Indicted US intelligence analyst defector wore many faces in Iranian media

https://www.timesofisrael.com/indicted-us-intelligence-analyst-defector-wore-many-faces-in-iranian-media/

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The former US Air Force intelligence analyst, her brown hair now hidden underneath a mandatory hijab, stood before an Iranian ayatollah as a television camera filmed behind her.

It was 2012 and Monica Elfriede Witt offered Ayatollah Hadi Barikbin the pledge of faith all Islam converts must recite: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger.”

Yet amid congratulations for her conversion, Witt — who once held a top secret security clearance — allegedly had a dark secret: She was being recruited by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to betray her country, according to federal prosecutors.

Private Mossad for Hire

newyorker/magazine/

One evening in 2016, a twenty-five-year-old community-college student named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he thought with disgust.

Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently declared bankruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all his actions were authorized by his company’s contract with the facility.) According to court documents, the contract was extremely lucrative for Benzeevi; in a 2014 e-mail to his accountant, he estimated that his hospital business could generate nine million dollars in annual revenue, on top of his management fee of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month. (In Tulare, the median household income was about forty-five thousand dollars a year.) The citizens’ group had drawn up an ambitious plan to get rid of Benzeevi by rooting out his allies on the hospital board. As 2016 came to a close, the group was pushing for a special election to unseat Kumar; if he were voted out, a majority of the board could rescind Benzeevi’s contract.

Gutiérrez, a political-science major, was a leader of the Young Democrats Club at the College of the Sequoias, and during the 2016 Presidential campaign he attended a rally for Bernie Sanders. Gutiérrez grew up watching his father, a dairyman, work twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, and Sanders’s message about corporate greed, income inequality, and the ills of America’s for-profit health-care system resonated with him. Seeing Benzeevi and Kumar enjoying themselves at La Piazza inflamed Gutiérrez’s sense of injustice. He spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s knocking on doors and asking neighbors to sign a petition for a recall vote, which ultimately garnered more than eleven hundred signatures. Gutiérrez later asked his mother, Senovia, if she would run for Kumar’s seat; the citizens’ group thought that Senovia, an immigrant and a social worker, would be an appealing candidate in a community that is around sixty per cent Hispanic.

The recall was a clear threat to Benzeevi’s hospital-management business, and he consulted a law firm in Washington, D.C., about mounting a campaign to save Kumar’s seat. An adviser there referred him to Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company. Psy-Group’s slogan was “Shape Reality,” and its techniques included the use of elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets. Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of Israel’s secret services—self-described “private Mossads.” The most aggressive of these firms seemed willing to do just about anything for their clients.

Netziv nature of halacha

file:///C:/Users/yadmoshe/Documents/Hebrewbooks_org_31768.pdf



file:///C:/Users/yadmoshe/Documents/HebrewBooksOrg_31768_page_8.pdf

Please advise Re: Lev vs. Ruach

Shalom,

Perhaps you can help me. 

I am looking at the Gemara Sota 5a and the Rashi there regarding Chizkiya's statement regarding tefilla.

אמר חזקיה אין תפלתו של אדם נשמעת אא"כ משים לבו כבשר שנא' (ישעיהו סו, כג) והיה מדי חדש בחדשו [וגו'] יבא כל בשר להשתחוות וגו'

I've seen multiple pasukim and sources but I do not have clarity.  Can you please tell or direct me to sources the explain what the Ruach and Lev do in terms of decision making and especially in regards to prayer?

Pelosi, Dem leaders condemn Rep. Omar for 'anti-Semitic' language

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/democratic-lawmakers-slam-rep-omar-over-deeply-hurtful-and-offensive-israel-comments

In an unprecedented rebuke under the new Congress, House Democratic leaders on Monday roundly condemned Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., for statements about supporters of Israel that were widely viewed as anti-Semitic and called on her to apologize.

The statement issued by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic leadership team followed the latest in a string of controversial comments from the freshman lawmaker -- as well as pressure from Republican leaders to speak out.

Muslim patrol group in New York faces backlash including far-right conspiracy theories

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-patrol-group-community-new-york-police-far-right-conspiracy-a8762056.html

Maeen Ali remembers the worry he felt when he first spotted the “Punish a Muslim Day” screed online.

