Religious website triggers complaint against Air Force general

valdosta daily times

A group of U.S. Air Force officers, enlisted personnel and civilian employees are calling for an investigation into the installation commander of Edwards Air Force Base in California, accusing him of violating Defense Department policies on religious proselytizing.

On Sunday, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation demanded that Defense Secretary James N. Mattis “immediately and comprehensively” investigate Air Force Brig. Gen. E. John Teichert.

The foundation, which seeks to maintain the separation of church and state in the military, provided reporters with a copy of the demand Monday.

At issue is Teichert’s website, called Prayer at Lunchtime for the United States, in which the commander says he encourages “Bible-believing Americans to take time to specifically pray for our nation at lunchtime every day.”

The foundation has asked the Defense Department to determine whether Teichert’s conduct “interferes with or violates the civil liberties of service members and civilians under his command” or “the diversity or equal opportunities of service members and civilians under his command.”

Michael Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said his organization represents 41 “client complainants,” most of whom are practicing Christians. The group also includes Muslims, Jews, Hindus and atheists, he said.

In the group’s demand letter, foundation attorney Donald Rehkopf accused Teichert of “using both his military rank as well as his position and status as an Air Force officer to aggressively promote his brand of religion — clearly giving the appearance if not outright impression that he, in his official status, is endorsing if not outright proselytizing” his religion.

The website also links to a 2014 interview that uses Teichert’s full name and discusses his military career. In it, he says, “We have allowed our country to slip away from its founding Christian principles while it has become increasingly intolerant of Christianity.”

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle.

politicEmail
Let me tell you a story about Stephen Miller and chain migration.

It begins at the turn of the 20th century, in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl of subsistence farmers in what is now Belarus. Beset by violent anti-Jewish pogroms and forced childhood conscription in the Czar’s army, the patriarch of the shack, Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America.

He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English. An elder son, Nathan, soon followed. By street corner peddling and sweatshop toil, Wolf-Leib and Nathan sent enough money home to pay off debts and buy the immediate family’s passage to America in 1906. That group included young Sam Glosser, who with his family settled in the western Pennsylvania city of Johnstown, a booming coal and steel town that was a magnet for other hardworking immigrants. The Glosser family quickly progressed from selling goods from a horse and wagon to owning a haberdashery in Johnstown run by Nathan and Wolf-Leib to a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores run by my grandfather, Sam, and the next generation of Glossers, including my dad, Izzy. It was big enough to be listed on the AMEX stock exchange and employed thousands of people over time. In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens.

What does this classically American tale have to do with Stephen Miller? Well, Izzy Glosser is his maternal grandfather, and Stephen’s mother, Miriam, is my sister.

I have watched with dismay and increasing horror as my nephew, an educated man who is well aware of his heritage, has become the architect of immigration policies that repudiate the very foundation of our family’s life in this country.

I shudder at the thought of what would have become of the Glossers had the same policies Stephen so coolly espouses— the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants — been in effect when Wolf-Leib made his desperate bid for freedom. The Glossers came to the U.S. just a few years before the fear and prejudice of the “America first” nativists of the day closed U.S. borders to Jewish refugees. Had Wolf-Leib waited, his family likely would have been murdered by the Nazis along with all but seven of the 2,000 Jews who remained in Antopol. I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

Like other immigrants, our family’s welcome to the USA was not always a warm one, but we largely had the protection of the law, there was no state-sponsored violence against us, no kidnapping of our male children, and we enjoyed good relations with our neighbors. True, Jews were excluded from many occupations, couldn’t buy homes in some towns, couldn’t join certain organizations or attend certain schools or universities, but life was good. As in past generations, there were hate mongers who regarded the most recent groups of poor immigrants as scum, rapists, gangsters, drunks and terrorists, but largely the Glosser family was left alone to live our lives and build the American dream. Children were born, synagogues founded, and we thrived. This was the miracle of America.

Acting for so long in the theater of right-wing politics, Stephen and Trump may have become numb to the resultant human tragedy and blind to the hypocrisy of their policy decisions. After all, Stephen’s is not the only family with a chain immigration story in the Trump administration. Trump's grandfather is reported to have been a German migrant on the run from military conscription to a new life in the United States, and his mother fled the poverty of rural Scotland for the economic possibilities of New York City. (Trump’s in-laws just became citizens on the strength of his wife’s own citizenship.)

These facts are important not only for their grim historical irony but because vulnerable people are being hurt. They are real people, not the ghoulish caricatures portrayed by Trump. When confronted by the deaths and suffering of thousands, our senses are overwhelmed, and the victims become statistics rather than people. I meet these statistics one at a time through my volunteer service as a neuropsychologist for the Philadelphia affiliate of HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), the global nonprofit that protects refugees and helped my family more than 100 years ago. I will share the story of one such man I have met in the hopes that my nephew might recognize elements of our shared heritage.

