Wash Post crticizes Obama's policy on Israel

Wash Post

ONE OF THE MORE striking results of the Obama administration's first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel. The new administration has pushed a reset button with Russia and sent new ambassadors to Syria and Venezuela; it has offered olive branches to Cuba and Burma. But for nearly three months it has been locked in a public confrontation with Israel over Jewish housing construction in Jerusalem and the West Bank. To a less visible extent, the two governments also have differed over policy toward Iran.

This week a parade of senior U.S. officials has been visiting Jerusalem to tackle the issues: Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Middle East envoy George J. Mitchell, national security adviser James L. Jones and senior aide Dennis Ross. But the tensions persist, and public opinion is following: The Pew Global Attitudes Project reported last week that Israel was the only country among 25 surveyed where the public's image of the United States was getting worse rather than better.

In part the trouble was unavoidable: Taking office with a commitment to pursuing Middle East peace, Mr. Obama faced a new, right-wing Israeli government whose prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has refused to accept the goal of Palestinian statehood. In part it was tactical: By making plain his disagreements with Mr. Netanyahu on statehood and Jewish settlements, Mr. Obama hoped to force an Israeli retreat while building credibility with Arab governments -- two advances that he arguably needs to set the stage for a serious peace process.

But the administration also is guilty of missteps. Rather than pocketing Mr. Netanyahu's initial concessions -- he gave a speech on Palestinian statehood and suggested parameters for curtailing settlements accepted by previous U.S. administrations -- Mr. Obama chose to insist on an absolutist demand for a settlement "freeze." Palestinian and Arab leaders who had accepted previous compromises immediately hardened their positions; they also balked at delivering the "confidence-building" concessions to Israel that the administration seeks. Israeli public opinion, which normally leans against the settler movement, has rallied behind Mr. Netanyahu. And Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which were active during the Bush administration's final year, have yet to resume.[...]

Obama administration drops voter intimidation charges against Black Panthers

Washington Times- Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the No. 3 official in the Obama Justice Department, was consulted and ultimately approved a decision in May to reverse course and drop a civil complaint accusing three members of the New Black Panther Party of intimidating voters in Philadelphia during November's election, according to interviews.

The department's career lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division who pursued the complaint for five months had recommended that Justice seek sanctions against the party and three of its members after the government had already won a default judgment in federal court against the men.

Front-line lawyers were in the final stages of completing that work when they were unexpectedly told by their superiors in late April to seek a delay after a meeting between political appointees and career supervisors, according to federal records and interviews.[...]

Rav Sternbuch - Preparing for Moshiach

41(2)

Proselytization - R' Celso Cukierkorn

Proselytization - R Jonathan Ginsburg

West Bank - Natural growth /NYT

General Colin Powell - arguing with the police

Yahoo news

WASHINGTON – Former Secretary of State Colin Powell was mildly critical Tuesday of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose angry response to a Cambridge, Mass., police officer touched off a national debate involving President Barack Obama.

Powell, interviewed by CNN's Larry King, criticized the way Gates dealt with Sgt. James Crowley, a white officer who responded to reports of a possible break-in by arresting the black professor at his home on a charge of disorderly conduct. The charge was soon dropped.

Gates "might have waited a while, come outside, talked to the officer, and that might have been the end of it," said Powell, one of the nation's most prominent African Americans.

"I think he should have reflected on whether or not this was the time to make that big a deal," he said.

But, Powell said, Gates was just home from China and New York and "all he wanted to do was get to bed."

When asked about the incident at a news conference, Obama said the police acted stupidly. The president subsequently toned down his criticism but not his denunciation of racial profiling generally.

Powell said he was the target of racial profiling many times and he sometimes got mad.

On one such occasion, he said, he tried to meet someone at Reagan National Airport "and nobody thought I could be the national security adviser to the president. I was just a black guy."
Asked how he dealt with the situation, Powell said "You just suck it up. What are you going to do?"

"There is no African American in this country who has not been exposed to this kind of situation," Powell said.

But, he said, "when you are faced with an officer trying to do his job and get to the bottom of something, this is not the time to get in an argument with him. I was taught that as a child.

