Moslems can kill Moslems & Jews but Jews can't kill Moslems

Alan Dershowtiz: Hamas deploys its 'CNN Strategy' on world opinion

As Israel persists in its military efforts — by ground, air and sea — to protect its citizens from deadly Hamas rockets, and as protests against Israel increase around the world, the success of the abominable Hamas double war crime strategy becomes evident. The strategy is as simple as it is cynical: Provoke Israel by playing Russian roulette with its children, firing rockets at kindergartens, playgrounds and hospitals; hide behind its own civilians when firing at Israeli civilians; refuse to build bunkers for its own civilians; have TV cameras ready to transmit every image of dead Palestinians, especially children; exaggerate the number of civilians killed by including as “children” Hamas fighters who are 16 or 17 years old and as “women,” female terrorists. [...]

Madoff's "Woman on Wall St."

NYTimes reports:

VIENNA — With an aggressive style that stood out in the staid world of Austrian banking even more than her bouffant red wig, Sonja Kohn made few friends gathering billions for Bernard L. Madoff from wealthy investors in Russia and across Europe.

Now, she has even fewer. Mrs. Kohn has dropped out of sight, leaving the firm she founded, Bank Medici, in the hands of Austrian regulators, who took it over last week.

Embarrassment from investing heavily with Mr. Madoff could explain wanting to disappear from public view. But another theory widely repeated by those who know Mrs. Kohn is that she may be afraid of some particularly displeased investors: Russian oligarchs whose money made up a chunk of the $2.1 billion that Bank Medici invested with Mr. Madoff.

“With Russian oligarchs as clients,” said a Viennese banker who knew Mrs. Kohn and her husband socially, “she might have reason to be afraid.”

It was a view shared in interviews with Mrs. Kohn’s fellow bankers, former employees and other associates — from Vienna to London to Geneva to Monsey, N.Y.

Few of those who know her were willing to be quoted by name because they feared being linked to the scandal surrounding Mr. Madoff as well as the investigations into his alleged fraud. But several people with knowledge of her personal and professional dealings say she became concerned about retribution by Russian investors after Mr. Madoff’s arrest last month. (Russia’s richest men have been especially strapped as commodity prices and their stock market have collapsed.) [...]

War means being aggressive

Haaretz wrote:

The incident in which some 40 Palestinian civilians were killed when Israel Defense Forces mortar shells hit an UNRWA school in the Jabalya refugee camp Tuesday surprised no one who has been following events in Gaza in recent days. Senior officers admit that the IDF has been using enormous firepower.

"For us, being cautious means being aggressive," explained one. "From the minute we entered, we've acted like we're at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground ... I just hope those who have fled the area of Gaza City in which we are operating will describe the shock. Maybe someone there will sober up before it continues."[...]

Israel's viewpoint in videos

Jpost reports:

15 Seconds

distance is only a matter of time

EJF - fishing for converts

Billings Farnsworth writes on Ezine articles:

Marriage and family are two beautiful and sacred things in the Jewish community. Through marriage comes children, and through children comes the preservation of their belief and way of life. Those who choose to get married do so with the hope that they will be able to have an eternal Jewish family.

However, many of these marriages are intermarriages where one spouse is of the faith while the other isn't. The two of them agree to work together and teach the same beliefs, but unless the non-Jewish spouse is converted using the standards of halacha, the conversion is often considered invalid.

The conversion doesn't have to stay invalid, however. There are organizations out there that teach the halachic method of conversion and help these couples bypass this hurdle. By converting to Judaism using the halachic method, the non-Jewish spouse will be considered a valid, orthodox member of the faith and community. When it comes time to teach the children religious beliefs both parents will be assets because they will know they have the belief system and passion necessary for the training of children.

There are many people who convert to Judaism using the non-halachic method. However, by following the guidelines of the Torah and halacha those people interested in converting show their absolute belief in Judaism, and their willingness to follow proper Jewish customs and religious rules.

