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“Anti-Americanism” at Rikers Island

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Colin Kaepernick is getting some heavy hitting political help starting with our own Mayor DeBlasio, who only last week gave this overtly anti-police guy the green light to address the inmates at Riker's Island, the prison that houses nearly 10,000 inmates and where attacks on the security staff is almost a daily occurrence.

Colin Kaepernick, you remember this guy, the former quarterback for the San Francisco 49’s who turned the NFL and this country upside down when he “took a knee” at the playing of The National Anthem before the start of games, in protest of what he calls “police brutality against blacks” and the corruption of America’s judicial system which he claims is geared to incarcerate blacks. Well now he has been transformed into a very dangerous folk hero by this nation’s “hate America” crowd. Sports Illustrated gave him the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award for his inspirational behavior in standing up against the evils of our government. You remember the classic words of the former boxing champ back in 1969 when being interviewed by David Frost, he stated that “All Jews” are “devils.” So Colin now inherits a bigot’s legacy?

Vanity Fair and “somebody” named Beyonce recently handed the football star a stand up shout out at this year’s Activist Awards Night. Even GQ magazine, with little else to offer its readers, named Kaepernick as “GQ’s Citizen of the Year.” This racist, radical ex-NFL’er is rising to become the latest Black Power fomentor of anarchism. But understand, there’s evidently a well laid out plan afoot to raise this guy from the gridiron and his worn out football pads to the steps leading to a guaranteed political future. Imagine–a half-black football hero and blown up “radical civil rights” champion entering the political arena! The Progressive Left has hit a gold mine.

And he’s getting some heavy hitting political help starting with our own Mayor DeBlasio, who only last week gave this overtly anti-police guy the green light to address the inmates at Riker’s Island, the prison that houses nearly 10,000 inmates and where attacks on the security staff is almost a daily occurrence. According to a report, Kaepernick talked with a group of inmates in two 45 minute sessions. He focused on the topic of the evils of our social justice system along with describing his motives for his protests where he knelt as the National Anthem was playing. He was, no doubt, spouting the mantra from the Democrat play book. The president of the Riker’s Correction Captain’s Association chimed in: “The inmates see a guy like this coming in. It’s almost like the administration is condoning being anti-law enforcement. His presence alone could incite these guys.

We’ve got enough issues in the facility with inmates assaulting staff.” But law and order advocates don’t understand it is planned that in the near future, all restrictions throughout the country, now preventing ex-cons from voting will evaporate and these hundreds of thousands of them will be casting their votes for Progressive, Marxist, Liberal Democrats such as DeBlasio, Hillary and Barack. Of course, Hizzoner and his top officials at the prison did not permit reporters or cameras to give us an insight as to what Colin told the inmates who were brought in to listen to him give his supposed words of encouragement to them to take the straight and narrow path once they are released to the streets. His was a closed meeting. Look to this guy to be a political leader in the near future. He has all the right, (oops!!) Left credentials. And at this talk he was getting his signals from the radical bench.

 

Shame on Verizon for Welcoming Jews to “Palestine” 

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Also shocked by Verizon’s Israel-Palestine misnomer was David Ben Hooren, the publisher of the Jewish Voice. During a recent trip to Israel, the staid publisher was outraged to see the “Welcome to Palestine” message on his cell phone that greeted him at Ben Gurion airport.

Over the last several years, the Jewish Voice has been fielding complaints from Israel bound tourists concerning the reprehensible message they receive on their cell phones once they arrive in the Holy Land. They are welcomed to a fictitious country known as “Palestine” which as any rational person can imagine would serve to confuse and frighten the average traveler. For the sake of clarity, it must be noted that the “Palestine” reference on cell phone text messages is only applicable if you have made the unfortunate selection of Verizon as your carrier and have signed up with their overseas phone plan. According to the most recent study of the wireless market by the research firm Strategy Analytics, Verizon was America’s largest cell carrier at the end of 2016.

Back in April of this year, JNS.org reported that a traveler to Israel named Mark Rosenblatt expressed profound dismay received a text message from his cell phone carrier, Verizon, reading, “Welcome to Palestine.” Rosenblatt, a high-tech consultant from Edgemont, N.Y said “I did a double take. I was shocked that an American company was falling into some BDS rhetoric.” He had traveled to Israel to see his daughter, who is studying in a master’s degree program at Bar-Ilan University.

Also shocked by Verizon’s Israel-Palestine misnomer was David Ben Hooren, the publisher of the Jewish Voice. During a recent trip to Israel, the staid publisher was outraged to see the “Welcome to Palestine” message on his cell phone that greeted him at Ben Gurion airport.

“This egregious message to Verizon customers visiting Israel is steeped in political overtones. Verizon should conduct an immediate internal investigation to discover the source of this offensive messaging and establish hard and fast rules and regulations that will be prevent this in the future, “ he said.

Okay. And now for Verizon’s lame response to the avalanche of complaints that they have received from very dissatisfied cell phone subscribers who just happen to be traveling to Israel.

Verizon spokesman Scott Charlston told JNS.org in a statement that Ben Gurion Airport “is close to the Israeli border [with the West Bank] and there are cell sites and wireless signals from different providers on both sides. In general, customers living in or visiting border areas occasionally receive a wireless signal from a cross-border provider. When powering up or leaving airplane mode, the phone connects to the strongest signal available at the time.”

Hmmm… Now that is an odd response. When has Ben Gurion Airport ever been described as a transportation hub that is “close to the Israeli border with the West Bank”? And more to the point, why does Verizon even proffer recognition to a country that does not exist? And why does this media giant find it difficult to rectify their egregious error and make travelers of all stripes aware that when they arrive at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, that they are “INDEED” arriving in Israel and most definitely not a country called “Palestine”?

While use of the word “Palestine” is bandied about in that cesspool of vile hate and raw anti-Semitism better known as the United Nations as well as on our nation’s left leaning, anti-Israel college campuses, it should be noted that this spurious use of a manufactured name is not in any way an imprimatur of the truth.

Letters to the Editor

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Liberals, Pensions & Trump

Dear Editor:

Down here in sunny South Florida we are inundated with a gazillion ex-New Yorkers and Jerseyites, made up of ex-teachers, and other government employees, all of whom have their pensions invested, where else(?) but joyfully in the stock market. This morning, the first thing they did upon awakening was to run to the financial section of whatever paper is delivered to their doorsteps and check out just how much their investments rose yesterday. And they were not disappointed. The market climbed to an all-time high of 24,504! They’ve been doing this since President Trump, whom they openly despise around the card table, golf courses and in the lines at Costco, took office. But when their investments that they hope to pass on to their kids are taking off like crazy, they awkwardly, grudgingly, to themselves, bless the steps Trump has taken to make them a lot more wealthy. Silent hypocrisy at work!

And these avowed Leftists, invested to the hilt in the capitalist system, are certainly not going to openly credit his fiscal policies within their social-socialistic-progressive circles. They’d be ostracized! They are Liberals who came down here to escape the burdensome, growing taxes and crimes encouraged by their former elected Democrat leaders. They are all for the government supporting the homeless, unemployed and illegal aliens but never did they include a few extra thousand bucks in their IRS payments earmarked for the aforementioned “unfortunates.” When asked if they’d rather have their government pensions invested in homeless shelters and soup kitchen enterprises they freeze into the deer in the headlights pose and remain speechless. Of course not! Are you nuts? Their lifetime accumulated savings are safely plowed into money making, profitable, anti-union, capitalistic run businesses that are out to and are, make money…….for them!

They are Socialists at heart and tell us so. Yet, at the drop of a hat, they’ll go on about how financially successful their kids are. Strange that none of them seem to have offspring that are union’d taxi drivers, shipping clerks or mere factory employees. They are hypocrites who denounce the moneyed class of which they are joyfully a part while they drive their BMW’s, board their cruise ships, fly off to China and check with their accountants about paying the least amount of taxes on their skyrocketing investment income. They bore me

Sincerely

Alan Bulwarky


The White House Chanukah Party

Dear Editor:

There has been somewhat of a controversy regarding the recent Chanukah reception at the White House as it pertains to the invite list and regarding whether American Jewish leaders and select personalities should attend.

Indeed, the supporters of the President were clamoring for an invitation and being in possession of one was considered somewhat of a status symbol.

To me personally, participating evoked an altogether different meaning. Politics and partisanship was not a factor. The purpose of partaking at the President’s Chanukah reception was an affirmation of the role of the American Jewish community as it pertains to engaging the “powers to be” at the highest level of our government.

“Bumping into a Supreme Court Justice” at the “spread” afforded Jewish leaders to advocate in an informal setting. Walking up the grand staircase into the East Room of the White House one noticed the White House Chief of Staff and the Treasury Secretary. Members of Congress and a myriad of prominent officials were mingling around allowing for relationships to be formed.

For those that know, the value of these encounters as fleeting as they are often create the conditions for concrete conversations at a mutually convenient time.

As someone who professionally represents various clients in the government relations arena, many of whom provide invaluable services benefiting the Jewish community, I am actually amazed at the level of chutzpah of anyone who can spurn the sacred duty of anyone who professes a prominent role in American Jewish life.

While I am very cognizant at the level of rancor that we are unfortunately witnessing, it is precisely our duty as responsible Jewish leaders to be able to set aside (as difficult as that can be) our profound differences so that we can break bread with those very officials that can impact the quality of life our collective constituents.

The one image that always accompanies me to the White House is the saga of the 400 Orthodox Jewish rabbis who attempted but were unfortunately unable to enter the White House in their desire to plead on behalf of European Jewry who were being murdered by the Nazis and the world including the United States was indifferent!

Who knows what lifesaving actions would or could have been taken had President Roosevelt agreed to meet the Rabbis?

We will never know, because unlike today, the doors were closed to them.

Sincerely

Ezra Friedlander

CEO of the Friedlander Group


MTA – Best Bargain in Town???

Dear Editor:

The proposal by Brooklyn New York State Senator Martin Golden and Bronx State Assembly member Jeffrey Dinowitz to offer two free transfers for those who have to ride two buses before boarding a subway is wishful thinking. People who moved to Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights, Bensonhurst, Marine Park, Gerritsen Beach and Gravesend represented by Golden knew full well that they would be living in a two fare (bus to subway) and sometimes three fare (bus to bus to subway) zone with longer commutes to and from work.

MTA services continue to be one of the best bargains in town. Since the 1950s, the average cost of riding either the bus, subway or commuter rail has gone up at a lower rate than either the consumer price index or inflation. The Metro Card introduced in 1996 affords a free transfer between bus and subway. Prior to this, riders had to pay two full fares. Purchasing either a weekly or monthly pass further reduces the cost per ride. Many employers offer transit checks, which pay up to $255 monthly toward these costs.

For years, local politicians would stir the pot on this issue. Now, the latest cause is the cost for those handful of people out of several million daily riders who have to pay two fares versus one. An overwhelming majority can afford and already purchase either a weekly or monthly unlimited Metro Card which makes the “double fare” issue moot.

Residents, taxpayers and commuters represented by State Senator Golden would be better off if he would worry more about how the State Legislature will find the $5.8 billion balance Governor Andrew Cuomo still owes to bridge the $8.3 billion shortfall in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $32 billion 2015–2019 Five Year Capital Plan plus $1 billion more in emergency funds to deal with last summer’s NYC Transit subway & Long Island Rail Road East River tunnel signal crises.

In the end, it all comes down to the availability of increased funding for additional transportation service to serve residents of two fare zones in the outer boroughs. Operating subsidies are required to increase the level of service and reduce the amount of time one waits for a bus on existing routes. Same for adding more off-peak, late night and weekend service.