"You don't argue with a police officer," Powell said.

EJF - Do rabbis know it converts mixed couples?

Aaron commented to "EJF - attracting non-Jews to proselytize - is permitted...":

Roni/R Tropper; I want to ask you , can you tell me with the full truth ,that all the Rabonim associated with the EJF including the beautiful dais that was shown at the confrence last week,are aware that the purpose of EJF is to be megayer these goyim in an intermarried couple? I have strong reason to beleive that they are being told one thing and the EJF is doing something else?

Michal bas Avraham commented to "EJF - attracting non-Jews to proselytize - is permitted...":

Aharon,
You are right they are not being told that the organization is there to convert intermarrieds. They are being told that they are trying to raise the standards of conversion. Last Shabbos, I was at someone's house and the husband told me three men in his kollel took some course to be on their baytai din. This is what they were told. Also, the RCA standards are actually higher. They know who is on their baytai din, real rabbis who have done conversions but, not the one before them. Whereas now we see about EJF.

Roni,
The EJF doesn't provide mentoring. They make you bring them your shul rabbi. They ask him to find you a mentor. They also ask him to "watch your attendance in shul." This is ridiculous. Anyone can go to shul and go home to watch TV. However, I've heard this from rabbis. They say, you have to live in my area so I can make sure you go to shul every week. Also, what about Brooklyn? In Brooklyn, a woman who goes to shul is like a prostitute that's how UNacceptable it is to go to shul.

I have blogged about EJF and I will do it again. They are this organization that just formed itself and run around with their ego telling everyone they better and have higher standards. Actually, they don't.

Psychiatrist in abuse case retracts evaulation

YNet

Dr. Yaakov Weill, who wrote the psychiatric evaluation of the mother suspected of starving her three-year-old son, has changed his mind and now says the woman does pose a threat to her children.

Weill's opinion, among other factors, contributed to the court's decision to release the suspect to house arrest with her children

Following his meeting with the mother last week, Dr. Weill concluded she was not dangerous to her children. However, in a letter recently sent to the rabbis who assisted the mother during her arrest, the psychiatrist wrote that he wishes to recant on his earlier estimate that the mother "can continue carrying out her parental duties to her children without risk."

"I did not have the sufficient tools to determine this," Weill said in a letter to Rabbi Avraham Froelich, who hosted the woman after she was remanded to house arrest.

"I wish to stress that I did not consider myself an expert witness appointed by the court, but was merely obliging you, the rabbis, who asked me to examine her," he added. [...]

Hunches save soldiers' lives

NYTimes

The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.

The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. "Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water," the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.

"I said no — no," Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: "My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling."

The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.

Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.

Everyone has hunches — about friends' motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people's brains can sense danger and act on it well before others' do.

Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.

Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.[...]

Hadassah Hospital officials harassed

JPost

Anonymous callers are continuing to harass the families of senior Hadassah Hospital officials in the case of the three-year-old Jerusalem boy who doctors believe was nearly starved to death by his mother, according to a tape recording of the latest call released Monday.

The harassment, which follows death threats made against Hadassah staff, persisted Sunday night, even though the child was discharged from the hospital earlier in the day.

In the latest telephone harassment, an English-speaking caller, who said that he was calling from the United States, told the sister-in-law of Hadassah Deputy Director-General Dr. Yair Birnbaum at her Haifa residence that Birenbaum was carrying out experiments on the child with chemotherapy.

"You should know that people are disgusted with him and the way he is behaving with Orthodox Jewish people," the caller said in heavy English, according to a tape of the call played on Israel Radio's lunchtime newsreel on Monday.

"He should know that there will be demonstrations in the US, the UK and Australia against Hadassah Hospital," he continued.

The caller, who has phoned the Hadassah family member's residence for four straight nights, went on to justify comparisons between Hadassah officials and the infamous Nazi known as Dr. Mengele who performed medical experiments on inmates.

"He says he feels offended by being called Mengele," the caller said. "Well, he is trying all sorts of experiments on this innocent child...and treated him with chemotherapy." [...]

