Saturday, September 16, 2017

Trump’s ‘fake news’ attack lost its power this week

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/09/16/trumps-fake-news-attack-lost-its-power-this-week

 
An amazing thing happened this week.
News outlets that President Trump has branded “fake news” reported Trump agreed in principle to grant long-term legal status to DACA recipients — a big item on Democrats' wish list — without securing funding for a Southern border wall in return. Trump said the media and the Democrats who say they negotiated with him were mischaracterizing the situation.
Given a choice of whom to believe, reliably pro-Trump commentators, such as Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter and Mike Cernovich chose the media, Charles E. Schumer and Nancy Pelosi over the president.
Mark it down: This is the week that Trump's “fake news” attack lost its power.
In the past, Trump's boosters would have rushed to assure his supporters that the president is totally committed to the wall and claimed that the media are trying to drive a wedge between Trump and his base by manufacturing a narrative about supposed flimsiness.
That was Breitbart News's contention last month, when The Washington Post published the transcript of a telephone conversation between Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto in which Trump said the wall is “the least important thing we are talking about, but politically this might be the most important.”
“Very fake news: Trump didn't say the wall wasn't important,” read a Breitbart headline. The accompanying article asserted that “instead, the new president of the United States (POTUS) shows an indefatigable commitment to his 'Make America Great Again' agenda — which included toughness on immigration, crime, trade and the border wall.”
That was some astounding spin. Now, even Breitbart is echoing the mainstream media and reporting that Trump is, indeed, waffling on the wall.
About 4 p.m. Thursday, Trump's reelection campaign sent an email to supporters that was signed by the president.
“Let me set the record straight in the simplest language possible,” he said in the email. “We will build a wall (not a fence) along the Southern border of the United States of America to help stop illegal immigration and keep America safe. Apparently, liberals in Congress and the mainstream media need one more reminder that building the wall is nonnegotiable.”
On Friday afternoon, the Trump campaign sent this text message to supporters:
Notice that Trump didn't deny that funding for the wall is not part of a tentative DACA deal in either message. He merely said that he will build the wall at some point; in fact, he told reporters on Thursday that “the wall will come later.”
Breitbart was not assuaged by the president's words. This is what the site's homepage looked like on Friday:
On Fox News, Carlson led off his Thursday night show with a stinging rejection of Trump's position that allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States does not amount to “amnesty.”
“It would be a massive amnesty,” Carlson said. “It would be the biggest ever granted in American history. This is thrilling news for Democrats and for open-borders advocates everywhere. In return for this concession, the president receives nothing — no reduction in overall immigration totals, no tightened restriction on foreign workers who take jobs from Americans, no E-Verify to prevent illegal immigrants from working under the table, no end to chain migration.
“The president isn't even getting a border wall, though he insisted he will somehow get one later, possibly. … Well, the president seems confident it will all work out in the end, but there's no reason to be optimistic. The fate of DACA recipients is, by far, the best piece of leverage he has or ever will have. If he gives it away for free, none of his other immigration priorities — the priorities he ran on and won the presidency with — will even be considered.”
On Twitter, Coulter fumed that Trump was “easily rolled” by Democratic leaders. Cernovich, an Infowars host, tweeted that it was “insane” for Trump to let DACA recipients stay in the country without demanding money for the border wall.
In a truly head-spinning exchange, Cernovich fired back at a Trump supporter who dismissed a New York Times report by Maggie Haberman as “fake news.”
“Pretty much any Haberman-Trump story is good to go,” Cernovich tweeted. “That's reality.”
You read that right: An Infowars host told a Trump supporter that the New York Times is not fake news.

The Infowars website also highlighted MAGA hat-burning on Friday and questioned Trump's dedication to his “America First” agenda.
None of this means the term “fake news” is dead or that every single Trump booster is calling BS on the president's claim that he is as determined as ever to build the wall.
“There hasn't been a cave yet,” Rush Limbaugh told his radio audience on Thursday, urging patience, “but it looks like there might be.”
The significance of this week is that Trump can no longer cry “fake news” when the media reports on a broken promise, and count on his boosters to help keep the faith. In a credibility war with the media, Trump's victory is not automatic, even in the eyes of his most ardent admirers.

‘Strange’ and ‘Strangers’

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/244808/strange-and-strangers

Two new studies of Islam portray recent outbursts of coordinated violence and oppression not as a reaction to Western liberalism but instead as fundamental to the religion itself
By Edward N. Luttwak