Sincerely,

Larry Penner

(Larry Penner is a transportation historian and advocate who previously worked 31 years for the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Transit Administration Region 2 NY Office)

Long History of Hypocrisy About Jerusalem

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Running for president in 2008, Barack Obama called Jerusalem the "capital of Israel." In one of his last acts in office, he engineered a UN Security Council Resolution declaring Jewish holy places in Jerusalem to be occupied territory.
Bill Clinton declared that Jerusalem is the “capital of Israel” and “must remain an undivided city” while running for president in 1992. George W. Bush pledged as a candidate in 2000 to “begin the process of moving” the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as soon as he took office.

President Donald Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel had barely sunk in when predictions of a looming catastrophe started to make waves in the mainstream liberal media.

Not surprisingly, Tony Burman, former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News, warned in the Toronto Star that “(recognizing Jerusalem) foreshadows a dangerous new phase in the conflict that will encourage extremists on both sides to reach for the gun and engulf the region in violence.”

For over 15 years American presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have declared they believe Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and promised to move the U.S. embassy to the city, but stepped back when confronted by possible repercussions to their supposedly principled stand.

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul

In 1992, Bill Clinton declared, “Jerusalem is still the capital of Israel and must remain an undivided city accessible to all.”

He was followed by George W. Bush in 2000, who made the following promise: “As soon as I take my office I will begin the process of moving the United States Ambassador to the city Israel has chosen as its capital (Jerusalem).”

Perhaps the tumultuous years following the 9/11 attack by al-Qaida on the U.S. put the issue of Jerusalem on the back burner, but when the White House returned to Democratic hands, Barack Obama took an even more vigorous stand supporting Israel than his predecessors.

In 2008, Obama not only asserted his support of Jerusalem being the capital of Israel, but emphasized, “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and must remain undivided.”

The fact Turkey has now taken the lead to speak for the Palestinians is rich with irony considering the Ottoman Turks colonized the Arabs for over 600 years and Jerusalem was kept a backwater city of no significance. As the Pakistani historian Mobarak Haidar recently wrote, “Muslims of the world have no religious basis to rule Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem was conquered by the Arab armies of Caliph Omar in 637, not because the Qur’an or Prophet Muhammad had ordained it to be Islamic, but because it was part of the war the expanding Arabs were fighting with the Byzantines.

Decades after conquering Jerusalem from the Christian Byzantines, Muslim caliphs of the Umayyad royalty in 715AD built a sanctuary in Jerusalem on top of the Jewish Temple Mount, and called it the Al-Aqsa Mosque, thus retroactively giving the city a role in Prophet Muhammad’s life.

The Dome on the Rock was used for a parallel Hajj by the Damascus caliphs to compete with Mecca’s Kaaba that was ruled by another competing caliph, Abdullah Bin Zubair.

Muslims did pray towards Jerusalem because of its connections to Abraham and because Mecca was still in pagan hands, but when Jews rejected Prophet Muhammad as the promised messiah, and Mecca was cleared of idols, Muslims turned their backs on Jerusalem.

We Muslims need to be a bit more honest than we profess to be. Imagine if Ethiopia invaded Mecca and built a church over the Kaaba, then claimed the city.

We have done this elsewhere, whether it was converting St. Sophia Cathedral into the Hagia Sophia mosque in Turkey, or destroying the Hindu temple considered the birthplace of Lord Rama and building the Babri Mosque over it in India.

It is time for us to show remorse, to stop playing the victim because, other than the likes of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, no one is listening. (Middle East Forum)

Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

By: Tarek Fatah

 

Preventing a “Red” Holiday Season – Religious Freedom Means Keeping Terrorists Out

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Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi Muslim living in Brooklyn, really hated Christmas. He hated Christmas so much that he used Christmas tree lights (along with a battery and some wire) as a trigger for a pipe bomb. He filled the pipe bomb with screws so that when it went off, metal shrapnel would tear bloody holes through morning commuters in Manhattan.

Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi Muslim living in Brooklyn, really hated Christmas. He hated Christmas so much that he used Christmas tree lights (along with a battery and some wire) as a trigger for a pipe bomb. He filled the pipe bomb with screws so that when it went off, metal shrapnel would tear bloody holes through morning commuters in Manhattan.

Wearing a hooded jacket and a backpack to cover the pipe bomb strapped to his body, Ullah got on the F Train at the 18th Avenue elevated subway station off Little Bangladesh. Like the Duke Ellington song says, he switched over to the A Train at Jay Street. It was early morning, but there were plenty of people riding the train. Jay Street is a major transit hub. But Ullah was waiting to blow up somewhere else.

He got off in the crush at the 42nd-St. Port Authority station. Here a whole lot of people can be found rushing up and down crowded staircases and shoving their way through cramped corridors.

Ullah took the long underground corridor that runs between the Port Authority station and Times Square. He strode past movie and beauty ads. He walked under the discouraging poem, “Overslept, So tired, If late, Get fired, Why bother? Why the pain? Just go home. Do it again.” But he wasn’t going home. And there would be no opportunities to do it again. The Muslim terrorist was right on time.

Rush hour was just getting started in the city that never sleeps. The Muslim terrorist probably passed hundreds of people: not to mention a saxophonist or drummer trying out his act on tired commuters.

But he was waiting for something else. Finally he saw it. A Christmas poster.

That’s when he detonated the pipe bomb using a Christmas tree light near a Christmas poster. Because if there was one thing that Akayed Ullah, like his ISIS masters truly hated, it was Christmas.

Last month, ISIS supporters had circulated a poorly photoshopped poster of Santa next to a box of dynamite overlooking Times Square. “We meet at Christmas in New York… soon,” it read.

As he walked toward Times Square, Ullah appeared determined to carry out the ISIS threat. Using a Christmas tree light in his bomb and detonating near a Christmas poster was a clear statement.

Ullah came to this country in 2011. Three years later, he had already been ‘radicalized’. The Bangladeshi terrorist had come here on a chain migration link that began with a diversity lottery visa. But Ullah didn’t actually like diversity. He didn’t want to share a city or country with Christians.

And so he set out to kill them.

In Ullah’s native Bangladesh, Christian churches have shut down midnight mass before due to threats of violence.

“This is the first time in my life that I find Christians celebrating Christmas with such panic and fear,” the Bangladesh Christian Association secretary general had said.

But with the diversity visa lottery, you don’t have to be a Christian living in Bangladesh to be terrorized by Bangladeshi Muslim violence.

And maybe that’s a diversity we could do without.

That same year, Bangladeshi authorities stopped a Christmas Day plot that involves a suicide bomb vest. But this year, America had its very own Bangladeshi suicide bomber. Christians are readying to celebrate Christmas in Bangladeshi churches this year with metal detectors and thousands of security personnel.

But these days that’s not just Christmas in Bangladesh. It’s Christmas in Europe.

Muslim Christmas violence spread terror across Europe last year. These ranged from the ‘Kindergarten bomber’, a 12-year-old Iraqi who planted a nail bomb in a German Christmas market to the Tunisian refugee who rammed a truck into another German Christmas market killing 12 people and wounding 68. These days, German Christmas markets come with car barriers that are gift wrapped with bows.

An estimated 29 ‘lone wolves’ were arrested last year in Christmas terror plots in the UK, France, Brussels and Australia. A number of these plots targeted Christmas markets, carnivals and cathedrals.

The year before, a Pakistani married couple had opened fire at a Christmas party at the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino. The worst half of the couple had groused about the Christmas decorations. Previous attack plots had included the Christmas Day bomber (the Nigerian terrorist also known as the underwear bomber) and Portland’s Somali Christmas tree lighting bomb plot.

This is what a religious war looks like.

Muslim violence spikes around Ramadan, and around Christian and Jewish holidays, because Islamic violence is inherently religious in nature. Islamic Supremacist terrorists like Ullah are lashing out at non-Islamic religions in order to clear the way for the imposition of Islamic rule.

Mayor Bill de Blasio, the lefty pol who dismantled the NYPD’s counterterrorism programs at the behest of Islamist pressure groups, insisted at the post-attack press conference that, “We actually show that society of many faiths and many backgrounds can work.”

A society of many faiths can work. As long as all of them practice mutual tolerance.

When a society includes Akayed Ullah, Sayfullo Saipov, the Uzbeki Muslim who ran over tourists on a Manhattan bike path in October, Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the Afghan who set off bombs in New York and New Jersey last year, Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani who tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square, Talha Haroon, another Pakistani who wanted to massacre New Yorkers in Times Square, Quazi Mohammad, another Bangladeshi who wanted to bomb the Federal Reserve and Raees Qazi, another Pakistani who scouted Times Square for an attack, that society can’t and won’t work.

You can’t coexist with people who refuse to coexist with you. They’re just ticking time bombs. Like Ullah riding the F Train and then the A Train while the passengers around him unthinkingly played games or clicked through Trump headlines not knowing that he could have detonated the bomb at any moment.

There are plenty of Ullahs all around us. Sometimes they wait years before blowing up. Other times hours and minutes. If we’re unlucky, it’s seconds. But the bombs, real and metaphorical, are there.

This is life in a society that has opened its borders to migrants from Islamic states where terrorism isn’t a horrifying aberration, but an ancient religious tradition to which the penitent sinner may turn to when his life no longer seems to have purpose or meaning. This is how we live now. And it will get worse.

Our politicians tout diversity after every attack. They tell us how much it enriches and improves us.

Akayed Ullah was a livery cab driver. His predecessor, Sayfullo Saipov, was an Uber driver. Do we really need two cab drivers so badly that we have to accept eight deaths and sixteen injuries in exchange?

Could we get our cab drivers from somewhere beyond Bangladesh and Uzbekistan?

We don’t have to live like this. We’re only living like this because we’ve been told that it would be mean and unfair of us to actually have a common sense immigration policy that keeps Islamic terrorists out.

The question is would we rather be mean to the Uber drivers of tomorrow or sit next to a ticking time bomb waiting to detonate at the first sight of a Christmas poster?

We’ve been told often enough that a common sense travel ban would violate religious freedom. But the greatest violation of religious freedom isn’t a selective immigration policy, it’s being murdered for your religion. That’s not just the reality in Bangladesh. It’s now the reality in America and Europe.

The diversity visa lottery has brought us the wrong kind of diversity. Our cities have become a diverse assortment of immigrants who will and won’t kill you over your religion. There isn’t much religious diversity in Bangladesh, Pakistan or Afghanistan. If we want to preserve our own religious diversity from going the same way, we have to exclude those immigrants who would kill anyone who is different.

And we need to hurry because the Ullahs of tomorrow are applying for their visas today.

By: Daniel Greenfield
(Front Page Mag)

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism

 

Think the Alabama Result Has Derailed Donald Trump? Think Again!

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President Donald Trump signs the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2018, at the White House, December 12, 2017. (Image source: The White House)

Pundits are furiously assessing the broader consequences of the Democrats’ upset Senate victory in Alabama on Tuesday, but there is less there than meets the eye. True, the Republican Senate majority now hangs by a thread, forcing even harder fights for every legislative victory.

Nonetheless, Republican chances for major gains in November 2018, perhaps six or seven Senate seats, remain strong. Moreover, Democrat Al Franken is resigning his seat any day now because of sexual misconduct charges, bringing another totally unexpected Republican opportunity.

Of course, any statewide Democratic victory in Alabama is stunning, but there were also stunning reasons for it. Republican Roy Moore was a flawed candidate even before allegations of sexual misconduct emerged – and he still lost by just one percentage point.

The winner, Doug Jones, will likely be defeated at the next regular election in 2020. The stakes have unquestionably been raised, but President Trump and Republicans hold a strong hand.

At some point, Democrats will have to declare what they believe in. Just as Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” 2016 victor, fell from grace when she revealed her beliefs, so too will legions of aspiring Democrats.