The letter, mailed last spring throughout England, encouraged violence that ranged from pulling off a woman’s head scarf to bombing mosques. Each attack, the letter instructed, would be rewarded with points. The hate campaign prompted the police in New York and other big cities to expand patrols around mosques and Islamic centres on the specified day.

Mr Ali, who lives in downtown Brooklyn, said he was consumed by thoughts of his four children’s safety.

“That just boiled inside of me,” said Mr Ali, who moved to the United States from Yemen in 1990. “That’s when I said to myself that it was really important to come out and protect Muslims in the community.”

As word of the new patrol has begun to spread, the backlash has been swift, even among some members of the Muslim community who have criticised the lack of information, and questioned the need for the patrol.

Like the Shomrim that patrols largely Hasidic neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Asian Safety Patrol that operates mainly in Sunset Park, the new group – believed to be the first of its kind in the country – hopes to function as extra sets of eyes and ears for the police.

The unarmed civilian patrol will offer translation services – its members are fluent in any of seven languages – explain cultural nuances, report suspicious activity, respond to traffic accidents and even help in searches for the missing. The patrol has the support of Brooklyn’s borough president, Eric L Adams, and assistant chief Brian J Conroy, the commanding officer of patrol borough Brooklyn South.

El Paso officials denounce Trump’s border comments ahead of his 1st 2019 campaign rally

The El Paso Times reported that violent crime rates in the city increased 17 percent between 2006 to 2011, even with construction of the border fence beginning in 2008. The city had the third-lowest violent crime rate among 35 U.S. cities with a population over 500,000 from 2005 to 2007 -– all before construction on the fence began. And, according to the Uniform Crime Reports from the FBI, between 1993 and 2006 the number of violent crimes dropped by more than 34 percent.

'It’s all about the Benjamins baby’: Ilhan Omar again accused of anti-Semitism over tweets

washingtonpost

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) again faced accusations of anti-Semitism on Sunday night after she suggested in tweets, which started with a Puff Daddy rap lyric, that members of Congress support Israel because of money from the pro-Israel lobby.

It’s the second time this month that Omar has become entangled in a Twitter controversyreplete with emoji and snarky clapbacks centered on the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Omar, who supports the anti-Israel movement called BDS, for “boycott, divestment and sanctions,” has persistently fought accusations of anti-Semitism by maintaining that her condemnation of the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians does not equate to condemnation of Jewish people. She has also claimed to be the victim of GOP attacks seeking to misrepresent her position on Israel as anti-Semitic.

But on Sunday, some Democrats also joined a chorus of critics rebuking Omar for using what some described as an ugly anti-Semitic trope: that Jews control politics through money.

The Progressive Assault on Israel

ny times

A movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.

It happened again last month in Detroit. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators seized the stage of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force’s marquee conference, “Creating Change” and demanded a boycott of Israel. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they chanted — the tediously malign, thinly veiled call to end Israel as a Jewish state.

They were met with sustained applause by the audience at what is the largest annual conference of L.G.B.T.Q.activists in the United States. Conference organizers did nothing to stop the disruption or disavow the demonstrators.

For Tyler Gregory, neither the behavior of the protesters nor the passivity of the organizers came as a surprise. Gregory is executive director of A Wider Bridge, a North American L.G.B.T.Q. organization that works to support Israel and its gay community. In 2016, his group hosted a reception at the Task Force’s conference in Chicago. The event was mobbed by some 200 aggressive demonstrators, and Gregory and his audience had to barricade themselves in their room while those outside were harassed.

“Whether you believe in the concept of intersectionality is beside the point,” Gregory told me recently, referring to the idea that the oppression of one group is the oppression of all others. “If this is your value system, you are not following it. As Jews we were denied our safe space. We were denied our place in a movement that fights bigotry.”

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/child-protect-18/m2UjiV2FqFE/l-0kkOy7DgAJ

Real Fears’ Over Child Victims Act, Say Charedim

Survivors and advocates say continued Orthodox opposition is meant as signal of intimidation.

