A Light Unto the Nations? Not in the Skies.

An ugly conflict between "right" and "smart" in Israel's national airline this week has come to symbolize a national struggle so unpleasant it nearly defies description. But this is an issue that must be addressed because it is essential to resolve the underlying issues that also lead to eruptions of violence as well.

For months, El Al Airlines has been struggling to deal with difficult Chassidic male passengers who refuse to sit next to females on the planes. They block women from taking their ticketed seats -- as was witnessed by this writer this week -- leaving the female passengers with nowhere to sit. Some also take up the entire overhead bin with carry-on luggage, hatbox and carefully-folded rekel (long coat), leaving no place for any other passenger's items.

A few can be quite nasty and intractable in their manner; others chuckle at the women and snicker with each other (as happened this week) over efforts made by female passengers and/or flight attendants to cope with their resistance.

Flight attendants are caught between a rock and a hard place by all this. Generally they try to find alternate seating arrangements for the displaced passenger -- but I don't understand why the airline does not try to establish an alternate airline altogether for this sector of the population. Either that, or simple eject the aggressive passenger from the flight. In any other country, that is what would be done. 

In Israel, however, it is a complicated problem. The hareidi population has a strong advocate in the United Torah Judaism (UTJ) political party which wields a great deal of influence over funding and legislation in the government -- and has a great deal of power over the airline as a result. Moreover, numbers talk. The population itself flies a great deal between major cities in the world, including Tel Aviv, New York, London, Brussels, Antwerp and Paris among others; those tickets comprise a significant percentage of the El Al market. Offending one's customer base is not good business. 

But in the eyes of the wondering non-religious Jews and those people who are not Jewish at all (some of whom have never even met an observant Jew before) the image is indelibly burned into their memories. It's not a nice one. That message goes home to the tourists and the other American Jews who fly on "Israel's national airline" to visit the Jewish State too. And they reconsider those plans, because when they factor in the cost and the potential for unpleasantness, the two points outweigh the advantage of El Al's peerless security record. Very few foreign flights are attacked on their way to Israel.

Slowly, the extremist ultra-Orthodox Jews -- whose Chassidic observance could probably be questioned, given the emphasis placed on physicality over spirituality -- the extremists succeed in scaring away other passengers.

Worse, this becomes to the public eye what “hareidi” Jews are all about – this horrific hilul Hashem, this desecration of G-d's Torah while claiming to be mehader the mitzvah of tznius and negiah.

The halachos of derech shalom, derech eretz, ahavas Yisroel and yes, also the mitzvah of not being mevayesh b'pumbit one's fellow Jew, which is machshiv k'retzach – all those halachos somehow are not even considered when measured against the sexual terror of these men.

For that is what this is really all about. Fear, plain and simple, cold fear because they are simply unable to manage their sexual issues properly. One who is at peace with one's physical body is not at war with that of another.

This was not about sitting next to girls who were dressed in revealing garb. It is winter, after all. Everyone was bundled quite warmly. It is about men who have issues about being near women, any women, at any time at all. They cannot manage their sexuality at any time because they are not taught how to do it. In fact, they are trained to allow their behavior to run unchecked with no self-regulation other than insisting there be no female presence in their immediate environment other than family -- and that minimally at best.

Men in this world rely on their rabbis citing extreme examples in Torah to regulate their behavior. They rely on their women to restrict their sexuality. They reject the presence of anything and anyone else, fearful of contamination by all, that it might taint the purity of their holy Torah learning. They can and do use violence when they perceive a threat to that insularity, real or imagined.

How pure and holy can such learning be, governed by hatred, violence and fear? What kind of merit is earned by a mitzvah performed with a poisoned mind and evil intent – or deed – towards a fellow Jew? 

Does the mitzvah supposedly earned outweigh the massive hilul Hashem committed on the world's only Jewish airline? 

I doubt it.

Why Do Israeli Media Sing the Enemy's Song?

November 1, 2014 - After a week in which security personnel have been trying to keep the capital from going up in flames, some Israeli media are nevertheless singing soulfully about the "occupation."

What the hell is that all about?

A somewhat confusing report on “the voices behind the riots” written for Jerusalem Online.com by Yael Klein allegedly quotes a “French news agency reporter” and “AP news agency” to describe the Arab “fear of becoming the next Mohammed Abu Hadir.” (sic)

Talk about slanted coverage.

The article cites this week's shooting of Temple Mount activist Yehuda Glick as a cause of current tensions, Frankly, that was an attempted targeted assassination by a convicted Islamic Jihad terrorist, who first asked Glick his name to be sure of his identity before firing four bullets at him at point-blank range. Oddly, that fact is not mentioned once in the article.