The Europe that conquered much of the world from the 15th century onward was empowered by its violent disunity. Its quarreling states large and small were sharpened in war and diplomacy by fighting one another at frequent intervals. Each war brought its share of death and destruction, but each was followed by vigorous procreation and reconstruction, so that Europe kept growing from war to war, in population and in wealth, while advancing in the arts, the sciences, and in technology. That Europe was still Christian except for its Jews, privileged survivors when the pagans were exterminated, but its very un-Christian central ideology was the Iliad’s: men love war, women love warriors. European wars over the centuries were fought by volunteers, whose urge to fight was far more widely admired than deplored, not least by women desirous of virile mates.
Europe’s tragedy is that while the Iliad’s ideology would now be deemed absurdly archaic, the sum total of the ideas that have replaced it does not permit its survival: The average fertility rate is far below the 2.1 replacement rate, so that it is only the aging of the population that prevents its disappearance, with a palpable loss of energy and creative vitality. As to why Europeans are producing so few babies—and they would be fewer still without the high fertility of the small percentage of Muslim mothers—there can be no definite answer, because in each country and each region there seems to be a different prevalence and different mix of refusals: men’s refusal of the responsibilities of fatherhood, women’s refusal of the burdens of motherhood.
As for the post-heroic ideas that have largely displaced the Iliad’s elemental prescriptions, they are varied and changeable and drifting right-ward of late, but among the better-educated anti-racism, feminism, post-colonial guilt, and a pacifist presumption remain the dominant mix, perhaps best exemplified by the Norwegian politician Karsten Nordal Hauken. In both a TV appearance and an April 6, 2016 article, Hauken proclaimed his own strong feelings of guilt and responsibility, because a male Somali asylum-seeker was being deported after serving four-and-a-half years in prison for rape: “I was the reason that he would not be in Norway anymore but rather sent to a dark, uncertain future in Somalia. … I see him mostly as a product of an unfair world, a product of an upbringing marked by war and despair.”
Hauken’s guilty plea may seem strange because he did not capture, prosecute, or judge the Somali. Yet there can be no doubt about his personal connection to the case: Karsten Nordal Hauken, self-described as “male, heterosexual, young Socialist Left Party member, feminist and anti-racist” was himself the object of the rape.
***
Hauken’s sentiments are by no means unusual: Many elite Europeans hold that Somalis have the right to leave the cruelties of Somalia, inflicted by fellow Somalis, to come to Europe with or without travel documents, as do all other Africans and, indeed, non-Africans—not to mention war refugees from Syria, even though the right of asylum which they truly do have under international treaties only applies to the first country they reach, and no country of Europe shares a border with Syria. That would be dismissed as a mere technicality by many contemporary Europeans,including Mario Bergoglio, the bishop of Rome, aka Pope Francis, who vehemently insists that all immigrants must be welcomed with open arms—a sharp departure from the views of his predecessor, Benedict.
With the pope easily outranking the prime minister in Italy, it is unsurprising that the Italian authorities have blithely ignored their own laws, including the acquired Schengen Treaty admission rules, by making no attempt whatever to separate and send home the vast mass of illegal migrants from the relatively few war refugees. Instead they did the opposite by sending their coast guard to collect them from the traffickers’ barges just off the Libyan coast. Germany does not have a Mediterranean coastline, yet in 2015, the still-very-popular Chancellor Angela Merkel took it upon herself to violate the Schengen rules (treaties outrank domestic laws) to invite Syrian war refugees without limit, and without any form of identity controls, thereby ensuring that many Afghans, Iranians, Eritreans, and Kurds set out for Germany. To do so, they had to cross all the countries in between, some of which attracted opprobrium by refusing transit. The European Commission threatened harsh economic retaliation, but, of course, it too is afflicted by the intersecting European maladies that make it as impotent as the national governments in dealing with immigration, or with Putin’s Russia, or with the subversion of national cultures by relatively small numbers of Muslim immigrants.
How large a threat do Muslim immigrants pose to a dying Europe? In 2016 they were only 4.6 percent of the population in the U.K. But their powerful Islamizing impact on schools, local governments, and police practices merits extended treatment in Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islamwhereby one learns that the death in question is not so strange after all, for it is merely a case of suicide—or, more precisely, attempted suicide, because there is an increasing resistance underway, which is even reversing Islamization in some European countries, at least in some respects. For example, in Italy, so lax with illegal immigration, there is no laxity at all when it comes to Islamist violence, with summary deportations and many arrests of would-be terrorists, and not a single fatality since it all started, in sharp contrast to France next door. More than 160 imams are in Italian prisons, some merely self-appointed to their ministries post-imprisonment, but others for preaching what others proclaim with impunity elsewhere in Europe.
Murray is very effective in fully identifying the deformed, guilt-ridden liberalism à la Karsten Nordal Hauken that generates illiberal concessions to intolerance—and to violence. He rightly gives extended treatment to the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who once held a seat in the Netherlands parliament and whose denunciations of female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and polygamy were themselves denounced as extremist, even racist, by many leaders of Dutch society, while the Dutch police professed their inability to protect her from local Muslims, forcing her into exile.
When it comes to Sweden, Murray rightly presents the rape scandal as emblematic while also surveying the territorial loss of control manifest in Malmö, among other places. But it is not clear if the Swedish rape phenomenon can properly be called a “scandal,” because it continues to be blandly denied by the government and, indeed, the entire establishment—there was an outpouring of much-applauded ridicule when Trump mentioned it. Yet the numbers are simple enough: In 1975, there were 421 rapes reported to the police; in 2014, the number was 6,620. Given that most migrants are young Muslim males brought up in places where any uncovered woman is fair prey, the numbers are no great surprise.
What is surprising is the eagerness of the press to cover up the facts. On Feb. 2, 2015, the Swedish press reported the gang-rape of a Swedish woman on the ferry Amorella under the headline “Eight Swedes questioned over ferry ‘gang rape.’”
When it turned out that the men were not, in fact, ethnically Swedes but rather Somalis, the Swedish press (Aftonbladed, Expressen, etc.) merely changed the headlines to read “Swedish citizens questioned over ferry ‘gang rape,’” When the investigative and right-wing Nya Tider published the fact that they were not Swedish citizens but rather asylum seekers and therefore could only be described as Somalis, the Aftonbladed and Expressen simply ignored the correction. Their fear, of course, is that publishing the truth would trigger a backlash against Muslim immigrants. That has been a widely shared fear since Sept. 11: Every time Islamists commit some outrage, there is a frenzy not over the victims but rather over the imminent danger of attacks on Muslims at large—and that is curious indeed, because there were hardly attacks on Muslims, even in violent America, after 2,983 were killed.