By Hannah Dreyfus February 6, 2019, 9:43 am ET

In the wake of the passage [https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/topic/child-victims-act] last week in Albany of the Child Victims Act, Orthodox leaders are cautioning that “fears” of a barrage of potentially crippling lawsuits from alleged victims of child sexual abuse against yeshivas and camps “are real.”

“The fact that law firms are actively seeking child victims is reason enough for our concern,” Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel, the large charedi umbrella group, told The Jewish Week in an email.

Agudath Israel issued a statement shortly after the bill passed on Jan. 28 that its “look-back window” — a provision that allows victims of any age to pursue claims during a one-year window that begins six months after the law takes effect, even if the statute of limitations has run out — “could literally destroy schools, houses of worship that sponsor youth programs, summer camps and other institutions that are the very lifeblood of our community.”

Rabbi Mark Dratch, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), the largest group of Orthodox rabbis in North America, expressed the same concern.

“We share the concern about the potential impact on institutions that the one-year window may have on schools and institutions but recognize and support the children who are the victims in these cases,” he wrote to The Jewish Week in an email.

In terms of what kind of settlements victims might receive, a recent case offers one example. That year Brooklyn Yeshiva Torah Temimah agreed to pay out $2.1 million to two former students, who said they were molested by their teacher, Rabbi Joel Kolko, when they were 6 years old.

While the RCA and other centrist Orthodox groups have been largely mum on the issue, the ultra-Orthodox community, alongside the Catholic Church, has consistently opposed the bill’s passage, for fear of the act’s possible financial impact. A divided state legislature in Albany allowed the bill to languish for years. But now, with the Democratic takeover of both houses of the legislature in November, the majority party moved quickly to pass the bill, which had long been a Democratic priority.

In addition to the one-year look-back window, the bill allows child victims of sexual abuse to file claims against abusers until the victims reach the age of 55 in civil cases, a significant increase from the previous age limit of 23. For criminal cases, victims can seek prosecution until they are 28.

And while groups that once opposed the bill, such as the Catholic Church, laid down arms and unequivocally praised the bill’s passage on Jan. 28, Orthodox groups stood alone in continuing to express objections — in formal statements and in a slew of articles across Orthodox media platforms.

Marci Hamilton, founder and CEO of Child USA, a nonprofit that works to prevent child abuse, said the conspicuous response of Orthodox institutions is “very telling.”

“The fact is that only the yeshivas are still complaining,” said Hamilton, who sees the “alarmist rhetoric” as an “attempt to claim they [the yeshivas] are the victims.”

“The bishops tried this years ago and failed,” said Hamilton. “The Orthodox community is proving itself to be behind the curve. These organizations are incapable of seeing beyond their own immediate needs to the needs of the victims they created.”

Still, while expressing serious concerns about the bill’s potential repercussions no longer has sway in Albany, charedi and Orthodox institutions may well be targeting another audience, said Hamilton: their own constituents.

“The statements and op-eds and hand-wringing about yeshivas going bankrupt is really a coded message about religious beliefs,” said Hamilton, a legal scholar, who pointed out that no bankruptcies have been linked to similar look-back provisions implemented in other states.

ראיון מצהירות דת

Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism Judith Butler, Reviewed by Chaim Gans, Tel Aviv University

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/parting-ways-jewishness-and-the-critique-of-zionism/

In her book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler argues for three main theses. Her first thesis amounts to a complete rejection of Zionism because of how it has affected the Palestinians. According to Butler, Zionism aspires to appropriate the Palestinians' land and disinherit them from it. In her second argument, Butler claims that Zionist ideology must also be rejected because of how it views the Jews. She maintains that Zionist ideology aspires to appropriate Jewish identity and to impose a nationalist interpretation of Judaism on all Jews. However, the major part of the book is devoted to a third thesis that combines the first two. It is in the name of Judaism itself, so Butler argues, that the Zionist movement should be totally rejected.