Trump is also demonstrating how a President can continue to command the national agenda, regardless of the comings and goings of domestic politics. For all these reasons, those who think Alabama marks the beginning of the end for Trump should think again. This is not even the end of the beginning.

There is no better proof of this than his foreign policy moves thus far.

They have not only shown him to be a dogged defender of American interests but an effective one too. Take his announcement that the US will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It is further unassailable evidence that he is not a status quo President.

Despite the anticipated opposition across the Middle East and Europe, apocalyptic predictions of mass rioting by the “Arab street” and the destruction of the “peace process”, Trump proceeded nonetheless.

The evidence so far is that widespread violence has not materialized and, inevitably, the Arab-Israeli peace process will rise again. Trump’s decision was an act of leadership, a paradigmatic act of realpolitik, not isolationism.

American leadership requires acting before others are willing to do so, not following some ephemeral global consensus, or waiting for Europeans or others to make up their minds.

Moreover, the Jerusalem precedent is consistent with the picture of Trump the “disrupter”. He withdrew America from the Paris Climate accord and from negotiations over a Global Compact on Migration. Similar steps to protect American sovereignty will almost certainly follow.

Trump’s rejection of “feel good” treaties in favor of concrete steps to protect American citizens and national interests will be vindicated. Indeed, the greatest “disrupter” decision for Trump may still lie ahead: how to correct nearly three decades of failure in the nuclear counterproliferation crusade, as North Korea and Iran grow close to becoming nuclear powers.

The same Establishment foreign policy cognoscenti who rejected Jerusalem as Israel’s capital have insisted for 25 years that the judicious application of diplomacy and economic sanctions would resolve the Iranian and North Korean nuclear-proliferation threats.

But this conventional wisdom has been proven flatly wrong. No less a representative of this perspective than Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s last national security adviser, conceded this summer that it had not delivered: “You can call it a failure. I accept that characterization over the last two decades.” No kidding. And no wonder Trump is looking for alternatives.

Twenty-five years of diplomatic failure has significant consequences. Endless negotiations and failed sanctions have wasted the most precious resource of all: time — time which has allowed Iran and North Korea to overcome the scientific and technological obstacles to building nuclear weapons.

Accordingly, Trump now faces extremely unattractive choices. The most pressing concerns North Korea. Unless China acts decisively, cutting off fuel and food shipments to the regime, forcing reunification with South Korea or replacing the Kim family dictatorship, the White House will soon face a binary choice: either Washington must accept a nuclear North Korea, or military force will be required.

The unpleasant alternative of pre-emptive military force is decidedly risky, but considerably less so than a future in which the world is subject to nuclear extortion by Kim’s bizarre regime — a regime perfectly prepared to sell nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to any bidder with the requisite hard currency.

Tut-tutting about where the United States locates its embassy in Israel simply obscures the far harder choices ahead. Let’s keep our priorities straight. Trump has shown every evidence he can do so.

By: John R. Bolton
(Gatestone Institute)

John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, is Chairman of Gatestone Institute, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad”.

This article first appeared in The Daily Telegraph and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

 

Ending the Silence on Sexual Abuse

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A story about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein (pictured) has led to what may well be a crucial turning point in the way sexual misconduct is viewed, writes JNS Editor in Chief Jonathan S. Tobin. Credit: David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons.

In the last two months, the avalanche of stories about sexual abuse and harassment has touched virtually every sector of American society. The revelations about deeply troubling behavior on the part of politicians, journalists and figures in the entertainment world have transfixed the country. As more victims come forward to tell their stories, the consequences have gone beyond the disgrace of some prominent individuals, the end of careers and, in Alabama, a surprising election result. What began with a shocking story about movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has led to what may well be a crucial turning point in the way sexual misconduct is viewed.

We are no longer in an era in which all forms of abuse—be it violent crime, abuse of minors as well as unwanted physical touching, abusive verbal comments and forms of pressure—that might have once been viewed as permissible if unpleasant behavior can be ignored or dismissed.

Under these circumstances, it is only to be expected that some of these stories would involve the Jewish community. This week’s JNS concerning alleged abuse carried out by a since-retired United Synagogue Youth (USY) director follows the same pattern of the rest of the #metoo scandals. A powerful person used his position to carry out sexual abuse, in this case, against minors. The victims felt unable to step forward at the time, both because of the shame they were made to feel by the predator and also because they felt nobody in a position to do something about it would listen. Organizations that should have been on guard against abuse were, like the rest of society, not listening or indifferent about what was going on under their noses.

The Conservative movement responsible for the USY program in question was not alone in this respect as such scandals have, in one form or another, touched other Jewish denominations. To its credit, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism appears now to have taken appropriate action, not only to sever any ties with alleged abusers, but also to ensure, as much as it is possible, that similar misconduct doesn’t recur.

This story is so similar to numerous other sex scandals that many readers who have become so accustomed to such discussions may have lost their ability to be shocked by the topic. But it is also true that there will be some in the Jewish world who, while eagerly consuming accounts of the various stories about celebrities who have been exposed as abusers, don’t want accounts of misconduct within their own community to be published.

The impulse to regard journalism about bad behavior by Jews—especially those connected to vital Jewish organizations—that are published in the Jewish press as an unnecessary airing of dirty laundry is, in one sense, understandable. Such stories are seen as something that ought to be kept in the family and away from the view of outsiders who might use them to denigrate Jews or harm Jewish institutions. There will always be a tendency to regard any accounts that portray Jewish life in an unflattering context as betrayals of tribal loyalty if they come from Jewish sources.

But as it should have already become clear as society comes to grip with the pervasive nature of sexual harassment, keeping quiet does nobody any good. The mindset that regarded the reporting of such crimes and misbehavior as bad form or disreputable scandal mongering, or what Jewish tradition regards as “lashon hara,” is a big part of the problem that enabled the abusers to get away with their crimes for so long. When

The New York Jewish Week reported on the abuse going on at the Orthodox movement’s NCSY in 2000, it was subjected to a storm of criticism from those who thought this wasn’t the sort of thing Jewish publications should publish. But it is exactly that kind of reporting that is a necessary precondition for action that will prevent future crimes of this nature.

While there may still be some Jewish readers who prefer to avert their eyes from coverage of these issues like this week’s JNS story or even to criticize us for publishing it, responsible Jewish journalists cannot be part of a conspiracy of silence about this or any other subject that directly affects the welfare of the community. It is the duty of JNS and every other reputable outlet of Jewish journalism to responsibly report the facts about sexual misconduct. That obligation is even more important when the safety of children is at stake.

The days when the predators could count on the silence of the Jewish world to protect them from the consequences of their crimes should be over. Let’s be sure never again to let a desire to avoid negative coverage of our own community lead us to keep quiet about criminal acts. Never again should such sentiments serve as an excuse for the sort of coverups that are part of the reason why it took so long for us to learn the awful truth about this subject.

By: Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS.org)

 

New Book, Same Old Smears – Vilifying the Counterjihadists

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Simen Ekern's Folket, Det Er Meg (I Am the People).
Within a week after July 22, 2011 – the day Anders Behring Breivik (pictured above) massacred seventy-seven people in and near Oslo, proclaiming that he was motivated by hostility to Europe’s Islamization – Ekern, then a staffer at the newspaper Dagbladet, argued passionately that critics of Islam shared blame for the murders

“That’s a really good one,” the clerk told me.

I was the only customer in the bookstore, and when he’d seen me paging through a slim new volume about the current wave of “populism” in Europe, he’d left his cash register, walked over to me, and begun waxing enthusiastic about it. He explained that he was just about finished reading it, and he repeated, not once but twice, that it was just plain terrific.

It was last Friday, and I was at the Oslo Airport, and he turned out not to have in stock the book I was looking for, so I bought the one he recommended: Simen Ekern’s Folket, Det Er Meg (I Am the People). I was struck by buyer’s remorse even before I’d actually paid for it – first, because, even with today’s strong dollar, it cost the equivalent of $42 (welcome to the land of state-mandated book prices), and second, because on the way to the sales counter I’d recognized Ekern’s name. Within a week after July 22, 2011 – the day Anders Behring Breivik massacred seventy-seven people in and near Oslo, proclaiming that he was motivated by hostility to Europe’s Islamization – Ekern, then a staffer at the newspaper Dagbladet, argued passionately that critics of Islam shared blame for the murders. My name led his list. He questioned our right to freedom of speech, because “our society is not improved by cultivating ever more ‘honest’ and ‘brave’ warlike Crusader rhetoric directed against Islam.”

Bruce Bawer writes: “Ekern would have us believe that the father of today’s counterjihad movement in Europe is the 89-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen (pictured above) – a Jew-hater who shrugs off the Holocaust and liked Mussolini. Ekern spends a whole chapter reminding us, over and over, just how despicable Le Pen is – and implying that if we support border controls or hate the EU, we’re in league with this old fascist”

Ekern wasn’t alone. In the days and weeks after July 22 pretty much the entire Norwegian establishment sought to use the Breivik massacre as an excuse to demonize and silence critics of Islam. Some of the nation’s most respected commentators talked seriously about curtailing our free-speech rights and making arrests. With his op-ed, Ekern, a relatively young man, made it clear to the big boys that he was with them – a solid establishment lackey. I see that he’s profited well from his loyalty: last December, I see, he was awarded two million kroner ($200,000) in taxpayer funds to write about foreign affairs. This is how things work in Norway: the proles are overtaxed, and much of that dough is then used to propagandize them: the nation’s top media organization, state-run NRK, is a shameless tool of the political elite; major dailies get government subsidies (without them, Dagbladet would probably have folded years ago), and hacks like Ekern are paid handsomely to churn out establishment agitprop disguised as journalism.

Which is exactly what Ekern’s new book is. Bearing the subtitle The Growth and Future of Right-Wing European Populism, it professes to be a work of reportage about what you or I might call the counterjihad movement – as well as of that overlapping body of Europeans who want out of the EU. In fact, it’s pro-elite PR. Still, I ended up being glad I bought it, because it proved to be a near-perfect example of its genre, and therefore worthy of study. To read it is to enter into the mind of a card-carrying member of the European establishment – a fellow who wants the deplorables to shut up and let their betters (himself included) go back to running things.

Bruce Bawer writes: “According to Ekern, the reason why so many Europeans have rejected mainstream parties is, quite simply, that they’ve been misled and manipulated – whipped up into an artificial frenzy by people like Geert Wilders, (pictured above) who don’t really care about immigration or freedom, only about power.

Although he specializes in skirting facts, Ekern kicks off his book – wisely – by getting out of the way those facts that are simply too big to ignore – which is to say, he quickly lists the major recent terrorist attacks in Europe. But he doesn’t dwell on them, doesn’t admit that they’re rooted in mainstream Islamic theology, doesn’t acknowledge that many “moderate” European Muslims cheer violent jihad, and doesn’t point out that terrorism is, indeed, only one aspect of a full-court European jihad that involves a range of gradual cultural and social transformations. He also denies – and this is the fulcrum on which his whole argument turns – that Europeans’ legitimate concerns about Islam (even when combined with their anger at politicians and the EU) are enough to explain the rise of “right-wing populism.” No, according to Ekern, the reason why so many Europeans have rejected mainstream parties is, quite simply, that they’ve been misled and manipulated – whipped up into an artificial frenzy by people like Geert Wilders, who don’t really care about immigration or freedom, only about power.