The murder attempt led directly to the closing of the Temple Mount to all visitors and worshipers for the first time since 1967, Jews as well as Arabs even though it was a Muslim Arab who tried to kill Glick and it is Arabs who are rioting. This detail was also ignored in the article, which cites the closing of the Mount as another cause of the continued violence by Arab “protesters” who have been “rioting” for weeks.

Instead, Klein attempts to pin the blame for the wave of destruction and attacks in Jerusalem by Arab terrorists on the revenge killing of young Abu Khder. While the murder was despicable she never mentions that the Jewish murderers were caught and detained immediately, unlike the Arab terrorists triggered the wave of violence in the first place by abducting and murdering three Jewish teens on June 12, less than three weeks earlier. 

Abu Khder was murdered and his body was discovered the day after the bodies of the three Jewish teens were found in a shallow grave in a field just north of Hebron.  

“Riots in Arab neighborhoods are unceasing, and the young men confronting the security forces have no faith in the situation changing.”

Huh??  HELLO.

The rioting young men who are hurling rocks and firebombs (Molotov cocktails) and fireworks at civilians and security forces -- who are doing their best to kill people on the roads of Jerusalem and anywhere else they can find them – THEY have no faith in the situation changing? Really? Why not? Could it be because they have no intention of changing it themselves, perchance?

“Hisham, 14, from Shuafat who was born during the second intifada, dreams of a new uprising that will protect Al-Aqsa.”

From what?  From his own people who are doing their best to destroy the structure with their own violence? Perhaps he just dreams of a new uprising because he is drunk on a hefty overdose of adrenalin and jazzed from the Friday sermon at the mosque.

“The Temple Mount compound, where the mosque erects, is a symbol for the Israeli occupation for the Palestinians in East Jerusalem,” Klein explains. She writes for the Jerusalem Online website, mind you – not an Arab website and not Haaretz -- but aside from the phrasing, I also don't get how the Temple Mount has suddenly become a symbol of the "occupation" since it is supposed to be the third holiest site in Islam. 

More to the point, I don't get this writer's intimate use of the enemy's language. 

What on earth is wrong with us? Since when have Israeli media become so self-destructive that we are now willing to trumpet Arab propaganda? 

There is a difference between recognizing a legitimate issue, and cozying up to total bullshit.

Are Arab youth having difficulties in their neighborhoods? Yes. They’re getting mixed messages from families, the mosque and political leaders. They have no idea which is right. More to the point – which is right for them.

Sadly, their own parents are in the same boat.

It’s been too many years and three generations fed on a steady diet of hate, thanks to a stupid Israeli government decision to abandon control over public communications and education of Arab youth in Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem restored to the capital in 1967.

This kind of damage cannot be undone quickly. But someone is going to have to bite the bullet and do it; since the current Israeli administration is hated internationally anyway, it may as well be now. 

Annex Palestinian Authority-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria, and give them autonomy status similar to that of Puerto Rico with the U.S. 

Cut Gaza loose -- it's just an enemy Arab state anyway at this point -- and then seal off the southern border, the way the northern border is sealed off with Lebanon. 

Israeli media are certainly doing no one any good whatsoever by feeding the frenzy to destroy any hope of co-existence by advancing radical Palestinian Authority propaganda. Disagreement is one thing. Incitement is quite another. Bashing your own people with Arab propaganda while they're actively being attacked by that same enemy? Wrong.

It's time for those who are citizens of this country to learn the definition of "allegiance." Those who believe they're supposed to be in Ramallah or Gaza (like MK Hanin Zoabi, for instance) really should be allowed to move on -- preferably across the border. 

Don't forget to surrender your passports, benefits and blue identity cards on the way out.

 

Rabbi Akiva, Daniel Pearl and ISIS

I have been reading the account of the murder this past weekend of David Cawthorne Haines, a British aid worker, by terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).   

It's a moniker that President Barack Obama prefers to avoid. He chooses to use “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, (ISIL), which avoids the unpleasantness of having to mention Syria and has the added benefit of including Israel in its geographic embrace. 

 But regardless of how one refers to this group of barbarians, their method of murder is brutal and direct. There’s no messing about with endless threats and semantics. They give an approximate two-week warning, then they behead their victim before a video camera and upload the footage on to a website for all to see. They also make sure to have their hapless victim read a script, in English, accusing his country of origin of having caused his demise by waging war against the terrorist entity. 