***
Murray is at his best in presenting Michel Houellebecq, the French author whose novels have been steadily decoding Europe’s post-heroic and feebly sexual nihilism since his Extension du Domaine de la Lutte of 1994. Houellebecq has been widely famous in the West since his best-seller, Plateforme, of 2001. His Soumission(Submission) of 2015 profoundly agitated French politics by presenting a totally plausible sequence of events that result in the Islamization of France, with a cynical, opportunistic, and feeble academic as the protagonist. French is one of my native languages and I became a Houellebecq devotee years ago (since Plateforme) because I was captivated by his style as well as by his subject matter (including the perils of too much self-realization). Even his fiercest critics—some were agitated years ago by his offhand remark that Islam is “nonetheless” the most stupid of religions—concede that Houellebecq has single-handedly invented a new prose splendidly classical in its cadenced tonalities, yet utterly modern, hence a perfect fit with his utterly realistic contemporary tales, and Soumission is certainly that.
“Submission” is of course an exact translation of the Arabic word “Islam,” a religion far more often willfully misrepresented than ignorantly misunderstood (you will hear professors of Middle East studies and such assert that it means “peace”): To cite one example among a thousand or more, Verso has just published Suleiman Mourad’s The Mosaic of Islam, which is squarely aimed at the U.S. collegiate market (Mourad teaches at Smith College), wherein we learn that the Quran’s more murderous verses count for nothing, because along with the entire corpus of Muhammad’s sayings it has “always” been subject to change, interpretation and “rigorous” debate. When the Quran says “kill” you should therefore instead read: admonish, or persuade, or plead, or “swim backstroke,” I suppose. In any case, he adds: “The Quran legitimizes a lot of things that modern Muslims consider embarrassing: slavery, military jihad, control of women.”
Yet unreconstructed interpretations of “jihad” continue to have wide appeal beyond the confines of Smith College, as countless polls testify, and, more to the point, as the ubiquity of jihadi violence across the world from Nigeria to Mindanao demonstrates. The control of women is both an overwhelming reality in Muslim countries—and any dense Muslim community anywhere—and is often reaffirmed by state-salaried preachers. Slavery, yes, is only an exotic survival (I saw slaves in Qatar eight years ago)—or was, until its revival with the capture of Yazidi women; the men were killed when they refused to convert, in strict accordance with Quranic injunctions.
Mourad’s short book is replete with misrepresentations, yet can scarcely be criticized as especially misleading. Simple, bare-faced lying pervades the approved textbooks of what might be called “American Collegiate Islam”—the mildest of religions, in which apostasy is not— repeat, not—a capital crime (notwithstanding laws in some 20 countries), and has nothing, but really nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the Islamic state; or al-Qaida, of course; or Boko Haram; or Laskar-i-Islam; or Abu Sayaf; or the Taliban; or any of the other 60 or 70 really sizable jihadi organizations around the world, which could not exist if they did not have substantial approval among many more Muslims.
It is in its determined violation of this unique regime of voluntarily induced cognitive dissonance that Graeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State has caused such a scandal. Instead of synthesizing his own version of American Collegiate Islam to be assigned to hapless students by U.S. college teachers of Islam, Wood has interviewed as many active supporters of the now-almost-defunct Islamic state as he could find in Cairo and elsewhere, without actually going to Mosul or Raqqah, to find out what they believed and why.
Wood interviewed many very different believers (one a Japanese academic) yet obtained very consistent answers. First, it is evident that Wood’s believers cannot be described as mindless fanatics—they had arrived at their faith in the necessity of a caliphate by a logical process once they adopted Islam (or took it seriously, if born in it), demonstrating that the Islamic State was no anomaly. Rather, it was a fulfillment of a rigorous form of Islam that is supported not only by the tens of thousands who went to fight, but by the 100 million or so Deobandis of India and Pakistan (and Birmingham) and “Wahhabis” of Qatar (yes) and Saudi Arabia, aka the followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), who revived the strict Islam ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328). Though Wood does discuss this Islam at length, he wholly omits the Deobandis, who now control at least 30,000(!) mosques around the world through preachers sent out from their immense (and tax-exempt) Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India. (In spite of its pervasive extremism—it was a fatwa from Deoband that mandated the Taliban destruction of the immense Buddhas of Bamiyan in March 2001—Darul Uloom is well protected in India … because of its extremism: It opposes Pakistan on the grounds that Muslims should rule all parts of India!)
All of the above concur with ibn Taymiyyah that insufficiently devout Muslims should be flogged into submission and that heretical or hypocritical Muslims (including the Shi’a) are much worse than properly submissive Christians or Jews—only disagreeing on whether they should be given a chance to renounce heresy or killed outright. Because Iran’s clerics have greatly intensified the cult of Ali and of their 12 Imams at the expense of sole devotion to Muhammad, and also because (to them) bizarre Shi’a ceremonies are now broadcast for them to see, very many Sunnis now agree that Shi’ism is indeed a heresy and thus subject to the death penalty, even if they do not support the Islamic State’s summary roadside executions (though in Pakistan, deadly attacks on Shi’a at prayer are an almost daily occurrence).
In other words, Islamic violence against non-Muslims is, in fact, peripheral to the greater violence directed at fellow Muslims—which really varies only in degree between the routine oppression of women (explicitly enjoined in the Quran) to the periodic outbursts of mass extremist violence, such as that of the Almohads who drove Maimonides into exile to find refuge in Fatimid Egypt in 1168 or so (esoteric Shi’a Sevener Ismailis themselves, the Fatimids had to be tolerant, and in fact were).
Wood’s central finding is therefore that the extremism of the Islamic State, though very modern in some ways, was not a reaction to modern events, such as U.S. invasion of Iraq (as has been endlessly argued by apologists). It was, instead, the latest in a long series of such outbursts of mass violence that have marked Islam since its birth: Muhammad, after all, lived by the sword, before and after preaching his religion, yet he is still Islam’s perfect man whom all should strive to imitate.
But the more serious problem for non-Muslims is not violence, but rather the West’s own internal encounter with unreconstructed mainstream Islamic beliefs. Both Houellebecq’s Submission and Murray’s book are not optimistic about the result. Not many Muslims outside the Middle East support jihadi violence. Yet the latest Pew survey, issued Aug. 9, shows that support for the imposition of Sharia—complete with hand-chopping and the ritual humiliation of non-believers—is at least substantial (from 37 percent) or overwhelming in every country with a large Muslim population (including Russia), with the solitary exception of Azerbaijan, whose secularism is daily reinforced by the immediate proximity of Iran’s extremism to the south and jihadism in Dagestan to the north. In Afghanistan, that support is 99 percent.
In the United States, the number of Muslims has increased by a million in the last decade. Those who believe that routine versions of Islamic fundamentalism must dissolve on contact with American conditions had better consider the demographic expansion of American Chassidim and the Amish—bearing in mind that jihad is as integral to Islam as pacifism is to the Amish.
***
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Australian Catholic Church Falls Short on Safeguards for Children, Study Finds