While he derides Wilders and other “populists,” Ekern cites with respect and deference a host of establishment nabobs. He approvingly quotes European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, for example, to the effect that populism, not Islam, is the chief danger facing Europe today. He gives a thumbs-up to Olivier Roy’s contention that violence by European Muslims is rooted not in their religion but in the supposed fact that they inhabit an “identity vacuum” that makes them neither truly French nor truly Algerian or Tunisian or whatever. (Why is it always Muslims, and never members of other immigrant groups, for whom such excuses need to be invented?) Ekern also approves of Sudhir Hazareesingh’s assertion that those who prophesy France’s doom at the hands of Islam are extremely light on facts. Bull: one book alone that comes immediately to mind, Laurent Obertone’s 2013 La France Orange méchanique, is almost nothing but facts, a paralyzing litany of what Obertone calls acts of “violence of conquest” by Muslims in France.

By contrast to Obertone, Ekern is a master at evading facts – immigration numbers, crime statistics, the percentage of Muslims in this or that country who favor sharia law and support jihad. He sneers consistently at the “populists’” who claim to be speaking for “the real people,” but he never faces up to the fact that ordinary European citizens – yes, “the real people” – were never asked whether they wanted their countries to be flooded by Muslims. Nor does he admit that most Europeans want a full halt to Muslim immigration. He ridicules the idea that “fundamentalist Islam” is “a totalitarian ideology.” He’s disgusted by ethnic Europeans who consider some European-born Muslims part of the “other.” (Never mind that millions of such Muslims dream of a sharia-run Europe.) Ekern actually describes the counterjihad movement, which is all about defending free civilization and fighting barbarity, as a campaign “against cultural and economic liberalism.” He acts as if the movement is hostile to all immigrants. He even portrays it as a reaction to “modernity.”

What, Ekern asks, are the roots of Europe’s “populism”? If he were more honest, he might have told the story of Enoch Powell, the brilliant, supremely decent British MP whose 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech destroyed his career and is now recognized as remarkably prescient. Or Ekern might have summed up the heroic career of Pim Fortuyn, the gay, left-wing sociology professor whose awakening about the dangers of Islam led him from the academy into politics and, in 2002, thanks to a pro-Islam assassin, into an early grave.

But no: Ekern would have us believe that the father of today’s counterjihad movement in Europe is the 89-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen – a Jew-hater who shrugs off the Holocaust and liked Mussolini. Ekern spends a whole chapter reminding us, over and over, just how despicable Le Pen is – and implying that if we support border controls or hate the EU, we’re in league with this old fascist. Ekern spends another chapter trying to convince us that Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, head of France’s National Front, shares her dad’s beliefs: it’s only a matter, you see, of “decoding” her rhetoric. (One is reminded here of the White House correspondents to whom every word out of Donald Trump’s mouth is a “dog whistle.”)

In his taxpayer-funded travels, Ekern interviews “populist” leaders from France, Italy, Germany, and elsewhere. But not Wilders. (A planned meeting with the Dutch leader is mysteriously cancelled, and Ekern wonders aloud whether it’s because one of Wilders’ people read about Ekern in my e-book. The very thought delights me.) But he doesn’t talk to any ordinary Europeans who have seen their worlds turned upside down by mass Islamic immigration. He doesn’t meet any Muslim imams or any of the innumerable Muslim women who, though living in Europe, are as deprived of basic civil rights as they were back in their homelands. Muslim gays? Nope.

Nor does he interview a single author who has made a specialty of this topic. He obviously considers me and his fellow Norwegian Peder Nøstvold Jensen (“Fjordman”) to be beyond the pale – but what about Britain’s Douglas Murray, Germany’s Henryk Broder, Italy’s Giulio Meotti, and France’s Guy Millière, just to name a few? These are smart, well informed, and deeply humane guys – not to mention splendid writers – who have arrived at their dire forecasts about Europe’s Islamic future after long and sober reflection. One suspects that Ekern prefers interviewing insurgent politicians to interviewing serious writers because the politicians’ rhetoric is easier to mock and their motives easier to question.

Avoiding conversations with writers like Murray, Broder, et al., also makes it easier for Ekern, in his closing pages, to sum up his ideological adversaries’ views in a way that absolutely none of them would recognize. They want, he says, a government with “an uncompromising attitude” toward immigrants. No, they just don’t want their countries flooded with illegal aliens, foreign criminals, instant welfare recipients, and ISIS fans. On his very last page, Ekern introduces subjects that haven’t figured at all in his book. Suddenly, and bizarrely, he wants us to believe that European “populism” isn’t really about Islam at all but about – get this – opposition to same-sex marriage, distaste for contemporary art, and a desire to be able to slur dark-skinned people with impunity. How, asks Ekern, can leaders like Wilders and Le Pen say that they speak for ordinary people, when ordinary people “are also women, minorities, gays, cyclists, and contemporary artists”? Cyclists? Art? What? (As for gays, it’s not Wilders & co. who want to throw them off roofs.)

I started reading Ekern’s book at Oslo Airport, and stayed with it on the flight to Hamburg. After taking the subway from Hamburg Airport to the main train station, I walked toward my hotel down a street called Steindamm. The first thing I noticed was the armies of women in hijab on the sidewalk. The second thing I noticed was that more of the signs on the stores I passed were in Arabic or Turkish than in German. There were a couple of travel agencies, with window posters advertising flights to Ankara, Islamabad, Peshawar, Shiraz, Kabul. Then, on the right, rising above the tops of the buildings, I saw a steeple – no, not a steeple; a minaret.

Turning onto a side street, I found my hotel – right next to a small shop with a sign in both German and Arabic that identified it as several things at once: an Internet café; a place where you could “buy” and “sell” (it didn’t say what); a “repair service” (but, again, it wasn’t clear what they repaired); and a place where you could carry out money transfers. Over the course of the weekend, at various hours of the day and late into the night, I saw streams of young non-German men – no women – going in and out of that shop, and what was odd that none of them took anything in or brought anything out, and all of them emerged almost immediately after entering, not having spent enough time in there to transfer money, go online, or do much of anything else. Perhaps it was all entirely innocent, but it certainly got my attention and aroused my curiosity.

Anyway, the bottom line is clear. A new Europe is being born. Whether you consider it a delight or a disaster, the change is real, dramatic, colossal. And yet Simen Ekern, like so many other media hacks on the old continent, is determined to downplay it all – determined to pretend that the European masses, far from reacting to the palpable, world-historic transformation of their own towns and cities, are being hoodwinked by a handful of haters.

By: Bruce Bawer
(Front Page Mag)

Bruce Bawer is the author of “While Europe Slept,” “Surrender,” and “The Victims’ Revolution.” His novel “The Alhambra” has just been published.

 

 

Operation Finale: The Capture & Trial of Adolf Eichmann Exhibition in NYC Extended Until January

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In response to popular demand, the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust announces the extension of the acclaimed exhibition, Operation Finale: The Capture & Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Originally scheduled to close on December 22, 2017, the exhibition has been extended to Sunday, January 14, 2018.

Extended for a Limited Time Only to Sunday, January 14, 2018

Short films within Operation Finale allow exhibition-goers to hear directly from the international agents that caught the SS lieutenant colonel and the legal team that prosecuted him. An immersive installation housing the original iconic original bulletproof glass booth from which a dispassionate Eichmann testified drops visitors right into the historic 1961 trial.

In response to popular demand, the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust announces the extension of the acclaimed exhibition, Operation Finale: The Capture & Trial of Adolf Eichmann. Originally scheduled to close on December 22, 2017, the exhibition has been extended to Sunday, January 14, 2018.

The Nazi responsible for the murder of millions of innocent people might well have lived out his days in Argentina as “Ricardo Klement,” if fate, a Holocaust survivor, and Israel’s foreign intelligence service had not intervened. Featuring recently declassified artifacts and immersive multimedia presentations, the exhibition reveals the secret history behind the capture, extradition, and trial of one of the world’s most notorious war criminals.

Operation Finale: The Capture & Trial of Adolf Eichmann opened on July 16, 2017 and has been viewed by thousands of visitors, including school groups.

“The public’s response has been phenomenal to this powerful exhibition that presents the incredible but true espionage story of finding the Nazi who helped plan the murder of millions of Jews during the Holocaust, how he was brought to justice, and how the world responded,” said Museum President and CEO Michael S. Glickman. “Visitors have the opportunity to experience the intrigue of Eichmann’s capture and the impact that resulted from the revelation of details of Nazi atrocities and survivor testimony as these came to the world stage.”

Surrounded by archival film footage, visitors become immersed in a courtroom setting, watching Eichmann, projected into the original bullet-proof glass booth where he sat dispassionately throughout the trial listening to eyewitness accounts of the brutality of the Nazi regime and their collaborators.

Operation Finale references the code name given by the Mossad to capture and abduct Eichmann. “The exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to view for the first time in New York the impressive pre-digital-era espionage with all of its accompanying maps, case files, hand-forged documents, and a pair of goggles used to obscure Eichmann’s vision during the abduction,” says former agent and espionage expert Avner Avraham, who curated the materials for the Mossad in Israel. With 130 original artifacts and photographs, the exhibition details exactly how agents located a perpetrator of “The Final Solution” hiding in South America and smuggled him to Israel to stand trial for crimes against the Jewish people.

Short films within Operation Finale allow exhibition-goers to hear directly from the international agents that caught the SS lieutenant colonel and the legal team that prosecuted him. An immersive installation housing the original iconic original bulletproof glass booth from which a dispassionate Eichmann testified drops visitors right into the historic 1961 trial. Although it was more than 15 years after the end of World War II, this was the first time many survivors publicly shared their stories that were broadcast across the globe, providing a deeper, more complete understanding of the Holocaust that became not only a living part of Jewish identity, but of the world’s conscience.

Operation Finale illustrates the enormity of the crimes committed during the Nazi regime and explores issues of justice and accountability. A high school dropout who lost his job as salesmen during the Depression in 1933, Eichmann rose to prominence in the Nazi party by zealously applying his logistical skills to the efficient execution of state-sponsored genocide. He never expressed remorse. “I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty,” he wrote, asking for clemency.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is located at 36 Battery Place in Lower Manhattan and is open Sunday through Friday. Phone: 646.437.4202 Website: www.mjhnyc.org

Operation Finale is presented as part of the Museum’s 20th Anniversary Commemoration with major support provided by The David Berg Foundation, Bruce C. Ratner, and the Bernard and Anne Spitzer Charitable Trust.

This exhibition has been made possible with a generous grant from the Maltz Family Foundation.

The New York presentation is made possible by George Klein, Paler Foundation, and Leonard N. Stern Charitable Fund.

Additional support is provided by Eugene and Emily Grant Family Foundation, The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, R. David Sudarsky Charitable Trust, Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation, and The Nancy Fisher Family Fund.

Operation Finale is a co–production of The Mossad–Israel Secret Intelligence Service; Beit Hatfutsot–The Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv, Israel; and the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, Cleveland, Ohio.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE – A LIVING MEMORIAL TO THE HOLOCAUST

The Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust has thrived for two decades along the waterfront of New York Harbor, and was created as a living memorial to those who perished, as well as those who survived, 75 years ago. The Museum is the second largest Holocaust museum in the United States and the third largest in the world. Established as a place of learning and reflection, a repository for artifacts and information, and a catalyst for dialogue across all age groups about vital lessons of Jewish history, the Museum serves both local and global communities and creates opportunities for diverse audiences to engage with history and to consider its relevance to the present.

Since 1997, the Museum of Jewish Heritage has welcomed more than two million visitors; it maintains a collection of more than 30,000 artifacts, photographs, documentary films, and survivor testimonies and contains classrooms, a 400-seat theater (Edmond J. Safra Hall), special exhibition galleries, a resource center for educators, and a memorial art installation, Garden of Stones, designed by internationally acclaimed sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. The Museum works globally through its Auschwitz Jewish Center in Poland, and JewishGen.org is the Museum’s online resource that provides access to one of the largest collections of Jewish historical material anywhere in the world–more than 22 million documents.

