Chareidim Don’t Work and Won’t Go into the Army

https://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/muqata/chareidim-dont-work-and-wont-go-into-the-army/2019/08/07/

Avigdor Liberman is putting in overtime to convince Israeli voters that this election is about Religion, State and Chareidim (the Ultra-Orthodox)- when it is only about dethroning Netanyahu, distancing Liberman’s former close partners – the Chareidim, from the government, and if his latest faux pas is any indication, to maneuver his way into the premiership.

We’ve all heard claims how Chareidim don’t work, that Chareidim don’t go to the army, that Chareidim don’t carry their share of the national burden. Liberman’s supporters are saying Liberman is raising this anti-Chareidi / anti-religious flag for their own good and ours.

The tone, the rhetoric, the Sinat Chinam is horrifying – and far too many people accept these statements/assumptions as fact.

The case for making Donald Trump America's first king

Joseph Orlowyesterdayedited

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The men who rebelled against the crown were also living in the wrong society. So they fixed it. The time has come to rebalance and move back towards monarchy.

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/20/12235572/donald-trump-king-america

Evidently, Trump is interested in the prestige and public attention that comes with the presidency. But he doesn’t want to spend a lot of time worrying about niggling policy issues like Brexit or corporate tax reform.

While the idea of a president with no power sounds crazy to American ears, it’s actually how a lot of advanced democracies work around the world. Many countries have a ceremonial figurehead — either an elected president or a hereditary monarch — who represents the nation at state dinners and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. And they also have a head of government, usually the prime minister, who makes all the important policy decisions.

In the United States, we’ve combined these roles into a single person, and it hasn’t been working very well. It’s made the presidency an impossibly demanding job, while giving our head of government a degree of prestige that makes it harder to hold him accountable for his policy mistakes.

So here’s a modest proposal: Let’s make Donald Trump king of the United States. This seems to be the job he actually wants. And replacing America’s powerful elected president with a powerless hereditary monarchy would improve the American political system.

Trump campaign manager calls polling "the biggest joke in politics

CONGRATULATE COM. FOR EJECTING SEXUAL ABUSE RABBIS - SAFED CHIEF RABBBI

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Congratulate-community-for-ejecting-sexual-abuse-rabbis-Safed-chief-rabbi-600442

Chief Rabbi of Safed Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu said on Monday that the religious-Zionist community should be congratulated for ejecting rabbis from its midst who have committed sexual abuse or harassment.

Eliyahu was speaking in reference to at least three incidents in recent years in which prominent religious-Zionistrabbis have either been criminally convicted of sexual assault or accused of sexual impropriety.

Does anyone understand the 2020 race? This scholar nailed the blue wave — here's her forecast

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/17/this-political-scientist-completely-nailed-the-2018-blue-wave-heres-her-2020-forecast/

My model for 2020 starts off with Democrats at 278 Electoral College votes, and that's a problem for Trump, because of course you need 270 to win. It does that because of my model's prediction, based on turnout and predicted vote share, that Pennsylvania and Michigan will slip back to the Democrats. I'm uncertain about Ohio, but even if Trump wins Ohio, he can't win the other three Midwestern states. Then as you point out I have four tossup states: Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Iowa. Even if he wins all four of them, the Democrats have already won the election — and the idea that he would win all four is pretty unlikely. 

President Donald Trump Loses In Trump Country trump's future is bleak

The Three Oaths dilemma dividing Jewish Zionists from anti-Zionists

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/22302

The Talmud cites three oaths which G-d administered: “One oath was that Israel would not make Aliyah 'as a wall'; and one oath was that G-d adjured Israel not to rebel against the nations; and one oath was that G-d adjured the nations not to persecute Israel too much” (Ketuvot 111a).

Of these three oaths, therefore, two apply to Israel and one to the other nations.

These Three Oaths are the basis for the ostensibly religious Jewish opposition to Zionism: the very essence of Zionism was that Jews from the world over return to Israel, ascending to the Land of Israel “as a wall”, together, united, using military force when necessary.