In the early 2000s, Joseph (not his real name) was conscripted at the age of 14 to be a soldier in Eritrea and sent to a remote desert military camp. Officers there discovered a Bible under his pillow which aroused their suspicion that he might belong to a foreign evangelical sect that would claim his loyalty and sap his will to fight. Joseph was actually a member of the state-approved Coptic church but was nonetheless immediately subjected to torture. “They smashed my face into the ground, tied my hands and feet together behind my back, stomped on me, and hung me from a tree by my bonds while they beat me with batons for the others to see.”

Joseph was tortured for 20 consecutive days before being taken to a military prison and crammed into a dark unventilated cell with 36 other men, little food and no proper hygiene. Some died, and in time Joseph was stricken with dysentery. When he was too weak to stand, he was taken to a civilian clinic where he was fed by the medical staff. Upon regaining his strength, he escaped to a nearby road where a sympathetic driver took him north through the night to a camp in Sudan where he joined other refugees. Joseph was on the first leg of a journey that would cover thousands of miles and almost 10 years.

Before Donald Trump had started his political ascent promulgating the false story that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim, while my nephew, Stephen, was famously recovering from the hardships of his high school cafeteria in Santa Monica, Joseph was a child on his own in Sudan in fear of being deported back to Eritrea to face execution for desertion. He worked any job he could get, saved his money and made his way through Sudan. He endured arrest and extortion in Libya. He returned to Sudan, then kept moving to Dubai, Brazil and eventually to a southern border crossing into Texas, where he sought asylum. In all of the countries he traveled through during his ordeal, he was vulnerable, exploited and his status was “illegal.” But in the United States, he had a chance to acquire the protection of a documented immigrant.

Today, at 30, Joseph lives in Pennsylvania and has a wife and child. He is a smart, warm, humble man of great character who is grateful for every day of his freedom and safety. He bears emotional scars from not seeing his parents or siblings since he was 14. He still trembles, cries and struggles for breath when describing his torture, and he bears physical scars as well. He hopes to become a citizen, return to work and make his contribution to America. His story, though unique in its particulars, is by no means unusual. I have met Central Americans fleeing corrupt governments, violence and criminal extortion; a Yemeni woman unable to return to her war-ravaged home country and fearing sexual mutilation if she goes back to her Saudi husband; and an escaped kidnap-bride from central Asia.

U.S. military fails to protect children from sexual abuse on bases, AP reports

pbs

A decade after the Pentagon began confronting rape in the ranks, the U.S. military frequently fails to protect or provide justice to the children of service members when they are sexually assaulted by other children on base, an Associated Press investigation has found.

Reports of assaults and rapes among kids on military bases often die on the desks of prosecutors, even when an attacker confesses. Other cases don’t make it that far because criminal investigators shelve them, despite requirements they be pursued.

The Pentagon does not know the scope of the problem and does little to track it. AP was able to document nearly 600 sex assault cases on base since 2007 through dozens of interviews and by piecing together records and data from the military’s four main branches and school system.

Sexual violence occurs anywhere children and teens gather on base — homes, schools, playgrounds, food courts, even a chapel bathroom. Many cases get lost in a dead zone of justice, with neither victim nor offender receiving help.

“These are the children that we need to be protecting, the children of our heroes,” said Heather Ryan, a former military investigator.

The tens of thousands of kids who live on bases in the U.S. and abroad are not covered by military law. The U.S. Justice Department, which has jurisdiction over many military bases, isn’t equipped or inclined to handle cases involving juveniles, so it rarely takes them on.

Federal prosecutors, for example, pursued roughly one in seven juvenile sex offense cases that military investigators presented, according to AP’s review of about 100 investigative files from Navy and Marine Corps bases.

WATCH: DONALD TRUMP JR. SAYS IT’S ‘SCARY’ HOW SIMILAR DEMOCRATIC AND NAZI PARTIES ARE

Donald Trump Jr. equated the Democratic Party to the Nazi Party in 1930s Germany at a film screening for conservative provocateur Dinesh D’Souza Wednesday night.

Trump Jr., who was co-hosting the event, told a reporter from One America News that he often “hears the left talking about fascism and Nazism on the right.” But, said Trump Jr., “when you look at the actual history of how those things evolved and you look at the actual platform of the modern left, you say, ‘Wait a minute, those two are actually really heavily aligned and frankly, contrary to the right.’”