The Museum receives general operating support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.

For more information, visit www.mjhnyc.org

Edited by: JV Staff

 

New Documentary Reflects on the Diversity & Rising Popularity of Israeli Cuisine

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Film director Roger Sherman samples Israeli cuisine. Credit: “In Search of Israeli Cuisine” press photo
Chef and restaurateur Michael Solomonov (left) at the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv. Credit: “In Search of Israeli Cuisine” press photo

When film director and producer Roger Sherman referred to Israel as one of the “hottest food scenes in the world,” his colleagues laughed. It was at that moment that Sherman knew he had discovered a subject for a successful film.

Indeed, he had.

Sherman’s documentary, “In Search of Israeli Cuisine,” featuring world-renowned chef and restaurateur Michael Solomonov, has played in 38 theaters across the U.S. and more than 150 around the world on the film festival circuit. The documentary is now available on Netflix.

The film’s success is reflected not only in its ability to reach wide audiences, but also in showing a side of Israel that very few knew existed—including Israelis themselves, who turned to Sherman after screenings to admit that they learned various new things about their own cuisine and heritage.

Chef and restaurateur Michael Solomonov (left) with a tray of bourekas. Credit: “In Search of Israeli Cuisine” press photo

Yet according to the director, the film still seeks to educate the masses who are largely “clueless” about Israel—including Sherman himself, who describes himself as “naive” on that topic before visiting the Jewish state to shoot the film.

“While I don’t consider this to be a historical film, we do tie together the historical aspects of immigration, how poor the country was, and how cuisine started and developed,” Sherman tells JNS.

“We don’t get the full picture from the [United] States, only the bad picture and bad news,” he says. “So it came as a surprise to me when I found out about Israel’s technological advances, agricultural advances, and that Israel has some of the happiest people in the world despite being surrounded by hatred.”

Solomonov, who was born in Israel and grew up in Pittsburgh, co-owns and runs Zahav, a modern Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia. The chef tells JNS he was happy that through the film, he could “personally make a case for Israel, outside of politics.”

In Sherman’s estimation, the film conveys a “portrait of the Israeli people, as told through food, conflict and all.”

“Every chef, whether Druze, Christian, Palestinian, Arab or Jewish, said, ‘You cannot be my enemy if you are sitting at my table,”’ he says.

Sherman found that Israeli culture was much more rich and modern than he had previously thought, and was surprised to find that Israeli traditions rooted in religion have become part of the country’s culture—even among the most secular Israelis.

Jewish dietary laws, such as not mixing milk and meat as well as not cooking during Shabbat, seep through the culture and into the food.

“Shabbat is very important to the Jewish cuisine, because when people [assimilated into] the Diaspora, what made them different from their neighbors were the Shabbat and the kosher laws. Because they had to preserve the Shabbat, not to light fire and all kinds of religious regulations, they developed a lot of dishes,” says culinary journalist Ronit Vered in the film.

Similarly, Solomonov maintains that the nuances and fusion of traditions and cultures represent the hallmarks of Israeli food. He specifically notes Israeli spices, small dishes, and “primitive cooking methods” such as “al ha-esh” (food cooked directly on a flame) that serve to excite and stimulate the Western palate.

The result, celebrity chef Yisrael Aharoni says in the film, is an “amazing, colorful mosaic” of cultures—as opposed to a melting pot of cultures—in which the 150 cuisines that came to Israel from around the world keep their distinct flavors so that traditions can really shine.

For instance, Israeli spice shops often sell 10 different za’atar mixes, each one a slight variation based on its origin.

“It’s remarkable that the same dish can be done 10 different ways,” says Sherman.

Due to the size of Israel—about the size of New Jersey—nearly all ingredients are local. While being a “locavore” (eating only local ingredients) has become a fad in the U.S. in recent years, Israelis have been cooking with almost exclusively local ingredients for decades.

“It took a while, but eventually, Israelis were saying, ‘Why are we copying other cuisines when we have such amazing fresh vegetables here?’” says Sherman.

Gradually, Israel’s chefs began to take their grandmothers’ traditional family recipes, and expanded and innovated on them with local ingredients. Sherman and Solomonov believe that process, as well as the insatiable Israeli travel bug, could be behind the recent worldwide boom of Israeli cuisine.

“Israel is such a small country, but it is very well-traveled,” says Solomonov. “Israelis travel everywhere, and with that, combined with their entrepreneurial spirit, it was just a matter of time that Israeli food became globalized.”

By: Eliana Rudee
(JNS.org)

NYPD: Fighting Terrorism on Three Sides

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The first attack occurred when Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national, drove a rented truck into a crowd of pedestrians near Ground Zero on Halloween. Eight people were killed, another 12 wounded, making it the deadliest attack on the city since 9/11.
The second terrorist attack came at the height of the rush hour Monday morning, when Bangladeshi immigrant Akayed Ullah detonated a pipe bomb strapped to his chest in a crowded subway tunnel underneath the Port Authority.

As if the New York Police Department’s task in keeping the city safe from ISIS-inspired terrorists wasn’t arduous enough, it now is faced with other adversarial forces that often hinder effective counter terrorism measures.

In recent weeks two terror attacks targeted the city that were committed by self-acknowledged soldiers of ISIS, the radical Islamic group which recently saw the decimation of its caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The first attack occurred when Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national, drove a rented truck into a crowd of pedestrians near Ground Zero on Halloween. Eight people were killed, another 12 wounded, making it the deadliest attack on the city since 9/11. The second terrorist attack came at the height of the rush hour Monday morning, when Bangladeshi immigrant Akayed Ullah detonated a pipe bomb strapped to his chest in a crowded subway tunnel underneath the Port Authority.

The response by the NYPD, the FDNY, and the Port Authority Police was nothing short of outstanding. They quickly took control of both areas under attack and apprehended the terrorists. Saipov was shot by an NYPD officer as he yelled “Allah Akbar,” brandishing what appeared to be two firearms. And Ullah, instead of waking up to 72 virgins, found himself handcuffed by Port Authority police officers after his bomb malfunctioned and he lay on the ground with burns and injuries to his torso.

Immediately following the truck rampage by Saipov, who admitted to police that he was a member of ISIS, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed with the statement Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller made to the press that this attack “isn’t about Islam” or about “what mosque he attends.” This is the same mayor who gutted a major part of the city’s counter terrorism surveillance initiative created by the NYPD’s Intelligence Division in 2006, and its report titled, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat.” The report was an eye opening tutorial on how and where Islamic radicalization takes place. The mayor called that program “broken.”

If that were not enough, the New York City Council is considering a bill that would force the police department to disclose in public reports the specific tactics and resources it uses when investigating terrorism. The bill would also limit when the police could enter a suspect’s residence or stop and question a person.

Political correctness handicaps the police, as they are frequently forced to battle against the syndrome caused by politicians who should know better. Americans by and large are not happy when PC replaces common sense, particularly when it comes to preventing terrorist attacks. The New York Post editorial board went so far as to say that the people would no longer tolerate such hindrances on law enforcement: “New Yorkers don’t want a police department that merely arrives at the scene of a tragedy to pick up the pieces. They want attacks like Monday’s prevented.”

The third front challenging law enforcement agencies like the NYPD when fighting terrorism is the negative attacks from activist groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Immediately following Monday’s explosion, NYPD detectives and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force rushed to several apartments in Brooklyn where the suspected bomb maker Akayed Ullah lived. As a normal police procedure, they evacuated the building and began a search, not only for evidence, but also for the possibility of additional improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that Ullah may have constructed.

That evening, while the investigation was still ongoing, CAIR-NY legal director Albert Fox Cahn issued a statement on behalf of the Ullah family complaining about the police department’s action. I guess CAIR thought the police should have left young children in the building where a bomb may have been. This is the same organization that accused the NYPD of spying on Muslims. This is not its first go round (battle) with those who are charged with protecting the United States from terrorists. In fact, in recent years CAIR officials have actually encouraged members of the Muslim community to refuse to cooperate with law enforcement agencies investigating terrorism. They portrayed cops in sinister garbsneaking through the neighborhood as villains not to be trusted.

Facing the terrorist threat head-on in New York City is not something that the NYPD shrinks back from. On the contrary, the men and women whose remarkable service has kept us safe welcome the fight. But it sure would be a lot easier if they didn’t have to constantly look over their shoulders to defend against attacks by politically correct politicians and the activist groups who never get the facts straight.

By: Patrick Dunleavy
(Investigative Project on Terrorism)

IPT Senior Fellow Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School

 

Ibrahim Munir, the Man Who Keeps the Muslim Brotherhood Alive

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Among the lesser known, yet most influential leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood organization is the Egyptian-born British national Ahmed Ibrahim Munir Mustafa. Known simply as Ibrahim Munir, he is the global Brotherhood's secretary general and interim supreme guide.

Among the lesser known, yet most influential leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood organization is the Egyptian-born British national Ahmed Ibrahim Munir Mustafa. Known simply as Ibrahim Munir, he is the global Brotherhood’s secretary general and interim supreme guide.

The Brotherhood faces a great succession dilemma with many of its Egyptian leadership jailed and facing trials. A controversial old Islamic jurisprudence fatwa states that captured men or prisoners of wars cannot lead their nation or groups. Accordingly, incumbent Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie cannot lead the group while he is in an Egyptian prison.

Several names were mentioned as a possible new supreme guide, among them Mahmoud Ezzat, a leading Brotherhood member since the 1960s, who is believed to be in hiding in Gaza and is wanted by Egyptian authorities for allegedly orchestrating the violence taking place in Egypt. But Ezzat announced in 2016 that he did not want the title and recommended Ibrahim Munir.

But group members and leaders in Egypt question the 80-year-old Munir’s leadership abilities as they fight against the Egyptian state and wish to substitute him with a wartime general guide.

Younger members who followed the late Brotherhood leader Mohamed Kamal indicated their desire for a more vicious supreme guide. While the Muslim Brotherhood leadership tried to keep the news of the succession war a secret, the divisions and resignations have rocked the group and shattered any image of unity.


The double messages

Among his Brotherhood duties, Ibrahim Munir supervises the content of IkwhanWeb, the group’s English-language website, and its weekly journal Risalat al-Ikhwan. English-language statements tend to be much more sanitized and tolerant than what the Brotherhood tells its Arabic-speaking audience.

Munir followed the taqqiya principal – a precautionary concealment or denial of religious belief and practice in the face of persecution – in all his English language communications with the media and United Kingdom politicians. The Brotherhood is a Sunni movement with a Salafist tradition, while taqqiya remains a practice found in the Shiite denomination of Islam.

For example, Munir told a British Parliament committee that sharia laws tolerate apostates, but that statement contradicts the beliefs and teachings of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. It also avoided answering questions about the Brotherhood’s positions toward minorities such as homosexuals.

An example of the Brotherhood’s dual messaging came in September 2012 when a group of Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood stormed the American Embassy to protest what was dubbed as an anti-Islamic movie. In Arabic, they called upon all “Egyptians to rise to defend the Prophet” in a million-man march directed towards U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Munir’s London-based IkhwanWeb, on the other hand, tweeted a statement from deputy head Khairat Al Shater: “relieved none of @USembassycairo staff were harmed,” while expressing hopes that Egyptian-American relations could weather the storm. However, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo twitter account mocked the tweet in English: “Thanks, by the way, have you checked your own Arabic feeds? I hope you know we read those too.”

Despite their following different religious denominations the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran have had relations for decades, as many Brotherhood leaders frequently visit Iran as guests of the regime. The first meeting between Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of the Islamic revolution took place in 1945 – more than three decades before the 1979 Islamic revolution. Moreover, the only time an Iranian president visited Egypt after the revolution came during Mohamed Morsi’s ill-fated one-year reign in 2013 when Mahmoud Ahmedinejad traveled to Egypt. Munir, along with other Brotherhood officials, have maintained strong ties with Iranian leaders. During a July conference on Islamophobia, Munir was among Brotherhood members to meet in London with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s personal representative, Mohsen Araki.