This compels the question: Does Zionism indeed violate G-d’s will? Do these Three Oaths constitute halakhah (Jewish religious law) in practice?

By Republican Standards, Almost Nothing Is Racist

When Democrats are accused of anti-Semitism, Republicans understand that coded language can be hurtful. But Trump’s racist comments get a pass.

Most of the time, conservatives and Republicans want the bar for what constitutes bigotry to be set extremely high. When President Donald Trump tweeted last weekend that four nonwhite Democrats in Congress should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” he offered a textbook example of racism. Trump’s own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission uses the phrase Go back to where you came from as one of its examples of discrimination based on national origin. Yet Trump insisted that “those Tweets were NOT Racist”—even as he doubled down on them by launching an attack on Representative Ilhan Omar that prompted rally-goers in North Carolina on Wednesday night to chant “Send her back!”

At the same time that Trump was denying charges of bigotry, however, he was also leveling them. At the North Carolina rally, he accused Omar of “vicious anti-Semitic” remarks—a reference to her tweet that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s influence in Washington is “all about the Benjamins” and her allegation that pro-Israel groups “push for allegiance to a foreign country.” Those comments—which evoked hoary stereotypes of Jews as money-driven and disloyal—elicited criticism even from Democrats, and Omar apologized for the first. But however damning one considers her statements, it’s utterly illogical to claim that they constitute bigotry while Trump’s far more direct attack does not. Yet this is exactly what Trump and other prominent Republicans are doing.

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When Democrats are accused of prejudice against Jews, Republicans can find it easy to discern ugly coded language. But when Trump and others in his party are accused of hostility to black people, Muslims, and Latinos, prominent conservatives set the standard for what constitutes bigotry so high that it’s almost impossible to meet.

The Republican Party has its own Israel problem

https://www.jta.org/2019/03/20/opinion/the-republican-party-has-an-israel-problem

But Republicans, who often point to declining support for Israel among Democrats, should also be paying attention to similar trends in their own party.

The largest recorded drop this year is the percentage of Republicans – not Democrats – who sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians. Republican sympathies for Israel fell 11 percentage points this year, to 76 percent from 87 percent, a slightly lower level of sympathy than Gallup has recorded in the last decade.

Support for Israel among Republicans certainly remains robust, with 43 percent of Republicans reporting a “very favorable” view of the country. But there are signs that this support should not be taken for granted. A significant minority of Republicans, for a variety of reasons, are eschewing America’s traditional alliance with Israel and are skeptical of President Donald Trump’s ability to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

What Donald Trump Will Never Understand About Jews

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/290038/what-donald-trump-will-never-understand-about-jews

President Trump is well aware that the vast majority of American Jews voted against him and are loyal to the Democratic Party. He is well aware that the vast majority of the Jewish members of Congress are Democrats. The idea that the Democratic Party stands against Israel is certifiably false. Regardless of how you feel about Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Ilhan Omar—I find them contemptible, not least for lying to Jewish voters during election season about their views on a two-state solution and BDS—they are two junior members of the Democratic Party.  They do not represent the majority, or even a sizable faction within the party.  

Indeed, last week over 40 of their peers, freshman Democrats, visited Israel. Yossi Klein Halevi described them as a diverse group of policymakers who were empathetic to Israeli security concerns and excited to be there. When we talk about party leadership the lie becomes even more obvious. Nita Lowey, chairwoman of the extremely powerful House Appropriations Committee; Hakeem Jeffries, likely the next speaker of the House and the highest ranking African American in the House; Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, all have impeccably pro-Israel records.  The notion that the Democratic Party supports cutting foreign aid to Israel is laughable—especially considering that the last person in Congress to actually block aid to Israel was a Republican. 

In fact, if you’re looking for something that a big number of Jewish Democrats agree on, it’s the investigation of Trump’s alleged crimes: Nearly half the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are Jewish—including Chairman Jerry Nadler. 

