gas, or LNG. They have drilled for oil in ever-deeper waters, ever farther offshore. They have worked out how to squeeze oil from the tar sands of Alberta. And they have deployed technologies like hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and horizontal drilling to produce gas from shale rock.
Wood Mackenzie, an oil consultancy in Edinburgh, says that more than half of the international oil companies' long-term capital investments are now going into these four "resource themes"—a huge shift, considering how marginal the companies once considered them.
There are also drawbacks to the new focus on nontraditional kinds of hydrocarbons. Environmentalists strongly oppose shale-gas extraction due to fears that fracking may contaminate water supplies, the oil-sands industry because it is energy-intensive and dirty, and deep-water drilling because of the risk of oil spills like last year's Gulf of Mexico disaster.
There are financial considerations, too. While conventional assets are relatively easy to develop and historically have offered good returns, projects in some more technically difficult sectors—like deep-water and LNG—typically take longer to bring on-stream, and are higher cost, meaning returns are lower.
But there is an upside for the majors. "The silver lining is the shape of the profile of these projects, which is different than conventional ones," says Simon Flowers, head of corporate analysis at Wood Mackenzie. LNG ventures, for example, can deliver contract levels of gas at a steady rate over 20 years. "So the returns may be lower, but overall you have a more dependable cash-flow stream," he says.
By pursuing these nontraditional fuels, the oil companies are committing themselves ever more deeply to the wealthy nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Wood Mackenzie says $1.7 trillion of future value for all the world's oil companies—52% of the total—is in North America, Europe and Australia. The consultancy has identified a "significant westward shift" in oil-industry investment, away from traditional areas like North Africa and the Middle East "towards the Brazilian offshore, deepwater oil in the Gulf of Mexico and West Africa and unconventional oil and gas in North America." And then there's Australia, far out east, "which is in the early stages of a spectacular growth phase."
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Consider Shell. Seven years ago, the oil giant, synonymous with turbulent hot spots like Nigeria, decided to shift resources to more-developed nations that offered a friendly environment for investors and predictable tax regimes. Shell used to split spending on the upstream—the basic business of exploring for and producing oil and gas—roughly 50/50 between nations in the OECD and those outside of it. It's now 70/30 in favor of the OECD, with the bulk going to Canada, Australia and the U.S.
"The risks in OECD are technical, but they're easier to manage than political risk," says Simon Henry, Shell's chief financial officer. "In the OECD, you have more control of your operations."
With the new turf comes a new focus: Shell will soon be producing more natural gas than oil. That might have scared investors a decade or two ago. But with gas demand set to grow strongly, especially in Asia, the future for gas-focused companies is looking increasingly rosy—especially after the Fukushima disaster, which prompted a rethinking of nuclear power in Japan and elsewhere.
Entrenching Its Position

Like Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp. is entrenching its position in the Americas, home to just over half its resource base. Its unconventional resources have grown by almost 90% over the past five years to 35 billion oil-equivalent barrels—partly thanks to its 2010 acquisition of XTO Energy, a big shale-gas player. Exxon's U.S. unconventional production alone is expected to double over the next decade.
Some giants are looking further afield. Chevron Corp.'s three focus areas—the parts of the world that account for the bulk of its exploration budget—are the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, offshore West Africa and the waters off western Australia.
In particular, the company has staked out a huge position in Australian natural gas; its Gorgon LNG project in Australia is one of the world's largest. The push is based on expectations of surging demand for the fuel in Asia, largely in China, which wants to improve air quality in its heavily polluted cities by switching from coal to gas in power generation and running more commercial vehicles and buses on natural gas.
It "wasn't a conscious decision" to move into the OECD, says Jay Pryor, head of business development at Chevron. The company doesn't decide what projects to pursue based on where they are in the world, but on the quality of the resource, the commercial terms and the geopolitical risk. "The best rocks with the best terms are going to get the quickest investment," he says. Money has flowed into the U.S. and Australia because they offer the best incentives to oil companies, he says.
In recent years, Chevron has also expanded into another promising part of the OECD—Europe, which some estimates suggest has shale-gas reserves comparable to those in the U.S. Chevron has picked up millions of acres of land in Poland and Romania, where it will soon be drilling for shale gas. That's part of a wider trend: Dozens of companies are now exporting to Europe technologies used to open up shale deposits in the U.S.
Holding Back

Not all oil companies have piled into unconventionals the way Shell and Chevron have. BP, for one, has far fewer investments in tar sands and shale gas than its peers, though it has an unrivaled position in deep-water oil. That means it has less of a presence in the OECD than Shell: Its biggest projects are in poorer countries like Angola, Azerbaijan and Russia, and in recent years it has won a string of licenses and contracts in India, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan.
Yet even BP has been bolstering its position in the OECD. It said recently it was pressing ahead with a £4.5 billion ($7 billion) investment in the North Sea's Clair oil field, part of a five-year, £10 billion program.
Still, being in the OECD doesn't guarantee oil companies an easy ride. Operators in the North Sea were shocked earlier this year when the U.K. government suddenly increased taxes on oil producers. In France, authorities recently banned hydraulic fracturing. And in the U.S., the drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico, imposed after the Deepwater Horizon blowout, threw many of the majors' plans into disarray.
But still, for the most part, the risks are much greater in the non-OECD. "The majors went to Venezuela and lost their property," says Ms. Myers Jaffe of the Baker Institute. "They went to Russia and had to whisk their CEO off to a safe house. They went to the Caspian and realized they couldn't get the oil out. I for one would much rather invest in a company that had 70% of its spending in the OECD

Questions about conversion

2011-12-04T08:44:00.001-06:00

Dear Rabbi

I have three questions to the synagoge service:

1) I asked myself already a lot of times, are converts allowed to wear a tallit during the service (reform / conservatives, masorti / orthodox) ?
When other Jews wear it, you should once Jewish. You are as Jewish as anyone. Not all reform wear them
2) Are converts allowed to touch the Torah when she is passing around, if the answer to my first question is yes, with the tallit, if no, with the prayer book (reform / conservatives, masorti / orthodox) ? yes as others do
3) Are converts allowed to do alliyot in the service (reform / conservatives, masorti / orthodox) ? for sure

once you convert you are as Jewish as anyone

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

Egypt turns Jihadist www.rabbijonathanginsburg.org

2011-12-01T07:33:00.001-06:00

Thanks you Obama for knocking off our ally Mubarak and giving Israel a new Jihadist neighbor in Egypt
From today's Daily Alert
Early Results in Egypt Show a Mandate for Islamists - David D. Kirkpatrick
Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt's parliament. The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood appeared to have taken about 40% of the vote. But analysts said the ultraconservative Islamist Salafis could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups combined control of nearly 65% of the parliamentary seats.
The new majority is likely to increase the difficulty of sustaining the U.S.' close military and political partnership with post-Mubarak Egypt. (New York Times)
See also U.S. Congratulates Egypt on Election (DPA)
Obama -either incompentent or playing for the other side

Play dreidl www.rabbijonathanginsburg.net

2011-11-30T16:32:00.000-06:00

Light the menorah www.rabbijonathanginsburg.net

2011-11-30T16:31:00.000-06:00

nov 29 at play today

2011-11-29T10:45:00.001-06:00

Nov 29 1948 resolution today at play
The Palestinians Resurrect the Partition Plan - Dore Gold
UN General Assembly Resolution 181 - the famous Partition Plan - was approved on Nov. 29, 1947. In 1999 the Palestinians were to claim that, according to Resolution 181, "both parts of Jerusalem - west and east - are occupied territory." However, Resolution 181 proposed internationalizing Jerusalem only as an interim measure, for ten years, after which there was to be a referendum. Given the Jewish majority in Jerusalem, it was expected that the city would then be annexed to the Jewish state.
It is also important to recall that UN General Assembly resolutions are only recommendations and do not bind member states under international law. Moreover, the Arab states rejected Resolution 181 in its entirety, especially its call for establishing a Jewish state.
Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, understood the moral importance of Resolution 181 because of its recognition of the right of the Jewish people to a state. But on Dec. 3, 1949, at the end of Israel's War of Independence, Ben-Gurion told the Knesset he opposed calls for Jerusalem's internationalization: "We can no longer regard the UN Resolution of 29 November as having any moral force. After the UN failed to implement its own resolution, we regard the resolution of 29 November concerning Jerusalem to be null and void."
Furthermore, it was not the UN that legally created the Jewish state with Resolution 181, but rather Israel's own declaration of independence in 1948. (Israel Hayom)

Obama's perfidity against Israel

2011-11-28T08:26:00.001-06:00

from World jewish Digest today 1. Egypt is the most populous Arab state and has long dominated the culture and politics of the Arab world. It is an oft-mentioned truism that as Egypt goes, so goes the rest of the Middle East.
One might expect Israel, which has long harbored pipe dreams of a more liberal and democratic Middle East, which might be more accepting of a Jewish state in its midst; but this is not the case. While publicly endorsing Egypt's democratic process, Israel has made no secret of its concerns that it may lead to an Islamic takeover of its powerful neighbor, with whom it has enjoyed a stable peace since 1978
There are disturbing indications that Israeli concerns are not unfounded. "The Muslim Brotherhood," notes the Times,the group that defined Islamist politics, is poised to win a dominant role in the Parliament of the country that for nearly six decades was the paradigmatic secular dictatorship of the Arab world.

2. from today's Daily Alert
U.S. Urges Egypt's Military to Yield Power - David D. Kirkpatrick
The White House on Friday threw its weight behind Egypt's resurgent protest movement, urging for the first time the handover of power by the interim military rulers. "The United States strongly believes that the new Egyptian government must be empowered with real authority immediately," the White House said. The statement is a significant escalation of the international pressure on the generals because the United States is among the Egyptian military's closest allies. (New York Times)

This comes after Obama aided and pushing Mubarak out and aiding these jihadists in their takleover of Egypt, and betray America's best and only real arab ally Mubrack, but did NOTHING to help the revolutionaries overthrow the jihadists terrorists leaders of Iran.

This story is repeating itself in Tunisia, Libya, now soon Jordan and Morroco,
Gaza democratically went from Assad who was bad enough to Hamas,(Iranbian stooge) Lebanon fell to Hezbollah, (iranian stooge) Obama pulls us out Iraq which will thenm fall to iran's orbit

Obama did nothing but try and talk Iran out of nuclear weapons for two years and now delays all serious sanctions.

Isn't it obvious what he is trying to do? Which side is he playing for? Come up with a different explanation. www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

Prepare to bomb www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

2011-11-27T18:11:00.000-06:00

Bachmann: Pentagon should prepare war plan with Iran

By NBC's Jamie Novogrod

November 21, 2011
NEW YORK -- On Sunday, Michele Bachmann urged the Pentagon to develop a war plan “immediately” that would evaluate ways to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
"We must accelerate our covert operations and our cyber operations in Iran, and order ... the CIA director to take all means necessary to stop Iran from getting the bomb before it’s too late," said Bachmann, a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

“And the Pentagon should prepare a war plan immediately to tell us what to do to prevent Iran from gaining those nuclear weapons,” she continued.
But these remarks, which came during a speech at the annual dinner of the Zionist Organization of America, a pro-Israel group, stopped short of calling for immediate military action against Iran.
“I do not take lightly the prospect of committing the United States troop to stop Iran,” Bachmann said. “Only a fool would ever wish for war."
Bachmann repeated that theme during a press conference following her speech, telling reporters it would be “foolish” to rush into war, before adding,: “We must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to stop Iran. They are the threat to Israel, they are the threat to the United States.”
Iran's nuclear program, though long a concern inside conservative circles, is again in the spotlight since a United Nations report released earlier this month showed Iran has made further steps toward achieving a nuclear weapon.
Finding a medium between “wishing for war” and being “prepared” could mark a new way Bachmann will talk about managing the threat -– allowing her to strike hawkish and practical tones in equal measure on the issue that has become the centerpiece of her foreign policy agenda.
It also sets her apart from Republican opponents who draw a harder line on both sides of the issue. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has called for a joint American-Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Herman Cain has said he doesn’t support the idea of military action against Iran.
Bachmann called on Sunday for a variety of measures against Iran that stop short of military action, including public support for Iranian dissidents, a naval blockade, and a regime of “crushing” economic sanctions that would seek Russia and China’s aid in shutting down Iran’s central bank. (Both countries have financial relationships with Iran.)
Election politics also made a brief appearance Sunday, when Bachmann was forced to address her work as a young lawyer at the IRS.
ZOA’s president, Morton Klein, had woven that biographical detail into his introduction, setting off boos in the crowd.
“To everyone that was mortified in this room to learn that I was a tax lawyer and worked with –- on behalf of –- the IRS,” Bachmann said, “I actually wore a white hat and was trying to be an advocate for lower taxes in that position, not for higher taxes. “
It was a unique reference to her former employer, which Bachmann often eludes mentioning by describing herself as a “former federal tax attorney.”
Bachmann wasn’t the only high-profile speaker Sunday. Glenn Beck received a “defender of Israel” award from the group, delivering a speech that included teary tributes to leaders of the resistance against the Nazis, and a sweeping reproach of the American political left.
“I’ve said George Soros is no friend to Israel,” Beck said, referring to the prominent liberal philanthropist who is Jewish. “Let me add to it: neither is this administration.”

Obama and the world www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-24T13:38:00.001-06:00

When Obama took over, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan all had good relations with Israel, and Iran was 4 years away from nuclear bombs. Libya was ruled by a madman but who had given up nuclear ambition. Russia was at least on reasonable terms with us. Egypt and libya will soon turn over to Muslim Brotherhood terrorists and worse, Turkey has turned into Islamic anti Israel nation, Jordan is going that way and Iran is very close to nuclear bombs if not already has them. A Russian newscaster gave a literal middle finger to a newscast to Obama the other day, which is what their president basically did in response to our missile plan. He betrayed our one solid ally i the Arab world-Mubarak. Israel feels betrayed by him. Obama has done much to accelerate this anti-Israel development among these important nations and destroying our relations with many nations, while drawing closer to anti-American leaders like Chavez and Assad. Is he just incompetent or purposely doing this? You'd have to try really hard to to blow things this much.

More half-measures from Obama administration on Iran www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-23T07:57:00.001-06:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/more-half-measures-from-obama-administration-on-iran/2011/11/22/gIQADXxLmN_story.html

More half-measures from Obama administration on Iran

By Editorial, Published: November 22

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION pledged that Iran would suffer painful consequences for plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington and for refusing to freeze its nuclear program. Key European allies and Congress — not to mention Israel — are ready for decisive action. But on Monday the administration unveiled another series of half-steps. Sanctions were toughened on Iran’s oil industry, but there was no move to block its exports. The Iranian banking system was designated “a primary money laundering concern,” a step U.S. officials said could prompt banks and companies around the world to cease doing business with the country. But the administration declined to directly sanction the central bank.
The result is that President Obama is not even leading from behind on Iran; he is simply behind. At the forefront of the Western effort to pressure Tehran is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who issued a statement Monday calling on the European Union, the United States, Japan, Canada and “other willing countries” to “immediately freeze the assets of Iran’s central bank” and suspend purchases of Iranian oil. France rejects the Obama administration’s view that these steps would cause a counterproductive spike in oil prices. In any case, higher oil prices are preferable to allowing an Iranian bomb — or having to take military action to stop it.
Congress is ahead of Mr. Obama, too. It’s likely that large bipartisan majorities will support legislation mandating sanctions against the central bank; in the Senate’s case it could be attached to the defense authorization bill. Another comprehensive sanctions bill, targeting both Iran and its ally Syria, could be brought to the Senate floor within a couple of weeks.
The administration’s slowness to embrace crippling sanctions is one of several persistent flaws in its Iran policy. Another is its continued insistence on the possibility of “engagement” with a regime that has repeatedly rejected it while plotting murder in Washington. “The United States is committed to engagement,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted Monday. Some European officials say they are concerned by the concessions the administration appears prepared to offer Tehran if there are new talks. (my comment: what does it say that Europe is concerned about US policy? Sarkozy, in particular, wants to make more aggressive steps regarding Iran’s Central Bank)
By now it should be obvious that only regime change will stop the Iranian nuclear program. That means, at a minimum, the departure of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who has repeatedly blocked efforts by other Iranian leaders to talk to the West. Sanctions that stop Iran from exporting oil and importing gasoline could deal a decisive blow to his dictatorship, which already faced an Arab Spring-like popular revolt two years ago. By holding back on such measures, the Obama administration merely makes it more likely that drastic action, such as a military attack, eventually will be taken by Israel, or forced on the United States.

Stopping Iran www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-22T15:03:00.001-06:00

Who’s best to take on Obama on Iran?
By Jennifer Rubin

The Huffington Post’s Jon Ward reports that the Mitt Romney campaign “recently decided to make Iran the centerpiece of their foreign policy strategy, believing it to be the most sensible point of attack, as well as a potent counterpoint to the inevitable Obama campaign boasts about bin Laden and Libya.”

Ward observes:

Romney’s Iran strategy clearly depends on sending a message to Tehran that, if elected president, he would not shrink from using military force to destroy their nuclear weapons program.
“Mitt Romney will make clear to the Iranian regime through actions — not just words — that a military option to deal with its nuclear program remains on the table,” the campaign said in a recent release detailing the steps Romney would take to put additional pressure on Iran. “Only if Iran understands that the United States is determined that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable will there be any possibility that Iran will give up its nuclear aspirations peacefully.”

Romney further points out, correctly, that Russia’s foot-dragging on Iran sanctions is further evidence (in addition to a worsening human rights record, involvement in bombings in Georgia, etc.) that the Obama administration’s Russian reset policy is a bust.

Dan Senor, a principal adviser to Romney on foreign affairs, told me this afternoon that the opportunity for sanctions to be effective is passing. He explained, “The administration’s sanctions policies are unlikely to stop Iran’s progress toward acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran is unlikely to enter serious negotiations toward a resolution of this problem. As we’ve learned from the IAEA report, the overall trajectory will almost certainly not change. And the Russian response, which was to dismiss the IAEA report and any possibility of further sanctions, highlights the failure of Obama’s ‘reset.’ Moreover, we have evidence that Iran is getting more, and not less, aggressive.”

Senor added, “The failed attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, in an operation that could have killed scores of Americans, is a significant ratcheting-up of Iranian terrorist activities. It is not the first such attempt on American soil, but it is by far the most ambitious. It makes clear that as Iran moves closer to possession of nuclear weapons, it is also becoming bolder in the use of terrorism against targets in the U.S. The combination is a nightmare scenario.”

Our actions in Iraq and our stance toward Syria have only made things worse, Senor told me: “The Obama administration’s precipitous and unexpected total withdrawal of American forces from Iraq has given Iran an enormous opportunity in that key neighboring state. The entire region views our pullout as an American defeat and an Iranian victory, which has shaken the confidence of our allies. The fact that Obama made this decision within days of the revelation of the Iranian terrorist plot is especially damaging.”

And as for the butcher of Damascus, Senor warned that “getting our Syria policy right is crucial because [Bashar al-]Assad’s regime is Tehran’s only Arab-world ally; it’s Tehran’s only port on the Mediterranean; and it’s Tehran’s path to arming Hezbollah. The fall of Assad would be a strategic blow to Tehran. So Syria is important not only because of the human catastrophe, but also due to the strategic imperative of setting back Iran.”

At the debate tonight, we will see other candidates’ views on Iran. Rick Santorum has also offered a comprehensive approach to Iran. The issue for voters will be to determine who has the determination, the judgment and the smarts to construct a foreign policy that effectively disarms Iran. Rhetoric is nice, but it is much harder to discern who is most capable.

To Romney’s credit, he’s already revealed the sorts of people he’d select as advisers on foreign policy. (His foreign policy team includes serious voices, such as Senor, Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan and Michael Hayden.) Part of Romney’s argument for his own candidacy is that — in contrast to President Obama, who selected feckless aides (retired Gen. James Jones, among them) and fell down in executing an effective policy — he will have a capable team, experienced in national security and with clear direction. (Contrast the Romney team with the hodgepodge of odd voices assembled by Newt Gingrich, including Robert McFarlane, whose claim to “fame” was the Iran-contra debacle and was part of a team assembled to push for an imposing a peace plan on Israel.)

But ultimately we don’t know for certain how a candidate will react under pressure in a foreign-policy crisis. Few expected that George W. Bush would become a wartime president. Jimmy Carter boasted Navy credentials but turned into a wet noodle in office. It’s perhaps the most important element in electing a president and the one which is arguably the toughest to assess. We’ll get at least some insight tonight.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2011/11/iran_policy_the_problem_is_obama.html
Iran Policy: The Problem Is Obama

By Ed Lasky
Iran is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. Years of sanctions have not stopped them, and now President Obama will not use his most effective tool short of acts of war.
The administration opposes new sanctions on Iran's Central Bank, despite the overwhelming support that measure (spearheaded by Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk) enjoys on both sides of the aisle in Congress. The administration says such a measure would lead to a spike in oil prices and harm the world economy. That is speculation.
What is not speculation is that sanctions on the Central Bank would impose crippling costs on a weak Iranian economy and be an effective measure to help dissuade Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. Iran's Central Bank plays a crucial role in Iran's economy. Sanctioning the Central Bank makes it difficult for companies to pay for oil purchases -- and oil sales represent 50-75 percent of the government budget.
Many Iranians are disgusted with the economic stewardship shown by the theocrats and terrorists running the nation. Any additional sanctions that are actually enforced would exacerbate the tensions within Iran and widen the schisms between merchants and mullahs.
Not only does the Obama team oppose this type of sanction, but they have inverted, twisted, and perverted the logic of its proponents.
In the past few days, a Treasury official, Adam Szubin, testified before Congress that sanctions on Iran's Central Bank would actually help Iran and therefore should not be passed. Huh? His reasoning is that it may lead to a spike in oil prices.
A milder version of an amendment promoted by Senator Robert Menendez (Democrat-New Jersey) would give Barack Obama broad waiver authority to give a pass to central banks of other nations that continue to do business with Iran's Central Bank.
This is a classic "national security" loophole that often allows presidents to blithely ignore the legislation Congress has passed. Of course, Barack Obama is wont to do this anyway, but the loophole allows him a fig leaf of legality. The stronger Kirk Amendment does not contain this broad waiver authority and would make it far tougher for President Obama to evade the intent of the law.
If the measure does pass with a national security waiver, no one can rest assured that the waiver will be used. The Obama team clearly did not want to cut off American money to UNESCO in the wake of its admission of the Palestinians as a member. However, the legislation governing this issue was passed years ago without the waiver loophole, so the administration was forced to stop funding UNESCO (it has subsequently tried to enlist businesses in trying to get Congress to eliminate the waiver, an effort that is dead on arrival).
Where is the logic, then, of the administration periodically trotting out the statement that "all options are on the table"? This is a codephrase for a military option. It is also used to try to garner support among supporters of Israel in America. It is a campaign slogan and political strategy; it is not a real threat, and the Iranians know this fact. Why some Americans are gullible enough to believe Obama's latest campaign slogan is the topic of another column.
If the White House will not impose legal sanctions on the Central Bank because of putative economic concerns, how likely is a military strike against nuclear installations? It has a zero likelihood of happening.
That is a certainty. The Iranians know this logic, know Obama will do nothing, and know they can act with impunity -- as they have for years, 　murdering our soldiers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. Most recently, they have stepped up their game and tried to bring terrorism to our nation's capital (plotting to murder the Saudi and Israel ambassadors and any innocent Americans who happened to be near them).
The Iranians can see the Obama administration's clear resistance to more potent sanctions. They can reasonably assume that stronger actions -- such as a military strike -- are definitely off the table. In fact, they were never on the table.
If Obama won't impose sanctions on Iran's Central Bank, he certainly won't order military strikes on nuclear installations.
Furthermore, President Obama said he wants a "common response" to Iran's nuclear program with Russia and China. Since Russia has dismissed the IAEA report as "biased and unprofessional," that common response would be the "lowest common denominator" response -- meaning little or no response. The best that can be hoped for is the steady drip, drip, drip of individual small companies or individuals being named as subject to sanctions. In other words, more of the same weak measures that have failed to work in the past and will fail to work now and in the future.
We periodically hear that President Obama signed the strongest Iran sanctions legislation of any U.S. president. Of course, the passage of that legislation took quite a long time to pass through Congress -- as it met resistance from certain quarters allied with Barack Obama.
Furthermore, legislation is merely a scrap of paper if the sanctions are not enforced by the Executive Branch. The Obama administration has been all but feckless in enforcing the existing sanctions on Iran. There are reasons why so many members on both sides of the aisle signed onto the Kyl-Menendez letter calling on the administration to actually enforce the legislation Congress already passed. A House letter (spearheaded by Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski) also called on the Executive Branch to enforce the sanctions on Iran.
We have a president overseeing a policy that is bankrupt, feckless, weak, and immoral.
Meanwhile, the centrifuges are not the only things spinning these days...so is the Obama administration when it comes to Iran. Richard Grenell writes in the Wall Street Journal of "Obama's Failing Diplomacy":
On Nov. 13, President Obama made some remarkable statements. "When I came into office," he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Honolulu, "the world was divided and Iran was unified around its nuclear program." Now, he said, "the world is united and Iran is isolated. And because of our diplomacy and our efforts, we have, by far, the strongest sanctions on Iran that we've ever seen." Mr. Obama added, "China and Russia were critical to making that happen. Had they not been willing to support those efforts in the United Nations, we would not be able to see the kind of progress that we've made."
This was pure spin. The United Nations Security Council actually began instituting resolutions and sanctions in 2006, agreed to and voted on by all 15 members, that called upon Iran to stop enriching uranium.
In its nearly three years in office, the Obama administration has helped pass just one of those resolutions -- in June 2009. Only 12 of the 15 members of the Security Council voted in favor of it. Brazil, Turkey and Lebanon did not.
The simple fact is that the world is less unified on Iran now than it was under President George W. Bush. True enough, Mr. Obama may hear fewer complaints about hard-charging U.S. foreign policies than his predecessor. But silence is not cooperation.
The Bush administration got five Security Council resolutions passed on Iran starting in 2006. Three were sanctions resolutions. The Security Council was unanimous on two of the votes and lost only one country's support (Indonesia) in the third vote in 2008. In total, the Bush team lost the support of one country in its three sanctions resolutions while the Obama team lost the support of three countries in one resolution.
Ultimately, President Bush got five Security Council resolutions passed on Iran, and Obama has had one. Granted, Bush's were done over a two-term period, but the threat is even more critical now, and certainly more actions at the Security Council could have been taken had there been the will in the White House.
Lest we forget, the mullahs loathe America as much as they hate Israel and have boasted of their desire to destroy the United States. They are possessed of an apocalyptic vision that nuclear war will bring about the return of the "Twelfth Imam" and millennial bliss (for those few left).
The problem is that there is no will to stop them. The problem is Obama.

2011-11-21T14:54:00.001-06:00

ask CNN this question

2011-11-19T14:15:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Ginsburg via CNN Politics
please go there and ask this question "It seems clear sanctions have not worked nor will realistically ever be able to prevent Iran from developing nuclear arms. At what point in time should the USA stop Iran by force? Should it be a bombing campaign only or an invasion?"

Submit your questions for the CNN Republican National Security Debate
politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com
‎(CNN) -- Help shape the debate in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Use the form below to submit your brief question to CNN’s Republican National Security Debate, co-sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
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Parasha Toldot

2011-11-19T14:07:00.001-06:00

Toldot Kristallnacht and Balfour www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-19T14:06:00.000-06:00

He blew Iran www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-17T14:02:00.001-06:00

HE MAGAZINE Weekly Standard
Obama’s Iran Failure
Israel turns up the heat.
NOV 21, 2011, VOL. 17, NO. 10 • BY LEE SMITHSingle PagePrintLarger
The Obama administration’s Iran policy rested on three pillars—the peace process, engagement, and containment. The first would win the newly elected president credit with the Arab people of the Middle East and empower the Arab states to gather in a robust coalition against Tehran. As for the second, even if engagement failed to bring Iran back into the community of nations, it would prove to Washington’s European allies and, more important, to Russia and China, that the Obama White House had gone the extra mile, which would, in turn, make containment possible.

All three efforts have now failed, which may explain why recent Israeli news reports suggest Jerusalem is moving toward a decision about a military strike of some sort against Iran’s nuclear program.

After more than half a year of relative quiet as the Arab Spring rolled through the Middle East, the Israeli government has helped shift the regional conversation back to Iran. It’s hardly surprising that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are reportedly in favor of a strike since their historical legacies might rest on how the Iranian issue is resolved. However, the fact that Israel’s president Shimon Peres now calls military action “more and more likely” suggests that, regardless of the eventual decision, Israel has embarked on a public diplomacy campaign intended to seize international attention.

WHO IS SERIOUS about Iran? www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-17T08:33:00.001-06:00

Stop Iran from getting nuclear bombs
GOP hopefuls challenge Obama on Iran
By BRADLEY KLAPPER | AP – Wed, Nov 16, 2011
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential hopefuls are focusing on Iran as a weak spot in President Barack Obama's foreign policy record, and they're reviving many of the arguments that neoconservative proponents of armed intervention against Tehran lost in the latter years of George W. Bush's presidency.
Spurred by a recent United Nations report on Iran's nuclear weapons research, the leading GOP candidates are presenting themselves as hawkish alternatives to Obama and his administration's two-track policy of pressuring and engaging the Islamic republic. They propose more drastic approaches to prevent Iran from developing an atomic bomb — from funding armed rebel movements to launching military attacks.
"If we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will have a nuclear weapon," Mitt Romney said during Saturday's foreign policy debate in South Carolina. "If you elect me as the next president, they will not have a nuclear weapon."
The former Massachusetts governor and Republican front-runner said the U.S. should be "working with the insurgents in the country to encourage regime change." But, if "there's nothing else we can do besides take military action, then of course you take military action."
"There are a number of ways to be smart about Iran and relatively few ways to be dumb, and the administration skipped all the ways to be smart," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said at Saturday's debate. He called for "maximum covert operations to block and disrupt the Iranian program" and backed Romney's call for possible military action. If "the dictatorship persists, you have to take whatever steps are necessary to break its capacity to have a nuclear weapon."
Seeking to one-up Gingrich, longshot candidate Rick Santorum said there "isn't going to be enough time" for tougher sanctions on Iran and more support for pro-democracy groups. He acknowledged the Obama administration's possible involvement in some of the covert attacks on Iran's nuclear program.
But he suggested an even tougher approach alongside Israel to strike Iran's nuclear facilities pre-emptively — similar to the operations the Jewish state conducted against Iraq in 1981 and Syria four years ago.

For all the early talk of engagement, Obama has stuck largely to the Bush administration's latter-year policies of negotiations with Iran alongside international pressure — without the inflammatory rhetoric such as accusations of Tehran's membership in an "axis of evil."
Republicans see the policy nevertheless as a failure and seem to be harkening back to the hard-line American posture taken after U.S. troops toppled Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 2003 and many conservative foreign policy thinkers made Iran's regime the next bogeyman that needed to be taken out.
Then, as now, the argument held that a nuclear-armed Iran would be a mortal threat to U.S. forces in the region and to U.S. ally Israel, whose U.S. backing is wide and deep. Then, as now, the more hawkish voices said time is running out for talking and the U.S. must make clear to Iran that it will use its overwhelming military advantage.
The most likely strategy would be a missile strike on one of Iran's known nuclear facilities, or sabotage from within the country.
Either is clearly within U.S. power, but Obama's calculation has thus far been the same as Bush's: A strike isn't yet worth the risks it carries. Iran could retaliate against U.S. interests or allies, and the Pentagon assesses that if Iran is bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, a strike would delay but not prevent it.
GOP candidate Herman Cain said he wouldn't pursue a military conflict.
"The only way we can stop them is through economic means," he said.
Libertarian Ron Paul also held back, saying war powers were vested in Congress.
Over the weekend, Obama argued that U.S. and international sanctions against Tehran have had "enormous bite" and said he'd consult with other nations on further efforts to stop Iran from acquiring an atomic weapon. Without specifically mentioning military action, he insisted, as Bush always did, that U.S. officials "are not taking any options off the table."

Don't miss Friday Night Service part 1

2011-11-15T18:30:00.000-06:00

Part2 of Friday shabbat service

2011-11-15T18:27:00.000-06:00

Connect the dots

2011-11-14T10:27:00.001-06:00

Connect the dots

Israel: Iran Closer to Atom Bomb than IAEA Report Indicates
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday the full extent of Iran's nuclear program was not reflected in a recent UN report, which said that Tehran appeared to have worked on designing an atomic bomb. "Iran is closer to getting an (atomic) bomb than is thought," Netanyahu said in remarks to cabinet ministers, quoted by an official from his office. "Only things that could be proven were written (in the UN report), but in reality there are many other things that we see." At the start of the meeting, Netanyahu repeated his call for the world "to stop Iran's race to arm itself with a nuclear weapon before it is too late." (Reuters)

Yesterday The president says sanctions are having a big impact, but all options remain on the table.
Either he is willfully and naively optimistic about the sanctions, which have not stopped Iran, or he is just plain lying and wants Iran to get nuks.

Romney said in the debate on Sat night that under Obama, Iran will get nuks. He is obviously right.

http://schnellmann.org/a-time-to-betray.html
(book) "A Time To Betray" --- CIA Spy Reza Kahlili: Iran Will Use Nukes Against Israel

My question: This is a desperate time. Why are Jewish organizations silent about pressuring the USA to bomb Iran’s nuclear plants. This is not Israel’s job to do. It si the USA’s, as leader of the free world.
They have to know the sanctions are a joke. This is 1938 all over again and Jewish organizations are timid. It is a nightmare. What is the point of Jewish power if we can’t even open our mouths to try and do what we can to stop Iran?

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

Time to bomb Iran wwwrabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-11-12T21:43:00.001-06:00

THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR MAZE by Ambassador (ret.) YORAM ETTINGER
forwarded by Gail Winston, Middle East Analyst & Commentator
THE IRANIAN NUCLEAR MAZE by Ambassador (ret.) YORAM ETTINGER, "Second Thought" "Israel Hayom" Newsletter,November 11, 2011
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=811

The assumptions that tougher sanctions could deny Iran nuclear capabilities,
could pacify Iran's nuclear programs, and could produce a regime change in
Teheran, defy reality. These assumptions and the suppositions that Mutually-Assured-Deterrence (MAD) would enable the Free World to co-exist with a nuclear Iran, and that the cost of a military preemption would be prohibitive, reflect a determination to learn from recent history by repeating – and not by avoiding – critical errors; a victory of delusion over realism.

US and UN sanctions against North Korea – which were initiated in 1950 - failed to prevent the nuclearization of Pyongyang. Sanctions could not abort the development of impressive North Korean weapons of mass destruction
capabilities and its exportation – along with terrorism - to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Asia, Africa and the American continent. Sanctions have not toppled the Kim Jong-il regime and haven't ended its relentless pursuit of the takeover of South Korea.

Sanctions against North Korea instilled a false sense of success, relieving Western policy-makers of taking tougher action, thus facilitating Kim Jong-Il's attainment of nuclear power. While sanctions brought down the comfort-driven White regime of South Africa, they generally do not deter rogue repressive Third World regimes, such as North Korea, Saddam's Iraq, Cuba and Burma, which has been targeted by US sanctions since 1990.

US and UN sanctions against Iran have been ineffective for 16 years! US sanctions were initially legislated in 1995, and UN Security Council sanctions were initially approved in 2006. They intended to end Iran's nuclear program and its support of Islamic terrorism and to bolster the Iranian opposition. Additional US legislation has tightened the sanctions and intensified punitive policy towards violators. However, systematic non-compliance has been demonstrated by Russia and China, as well as by Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Japan, South Africa, Venezuela and some of the European countries.
Disengagement from delusions and engagement with realism constitute a prerequisite for averting Iran's nuclearization, which constitutes a clear and present danger to the US, then to NATO, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as well as to Israel and to global sanity. Therefore, the prevention of a nuclear Iran should constitute a top US national security priority.
In other words, Iran's mega-goal, since the 7th century, has been the domination of the Persian Gulf, irrespective of the Palestinian issue, Israel's policy or Israel's existence. Iran's mega-hurdle has been the US and NATO presence in the Gulf. Therefore, the development of Iran's mega-(nuclear) capability is primarily designed to force the US evacuation of the Gulf and the Indian Ocean, through deterrence and intimidation in the Gulf region, through beachheads in Latin America and the US mainland. Iran's mega-capability would allow it to occupy Iraq – its arch rival since the 7th century – and Saudi Arabia, which Iran considers an apostate regime. All Gulf States are perceived by Iran as key prizes, required to control the flow and the price of oil and to bankroll Teheran's megalomaniac regional and global aspirations.

Iran's geo-strategic goals are energized by its current Islamic zeal, viewing Jihad (Holy War) as the permanent state of relations between Moslems and non-Moslems, while peace and ceasefire accords are tenuous. Iran demonstrated its zeal to obtain the mega-goal at all cost, sacrificing some 500,000 people on the altar of the 1980-1988 War against Iraq, including approximately 100,000 children who were dispatched to clear minefields. Moreover, Teheran’s Mullahs are emboldened by the pending US evacuation of Iraq, which they consider an extension of the US retreats from Lebanon (1958
and 1983), Vietnam (1973) and Somalia (1993).

An Iranian nuclear cloud, hovering above the US and Israel, would not require the launching of nuclear warheads, in order to acquire significant extortion capabilities and produce economic, social, moral and national security havoc. Therefore, one cannot afford to await a smoking nuclear gun in the hand of Teheran; one must prevent the nuclear gun from reaching Teheran's hand. That excludes the options of deterrence, coexistence and retaliation. It highlights the option of a swift and a disproportional preemptive military operation, whose cost would be dwarfed by the cost of inaction.

The Iranian nuclear challenge constitutes the ultimate test of leadership. Will the US and Israel be driven by long-term conviction and realism, or will they succumb to vacillation, oversimplification and short-term political convenience, thus facilitating the surrender of Western democracies to rogue Islamic regimes!?

Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, "Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative",

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2011-11-12T20:25:00.001-06:00

http://judaismtochristians.blogspot.com/

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2011-11-12T20:13:00.000-06:00

Try our online course http://hebrewreading.blogspot.com/

2011-11-12T15:46:00.001-06:00

2011-11-12T15:44:00.001-06:00

2011-11-11T16:32:00.001-06:00

Caroline Glick THE OBAMA administration's stubborn refusal

2011-11-09T12:22:00.000-06:00

...THE OBAMA administration's stubborn refusal to acknowledge the obvious fact that a nuclear armed Iran constitutes a far greater danger to US interests than an Israeli military strike to deny Iran nuclear capabilities is in line with the administration's consistent refusal to treat Israel as an ally. Its unserious handling of Iran is of a piece with its gentle policies towards Hamas and Hezbollah, its refusal to call Fatah on its bad faith, its blindness to the threat emanating from Islamist movements in Turkey and North Africa, and its consistent pressure on Israel to appease its enemies. The administration's apparent antipathy for Israel has played a significant role in causing it to underestimate the threat that all these forces pose not only to Israel but to the US and to international security in general.
And Israel is not the US's only Middle Eastern ally that has suffered from its strategic myopia. Iran's pro- American Green Movement was betrayed by Obama's decision to side with the regime against the Green Movement in 2009. Iraq's pro-American political forces will be harmed if not destroyed in the aftermath of the administration's planned withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
Then there are the Sunnis. Under Obama, the US betrayed its most important Arab ally when it called for then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to resign in response to the anti-regime demonstrations in Cairo. America is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. It supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated, Turkish organized Syrian opposition to Assad's regime. It upholds Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist, anti-Semitic and anti-Western regime as the US's greatest regional ally.
With its dismal track record, it is far from clear that Israel is well-served by pressuring the Obama administration to take action against Iran. On Sunday, British military commentator Con Coughlin noted in theSunday Telegraph that in recent years, the "only measures that have had any demonstrable effect on slowing Iran's nuclear progress have been undertaken by Israel, via a skillful combination of targeted assassinations and cyber-warfare."
So Israel's low-key, tactical operations against Iran have been effective while all of Obama's high-profile strategic operations have empowered Israel's enemies.
True, Obama has not yet taken any operational steps to attack Iran's nuclear installations. But the dire implications of his track records cannot be ignored.
At least until the US presidential elections next year, Israel's best bet may be to simply step up its covert efforts to sabotage Iran's nuclear program.
The goal of these efforts should be to slow down Iran's nuclear progress sufficiently to prevent it from developing a nuclear arsenal or moving its nuclear project to hardened locations until after the US presidential elections. In the meantime, Israel should continue to develop its independent capacity to attack Iran. It should also take military action to weaken Iran's terror proxies in order to limit their capacity to wage war against Israel in the aftermath of an eventual, post-presidential election Israeli or US strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.
Obviously, it would be a mistake to assume that Obama will lose his reelection bid. But even if he wins, as a lame duck, second term president, he will have less power to harm Israel than he will as a first term president poised for reelection.

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

more particulars

2011-11-09T11:39:00.001-06:00

From 1776-2008 USA total accumulated deficit $10 trillion. 3 years under Obama adds $5 trillion, 50% in 3 years. Europe is falling apart under debt and we are getting there. How can any intelligent person still think of voting Democratic?
He gutted our navy, tried to establish socialized medicine to further bankrupt us, stabbed Israel in the back repeatedly, appointed extreme left wing power grabbing czars to bypass the democratic process all over his administration, furthered the rise of a coming Islamic extreme state to replace our Egyptian ally Mubarak, thinks the only terrorists in the world are Al quida, promoted policies which would have never let us find Bin Laden if he had his way, stalled on stopping iran's nuclear weapons, etc etc.

Obama willfully allowing Iran to go forward

2011-11-09T11:26:00.000-06:00

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/192447-white-house-iaea-report-raises-concerns-about-irans-nuclear-program

Ah..that all purpose “raises concerns”….

Spinning like centrifuges….”sporadic”, “report certainly doesn’t assert that Iran has mastered all the necessary technology [to make a weapon] and we agree with that”, “no evidence”, “does not draw any conclusions” etc.

I guess the “smoking gun” that seems to be required will have to be a “ mushroom cloud”.

Now comes the “consulting with the international community” but don’t worry:

Administration officials said Obama expects Iran “to respond to this report by demonstrating to the world the peaceful nature of its program by answering the questions that are raised, very directly, by this IAEA report.”

Hasn’t this been going on for years now? Hasn’t Iran been asked constantly to demonstrate the peaceful nature of its program and to answer questions. The IAEA report itself brings up the fact that Iran has REFUSED to answer many questions. Did the WH even read the IAEA report?

Tick..tock..tick tock…

From ed Lasky

Kristallnacht

2011-11-08T06:37:00.001-06:00

Parasha Binding of Isaac

2011-11-07T12:54:00.001-06:00

on the parasha Vayera

2011-11-07T12:48:00.000-06:00

Options on Iran

2011-11-07T11:46:00.000-06:00

Obama Still Has Options on Iran
Seth Mandel | @SethAMandel 11.07.2011 - 11:50 AM

The Washington Post’s write-up of the upcoming report from the UN’s nuclear watchdog confirms the two key elements of Iran’s nuclear program: they have “mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles,” and the Iranians intend to use this capability for “weapons-related” purposes.
None of this is particularly shocking, nor is the Iranian government’s yawn in response: “Let them publish and see what happens.” As Jonathan noted yesterday, sabotage (either through the Stuxnet worm or assassinations of nuclear scientists) were never considered a silver bullet to stop the Iranian program; sanctions that would do the trick will be blocked by Russia and China; and sanctions targeting the Central Bank of Iran would be helpful but not conclusive. So what should President Obama do? He has three options.
First, he should take action that could collapse the Central Bank of Iran anyway. It’s true this is not going to stop the program, but it would help and it would send a message. If the U.S. cannot effectively sanction the Iranian Central Bank, it will have no credibility to enact tougher sanctions. The Republican currently holding Obama’s old Senate seat, Mark Kirk, has been pushing the president on this and called a press conference today to continue doing so. Kirk and Charles Schumer have been rallying their respective caucuses behind the effort, and a letter calling for such action received the signatures of 92 senators in August. The purpose of Kirk’s press conference today is to outline an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations bill under consideration this week. “We have to use the strongest non-military means available to reduce the coming danger to America, Saudi Arabia, and Israel,” Kirk said.
Second, the U.S. should stop pretending it has no leverage over Russia. The last hurdle to Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization–Georgian opposition–has been cleared. But the U.S. can still block it. If Obama wants an indisputable success with regard to the “reset,” getting Russia to stand down and allow real sanctions on Iran would be an especially good place to start. Of course it benefits the American economy to have Russia in the WTO, but so does doing business with Iran. So far, the U.S. has wrung zero concessions from Vladimir Putin over Russia’s long-awaited accession to the WTO, and in fact has ignored its illegal behavior toward Georgia in order to welcome Russia to the club. Iranian sanctions wouldn’t be too much to ask from an authoritarian country looking to join a global organization dedicated to ethical trade practices.
Third, Obama should keep the pressure up on Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad any way he can. He should start by figuring out what can be done to stop the American and European companies currently outfitting the Syrian regime with surveillance equipment to help their brutal crackdown on Syrian opposition and civilian protesters, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported a few days ago. Every Iranian ally in the Middle East relies on Syria as well in some form or another, most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. And those allies are key to Iran’s deterrent capability, through its terrorist proxies with thousands of missiles aimed at Israel in case of attack. Any weakening of that nexus will weaken Iran.
Obama cannot stop the Iranian nuclear program with any of these measures, but they will all do more than simply describing the news as “unhelpful” and changing the subject, as this administration likes to do.

He forgot to add

Obama could order a month long sustained bombing campaign targeting all known sites
:-)

Jonathan Ginsburg

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.org

obama nightmare presidency for USA, World and Israel

2011-11-04T15:03:00.001-05:00

Obama nightmare President for World, USA and Israel
Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg

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USA Economy
1. 9 percent unemployment, stagnant growth and ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see so Obama blames everyone but himself for his incompetence http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/2011/10/scapegoat-strategy-charles-krauthammer.html
2. Nearly three years since his election and more than two years since the economic recovery began, Mr. Obama has enacted myriad policies at great expense to American taxpayers and amid political rancor. An interim evaluation is in order.

And there's plenty to evaluate: an $825 billion stimulus package; the Public-Private Investment Partnership to buy toxic assets from the banks; "cash for clunkers"; the home-buyers credit; record spending and budget deficits and exploding debt; the auto bailouts; five versions of foreclosure relief; numerous lifelines to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; financial regulation and health-care reform; energy subsidies, mandates and moratoria; and constant demands for higher tax rates on "the rich" and businesses.

Consider the direct results of the Obama programs. The failed stimulus bill cost an astounding $280,000 per job—over five times median pay—by the administration's inflated estimates of jobs "created or saved," and much more using more realistic estimates.

Cash for clunkers cost $3 billion, just to shift car sales forward a few months. The Public-Private Investment Partnership, despite cheap federal loans, generated 3% of the $1 trillion claimed, and toxic assets still hobble some financial institutions. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law institutionalized "too big to fail" amid greater concentration of banking assets and mortgages in Fannie and Freddie. The foreclosure relief program permanently modified only a small percentage of the four million mortgages the president promised. And even Mr. Obama now admits that the shovels weren't ready in all those "shovel-ready" stimulus projects.

Perpetually overpromising and underdelivering is not remotely good enough, not even for government work. No corporate CEO could survive such a clear history of failure. The economic records set on Mr. Obama's watch really are historic. These include the first downgrade of sovereign U.S. debt in American history, and, relative to GDP, the highest federal spending in U.S. history save the peak years of World War II, plus the highest federal debt since just after World War II.

The employment picture doesn't look any better. The fraction of the population working is the lowest since 1983. Long-term unemployment is by far the highest since the Great Depression. Job growth during the first two years of recovery after a severe recession is the slowest in postwar history.

Moreover, the home-ownership rate is the lowest since 1965 and foreclosures are at a post-Depression high. And perhaps most ominously, the share of Americans paying income taxes is the lowest in the modern era, while dependency on government is the highest in U.S. history.

That's quite a record, although not what Mr. Obama and his supporters had in mind when they pronounced this presidency historic.

Enlarge Image

President Obama constantly reminds us, with some justification, that he was dealt a difficult hand. But the evidence is overwhelming that he played it poorly. His big government spending, debt and regulation fix has clearly failed. Relative to previous recoveries from deep recessions, the results are disastrous. A considerable fraction of current joblessness, lower living standards, dependency on government and destroyed savings is the result. Worse, his debt explosion will be a drag on economic growth for years to come.

Mr. Boskin, a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/p/us-economy.html

USA Foreign Policy
1. Done virtually nothing to stop Iran http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/2011/10/obama-responds-limpedly-about-iran.html a http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/p/iran.html

2. Barry Rubin “Destroying Western Interests in the Middle East, Helping Destabilize the Region, and Putting Millions of Lives in jeopardy” ”http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/2011/09/i-accuse-president-barack-obama-of.html
3. http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/p/incompetent-foreign-policy.html
4.

Israel
1. Manifestations of hostility in recent months include Obama’s renewal of pressure on Israel to accept the indefensible 1949 armistice lines (with swaps agreed to by the Palestinians) as the opening basis for negotiations; his renewed condemnation of construction in Jewish Jerusalem; the recent State Department challenge of West Jerusalem’s legal status as being Israeli; efforts to bludgeon Israel into apologizing to the bullying Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan; the disastrous outcome of simplistic US support for the Arab Spring; Obama’s recent 9/11 speech, in which he notably omitted Israel when enumerating countries suffering terrorism; the leak from Richard Gates (retired secretary of defense) castigating Netanyahu for being “ungrateful” for America's largesse. These and other similar provocations have created a maelstrom within the Jewish community, convincing many that their president was excessively hostile and biased against Israel. http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/2011/09/jews-moving-from-obama.html

2. Dan Senor -February 2008: When running for president, then-Sen. Obama told an audience in Cleveland: "There is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel." Likud had been out of power for two years when Mr. Obama made this statement. At the time the country was being led by the centrist Kadima government of Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and Shimon Peres, and Prime Minister Olmert had been pursuing an unprecedented territorial compromise. As for Likud governments, it was under Likud that Israel made its largest territorial compromises—withdrawals from Sinai and Gaza.

• July 2009: Mr. Obama hosted American Jewish leaders at the White House, reportedly telling them that he sought to put "daylight" between America and Israel. "For eight years"—during the Bush administration—"there was no light between the United States and Israel, and nothing got accomplished," he declared.

Nothing? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted thousands of settlers from their homes in Gaza and the northern West Bank and deployed the Israeli army to forcibly relocate their fellow citizens. Mr. Sharon then resigned from the Likud Party to build a majority party based on a two-state consensus.

In the same meeting with Jewish leaders, Mr. Obama told the group that Israel would need "to engage in serious self-reflection." This statement stunned the Americans in attendance: Israeli society is many things, but lacking in self-reflection isn't one of them. It's impossible to envision the president delivering a similar lecture to Muslim leaders.

• September 2009: In his first address to the U.N. General Assembly, President Obama devoted five paragraphs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during which he declared (to loud applause) that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements." He went on to draw a connection between rocket attacks on Israeli civilians with living conditions in Gaza. There was not a single unconditional criticism of Palestinian terrorism.

• March 2010: During Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, a Jerusalem municipal office announced plans for new construction in a part of Jerusalem. The president launched an unprecedented weeks-long offensive against Israel. Mr. Biden very publicly departed Israel.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton berated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a now-infamous 45-minute phone call, telling him that Israel had "harmed the bilateral relationship." (The State Department triumphantly shared details of the call with the press.) The Israeli ambassador was dressed-down at the State Department, Mr. Obama's Middle East envoy canceled his trip to Israel, and the U.S. joined the European condemnation of Israel.

Moments after Mr. Biden concluded his visit to the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority held a ceremony to honor Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the deadliest Palestinian terror attacks in history: the so-called Coastal Road Massacre that killed 38, including 13 children and an American. The Obama administration was silent. But that same day, on ABC, Mr. Axelrod called Israel's planned construction of apartments in its own capital an "insult" and an "affront" to the United States. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on Fox News to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of "weakening trust" between the two countries.

Ten days later, Mr. Netanyahu traveled to Washington to mend fences but was snubbed at a White House meeting with President Obama—no photo op, no joint statement, and he was sent out through a side door.

• April 2010: Mr. Netanyahu pulled out of the Obama-sponsored Washington summit on nuclear proliferation after it became clear that Turkey and Egypt intended to use the occasion to condemn the Israeli nuclear program, and Mr. Obama would not intervene.

• March 2011: Mr. Obama returned to his habit of urging Israelis to engage in self-reflection, inviting Jewish community leaders to the White House and instructing them to "search your souls" about Israel's dedication to peace.

• May 2011: The State Department issued a press release declaring that the department's No. 2 official, James Steinberg, would be visiting "Israel, Jerusalem, and the West Bank." In other words, Jerusalem is not part of Israel. Later in the month, only hours before Mr. Netanyahu departed from Israel to Washington, Mr. Obama delivered his Arab Spring speech, which focused on a demand that Israel return to its indefensible pre-1967 borders with land swaps.

Mr. Obama has made some meaningful exceptions, particularly having to do with security partnership, but overall he has built the most consistently one-sided diplomatic record against Israel of any American president in generations. His problem with Jewish voters is one of substance, not messaging. http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-obama-is-losing-jewish-vote.html

3. Trying to Separate Jerusalem from Israel;
Richard Baehr “ American Jews born in Jerusalem, believe they were born in a country, namely Israel. . Aligned against them: Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.”: http://notopalestine.blogspot.com/2011/11/american-jews-born-in-jerusalem-believe.html
4. Supports Turkey enemy of Israel; Barack Obama went to the G-20 meeting, and there were a lot of handshakes. But one leader got the warm hugs, Turkey's Recep Erdogan. Maybe it is because Erdogan gets to channel the inner Obama with regard to Israel:
http://tinyurl.com/3c69y7p
5. Obama aids jihadists growth in Israel’s neighbors by forcing out the old leadership to be replaced by much much worse http://rabbireflects.blogspot.com/2011/11/obama-aids-jihadist-and-islamitization.html and http://rabbisagainstobama.blogspot.com/p/aids-arabmuslim-extremism.html

6. Apologizes for helping Israel Unesco fiasco http://israelgreatest.blogspot.com/2011/11/obama-aplogizes-hor-helping-israel.html

NYT continues to smear Israel

2011-11-04T11:28:00.001-05:00

The Times’ Anti-Israel Smear Campaign

Evelyn Gordon | @evelyng1234 11.03.2011 - 9:06 AM

Reading the New York Times op-ed pages recently, one can’t help thinking the paper has launched a deliberate smear campaign against Israel. Consider just two examples:
This week, it published a piece called “In Israel, Press Freedom Is Under Attack” by Israeli journalist Dimi Reider. Reider lambastes the 4.5-year sentence a court just imposed on Anat Kamm, claiming the former soldier has been punished “for leaking documents containing evidence of what she suspected might be war crimes committed by her commanders.” Since journalists worldwide rely on whistleblowers, he charged, this undermines press freedom:
The verdict sends several chilling messages. To young soldiers it says: shut up, even if you suspect your commanders of violating the law; they will go unpunished and you will go to jail if you leak. To the source it says: no one will protect you; don’t be a self-sacrificing fool. And to the journalist it says: know your place; cover what we tell you to cover, print our news releases, and keep within your bounds.
But here’s what the court said actually happened, as reported by the very newspaper to which Kamm gave the documents: Over the course of her army service, Kamm betrayed her oath as a soldier by “systematically” stealing everything she could get her hands on – 2,085 documents in all, including “plans for military operations, information on troop deployments, summaries of various internal discussions, military targets and intelligence assessments.” For similar crimes in America, WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning now faces life in jail.
She then gave 1,500 documents to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau, who sorted through and found a handful that, in his opinion, showed the army was violating Israeli Supreme Court guidelines on assassinating terrorists. But as Reider himself admits, Israel’s attorney general – presumably a greater legal expert than journalists Reider and Blau – reviewed the material and concluded otherwise.
All this was widely reported in Israel’s English-language media, so the facts were easily checkable. But the Times preferred printing an anti-Israel smear.
Two months earlier, the Times published an op-ed by Israeli professor Carlo Strenger entitled “Netanyahu’s Partners, Democracy’s Enemies.” Strenger accused the Knesset of having “proposed and passed laws that seriously endanger Israel’s identity as a liberal democracy,” including “a law forbidding public commemoration of” the Nakba (literally, “catastrophe,” the Palestinian term for Israel’s establishment) and a “demand for all new Israeli citizens to swear a loyalty oath to a Jewish and democratic country.”
I’ve argued before that the proposed loyalty oath is no different than the pledge of allegiance required of American immigrants. But in any case, the bill died in the Knesset: Lacking a parliamentary majority, it wasn’t even brought for a vote.
As for the Nakba proposal, the Knesset itself concluded (correctly) that the original bill was undemocratic. Hence the law actually passed merely prohibited state funding for public commemorations of the Nakba. And while democracies must permit offensive speech, no democratic principle requires a state to finance public calls for its demise.
Again, all this was widely reported in Israel’s English-language media, so the facts were easily checkable. But the Times preferred printing an anti-Israel smear.
There’s been much talk lately about liberal American Jews “distancing” themselves from Israel. But that’s really not surprising when you consider that most liberal American Jews get their (dis)information about Israel from The New York Times. Hence American Jewish leaders concerned about this trend must start challenging the Times on these smears. And they must also start educating their public not to believe everything they read in its page

ObAMA AIDS jIHADIST AND ISLAMITIZATION OF iSRAEL'S NEIGHBORS

2011-11-04T11:25:00.001-05:00

The Arab World

Arab Spring or Islamist Surge? - Benny Morris
The main result of the "Arab Spring" will be - at least in the short and medium terms, and, I fear, in the long-term as well - an accelerated Islamization of the Arab world. In Tunisia the Islamist al-Nahda Party won a clear victory in the country's first free elections, winning some 90 out of 217 seats. Speculation about whether the party is genuinely "moderate" Islamist or fundamentally intent on imposing sharia religious law over Tunisia is immaterial. The Islamists won, hands down and against all initial expectations, in a country that was thought to be the most secular and "Western" in the Arab world.
In the tribal wreckage that is Libya, the Islamist factions appear to be the major force emerging from the demise of the Gaddafi regime. And much the same appears to be emerging from Egypt - the demographic, cultural and political center of the Arab world. All opinion polls predict that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood - which has long sought the imposition of strict sharia law and Israel's destruction - will emerge from next month's parliamentary elections as the country's strongest political party.
The Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel and Gaza has become, following Mubarak's fall, a lawless, Islamist-dominated territory. Smugglers have collaborated with Islamists to plunder Gaddafi's armories, and Israeli intelligence says that many Grad rockets and sophisticated shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles have recently made their way into Gaza via Sinai. One anti-aircraft missile was fired at an Israeli helicopter in a recent skirmish on the Sinai-Israel border. The writer is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University. (National Interest)
A Dawning "Muslim Brotherhood Crescent" - Lee Smith
An Islamist alliance drawn from the region's Sunni majority spells a kind of long-term trouble for U.S. and Israeli interests that may be equally or even more dangerous than a Shia crescent. The Muslim Brotherhood crescent is powerful because it both draws on the political aspirations of the regional Sunni majority and is deeply rooted in national sympathies. Given a choice in free and fair elections, Arab electorates will invariably put Islamists in power.
"Moderate" is a word that gets thrown around recklessly when it comes to the Islamist groups that comprise the new Muslim Brotherhood crescent. Consider the leader of al-Nahda, Rashid Ghannoushi, who may well be Tunisia's next prime minister. He is routinely described as a moderate, even though he has praised the mothers of suicide bombers and believes that the "region will get rid of the germ of Israel." (Tablet)

Hamas murderers www.jonathanginsburg.org

2011-11-03T07:35:00.001-05:00

ANOTHER ROUND OF WAR by Rachel Saperstein, Neve Dekalim/Nitzan

Over forty rockets have fallen in the south this past weekend. The shooting began Wednesday and intensified on Friday night, a favorite time for Arabs as they know it will destroy our Shabbat rest. The sirens wailed and the loudest, closest explosions were heard at 11:20pm. Our sleep was over.

New Syria nuk plant? www.jonathanginburg.com

2011-11-01T12:46:00.000-05:00

AP Exclusive: New signs of Syria-Pakistan nuke tie

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By GEORGE JAHN
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — U.N. investigators have identified a previously unknown complex in Syria that bolsters suspicions that the Syrian government worked with A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, to acquire technology that could make nuclear arms.

This Aug. 14, 2011, satellite image provided by GeoEye, shows a facility in Al-Hasakah, Syria. Invesigators at the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency have asked Syria about this complex, in the center of the image, in the country's northwestern city of Al-Hasakah because they believe it closely matches plans for a uranium enrichment plant sold by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb A.Q. Khan. (AP Photo/GeoEye Satellite Image)
More Nation & World stories »

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The buildings in northwest Syria closely match the design of a uranium enrichment plant provided to Libya when Moammar Gadhafi was trying to build nuclear weapons under Khan's guidance, officials told The Associated Press.

Don't let Obama off the hook by silencing dissent on Israel

2011-10-29T17:44:00.000-05:00

Conservatives Reject Call To Leave Israel Out of Campaign
Call for Bipartisan Unity from ADL and AJC Falls on Deaf Ears
By J.J. Goldberg the Forward
Published October 27, 2011, issue of November 04, 2011.
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Here’s how crazy things have gotten: An emergency call went out recently from the heart of the Jewish Establishment — from the very epicenter of macherdom, the twin citadels of Jewish defense, the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee themselves, in a rare moment of joint action — for American Jews to unite around Israel and defend its alliance with the United States.

And what’s been the response so far? To put it politely: Drop dead.

The machers’ summons is called the “National Pledge for Unity on Israel,” and it’s posted on the two organizations’ websites. They declare that with all the “new dangers and challenges” facing Israel in a “fast changing Middle East,” it’s more important than ever for America to “project to the world” that our support for Israel is wall-to-wall and rock solid. Right now, as we enter what’s shaping up as an ugly election season, the Jewish community should take care not to let Israel become a political football. Let’s have “American voices raised together in unshakeable support for our friend and ally.” If you agree, they say, click here, add your name and take the pledge.

Related
■Proposed Unity Pledge Spurs More Debate
■Jewish Leaders Warn Against Using Israel As 'Wedge' Issue
■AJC Blasts Anti-Obama Ad Campaign
So where’s the problem? The problem, writes Commentary magazine’s Jonathan Tobin, is that while “the cause of unity is noble” and much of the pledge’s text is “unexceptionable,” in the end the pledge “doesn’t pass the smell test” — parts of it seem “aimed more at silencing any effort to hold the Obama administration accountable.”

Matt Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition is more direct: “An open and vigorous debate on the questions confronting our country is the cornerstone of the American electoral process,” he writes. “This effort to stifle debate on U.S. policy toward Israel runs counter to this American tradition. Accordingly, the RJC will not be silenced on this or any issue.”

And, as is so often the case, no one puts it more succinctly than Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, chairman of the Emergency Committee for Israel. “Here’s the Emergency Committee for Israel’s answer to Directors Abe Foxman and David Harris: You must be kidding.”

Ah, you say, but that’s just a handful of voices on the Republican right. Let’s hear from the majority. What does the public say?

Funny — the ADL and AJC are wondering the same thing. As of six days after the pledge’s October 19 launch, according to one staffer, “maybe two dozen” people had signed on. “It’s not what you’d call a tidal wave.”

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/144966/#ixzz1cDIXNBlF

latest on Israel bombing Iran

2011-10-29T17:40:00.001-05:00

The Forward
Previous
The Political Dividends of the Shalit Deal October 28, 2011, 6:05pm
Israeli Brass Astir Amid Pressure for Iran Strike
By J.J. Goldberg
“Have the prime minister and defense minister sealed a deal between them, one on one, to attack the nuclear reactors in Iran?” So asks Nahum Barnea, commonly described as Israel’s senior and most respected political journalist, in an article leading the top of the front page of today’s Yediot Ahronot. He writes that growing rumors to that effect have created a quiet but urgent buzz within Israel’s political and military elites. They’re also troubling foreign governments, which “have a hard time understanding what is going on here”: a fateful decision that could “seal the fate of the Jewish state” for good or ill, and yet near-total silence on the topic in the public arena.

Barnea writes that the question of whether or not to attack divides Israel’s leadership into four camps. One camp says the benefits would be slim and the risks “insane,” given Iran’s ability to bombard Israel with deadly missiles from Lebanon, Gaza and Iran itself and touch off a regional war “that could destroy the state of Israel.” This camp says it’s better to focus on international sanctions, bearing in mind that if they fail and Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, “it won’t be the end of the world” — while an Israeli attack just might be.

The second camp says there’s no rush. Iran is still at least two years away from a weapon, which leaves plenty of time to let other options play out, reserving a military attack as an absolute last resort. Barnea quotes a senior American diplomat who told him Israel should back renewed negotiations on international inspections. If and when Iran turns out to be lying, an Israeli attack will have a lot more international understanding and support, which could be crucial in determining how well Israel survives the ensuing onslaught. Some Israeli cabinet ministers subscribe to this view, and suspect that the growing pressure for an immediate attack stems from “outside motives, whether personal or political.” More on that later.

The third camp consists of the heads of the military and intelligence community: IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz, military intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi, Mossad chief Tamir Pardo and Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen. All four, he writes, are opposed to the military option, just like their predecessors: respectively, Gabi Ashkenazi, Amos Yadlin, Meir Dagan and Yuval Diskin. The difference is that the current chiefs are all new in their posts and lack the standing, experience, self-confidence and temperament to “bang on the table” and restrain Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Ehud Barak, as their predecessors repeatedly did.

Finally, he writes, there are “the Siamese twins,” Netanyahu and Barak, who appear to be in a distinct minority, yet have the power to make the final decision. Netanyahu, he writes, has been warning since he entered office that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler and a new Holocaust is looming. “There are those who describe Netanyahu’s passion on the topic as an obsession,” Barnea writes. “All his life he’s dreamed of being Churcill. Iran offers him the opportunity.” As for Barak, he looks at Israel’s past attacks on nuclear installations in Iraq and (“according to foreign reports”) Syria, and figures the pattern has been set. It’s not just a strategy, he writes, it’s a legacy. Moreover, some cabinet ministers suspect Barak is driven at least partly by personal motives: with no party or constituency behind him since he left Labor, he may see a military triumph as his best ticket to a continuing role in politics.

For more details on the increasingly urgent debate on Iran inside the Israeli brass—and the role it played in the sweeping changeover in the senior command engineered by Barak and Netanyahu over the past year, here’s some of my own coverage of the struggle from August 2010, December 2010, January 2011, May 2011 and June 2011

www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/forward-thinking/145227/#ixzz1cDH94nZm

Conservative Rabbi students far left wingers on Israel

2011-10-24T11:15:00.001-05:00

Jokes My Grandfather Told Me Daniel Gordis, Jerusalem Post. Gordis responds that the recent JTS study does not disprove but actually confirms his thesis that non-Orthodox rabbis have taken a universalist turn.

But if the new crop of Conservative rabbis has anything to say about it, Conservatism may not occupy the center for very long. That, at least, is the message of a recent report by the movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, based on a survey of political views among "Generation Y" rabbinical students—born in the mid-1970's to mid-1990's—and the Seminary's somewhat older rabbinical alumni, ordained since 1980.
At first blush, the report purports to show what one would hope to find among the rabbinate: a solid Jewish identity and strong attachment to Israel. On closer examination, this identity appears increasingly filtered through a universalistic and liberal political perspective. Among American Jews as a whole, according to the Pew Forum, 38 percent identify themselves as liberal; 39 percent call themselves moderate. In contrast, 58 percent of the Conservative rabbis surveyed—and 69 percent of the rabbinical students—called themselves liberal. It's hard to defend the center when you're not in it.
These rabbis and rabbinical students are "pro-Israel," but they are redefining what "pro-Israel" means. As liberals, they hold an optimistic view of human nature: Though Palestinian leaders see their conflict with Israel as a zero-sum game, it seems hard for the rabbis to acknowledge this grim fact. Instead, they get their understanding of events in Israel from ideologically reinforcing left-oriented sources: liberal media outlets, Facebook posts, and Haaretz. These sources help explain the conspicuous disconnect between the next generation of Conservative rabbis and mainstream American Jews on the subject of the Arab-Israel conflict. More than three-quarters of American Jews, according to the latest American Jewish Committee survey, believe that the Arabs' goal is not merely the return of the "occupied territories" but the actual "destruction of Israel." Only 30 percent of the JTS rabbinical students agreed with a similar statement.
Indeed, fully 12 percent of the rabbinical students are "uncomfortable" with Israel's being a "Jewish state." To individuals with this universalistic bent, moral relativism comes more naturally. Most of the future rabbis—all of whom have studied in Israel—do not see Palestinian leaders as their enemies. A majority, 56 percent, say the Palestinian side is no "more to blame" than Israel for the ongoing conflict. Sure, Hamas dominates Gaza. Yes, the West Bank Fatah leadership refused to negotiate with the Netanyahu government during a ten-month settlement freeze. Even so, a majority of the rabbis wants an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, with "land swaps" and a freeze on any "expansion of settlements in the West Bank."
Compare these views with the position of most American Jews in the face of unremitting Palestinian intransigence: 55 percent, according to an AJC poll, oppose a Palestinian state. In equally stark contrast, most Israelis, regardless of their political views, simply do not believe that today's Palestinian leadership is capable of making peace with Israel.
The JTS survey elicited the opinion of 68 percent of the rabbinical students that the "settler movement"—not just extremist settlers, mind you—is a "threat." The survey did not bother to ask whether the Palestinians should be required to accept Israel as a Jewish state (the position of 96 percent of American Jews) or whether Mahmoud Abbas should abandon his demand for a Palestinian "right of return." The survey tells us that 72 percent of the rabbinical students have engaged in efforts at dialogue with Arabs: Some head to Ramallah for the opportunity to socialize with Palestinians, while others take excursions to West Bank Arab villages with New Israel Fund-supported activists. The survey says nothing about any commensurate efforts by the rabbis to understand the "settler mindset." Many report having visited a "settlement"; but the definition of "settlement" and the auspices under which the visits were made are left to our imagination.
We can guess the reasons for the disparate treatment of Palestinians and settlers. The rabbis believe AIPAC is not liberal enough. J Street, whose platform practically mirrors that of the Palestinian Authority, is closer to their hearts, with 58 percent approval. At 80 percent approval, the New Israel Fund is the absolute cat's meow.
The 63-year-old Zionist enterprise is a work-in-progress. No Israeli would suggest it is beyond criticism. But 30 percent of Reform rabbinical students return from Israel feeling "hostile" or "indifferent" toward the Jewish state; now we learn that 53 percent of JTS rabbinical students are "sometimes" or "often" ashamed of Israel. Is it the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on state-controlled religious life that alienates them? Too bad, then, that so few future Conservative rabbis volunteer extensively at Conservative-affiliated Masorti congregations in Israel.
Seminaries and professors have been unable or unwilling to provide their students with the moral compass needed to navigate between worthy universalistic values and particularistic Jewish standards. By the time they get to seminary, it may be too late. Most of today's rabbinical students did not attend Jewish elementary or high schools, though they are likely to have attended Camp Ramah. The attitudes revealed in the JTS survey hammer home the need, now more than ever, for the community to find ways to provide its youth with, yes, a parochial education.
The JTS report concludes that the younger cohort of rabbinical students is "no less connected" to Israel than its elders. Yet, for many, this connection seems compromised by the felt need to reconcile their attachment with uncritically assimilated universalist ideals and, in extreme cases, left-liberal dogma that is anti-Zionist. No amount of redefining what it means to be pro-Israel can paper over the predicament facing Conservative Judaism's future leaders: What is the place of the movement in Jewish life if not as an embodiment of political and theological centrism and moderation?