These converts are sometimes considered ideological converts due to their desire to be identified with the Jewish community from a completely religious standpoint. If you are unsure of the proper halachic standard of conversion, consider finding an organization that will help you achieve the religious belief you are searching for.

Eternal Jewish Family, or EJF, is a website with information on Jewish family issues. Billings Farnsworth is a freelance writer. Article Source:

Reform rabbi vs the KKK

NYTimes reports

[...] In 1991, he was living in Lincoln, Neb., with his wife at the time, Julie Michael, and three of their five children. He was then the cantor and spiritual leader of the South Street Temple, the oldest Jewish congregation in Lincoln. One Sunday morning, a few days after they had moved into their new house, the phone rang.

The man on the other end of the line called Rabbi Weisser “Jew boy” and told him he would be sorry he had moved in. Two days later, a thick package of anti-black, anti-Semitic pamphlets arrived in the mail, including an unsigned card that read, “The KKK is watching you, scum.”

The messages, it turned out, were from Larry Trapp, the Grand Dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Nebraska, who kept loaded weapons, pro-Hitler material and his Klan robe in his cramped Lincoln apartment. Then 42, Mr. Trapp was nearly blind and used a wheelchair to get around; both of his legs had been amputated because of diabetes.

In a 1992 interview with Time magazine, Mr. Trapp said he had wanted to scare Rabbi Weisser into moving out of Lincoln. “As the state leader, the Grand Dragon, I did more than my share of work because I wanted to build up the state of Nebraska into a state as hateful as North Carolina and Florida,” he said. “I spent a lot of money and went out of my way to instill fear.”

Rabbi Weisser, who suspected the person threatening him was Mr.Trapp, got his telephone number and started leaving messages on the answering machine. “I would say things like: ‘Larry, there’s a lot of love out there. You’re not getting any of it. Don’t you want some?’ And hang up,” he said. “And, ‘Larry, why do you love the Nazis so much?They’d have killed you first because you’re disabled.’ And hang up. I did it once a week.”

One day, Mr. Trapp answered. Ms. Michael, the rabbi’s wife, had told him to say something nice if he ever got Mr. Trapp on the line, and he followed her advice. “I said: ‘I heard you’re disabled. I thought you might need a ride to the grocery,’ ” Rabbi Weisser said.

Then, one night, Rabbi Weisser’s phone rang again. It was Mr. Trapp. “He said, quote-unquote — I’ll never forget it, it was like a chilling moment, in a good way — he said, ‘I want to get out of what I’m doing and I don’t know how,’ ” Rabbi Weisser said. [...]

Hamas founder's son - converts & talks

Fox News:

"There is no chance. Is there any chance for fire to co-exist with the water?" said Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of the group's founding members. Yousef added: "It's not about Israel, it's not about Hamas: it's about both ideologies." Yousef, son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the most influential leaders of the militant group, said the organization betrays the Palestinian cause and tortures its own members.

• Video: Click here for more on FOX News' special Escape from Hamas.

Hamas, formed in the late 1980's as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the radical Muslim Brotherhood, is considered a terror organization by the U.S. government. Hamas seized power in the Gaza strip in 2007 in a violent coup against the more moderate Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas.

Yousef said he was indoctrinated at an early age to use violence to challenge Israeli control in the region. As a teenager he moved up within the organization and became the leader of the radical Islamic Youth Movement that fought Israeli tanks and troops in the streets, celebrated suicide bombings and recruited young men to the cause.

Yousef, 30, said he realized the true nature of Hamas and radical Islam during a stint in an Israeli prison. He renounced his Muslim faith, left his family behind in Ramallah and converted to Christianity.

"Islam is not the word of God," said Yousef. "If you want to be offended it's your problem. But you know something? Go study. Think for a second that I might be right. So wake up, look at your path, see where you're going. Are you really going to heaven with 72 virgins after you kill yourself and kill another 20 people?"

Yousef has sought asylum in the United States and now attends an evangelical Christian church in San Diego, Calif.