The group’s stated aim, baldly, is to take over and subjugate the entire world, murdering those who do not convert to their twisted concept of Islam. So clearly it is not an option to evade that responsibility in any event. Anyone who has fallen into their grasp, and thus is likely bound to die, is bereft of most options. So far, their victims have been quite docile about it all -- likely feeling they have no choice. They have read their scripts obediently. 

 But as Viktor Frenkel once observed, one does always have the choice of attitude, and thought. One can choose how to die. 

 It was a point made thousands of years earlier by the great Talmudic Sage Rabbi Akiva, who was tortured to death by the Romans. Rabbi Akiva’s flesh was flayed from his body with the use of metal combs as he was roasted to death at the stake before his horrified students. And yet he gave the Romans no sign of fear, and no cry. He reassured his students, telling them he had prepared for the day that he would depart this World for the Next, to sanctify G-d’s Holy Name. At the very last when he felt his soul departing his physical body, then he called out the greatest prayer in the Jewish faith, the Shema, ending his life on the final word, acknowledging that G-d is “One.”

The Romans got nothing from Akiva, but they created an infinite Jewish martyr that day. 

 Not many can be a Rabbi Akiva. In fact I can hazard a guess that none of us in our generation are capable. I could not. But perhaps we can be a Daniel Pearl. 

 Journalist Daniel Pearl was the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. Based in Mumbai, India, he was abducted and later beheaded by a Pakistani member of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization in Pakistan. A British national of Pakistani origin who was a member of Al Qaeda was also later sentenced to death by hanging for Pearl’s murder. 

 When Pearl was kidnaped, the group first sent a list of demands to the United States. When there was no response from the government, the journalist was decapitated nine days later. But while Daniel, too, was forced to read a script prior to his beheading, he added during his recitation that a street in Israel’s city of Bnei Brak is named after his great grandfather, who was one of the founders of the town. Pearl’s family has stated that this authenticated Daniel’s own voice, and showed that to the end, he claimed the right to his own identity as a Jew. 

“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish,” he said – per the script – prior to adding that detail that made clear his pride in his heritage. It was his last act before his death on Feb. 1, 2002, but one that made a world of difference to those he left behind, and to his captors who realized that at the end, they were not the victors after all. 

 The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneerson, – the spiritual leader of the Chabad Lubavitch chassidic movement -- was arrested and held in a Bolshevik prison in Leningrad in the Soviet Union in 1927. 

Accused of “counter revolutionary activities and sentenced to death, the Rebbe was tortured repeatedly, and threatened by his jailers with firearms. 

“With this little toy, I can do you more harm than you can possibly imagine,” one of his jailers told him at one point. The Rebbe’s response was instructive. 

“This little toy is effective only in this World,” he replied. “It can do nothing to me in the Next; there it is completely harmless.” 

 Ultimately, a storm of protest by Western leaders and the International Red Cross forced the Soviet government to commute the death sentence. On 3 Tamuz he was banished to Kostroma for three years, a sentence that again was commuted, and eventually he was allowed to leave Russia altogether.  
The point is this: for every person there comes a point at which we must contemplate our final destiny, and our means of getting there. For some of us this moment comes sooner than others, and in ways far more dramatic, or frightening. Regardless, we are never at a complete loss of control. One can always choose a course of action. 

Even at the last moment, with one’s last breath, one can choose to smile, spit or say or think the Shema. In the Jewish world, we are taught that if one must die in any case, it is best to make that last moment count for yourself and for others, forever.

Anti-Israel, Anti-Semitic Attack in London July 31, 2014 - August 1, 2014

Post by Doron Ska.

To Israel’s International ‘Do Gooder’ Fan Club

August 3, 2014 - I have been sitting here at my desk since late morning, watching the ‘Code Red’ alert pop up on my screen every time there’s a launch from Gaza.

They appear every few minutes.

U.S. Congressman Mike Fitzpatrick gets it. He joined with his House colleagues to send a letter to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on July 31, pointing out that this is the third campaign by Hamas in six years, “of terrorizing a civilian population by indiscriminately firing nearly two thousand rockets into Israeli airspace. As well, Hamas has built a network of underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel with the express intent of killing and capturing Israelis.”

A few years ago, it was estimated there were more than 600 of those tunnels honeycombing the earth under Gaza and its borders with Israel, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula.

There are probably more, now. The Egyptians flooded and destroyed several hundred. Our soldiers detonated and destroyed a few dozen in the two weeks they have managed to discover and map out the ones they tracked down during Operation Protective Edge.  