Butler argues that Jewish history and experience have driven many Jews in the past to construct a Jewish identity for themselves that incorporates the non-Jew. She believes that this experience and history should prompt Jews to do the same today, not only outside Israel and historic Palestine, but also within these geographic and political spaces. She therefore proposes to construct these spaces as binational. By binationalism she does not mean a legal arrangement that allows two nations to live together side by side in one polity under equal conditions, but rather a society and a polity whose citizens are binational at the level of their personality-identity. That is, they are either Jews who have in some sense made Palestinianism a part of their identity, or Palestinians who have in some sense incorporated a diasporic identity, which, according to Butler, is the major characteristic of Jewish identity. It is this specific type of binationalism that makes her book philosophically interesting and novel. She wants Israel/Palestine to be a political entity that is inhabited by Jews and Palestinians who first have deconstructed their particular mono-national identities and then reconstructed themselves with binational identities. The political entity that would emerge as a consequence of this individual deconstruction and reconstruction would therefore be post-national.

Butler's proposal is radical on two levels. Firstly, she turns the elementary moral requirement that we be considerate of the other while preserving our own identity into a requirement to make the other a part of our identities while, at least to some degree, annulling our previous selves. Secondly, she takes the basic requirement imposed by political morality on countries whose populations are binational to reflect this binationality in their institutional structure one step further, requiring individuals living in such countries to acquire binational identities.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/judith-butler-jewishness-and-the-critique-of-zionism

Judith Butler comes to her critique of Jewishness and Zionism with impressive credentials. She is widely known as a philosopher in the fields of feminist, queer, and literary theory, of politics and ethics, and her books are translated into many languages. She is a professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature and the co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She actively works against innumerable social injustices, is on the Advisory Board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and she publicly supports the BDS campaign.

At the outset, she states that “some aspects of Jewish ethics require us to depart from a concern only with the vulnerability and fate of the Jewish people. I am proposing that this departure from ourselves is the condition of a certain ethical relation, decidedly nonegological: it is a response to the claims of alterity and lays the groundwork for an ethics in dispersion.” From the standpoint too of Palestinians Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, she examines this ethic in secular Jewish writers Emannuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Primo Levi: is plurality and cohabitation possible, is plurality undermined by law itself and by the nation-state?

A short review can hardly do justice to Butler’s detailed exploration. I will focus on one limitation that is inherent to a philosophical approach based primarily on deduction and introspection vs a more empirical approach. For example, there is her focus about whether Jewish and Palestinian people can find commonality and a basis of mutual empathy because they are both diaspora peoples. While acknowledging the differences in the two diasporas, she neglects the fact that Zionists caused the Palestinian diaspora. Israeli leaders are very far from experiencing shame and guilt. Butler writes, elusively, that “Remembrance may be nothing more than struggling against amnesia in order to find those forms of coexistence opened up by convergent and resonant histories. Perhaps for this we still do not have the precise name.” Does resonance imply amnesia about blame? There is a psychological capacity to feel guilt. What happens historically when there is no real grappling with responsibility

President Trump’s fantastical human-trafficking claims

washingtonpost

“Human trafficking by airplane is almost impossible. Human trafficking by van and truck, in the back seat of a car, and going through a border where there’s nobody for miles and miles, and there’s no wall to protect — it’s very easy. They make a right, then they make a left. They come into our country. And they sell people.”

— President Trump, remarks at an event on human trafficking, Feb. 1

“This really is an invasion of our country by human traffickers. These are people that are horrible people bringing in women mostly, but bringing in women and children into our country.”

— Trump, interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Feb. 3

“Human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide-open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery.”

— Trump, in his State of the Union address, Feb. 5

In making the case for a wall along the southern border, President Trump has increasingly drawn attention to the scourge of human trafficking. This is a serious issue, but one (like many underground crimes) that often is plagued by hyped statistics and fuzzy data.

The president is falling into the same trap, making statements that simply are not true or are unsupported by the data. He says that “human trafficking by airplane is almost impossible,” that there is “an invasion of our country by human traffickers,” and that “thousands of young girls and women” are smuggled across the border for prostitution. None of these statements are correct.

The Facts

Let’s start with the government’s own data. In fiscal 2018, the Justice Department initiated 230 human trafficking prosecutions. That’s an 18 percent decline from the year before, when 282 cases were brought.

The Justice Department regularly posts news releases about its human trafficking cases, and you have to dig far to find many that involve the southern border. Most of the cases involve U.S. citizens. The foreign national cases, contrary to Trump’s claims, generally used legal border crossings, visa fraud and airplanes.