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/world/australia/australia-catholic-church-child-abuse.html

By JACQUELINE WILLIAMS
Sept. 12, 2017

MELBOURNE, Australia — A study that examines child sexual abuse worldwide in the Roman Catholic Church has found that the Australian church has done less to safeguard children in its care than its counterparts in similar countries have.

The report, released on Wednesday by the Center for Global Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, also found that the church’s requirement that priests be celibate was a major risk factor for abuse. And it said that the possibility of abuse in Catholic residential institutions, like orphanages, should be getting more attention, especially in developing countries.

Experts said the report could put pressure on Pope Francis, and particularly the church in Australia, to do more to prevent abuse. The Australian church was rocked in June when Cardinal George Pell, an Australian who is one of the pope’s top advisers, became the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate to be formally charged with sexual offenses.

Desmond Cahill, the report’s lead author, said its findings pointed to an urgent need to rethink the priesthood in the 21st century. A professor of intercultural studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, he said the church should reconsider the celibacy requirement for priests.

"The Catholic Church is in a state of crisis, and pressure has to be put on the Holy See to take the necessary steps to change,” Professor Cahill said.

In nearly 400 pages, the report traces the history of child sexual abuse in the global church and tries to identify factors that have contributed to it, with a particular focus on Australia.

Professor Cahill and the report’s co-author, Dr. Peter Wilkinson, a researcher in Catholic culture, are both ordained priests who resigned from church ministry in the 1970s but remain practicing Catholics. Professor Cahill said that while in the ministry, he worked alongside some of Australia’s most abusive priests, but did not realize it until decades later.

“Our backgrounds have allowed us not only to understand in depth the workings of the church in Australia, but also the Holy See in Rome, where we both studied at postgraduate level in pontifical universities,” he said.

The authors acknowledge that the Australian church has made progress in dealing with abuse, particularly in its schools, but the report found that it had “lagged significantly behind other comparable countries in relation to developing safeguarding policies and protocols” to protect children.

For example, the Australian church has not appointed representatives in each parish charged with safeguarding children or provided “safe environment training” to all Catholic employees, the report said.

“Any suggestion that the Catholic Church in Australia has led the way in child protection is not sustainable in face of the initiatives in other countries nor has there been much accountability or evaluation in Australia,” the report said.

Last month, a commission that has been investigating the Australian church’s response to sexual abuse recommended a series of legislative and policy changes, one of which would require priests who are told about sexual abuse in confessions to report it to the authorities.

That proposal began a heated debate, in which Archbishop Denis Hart of Melbourne said he would rather go to jail than violate the confidentiality of the confessional. The report released on Wednesday cites several historical instances in which the church allowed exceptions to that confidentiality requirement.

Professor Cahill and Dr. Wilkinson have been consultants for the Australian commission, the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It is due to release the final report from its yearslong inquiry later this year, and is expected to recommend further measures for protecting children.

Dr. Wilkinson said that the Australian church was in dire need of self-examination. He said it was “going nowhere except possibly down.”

“To regain trust, not only within the Catholic community, but trust in the church within the nation, the church has to undertake a metanoia — that’s a complete transformation, a change of heart and culture,” he said.

As the global church’s sex abuse scandal has unfolded, attention has tended to focus on offending priests in parishes, the report by Professor Cahill and Dr. Wilkinson said. But it said a “parallel tragedy” in Catholic residential institutions, like orphanages and boarding schools, was a cause for major concern, especially in the developing world. The church operates more than 9,000 orphanages worldwide.

The report documents patterns of past abuse at such facilities in Australia, where the church no longer runs orphanages, and in other countries, based on inquiries conducted by governments and the church. It concludes that if such trends prevail elsewhere, “one must fear for the safety” of children at Catholic residential institutions.

“The Holy See does not seem to be aware of the issue or chooses to ignore it,” the report said. It singles out India and Italy, where the church operates many residential centers, mainly orphanages.

The celibacy requirement for priests is a “major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse,” according to the report. In Eastern Rite churches where priests are allowed to marry, though only before ordination, the “offending rate is low, probably negligible,” the report said.

The Rev. Joseph Palacios, a Catholic priest and sociology professor at the University of Southern California, called the report a “highly professional study” with “a very good grasp of the historical and theological undercurrents of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.”

He praised the study for its analysis of schools and residential institutions run by religious orders, which he said could “provide a safe space” for potential abusers. “Coupled with the psychological trust that children have with teachers and providers, these institutions become very dangerous places for sexually and psychologically underdeveloped religious personnel,” he said.