Ties to terrorism:

During the 1960s, Munir was part of a terrorist group led by Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb. Munir was sentenced to 10 years in a maximum security prison as a result. He remains loyal to Qutb, who advocated violent jihad and the toppling of what he considered “apostate” regimes. In a lengthy essay last year, Munir called Qutb a “humanitarian teacher.”

As with many Islamists in the past five decades, Munir applied for political asylum in the United Kingdom, citing political persecution in Egypt. From his safe haven in London, he established, along with defector former member Kamal Al Hilbawy, the Muslim Brotherhood’s international base in 1982. The organization established a network that extended across the globe using London as a political and financial center.

From his office in London’s Cricklewood Broadway neighborhood, Munir established a web of connections using his diplomatic skills and contacts in the British government. He was instrumental in keeping the Muslim Brotherhood from being banned in the United Kigdom in 2014 after then-Prime Minister David Cameron ordered an investigation into the Brotherhood’s activities in Britain and Egypt. The investigation was prompted by terrorist attacks in Egypt that were orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood after the June 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi.

Munir issued an indirect threat to the British government that terrorism will increase if the ban goes in effect. “This would make a lot of people in Muslim communities think that ‘peaceful’ Muslim Brotherhood values . . . didn’t work and now they are designated a terrorist group, which would make the doors open for all options,” he said. Asked if that might include violence, he replied, “Any possibility.”

Munir helped saved the Muslim Brotherhood from a terrorist designation by lobbying Britain’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, headed by British MP Crispin Blunt, to release a counter report criticizing Jenkins’, neglecting the clear condemnation of the group’s activities in UK found in Sir John Jenkins’s 2014 report.

“Their public narrative – notably in the West–emphasised engagement not violence. But there have been significant differences between Muslim Brotherhood communications in English and Arabic,” the report said.

“Aspects of Muslim Brotherhood ideology and tactics, in this country and overseas, are contrary to our values and have been contrary to our national interests and our national security,” it added.

Munir defended Hamas terrorism as self-defense during an unaired June interview with NBC. “I don’t just support Hamas,” he said, “I support the Palestinian cause, that conflict was created by the West and they have to resolve it or the conflict will continue indefinitely; if Hamas violates the UN articles and Geneva Accords we will condemn them but the West should tell us how else can the Palestinians acquire their rights.”

Undoubtedly, without Britain’s hosting and granting of political asylum and citizenship to its leaders throughout the past six decades, the Brotherhood would have lost access to international media outlets and financial means, and might have disbanded by now. Munir and his colleagues managed to keep the ship afloat through its international base, aided by Islamic charities such as the Takaful Trust and now-defunct Human Relief International. These fronts financed multiple media outlets including a TV network originating from Turkey after June 2013 which became the launching pad for Brotherhood propaganda and incitement of violence in Egypt.

Moreover, the Brotherhood convinced the British authorities repeatedly of its so-called peaceful nature. They managed through trickery, taqqiya, and shrewd diplomacy to play off British politicians’ naiveté’ to keep their UK operations intact.

Ibrahim Munir may not be a household name but he remains the Brotherhood’s gatekeeper and its savior in dire situations. His good-cop attitude with the British media and political circles, along with shrewd financial and media skills, has managed to protect the group from attempts to ban it. (Investigative Project on Terrorism)

By: Hany Ghoraba

Hany Ghoraba is an Egyptian writer, political and counter-terrorism analyst at Al Ahram Weekly, author of Egypt’s Arab Spring: The Long and Winding Road to Democracy and a regular contributor to the BBC

 

Murder on a Moonless Night: How the Rebbe Responded to Terror in Israel – Part 1

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When Arab terrorists killed five students and their teacher in 1956 in the midst of prayer at a vocational school in Kfar Chabad, Israel, some wondered whether it was time to abandon the fledgling village. The Rebbe responded by sending 12 yeshivah students as his personal representatives there, and by encouraging the Chassidic villagers to continue building and growing. (Illustration by Rivka Graphic Design)

Six decades later, recalling a time of hazard and hope

Kfar Chabad, seen here in 1949, was established that year by the sixth Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory—and populated by Russian Chabad Chassidim who had survived the Holocaust and Soviet oppression. (Photo: Zoltan Kluger/Israel Government Press Office)

It was a moonless night: April 11, 1956, Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of the new month of Iyar on the Jewish lunar calendar. Seventeen-year-old Leibel Alevsky, a Russian-born yeshivah student living in Jerusalem, clung to the bed of a small truck as it rumbled down the long road leading to Kfar Chabad, also known at the time as Shafrir. Hearing a snippet of a radio report of fedayeensightings in nearby Beit Dagan, he unscrewed a little light bulb illuminating his rear perch, hoping to make himself less visible. Orchards lined both sides of the dark road, their orange-filled branches making it nearly impossible to see any approaching threats.

Entering the village, the old truck passed Beit Sefer Lemelacha, Kfar Chabad’s vocational school geared mostly towards new immigrants, sitting on the right. School had restarted that evening following the Passover break, and the wooden structure’s windows blazed with light as those inside began evening services. The school’s staff had managed to recruit even more students over the vacation period; some were there for the first time.

Around 8 p.m., Alevsky’s ride pulled up at the village center. Climbing off the truck, he heard a sudden outburst of automatic gunfire. It came from the direction of the vocational school.

Sixty-one years later, 12 men in their 80s sat together on a dais in Brooklyn, N.Y. One has been an educator in Casablanca, Morocco, since 1958. Another served as a member of the Rebbe’s secretariat, while a third is the founding Chabad emissary in the state of Florida, today home to nearly 150 centers. Each of the dozen rabbis has accomplished much in their lives.

What brought them together for the first time in more than six decades was recalling the mission they were collectively sent on by the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—to lift the spirits of a broken Chassidic village and a fledgling Israel under daily terror attack.

The yeshivah students (nine of the 12 seen here) chosen as the Rebbe’s representatives arrived in the Lod airport on July 13, 1956, remaining in Israel for 28 days. From left: Rabbis Zushe Posner, Sholom Ber Butman, Sholom Ber Shemtov, Dovid Schochet, YosefRosenfeld, Sholom Eidelman, Faivel Rimler, Shlomo Kirsh and Yehuda Krinsky. (Photo courtesy of Kehot Publication Society)

On that Wednesday night in April 1956, Arab fedayeen (terrorists armed and trained mostly by the Egyptian government) entered and attacked the village, leaving five children and one teacher dead at Beit Sefer Lemelacha, murdered in cold blood while they prayed.

Speaking at a farbrengen one month later, the Rebbe stated that he would be sending a group of yeshivah students to Israel, whose mission would be to strengthen the traumatized community. The Rebbe chose the students, personally overseeing an itinerary that would take them through five European countries and then throughout Israel, their time filled with meetings, classes, speeches and farbrengens (Chassidic gatherings meant to educate and inspire), a schedule stretching from 15 to 18 hours a day.

It was to mark this groundbreaking mission that all 12 men gathered together as a group for the first time since 1956, on Oct. 15 in the main study hall of Educational Institute Oholei Torah in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., at an event organized by Vaad Talmidei Hatemimim and A Chassidisher Derher magazine. Some 1,500 people filled the hall—mostly yeshivah students—where silence reigned for two hours as the elderly men reminisced, with each other and the crowd, recalling the great mission they were entrusted with by the Rebbe when they were just boys, not much older than the audience members.

“The Rebbe made it clear that we were representing the Rebbe himself,” said one of the 12, Rabbi Faivel Rimler. “And that’s how we were greeted [wherever we went]. It was amazing.”

The Rebbe’s response of not attempting to explain the tragedy, but instead striving for the future—healing through growth and in this way, conquering death and evil itself—both saved a village and raised up a country.

Murder in the Village

Now a sizeable community in the heart of Israel, Kfar Chabad began as a tiny settlement. It was founded in 1949 on the ruins of an abandoned Arab village and populated, incongruously, by Russian Lubavitcher Chassidim, survivors of both the Holocaust and the Soviet Union’s decades-long assault on Jewish life and practice.

There, bearded men rose early to study and pray before heading out to work the fields, while their wives and children raised chickens and turkeys.

Life in this new place wasn’t easy. Nevertheless, at the Rebbe’s behest, the Chassidic villagers focused not merely on rebuilding their own community (almost all lost loved ones in the war, and most still had family members locked away behind the Iron Curtain), but had thrown themselves into Jewish communal work in their adopted homeland, with one of the results being Beit Sefer Lemelacha, a vocational school teaching carpentry and agriculture. The school drew teenage boys from across Israel, mostly from disadvantaged Sephardic immigrant families.

Then came the attack. That night the school’s three teachers and 50 students had been quietly reciting the words of the Amidah, the silent prayer. Suddenly, the lights went out—the fedayeen cut the electricity—and gunshots exploded through the synagogue doors. Everything happened quickly after that. One teacher, a young yeshivah student named Simcha Zilbershtrom, yelled for the children to hit the floor.

“When the door was breached, the bullets flew straight into the center of the room,” student Asher Kadosh would later remember. He and his younger brother, Meir, had emigrated from Morocco just six months earlier and arrived that day to the school for the first time. “I hid to the left, behind the room’s entrance door, and suddenly, I felt someone fall on me. It was a heavy darkness, but a few seconds later I moved aside, and I recognized our teacher, Simcha, lying on the floor. He was bleeding very badly.

“That moment I began to realize what was going on, and I started calling out my younger brother Meir’s name, but I heard no response. I crawled over to the place where he had stood before, and the teacher, Reb Meir Friedman, struck a bunch of matches, and that’s when I saw that Meir wasn’t hurt. The school’s director, Reb Yeshayahu Gopin, was throwing children out the window so they could get out until the storm passed. As soon as he saw me, he lifted me up in his hands and threw me out through the first-floor window, and from there I ran to our dorm rooms. We had no idea if the terrorists left or not.”

“Within a minute [of hearing gunshots], someone sped down the road on a bicycle, and said people were shot and that the Arab infiltrators were still there,” recalls Alevsky, today the head Chabad emissary in Cleveland. A group of men near a car in the village center grabbed the few odd firearms kept in a small defense locker nearby and rushed towards the school.

“We got there not five minutes after the shots; blood was everywhere,” he remembers. “No one knew what to do because no one knew where those guys were. The orchard was very close to the school’s structure; they could have been hiding there.”

School director Yeshayahu Gopin’s daughter, Raizel, was 14 at the time. She was at a Torah class for girls that evening when the shots rang out. Alarm swept through the village as the girls ran home through the pitch-black streets. “I got home, and my mother was in a panic,” she recalls. “She heard that there was a shooting, but she didn’t know what was going on and had no way to find out. It was a very primitive place then. No phones, hardly any electricity.”

Shortly after the attack, her father ran into the house with a few of the boys—scared 13-year-olds with wide eyes and blood stains on their clothes.

“My father’s hands and clothes were covered with blood,” she remembers. “After he checked that we were alright, he ran back to the school,” leaving the boys to be cared for by his family.

Kfar Chabad had one telephone, which they used to call the police, and two vehicles: the yeshivah’s truck (the one Alevsky had ridden in that night) and another driven by Velvel Zalmanov, who had it through his job with the Dubek cigarette company. Zalmanov’s house was right next door to Beit Sefer Lemelacha, and he was one of the first on the scene. The men grabbed the available vehicles, and drove the injured and dying to the hospital in nearby Tzrifin, guys holding old rifles hanging off the sides of the cars to try to prevent further attack.