In December, for instance, five defendants were found guilty of participating in a scheme that allegedly brought hundreds of Thai women into the United States to engage in the sex trade. The women came from poor areas of Thailand and were told they could earn money for their families back home.

“The organization also engaged in widespread visa fraud to facilitate the international transportation of the victims,” the Justice Department said. “Traffickers assisted the victims in obtaining fraudulent visas and travel documents by funding false bank accounts, creating fictitious backgrounds and occupations, and instructing the victims to enter into fraudulent marriages to increase the likelihood that their visa applications would be approved. Traffickers also coached the victims as to what to say during their visa interviews.”

Another recent case involved the son of the former president of Guinea, who along with his wife was convicted of keeping a West African girl enslaved in their Texas home for 16 years. She had come with them when they moved to the United States.

Trump at various times has described women as being kidnapped, “duct tape put around their face,” and smuggled across the border.

The Human Trafficking Legal Center, which assists victims, maintains a database of 1,435 federal court cases dating to 2009 and current as of six weeks ago. Martina Vandenberg, president of the organization, said that a search of the database found only 26 cases that included kidnapping charges and 29 that involved smuggling. There was only one case, in 2012, that mentioned “duct tape” — but that took place in Atlanta and involved a victim being required to wear duct tape during sex.

Many of the cases involved just a single case of trafficking, such as the woman who smuggled another woman into the United States from Mexico to serve as a pregnancy surrogate but instead forced her to engage in domestic labor. Or there are cases involving U.S. citizens trafficking other U.S. citizens, such as the “Horse Block Pimpin’ ” prosecution, in which defendants trafficked 55 women mostly across the Mid-Atlantic region.

A recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics said that in fiscal 2015, 92.1 percent of the forced labor and sex trafficking cases and 92.5 percent of transportation for illegal sex activity cases involved U.S. citizens.

In his State of the Union address, the president referred to “thousands of young girls and women” being smuggled between ports of entry.

It’s unclear where Trump got that statistic — the White House did not respond to a request for comment — but he appears to have picked it up from a conversation with Tim Ballard, chief executive of the anti-trafficking group Operation Underground Railroad, during a White House event on human trafficking on Feb. 1. In an opinion column Monday for the Deseret News, Ballard wrote that “the State Department reports that around 10,000 children are smuggled into the U.S. annually and forced into the commercial sex trade.”

Ballard did not respond to a request for his source. The State Department appears to have no records that would validate this claim.

The Justice Department, however, said that in fiscal 2017, “the FBI identified nearly 450 victims of domestic minor sex trafficking and adult domestic and foreign national victims of sex and labor trafficking.” It’s unclear how many were from Central America, but clearly it’s less than “thousands.”

More likely than not, those foreign nationals came through legal ports of entry. Data collected by the United Nations’ International Organization on Migration, analyzing 10 years of information on more than 90,000 victims, has found that 79 percent of international trafficking journeys “go through official border points, such as airports and land border control points.” The IOM said that “about a third of official border points are crossed by bus, another third by train, and 20 percent by plane.”

But the IOM also said that cases involved in sexual exploitation were more likely to travel through unofficial routes: “Sexual exploitation makes up 15 percent of official border crossings and 22 percent of nonofficial border crossings.” Children, especially those under 10, were also more likely to travel through unofficial entry points: "Out of all the children in the sample, nonofficial border points are used in 44 percent of cases, against 20 percent for adults.”

The anti-trafficking group Polaris has contributed to the IOM project. Brandon Bouchard, a spokesman for the group, said between 2015 and the middle of 2018, the group’s tips about human trafficking were basically split between U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. Of foreign nationals, the most frequently reported were Mexico (over 1,500 victims), Philippines (over 460 victims), Guatemala (over 380 victims), China (over 370 victims) and Honduras (over 290 victims).

(The U.S. government issues T visas to victims of trafficking. The Fact Checker was not able to obtain a breakdown of such visas by nationality, but a Jan. 18 notice in the Federal Registersaid that from fiscal 2014 through 2016, 40 percent of T-derivative visas, for family members, were issued by the U.S. Embassy in Manila. In 2017, there were 1,141 T-visa applications received from alleged victims and 672 approved, according to government data.)