Professor Cahill said he began work on the report in 2012, and expanded its scope in 2014 after participating in an international workshop in northern Spain, which brought together leading researchers into child sex abuse in Catholic settings. Dr. Wilkinson joined the study in 2015.

Kieran Tapsell, a retired lawyer who wrote a book about the church’s abuse scandals, said the report was noteworthy for synthesizing a great deal of material and viewing it from sociological, psychological and theological perspectives.

“That hasn’t been brought together before,” he said.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Seventeen Year Sentence for Jerusalem Educator Found Guilty of rape

https://www.inn.co.il/News/News.aspx/354925

The Mashgiach of a Jerusalem yeshiva was sentenced to 17 years in jail after he admitted and was found guilty of heinous acts of molestation and child rape.  The victims were spared having to come forward and publicly testify following a plea bargain.

In addition to the jail sentence, he was fined 145 thousand shekel which was deposited with the court.

About a year and a half ago, this Mashgiach from Jerusalem (Bayit Vegan) was arrested and was found guilty of a long list of acts of rape
which he perpetrated for many years against three young girls [nieces].

One of the girls was only six years old when he began to molest her. He continued this for many years, including two more nieces, using religious manipulation and "mind games" as part of his tactics.

I can ‘do Jewish’ on just $40,000 a year

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/i-can-do-jewish-for-40000/

Last year, I was a 45-year-old married father of four children, a member of a large American Modern Orthodox Jewish community, and I didn’t have a penny saved in the bank. I decided to get serious about my finances and sit down with a financial planner. He told me that in order for me to be able to pay for my four children to go to college, and to have any semblance of a retirement for myself and my wife, we would need to save 50 percent of our net income for the next 20 years. We began to itemize my family’s major expenses:



  • Day school tuition – approximately $80,000 post tax dollars a year. Currently consuming nearly 50% of our post tax annual take home pay.

  • Housing and utilities – near a synagogue, walking distance, big enough for 4 kids, another large sum of money.

  • Health insurance – my employer only plays 50 percent, leaving me with almost $900 a month to pay to cover the family

  • 2 cars

  • Jewish Summer camp – with 4 kids in various combinations of summer camps, both home and away, plus all associated flights and gear, approx $20,000.

  • Kosher food – At times coming to more than $1,000 a month

  • Additional outlays: to Jewish charities, synagogue dues + building fund, and more, as well as life insurance, tolls, and random other surprises.

  • Dollars left for savings, investment, college tuition, wealth building: Zero

  • We reviewed this short list of items and my advisor said, “You realize the greatest expense to your life is your religion. It is consuming over half of your post tax take home pay. You are paying almost $150,000 a year to ‘do Jewish.’”


And that’s when I realized I had forgotten to include Passover on the list.

I’m not alone
This was the wakeup call of the century for me. I was raised to believe that religion came first; that everything was ‘holy’ and a ‘mitzvah’; that the more you spent on your Judaism the better it was in God’s eyes. And I now realized I had been completely neglecting the financial health and future of my family.

The first thing I did was to ask around how other people were managing it. Word on the street was that to do everything on my list in a “second tier” community, not something in the greater New York area, one would have to earn more than $500,000 a year. Now I work very hard and I do pretty well, but I will most likely never make half a million dollars a year. Granted, some people in the community do, but not many.

What I saw was far more people who were – if they were willing to admit it – getting steady monthly checks from their parents to survive. Adult children 50 years old still living off handouts from their parents in order to “do Jewish.” Some parents had large fortunes and were easily able to afford to help several adult children, but some were slowly being bled dry. I had one grandmother tell me, “It’s wrong that the day schools are now trying to fund themselves off the backs of the grandparents, now that they have already broken the parents.”

Even more concerning, were the large number of families, doctors, lawyers, investment professionals, who, when asked in confidence, replied that they don’t have two pennies to rub together. And that was before their children were setting off to years in Israel and very expensive college in New York.

The day I left the synagogue forever was the Saturday the rabbi preached that day school tuition does not fulfill the obligation to give 10 percent of one’s income to charity — and that from a rabbi making $350,000 a year, along with free tuition, free housing, and free food expenses. As I angrily began to walk out of there for the last time, my neighbor grabbed my tallis and told me “The day the rabbis pay full tuition is the day that the tuition crisis will be solved.”

‘You’re in or you’re out’
Let’s spend a little more time on the tuition crisis in Modern Orthodox day schools, since this was the greatest expense for me. With four kids in school and an upper middle class income, I was told I had to pay full tuition for all four kids with no sibling discounts (and no reprieve from constant fundraising calls).

At one point, I went to the school president, a major donor (independently wealthy) to the school. I explained that keeping all my kids in the school would mean never saving a penny for retirement or college, and asked if there was any plan for helping working middle class parents, such as capping tuition at a percentage of income, or providing a sibling discount. His reply: “You’re in or you’re out.”

So I took myself out.

I enrolled my kids in an excellent private secular school for a third the cost of the “excellent” Jewish day school. And now, a year later, you know what I’ve found? That my kids are not running a year behind public school in their education; That kids actually have discipline and respect for their teachers; And even more importantly, that all children who misbehave are handled in the same manner, instead of letting the children of the wealthy supporters get away with murder. And even more interesting, this amazing secular school had all of…drumroll…one principal — the Day School I left had five. Enough said.

In hindsight, I remember when a Muslim I worked with asked me one day why I was so stressed out. I said because I have to make so much money to pay for my kids to go to school. He asked me how much tuition I was paying per kid and when I answered $20,000, he said, “Wow, you’re getting screwed. We in the Muslim school are paying only $5,000.” Of course their school also had only one principal.