"The Hamas leadership, including my father, they're responsible; they're responsible for all the violence that happened from the organization. I know they describe it as reaction to Israeli aggression, but still, they are part of it and they had to make decisions in those operations against Israel (for) which there was the killing of many civilians." [...]

Six installments available on youtube

1 2 3 4 5 6

Gaza ground operation begins

Haaretz reports

"The objective is to destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure in the area of operations," said Israel Defense Forces Major Avital Leibovitch, a military spokeswoman, confirming that incursions were under way. "We are going to take some of the launch areas used by Hamas."

The IDF Spokesperson's office issued a statement, emphasizing that this stage of the operation will further the goals of the eight-day offensive as voiced by the IDF until now: To strike a direct and hard blow against the Hamas while increasing the deterrent strength of the IDF, in order to bring about an improved and more stable security situation for residents of Southern Israel over the term. [...]

Shidduch Crises & Easy conversion

Jersey Girl has left a new comment on your post "Homosexuality & Orthodoxy /R' Riskin":

Twenty five years ago, a friend of my parents, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, an attorney,an Orthodox Jew and a truly wonderful person, turned 30 unmarried.

She lamented that no Jewish man wanted her, brilliant, introverted and not model thin. So, on her 30th birthday she told her parents that she did not want to leave this world childless. She had saved two years salary to take a leave of her profession and become a single parent. She was
going to the sperm bank to become a mother and bring a Jewish child into the world.

The strictly Orthodox parents were appalled and disowned their daughter.Friends and neighbors explained that due to already widespread "conversions" being done by Orthodox Rabbis who believe they are "making a Jewish home" out of an intermarriage, there WERE no Jewish men who would interested in a woman like her. (How CAN American Rabbis NOT think of the Jewish woman who is left single when they permit a Jewish man to intermarry?).

She had registered with every shadchan, been to every singles event and actively pursued marriage for more than 10 years. She was willing to marry any man within 20 years of her age who would have her and had only pursued a career because she could not get married.

At age 30, she could see that her chances of marrying were slim and back then, a woman over 30, was considered unlikely to conceive. She did not want to be childless; both of her parents were the sole survivors of their large extended families and this was constantly on her mind.

Today, I know of dozens of beautiful, smart, and refined Jewish women who cannot get married.

The crisis is so widespread that the Star K is offering a $2500 cash gift to any shadchan who matches a single Jewish woman over the age of 22.

The Star K's website sums it up:

"Thousands of single Jewish women, of all ages, who are shomrei Torah and mitzvos, are finding it difficult to find a suitable match. There are many single observant Jewish women in Baltimore, whose numbers are on the increase. A significant number of divorcees and widows, contribute to these statistics, as well."

http://www.star-k.org/cons-new-bignews-shidduch.htm

In the past year, two husbands of our middle aged cousins left their wives and young children to marry Gentile women, whom they had "converted" by "Orthodox" Rabbis.

Another woman in our shul recently lost her husband to a non Jew 20 years younger; the couple was married in an "Orthodox" ceremony.

One of my close friends, the mother of several children herself lost her father to a non Jew, a generation younger. The famous Rabbi Bomzer "converted" the Gentile and married them.

Psychologists say that men and women seek different things from their relationships. Women seek stability and men seek adventure; it is human nature for women to want to marry men like their fathers and for men to wish to seek out women who are different.

An often overlooked statistic in the intermarriage crisis is that according to "Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent" by Dr. Sylvia Barack Fishman, a professor at Brandeis University , women who intermarry get married, on average, three years later than women who marry Jewish men. This three-year gap is statistically significant because it reflects even non observant women's desire to marry a Jew. The intermarriage comes sociologists explain, after a woman gives up on finding a Jewish husband and decides to marry a gentile rather than stay single.

Two cousins of my husband's, both unmarried, committed, educated Jewish women in their 30s moved in with other Jewish women and conceived children (from Jewish sperm donors) that they plan to raise cooperatively.

If our Rabbis continue to promote intermarriage as an acceptable option within even Orthodox Judaism, what other choice will there be for thousands of Jewish women who are committed enough to prefer single motherhood to intermarriage?

Rabbis should consider the Jewish woman left alone and the Jewish home she could have built when they perform a "conversion" they attempt to justify by saying "they are making a Jewish home from an intermarriage".

In reality, our Rabbis are PREVENTING thousands of Jewish women from ever marrying and preventing the Jewish homes they would have made from EVER being built.

Financial crisis - 12 Reasons

Time Magazine

After a year of epic financial crisis, 2009 will — if all goes well —be a time for digging ourselves out of the mess and figuring out how to prevent a repeat. Before we can do that, we have to have some idea of what went wrong. People are still arguing about what caused the Depression of the 1930s, so don't expect a definitive diagnosis anytime soon. But here's my current list of blame, or at least the first dozen items on it, in descending order of culpability.[...]

Self Abuse - Cutting - Our community too

Newsweek reports:

[...]This is how it began for Becki. For the millions of others who hurt themselves intentionally, the story may start differently, but the result is often the same: What is at first just an impulse, a moment of relief, becomes a secret habit—a need for pain that medical science doesn't fully understand and can treat with only mixed success. Eventually, for Becki, the cuts became too much to hide, and her excuses—"I burned myself," "It was a cat scratch."—rang hollow. Her mother sent her to a therapist, then a psychiatric ward, where she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and put on mood stabilizers and antidepressants. But the cutting didn't stop—it worsened. Years passed, middle school became high school, friends and interests changed, one therapist merged into another. Yet the cutting remained ritual, sometimes happening a dozen times a day—on arms, thighs and stomach. "Seeing the blood would give me a sense of being alive," Becki explains.

Self-injury has been documented for hundreds of years. Cases of women and girls, mostly teens, hurting themselves with blades or other implements, even inserting small objects under their skin, go as far back as the medical literature will reach. Though figures vary, researchers estimate between two and eight million Americans, most of them women, have engaged in self-injury at some point in their lives. Yet, while experts agree that this propensity exists, from there, opinions diverge. Is non-suicidal self-injury a diagnosable disorder, or simply a symptom of more profound mental disorders? Can it become an addiction? Does this behavior create changes in the brain chemistry of sufferers? And how do you treat it? [...]

Teach truth through lies?

Avraham [guest post] has left a new comment on your post "EJF - Cost Benefit analysis":

On the subject of truth touched on at the end of the blog, here is some recent correspondence I had with a talmid chacham.

Rabbi X:

I do not know if vorts are dangerous, but they are usually not true...

My reply:

For a solid person like you, vorts are not dangerous. But most people cannot separate the wheat from the chaff.

I consider vorts as dangerous as fake Holocaust stories (a famous one just hit the news recently and I have spotted dubious Holocaust tales on the Aish site), and as dangerous as the golem tales which are presented to youngsters as Torah miSinai. A youngster or uncomplicated sort of person hears these vorts, fake Holocaust stories and golem tales. Five years down the line he realizes that the vorts are nonsense, the Holocaust stories are fake, and the golem stories are a rabbi's invention. Many are then struck with the thought that if people I trusted have fed me lokshen for the past five years, how can I trust anything they say? This can lead to extreme consequences. In addition, you have a frum press (papers and books) which censors and edits everything it prints and then tries to destroy frum weekend magazines that try to be a drop more truthful does little to strengthen people's belief in authority.

All this nonsense percolates into mainstream hashkofo leading to a split-personality tzibbur. The average Chareidi is quite cynical, while simulataneously willing to believe that any unusual tale ranks equal to Megillas Esther, and putting faith into a roster of segulos and alternative rostrums that would do a medicine man proud.

Rabbi X:

Your points are, as usual, excellent- and you definitely pointed out things that had not occurred to me.

For many of these reasons, I try to keep as low a profile as I can, and help people privately, discreetly. I realized many years ago that I am not very good at battling windmills, but can be helpful on a one-on-one basis.

EJF - Cost Benefit analysis

bandit has left a new comment on your post "EJF defended":

If the world of kiruv would be perfect and they would be concentrating on teaching people, one by one, Torah and mitzvos and they ran into the problem of intermarried couples we would understand (though not agree with) EJF's position. However, the vast majority of kiruv is half-baked and aimed at improving people's feelings towards Judaism instead of teaching them Torah. This may not be a problem (although probably is) but once we start doing other things because of kiruv we have to reevaluate. If someone out there believes kiruv to be changing lobster eaters into latke eaters he will be bringing his clients to this beis din too. When a spouse converts are they accepting all mitzvos? Are they accepting a path that leads to all mitzvos? They are statistically more likely to divorce. What will happen then? If the geyrus is kosher they may still act like goyim, not having seen their geyrus in any context other than connected to their Jewish former spouse. This can create problems with mamzeyrus. If the geyrus is not kosher we are left with more problems. For EJF to say that they only accept geyrus with KM is allowing them to create a problem and then try and create a solution. That is a dangerous approach.

As a sidebar, the Chasam Sofer writes in a letter that when fighting evil one must take care not to attack people personally for two reasons. One, because the argument makes less sense when it includes a personal attack. Two, because the evil stands on its own and even if the perpetrator dies or leaves the scene the evil must still be fought. The personal digs in these comments (both against R' Bomzer and R' Tropper and each other) detract from the weight of the argument.

One last point. The ads printed in the Jewish media have quoted lists of teshuvos supporting them. I made it my project to research them and I was shocked to see that not one proved their point. It was a good lesson to me to research everything . But the credibility of this organization took a severe beating. Who knows what other lies are being said?

Psychological Abuse - Identity & expectations/ Maharal

The Maharal explains that ona'as devarim (verbal abuse) is devastating because it directly impacts the person's soul. The abuser treats the person as if he was nonexistent and thus it is a belittling of his spiritual and psychological essence. Secondly - especially in the case of a wife - it undermines her expectation and perception of her importance. This denial of her self vision and expectations of her dignity - are devastating as seen by how readily they bring about her tears.

Maharal (Nesiv Ahavas Re’ah 2): Bava Metzia (59a): All the heavenly gates are locked except the gate for those who have been verbally abused (ona’ah)…R’ Eliezar said that every transgression is punished by means of an intermediary except for that of ona’ah which is punished directly by G d. R’ Abahu said that there are three things for which access to heaven is not blocked – ona’ah, theft and idolatry… These are the words of the gemora. It is important to understand these words because the Sages are alluding to a very deep understanding of the nature of ona’ah. First of all it is important to know that there is a major difference between verbal ona’ah and hurting somebody through a physical beating. That is because verbal ona’ah specifically affects the soul of man when he is insulted. On the other hand there is no such thing as ona’ah in reference to the physical body. There is nothing that ona’ah can do to the body. We see this idea in Shemos (22:9): Don’t wrong the ger or oppress him but you know the soul of the ger. The Torah connects ona’ah with the soul which receives the ona’ah. Also all embarrassment is to the soul, as we will explain. Furthermore since ona’ah is to the soul and the soul is in G d’s hand as is stated in Vayikra Rabba (4:1)…the soul and justice are in G d’s left hand… Because of this the soul which suffers wrong is in fact in G d’s hand…Furthermore someone who insults and abuses another person shows that he does not consider that his victim has any importance or existence at all. He treats the victim as a non-entity… There are other matters for which the ona’ah is ever more severe. Bava Metzia (59a): A person should always be careful not to distress his wife because since she readily cries she is more readily distressed. The explanation of this that a person should be particularly careful with his wife because the woman is controlled by her husband and therefore her tears are much more common. Distressing another person is not so devastating. But concerning his wife since she is under his domain and if he should distress her verbally – she readily cries. In contrast the Jewish slave is not so affected by nature. Even a Jewish woman slave does not readily cry because she has accepted the state of servitude to her master on her own. However the wife who is under the control of her husband, nevertheless she views her self as being a significant being. Therefore if there were any distress or insult against her from her husband she is strongly devastated – consequently she readily cries.