President Donald Trump’s eldest son stuck to this point, clarifying it later in the interview: “You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s...and you look at it, compared to the DNC platform of today, you’re saying, ‘Man, those things are awfully similar’ to a point where it’s actually scary, to me. That was one of the striking things I took from the movie because it’s the exact opposite of what you’ve been told.”

Trump-appointed judge upholds special counsel Mueller's authority

cnn

A federal district judge who was appointed by President Donald Trump has upheld Robert Mueller's appointment and constitutional authority in the special counsel's case against Russian social media propagandists.

Judge Dabney Friedrich, who serves at the trial-court level in DC federal court, said Concord Management and Consulting could not have its case tossed on constitutional grounds. The Russian company accused of backing a social media effort to sway voters against Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed Mueller didn't have power to bring the case because he was not appointment by the President and confirmed by Congress. Mueller was appointed under the authority of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has broad power as the acting head of the Justice Department for the 2016 election probe.

Friedrich cited opinions by three other federal judges -- Amy Berman Jackson, who oversees Paul Manafort's criminal foreign lobbying case; T.S. Ellis, who oversees Manafort's financial fraud case; and DC District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell -- to back up her decision.

All three judges also denied requests to invalidate Mueller's authority, with Howell writing as recently as late July that a witness subpoenaed to turn over documents and to testify before the grand jury about Roger Stone would have to. That witness, Andrew Miller, has been held in contempt of the court and now may appeal.

Trump, along with his lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow, have claimed that Mueller's investigation violated the Constitution. Most notably, Trump said in an early June tweet that Mueller's appointment was "totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL." Monday's ruling specifically rejected some of these arguments that Trump's lawyers have made on television.

EX-HAREDIM BATTLE ULTRA-ORTHODOX IN A DIVIDED ISRAELI CITY

jpost

There is s simmering battle: several dozen haredi dropouts, young men and women who shed their Orthodox identity in their teenage years and are rejected by many in their former communities.

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel  — Built in the 1990s in part to ease crowding in haredi Orthodox neighborhoods elsewhere in Israel, Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet is both an Orthodox boom town and a site of ongoing tensions between different streams of religious Jews.

National-religious Jews have long complained of harassment by members of the haredi community, who style themselves as enforcers of strict codes for dress and conduct.

The Nastiest Feud in Science

the atlantic
 A

1.

Gerta keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse. Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridif colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate. geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.

A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that tA Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.he fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.

Rebbetzin Sheila Feinstein, A”h

https://hamodia.com/2018/08/09/levayah-rebbetzin-sheila-feinstein-ah-staten-island-yeshiva/

Hundreds gathered Thursday morning to mourn the petirah of Rebbetzin Sheila (Chava Sarah) Feinstein, a”h, the wife of, ybl”c, Harav Reuven Feinstein, shlita, who was niftar on Wednesday night, 28 Menachem Av. She had been hospitalized for the past two weeks following serious injuries suffered in an automobile accident. The Rebbetzin was in her late 70s.

At the levayah, held at the Yeshivah of Staten Island, Rav Reuven spoke of his late Rebbetzin’s great dedication in her essential role in enabling his own growth and decades of harbotzas haTorah.

“She supported me … she was mechazek me and took care of the whole olam hazeh part of my life,” he said.

With a commanding and regal presence, joined with exceptional intelligence and wit, Rebbetzin Feinstein’s dynamic personality propelled her to be one of the pillars upon which her husband’s yeshivah stood, and to be among the most trusted and loyal assistants to her revered father-in-law, Harav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l. At the same, she was a highly respected educator for many years in New York City’s Public School system and later in several mosdos haTorah.

The Rebbetzin grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where her parents, Reb Avrohom, z”l, and Mrs. Ita Devorah Kaplan, a”h, resided. She was a student in the very first class of the neighborhood’s Bais Yaakov, and took great pride in having remained steadfast in her commitment to Yiddishkeit at a time when many of her peers succumb to the rampant assimilationist trends that prevailed at the time.

Even while pursuing higher education, when challenged by classmates or professors, young Sheila, with signature strength and down-to-earth logic, never shied away from standing up for her beliefs.

Towards a Working Theory of American Gadolim in the Post-truth Era

The study of Torah is built on a fundamental bedrock concept that the Torah is knowable. This underlies the whole institution of Gadolim. Moshe Rabeinu received the Torah and he knew the Torah. This is why it was possible to ask him a question about the Torah and he would answer it. This is why, when he couldn't answer a question, as by Pinchas, that the whole nation was in peril.

In every generation there are leaders, who study the Torah and know the Torah. Collectively, they are the Moshe of that generation. If there is only Torah scholar leader, then he, individually, is the Moshe of that generation.