I had now left day school and synagogue, and my life was only getting better. Not just financially, but emotionally as well. I actually didn’t have to work as hard, and started to have more time with my family. I knew fathers working five jobs to pay the Jewish bills, or taking jobs out of town, showing up for weekends at home, or even putting their families in Israel and flying back one week a month. This is no recipe for ‘Shalom Bayit.’

Kosher food came next. I set a $200 a month limit for my wife on spending in the local Kosher butcher shop. Some chicken breast, some wings. There is no health benefit to eating meat more than maybe twice a month. Now that I look at the prices, I am actually shocked the communities have not simply boycotted these establishments en masse.

Passover? Forget about it. We just do it at home now. I toss that one up there as a luxury on par with buying a country club membership or a small yacht.

Summer camp? Chabad. In fact, we have been getting more involved with Chabad. At least they don’t make Judaism all about the money. Sure, they also need community support to exist, but in return they provide full-service Judaism at a reasonable price. That in my opinion, will effectively position Chabad as the ‘last man standing’ of US Jewish Orthodoxy, as the far right Jewish communities become increasingly impoverished due to the failure to educate their kids for the workforce, and as the Modern Orthodox numbers continue to dwindle under lack of commitment, unbearable costs and attrition in the college years and beyond.

Time for a revolution
Over the past year, our family has rewritten our financial future. We now live on half of our income and invest and save the rest. And thanks to this new president, the financial markets have been doing great. We pulled our kids out of Jewish day school and they are getting a better education in a better environment, and we supplement their Jewish education via Chabad. I am now able to comfortably “do Jewish” for $40,000 a year, the sum my financial planner told me needed to be our limit. You know what, we may even be able to go away next year for Passover!

The overpriced balloon of the Modern Orthodox experience rests on three core flaws:

Jewish organizations are too top heavy, with too many positions filled by wives and cronies, and with amply-paid rabbis who are out of touch with the financial woes of their congregants.

There are too many very wealthy board members controlling too much of the decision-making for the wider Jewish community. It’s time to get some working class and even poor people on the boards of schools and JCCs.

Too many sheep just go right along, with their heads buried in the rear end of the sheep in front of them. It’s time for a revolution.

What kind of revolution?

How about launching a month-long community boycott of all neighborhood kosher markets? (Start two weeks before Passover.) Or pulling the kids out of day school, demanding charter schools, and insisting that the local rabbis earn their fat salaries by holding lowcost Jewish after-school programs in the synagogue.

As we gear up for the High Holidays – by the way, my Chabad doesn’t charge mandatory ticket fees – it’s time to take an honest look at where Modern Orthodox Judaism is going. For me it was a $150,000 a year post tax commitment, a sum of money that most people never even come close to earning.

Religious leaders have no right to complain about intermarriage rates in the US when the religion is being priced out of affordability. And don’t even get me started on the shidduch crisis, although if you look honestly at the problems of matchmaking and failure to find a mate, there too you find that much of the problem also comes back to who has the most money. It’s time to take back our religion, to make it more accessible to Jews of all financial situations.

Those who stand in the way of this progress should be expelled from the community. The legacy rabbinate and top-heavy institutions are not sustainable in the long term. They’ve bankrupted the parents. They are now trying to bankrupt the grandparents. That was never the way this religion was supposed to be.