Simcha Zilbershtrom, 24, and students Nisim Assis, 13; Moshe Peretz, 14; Shlomo Mizrahi, 16; and Albert Edery, 14, were declared dead at the hospital. Amos Uzan, 15, died two weeks later. Many more children were badly injured.

After the Shock, Build for the Future

Morning in Jerusalem came like any other. Simcha’s older brother, Aharon Mordechai, rose early and went to pray. On his way back home, he noticed a newspaper on the stoop, its front page screaming of murder in Shafrir-Kfar Chabad. There, black on white, read the names of the dead, his younger brother Simcha leading the list.

“That’s how we found out that it happened,” remembers Rabbi Eli Zilbershtrom, Aharon Mordechai and Simcha’s younger brother. (Eli Zilbershtrom later married Raizel Gopin.) “There were no phones to call; we read it in the paper.”

Most of the Zilbershtrom children, Simcha included, were born in Germany. The family survived World War II hiding in a village in southern France and arrived in British Mandate Palestine in 1945. Within a few months the family’s father, Binyomin Nachum, passed away, leaving behind his wife, Fradel, and their children. Both Zilbershtrom parents had lost relatives in the Holocaust; Fradel’s sister and mother had perished in Nazi concentration camps. Despite having survived the horrors of the Old World and making it to Israel, her son was now dead.

Simcha had devoted himself to the children of Beit Sefer Lemelecha, becoming a surrogate father to many. His knowledge of French, gained during the war years, proved valuable in befriending and relating to the school’s Moroccan-born students, and they were shattered by his murder. “ ‘Simcha Was Like Our Father’ ” read a headline in Maariv the day after the funeral.

Arabs were launching attacks on Israelis on a regular basis; that decade, 347 Jews were killed by fedayeen.In 1953 in the village of Yehud, a Jewish mother and her two young children were killed after a grenade was thrown into their home while they slept. A year later, the Ma’ale Akrabim massacre left 11 Jews dead, killed on an Egged bus heading from Eilat to Tel Aviv. The Beit Hanan attack in 1955 left four Jews dead, shot and stabbed as they worked the fields. Now, the attacks were becoming more and more frequent; between April 7-15, 1956, 15 Israelis were killed and 49 injured.

Shocked and horrified by this particularly brutal attack, Israeli society had reached its tipping point. Newspapers spent days capturing the country’s despondent mood. “Entering the school’s modest synagogue,” reported Yediot Achronot’s Hertzl Rosenblum shortly after the attack, “was like visiting Kishinev after the pogrom of 50 years ago.”

Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett sent an urgent message to U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, informing him of the latest fatal raids by Egyptian terror commandos into Israel and highlighting the one on Kfar Chabad the night before. Ambassador to the United Nations Abba Eban met with the representatives of the Western “Big Three” on the Security Council—the United States, Great Britain and France—indicting Egypt “for the murder of Israeli children and their instructor in the sacred moment of prayer,” and calling the attack a “particularly revolting example” of Egyptian President’s Gamal Abdel Nasser’s increasing belligerence.

One jarring photo told the story: It showed a blood-stained prayer book splayed open on a white-washed floor caked in thick blood.

With the country turned towards them, the residents of Kfar Chabad were themselves unsure how to proceed. Just a year earlier, a yeshivah student disappeared while walking through the orchards to Kfar Chabad, his desecrated body discovered a few days later.

Now, the stunned Chassidic villagers—faithfully religious pioneers of the land, whose pale Eastern European complexions had bronzed with time under the sun—stood at a crossroads.

Maybe it was time to leave the village, many thought; wouldn’t it be safer in the bigger cities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Bnei Brak?

“What can be said, what can be spoken?” wrote key Kfar Chabad activist Rabbi Ephraim Wolff at the time. “We do not know what to do.”

There was only one place for them to turn. “We now await direction from the Rebbe . . . ”

Within days of the tragedy direction came in the form of letters and telegrams sent by the Rebbe in New York, giving blessings and instructions to the villagers of Kfar Chabad and the broader Chassidic community in Israel. His message? To remain strong, to rededicate themselves to the study of Torah and doing mitzvot, and most importantly, to build. Expansion projects that had begun earlier should be redoubled, new buildings should be erected and new schools opened. Not only were the people not to abandon Kfar Chabad, they were to grow, sink their roots deeper into the soil and continue to serve as inspirations for the entire country. At the same time, this message was reiterated to communal leaders across Israel.

At the end of the shiva mourning period, the Rebbe addressed a letter to “all of the Chassidim in the Land of Israel, to residents of Kfar Chabad, to Chabad’s institutions in the Holy Land, and in particular, to all those affiliated with Beit Sefer Lemelacha” (free translation):

It is my strong hope that with the help of G d, Who guards with an open eye and oversees with Divine Providence, that you will overpower every obstacle, strengthen both personal and communal affairs, [and] expand all of the organizations in both quantity and quality. With peace of mind may the study of our Torah, “the living Torah and the words of the living G d,” be strengthened and greatened, as well as the fulfillment of its mitzvos with joy, in a manner of v’chai bahem—“living with them.” From Kfar Chabad will spread out the wellsprings of Chassidus, and the Torah and works of our holy rebbeim, until they reach the “outside” . . .

Another telegram came later that day addressed to the directors of Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim in Israel, under whose auspices Beit Sefer Lemelacha fell, this one explicitly laying out what had been implied earlier. “[You] should begin with vigor the construction of the new building of the yeshivah and other buildings in the village… ”

At the shloshim—the period marking the end of 30 days after the passing—thousands of men and women from across Israel gathered in Kfar Chabad for the laying of the cornerstone of a new building for Beit Sefer Lemelacha, which would house its new printing school, to be named Yad Hachamishah (“Hand of the Five”) in memory of the slain students and their teacher. Among the dignitaries was Talmudic scholar Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin, who chaired the event; and the country’s two chief rabbis, YitzhakHalevi Herzog and Yitzhak Nissim.

A “who’s who” of the young country’s founding fathers was there as well. Speaker of the Knesset and Histadrut founder Yosef Sprinzak attended, as did Israeli declaration of independence signatory Moshe Kol (Moshe Shapiro, at the time minister of religion and welfare, who was also there, was also a signer). They were joined by National Religious Party founder Yosef Burg; Avraham Herzfeld (also a founder of Histadrut); judicial figure Gad Frumkin; minister of agriculture and Mapai stalwart Kadish Luz; Jewish Agency leader (and future president) Zalman Shazar; Poalei Agudat Israel’s deputy Knesset speaker Binyamin Mintz; future prime minister Menachem Begin; and then-Mapai secretary Yona Kesse, among other rabbis and political figures.

Fradel Zilbershtrom was also there.

“I was pleased to receive news of today’s groundbreaking for the Beit Sefer in Kfar Chabad, especially as you were there and participated in it,” the Rebbe wrote in Hebrew to Mrs. Zilbershtrom. “For all of Israel are ‘believers, the sons of believers’ that the most important part of man is his soul, which is ‘literally a part of G d above.’ Since the soul is everlasting, and the purpose of man’s creation and his being placed on earth is to have an effect on the world, including this world [below], therefore when the soul is connected with concrete action in this world—specifically an action that will continue and experience compounding growth, bearing more and more fruit—this is the greatest victory over death and the greatest satisfaction that can be experienced by the soul, especially when these things are being accomplished at the very place where the ‘event’ [i.e., murder] took place.”

By: Dovid Margolin
(To Be Continued Next Week)

The Woman Behind the Fifth Avenue Menorah

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The Fifth Avenue menorah is the largest and most frequently viewed public menorah in the world. Reassembled each year at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 59th Street in Manhattan, it was first lit 30 years ago, on Dec. 26, 1986. Chanukah celebrations and menorah-lightings have taken place there since 1977. (Photo: Chaim Perl/Chabad.org)
Atara Ciechanover, shown here at the construction of the Fifth Avenue menorah with Rabbi Shmuel Butman of the Lubavitch Youth Organization. In 1985 Ciechanover suggested having a new Fifth Avenue menorah designed by her longtime family friend, Israeli artist Yaacov Agam and she was involved in all aspects of its design, approval and construction. (Photo: Jewish Educational Media/The Living Archive)

The gleaming two-ton Chabad-Lubavitch menorah on the corner of Manhattan’s storied crossroads at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street—one of the busiest and most affluent thoroughfares on the planet—has long been an inseparable part of life in New York. Throughout the eight days of Chanukah, the dancing flames atop the world’s largest menorah cast a luminous glow upon the city, beckoning to and inspiring millions. Whether on foot or riding in cars, taxis, limousines, bicycles, in the horse-drawn carriages emerging from Central Park or peering down from the comfort of the neighborhood’s luxurious homes and hotels, this public work of art has become an essential part of New York’s wintertime landscape.

The 32-feet-high sculpted bronze branches soar diagonally in front of the world-famous Plaza Hotel, supported by a 28-foot-wide casing—noteworthy for its arresting design, even alongside some of the world’s most prominent architecture, expensive office spaces, and exclusive residences and shops. The importance of a profoundly spiritual symbol proudly and elegantly spreading its Chanukah message from “the center of the world” has not been lost on the international media, which annually spreads this menorah’s holiday message of light and hope to hundreds of millions of people.

But that wasn’t always the case.

How did it get there? Who designed, built and erected it—and why? How did the Big Apple get such an iconic and utterly unmissable menorah?

Design Matters

Each Chanukah, more than 300,000 pedestrians pass by the menorah, not to mention all those who drive by in private cars, cabs, buses and bikes.

It traces back to a woman with vision and determination, and a deep understanding of what the Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory—saw to be the place of Judaism in general and Chanukah in particular in the 20th and 21st centuries.

That woman was Atara Ciechanover.

The global campaign to publicize the miracle and message of Chanukah began in earnest in 1973, when the Rebbe spoke of the need to shine the light of the menorah wherever there was darkness and encouraged every Jew to spread the light and practices of Chanukah to their brethren worldwide. Chassidim got to work immediately. Little tin menorahs were designed, molded and churned out by the thousands; then the car-top menorah was invented and attached to vehicles everywhere. In 1974, a small public menorah was first lit in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, followed the next year by a towering 25-footer in San Francisco, supported and promoted by legendary rock promoter Bill Graham. Soon, public menorahs sprouted up around the world.

Looking up into the night sky as the candles are ignited. (Photo: Mendel Benamou/Chabad.org)

Towards the end of 1977, Lubavitch Youth Organization activists in New York were inspired to erect a large menorah in Manhattan. They found a company to weld together a collection of pipes for $5,000 and, sure enough, they had a menorah. Then, through a series of providential phone calls and more than a little chutzpah, Chabad received permission from New York City’s Parks Department to set up the menorah at Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza, where it has stood ever since.

The menorah was tall. It held the candles aloft. Mayor Abe Beame came to light it that first time. Who cared about aesthetics?

Atara Ciechanover did.

Ciechanover’s husband, Yosef, had held numerous Israeli government posts over the years, including director general of the Foreign Ministry, legal adviser to the Defense Ministry, head of Israel’s defense mission to the United States, and more. As a result of his work, the Ciechanovers spent years living in New York City—not far, in fact, from the site of the Fifth Avenue menorah.

During Chanukah of 1985, Atara Ciechanover passed by it and felt it was falling short of its goals. The rickety menorah’s tall stem—topped with the eight-branched candelabrum—was barely visible in profile, and seemed to fall short of the Rebbe’s desire to engage every single Jew and to spread Chanukah’s message of religious freedom beyond the Jewish community as well.