As cain and santaroum go back AND FORTH ON ABORTION-A JEWISH VIEW WWW.RABBIJONATHANGINSBURG.INFO

2011-10-21T13:37:00.001-05:00

More reason not to get complacent re Iran www.rabbijonathanginsburg.org

2011-10-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

Iran's Nuclear Program: The Full Picture - J.E. Dyer
A widely referenced Washington Post story has got folks feeling complacent about Iran's nuclear program. The piece, crediting Stuxnet and sanctions, speaks of a "sharp decline" in the output of low-enriched uranium (LEU) at the Natanz enrichment facility, along with the aging and low-performing condition of Iran's original Pakistani-design centrifuge cascades. Meanwhile, sanctions have apparently made it impossible for Iran to import high-strength maraging steel, forcing the Iranians to manufacture their newest centrifuges from less reliable carbon fiber.
But one of the most important facts is that, according to the September 2011 IAEA report, Iran had - as of mid-August 2011 - piled up a total of 4,543 kg. of LEU. By Western intelligence estimates, that is enough for 4 nuclear warheads. While the efficiency of production has declined and the Iranians are now using more centrifuges to produce the same amount of LEU, between May and August 2011, Iran still produced enough LEU on an annualized basis for a nuclear warhead per year. The writer is a retired commander who served in U.S. Naval intelligence. (Hot Air)
See also UK: Iran Nuclear Issue to Grow More Urgent - Adrian Croft
Tackling Iran's nuclear program will become more urgent over the next year and the world must not be distracted from it by the focus on the Arab Spring popular uprisings, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Tuesday. This was because Iran had stepped up its nuclear work by increasing the fissile content of its enriched uranium to the 20% level and moving centrifuge machines to a previously secret underground bunker near Qom. (Reuters)
See also Iran's Nuclear Program Suffering New Setbacks, Diplomats and Experts Say - Joby Warrick (Washington Post)
See also Report: Iran Could Make Atom Bomb Material Despite Hurdles
Iran's nuclear program is struggling with low-performing enrichment machines but it would still be able to produce material that could be used for atomic bombs, according to a U.S. think tank. "Is the Iranian enrichment program on a trajectory toward being dedicated to producing weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons?" the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) asked and replied: "Unfortunately, despite its severe limitations, this program is able to do so." (Reuters)

The Repub candidates need to hire me as their argument makes

2011-10-19T16:00:00.002-05:00

anemic responses last night to the question on cutting foreing aid to Israel. here is my video on it 9from former national HS debate national champion 1974)

Rabbi David Golinkin on Simhat Torah

2011-10-18T17:32:00.001-05:00

The Jewish people loves Simhat Torah. Even Jews who do not usually come to the synagogue every Shabbat, make an effort to come on Simhat Torah in order to dance and have an aliyah. This is not surprising. Simhat Torah is a spiritual and physical delight which allows Jews to rejoice and dance with body and soul. But Simhat Torah is much more than a day of joy and dancing. At second glance, it contains a number of deeper messages which are easy to miss amidst the enthusiasm of the holiday.
Love of Torah: First and foremost, Simhat Torah symbolizes the love of the Jewish people for its Torah. We are not only commanded to study Torah every day (Deut. 6) and to read the Torah in public on Shabbat, Mondays and Thursdays (Mekhilta B'shalah, ed. Horowitz-Rabin, p. 154 and parallels), but for over one thousand years it has been our custom to dance with the Torah once a year. There are very few peoples in the world who dance with their sacred scriptures. (2) Torah study ties us to the Torah intellectually and reading the Torah in public ties us to the Torah communally, but Simhat Torah ties us to the Torah physically and emotionally and that is a knot which cannot be undone.

The Cyclical Nature of Torah Study: Secondly, Simhat Torah symbolizes that Torah study has no beginning and no end. As we recite in the Arvit (evening) service every night: "for [the words of the Torah] are our lives and the length of our days; day and night shall we meditate upon them". Rabbi David Abudraham explained this aspect of Simhat Torah in fourteenth-century Spain: "And the reason we start again at Bereishit... just as we have merited to finish the Torah, so may we merit to begin her again". (3)

The Democratic Nature of Torah Study: In addition, Simhat Torah symbolizes the fact that the Torah belongs to the entire people of Israel: scholars and laypeople; men, women and children. This idea was expressed in a number of Simhat Torah customs. In twelfth-century France, they began to read V'zot Haberakhah (the last Torah portion) many times “until the entire congregation had an aliyah”. (4) In fourteenth-century Germany, they invented the kol hanearim aliyah so that all the children in the synagogue could have a collective aliyah. (5) In seventeenth-century Germany, they would honor the wives of the Hattan Torah and Hattan Bereishit – the men who had the last aliyah of the Torah and the first of Bereishit - with the title kallot and say to them: gut yontiff, kallah! (6) Indeed, many modern congregations continue this democratic trend on Simhat Torah and the entire congregation receives an aliyah: men, women and children. (7)

The Development of Jewish Law: Finally, the Conservative Movement likes to emphasize that the halakhah developed from generation to generation and from country to country. (8) There is no better proof of this assertion than the holiday of Simhat Torah. A holiday which began in Babylonia in the tenth century spread to the entire Jewish world, with each ethnic group contributing new customs which were then absorbed by Kelal Yisrael (the collective Jewish people). The Jews of Babylonia invented the holiday and its name and began to dance on Simhat Torah. (9) In France, they added the Attah Horeita verses in the twelfth century. (10) The Jews of Spain began to recite the beginning of Bereishit by heart at the beginning of the twelfth century (11) while the Jews of France instituted at that time that a Hattan Bereishit should read the beginning of Bereishit. (12) In Ashkenaz, they added a hakafah in the evening in the early fifteenth century (13) while the Ari and his students in sixteenth-century Safed instituted that there should be seven hakafot around the bimah. (14)

In summary, Simhat Torah is not just a holiday of joy and dancing, but also symbolizes our love for the Torah, the cyclical nature of Torah study, the democratic nature of Torah study, and the development of Jewish law throughout the generations.

Why Israel made the Shalit deal www.rabbijonathanginsnurg.org

2011-10-17T06:54:00.001-05:00

· OPINION
· OCTOBER 17, 2011
Israel's Deals With the Devils
What explains its lopsided prisoner exchange with the terrorist group Hamas, which will save one life now but endanger many lives in the future?
By ROBERT H. MNOOKIN

It's hard to think straight when negotiating with an adversary you claim is evil, and Israel proved it last week. The usual problem is a refusal to negotiate at all. Here the Israelis made what seems to be a crazy deal.

In a lopsided prisoner exchange, the Netanyahu government agreed to release about 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for a single life: that of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli corporal kidnapped by Hamas in a cross-border raid in 2006 and held hostage in Gaza. What explains this decision?

Israel has always claimed it will not negotiate with what it considers terrorist organizations. Chief among those groups is Hamas, which has repeatedly expressed its commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state. The deal announced on Oct. 11 was the result of months of secret negotiations between the Israeli government and Hamas, facilitated by the Egyptian government. Israel may claim that no one in the government ever met face-to-face with representatives of Hamas, and it is possible that the two adversaries worked out the details by exchanging offers and counteroffers through Egyptian intermediaries. But this fig leaf hardly hides the fact that a deal was negotiated.

I am not claiming that a government should never deal with terrorists under the table. Many governments maintain an official policy of never negotiating with terrorists, pirates or evil regimes—while secretly violating that policy when important interests are at stake.

In some situations this may be a pragmatic approach: Hypocrisy is at times the handmaiden of statecraft. But in this case, Israel is only compounding the damage from previous deals.

For example, in the Jibril Agreement of 1985 (made with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Israel freed 1,150 prisoners in exchange for the release of three Israelis captured during the first Lebanon war. And in 1998 Israel and its ally, the South Lebanese Army, released 65 prisoners to Hezbollah in exchange for the remains of one dead Israeli soldier.

In cost-benefit terms these exchanges make little sense. Israel has typically justified such deals on the ground that Israel has a citizen army in which nearly all Jewish citizens (except the ultraorthodox) must serve. In asking its citizens to risk their lives in service of their country, part of Israel's implicit bargain is that it will make every effort to recover anyone who falls into enemy hands.

This justification would hardly seem rational to any hard-headed security analyst who thought through the long-run costs and benefits. In the present case, one Israeli soldier has regained his freedom. But to free 1,000 prisoners in exchange? Israeli parents may on some unthinking level feel better about their government's concern for each individual soldier. But the deal jeopardizes the freedom and safety of many Israelis in the future.

The most direct security threat is perhaps posed by the about-to-be-freed prisoners themselves. Some have "blood on their hands"—they were imprisoned after a trial demonstrating their participation in specific terrorist acts. They may well commit additional terrorist acts. In 2004, Israel exchanged several hundred Palestinian prisoners for an Israeli held captive by Hezbollah (and the remains of three soldiers). Drawing on government figures, Nadav Shragi noted in a report by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs that "those freed in the deal had murdered 35 Israelis" by 2007.

A more substantial cost is that of precedent. Just as paying a high ransom to pirates may encourage more piracy, paying this ransom to Hamas may encourage Israel's enemies to engage in more kidnapping.

A third cost is political. The deal enhances substantially the political standing of Hamas and further weakens its rival Fatah. Hamas cleverly negotiated for the release of not simply its own members, but members of Fatah as well as Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. In securing the release of nearly 1,000 Palestinians of mixed demographics, Hamas will claim that it is the most effective representative of all the Palestinian people.

So what may explain Israel's bargain? Gilad Shalit is a known individual: what psychologists would call an "identifiable being." His picture has been plastered throughout Israel. The Israeli press has written hundreds of articles speculating about his well-being. By contrast, the Israelis who are endangered by this deal are mere statistics—an unidentifiable group of people who may die in the future. Psychologists call these "statistical lives."

There is a long line of psychological research showing that, in making decisions, human beings will incur far greater costs to save one identifiable being from immediate peril than to enact safety measures that might save many more statistical lives. While no expense will be spared to save an identifiable miner trapped in a coal mine, there is often great political reluctance to spend an equal amount on mine safety. Such a response is entirely human, but it is not rational.

Mr. Mnookin is chair of Harvard University's Program on Negotiation. His most recent book is "Bargaining with the Devil: When to Negotiate, When to Fight" (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

why no conversation? www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-10-16T21:50:00.001-05:00

Iran Iran Iran in all the discussion about the Iran backed effort to kill Saudi ambassador on US spoil note 1. virtually no conversation about the effort was also to bomb the Israeli Embassay and much much worse, 2. notice how virtually no talk about the impending Iran nuclear weapons developement and their determimnation to destroy Israel and the US? Sanctions are a joke. why is no one in this country talking about going to do the responsible thing and stop them with force?

Israel does not stand alone Amb Michael Orren www.rabbijonathanginsburg.org

2011-10-16T16:53:00.001-05:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/israel-does-not-stand-alone/2011/10/12/gIQAbXqyhL_print.html

Israel does not stand alone

By Michael Oren, Published: October 13

The claim of Israel’s isolation, echoed by Democratic and Republican leaders alike, is gaining status as fact. “Israel finds itself increasingly isolated, beleaguered, and besieged,” John Heilemann wrote recently in New York magazine. The Economist reported that “Israel’s isolation has . . . been underlined by the deterioration of its relations with Turkey and Egypt.” New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “isolating his country,” while Thomas Friedman described Israel as “adrift at sea alone.”
But is Israel really more isolated now than in the past?
Isolation, of course, is not automatically symptomatic of bad policies. Britain was isolated fighting the Nazis at the start of World War II. Union forces were isolated early in the Civil War, as was the Continental Army at Valley Forge. “It is better to be alone than in bad company,” wrote the young George Washington. That maxim is especially apt for the Middle East today, where one of the least-isolated states, backed by both Iran and Iraq and effectively immune to United Nations sanctions, is Syria.
Israel, in fact, is significantly less isolated than at many times in its history. Before the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel faced a belligerent Egypt and Jordan and a hostile Soviet bloc, Greece, India and China — all without strategic ties with the United States. Today, Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan; excellent relations with the nations of Eastern Europe as well as Greece, India and China; and an unbreakable alliance with America. Many democracies, including Canada, Italy and the Czech Republic, stand staunchly with us. Israel has more legations abroad than ever before and recently joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which comprises the most globally integrated countries. Indeed, Egypt and Germany mediated the upcoming release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who had been held hostage by Hamas for five years.
Israel is not responsible for the upheavals in the Arab world or for the lack of freedom that triggered them. Israelis did not elect Turkey’s Islamic-minded government or urge Syria’s army to fire on its citizens. Conversely, no change in Israeli policies can alter the historic processes transforming the region. Still, some commentators claim that, by refusing to freeze settlement construction on the West Bank and insisting on defensible borders and security guarantees, Israel isolates itself.
The settlements are not the core of the conflict. Arabs attacked us for 50 years before the first settlements were built. Netanyahu froze new construction in the settlements for an unprecedented 10 months, and still the Palestinians refused to negotiate. Settlements are not the reason that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed a unity pact with Hamas in May, or why, in his address to the U.N. General Assembly last month, Abbas denied the Jews’ 4,000-year connection to our homeland. As Abbas wrote in the New York Times in May, the Palestinian attempt to declare a state without making peace with Israel was about “internationalization of the conflict . . . to pursue claims against Israel” in the United Nations, not about settlements.
As for borders and security, Israel’s position reflects the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. After uprooting all our settlements, we received not peace but thousands of Hamas rockets fired at our civilians. In Lebanon, a U.N. peace force watched while Hezbollah amassed an arsenal of 50,000 missiles. Israel’s need for defensible borders and for a long-term Israeli army presence to prevent arms smuggling into any Palestinian state is, for us, a life-and-death issue. Moreover, in a rapidly changing Middle East, we need assurances of our ability to defend ourselves if the Palestinians who support peace are overthrown by those opposed to it.
Despite repeated Palestinian efforts to isolate us, Israel is not alone. And we have a great many friends, especially in the United States, who we know would not want to imply that Israel stands alone in a dangerous region. Prime Minister Netanyahu remains committed to resuming peace talks with the Palestinians anywhere, any time, without preconditions, while insisting on the security arrangements vital to Israel’s survival. Meanwhile, we will continue to stretch out our hand for peace to all Middle Eastern peoples. To paraphrase one of George Washington’s contemporaries — if that be isolation, make the most of it.
The writer is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

Caroline Glick Bad Shalit Deal www.rabbijonathanginsburg.org

2011-10-16T11:39:00.001-05:00

Home

A pact signed in Jewish blood

October 13, 2011, 6:23 PM
Comments (21) | | Print

No one denies the long suffering of the Schalit family. Noam and Aviva Schalit and their relatives have endured five years and four months of uninterrupted anguish since their son St.-Sgt. Gilad Schalit was abducted from his army post by Palestinian terrorists and spirited to Gaza in June 2006. Since then, aside from one letter and one videotaped message, they have received no signs of life from their soldier son.