Monday, September 11, 2017

Campaign against neighbors Get refusal results in large fine


http://m.takdin.co.il/pages/article.aspx?artid=5783318


שכנה שניהלה קמפיין נגד "סרבן גט" ללא הכרזתו ככזה בבי"ד חויבה בפיצוי חריג בגבהו

http://www.takdin.co.il/pages/article.aspx?artid=5783318

תושבת השומרון טענה כי היא ניסתה לעזור לשכנה במצוקה ועודדה את תושבי היישוב להחרים את בעלה שלטענתה סירב לתת לה גט ולהדיר רגליהם מהפיצרייה שבבעלותו. הפיצוי שנפסק היה גבוה מאד ביחס לתביעות לשון הרע
תושב השומרון שנאלץ לעזוב את הישוב ולסגור את הפיצרייה בבעלותו בעקבות מסע הכפשות שניהלה חברתה של אשתו לשעבר, שכינתה אותו סרבן גט ועודדה את חברי הקהילה להחרימו, יקבל פיצוי בסך של 300 אלף שקל בגין לשון הרע. ביהמ"ש לא חסך בביקורת על הנתבעת והבהיר: אין אמת בפרסום, אין עניין ציבורי ואין חובה מוסרית לפרסם.
התובע, לשעבר תושב ישוב בשומרון, התגרש מאשתו בשנת 2013. עד הגירושים, ניהל התובע עסק של פיצרייה, שהיתה היחידה בישוב, אולם לאחר שעזב את בית המגורים המשותף פתחה אשתו עסק פיצה מתחרה מתוך ביתם.
בתביעה שהגיש באמצעות עורך הדין אורן אליעז, טען התובע כי הנתבעת, תחקירנית בערוץ טלוויזיה שהתגוררה בסמוך והיתה מיודדת עם אשתו, ביקשה לסייע לה בגירושיה ולשם כך הפיצה נגדו פרסומים באמצעי מדיה שונים, לרבות עלונים לתיבות הדואר ומייל לתושבי היישוב. בנוסף, התייצבה הנתבעת בפתח הפיצרייה שלו עם מגשי פיצות וקראה ללקוחות שלא להיכנס לפיצרייה, תוך שהיא מציעה להם פיצות מהמגשים שבידיה ומציגה את התובע כסרבן גט. לטענת התובע, כתוצאה ממעשיה של הנתבעת, הוא נאלץ למכור את הפיצרייה שלו ולעזוב את הישוב.
עוד טען התובע כי הנתבעת החלה להפיץ לכל תושבי היישוב כי הוא סרבן גט ודרשה מהתושבים לפעול ליצירת לחץ קהילתי כדי להביא לקבלת הגט, ואף הביאה את בעלה – גבאי בית הכנסת – לסרב להעלות אותו לתורה, גם בשבת בר המצווה של בנו, תוך השפלתו וביזויו.
התובע טען כי הנתבעת פעלה מבלי לדעת את העובדות הנכונות, מתוך כוונה ברורה לפגוע בשמו הטוב, ועשתה יד אחת עם האישה כדי לפגוע בו ולהשיג לאשתו את מבוקשה. לטענתו, לאור מעשיה של הנתבעת, הוא נשבר ומכר את הפיצרייה שלו, וכן עזב את הישוב לבית הוריו שבצפון.
הנתבעת טענה מנגד כי מדובר בתביעת סרק טורדנית וכי התובע פועל בשיטת "מצליח" ויורה לכל הכוונים ללא כל בסיס. הנתבעת הכחישה את הפצת העלונים לתיבות הדואר בישוב וטענה כי היא גילתה אזרחות טובה וניסיון לסייע לחברה במצוקה, שלא קיבלה גט מזה כשנתיים, ועל כן מדובר באמת בפרסום ובפרסום שנעשה בתום לב מתוך חובה מוסרית.
השופט אריאל ברגנר קיבל את התביעה וציין כי אף שלא הוכח שהנתבעת פרסמה את העלונים, היא הודתה במשלוח המייל בתפוצה רחבה ביישוב, ובסופו של דבר הודתה גם בשני הביקורים בפיצרייה, שבהם טענה כי התובע ממרר את החיים לאשתו ולילדים וכי הוא מסרב לתת גט לאשתו.
השופט דחה את טענת הנתבעת כי היא מעולם לא כינתה את התובע "סרבן גט", והבהיר כי אין כל הבדל בין סרבן גט לבין מי שמסרב לתת גט לאשתו, וכל ניסיון לפרשנות אחרת הוא משחק מילים והיתממות חסרת בסיס.
עוד הבהיר השופט כי על מנת שאדם ייקרא סרבן גט, חייבים להתמלא שני תנאים מצטברים: ניתן פסק דין של בית הדין הרבני לגירושין, ואותו אדם אינו מקיים את פסק הדין. במקרה זה, לעומת זאת, אין חולק כי בעת הפרסומים לא ניתן עדיין פסק דין לגירושין, וכי כשבוע לאחר מתן פסק הדין ניתן הגט. השופט ציין עוד כי בית הדין הרבני נדרש להבהיר את המצב המשפטי והודיע חד משמעית כי התובע לא היה סרבן גט, כי הוא הסכים להתגרש ואף היה זה שביקש את הגירושים. נוכח האמור, קבע השופט כי לא עומדת לנתבעת הגנת אמת דיברתי, וממילא לא ניתן לטעון במקרה זה לעניין ציבורי בפרסום, הנוגע להליכים חסויים של מעמד אישי הנדונים בדלתיים סגורות.
עוד נדחתה טענת הנתבעת כי הפרסום נבע מחובה מוסרית וחברתית לעזור לחברה שהגיעה לפת לחם ומוחזקת כבת ערובה על ידי התובע. השופט ברגנר ציין כי אינטרס שמירת הסודיות והחיסיון של ההליכים בבית הדין הרבני גוברים על אינטרס מקומי של הנתבעת או תושבים אחרים בישוב לפרסם את דבר היות התובע "מסרב גט", על מנת להפעיל עליו לחץ. "לא יכולה לקום כל חובה חברתית או מוסרית אשר תתמוך ותוביל הפעלת לחץ חיצוני חברתי על אדם כדי להשפיע עליו בהליך משפטי אותו הוא מנהל", קבע השופט. "מדובר בלחץ פסול הבא כדי להפריע להליך המשפטי ומנסה שלא כדין למנוע מהתובע 'הליך הוגן' בביה"ד הרבני".
השופט הוסיף כי הנתבעת חרגה ועברה כל גבול אפשרי מהתנהלות סבירה להגנת אותו ערך חברתי נטען של סיוע לחברה במצוקה, וקבע כי אין מדובר בפרסום שנעשה בתום לב. השופט הבהיר כי אין כל רלוונטיות לאמונתה הסובייקטיבית של הנתבעת בנכונות הפרסום ומתח ביקורת על הנתבעת, המבקשת לחסות בצילה של ההגנה על הבעת דעה וביקורת על פעולה פומבית של הנפגע. זאת, שכן כל הליכי המעמד האישי וההליכים בבית הדין הרבני הם חסויים ומתנהלים בדלתיים סגורות, והנתבעת לא נקטה כל אמצעי סביר כלשהו על מנת להיווכח אם טענותיה הן אמת.
בפסיקת הפיצוי התחשב השופט בהתנהלותה של הנתבעת, שהמשיכה לדבוק בעמדתה ולפגוע בתובע במהלך כל המשפט, גם לאחר שהתבררה עמדת בית הדין הרבני כי התובע אינו סרבן גט. השופט הוסיף כי נוכח תפוצת הפרסום והפגיעה הקשה והזדונית בתובע יש מקום לפסיקת כפל פיצוי ללא הוכחת נזק. הפרסום במייל לתושבי הישוב ושני הביקורים בפיצרייה מזכים את התובע בפיצוי של 50 אלף שקל כל אחד, ועל כן כפל הפיצוי יעמוד על סך של 300 אלף שקל.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