No. What’s really happening here is not just irresponsible; it’s purposeful. The president thrives on fear. He hopes that by dividing America and frightening America he will win. And so he engineered this political moment. He pressured Prime Minister Netanyahu to make the wrong call so he could reap the political rewards. He created this political moment so he could call the majority of American Jews disloyal. He can’t make the case for us to vote for him on merit, so he resorts to bullying us. 

Now we must grapple with how to respond to this terrifying moment.  

Let’s start by being honest with ourselves. As hard as this is to accept, it’s simply a reality that whole swaths of the American political establishment are treating us like morons. Like we couldn’t possibly believe that Omar’s rhetoric is anti-Semitic and Trump’s rhetoric is also anti-Semitic. As though we couldn’t possibly be nuanced enough to be furious at both these few members of the House as well as the president. As though we couldn’t recognize both the left and the right have anti-Semitism problems. Be furious at BOTH. Demand better from BOTH. Look at your side of the aisle and raise hell—that is what you owe your people, your tribe; not lockstep agreement or partisanship, but the courage and conviction to demand the very best from those you vote for, volunteer, donate to, identify with. I want to see you at every town hall, meet-and-greet, and advocacy day demanding that those who are asking for your vote fight rising anti-Semitism always, not just when politically useful. 

To that end, I want to say that I am profoundly disappointed not a single Democrat condemned Omar and Tlaib sharing a deeply anti-Semitic cartoon drawn by the second place winner of Iran’s International Holocaust Cartoon Competition, Carlos Latuff. I encourage all of you to reach out to Democratic leaders in your community and express your anger, dismay, and disappointment at their silence—and tell them you demand better if they want your vote.  

The Truth the Trump gospel according to Yated

https://yated.com/the-truth/

But when the president of the United States, who is a greater supporter of Israel than anyone who preceded him in that position, points out the obvious and says that a Jew who doesn’t vote Republican is either an idiot or disloyal to the party that supports Israel and fights anti-Semitism, the Jews and the media go crazy and say that Trump is out of his mind. How dare he point out that the Democrats can no longer be counted on to support Israel? Who is he to remind everyone that the Democrat Party tolerates anti-Semitism and has within its ranks some of the most prominent enemies of the Jewish state? Not only does the party support and condone them, but it places them on vital congressional committees, where they certainly don’t belong.

Trump, the media warns, is an anti-Semite. “Jews,” they say, “be careful. Stay away from him. He doesn’t like you.”

It is helpless to remind them that his son-in-law is Jewish, that he permitted his daughter to undergo an Orthodox conversion to marry a Jew, that his grandchildren are Jewish, that his closest people in the administration are Jews, that he stuck his neck out for Israel several times, and that he freed Rubashkin because he is a compassionate person who cares about justice.

The New York Times and the media echo chamber that follows it accused Trump of bringing up the old canard that Jews are not patriotic citizens of the lands in which they reside, because he used that dirty word “loyal” when he said that Jews who vote for Democrats “are being very disloyal to the Jewish people and very disloyal to Israel.”

Donald Trump and the Jews: He's exactly why most of us vote for Democrats

https://www.salon.com/2019/08/24/donald-trump-and-the-jews-hes-exactly-why-most-of-us-vote-for-democrats/

If President Trump doesn't understand why a large majority of American Jews are Democrats, maybe he should take a look in the mirror.

In case you need a quick refresher, Trump sparked an enormous furor on Tuesday when he said, "I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty." He added that "five years ago, the concept of even talking about this . . . of cutting off aid to Israel because of two people that hate Israel and hate Jewish people — I can't believe we're even having this conversation. Where has the Democratic Party gone? Where have they gone where they're defending these two people over the State of Israel?"

The new James Comey report proves whatever you want it to prove

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/29/politics/james-comey-russia-donald-trump/index.html

But Comey is, in many ways, the weathervane of Trump's presidency. How you feel about Comey and the actions he took in and out of office are a near-certain predictor of your view of Trump's presidency. So, too, this IG report on Comey's conduct. He's either an American hero for standing up to power at the risk of his career or a leaker and a liar intent on overriding the will of the American people. There's no middle ground.

Fox host goes viral with EPIC anti-Trump speech