Missionaries targeting the elderly

JPost

A Holocaust survivor who was suffering from dementia was deceived by those hired to help her, family members said, because they claimed they converted her to their Messianic Christian religion.

The two women who were hired to play music and speak with 94-year-old Sara told her daughter Goldie Maxwell weeks after Sara died that they were both Messianic Jews, that they had played and sung songs from the New Testament when Maxwell and her husband were not around, and that at the end of her life, Sara had a revelation and acknowledged Jesus as the messiah.

They also recorded these statements in a document they gave to Maxwell after Sara's death in March.

"I sensed that they had betrayed me, because I let them into the house on certain assumptions, but even more, the betrayal of my mother and of who she was," Maxwell told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. "They knew who she [Sara] was." [...]

Abuse: Questions to ask your local rabbi

1. In a case where a father finds out that his son is being molested by a teacher and this is corroborated by several of his classmates. The abuse has been going on for a number of months. Thus there is absolutely no question that the abuser is active and the danger is present for the foreseeable future.

--- Since in my opinion I have clear and unequivocal evidence that the molesting is taking place - can I go directly to the police. Or do I need rabbinic approval first?

---- Is there a difference whether the likelihood of another incident is clearcut and urgent or whether there is clearly time to consult rav?

2. A person reported Reuben as an abuser or attacked Reuven because he reasonable thought Reuven was a rodef and needed to save Reuven's apparent victim from harm and he hurt Reuven in the process. It was discovered that the Reuven not in fact an abuser or rodef – is the person liable for damages? For example I see a man and woman fighting and the woman is screaming. I go over and warn to guy to stop but he tells me to mind my own business. the women seems to be in danger and the ownly way I can stop the attacker is by taking a baseball bat and knocking him out. It turns out they are married and the wife sues me for hurting her husband.

3. In a case where a rav said not to report a case of abuse and as a result the child suffered severe physical and psychological damage – is there any liability for either the rav or the person who listened to the rav?

4. In a case where a person reasonable concluded that a child is being molested and a rav told him not to report it – should the person report it anyway?

Kidneys for sale - is it immoral?

Wall Street Journal

Even by New Jersey standards, Thursday's roundup of three mayors, five rabbis and 36 others on charges of money laundering and public corruption was big. But what put this FBI dragnet head and shoulders above the rest are the charges of trafficking in human body parts.

According to a federal criminal complaint filed in district court in New Jersey, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum of Brooklyn conspired to broker the sale of a human kidney for a transplant. The cost was $160,000 to the recipient of the transplant, of which the donor got $10,000. According to the complaint, Mr. Rosenbaum said he had brokered such sales many times over the past 10 years.

"That it could happen in this country is so shocking," said Dr. Bernadine Healy, former head of the Red Cross.

No, it isn't. When I needed a kidney several years ago and had no donor in sight, I would have considered doing business with someone like Mr. Rosenbaum. The current law—the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984—gave me little choice. I would be a felon if I compensated a donor who was willing to spare me years of life-draining dialysis and premature death.

The early responses to the New Jersey scandal leave me dismayed, though not surprised. "We really have to crack down," the co-director of the Joint Council of Europe/United Nations Study on Trafficking in Organs and Body Parts told MSNBC. That strategy is doomed, of course. It ignores the time-tested fact that efforts to stamp out underground markets either drive corruption further underground or causes it to flourish elsewhere.

The illicit organ trade is booming across the globe. It will only recede when the critical shortage of organs for transplants disappears. The best way to make that happen is to give legitimate incentives to people who might be willing to donate. Instead, I fear that Congress will merely raise the penalties for underground organ sales without simultaneously establishing a legal mechanism to incentivize donors.

Al Gore, then a Tennessee congressman who spearheaded the National Organ Transplant Act, spoke of using "a voucher system or a tax credit to a donor's estate" if "efforts to improve voluntary donation are unsuccessful." After 25 years, it is clear they have been unsuccessful.

More than 80,000 Americans now wait for a kidney, according the United Network for Organ Sharing. Thirteen of them die daily; the rest languish for years on dialysis. The number of donors last year was lower than in 2005, despite decades of work to encourage people to sign donor cards and donate to loved ones. [...]