FRACTURED LANDS: HOW THE ARAB WORLD CAME APART

nytimes


Before driving into northern Iraq, Dr. Azar Mirkhan changed from his Western clothes into the traditional dress of a Kurdish pesh merga warrior: a tightfitting short woolen jacket over his shirt, baggy pantaloons and a wide cummerbund. He also thought to bring along certain accessories. These included a combat knife, tucked neatly into the waist of his cummerbund, as well as sniper binoculars and a loaded .45 semiautomatic. Should matters turn particularly ticklish, an M-4 assault rifle lay within easy reach on the back seat, with extra clips in the foot well. The doctor shrugged. “It’s a bad neighborhood.”
Our destination that day in May 2015 was the place of Azar’s greatest sorrow, one that haunted him still. The previous year, ISIS gunmen had cut a murderous swath through northern Iraq, brushing away an Iraqi Army vastly greater in size, and then turning their attention to the Kurds. Azar had divined precisely where the ISIS killers were about to strike, knew that tens of thousands of civilians stood helpless in their path, but had been unable to get anyone to heed his warnings. In desperation, he had loaded up his car with guns and raced to the scene, only to come to a spot in the road where he saw he was just hours too late. “It was obvious,” Azar said, “so obvious. But no one wanted to listen.” On that day, we were returning to the place where the fabled Kurdish warriors of northern Iraq had been outmaneuvered and put to flight, where Dr. Azar Mirkhan had failed to avert a colossal tragedy — and where, for many more months to come, he would continue to battle ISIS.
Azar is a practicing urologist, but even without the firepower and warrior get-up, the 41-year-old would exude the aura of a hunter. He walks with a curious loping gait that produces little sound, and in conversation has a tendency to tuck his chin and stare from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, rather as if he were sighting down a gun. With his prominent nose and jet black pompadour, he bears a passing resemblance to a young Johnny Cash.
The weaponry also complemented the doctor’s personal philosophy, as expressed in a scene from one of his favorite movies, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” when a bathing Eli Wallach is caught off guard by a man seeking to kill him. Rather than immediately shoot Wallach, the would-be assassin goes into a triumphant soliloquy, allowing Wallach to kill him first.
“When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk,” Azar quoted from the movie. “That is us Kurds now. This is not the time to talk, but to shoot.”
Azar is one of six people whose lives are chronicled in these pages. The six are from different regions, different cities, different tribes, different families, but they share, along with millions of other people in and from the Middle East, an experience of profound unraveling. Their lives have been forever altered by upheavals that began in 2003 with the American invasion of Iraq, and then accelerated with the series of revolutions and insurrections that have collectively become known in the West as the Arab Spring. They continue today with the depredations of ISIS, with terrorist attacks and with failing states.

AI that can determine a person’s sexuality from photos shows the dark side of the data age

tech crunch

We count on machine learning systems for everything from creating playlists to driving cars, but like any tool, they can be bent toward dangerous and unethical purposes, as well. Today’s illustration of this fact is a new paper from Stanford researchers, who have created a machine learning system that they claim can tell from a few pictures whether a person is gay or straight.

The research is as surprising as it is disconcerting. In addition to exposing an already vulnerable population to a new form of systematized abuse, it strikes directly at the egalitarian notion that we can’t (and shouldn’t) judge a person by their appearance, nor guess at something as private as sexual orientation from something as simple as a snapshot or two. But the accuracy of the system reported in the paper seems to leave no room for mistake: this is not only possible, it has been achieved.
It relies on cues apparently more subtle than most can perceive — cues many would suggest do not exist. And it demonstrates, as it is intended to, a class of threat to privacy that is entirely unique to the imminent era of ubiquitous computer vision.
Before discussing the system itself, it should be made clear that this research was by all indications done with good intentions. In an extensive set of authors’ notes that anyone commenting on the topic ought to read, Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang address a variety of objections and questions. Most relevant are perhaps their remarks as to why the paper was released at all:
We were really disturbed by these results and spent much time considering whether they should be made public at all. We did not want to enable the very risks that we are warning against. The ability to control when and to whom to reveal one’s sexual orientation is crucial not only for one’s well-being, but also for one’s safety.
We felt that there is an urgent need to make policymakers and LGBTQ communities aware of the risks that they are facing. We did not create a privacy-invading tool, but rather showed that basic and widely used methods pose serious privacy threats.
Certainly this is only one of many systematized attempts to derive secret information such as sexuality, emotional state or medical conditions. But it is a particularly concerning one, for several reasons.

Seeing what we can’t (or won’t)
The paper, due to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, details a rather ordinary supervised-learning approach to addressing the possibility of identifying people as gay or straight from their faces alone. (Note: the paper is still in draft form.)
Using a database of facial imagery (from a dating site that makes its data public), the researchers collected 35,326 images of 14,776 people, with (self-identified) gay and straight men and women all equally represented. Their facial features were extracted and quantified: everything from nose and eyebrow shape to facial hair and expression.
A deep learning network crunched through all these features, finding which tended to be associated with individuals of a given sexual orientation. The researchers didn’t “seed” this with any preconceived notions of how gay or straight people look; the system merely correlated certain features with sexuality and identified patterns.

Thursday, September 7, 2017

AYIN Harah or mechilah

When I was involved  in the tropper scandal Rav Sternbuch told me to go to Bdatz and have Beis Din remove aiyin harah

Asked him again now if I should go, he said no, there is no issue of aiyin harah in the present case.
He was asked about asking mechila, he said no, because I thought I was right.