Moral relativism has undermined that concept.

Moral relativism means that there is no absolute right or wrong. Thus, a moral relativist will maintain that the Torah is unknowable.

Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky appears to be the synthesis of Torah with moral relativism. He studies Torah. But ultimately, he holds it's unknowable. He is unwilling to state, for example, who Tamar Epstein is married to. He points to Rabbis who have different answers.

Rabbi Kamenetsky represents a new kind of Gadol. What shall we call him? Perhaps we will coin a new term: Apikoros Gadol, or Api-Gadol.

An Api-Gadol can never be reasoned with nor swayed by Halachic arguments. An Api-Gadol holds that Torah is unknowable. He embodies this unknowability. His pronouncements are thus perfect because they can never be challenged. His statements are "true" by dint of coming from him, not because of any Mesorah.

What crystallized this idea of Api-Gadol for me was a series of stories I received from multiple sources about the power that Rabbis in a certain city hold over many of the Torah observant inhabitants there.

The Rabbis apparently wield this power in an arbitrary fashion to suit themselves. There is no formal mechanism to challenge, question, or in any way change their decisions.

True Gadolim can be challenged. The daughters of Tzlapchod challenged Moshe. Respectfully, with great deference, asking but not demanding -- yet, still with all that, challenging. And that is because G-d Himself can be challenged, as Avrohom challenged G-d regarding the Five Cities. The right to challenge a Gadol stems from the very belief that the true Gadol knows the Torah, the Word of G-d.

And the unchallengeability of an Api-Gadol stems from his not knowing, by definition, the Torah. For if an Api-Gadol claims to know the Torah, he would cease being an Api-Gadol. An Api-Gadol's status rests on his refusal to be challenged.

The stories told to me about this certain city were nigh unbelievable to me. I will share one, and only in vague outline. I was told that this city allowed the Yeshiva where these Rabbis hold sway to obtain some city land. Part of the land was then given over to build a ballpark. Some complained that the Yeshiva had contributed to a ballpark in the midst of the city that might draw in Jewish kids.

So the Yeshiva issued a letter that if a child in any family was caught going to a ballgame in the ballpark, then the child would not be welcome in any school associated with the Yeshiva. Furthermore, none of the siblings of the child would be welcome in any of the schools.

Collective punishment.

This ruling could be challenged in many ways from a Halachic perspective. But apparently, the leaders of this Yeshiva are Api-Gadolim, the pseudo-Moshe of the city.

These are just some of my thoughts. My intention in sharing them is to explain the necessity for pulling back from communities where Api-Gadolim rule. This is not sepsrating from the Tzibur. It is the opposite. This is creating a Klal that has rid itself of Apikorsos and that clings to true Gadolim.

Alex Jones banned

ANTI-JEWISH, 'PRO-ISRAEL' CONSPIRACY THEORIST BANNED BY FACEBOOK

.jpost

Facebook said it removed his pages, including Infowars, "for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies."

The conspiracy theorist has, in the past, also engaged in several anti-Jewish theories, claiming last year that Jews posed as KKK followers in Charlottesville in order to discredit white supremacist protesters. 

"I mean, quite frankly, I’ve been to these events, a lot of the KKK guys with their hats off look like they’re from the cast of “Seinfeld,” Jones said at the time. 

The Illness Is Bad Enough. The Hospital May Be Even Worse.

ny times

The elderly are particularly vulnerable to “post-hospital syndrome,” some experts believe, and that may be why so many patients return.

Even after her discharge, the stress and disruptions of hospitalization — interrupted sleep, weight loss, mild delirium, deconditioning caused by days in bed — left her disoriented and weakened, a vulnerable state some researchers call “post-hospital syndrome.”

FORMER SENIOR UNITED NATIONS OFFICIAL FACING PEDOPHILIA CHARGES IN NEPAL

newsweek

One of the world’s leading experts on humanitarian work with street children and children affected by war has been arrested on pedophilia charges.

Canadian humanitarian worker Peter Dalglish, who helped found the charity Street Kids International, was taken in by police in Nepal on Sunday (April 8), Xinhua news agency reported.

The Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) of Nepal Police said they wanted to question Dalglish over claims he was involved in pedophile activities in Kavre district, around 50 kilometers north of the capital, Kathmandu.

An initial investigation claims the 60-year-old had offered children foreign trips and better education before sexually abusing them.

My Republica reported that two children, aged 12 and 14, had allegedly been abused by Dalglish and rescued by authorities.

CIB chief and Deputy Inspector General of Police, Pushkar Karki, said that an organization outside the country had tipped off the police about Dalglish.