There is not a Jewish household in Israel that doesn't empathize with their suffering. It isn't simply that most Israelis serve in the IDF and expect their children to serve in the IDF.

It isn't just that it could happen to any of our families.

As Jews, the concept of mutual responsibility, that we are all a big family and share a common fate, is ingrained in our collective consciousness. And so, at a deep level, the Schalit family's suffering is our collective suffering.

And yet, and yet, freedom exacts its price. The cause of freedom for the Jewish people as a whole exacts a greater sacrifice from some families than from others.

Sometimes, that sacrifice is made willingly, as in the case of the Netanyahu family.

Prof. Benzion and Tzilla Netanyahu raised their three sons to be warriors in the fight for Jewish liberty. And all three of their sons served in an elite commando unit. Their eldest son Yonatan had the privilege of commanding the unit and of leading Israeli commandos in the heroic raid to free Jewish hostages held by the PLO in Entebbe.

There, on July 4, 1976, Yonatan and his family made the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of the Jewish people. Yonatan was killed in action. His parents and brothers were left to mourn and miss him for the rest of their lives. And yet, the Netanyahu family's sacrifice was a product of a previous decision to fight on the front lines of the war to preserve Jewish freedom.

Sometimes, the sacrifice is made less willingly.

Since Israel allowed the PLO and its terror armies to move their bases from Tunis to Judea, Samaria and Gaza in 1994, nearly 2,000 Israeli families have involuntarily paid the ultimate price for the freedom of the Jewish people. Our freedom angers our Palestinian neighbors so much that they have decided that all Israelis should die.

For instance Ruth Peled, 56, and her 14- month-old granddaughter Sinai Keinan did not volunteer to make the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of the Jewish people when they were murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber as they sat in an ice cream parlor in Petah Tikva in May 2002.

And five-year-old Gal Eisenman and her grandmother Noa Alon, 60, weren't planning on giving their lives for the greater good when they, together with five others, were blown to smithereens by Palestinian terrorists in June 2002 while they were waiting for a bus in Jerusalem.

Their mothers and daughters, Chen Keinan and Pnina Eisenman, had not signed up for the prospect of watching their mothers and daughters incinerated before their eyes. They did not volunteer to become bereaved mothers and orphaned daughters simultaneously.

The lives of the victims of Arab terror were stolen from their families simply because they lived and were Jews in Israel. And in the cases of the Keinan, Peled, Alon and Eisenman families, as in thousands of others, the murderers were the direct and indirect beneficiaries of terrorists-for-hostages swaps like the deal that Yonatan Netanyahu's brother, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, made this week with Hamas to secure the release of Gilad Schalit.

The deal that Netanyahu has agreed to is signed with the blood of the past victims and future victims of the terrorists he is letting go. No amount of rationalization by Netanyahu, his cheerleaders in the demented mass media, and by the defeatist, apparently incompetent heads of the Shin Bet, Mossad and IDF can dent the facts.

IT IS a statistical certainty that the release of 1,027 terrorists for Schalit will lead to the murder of untold numbers of Israelis. It has happened every single time that these blood ransoms have been paid. It will happen now.

Untold numbers of Israelis who are now sitting in their succas and celebrating Jewish freedom, who are driving in their cars, who are standing on line at the bank, who are sitting in their nursery school classrooms painting pictures of Torah scrolls for Simhat Torah will be killed for being Jewish while in Israel because Netanyahu has made this deal. The unrelenting pain of their families, left to cope with their absence, will be unimaginable.

This is a simple fact and it is beyond dispute.

It is also beyond dispute that untold numbers of IDF soldiers and officers will be abducted and held hostage. Soldiers now training for war or scrubbing the floors of their barracks, or sitting at a pub with their friends on holiday leave will one day find themselves in a dungeon in Gaza or Sinai or Lebanon undergoing unspeakable mental and physical torture for years. Their families will suffer inhuman agony.

The only thing we don't know about these future victims is their names. But we know what will become of them as surely as we know that night follows day.

Netanyahu has proven once again that taking IDF soldiers hostage is a sure bet for our Palestinian neighbors. They can murder the next batch of Sinais and Gals, Noas and Ruths. They can kill thousands of them. And they can do so knowing all along that all they need to do to win immunity for their killers is kidnap a single IDF soldier.

There is no downside to this situation for those who believe all Jews should die.

In his public statement on the Schalit deal Tuesday night, Netanyahu, like his newfound groupies in the media, invoked the Jewish tradition of pidyon shevuim, or the redemption of captives. But the Talmudic writ is not unconditional. The rabbinic sages were very clear. The ransom to be paid cannot involve the murder of other Jews.

This deal - like its predecessors - is not in line with Jewish tradition. It stands in opposition to Jewish tradition. Even in our darkest hours of powerlessness in the ghettos and the pales of exile, our leaders did not agree to pay for a life with other life. Judaism has always rejected human sacrifice.

The real question here is after five years and four months in which Schalit has been held hostage and two-and-a-half years into Netanyahu's current tenure as prime minister, why has the deal been concluded now? What has changed? The answer is that very little has changed on Netanyahu's part. After assuming office, Netanyahu essentially accepted the contours of the abysmal agreement he has now signed in Jewish blood.

Initially, there was a political rationale for his morally and strategically perverse position.

He had Defense Minister Ehud Barak and the Labor Party to consider.

Supporting this deal was one of the many abject prices that Netanyahu was expected to pay to keep Labor and Barak in his coalition.

But this rationale ended with Barak's resignation from the Labor Party in January.

Since then, Barak and his colleagues who joined him in leaving Labor have had no political leverage over Netanyahu.

They have nowhere to go. Their political life is wholly dependent on their membership in Netanyahu's government. He doesn't need to pay any price for their loyalty.

So Netanyahu's decision to sign the deal with Hamas lacks any political rationale.

WHAT HAS really changed since the deal was first put on the table two years ago is Hamas's position. Since the Syrian people began to rise up against the regime of Hamas's patron and protector President Bashar Assad, Hamas's leaders, who have been headquartered in Syria since 1998, have been looking for a way to leave. Their Muslim Brotherhood brethren are leading forces in the Western-backed Syrian opposition.

Hamas's leaders do not want to be identified with the Brotherhood's oppressor.

With the Egyptian military junta now openly massacring Christians, and with the Muslim Brotherhood rapidly becoming the dominant political force in the country, Egypt has become a far more suitable home for Hamas.

But for the past several months, Hamas leaders in Damascus have faced a dilemma. If they stay in Syria, they lose credibility. If they leave, they expose themselves to Israel.

According to Channel 2, in exchange for Schalit, beyond releasing a thousand murderers, Netanyahu agreed to give safe passage to Hamas's leaders decamping to Egypt.

What this means is that this deal is even worse for Israel than it looks on the surface.

Not only is Israel guaranteeing a reinvigoration of the Palestinian terror war against its civilians by freeing the most experienced terrorists in Palestinian society, and doing so at a time when the terror war itself is gradually escalating. Israel is squandering the opportunity to either decapitate Hamas by killing its leaders in transit, or to weaken the group by forcing its leaders to go down with Assad in Syria.

At best, Netanyahu comes out of this deal looking like a weak leader who is manipulated by and beholden to Israel's radical, surrender-crazed media. To their eternal shame, the media have been waging a five-year campaign to force Israel's leaders to capitulate to Hamas.

At worst, this deal exposes Netanyahu as a morally challenged, strategically irresponsible and foolish, opportunistic politician.

What Israel needs is a leader with the courage of one writer's convictions. Back in 1995, that writer wrote: "The release of convicted terrorists before they have served their full sentences seems like an easy and tempting way of defusing blackmail situations in which innocent people may lose their lives, but its utility is momentary at best.

"Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists by giving them the feeling that even if they are caught, their punishment will be brief. Worse, by leading terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the terrorist blackmail they are supposed to defuse."

The writer of those lines was then-opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu wrote those lines in his book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists.

Israel needs that Netanyahu to lead it. But in the face of the current Netanyahu's abject surrender to terrorism, apparently he is gone.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Santorum willing to go to war to stop Iran www.rabbijonathanginsburg.info

2011-10-13T18:05:00.001-05:00

Santorum on the threat of Iran's nuclear weapons program
Posted by
CNN's Diana Ozemebhoya
Washington (CNN) – GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum said Thursday that as president he would use "whatever means necessary" to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear program, including going to war.

In an effort to halt the steps he says Iran is taking to grow a nuclear weapons program, the former Pennsylvania senator said on CNN's "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer" that in addition to using covert operations he would order "actual operations within the country to make sure the program does not continue."

http://www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/nominees/profile/jonathan-ginsburg

2011-10-13T13:49:00.001-05:00

Thanks to whomever nominated me for Jewish community Hero. See it at
http://www.jewishcommunityheroes.org/nominees/profile/jonathan-ginsburg

Obama responds limpedly about Iran again www.RabbiJonathan

2011-10-13T11:54:00.001-05:00

bama responds limpedly about Iran again www.RabbiJonathanGinsburg.info
He is mad about Iran trying to kill Saudi ambassador in US. Lauds his efforts so far to curb Iran. But
1. White House Wants to Stall Iran Sanctions
Wednesday, 16 Dec 2009 09:59 AM
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
Even before the House overwhelmingly passed long-stalled legislation Tuesday to impose sanctions on foreign suppliers of refined petroleum products to Iran, the Obama administration had asked the Senate to hold off on approving new sanctions on Iran until early next year.
In a little-noticed move Friday, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg wrote to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass., urging him not to move similar legislation in the Senate because it “might weaken rather than strengthen international unity and support for our efforts.”
The Obama White House has used similar arguments in the past to forestall the House sanctions bill, which Democrats held for six months before finally voting it out of committee in frustration mid-October.
2. Obama to Iran: U.S. offer of dialogue still stands
By Jeff Mason And Ross Colvin Sat Mar 20 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama renewed his administration’s offer of dialogue and diplomacy with Tehran on Saturday, a year after his offer of a new beginning with Iran failed to achieve concrete results.
Obama, who addressed Iranians in a new videotaped appeal to mark the observance of Nowruz — a festival celebrating the arrival of spring — has pledged to pursue aggressive sanctions to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
"We are working with the international community to hold the Iranian government accountable because they refuse to live up to their international obligations," Obama said in the address released by the White House.
"But our offer of comprehensive diplomatic contacts and dialogue stands." …
During his first year in office, Obama marked Nowruz with an unprecedented message offering Iran a "new beginning" of diplomatic engagement with the United States.

3. Why is there no mention of the plot including bombing the Israeli embassy too? Doesn't Israel matter at all to him?
By JOHN STEVENS and OLIVER TREE
Last updated at 8:36 AM on 13th October 2011
House Speaker John Boehner today called on Obama to 'hold Iran's feet to the fire' in the wake of the thwarting of a 'significant terrorist act' by agents working for the Iranian government to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to America in Washington DC.
Vice President Joe Biden this morning said that 'nothing has been taken off the table' as the U.S. discusses possible sanctions and military action. He said the consequences for Iran will be 'serious'.
Retaliation: House Speaker John Boehner called on Obama to 'hold Iran's feet to the fire' after the plot was uncovered
He is accused of plotting to kill Adel Al-Jubeir by bombing a restaurant, before setting off blasts at the Saudi and Israeli embassies.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047939/US-foils-Iran-terror-plot-kill-Saudi-ambassador-Washington-D-C.html#ixzz1agJRoLYA

My video on the Shalit release deal from May 2010 www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-10-11T16:18:00.001-05:00

Easy to assemble Sukkah www.rabbijonathanginsburg.net

2011-10-09T09:16:00.001-05:00

Lulav and etrog www.rabbijonathanginsburg.com

2011-10-09T09:12:00.000-05:00