By my calculation, that still leaves several hundred more, and they're still firing rockets and missiles at our civilians, attacks launched every five minutes or so.  That means that in the south, a significant portion of the population is cooped up in bomb shelters for a good part of the day, every day.

Could you live that way, with your family? How would you manage your job, or your farm if you had one? Could you work your fields like that? What about getting to your office? How about school for your children? What about getting your little ones to sleep through the night? Toilet training? Taking a shower? Intimate marital relations? A wedding night?

No one should be asked to live this way.  Israel certainly refuses to live this way any longer.

“United Nations shelters must be safe zones, not combat zones,” Ban said in one of his sanctimonious statements on Sunday after another UN school was used as a refuge for terrorists, by terrorists. But Israeli soldiers aimed as carefully as they could and returned fire to the source. The source – Hamas terrorists – then fled in a vehicle, right next to the gates to the entrance of an UNRWA school. They moved quicker than the missile of course, which struck just outside the gate – where civilians were standing around, including children, as the terrorists knew – and hoped – they would be.  It makes a great photo op!

“The Israel Defense Forces have been repeatedly informed of the location of these sites.” 

You bet, baby. By Hamas, with its mortar shelling and rocket fire.

“This attack, along with other breaches of international law, must be swiftly investigated and those responsible held accountable.”

Now wouldn’t THAT be nice?  If for once on this planet your self-righteous, pompous, bigoted world body actually did carry out a real investigation and hold those responsible for the violations of international law ?

“It is a moral outrage and a criminal act.”

Yep.  It sure is. A pity you can’t see that though.

The IDF has dropped hundreds of thousands of flyers over Gaza, begging the residents to get out of the way so we could neutralize the weapons with which we were being attacked. No one wanted to hurt them.  IDF personnel made phone calls to their homes – and to the hospitals that had to be evacuated too – and sent Arabic-language SMS text messages to all of their cell phones, letting them know where we would attack, and when. They were given plenty of notice to leave, and even directed as to where to go.

Which army in the entire world does that?

Neither of the nations of your birth – not you, Ban, nor you, Navi -- do that. That’s for damn sure. And neither does the U.S. Army. Nor does the UK. In fact, feel free to email me with the name of any other that does. I’d be pleased to know about it.

Have the people of Gaza taken the hint? Some have. 

But many have not, and instead they follow the orders of terrorist handlers and race up to rooftops like sheep, thinking we will run.

But not this time, because at last we decided it was time for their relatives to stop attacking our own innocent sleeping children. Time to hit back, and stop allowing terrorists to fire at innocent Israeli families, without firing back.

It is now 6:30 pm Sunday night, and Hamas is still firing medium range missiles at major population centers in Israel. The Code Red incoming rocket alert sirens have been blaring across the coastal city of Ashkelon, and throughout the port city of Ashdod. Literally hundreds of thousands of Israelis are racing for shelter again, and the night has barely begun. In fact, the sun hasn’t even set yet. 

Two missile were intercepted this evening over Ashdod by the Iron Dome anti-missile defense system and one exploded in the city. 

Were it not for a last-minute move by the U.S. Senate on Friday, and a signature by President Barack Obama, Israeli civilians might soon find the problem solved forever to the liking of Hamas, and perhaps the rest of the world – maybe including Ban and Pillay. Hamas has yet to exhaust its supply of missiles after all. Moreover, Iran is willing to supply more, and North Korea has just signed a contract to provide military supplies as well.

Has there been heard even one murmur of outrage from the United Nations against this incessant rain of rocket fire against Israeli civilians?

Silence.  Just silence.

Similar to the gap in the words where there should be a condemnation of ‘those responsible’ for the breach in Friday’s cease fire – the one the UN and the US forced on Israel and Hamas. The one violated by Hamas, and which resulted in the death of three young IDF officers, including two about to be married.

I'm sick to the teeth of all of it, diplomatic hypocrisy cloaked in worldly wisdom. 

Until the IDF has completed its mission in destroying the terror tunnels and silences the rocket fire, when peaceful days finally return to southern Israel, probably the less said by international ‘do gooders’ the better.

Those suffering from war crime issues, ‘moral outrage’ and ‘gross violation of international humanitarian law’ can shove them all.  Either apply your standards equally or not at all.

Spend a month in our shelters, and then let’s discuss it. And yes -- we do have shelters and the Gazans don't. Reason: we spent our money on defensive technology and shelters to protect our citizens. They spent their money on buying more weapons and building tunnels to attack our citizens.

And no, we're not going to apologize for that.

US President Barack Obama Briefs Media Friday August 1, 2014, on Hamas Breach of Cease Fire in Gaza