Ciechanover was quite familiar with the Rebbe’s vision. Within the capacity of his work for Israel, her husband served as a liaison between the Rebbe and the highest levels of Israel’s political and defense establishments, whose principals regularly sought the Rebbe’s counsel. The Ciechanovers’ relationship with the Rebbe stretched back to the 1960s, and over the years, the couple—together or individually—had spent tens of hours in conversation and consultation with him. As a designer and architect, she was also deeply aware of the Rebbe’s own concern and attention to aesthetics when it came to Jewish structures, symbols and buildings.

Moreover, the location—so central and attention-grabbing—was not being used to its fullest potential.

“She saw the menorah in front of the Plaza, and she didn’t like it,” recalls Yosef Ciechanover. “She felt it was not dignified enough to appropriately represent the Rebbe. She felt that such a central place like Manhattan—the center of the world—needs the most beautiful menorah of all.”

“Atara had extremely fine taste,” says a close family friend, Laya Klein. Klein’s husband, the late Rabbi Binyamin Klein, was a member of the Rebbe’s secretariat who served as a liaison for the Rebbe to Israeli government leaders and politicians, and became one of Yosef Ciechanover’s closest friends in the world. The friendship extended to the spouses, who spent much time together. “She was a very elegant woman. She had an eye for design, and she really, really cared.”

Beautiful and Dignified

Wasting no time, Ciechanover took her concerns, along with a suggestion for a new menorah design, directly to the Rebbe, while in private audience together with her husband.

“She told the Rebbe that she aimed to make a beautiful and dignified menorah,” says Yosef Ciechanover. “The Rebbe agreed with her concern and told her the new one should be built according to the design of the Rambam. He corrected her sketch to show what he meant by it.”

Menorahs had for a long time been built with curved branches, as famously depicted in relief on Rome’s Arch of Titus, which memorializes the Siege of Jerusalem. The Rebbe objected to the widespread use of this design to depict the Temple menorah—taken from a Roman triumphal arch meant to humiliate the Jewish people—that also contradicted a famous sketch of the Holy Temple’s menorah made by the Rambam (Maimonides), which clearly showed the menorah constructed with diagonal branches.

The Rebbe posited that curved menorahs were used to illuminate other parts of the Temple and were differentiated from the main diagonal one. Though the Chanukah menorah has more branches than the Temple menorah, in order to celebrate the eight-day miracle, it still meant to be evocative of the Temple menorah; therefore, the Rebbe preferred the design to be close to that of the original.

Following her meeting with the Rebbe, Atara Ciechanover met with the Lubavitch Youth Organization’s Rabbi Shmuel Butman, suggesting to him that she could ask her longtime personal friend, Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, to design a new menorah.

The Paris-based Agam was at the time already quite renowned, having just a few years earlier been the subject of a huge retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Today, the 88-year-old is Israel’s most widely-collected artist, living or dead. His colorful abstract work, often kinetic in nature, can be seen in sculptures in Buenos Aires, fountains in Israel, building facades in Miami and Tel Aviv, and in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York City.

Agam took the commission, although not without some trepidation, saying that while he “was excited to fulfill a request coming from the Rebbe,” he did have some “internal hesitation” due to what he saw as “the complexity of the project.”

Over the next months, Atara Ciechanover threw herself into the menorah’s design and construction. Considering it a great merit, Agam donated his services free of charge, while the Lubavitch Youth Organization footed the construction bill. When Agam sent Atara Ciechanover one round of his design sketches for the menorah, her husband remembers her promptly taking them to the Rebbe for his approval.

“The Rebbe made corrections on Agam’s plans as well,” recalls Yosef Ciechanover.

Finally, Agam arrived in New York with a miniature model of his design. Butman gave it to Rabbi Klein, so that he could then show it to the Rebbe for his approval. Three days the model sat on the Rebbe’s desk before an emphatic stamp of approval was given. Butman remembers Klein telling him that he had mentioned to the Rebbe that it was shaped differently than the Rambam’s classic menorah design.

The Rebbe responded that the primary emphasis of a menorah according to the Rambam is its diagonal branches. Within those parameters, however, an artist such as Yaacov Agam must be given the space to express himself.

Atara Ciechanover’s involvement with the menorah did not remain only on paper. Recently uncovered photos in the archives of Jewish Educational Media (JEM) show her touring the factory where the menorah was being constructed with Butman. “It was totally her project,” remembers Butman.

“The planning and production took a long time, and she was involved throughout,” says Yosef Ciechanover, adding that Agam personally oversaw construction of the menorah as well. “It was Agam’s design, and he had to approve every step of the process.”

‘Modern and Ancient’

On Friday, Dec. 26, 1986, Agam’s menorah was lit for the first time. The menorah has been lit every year since, this year marking its 30th in use.

“I didn’t only want to create something beautiful; the Romans could also create something beautiful. I wanted to create something that was beautiful and Jewish,” Agam shared with the Rebbe. “My goal was to make something beautiful, Jewish and true to its roots. That it should be modern while conveying the ancient.”

Millions of people have since seen and been inspired by Agam’s menorah—its “beautiful and Jewish” nature taking a place of prominence in a focal point of New York City. It could not have happened without the vision and dedication of Atara Ciechanover.

“She was very happy with how the menorah came out,” says her husband. “It’s beautiful, and that was her aim. She saw it as an opportunity to make a point by having the most beautiful Chabad menorah in the center of the world. It makes me happy every time I see it.”

Atara Ciechanover passed away in 2012, but her labor of love stands as a beacon of the timeless message of religious freedom—to New York City and the world, for generations to come.

By: Dovid Margolin
(Chabad.org)

 

Orthodox Jews in Israel Becoming Rooted to the Land Through Nature

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Orthodox children gather around an SPNI Community Gardens staff member to learn planting tips in Jerusalem
Young residents of an Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem excitedly tidy up their courtyard to make way for a community garden

The centrality of nature to the Israeli ethos is undeniable. Its citizens are infatuated with the country’s incomparable natural beauty and celebrate it constantly. Boasting some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes, diverse eco-systems, and unique wildlife, Israel’s abundant biodiversity serves as a key component of the population’s vibrant culture and history.

Still, many Israelis struggle with discerning the difference between loving nature and preserving it, which begs the question: How does a nation that so strongly values its natural resources lack such a basic understanding of conservation?

In 1999, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) began addressing this disconnect by establishing a Community Garden Initiative. With the support of municipalities across the country, SPNI coordinates community gardens and executes creative sustainability programs in neighborhoods that lack access to sufficient environmental education. Though there are now 70 community gardens in Jerusalem and hundreds throughout Israel, SPNI is actively implementing more targeted solutions to encourage participation among Israel’s diverse populations.

One of the highest priorities is the engagement of ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, where the concentrated educational curriculum pays little attention to environmental awareness. SPNI’s Community Garden Project is filling this educational gap by teaching green practices in a way that respects their limitations and embraces their distinctive culture.

An SPNI Community Gardens coordinator leads a planting workshop for Ultra-Orthodox families in Jerusalem

“We focus on educating about nature and sustainability in a way that compliments their lifestyle,” explained Amanda Lind, the Community Gardens Coordinator for SPNI Jerusalem. The ultra-Orthodox community garden program is designed specifically to respect and support their deeply religious values, such as segregating gardening time for each gender and abiding by the laws of the Shmittah (Sabbatical) year. Thus far, these tailored programs have been very successful, bringing together segments of the ultra-Orthodox population that have never before had the chance to connect with nature or each other.

Though it is not part of SPNI’s mission to encourage every ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel to cultivate a community garden, the project is willing to take root wherever there is interest. “It is up to the community to approach SPNI when they are ready to partake in the initiative, at which time concrete plans are made to lay the groundwork for grassroots movements,” explains Lind.

“Creating green spaces requires work and dedication and presents an important opportunity for communities to take responsibility of their own area. In order for them to take ownership, it cannot be forced.”

Currently, the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhoods of Choma HaShlishit and Maalot Dafna boast thriving communal gardens. Having taken the initiative to contact SPNI for support, these neighborhoods continue to enjoy a healthier environment and a more cohesive community.

The project provides unique learning opportunities for all ages, especially for children. The gardens appeal to Cheder (ultra-Orthodox elementary school) students who spend all day inside studying and have never had the opportunity to connect with nature. “Instead of destroying trees, which is often the case for children in these neighborhoods who find themselves without a constructive activity, they’re planting trees and making positive contributions,” Lind said. “It gives them a sense of purpose and responsibility, and they love knowing that they have the ability to change a space and make it beautiful.”

The children engage in activities such as designing the layout of the garden and planting the trees, herbs and vegetables. This provides them with opportunities to interact with nature. At a young age, these students have begun to understand the importance of environmental sustainability and appreciate its value in their communities.

The project has also been successful in promoting inclusion, allowing teenage girls with Down syndrome from the ultra-Orthodox community to receive focused environmental education alongside their peers. A joint initiative with the local community center, this sister program teaches its participants how to grow and sustain plants and provides practical gardening experience in Jerusalem’s Neve Yaakov neighborhood. As a reward for their contributions to the community, SPNI staff members take the participants to the Botanical Gardens, where they can learn even more about the beauty and diversity of Israeli flora.

“After years of work with the ultra-Orthodox community, we are now seeing serious changes in terms of how these neighborhoods relate to nature. There is a desire to connect and preserve, as well as an understanding that they must share this knowledge with others,” Lind added. “SPNI will provide support to any community that is willing to take the initiative.”

Through its educational and hands-on programs, the project is transforming insular communities across the country into eco-friendly educators. By providing easy access to the tools and knowledge necessary to make a difference in their immediate surroundings, SPNI has motivated ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods to look beyond the fences that divide them and work together to cultivate the kind of growth that will help shape the future of nature in Israel

By Marlee Michelson

 

Paul Singer’s Elliott Mgmt Pushes for Changes at Hess

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Activist and investor Paul Singer is at it again. Elliot Management, Mr. Singer’s hedge fund, which owns a 6.7 percent stake in Hess, will take another swing at the oil and gas giant’s management. Elliot will try to unseat John Hess, who is still the CEO of the company and has for two decades run the company, which was founded by his father in 1933

Activist and investor Paul Singer is at it again. Elliot Management, Mr. Singer’s hedge fund, which owns a 6.7 percent stake in Hess, will take another swing at the oil and gas giant’s management. Elliot will try to unseat John Hess, who is still the CEO of the company and has for two decades run the company, which was founded by his father in 1933. Elliot management will also fight to sell parts of the Hess company, cut dividends, and/or buy back stocks from shareholders, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

In 2013, Mr. Singer first led his company in battling Hess. At that time, as per the NY Post, his company won an eleventh-hour settlement with the oil and gas producer, gaining three seats on the company’s board, and ousting John Hess from the role of chairman. Hess also was compelled to sell some assets.

Now, Elliot management is renewing its attempts against Hess. “As long-term shareholders in Hess, we are frustrated by the company’s continuing underperformance,” said John Pike, portfolio manager at Elliott. “Shareholders are getting impatient because the changes needed to remedy Hess’s severe undervaluation are substantial and need to be announced without delay,” he continued.

The $13 billion oil company has underperformed, despite an increase in oil prices since June. Hess shares are lower by 31.5 percent this year, while in comparison the S&P 500 is up 19 percent. Investors are reportedly dissatisfied with Hess’s projection that it won’t have free cash flow through 2020, because of the amount it will be spending on offshore oil projects in Guyana and its U.S. shale fields.

Last Thursday, after news of Elliot’s planned intervention, Hess’ stock price rose 6 percent in afterhours trading, continuing to climb on Friday.

In response to the criticism, Hess said in a statement on Thursday, “The Hess Board unanimously and unequivocally supports the company’s current strategy and John Hess as CEO.” It continued, “The company is well positioned to deliver industry-leading returns and value to shareholders for many years to come”.

By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh