Influencers in NYC for anti-Jew-hate summit
By Mike Wagenheim, JNS
More than 300 influencers traveled to New York City from around the world for a first-of-its-kind antisemitism-busting event this week.
“This is your moment to use your platforms to change the course of what we’re experiencing across the globem,” Mayor Eric Adams told the gathering that was sponsored by the Combat Antisemitism Movement and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “There’s no room for hate in our city or on our globe. We can turn this around.”
Participants included television personality Andy Cohen, Rep. Ritchie Torres, Holocaust and Nova festival massacre survivors, singers, storytellers and social-media standouts, The “Voices for Truth: Influencers United Against Antisemitism” summit took place at The Glasshouse in Manhattan on Sunday and Monday.
“This is our chance to make a difference — to stand up for Jewish people and our values and the protection of minorities,” Sacha Roytman, CEO of CAM, told attendees. “To stand by is not an option anymore. Bring back activism and community leadership as a way of life.”
“Many of you have large socialmedia platforms, and that simply by representing Jewish culture with pride to your followers, you will have more of a far-reaching impact than you may even realize,” said Andy Cohen, host and executive producer of “The Real Housewives” franchise and co-host of CNN’s annual New Year’s Eve event. Jewish influencers have dealt with increasing levels of hate and lost
business in the aftermath of Oct. 7 and their continued support of Jews and Israel. The summit included panel discussions and other platforms to chart a path forward.
Cohen hosted an influencer town hall with Jewish content creator Melinda Strauss of the Five Towns, yoga instructor and gray-hair influencer Lynn Shabinsky, business consultant Joseph Yomtoubian, social media personality Baby Ariel, pro-Israel activist Lizzy Savetsky, fashion designer Julia Haart and others.
Speaking of the thousands of followers she has lost for defending Jews online, Shabinksy said, “We don’t need them. We’re here as people. We need to survive. The money will come later.”
Montana Tucker received the CAM Impactful Activism Award from Natalie Sanandaji, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre.
“Jews today have a voice. We are strong. We are powerful, and we are resilient. We are fortunate to have social media to use our platforms to reach people all around the world,” Tucker said. “We have experienced brand deals fall through, death threats, but we’ll continue to fight every single day, and we will not give up.”
Sanandaji helped to bring attention to the plight of the hostages whom Hamas and other terrorists continue to hold in Gaza.
Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman, who runs a popular TikTok account, told those in attendance
about her final days at Auschwitz.
“I tell myself ‘Never again,’ and here we are, antisemitism again,” she said.
Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter Matisyahu performed and participated in a fireside chat with author and influencer Jen Cohen. Author and speechwriter Aviva Klompas led a panel discussion on “Navigating the Science of Social to Maximize Impact.”
Comedians Yechiel Jacobs, LE Steiman and Josh Zilberberseg took part in a conversation on how to fight antisemitism with comedy, media personality Donny Deutsch moderated a student activist panel on campus antisemitism and a collection of Zionist LGBTQ community members discussed the gay community’s support for Hamas and
the Palestinian cause, despite the latter’s violent anti-gay stance.
“The absurdities of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in America have become too dangerous to ignore,” Torres said. “What is unprecedented in our present moment is the algorithmic amplification of antisemitism on TikTok and on Twitter.”
“Social media is enabling antisemitism to spread to an extent and on a scale and at a pace that we’ve never seen before,” the congressman said. Cohen included a call to action in his message to attendees.
“Be proud of being Jewish, and don’t shy away from showing it publicly,” he said. “Sometimes, the simplest displays or gestures are the strongest and most effective.”
Montana Tucker, one of the big influencers at this week’s anti-Jew-hatred summit in Manhattan, takes a selfie at the event. Combat Antisemitism Movement
Holocaust survivor Tova Friedman and her grandson, Aron Goodman, speak at this week’s anti-Jew-hatred summit. Combat Antisemitism Movement
Separate
Shabbos
Shabbos
Pols turn out to salute the heros of Mt. Sinai
By Kepherd Daniel and Ryan Demino
Mount Sinai South Nassau dedicated its new Maidenbaum Health Care Heroes Plaza on Monday, using the occasion to salute the hospital’s doctors, nurses and other health care workers for their extraordinary efforts during the coronavirus pandemic. The plaza was financed by a significant donation from Iris and Shalom Maidenbaum and Amy Madmon of the Maidenbaum Property Tax Reduction Group.
The plaza, at the front of the hospital, is adorned with brick pavers, trees and benches, and is the focus of the hospital’s Buy-a-Brick fundraising campaign, in which the bricks will be inscribed with messages from staff and friends of the hospital.
Dr. Aaron Glatt, chairman of the department of medicine and chief of infectious diseases, highlighted the heroism of health care workers who have run toward danger to save lives.
“A hero is a person that overcomes his natural inclinations and does good,” said Glatt, who is also associate rabbi at the Young Israel of Woodmere. “During Covid, every single employee ran towards the fire. We are honored and are so moved by all of the hospital heroes at Mount Sinai South Nassau and throughout the health care industry, who never for a moment stopped taking care of very sick patients. I think it’s important that people realize who the true heroes are.”
The ceremony was attended by a who’s who of local elected officials, including Rep. Anthony D’Esposito; state Sen. Patricia Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick; Assemblymen Ari Brown and Brian Curran; Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman; Legislators Howard Kopel and Patrick Mullaney; Hempstead Town Supervisor Don Clavin; Oyster Bay Town Supervisor Joseph Saladino; Island Park Mayor Michael McGinty; Freeport Mayor
By Mike Wagenheim, JNS
Voices are rising to demand that New York State reinstate its law banning wearing masks in public places after months of violent anti-Israel protesters wearing face coverings. The 175-year-old law, which had targeted the KKK, was cancelled in 2020 the state required people to wear masks in public spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“New York City will always defend your right to free speech and will continue to protect public health, but we are increasingly seeing masked protestors using anonymity to intimidate, threaten and break the law,” Mayor Eric Adams said on Thursday, endorsing the Unmask NY campaign. “This behavior is unacceptable, and we will not tolerate it.”
The mayor spoke outside of Columbia University’s campus, which was the site of a pro-Hamas encampment where protesters, many of them masked, intimidated and harassed Jewish students and other members of the Columbia community.
Also attended the press conference were New York State Assembly members from three of the city’s five boroughs; National Urban League president Marc Morial; Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of Anti-Defamation League; Mount Neboh Baptist Church pastor Johnnie Green; and representatives of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and UJA.
Robert Kennedy; Cedarhurst Mayor Benjamin Weinstock; Long Beach City Councilman John Bendo; and David Friedman, the former US ambassador to Israel.
Tony Cancellieri, co-chair of the hospital’s advisory board, recalled a caravan organized at the height of the pandemic, in which over 400 cars paraded outside the hospital to thank health care workers.
“These health care workers put their lives on the line every single day to save our lives,” Cancellieri said.
The dedication of the Heroes Plaza is about the future as well as the past, Shalom Maidenbaum said. “We also honor the services of individuals who continue to dedicate themselves to the well-being of our community, despite challenges they continue to face. They persevere with unwavering determination, always ready to lend a helping hand to provide comfort and care.”
—LI Herald
“Black communities know all too well that individuals who hide their identities with intent to terrorize, intimidate or harass are a threat to all of our safety and have no place in New York,” said Hazel Dukes, a former NAACP president and current president of its New York State conference.
“Reinstating New York’s masking laws will protect New Yorkers from some of the most terrifying periods in our history, when the Klan menaced black Americans, faces covered, without accountability,” Dukes added. “We can’t let history repeat itself.”
Hamas supporters near Columbia University on May 23. John Lamparski, Getty Images
From left: Iris and Shalom Maidenbaum and Amy Madmon at Monday’s Mount Sinai dedication.
Rabbi Dr. Aaron Glatt says a hero “overcomes his natural inclinations and does good.” Photos by Tim Baker, LI Herald
Believe all women … unless they’re Israeli victims of the savagery on and after Oct. 7
Editor’s note: This article includes sensitive and disturbing content, as it discusses atrocities committed by Hamas during and after its invasion of Israel. Discretion is advised in making this accessible to children.
By Charles Bybelezer and
Amelie
Botbol, JNS
“It’s very sad for me that people would not believe, or deny, the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas,” a former Israeli hostage told JNS. “I was with the girls in Gaza that were abused and while it’s very difficult to discuss in detail, I saw them after it happened. The girls would not stop talking about their period and I am very worried about them.”
The woman, in her 60s, was freed from Hamas captivity in Gaza in November as part of a ceasefire deal. She asked that her name not be used due to her close connection to another abductee still being held in the Strip.
“I saw that something happened to her. I saw it on her face,” said the ex-captive. “She was very scared. And she did not tell us at the beginning. She was very quiet. After a couple of hours, she told us that he had touched her in all parts of her body.”
This account is one of many excluded from Catherine Philp’s and Gabrielle Weiniger’s June 7 article in the Times of London, titled “Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?”
The piece is a classic example of denialism, cherry-picking information to paint Jews, and by extension their country, as unable to differentiate between reality and fiction due to their political proclivities and past traumas.
Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, Orit Sulit-
zeanu and Dr. Sarai Aharoni, all of whom were quoted in the London Times piece, released a statement accusing its authors of misrepresentation in service of an agenda.
Despite the article’s claims, “The use of sexual violence as a weapon of war was a significant part of the October 7 attack,” the professors state.
Halperin-Kaddari, founding director of the Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women at Bar-Ilan University Law Faculty, told JNS that “sexual violence on October 7 was
used as a weapon of war.”
This conclusion is based on “evidence that sexual violence was perpetrated in several distinct locations, all at the same time during a very short span, and all performed with an extremely high degree of brutality,” she said, adding: “We have the footage, the pictures taken at the scene, the testimonies of eyewitnesses and those of first responders who found all the bodies.”
The documented incidents followed a similar pattern and were carried out in a similar fashion, suggesting “it was a premeditated part of the
plan of the attack of October 7,” she said.
In March, Amit Soussana, who was freed along with more than 100 others from Hamas captivity as part of the November ceasefire deal. Told the New York Times that she was sexually assaulted during her 54 days of Hamas captivity in the Gaza Strip. She described being held in a children’s bedroom, chained by her ankle, and being violated on multiple occasions by a guard named Muhammad who forced her to “commit a sexual act on him” at gunpoint.
Last week, Soussana recounted her experience during a White House event marking International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict.
“The sexual assault I experienced should never happen to any human being under any circumstances. No one should ever be sexually violated, and there are no justifying circumstances for these crimes,” she said.
Vice President Kamala Harris vowed not to remain silent after hearing Soussana’s story, saying the Israeli survivor, an attorney, “has bravely come forward with her account of sexual violence while she was held captive by Hamas.”
“These testimonies, I fear, will only increase as more hostages are released,” said the vice president. “We cannot look away. And we will not be silent.”
Harris said that after Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel’s northwestern Negev, she witnessed “images of bloody Israeli women abducted.”
Yet in their London Times piece, Philp and Weiniger suggest that “the only reason” Soussana and others “told their story was because they wanted some kind of political pressure on
See London Times on page 14
A woman amid the ruins of Kibbutz Be’eri after Hamas terrorists attacked, Dec. 20, 2023. Yonatan Sindel, Flash90
Thinking about the blood libels, then and now
RABBI CHAIM STEINMETZ
Kehilath Jeshurun, NYC
Last Wednesday was the 20th of Sivan, which was once a fast day that commemorated the first violent blood libel. (The Vaad Arba Aratzot later redesignated it to commemorate the Cossack massacres of 1648-1649.)
In 1144, 12-year-old William of Norwich was found murdered. In 1149, a Knight named Simon, on trial for murdering Eleazar, a wealthy Jew to whom he owed money, claimed in his defense that Eleazar and the Jewish community had murdered William as an act of ritual murder. The defense won the case.
A local monk, Thomas of Monmouth, then published a book about the supposed “murder” of William of Norwich. He claimed that Jews engage in the ritual murder of Christian children in order to return to Israel. He wrote:
As a proof of the truth and credibility of the matter we now adduce something which we have heard from the lips of Theobald, who was once a Jew and afterwards a monk. He verily told us that in the ancient writings of his fathers, it was written that the Jews, without the shedding of human blood, could neither obtain their freedom nor could they ever return to their fatherland. Hence it was laid down by them in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the Most High God in scorn and contempt of Christ… Thomas of Monmouth’s blood libel circulated through Europe for nearly two decades. Then, in 1171, it became deadly. In Blois, France, a Jew and a Christian brought their horses to drink from the river. The Jew dropped an untanned hide and the horse of the Christian jumped. The Christian then claimed that the Jew had dropped a murdered baby into the river.
Count Thibault, the local ruler (and brother-inlaw of the French King Louis VII) claimed that the Jewish community had committed a ritual murder. The judicial proceedings, which were based on a bizarre trial by ordeal, found the Jews guilty, even without a body or an alleged victim. And 32 Jews were burned at the stake.
Rabbeinu Yaakov Tam, the great rabbinic leader and grandson of Rashi, then declared the 20th of Sivan a fast day. (He was 71 at the time and died a few weeks later.)
Declaring a new fast for the murdered in Blois was a major statement. No fast had been declared for the First and Second Crusades, which resulted in thousands of deaths. Rabbeinu Tam himself nearly died in the Second Crusade, but he realized that what happened in Blois was even worse. He recognized that the blood libel was a lethal form of propaganda and would cause centuries of trouble. And he was right.
EM Rose wrote an exceptional book on this topic, “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe.” She explained that the blood libel was unique in several ways.
First, it was a theory that originated and was embraced among the educated elite, not just the unwashed masses. She wrote: “This supposed ‘irrational,’ ‘bizarre,’ ‘literary trope’ was the product of lucid, cogent arguments, thoughtfully and carefully debated in executive councils, judged in detail by sober men who were not reacting under pressure to thoughtless mob violence.”
The original blood libel started with the intelligentsia and became well-accepted.
Asecond element she points out is that the blood libel put every Jew on trial: “Jewish identity was on trial, rather than any single individual perpetrator.”
Every Jew was guilty until proven innocent.
The 20th of Sivan is sadly once again an important date in 2024. Once again, Israel is guilty until proven innocent. Even a hostage rescue is imme-
diately treated as a wanton massacre of innocent civilians until Israel provides video evidence to the contrary.
Once again, leading the charge against Israel are some well-educated people — professors and students at elite universities who, in their hatred of Israel, are eager to support a group of fanatical, depraved murderers. And like Thomas of Monmouth, the testimony of individual Jews, no matter how tainted, is taken to support horrific falsehoods.
The libel of Jewish ritual murder was accepted by some of the most educated people. And that opened the door to widespread violence.
Medieval antisemites believed awful things about Jews, and that gave them license to do awful things to Jews.
But one more point: The 20th of Sivan also marks exceptional heroism. The 32 Jews who were murdered in Blois died with their heads held high.
Ephraim of Bonn, the great medieval chronicler of antisemitic persecution, wrote, “It was also reported in that letter that as the flames mounted high, the martyrs began to sing in unison a melody that began softly but ended with a full voice. The Christian people came and asked us ‘What kind of a song is this for we have never heard such a sweet melody?’ We knew it well, for it was the song: ‘It is incumbent upon us to praise the Lord of all’.”(Aleinu on the High Holidays is sung with a special melody.)
These martyrs died singing Aleinu.
Fresco of a blood libel painted by the monk Adam Swach (1668-1747) at the cathedral basilica in Sandomierz, Poland. WikiCommons
Nassau County Bridge Authority
160 Beach 2nd Street Lawrence, N.Y. 11559-0341 516-239-6900
PUBLIC NOTICE
Amended Atlantic Beach Bridge Drawbridge Operation Regulations
Effective June 6, 2024
As published in the U. S. Federal Register Vol. 89, No 89 Tuesday May 7, 2024/ Rules and Regulations, the U. S. Coast Guard amends the drawbridge operations of the Atlantic Beach Bridge as follows:
Section 117.799 Long Island New York Inland Waterway from East Rockaway Inlet to Shinnecock Canal
PART 117—DRAWBRIDGE OPERATION REGULATIONS
■ 1. The authority citation for part 117 continues to read as follows: Authority: 33 U.S.C. 499; 33 CFR 1.05–1; and DHS Delegation No. 00170.1. Revision No. 01.3
■ 2. Amend § 117.799 by revising paragraph (e) to read as follows:
§ 117.799 Long Island, New York Inland Waterway from East Rockaway Inlet to Shinnecock Canal * * * * *
(e) The draw of the Atlantic Beach Bridge across Reynolds Channel, mile 0.4, shall operate as follows:
(1) From October 1 through May 14 the draw shall open on signal from 8 a.m. to midnight.
(2) From midnight to 8 a.m. year-round, the draw shall open on signal if at least eight (8) hours of notice is given by calling the Bridge Tower at 516–239–1821.
(3) From May 15 through September 30, the bridge will open on signal except from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays, and from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturdays, Sundays, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day, when the bridge will open on the hour and half-hour.
‘Pulse of Israel’ confab tackles Jewish identity
By Troy Osher Fritzhand, JNS
Pulse of Israel hosted its second annual conference on Sunday evening, in a night dedicated to finding solutions to problems facing Israel and achieving “independence” after the war.
“We need to be who we are in the deepest sense,” said Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli in answer to a question by Pulse of Israel founder and CEO Avi Abelow about what Israel’s role should be in the world. Recounting a story he was told about the Nazis, “the ultimate evil,” Chikli said, “Ultimate evil declared Judaism as its enemy. …We should be proud to be the enemies of pure evil, because we represent the opposite of it. To seek goodness and the truth.”
Chikli’s remarks were part of a larger discussion touched on by most of the speakers — including Caroline B. Glick (whose column appears regularly in The Jewish Star) — about the “red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists” and its acts of upheaval in the world today.
“The core of the Jewish people is the Ten Commandments, universal freedom, our connection to our homeland,” said Chikli. “We need to give up on the notion that we are a normal nation — we are not,” he added.
This means ensuring Diaspora Jews learn Torah and understand the history and stories of the Jewish people, and most important: “They need to know Hebrew.”
Another member of the coalition, Constitutional Law and Justice Committee chairman MK Simcha Rothman of the Religious Zionist Party, lamented the fact that while in the past Israel’s High Court of Justice took the position that it was not their place to legislate, today it is involving itself in every aspect of the war.
bring about peace in the region, he said.
Israel, said Kodorkovsky, “finds itself in the most perplexing situations, that would make King Solomon jealous,” but ultimately must act in its own interest.
“In the end, it’s not the call of the U.S. government [to take care of the Iranian threat], it’s the Israeli government,” he said.
Turning to the audience, Khodorkovsky asked, “Do the Israeli people want to solve this problem?”
With regard to the nuclear threat, he asked the same question, again saying the Israeli government must make the decisions.
“America is not going to solve this for you,” he said.
Tehran is reportedly set to triple or possibly quadruple its uranium enrichment capacity at Fordow, one of the country’s most secretive nuclear facilities, where it is installing some 1,400 advanced IR-6 centrifuges. Under the terms of the JCPOA, Iran had committed not to install or operate those centrifuges, and not to use Fordow for enrichment purposes.
“Israel’s justice system lost its sense of justice,” he said. “The court and its legal advisers are actively limiting the way the IDF fights in the war.”
Rothman also pointed to potential arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant from the International Criminal Court as evidence of failed policy by the High Court.
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant will include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan told CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour in May.
Rothman, himself a former lawyer, said that during last year’s protests in Israel against his judicial reform initiative, its opponents argued that the reforms would eliminate the “legal Iron Dome” protecting Israel from such actions by the ICC. “It did not work,” he said.
JNS CEO Alex Traiman sat down with Len Khodorkovsky, current senior adviser to the chairman of the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue, for an in-depth discussion on the Iranian threat and the implications of the upcoming U.S. election.
“Hamas is Iran. Hezbollah is Iran. Houthis are Iran,” said Kodorkovsky, describing how the Islamic state is overseeing the largest statesponsored terror apparatus in the world today. “The United States would be wise to have a different strategy on Iran,” he added.
Regime change should be on the table, as only an alternative government in Iran could
Tehran’s decision to do so was possibly an answer to the censure of the Islamic Republic on June 5 by the International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors, which demanded it comply with the IAEA and reinstate inspections. The effort was led by the so-called E3 of the United Kingdom, Germany and France.
Glick touched on this, speaking about how with all relationships, including with the United States, the degree of friendliness depends on who is in power.
“Israel needs to stop romanticizing international affairs” and recognize that other countries will act in their own best interest, and to not take it personally, she said.
Via video, Knesset member Dan Illouz of the Likud Party emphasized this, saying that Israel must stand strong diplomatically and defeat Hamas to prosper in the future. “We are at a crossroads,” he said.
Also at the conference, comedian Michael Rappaport, who has been an outspoken supporter of Israel and the Jewish people since the war broke out on Oct. 7, was given the “Leadership of Zion Award.”
“I love this country. I respect this community,” said Rappaport, adding he feels at home in Israel and prays daily for the hostages, the soldiers, the citizens and the displaced of Israel. Rappaport touched on the growing antisemitism in New York, saying it makes him sad. However, he added, “Never doubt your Judaism … it did not matter what kind of Jew you are, on Oct. 7 you were treated as a Jew.”
Finally, Shay Kallach, a former fighter pilot and founder of Netzach Israel movement, gave a lecture on the meaning of the Jewish people returning to their homeland after 2,000 years. “Why have we returned to Zion…to be a light unto nations, to lead the world,” he said.
To accomplish this, “We are in the process of rediscovering our identity,” he added.
Pulse of Israel is a media company that seeks to tell the true story of Israel.
“We are about providing the not politically correct but correct information for Jews and non-Jews around the world, that we are on the right side of history,” Abelow told JNS. “It’s hard when people make us out to be evil, even though we are the good fighting that evil,” he said.
Wine AnD Dine
Saluting America and recalling when we were immigrants too
Kosher Kitchen
Joni SCHoCKeTT Jewish Star columnist
t is almost July 4th, that most American of all American holidays. I am a true and unabashed patriot, especially on the Fourth of July, and I love the parades, the concerts and the many, many barbecues that take place across our vast country.
A few years ago, I wrote about the Jews who have fought for America from its inception, through all its wars, and who continue to serve in the armed forces today. But this year, I have been thinking about my grandfather, the one I never knew, who died just a few months before I was born. He came to America escape the pogroms in Russia, and found here a country that accepted him and allowed what he felt were extraordinary freedoms. I also thought about the very first Jews to arrive on this continent. How lonely it must have been for them!
The first Jewish man to come to the New World was Elias Legarde, a Sephardic Jew who arrived in Jamestown in 1621. In 1649, another Sephardic Jewish man, Solomon Franco, arrived in Boston and settled there, doing business for a Dutchman. Apparently, things went badly, and he was expelled to Holland a few years later. In 1674, there were only two Jews in Boston.
My
grandfather was a staunch patriot who loved an America that had saved his family from the Russian pogroms.
For decades, you could count the Jewish population of Boston on one hand. Those who trickled in experienced prejudice as they tried to forge a life: they wanted to be full participants in the political creation of the new world, but to their disappointment, were barred from voting. By 1875, America was almost 100 years old, but the Jewish community in Boston numbered merely 3,000.
However, by World War I, that number had exploded — to almost 90,000! Most of the new immigrants were Eastern European Jews who fled before, during and after the war. My maternal grandfather arrived in 1904 as an 8-year-old, and got right to work. He learned English, attended some yeshiva, and read scores of books. He eventually built a thriving, lucrative business that made women’s apparel and women’s armed forces uniforms during World War II. He was a staunch American patriot who loved this country that had saved his family from the Russian pogroms. So I come by my patriotism and love of country honestly. America is an amazing place, and I am thankful every day that I live where I can love my country, practice my religion openly and say what I want — within reason, of course!
Those early Jewish settlers came to a new world and made this
country — often good, sometimes bad, forever complicated and beautifully diverse — a place for us all to love and cherish. The poem at the gateway to America was penned by a young Jewish woman, speaking to the acceptance of all who choose to come to its shores. The Fourth of July celebrates that enduring ideal.
Sweet Hot Salmon with Jicama Celery Slaw (Pareve)
All the ingredients in this glaze are to taste. Make it as hot — or not! — as your family likes.
• 2 Tbsp. hot sauce, tabasco or sriracha, to taste, less for less heat
• 1-1/2 Tbsp. dark brown sugar, firmly packed
• 1 tsp. (scant) smoked paprika
• 1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper, more or less, to taste
• 1 small clove garlic, pressed through a garlic press
• 1 tsp. agave nectar or honey
• 2 tsp. canola oil
• 1 Tbsp. chives, finely minced
• 1 Tbsp. fresh parsley, finely minced, leaves only
• 4 salmon fillets, 5 to 8 ounces each, thin fat edge removed
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Canola oil for grill and for brushing salmon
Place the hot sauce, dark brown sugar, paprika, cayenne, garlic, agave syrup or honey, and canola oil in a small bowl and whisk vigorously to blend thoroughly.
Brush the grill with oil and brush each salmon piece lightly with oil. Season lightly with salt and pepper. Place on the hot grill and leave for 2 to 3 minutes, or until the fish moves easily. While cooking, brush the top with the glaze once or twice.
Flip the salmon pieces and brush the cooked side with the glaze 2 or 3 times while cooking the second side. When cooked, place on a platter and brush once more with the glaze. Garnish with the parsley and chives. Serve with Jicama Celery Slaw. Jicama Celery Slaw for Salmon (Pareve)
1 small jicama, peeled and cut into thin, matchstick pieces
6 to 10 stalks of celery, thinly sliced on diagonal 1/4 of small purple cabbage, cut into slices
1 small sweet onion, like Vidalia or red onion, cut in quarters and thinly sliced
1-1/2 Tbsp. prepared hot/sweet glaze
2 to 4 Tbsp. lite mayonnaise
NOTE: A thinly-sliced Granny Smith apple adds a nice touch. Place 1-1/2 tablespoons of the hot sauce into a large bowl. Add the mayonnaise and whisk to blend.
Slice the celery, purple cabbage, red onion and jicama into thin pieces and add to the bowl. Toss to coat with the dressing and then cover and refrigerate.
Serve with the salmon. Serves 4.
Thai Curried Grilled Salmon (Pareve)
• 1 Tbsp. canola oil
• 1 tsp. minced garlic
• 1 tsp. grated peeled ginger
• 1 tsp. coriander
• 1-1/2 tsp. Thai red curry paste, more or less, to taste
• 1 tsp. paprika
• 1/2 tsp. cumin, more to taste
• 1-1/4 cups coconut milk, full fat or low-fat
• 3 Tbsp. tomato paste, scant
• 2 tsp. tamari sauce
• 1-1/2 Tbsp. packed dark brown sugar, more to taste
• GARNISH: 1 to 2 scallions, thinly sliced
• OPTIONAL: 1 Tbsp. coarsely chopped peanuts
• 4 salmon fillets, about 6 to 8 ounces each
• 2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Heat the canola oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and ginger and sauté for 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the coriander, cumin, paprika, and curry paste and cook over very low heat for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Slowly add the coconut milk, tomato paste, soy sauce, and brown sugar. Increase the heat and, stirring constantly, bring the mixture to a simmer, but not a boil. Remove from heat. When bubbles start to form, remove from heat.
Heat the grill to medium and brush a fish rack with olive oil. Brush the salmon with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Place the fish on the grill and cook for about 3 to 4 minutes each side until cooked through. Don’t overcook!
When the fish is done, place one piece on each plate and drizzle with the sauce. Serve with rice and drizzle the sauce over the rice. Garnish with scallions and peanuts. Serves 4.
World Peace Cookies (Dairy)
These were named by the originator of this recipe, Pierre Hermes, who gave it to famed cook Dorrie Greenspan. The recipe has traveled through many hands. This is my adaptation.
• 1-1/4 cups unbleached flour
• 1/3 cup natural unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1 stick plus 3 Tbsp. unsalted butter, room temperature
• 2/3 cup (firmly packed) golden brown sugar
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tsp. pure vanilla extract
• 1/8 tsp. salt
• 6 ounces bittersweet or extra-bittersweet chocolate, 52 to 72% cocoa, chopped (no pieces bigger than 1/3 inch), or 6 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips.
• 3 ounces milk chocolate chips or white chocolate chips, or even peanut butter or butterscotch chips
Sift the flour, cocoa, and baking soda into medium bowl.
Place the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat until smooth and creamy. Add the brown and white sugar and the vanilla and sea salt. Beat until fluffy, about 2 minutes.
Reduce speed to very low and slowly add flour/ cocoa mixture. Beat just until blended. The mixture may be a bit crumbly. If too crumbly, knead a bit in the bowl to bring the dough together in a ball. Divide dough in half and place each piece on a sheet of plastic wrap. Form into a 1-1/2-inch thick log, wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 3 hours.
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
Use a thin sharp knife to cut ½-inch thick rounds. Place 1 inch apart on the parchment. Bake for 11 to 12 minutes until the cookies look dry on top. Place the baking sheets on a rack to cool and firm up. When cooled, transfer to an airtight container. Makes about 18 cookies.
This column was previously published.
Thai Curried Grilled Salmon (Pareve)
World Peace Cookies (Dairy)
This July Fourth will be a freedom bonanza
etHeL G. HOFMan
Many of us tend to forget the origin of July 4, but not I! Fifty years ago, this Shetland Islands native became a proud new American citizen after studying the fundamentals of US history and the break from Britain. The words stuck in my head: “No taxation without representation.” Unpopular taxes and laws put in place by the British included the Sugar Tax and the Stamp Act. Colonists, motivated to stand up for their rights, rebelled against a tea tax by tossing crates of the valued commodity into Boston Harbor. The colonies’ widespread dissatisfaction with increasing British control led to a revolt, and eventually, the Declaration of Independence.
The document signed by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, is a celebration of independence and freedom from British rule. Now, with the coronavirus being harnessed by vaccinations, this day becomes doubly meaningful as a return to freedom and (a new) normalcy.
It’s been a while since we’ve entertained a crowd, but now’s the time to break out. Mix and mingle. You’ve earned it! Start with Shabbat dinner on Friday night and work up to Sunday knowing Monday is a day off. Make up a menu from the dishes below and delegate. There’s something to delight everyone, whether the vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian or “I’ll eat everything” gang.
I’m always on the lookout for new food items, so when I saw packages of baby zucchini, I grabbed them. Sliced lengthwise, they’re perfect to scoop up the lentil pâté, fragrant with Mediterranean spices.
There’s no flavor, however, comparable to fresh herbs. Even for me, a sometimes gardener with limited space, it’s easy enough to plant a half-dozen herbs ready to pick. My Biblical Blessing Salad is inspired by a memorable dinner at a Jaffa cafe overlooking the sea.
We delved into a lively, tongue-tingling fresh herb salad, dressed lightly with olive-oil dressing and served alongside crisp fried St. Peter’s fish (tilapia). The base for the Old Glory Cookie Cake is a zesty lemon-bar cookie, garnished with fresh berries. I used blueberries and raspberries, but substitute with your favorite colorful toppings. Serve with a scoop of lavender-infused fruit on the side. Then insert a few sparklers for a celebratory, rousing finale.
Lentil Pâté (Pareve)
Adapted from a recipe shared by my culinary friend and colleague, Myra Chanin. Makes 2-1/2 to 3 cups.
Cook’s Tips: •Steamed lentils are available in some markets or cook 1-1/2 cups dry lentils according to package directions. •Pereg makes a wide variety of kosher spices such as sumac and mixed spices.
Ingredients:
1 package (17 oz.) steamed lentils
1 Tbsp. cut-up Vidalia onion
3 Tbsp. seasoned rice vinegar
3 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
1-1/2 tsp. sumac
1-1/4 tsp. Pereg Cajun mixed spices
Directions:
Break up lentils and place them in a food processor.
Add the onion and process to combine.
Add the remaining ingredients. Process until coarsely ground or until smooth.
Serve with baby zucchini, cut in half lengthwise.
Barbecued Flank Steak With Fresh Herb Sauce (Meat)
Serves 6.
Cook’s Tips: •May use lite soy sauce to reduce sodium. •Substitute dried sage for thyme.
Ingredients:
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 cup dry red wine
2 Tbsp. soy sauce
2 Tbsp. bottled minced garlic
1 Tbsp. chopped fresh thyme or 1 tsp. dried
2 tsp. freshly ground pepper
2 (1 lb. each) flank steaks
Directions:
In a medium bowl, whisk together, the vinegar, olive oil, wine, soy sauce, garlic, thyme and pepper.
Arrange the steaks in one layer in a large shallow glass dish. Prick each steak several times all over with a fork. Pour the marinade over, turning steaks to coat thoroughly.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 4 hours, turning several times or overnight. Remove steaks from the refrigerator. Pour off marinade and discard (do not reuse).
Heat grill to medium-hot. Arrange steaks on the grill.
Cook for 5 to 6 minutes on each side for rare. Cook a few minutes longer for medium or welldone. If steak is thick, cooking times may be longer.
Transfer to a cutting board. Let rest for 5 to 10 minutes.
Slice 1/4-inch thick on the diagonal, cutting across the grain. Arrange on a platter and spoon some sauce (below) over top. Pass remaining sauce in a gravy boat.
Fresh Herb Sauce (Pareve)
Makes about 1-1/2 cups
Cook’s Tips: •Prepare sauce a day ahead. Cover and refrigerate. Remove from refrigerator 30 to 45 minutes before serving.•Make cooked fish or chicken sparkle. Spoon the sauce over top before serving.
Ingredients:
4 cups parsley, loosely packed
2 green onions, trimmed and sliced
2 hard-cooked eggs, quartered
2 Tbsp. Dijon-style mustard
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1-1/2 tsp. lemon-pepper seasoning or to taste
Directions:
In the food processor or blender, place the parsley, green onions, eggs, mustard, lemon juice and olive oil.
Process until mixture becomes smooth.
Season to taste with lemon-pepper seasoning.
Serve at room temperature.
Cod Fish Rolls (Pareve)
A kosher take on a New England lobster roll. Makes 4
Cook’s Tips: •Substitute cooked salmon for
codfish.
*Prepare cod filling a day ahead. Cover and refrigerate. •3/4 lb. cooked flaked cod is about 2 cups. •Toast hot-dog rolls, if desired.
Ingredients:
1/4 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 Tbsp. grated lemon rind
1/4 tsp. hot sauce or to taste
1/2 tsp. fresh ground pepper
1/8 tsp. salt
3/4 cup finely diced celery
1 Tbsp. chopped shallots
1 Tbsp. pickle relish
3 Tbsp. thinly sliced chives, divided 3/4 lb. cooked cod, cut in small chunks (recipe below)
4 hot dog rolls, split
8 lettuce leaves, shredded
Directions:
In a medium bowl, whisk together the mayonnaise, lemon juice and rind, hot sauce, pepper and salt.
Fold in the celery, shallots, pickle relish and 2 Tbsp. chives.
Add the cod and mix gently.
Line the hot dog rolls with lettuce. Divide cod filling evenly and spoon over top.
Sprinkle with remaining chives and serve.
To poach cod: Cut cod into 2 or 3 pieces. Pour 1/4 cup orange juice, 1 Tbsp. vinegar and 1/2 cup water into a large nonstick skillet. Bring to boil over high heat. Add the cod; reduce heat to medium. Simmer, covered, for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the fish flakes easily when tested with a fork.
Biblical Blessing Salad (Pareve)
Serves 6.
Cook’s Tips: •Could substitute quinoa for bulgur. •Include salad greens for some of the fresh herbs or shredded spring greens for dill. •Rinse herbs well in cold water. Spin dry in a salad spinner.
Ingredients for dressing:
3 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tsp. Dijon mustard
freshly ground pepper and salt to taste
1/4 cup bulgur wheat
Boiling water
1 bunch parsley (about 4 cups, loosely packed) stalks trimmed
1/2 bunch basil (about 1 cup, loosely packed), leaves only
1/2 bunch dill, (about 2 cups, loosely packed)
1/2 cucumber, unpeeled, seeds removed and coarsely diced
1/2 to 3/4 cup dried cranberries or raisins
1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
Directions:
Prepare the dressing: In a small jar, pour the lemon juice, olive oil and mustard. Cover and shake well to mix. Season to taste with pepper and salt. Set aside.
Place bulgur in a cup and pour boiling water over to cover. Let stand 10 to 15 minutes to soften. Drain well. Set aside.
Using kitchen shears, snip the parsley, basil and dill coarsely into a large bowl.
Add the bulgur, cucumber, cranberries and pumpkin seeds.
Just before serving, pour enough dressing over to barely moisten. Toss and serve.
Old Glory Citrus Cake (Dairy) Serves 12.
Cook’s Tips: •Make it easy. Use prepared vanilla frosting. •Prepare the citrus cookie base ahead of time (it can be frozen). •White baking chips do not contain cocoa butter and so can’t be labeled as chocolate, but they do contain partially hydrogenated oil (usually palm kernel oil). True white chocolate is almost always in bar form and contains cocoa butter. •To make pareve, use margarine instead of butter. Prepare non-dairy frosting. See recipe below. •Two large lemons should yield 6 Tbsp. of juice.
Ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
3 Tbsp. grated lemon rind, divided 2 cups all-purpose flour
Filling:
4 large eggs
1-3/4 cup sugar
6 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
6 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
1 container (16 oz.) vanilla frosting
Blueberries, raspberries, white baking chips
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a medium bowl, beat the butter and confectioners’ sugar till fluffy, about 30 seconds. Stir in 1 Tbsp. grated lemon rind. Add the flour, 1/2 cup at a time, beating well between each addition.
Press into an ungreased 13×9-inch baking pan. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes. While crust is baking, prepare the filling. Whisk the eggs and sugar until blended. Stir in the flour, lemon juice and remaining grated lemon rind. Pour over the partially baked crust.
Bake 25 to 30 minutes longer until goldenbrown and almost set in the center. Cool completely in pan on a wire rack.
To decorate: Spread frosting over to edges. Decorate like an American flag with blueberries, raspberries and white “chocolate” chips.
Vanilla frosting (Pareve): Whisk 3 cups confectioners’ sugar with 1/3 cup softened margarine. Stir in 1 tsp. vanilla and 1 Tbsp. non-dairy creamer. Stir to mix. If too stiff, add a little more non-dairy creamer, a drop at a time. Be careful; too much liquid and frosting will become runny.
Red, White and Blue Lavender Fruit (Pareve)
Serves 6 to 8.
Cook’s Tips: •For adults only: prepare the day before. Drizzle orange liqueur such as Sabra over and refrigerate. •Set aside honeyed fruit for the kids. •An acid such as orange juice prevents bananas from browning.
Ingredients:
2 bananas, cut into chunks
1/4 cup orange juice
1 pint of raspberries
1 pint of blueberries
1 pint of blackberries
1/2 tsp. dried lavender
Honey to drizzle
Directions:
In a small bowl, place the bananas and pour orange juice over top. Toss gently and let stand for 5 minutes.
Drain, saving juice to add to breakfast drinks. Place in a bowl with the berries. Sprinkle lavender over and stir gently. Drizzle with honey. Chill and serve.
This column was previously published.
Lentil Pâté.
Ethel G. Hofman July Fourth Fruit.
Pixabay Old Glory Citrus Cake.
Ethel G. Hofman
London Times: Israeli women beyond belief…
the Israeli government to work harder to release the hostages.”
Shelly Tal Meron, an Israeli lawmaker from the opposition Yesh Atid Party, confirmed to JNS that “on Oct. 7, we had a lot of cases of sexual assault, mutilation, rape and different kinds of abuse. We also know that it’s happening right now in Gaza so to hear that people are even doubting it is outrageous.”
Tal Meron went on to say, “I have been in contact with hostages who returned from captivity and told me what happened to them. I also met a survivor of the Supernova music festival who heard other women being raped around her. We heard testimony from someone else at the festival who watched a gang rape happen during which the terrorists cut out the breast of their victim and played with it. Another victim was stabbed while being raped and then shot in the back of the head.
“There are a lot of bodies that had sharp objects in the women’s groin, they shot or cut off their intimate parts. We saw that this was a systematic way of Hamas terrorists harming these women.”
Tal Meron is chair of the Global Women’s Coalition Against Gender Based Violence as a Weapon of War and has been speaking in parliaments around Europe.
“Right now, it’s happening in Israel to Jewish women but this is at the doorstep of every country in the world, we have instances in Ukraine, against Yazidi women in Iraq, and in Africa,” she explained.
After attempting to portray Soussana as a political tool, the London Times authors then attribute fantasies of rape on Oct. 7 to “historical memories” imprinted on the Jewish psyche during centuries of pogroms in Eastern Europe — “a fact that would come to play a role in the reporting of what happened” during the Hamas massacre.
According to Philp and Weiniger, this mental problem is compounded because Jews harbor an “idea of the Arab male as an explicit sexual threat to Jewish women” which, to hammer home their prior point, was “developed in tandem with the movement of Israeli politics to the right.”
The groundwork is thus laid to discredit Zaka, an organization made up primarily of ultra-Orthodox Jewish volunteers who have for decades sifted through the carnage of Palestinian terror attacks in a bid to identify victims and provide them with burials in accordance with Jewish law.
Zaka played an instrumental (albeit imperfect) role in identifying the bodies of hundreds of Israelis mutilated by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7. The authors suggest that such religious Jews are unable to identify evidence of sexual atrocities because they are faithful to their wives.
“At Zaka, we have close to 4,000 volunteers — Men and women, Jews, Muslims and Christians — so hearing that we cannot identify rape because we never saw a woman naked aside from our wives is outrageous,” veteran ZAKA volunteer Simcha Greiniman told JNS. “Every volunteer goes through training to understand how to deal with remains without contaminating the scene and to leave it in optimal condition for those coming afterwards to collect evidence.
“According to Jewish law, a man can bury a woman and can handle her body. Zaka volunteers don’t walk away from
women who were killed in car accidents and we didn’t walk away from women killed on Oct. 7,” continued Greiniman. “I have many pictures and videos that I took. The police got pieces of evidence from Zaka, including 200,000 images from the scene. A lot of the bodies were shot in their private parts so there wasn’t even the possibility to gather samples.
“Whatever was taken by us was given to the police,” he added.
Yet the London Times article suggests that Israeli police have no evidence at all.
“While substantial evidence of various types has already been collected and reviewed, this sensitive matter requires the utmost care to ensure integrity, allowing us to properly process the evidence through the criminal justice system,” Israel Police said in a statement. “Beyond the evidence cleared for public release, statements given, and admissions of guilt by the terrorists, we remain committed to upholding due process by reserving the right to not divulge additional sensitive information. • • •
Thirty-four paragraphs into their article, the authors finally concede — briefly — that sexual violence was, in fact, rampant on Oct. 7.
They write: “On March 4, Pramila Patten sat down before journalists to deliver her findings. There were, she said, ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe there had been rape and sexual assaults on October 7, particularly at the Nova festival ground, and ‘clear and convincing information’ — a higher standard of evidence — of rape and sexual torture of hostages held in Gaza.”
What they omit is that when Patten, the UN secretary-general’s special representative on sexual violence and conflict, visited Israel in late January and early February, her team found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations during the 7 October attacks, including rape and gang-rape in at least three locations, namely: the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im. In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed, and at least two incidents relate to the rape of women’s corpses.
“The mission team also found a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations. Although circumstantial, such a pattern may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence, including sexualized
torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
Sulitzeanu, one of the experts who released the statement denouncing their inclusion in the London Times piece, is the head of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel. Philp and Weiniger fail to mention that Sulitzeanu’s ARCCI in February released a report documenting the “sadistic sex crimes” committed during the Hamasled invasion on Oct. 7.
“Many rape incidents occurred collectively, with collaboration among the perpetrating terrorists. In some cases, rape was conducted in front of an audience, such as partners, family, or friends, to increase the pain and humiliation for all present,” the report found.
“Some Hamas members pursued victims who escaped the massacre, dragging them by their hair with screams. The majority of victims were subsequently killed during or after the sexual assault. Several testimonies, interviews, and additional sources indicate the use of sadistic practices by Hamas terrorists, aimed at intensifying the humiliation and fear of sexual abuse. Many victims’ bodies were found mutilated and bound, with sexual organs brutally attacked, and in some cases, weapons were inserted into them. Some bodies were discovered deliberately booby-trapped,” it added.
Sulitzeanu told JNS that the London Times journalists “abused her sincerity and did not correctly represent her point of view.” She had wrongfully assumed that “we are women, we fight this terrible thing of sexual violence
47, and his son Abdallah, 18, confessing to rape and murder on Oct. 7.
“My father raped her, then I did, and then my cousin did, and then we left, but my father killed the woman after we finished raping her,” Abdallah told an Israeli interrogator. “Before this woman, we had raped another girl as well; I killed two people, I raped two people, and I broke into five houses.”
In March, the IDF released footage of Manar Mahmoud Muhammad Kasem, 28, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist captured by Israeli troops in Khan Yunis, admitting that he raped a girl on Oct. 7.
In December, the New York Times reported that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck on Oct. 7 they brutalized women. The newspaper’s two-month investigation determined such assaults were not isolated incidents but rather part of a greater pattern of Hamas-perpetrated gender-based violence.
because we believe that nobody should go through this regardless of political affiliations,” she said.
“Not everybody has to believe in the same agenda but being a woman, you fight sexual violence,” she said.
In December, Dr. Itai Pessach, director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Children’s Hospital at Sheba Medical Center outside Tel Aviv, told CBS News that his team had interviewed and treated hostages freed as part of the truce agreement the previous month who were sexually abused.
“We did hear and see evidence of sexual abuse in a significant part of the people we have treated. We also heard evidence — and that was one of the hardest parts — of abuse against those that [are still there], both physical and sexual,” he said.
Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, chair of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas Against Women and Children, was also attacked in the London Times article, described as one of the “women[who] made forensic assessments they were far from qualified to make.”
“The head of our archive is the former deputy head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial archive. We have legal experts, forensic experts. All of us are exposed to traumatizing material on a daily basis,” Elkayam-Levy told JNS. “We collect testimonies with trauma experts. We try to do the most meticulous work. We do our best to represent the victims accurately, give them a voice and an opportunity to get justice in the future.”
“We compile evidence such as videos, images, work on authenticating the material and sorting it, in ways that international tribunals could use the database in its entirety,” she continued.
“We do so in partnership with research institutes, universities and centers around the world that have special expertise in documenting war crimes.”
“The Times of London article creates a hostile environment for victims to come forward,” Elkayam-Levy said.
“I am not surprised by the denial of gender-based crimes,” she added. “We know that individually every time there is a rape victim who comes forward, we see the difficulty to navigate between denial, systematic discrimination and the disbelief in women. On one hand, I am not surprised, on the other hand it hurts.”
Britain’s Daily Mail last month released footage of two captured Hamas terrorists, Jamal Hussein Ahmad Radi,
The piece pinpointed seven sites where available evidence suggests Israeli women and girls endured sexual violation or mutilation. One witness recounted that a Hamas terrorist had raped an Israeli woman as another severed the victim’s breast.
The same month, the Associated Press reported that at least 10 of the hostages released during the ceasefire in November, both men and women, were sexually assaulted or abused, citing a doctor who treated those released from captivity.
• • •
In December, the Israeli mission to the United Nations sponsored an event at the international body titled, “Hear Our Voices: Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the Oct. 7 Hamas Attack.” It took place against a backdrop of what critics called a “shameful silence,” including by UN Women.
During the event, Simchat Greyman, a volunteer for ZAKA, told participants that on Oct. 7 he saw a dead woman with “nails and different objects in her female organs.”
Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist tasked with preparing female soldiers’ bodies for burial, said that “many young women arrived in bloody, shredded rags or just in underwear, and their underwear was often very bloody.”
She added that “our team commander saw several female soldiers who were shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina or shot in the breast.”
All this information is publicly available, leading US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller to say that Hamas was likely refusing to release additional women hostages to prevent testimony on sexual violence committed against them.
• • •
To downplay such horrors or deny them outright requires a special form of mental gymnastics, which the authors of the London Times article have perfected along with their fellow denialist travelers.
Case in point: Briahna Joy Gray, the former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 US presidential campaign, who last was fired from her two-year gig as co-host of The Hill‘s online program “Rising.” She was sacked after rolling her eyes at and cutting off an interview with Yarden Gonen, whose sister Romi was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists from the Supernova music festival during the Oct. 7 invasion. Yarden had visibly frustrated Gray by imploring her and others to believe Israeli women who come forward with
ZAKA search and rescue volunteers at Kibbutz Be’eri identify the bodies of Israelis slain by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, Oct. 11, 2023. ZAKA
Protesters bring attention to sexual violence against women during the Hamas terrorist invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, as well as
High Performing in Ten Areas of Care mountsinai.org/southnassau
jewish star torah columnists:
•Rabbi Avi Billet of Anshei Chesed, Boynton Beach, FL, mohel and Five Towns native •Rabbi David Etengoff of Magen David Yeshivah, Brooklyn
•Rabbi Binny Freedman, rosh yeshiva of Orayta, Jerusalem
contributing writers:
•Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks zt”l,
former chief rabbi of United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth
•Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh
Weinreb, OU executive VP emeritus
•Rabbi Raymond Apple, emeritus rabbi, Great Synagogue of Sydney
•Rabbi Yossy Goldman, life rabbi emeritus, Sydenham Shul, Johannesburg and president of the South African Rabbinical Association.
contact our columnists at: Publisher@TheJewishStar.com
Five towns candlelighting: From the White Shul, Far Rockaway, NY
תבש לש
Fri July 5 / Sivan 29
Korach • Shabbos Rosh Chodesh
Candles: 8:10
• Havdalah: 9:19
Fri July 12 / Tamuz 6
Chukat
Candles: 8:07
• Havdalah: 9:16
Fri July 19 / Tamuz 13
Balak
Candles: 8:03
• Havdalah: 9:11
Tues July 23 / Tamuz 17
Fast of Tamuz
Fri July 26 / Tamuz 20
Pinchas
Candles: 7:57 • Havdalah: 9:05
Fri Aug 2 / Tamuz 27
Matos-Masei • Shabbos Mevarchim
Candles: 7:50 • Havdalah: 8:58
High ideal: Argument for the sake of Heaven
rabbi sir jonathan sacks zt”l
The Korach rebellion was not just the worst of the revolts from the wilderness years, it was also a direct assault on Moshe and Aaron. Korach and his fellow rebels in essence accused Moshe of nepotism, failure, and fraud — of attributing to G-d decisions and laws devised himself for his own ends.
So grave was the attack that it became, for the Sages, a paradigm of the worst kind of disagreement: “Which is an argument for the sake of Heaven? The argument between Hillel and Shammai. Which is an argument not for the sake of Heaven? The argument of Korach and his company” (Mishnah Avot 5:17).
Menahem Meiri explains this teaching in the following terms: “In debates [between Hillel and Shammai], one of them would render a decision and the other would argue against it, out of a desire to discover the truth, not out of cantankerousness or a wish to prevail over his fellow. An argument not for the sake of Heaven was that of Korach and his company, for they came to undermine Moshe, our master, may he rest in peace, and his position, out of envy and contentiousness and ambition for victory.”
The Sages were drawing a fundamental distinction between two kinds of conflict: argument for the sake of truth and argument for the sake of victory.
The passage must be read this way because of the glaring discrepancy between what the rebels said and what they sought. What they said was that the people did not need leaders — they were all holy; there should be no hierarchy or rank.
Yet from Moshe’s reply, it is clear that he had heard something different:
Moses also said to Korach, “Now listen, you Levites!. Is it not enough for you that the G-d of Israel has separated you from the rest of the Israelite community and brought you near Himself to do the work at the L-rd’s Tabernacle and to stand before the community and minister to them? He has brought you and all your fellow Levites near Himself, but now you are trying to get the priesthood too” (Bamidbar 16:8–10).
It was not that they wanted a community without leaders, it was that they wanted to be the leaders. The rebels’ rhetoric had nothing to do with the pursuit of truth and everything to do with the pursuit of honor, status, and power.
First, Moshe proposed a simple test. Let the rebels bring an offering of incense the next day, and G-d would show whether He accepted or rejected their offering. This is rational. Since what was at issue was what G-d wanted, let G-d decide. G-d would let the people know, in an unambiguous way, who was right.
But Moshe did not stop there, as he would have done if truth were the issue involved. As we saw in the quote above, Moshe tried to argue with Korach by addressing the resentment behind it. He told Korach that he had been given honor, and that while may not have been a priest he was a Levite.
He then turned to Datan and Aviram, the Reubenites. Given the chance, he would have said something different to them, since the source of their discontent was different from that of Korach. But they refused to meet with him — another sign that they were not interested in the truth. They had rebelled out of a profound sense of slight that the tribe of Reuben, Jacob’s firstborn son, seemed to have been left out altogether from the allocation of honors.
At this point, the confrontation became more intense. For the only time in his life, Moshe staked his leadership on a miracle:
Then Moses said, “By this you shall know that it was the L-rd who sent me to do these things, that they were not of my own devising: If these men die a natural death and suffer the fate of all mankind, then the L-rd has not sent me. But if the L-rd brings about something totally new, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them, with everything that belongs to them, and they go down alive into the grave, then you will. Know that these men have treated the L-rd with contempt.” (Num. 16:28–30)
No sooner had he finished speaking than “the ground under them split apart and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them” (16:32). The rebels “went down alive into the grave” (16:33).
One cannot imagine a more dramatic vindication. G-d had shown beyond possibility of doubt that Moshe was right. Yet this did not end the argument. Far from being apologetic and repentant, the people returned the next morning still complaining — this time not about who should lead, but about the way Moshe had chosen to end the dispute: “The next day the whole Israelite community grumbled against Moshe and Aaron. ‘You have killed the L-rd’s people,’ they said” (17:6).
You may be right, they implied, and Korach may have been wrong. But is this a way to win an argument?
This time, G-d suggested a different way of resolving the dispute. He told Moshe to have each
The rebels’ rhetoric had nothing to do with the pursuit of truth and everything to do with the pursuit of honor, status, and power.
of the tribes take a staff and write their name on it, and place them in the Tent of Meeting. On the staff of the tribe of Levi, he should write the name of Aaron. One of the staffs would sprout, and that would signal whom G-d had chosen. The tribes did so, and the next morning they returned to find that Aaron’s staff had budded, blossomed, and produced almonds. That, finally, ended the argument (Bamidbar 17:16–24).
What resolved the dispute, in other words, was not a show of power but something altogether different.
In the Near East, the almond is the first tree to blossom, its white flowers signaling the end of winter and the emergence of new life. One could almost say that the almond branch symbolized the priestly will to life against the rebels’ will to power.
The priest does not rule the people; he blesses them. He connects the nation to the Divine Presence. Moshe answered Korach on Korach’s terms, by a show of force. G-d answered in a quite different way, showing that leadership is not selfassertion but self-effacement.
What the entire episode shows is the destructive nature of an argument not for the sake of Heaven — that is, argument for the sake of victory. In such a conflict, what is at stake is not truth but power, and the result is that both sides suffer. If you win, I lose. But if I win, I also lose, because in diminishing you, I diminish myself. Even a Moshe is brought low, laying himself open to the charge that “you have killed the L-rd’s people.” Argument for the sake of power is a lose-lose scenario.
The opposite is the case when the argument is for the sake of truth. If I win, I win. But if I lose I also win — because being defeated by the truth is
the only form of defeat that is also a victory.
In a famous passage, the Talmud explains why Jewish law tends to follow the view of the School of Hillel rather than their opponents, the School of Shammai:
Because they were kindly and modest, because they studied not only their own rulings but also those of Shammai, and because they taught the words of Shammai before their own (Eiruvin 13b). They sought truth, not victory.
Judaism has sometimes been called a “culture of argument.” It is the only religious literature known to me whose key texts — the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Mishnah, Talmud, the codes of Jewish law, and the compendia of biblical interpretation — are anthologies of arguments. That is the glory of Judaism. The Divine Presence is to be found not in this voice as against that, but in the totality of the conversation.
In an argument for the sake of truth, both sides win, for each is willing to listen to the views of its opponents and is thereby enlarged. In argument as the collaborative pursuit of truth, the participants use reason, logic, shared texts, and shared reverence for texts. They do not use ad hominem arguments, abuse, contempt, or disingenuous appeals to emotion. Each is willing, if refuted, to say, “I was wrong.” There is no triumphalism in victory, no anger or anguish in defeat.
The story of Korach remains the classic example of how argument can be dishonored. The Schools of Hillel and Shammai remind us that there is another way.
“Argument for the sake of Heaven” is one of Judaism’s noblest ideals — conflict resolution by honoring both sides and employing humility in the pursuit of truth.
The lazy days of summer should not be a vacation from Torah
BY RABBI HERSHEL BILLET
With the start of summer, The Jewish Star is again pleased to publish a message by Rabbi Hershel Billet, retired spiritual leader of the Young Israel of Woodmere. In a version of the message that the YIW continues to send each year, he urges the exercise of both physical and spiritual caution during the summer months. This message is as relevant now as when it was first published.
By Rabbi Hershel Billet
Now that the summer is officially upon us, our kids will be scattering all over the world in the coming weeks. I am sharing some points I believe are worth noting when anticipating many summer activities we and/ or our children might engage in. The first set of points concern safety issues many of us are aware of, along with some reminders I think of every summer on account of sundry items that have caught my attention over the years. Please forgive me if I am saying things to you that you already know. When it comes to safety, a friendly reminder is appropriate.
The second set of points concerns our summer attitudes towards sanctity and kedusha. On a metaphysical level our eternal values are as important as our temporal values.
SAFETY
1. Sunscreen. Just about every study and article about the dangers of the sun recommends putting sunscreen on exposed parts of the body, especially when one will be outdoors for a few hours. When in the sun for extended periods, heads should be covered!
2. Bike Helmets. Biking accidents are never good for riders, but while most injuries have a better chance of recovery, brain injuries don’t have such luxuries. Please wear helmets — be a role model for the children of our community — and insist that kids do too, even when biking on your block.
3. Hydration. We are not always aware how much the heat or humidity affects us. In general, healthy consumption of water is at least 80 ounces a day. On hot days spent outdoors, even more is recommended. It is important to remember to drink even when you are doing a water activity. Getting wet does not keep your body hydrated. If you are taking a long plane flight, be sure to drink a good quantity of water.
4. Nature precautions. Every summer brings with it warnings of ticks that may carry diseases. Appropriate clothing, sprays, and general awareness of what to look for — either in the tick itself or if you are bitten — are all important to bear in mind. In the Northeast USA use appropriate precautions and awareness to avoid Lyme disease.
5. Plants and wildlife. When in the great outdoors, we come in contact with the beauty, but also the potential dangers of nature. Know what kinds of animals may be in your vicinity. Know what kinds of plants — whether dangerous by contact alone or through ingestion — are to be avoided.
Snakes are a particular issue in Israel this summer. There are poisonous snakes. A few precautions are in order. Do not hike in the dark. Do not step or place hands into covered areas where you cannot see what is beneath the covering. Snakes can also be found in swimming holes or lakes. Doors should always be closed and windows must have screens. If bitten, sit down, call for an emergency ambulance and get to the nearest hospital ASAP. A poisonous bite will include genuine swelling at the spot of the bite. It is important not to lose one’s cool and not to be active after a bite. Do not tie a tourniquet, or make an incision or suction the bite.
5a. Allergies. I always carry Benadryl with me when I travel or hike. People can get allergic reactions from insect and bee bites even if they have no history of having a reaction. Sometimes the reaction can be dangerously severe. Ask your physician what is the best precaution for you.
6. Hiking. Hikers should stick to marked trails. Always have a map. And hike safely. Every year Israeli news reports include too many stories of accidents and tragedies involving people unfamiliar with the desert who go hiking with no plan, map, or communication. Death by dehydration and exposure to the elements is usually the result. Never hike alone and always have a reliable means of communication with you in case of emergency.
7. Driving in the country. Relatively inexperienced drivers (kids under 21) must be reminded that the Catskills and Poconos are full of one-lane, challenging roads. Extra care should be taken on these roads — day and night — especially with young drivers who (percentage-wise) tend to be more reckless. Responsible driving will help prevent the fatalities we unfortunately hear about every summer.
Cell Phones: We should remind ourselves and our children about the grave dangers associated with texting and driving. Everyone should drive with a hands-free device while speaking on a phone in our cars.
8. Water Safety. Please use every safety precaution with home pools. No one should swim without a responsible and capable person supervising. Especially small children. Pool safety with young children is paramount. There is no margin for error! Tragedy can strike — literally — in seconds. If swimming at the shore or in a lake, familiarize yourself with important information like undertow or depth of the water. Do not swim without a trained water safety person present. Never swim alone!
9. Hitchhiking. We are in the throes of an emotionally wrenching experience in Israel. Hitchhiking in Israel and in Gush Etzion is part of the culture and one may argue, almost a necessity. We leave that for the Israelis to debate (as they already are) going forward. In the USA it is not a necessity. Staff members who are allowed to leave camp should only take rides from within the camp or outside the camp with people who they can be certain are trustworthy people. Many camps arrange
shuttle rides for their staff at fixed hours out and back to camp. Such a policy is commendable.
10. Personal Space. TEACH YOUR CHILDREN TO GUARD THEIR BODIES. If anyone in camp, on a trip, or anywhere else touches them inappropriately, they should know what to do to protect themselves. They must immediately notify you about what happened. Be sure to emphasize to them that they must disclose even (and especially) if they have been warned to keep quiet! There can be no mercy for a person who molests children. Such people are potential murderers!
11. Zika Virus. Zika remains a potential serious risk for people of childbearing age. One should check the CDC or local Department of Health websites for the most up to date information about any Zika risks in areas you are travelling to [and] follow the suggested precautions. …
12. Driving in the neighborhood. During the summer and on weekends many children play outside. Parents must teach them about safety in the streets. Drivers must be aware that not all children think about looking before they dart into the street. Let us all try to take the necessary precautions about this matter. Drivers must go very slowly down side streets, and parents must watch and caution children. Even the safest and slowest driver can accidentally hit a child who dashes from a blind spot in front of their car.
Cell Phones: We should remind ourselves and our children about the grave dangers associated with texting and driving. Everyone should drive with a hands free device while speaking on a phone in our cars.
13. Substance Abuse
Substance abuse is a very serious issue in our communities. Unfortunately, we cannot be certain that our schools and our camps are drug-free. All of these institutions have strict rules about bringing forbidden substances onto their campuses. But they cannot possibly prevent it from happening.
The results of substance abuse ranges from
the most dire results that you could imagine other serious consequences in the lives of our children and our families.
Please support your schools and your camps in their efforts to keep these things away from our children. And please urge your children to stay away from the temptations of these substances. Urge them to report to the authorities anything that they see that is improper. This is not called being a gossiper. This is called saving lives.
14. Motorcycles. The risk-reward factor is not worth the risk. NO NO NO. No one should ride a motorcycle!
SANCTITY
1. Tzniut. We are Orthodox Jews living in a very open society and we are exposed to the accepted norms of that society. Our standards of kedoshim tihiyu, to be a holy people, often clash with the reality around us. Being a “holy people” requires us to be separate and different in our behavior in general and in the choices we make in our dress. This applies to both men and women. For leisure time and even for swimming, there are appropriate options available that preserve our sense of modesty when in the company of friends.
As the schools our children attend have dress codes, let those guidelines essentially determine how both parents and children choose to observe a standard of tzniut in dress, at least as far as how we cover our arms, legs, and torso. This is a standard we can all appreciate and respect. Summer footwear (sandals, socks, etc.) are a matter of personal choice which I am not addressing here. I do think that there is room in the halacha to allow people to wear comfortable footwear in warm and hot weather.
There are both objective standards of tzniut and subjective standards. But everyone has some concept of what is not appropriate. It is a challenging task. But we must elevate ourselves in the same way that we sacrifice to keep kosher and to observe Shabbat.
2. Religious standards when on vacation. Daily prayers, tzitzit, tefillin, kashrut, choice of entertainment, and full Shabbat observance is a sine qua non for the Orthodox family.
An accepted halachic practice, for example, is not to swim on Shabbat! Just as our community does not condone picking the kosher item in a non-kosher menu,” we must live by the same standards we live by at home even when we are on vacation, away from anyone who knows us.
We may go on vacation from the pressures of our daily routines, but there is no vacation from our covenant with Hashem. Parents should set a high bar for themselves and their children.
Consistency is a special gift we can give our children.
May we be blessed to be avenues of kiddush Hashem and the sanctification of G-d’s name in all that we do.
I wish everyone a pleasant summer.
Hershel Billet, rabbi emeritus, YI of Woodmere.
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ADL’s censorship stand comes back to bite it
JONATHAN S. TObiN
JNS Editor-in-Chief
Most of the organized Jewish world is as outraged as the Anti-Defamation League.
The decision of Wikipedia to label the ADL as an “unreliable source” on its site with respect to anything related to Israel generated a letter of protest from 43 of the largest and most influential American Jewish organizations, including a sampling of groups on the center, left and right.
The notion that the ADL — still considered the authoritative source on the subject of antisemitism by the liberal media — being shut down by the ubiquitous online encyclopedia site in such a manner is shocking.
And none are more surprised than ADL’s CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt. That’s because during his decade in charge of the venerable organization, Greenblatt and the ADL have not just switched from being liberal but nonpartisan to open advocacy for the Democrats and the political left. They’ve also been prominent supporters of efforts to do to others what Wikipedia is doing to them now: censoring those who dissent from the political orthodoxies of the left.
In other words, what’s happening to ADL isn’t merely another example of how a major online company has succumbed to anti-Israel and antisemitic prejudice. It’s that the ADL’s pro-censorship chickens have come home to roost.
Wikipedia’s reason for declaring that the ADL can’t be cited as an authority on anything to do with Israel goes to the heart of the postOct. 7 surge in Jew-hatred in America. Boiled down to the essentials, they object to the fact that the ADL rightly labels anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism. While they could cite no instances in which ADL had made false claims, the Wikipedia editors said that didn’t matter.
ADL championed censoring conservative groups. Inevitably, its erstwhile leftist allies are now targeting it for opposing antisemitism.
ADL is a group that is supposed to advocate on behalf of the Jewish people, monitor antisemitism and support the right of the one Jewish state on the planet to exist. According to Wikipedia editors, this impairs its ability to accurately report facts about those, like the Hamas terrorists and their American apologists, who wish to destroy Israel and commit the genocide of its population.
Yet, as Greenblatt noted, this is not the same standard applied to organizations that advocate for the rights of other groups. No one, for example, at Wikipedia judges the NAACP by this standard when it speaks out on anti-black racism.
Nor would any reasonable person — let alone someone who controls the content on a widely used internet site — argue that AfricanAmericans don’t have the right to define what is offensive to them or considered racist. Only Jews are lectured about what is or isn’t prejudice against Jews.
And given the fact that anti-Zionists wish to deny rights to Jews, such as to live in peace and sovereignty in their ancient homeland and defend themselves, to any other people, the ADL is entirely correct to label them as Jew-haters. Indeed, if anything, the ADL has shown itself not as zealous as it should be in making this charge.
Even under the leadership of Greenblatt, who served as a Democratic Party staffer in the Barack Obama White House, the ADL has had its left-wing critics. In recent years, the ADL has striven mightily to stay in sync with its allies on the left. It endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement, no matter its open hostility to Israel and Zionism. And it incorporated toxic woke ideas about “white privilege” rooted in intersectionality and critical race theory into model curricula that it sells to school districts, despite the glaring evidence that these concepts grant a permission slip for antisemitism.
Just as important was the fact that despite the growing evidence of the influence and reach of left-wing antisemitism in mainstream politics and media, the ADL maintained that the real threat to Jews came from marginal right-wing extremists, whom it often sought to link to former President Donald Trump without proof. They also smeared former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an ardent friend of Israel, as an Islamophobic bigot for opposing Islamist radicals.
But that was never good enough for the intersectional left.
Even as it tilted away from the political center, the ADL remained essentially pro-Israel, which is unacceptable for “progressives” who falsely label Israel and the Jews as “white” oppressors of people of color.
As a columnist at the increasingly anti-Zionist Forward website noted, the minority of Jews who oppose the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism because it includes anti-Zionism and demonization of Israel as one of its examples of Jew-hatred seem happy to see Wikipedia undermine the ADL.
This is outrageous and doubly so because after the atrocities committed on Oct. 7 — the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust — for Wikipedia to align itself with antiZionists in this fashion is not so much an editorial decision but another indication of just how far the subsequent surge in antisemitism has spread.
Even as it is right to complain about this, the ADL is at the same time demonstrating just how hypocritical and short-sighted it has been since Greenblatt took over.
In the last several years, ADL has been part of an effort to enforce censorship on the Internet, especially social-media platforms and other services essential to online commerce.
It was initially goaded into the stand by celebrities like actor Sacha Baron Cohen, whom ADL honored after he demanded that Facebook stop allowing antisemites access to its site. But the group became part of what writer Ben Weingarten has aptly named the censorship industrial complex. That describes an effort in which a sinister combination of Internet and socialmedia companies, left-wing nonprofit groups
and the Biden administration sought to shut down conservatives who dissented from a wide range of policies.
Unfortunately, the US Supreme Court passed on an opportunity to stop this blatant violation of the free-speech rights of citizens this week in a case that may serve as a green light for future efforts by the Biden administration and its Silicon Valley oligarch allies. Twitter files uncovered after the company was bought by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk revealed the extent to which the government and Big Tech had combined efforts to silence their opponents.
Greenblatt openly boasted of his involvement in this campaign, speaking of how he and his staff have been advising all the big Internet companies on their “content moderation” and coaching PayPal on how to demonetize groups it deems extremist. It also worked with Google and a British company called Moonshot LVE on a program to redirect users from hate sites but, as was soon discovered, some of the sites to which they were sent were themselves hateful. The point of all this was to create a virtual public square in which conservatives would be likely to be shut down or shadow-banned, a measure by which social-media companies make content impossible to access. The ADL was happy to be part of it because of its political alignment with the people who were doing the censoring, which they justified by falsely claiming that the victims were all spreading hate.
Wikipedia.
Gerd Altmann, Pixabay
We’re down and out in both Paris and London
GLOBAL FOCUS
BEN COHEN
In my previous column, I wrote about the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Paris at the hands of three boys just one year older than her, who showered her with antisemitic abuse as they carried out an act of violation reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel.
This week, my peg is another act of violence — one less horrifying and less traumatic, but which similarly suggests that the writing may be on the wall for the Jews in much of Europe.
Last week, a group of young Jewish boys who attend London’s well-regarded Hasmonean School was assaulted by a gang of antisemitic thugs. The attack occurred at Belsize Park tube station on the London Underground, in a neighborhood with a similar demographic and sensibility to New York’s Upper West Side, insofar as it is home to a large, long-established Jewish population with shops, cafes and synagogues serving that community.
According to the mother of one of the Jewish boys, an 11-year-old, the gang “ran ahead of my son and kicked one of his friends to the ground. They were trying to push another kid onto the tracks. They got him as far the yellow line.” When the woman’s son bravely tried to intervene
While the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
to protect his friends, he was chased down and elbowed in the face, dislodging a tooth. “Get out of the city, Jew!” the gang told him.
Since the attack, her son has had trouble sleeping. “My son is very shaken. He couldn’t sleep last night. He said ‘It’s not fair. Why do they do this to us?’” she disclosed. “We love this country,” she added, “and we participate and we contribute, but now we’re being singled out in exactly the same way as Jews were singled out in 1936 in Berlin. And for the first time in my life. I am terrified of using the tube. What’s going on?”
The woman and her family may not be in London long enough to find out. According to the Jewish Chronicle, they are thinking of “fleeing” Britain — not a verb we’d hoped to encounter again in a Jewish context after the mass murder we experienced during the previous century. But here we are.
When I was a schoolboy in London, I had a history teacher who always told us that no two situations are exactly alike. “Comparisons are odious, boys,” he would repeatedly tell the class. That was an insight I took to heart, and I still believe it to be true. There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago.
Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
Therein lies the rub, however.
Since 1948, Israel has allowed Jews inside and outside the Jewish state to hold their heads high and to feel as though they are a partner in the system of international relations, rather than a vulnerable, subjugated group at the mercy of the states where we lived as an often hated minor-
ity. Israel’s existence is the jewel in the crown of Jewish emancipation, sealing what we believed to be our new status, in which we are treated as equals, and where the antisemitism that plagued our grandparents and great-grandparents has become taboo.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted antisemites. And if one thing has been clear since the atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7, it’s that Israel’s existence is not something that Jews — with the exception of that small minority of anti-Zionists who do the bidding of the antisemites and who echo their ignorance and bigotry — are willing to compromise on.
What’s changed is that it is increasingly difficult for Jews to remain in the countries where they live and express their Zionist sympathies at the same time.
We are being attacked because of these sympathies on social media, at demonstrations and increasingly in the streets by people with no moral compass, who regard our children as legitimate targets. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
And so the age-old question returns: Should Jews, especially those in Europe, where they confront the pincer movement of burgeoning Muslim populations and a resurgent far-left in thrall to the
See Cohen on page 22
Debate was a lesson in American mediocrity
THANE ROSENBAUM
Distinguished University Professor Touro College
There is a certain kind of person for whom “The West Wing” was dramatic television at its finest. It featured sharp, brainy, political dialogue with a cast walking around the White House outwitting one another — not outdoing the other’s wits, but simply being wittier.
The president was a former professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist. Naturally, he was a Democrat. “The West Wing” catered to coastal elites in the same way that “Roseanne” and “My Name Is Earl” were beloved by the working class in red states — or, at least, that’s how Ivy Leaguers assessed the demographics.
After last week’s presidential debate, one plot conceit from “The West Wing” is worth recalling, one that nearly capsized the fictional Bartlet administration: During the campaign, Jed Bartlet failed to disclose that he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. When the story went public, his staff, who still believed the right man occupied the Oval Office, realized that in getting him there, they may have perpetrated a fraud on the public.
Watching President Joe Biden debate former President Donald Trump was a master class in American mediocrity. But substance aside, one
can’t help but wonder whether Biden’s West Wing was thinking about that other “West Wing.” After all, the Biden administration prides itself on its progressive, democratic bona fides. They aspire to the better angels of that show, even though they fall miserably short of those lofty standards. But like “The West Wing,” Biden loyalists en-
Mainstream media, Hollywood, think tanks and universities — they were all in the tank to deny Trump a second term.
gaged in a cover-up. The public discovered what it had long suspected: Joe Biden’s mental acuity is not up to the task; he is most decidedly not, as many assured us, “as sharp as a tack.” The leader of the free world and the commander-in-chief of the most advanced military in the world looks lost. When some of us drew this conclusion long ago, we were accused of engaging in ageism or cruel partisanship.
Americans, as of late, have been exposed to a lot of representations that ended up not being true: Russia’s interference with our presidential election was not tied to the Trump campaign; the coronavirus was made in China and far too much of what scientists told us, ap-
parently, had no science to support it; the laptop did, in fact, belong to Hunter Biden, and its contents might have affected the outcome of the election; Hunter’s father spent the 2020 presidential campaign holed up in the basement of his house, and once in the White House held few press conferences, for a very good reason—the real Joe Biden would have shown himself to be far less presidential than it was claimed Donald Trump was.
We all know what happened. The hatred of Donald Trump among half the country was so great all kinds of allowances were made to ensure that Trump was denied a second term. And it wasn’t just Democrats and Never Trumpers who had joined forces, but also the mainstream media, Hollywood, think tanks and universities — they were all in the tank.
The ferocity of those efforts continued for the next four years, which explains all those court cases against Trump and the cover-up of Biden’s incapacity. If Trump had not declared his candidacy, those cases would never have been filed.
The threat that Trump represented also accounts for the country’s disastrous plunge to the political left. In order to defeat Trump, Biden made a Faustian bargain with people who had never heard of Goethe but were simply mad about Marx.
Biden ran as a moderate but was beholden to the progressives in the Squad, the Congressional Black Caucus and the LGBTQ pronoun police. Why else would this administration have exaggerated the nonexistent threat from white supremacy and “systemic racism,” ignored streetwide criminality, left the door wide open on the southern border, turned gender fluidity into a moral crusade, and done virtually nothing to address, and arrest, the sweeping hordes of antisemites who have spent the past nine months hunting down Jews and maligning Israel’s war on terror?
See Rosenbaum on page 22
Donald Trump and Joe Biden during their final 2020 debate. Brendan Smialowski and Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Image
The London Underground’s Belsize Park station. William via Adobe
A DOUBLE DOSE FROM DANIELD GREENFIELD
From empathetic humanitarianism to terrorism
Daniel GreenfielD
Jewish studies
“Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” — A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Every leftist cause is founded on empathy.
The quintessential leftist, no matter how much blood eventually spatters his hands, starts off by caring a great deal about other people. His heart bleeds for the oppressed, the workers and the peasants, for racial and sexual minorities and for all the oppressed peoples of the world.
The ideological fashion may change, but the story is always told the same way.
Somewhere there is an oppressed group to be liberated, and he, she or they is the one to fight for its liberation. Along the way, that exquisite sensitivity which may lead an upper class Ivy Leaguer to learn all about the customs and suffering of black transgender men in Detroit or Hamas ter-
Every leftist is a heroic freedom fighter who wants to be king. He pretends he wants to save the world when he’s out to rule it.
rorists in Gaza congeals into an equal insensitivity for the suffering of his targets.
And then people die. Sometimes it’s those he considers the oppressed or the oppressors. Usually both. The humanitarians become terrorists and their revolutions lead to tyranny.
The opposite of tyranny isn’t revolution, just as the opposite of empathy isn’t a lack of caring. They are both circles. Revolutions make tyrannies and empathy leads to cruelty. While there is a small subset of humanity that genuinely lacks empathy, most of the ideological bloodshed of the last century and this one was committed by men and women who cared far too much.
Those who care too much will eventually care enough to kill.
That is the argument that has been made in defense of every murderous leftist cause and is currently being made for Hamas. If you really care about the suffering in Gaza, you too would set yourself on fire or burn Israeli families alive in their homes. If you really care, you won’t care.
Genuine humanitarians can exhaust themselves caring too much. But those are the types of people who stay up nights helping others. Some of this type can be recruited into leftist movements, but the average leftist is a deeply insincere humanitarian who cares about others only as a vehicle for developing an identity and asserting it on a public stage.
Leftists genuinely do care a lot. They care about rising oceans, polar bears, women in hijabs, men in dresses, drug dealers in the ghetto and eco-terrorists in prison, racist highways and dead terrorists, and if you can think of something that they don’t care about yet, they will soon.
As long as it fits the larger agenda of asserting their will over society from a moral high ground.
That is why they also don’t care about the hor-
rifying death toll among young black men from crime, about how many Muslims are being killed by Muslim governments or about the state of the gay rights movement in Marxist dictatorships. If the oppression does not conform to the narrative of external social oppression to be overthrown by a liberation movement it is useless to the political movement and to the individual ego of the aspiring freedom fighter.
To a genuine humanitarian, the oppressed are an end, but to a leftist they are a means. A leftist cares a great deal about a coal miner
until he votes for Trump or a black man until he runs as a Republican. Or until, even through no fault of his own, like the coal miners and steelworkers for whom leftists once bled, he is replaced by a new pathway to the ultimate revolution. It is not truly the workers and peasants, the transgenders and the terrorists, whom the leftist cares about. They humanize, articulate and personalize the revolutionary mandate whose purpose is not to save, but to destroy everything about a world that doesn’t care as much as they do.
The truth is this: There are no civilians in Gaza
Daniel GreenfielD
Jewish studies
Americans expected Osama bin Laden to be found in a cave in Afghanistan. In reality, he was living comfortably in a military town in Pakistan under the protection of local authorities. Similarly, Israeli hostages, including the four who were rescued last Saturday, have come home telling stories of being kept captive in “civilian” households.
Many in the West fundamentally misunderstand what Islamic terrorism is. It’s not a “fringe group of extremists,” as politicians and the media describe it, but an ethnic and religious movement. The religious values of Islamic terrorists
In a culture where terrorists in the field don’t wear uniforms, where large families have sizable stocks of weapons, and where children are taught to kill and die, the externals don’t matter.
are universally shared by the vast majority of Muslims, while the ethnic ones ground Islamic warfare in the interests of specific clans and families.
Hamas is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood and has a widespread base of support across the Muslim world, which is dotted with branches of the Brotherhood. But its ethnic power base is also grounded in the key clans and families that control Gaza. That is why Hamas still retains the support of the majority of the Muslim colonists currently occupying Gaza. It’s also why those same “civilians” held Israeli hostages prisoner and could be trusted not to inform on them.
The latest Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll shows that 71% of Gazans support the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and 56% expect Hamas to win the war. Some 62% in Gaza are happy Hamas’s performance during the war, and 59% want Hamas to stay in power.
That’s because they are Hamas and the terror group is also them.
The “Palestinian” myth is that the Muslim colonists occupying parts of Israel are the “indigenous” people. The reality is that they were Arab settlers who arrived with and after the Islamic conquest of Israel.
Some, like the notorious Husseini clan, which produced Hitler’s mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, were relatively recent arrivals. The most powerful and wealthiest of these large families took control of urban areas, as the Husseinis tried to do in Jerusalem, and became a vital part of the Ottoman feudal order, serving as mayors and muftis. When the Ottomans were defeated, the clans fought to reclaim their power with movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, also known as Hamas.
Hamas is an ideological Islamist movement, but its control over Gaza depends on these large
families. That’s why the idea that most people have that Hamas is a fanatical movement that exists apart from ordinary people and can be fought and defeated apart from them is wrong.
That’s also why so few of the hostages have been rescued. Like the recently rescued four, the hostages are largely dispersed among “civilian” clan families across neighborhoods controlled by them. These families are formally civilian households, but many of their members are affiliated with Hamas. Rather than being an army whose members belong foremost to Hamas, they are more like the mafia and belong foremost to their extended clan, and choose to lend their support to Hamas.
It’s not just that Hamas uses human shields, which it certainly does, it’s that its infrastructure depends on clans whose adults provide fighters, and whose women and children act as human shields for the greater glory of the clan and Islam. The same clans that will kill teenage girls for violating family honor will also serve up even younger children as human shields for honor.
There is no way for Israel to rescue its hostages without going into dense neighborhoods under the control of the clans to get them out. And that will lead to firefights and “Black Hawk Down” moments. Clan members, who never identify them-
Fruits of the French Revolution: Execution by guillotine of Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. Antique illustration
Palestinians line up in the Gaza Strip to receive drinkable water numbers while battles take place between Israel and Hamas in the southern city of Rafah on May 20. Abed Rahim Khatib, Flash90
The ‘Zionism is racism’ nonsense is thriving
ERIC R. MaNdEl
In 1975, the United Nations General Assembly, which had evolved from an organization of democracies at its founding to an association dominated by anti-American, anti-Western and antisemitic authoritarian regimes, passed its infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution.
In 1991, President George HW Bush orchestrated the rescinding of this infamous resolution. Unfortunately, even before the ink was dry, the world continued to treat Israel as the Jew among nations and as a racist, colonialist enterprise. The term “Zionism” remained a pejorative term used against Jewish people, who were indicted on the charge of Jewish racism, Israeli apartheid and Palestinian genocide.
Oct. 7 was a call to action for the “Zionism is racism” crowd that dominates the far-left and a
Just wait for the Democratic National Convention.
frighteningly high number of university academics, all of whom will be front and center at the Democratic convention this summer.
The massacre and the antisemitic reaction in America was a wakeup call for American Jews who were oblivious to the antisemitism going on for years and were suddenly shocked to learn that many of their neighbors and colleagues were not their friends on Facebook anymore because they were infected with the belief that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state. To this crowd, to be Jewish is to be a Zionist, which is something vile.
Five years ago, Al Jazeera published an op-ed, which is representative of the anti-Israel thought that was and is pervasive on many campuses and within the far-left “Squad” and its sympathizers. It is little different from the Soviet Union’s propaganda based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, embraced for years by the far-left and its Islamist partners:
Early Zionists syncretized many aspects of European fascism, white supremacy, colonialism and messianic Evangelism and had a long and sordid history of cooperating with antisemites, imperialists and fascists in order to promote exclusivist and expansionist agendas … [working] towards the mutual interest of concentrating Jews in Israel … as a means of scapegoating and expelling an unwanted population … to combat the demographic threat posed by native Palestin-
See Mandel on page 23
PETER KING
Retired Congressman
July 4th is a national holiday which deserves to be celebrated by all Americans. The bottom line is that July 4, 1776 began the daring experiment which led to the formation of the greatest nation in the history of the world which has produced more opportunity and more free-
We’re not a melting pot but a stained glass window.
doms for more types of people than had ever been imaginable.
I say this not as a super patriot but as someone whose individual experiences and opportunities to observe so many countries up close have caused me to appreciate America even more than I would have otherwise.
Before the naysayers start with their litany of complaints, let me make it clear that I know full well that all has not been perfect for everyone. Besides the unique injustices suffered by AfricanAmericans and the discrimination against Jews, Catholics and Japanese Americans, there has been intolerance toward a number of immigrant groups, particularly those that arrived in waves such as the Irish in the 1840s or the Italians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Having said that, I believe unequivocally that no nation has done more to provide more races and nationalities the opportunity to advance and live their lives to the fullest. These are people
from many countries that oppressed their own people or waged war against their neighboring countries whose people have come to America and learned to live side by side.
At the international level, the US rescued Europe in two world wars in the 20th century and when at the end of World War II we were as powerful as any world power had ever been including having sole control of nuclear weapons — we not only began unilateral demobilization but rebuilt our enemies Germany and Japan. Then in the face of Soviet aggression created NATO and provided security and stability to a Europe which had been wracked by wars for centuries.
What has made the great experiment work is not that we are a melting pot but a stained glass window, a mosaic where each group maintains its individual identity while adding to the overall beauty.
The greatest achievement of the American ex-
periment was giving ordinary citizens the power to select their government leaders. No royalty or unelected dictators.
While the leaders we have selected have often not been perfect, the democratic system has worked. It is this system which has constantly striven to correct injustice and improve quality of life and which allows us to speak freely and demonstrate peacefully. Because we have these freedoms to make peaceful change, the anti-police riots in the summer of 2020 or the January 6th attacks on our Nation’s Capitol can not be justified. American democracy is a great gift but also a constant challenge. We do not have the luxury of complaining and sitting back. It is a contact sport. We cannot ignore injustice or inequity; nor can we allow ourselves to be defined by it. We must appreciate our nation’s greatness and fulfill the freedoms and challenges it provides us all.
G-d Bless America! Happy 4th of July! First published this week in the LI Herald.
The ongoing global lust for more Jewish blood
Like all those who publish here, I too am a warrior and a wordsmith. I am driven by ideas. They rule my waking life. But some days are too hard.
I’ve been writing about antisemitism and anti-Zionism rather intensely since 2000. I’ve been covering Oct. 7 for nine months around the clock and only now am I thinking that I need a break. Are soldiers allowed to slow down while a war still rages on and threatens to become even larger and more consequential?
The other day, after delivering a lecture on this subject, I became unusually irritable. I think that I may actually be somewhat traumatized by the non-stop Jew-hatred that has gone viral around the world.
It’s not only the jihad-like violent riots, violent demonstrations and violent campus encampments that have persisted all across the United States; it’s
not only the sheer vulgarity and barbaric aggressiveness of jihadists, both here against Jews and in the Middle East against Israel; it is also the nonstop attacks on individual Jews, the boycotts of Israeli diplomats, academics, athletes, artists, singers, scientists; it’s the hotel and B&B clerks who, on their own, refuse to honor reservations when they see that the guests hold Israeli passports.
Together with Prof. Amy Elman, I was privileged to deliver a lecture via Zoom to De Paul University’s Law School. Our host, Prof. Steven Resnikoff, was very well informed and most respectful. He asked us to address the weaponization of sexual violence by Hamas on Oct. 7.
That subject. I’ve written more than 30 articles about it, given interviews, delivered lectures and still the denials persist. Still the hostages remain in captivity undergoing torture. Still Israel is demonized for trying to rescue them.
Iran’s Hamas is ISIS on steroids. Hamas committed a pogrom meant to be viewed again and again. It showed Jews as victims, which has always functioned as incitement to genocide. For this reason, I do not think that showing any part of Oct. 7 is a good idea. The footage, the testimonies of eyewitnesses and survivors, best belong in
a Jerusalem courtroom in an Eichmann-like trial.
That’s assuming Israel is finally willing to execute terrorists with blood on their hands.
For those who must know: Here’s an excerpt of some of what I said that is “new.”
•What happened on Oct. 7 was unspeakable, but it was not unique.
•It was a pogrom but on steroids, one in which the assassins recorded and photographed themselves. Public gang rape, torture, murder are all part of a classic pogrom. Filming and disseminating it constitutes genocide pornography. (This point was made again and again by Prof. Elman.)
•The focus on only girls and women is too limited. Boys and men were also genitally mutilated, sexually tortured, kidnapped and murdered.
•Rape was aways a spoil of war until it became a systematic weapon of war whose purpose was to ethnically cleanse a specific population. Only now is it considered a war crime.
•What’s unique is the utter silence among Western feminists (who claim to care about violence against women) in response to Hamas/ Iran’s sadistic violence against civilians in Israel, some of whom were neither Jews nor Israelis.
•What’s unique is that, instead of the world
having sympathy for the victims, the sight of Jewish blood unleashed global bloodlust for more Jewish blood.
Iwas not surprised by the great American feminist silence after Oct. 7. I’ve been dealing with antisemitism/anti-Zionism on the left and among feminists since 1971. I’ve written books and hundreds, maybe a thousand, articles on the subject. Thus, I may have been among a handful of people not surprised by the feminist silence about Oct. 7 and the ongoing denial of this atrocity. Their silence has deep roots in the politically correct academic world.
You are either a victim or a victimizer; you are oppressed or you are an oppressor; you are colonized or you are a colonizer. Israel has been designated as the world’s chief oppressor and colonizer. Some victims are more sacred than others. Men of color are more important than white men; Muslim men of color are even more important, unless they’ve been killed by other Muslims. Then, their deaths do not matter. The murders of women of all colors matters even less.
In addition, there is the belief in multicultural relativism — that all cultures are equal; that there
See Chesler on page 22
Anti-Israel demonstrators protest at a “Get Out The Vote” rally the weekend before the Democratic Party primary in New York on June 22. Yuki Iwamura, AFP via Getty Images
Women...
Continued from page 14
stories of sexual violence perpetrated by Palestinian terrorists.
A day later, Gray let loose on Twitter: “We already knew this [because] of excellent reporting by independent left outlets, but The Hill fired me for pushing back against a guest who tried to use the platform to spread the mass rape hoax, & congress members like @RitchieTorres lie about it almost daily.”
To support her claim of a “hoax,” Gray linked to the London Times article.
To clarify: There is ample evidence that Hamas perpetrated widespread sexual violence on Oct. 7. That the scope remains unknown and might never be fully understood is because so many of the victims were killed; that plenty of evidence was lost due to the fog of war and the overriding difficulties associated with collecting samples in the aftermath of a massacre perpetrated by 3,000 invading terrorists; since victims have not yet come forward; or their stories are still working through the justice system of a country at war.
Not due to some nefarious right-wing Israeli conspiracy.
Yet Philp and Weiniger chose to advance Hamas’s denialist narrative by whitewashing horrific crimes committed against innocent women, effectively further dehumanizing them.
They and their editors at the of London might begin a mea culpa by internalizing the underlying humanity demonstrated in a comment cited in their piece by the UN’s Patten: “I do not have numbers in the report, because for me, one case is more than enough.”
Tobin...
Continued from page 18
Some critics warned the ADL that in addition to this being antithetical to democratic values or the ability of the United States to survive as a constitutional republic, this sort of “free speech for me but not for thee” attitude was bound to boomerang on the Jews. That’s because most of the people doing the censoring of the right were equally interested in silencing supporters of Israel because intersectional ideology labeled it as a villain.
The Wikipedia decision represents the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to Big Tech using its vast power to shape public discourse on the war against the Jewish state. It’s a reminder to both the ADL and the rest of the Jewish community that though they may wish for an Internet where bad actors like Nazis and other open antisemites are no longer present, the only way to make that happen means the creation of a censorship regime that can just as easily be used against Jews and Zionists, who left-wingers also think of as hateful.
The ADL has been playing with fire by backing censorship, and it is unsurprising though ironic that it has wound up being singed by the flames they helped fan. If the ADL wants to defend the Jewish people, it’s also going to have to return to an understanding that the only way to defend their rights is to defend the principle of free speech for everyone — and not just its leftist political allies.
Cohen...
Continued from page 19
Palestinian cause, stay where they are, or should they up sticks and move to Israel? Should we be thinking, given the surge in antisemitism of the past few months, of giving up on America as well?
I used to have a clear view of all this. Aliyah is the noblest of Zionist goals and should be encouraged, but I always resisted the notion that every Jew should live in Israel — firstly, because a strong Israel needs vocal, confident Diaspora communities that can advocate for it in the corridors of pow-
er; and secondly, because moving to Israel should ideally be a positive act motivated by love, not a negative act propelled by fear.
My view these days isn’t as clear as it was. I still believe that a strong Israel needs a strong Diaspora, and I think it’s far too early to give up on the United States — a country where Jews have flourished as they never did elsewhere in the Diaspora.
Yet the situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker in “Autoemancipation,” a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.”
The antisemitism we are dealing with now presents itself as “enlightened,” based on boundless sympathy for an Arab nation allegedly dispossessed by Jewish colonists. When our children are victimized by it, this antisemitism ceases to be a merely intellectual challenge, and becomes a matter of life and death.
As Jews and as human beings, we are obliged to choose life — which, in the final analysis, when nuance disappears and terror stalks us, means Israel.
Rosenbaum
Continued from page 19
Now that doubts about a second term for Biden are being openly discussed, someone from the Democratic Party should acknowledge, truthfully, how we got here. That might, actually, win back some votes.
Trump may have won the debate, but it was not his finest hour, either. He had an opportunity to attract college-educated moderates — i.e., “West Wing” watchers—especially given Biden’s appalling performance. Who knows: Never Trumpers might have come around and said, “Never say never.”
But Trump is hopelessly hooked on his base, a maestro in front of the cheap seats. He repeats the same words over and over again instead of demonstrating a true mastery of the facts that manifest America’s dismal decline. He somehow failed to specifically mention the eight illegal migrants with connections to ISIS-K who were only recently apprehended, and the hundreds more who are still on the loose.
People from “mental institutions” are the least of our problems.
And he sidestepped the one question that could have most separated him from Biden’s poisonous progressive caucus: “Would you agree to a Palestinian state in order to bring peace to Gaza?”
In case you are reading this, President Trump, and should the question ever present itself again, here is your answer:
“Of course not. I don’t believe in rewarding people whose elected representatives started a war by beheading babies and gang-raping teenagers. America does not endorse barbarism, especially if perpetrated against a longstanding ally.
“Quite honestly, the Palestinians have failed to demonstrate any interest in nation-building. They have a talent for blowing things up, but statesmen never arise from such a skill set. They could have had a state decades ago, but it would have required them to live beside Jews. Palestinians insist on practicing apartheid, not Israelis. Instead of pandering to people who hate America while living in Michigan, the Biden administration should be setting the record straight as to what Israel is, and what Palestinians are not.
“And, one more thing, speaking as a grandfather of Jewish children: The Biden administration’s gross negligence in allowing violent antisemitism to worsen is a colossal failure of leadership. And because it endangers my own family, I am taking it personally.”
Biden’s own children have married Jews, and he has Jewish grandchildren. Yet he doesn’t seem all that worried about their safety in a nation that protects masked antisemites calling for a “global intifada!”
Trump is leading in the polls. But that answer might have sealed his victory against such an addled and unprincipled West Wing.
Empathy..
Continued from page 20
The more the leftist cares, the worse the atrocities he can justify.
That the caring rarely leads to anything useful is the entire point. Empathy for the leftist is a narrative point. Really fixing anything robs him of his motivation. That is why the standard leftist position is that black people are as oppressed today as they were under segregation. If they were to admit that black people were equal and free, what would they do with their time?
Successful leftist movements seize power. They fix nothing and repair nothing because caring is a means for the individual and collective ego. Every leftist is a heroic freedom fighter who wants to be king. He pretends he wants to save the world when he’s out to rule it.
Leftist violence is not the outcry of the oppressed, but the mandate of the oppressors.
That is why every leftist cause begins as humanitarianism and ends in terrorism. Humanitarianism and terrorism don’t contradict each other, they complement one another. There could be no terrorism without humanitarianism. Terrorism is not an accidental sidetrack, but the next phase of a threestep process that then ends with tyranny or defeat.
When a leftist starts caring about something, it will, given enough time, end in mass murder.
It’s not because he can’t feel your pain, it’s because he’s too busy feeling someone else’s pain so he doesn’t feel yours when he comes after you. Much as the best way to drown out a signal is with noise, the best way to drown out empathy is with lots more empathy.
The leftist cares about so many people and things that he can’t feel anything when it comes to his real targets. Human suffering has become so much noise that he picks and chooses which strands to isolate and listen to based on ideological grounds. Leftist empathy doesn’t sensitize, it desensitizes by design. Given a large enough palette, the leftist can vandalize art, bomb events and assault people because he’s trying to save millions, billions, the entire planet.
But the only one he’s really trying to save is himself, from his own boring mediocrity.
The upper-class leftist revolutionary, unable to accomplish anything of worth or become anyone of note, sets out to subjugate the world. His empathy for people he has never met instantly makes him a wiser and deeper person. And before you know it, he’s cheering Hamas.
And it’s all because he cares so much.
Gaza truth…
Continued from page 20
selves as such, will cry that they were massacred. And foreign leaders and the media will condemn the deaths of “civilians.”
Defeating Hamas without civilian casualties is impossible because the Islamic terrorist group not only operates among civilians but is rooted in the society of Gaza. The clans that run Gaza, that provide the manpower that controls UNRWA institutions, and that are the mainstays of Hamas are also the large families that dominate the businesses, cultural and religious life in Gaza.
There’s no meaningful distinction between civilians and Hamas. Some clans reject Hamas authority and Israel has tried to solicit some of them to run Gaza. For now, with few results. The US strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq had similarly depended on swaying certain clans, elders and warlords into abandoning Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, with very temporary success.
Eventually the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, rebranded as the Islamic State, returned. And some of the same men we had armed and trained turned their guns on us. It is an almost inevitable outcome of counterinsurgency (COIN). When bringing democracy to the Muslim world fails, Westerners begin competing with jihadists for the support of the clans, only to be stabbed in the back.
The jihadists have the Quran on their side. To Muslims, their terrorism will always be more righteous than our fumbling efforts to avoid civilian casualties and collateral damage. Appeal-
ing to moderates or promising a better life will not win their support. On the contrary, it only infuriates the imams in their mosques and the influential clan leaders into opposing us.
Instead, we must reckon with the reality that there are few civilians in Gaza or the Muslim world generally. And those who legitimately are civilians should be measured by their deeds, not their clothing. In a culture where terrorists in the field don’t wear uniforms, where large families have sizable stocks of weapons, and where children are taught to kill and die, the externals don’t matter.
There are no civilians in Gaza. The vast majority of the population supports Hamas or some Islamic terrorist movement. Only a tiny minority opposes Islamic terrorism and wants peace.
The distinction is not between soldiers, terrorists and civilians, but enemies and non-combatants. Israel and Western nations should stop thinking about civilians, a concept that does not apply in a battlespace where terrorists wear street clothes and entire neighborhoods are controlled by clans that hide hostages in plain sight, and think about enemies and neutrals.
An enemy is anyone, regardless of clothing or sex, who is aligned with Islamic terrorists.
Every poll continues to show that the vast majority of those in Gaza are aligned with the enemy. And if that were not the case, the war would have long since ended once locals informed the authorities of where the hostages are and where the remaining Hamas terrorists are set up.
Israel is not just at war with an organization, but with an enemy culture. As is most of the world, whether it chooses to admit it or not. The war is not defined by what they wear, but by what they think. As long as human shields, female suicide bombers and child soldiers abound, the war cannot be fought by treating civilians as noncombatants while hunting elusive terrorists.
The only way to defeat an enemy is to fight him as he is, not as we would like him to be.
It would be a far cleaner and neater war if Islamic terrorists fought like conventional armies. They do not. And it is time to fight them on their own terms instead.
Hamas can’t be defeated by waiting until its terrorists take off their civilian clothes and put on uniforms. Hamas are the civilians. They are the ones holding the hostages. The only way to free the hostages and defeat the terrorists is to destroy the terror culture in whatever form it takes.
Continued from page 21
is no objective truth. Everything is relative, subjective; everyone is entitled to their own narrative.
Here’s one reason my views are so different: Most Western pro-Palestinian feminists, leftists and academics have never lived in a Muslim country or moved in Muslim circles or worked with Muslim dissidents as I do.
I wrote about this in “An American Bride in Kabul.” They have absolutely no knowledge of Islamic gender and religious apartheid; Islamic imperialism, Islamic colonialism, or Islamic conversion via the sword; no understanding that Muslims practiced anti-black slavery and sex slavery — and many still do.
Demonizing Israelis as “worse than the Nazis” allows Europeans to continue the Holocaust against the Jews and feel that they are rendering themselves safe from radical Islamic hostility by appeasing the Islamist Muslims who live in their midst. It is also a way of scapegoating Jews and Israel for the crimes of European and Muslim racism and colonialism. Like so many, I had assumed that the world’s hatred and persecution of Jews had ended; that Jewish history would never again repeat itself. I was wrong.
It was foolish to have thought that Jew-hatred would suddenly become extinct or that Israel would not remain under siege.
We must shed our illusions — permanently. We cannot expect that conditions will always improve, or that one country or another will always be a safe haven for Jews.
One cannot win a war of ideas if one refuses to fight it.
I will take a step back, take a breath or two and return to my frontline post.
Mandel...
Continued from page 21
ians. … Antisemites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopian global apartheid.
The organization Black Lives Matter picked up this rhetoric, morphing into today’s pro-Hamas protestor encampments that intimidate and attack Jews. Written on some of the pro-Hamas encampments are signs saying Zionists are not welcome. On a New York City subway, masked pro-Hamas agitators tell subway riders that all Zionists must identify themselves and leave the train. In Los Angeles, Jews minding their own business at a café are attacked.
The threats are real. This is not Paris or London — where outwardly Jewish symbols have been an invitation to Islamists to threaten your safety — but New York and Los Angeles, in America, the place Jews thought was permanently safe.
Adam Milstein wrote, “Many pro-Hamas activists deny that this wave of antisemitism is rooted in Jew-hatred, claiming their actions support the Palestinian cause and are rooted in anti-Zionism. This claim is both outlandish and dangerous. Hurting Jews does not aid Palestinians. … The only motive behind these attacks is pure anti-Semitism. … Anti-Zionism is a thinly veiled disguise for antisemitism.”
So, what does Zionism really mean?
Even to most American Jews, when you say the word “Zionist,” they seem to cringe. Zionism is the legitimate quest of the Jewish people to have a national dimension to their identity. Jewish identity encompasses nationhood (Zionism), religion, culture, tradition and a 4,000-year-old civilization spanning every race under the sun.
After nearly 2,000 years of jihads, Crusades, Inquisitions, pogroms, dhimmi status and the Holocaust, the formation by the Jews of a nation with its territory in their ancestral homeland is entirely in line with the norms of the civilized modern world.
One can be left or right, religious or secular, Jewish or not and be a Zionist. President Joe Biden has said he is a Zionist. However, the fear is that he may be the last American Democratic president to take that risk, especially after what is likely to transpire with tens of thousands of pro-Hamas demonstrators creating havoc at the Democratic National Convention this August.
On the American college campus, being proIsrael — in other words, believing Israel has a legitimate right to exist as a Jewish state — or wearing a Jewish star or a kippah puts your physical well-being at risk, not to mention the damage to your mental health caused by dealing with the intimidation, stigmatization and abandonment by university administrators.
Pro-Hamas protesters, with the support of faculty and university officers, who cowardly choose not to protect pro-Israel students, feel immune to consequences. The Manhattan district attorney has claimed he could not prosecute Columbia students blatantly breaking the law because of face coverings. Would he say that if the KKK did the same things to AfricanAmerican students?
This should be a wake-up call to New York Governor Kathy Hochul to reinstate the ban on face coverings, as masks create a lawless society and give an excuse to sympathetic progressive prosecutors to avoid enforcing the law.
The best way to fight anti-Zionism and protect Jewish students is for Congress to pass the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA), making the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition the gold standard for defining antisemitism. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed it on a bipartisan basis and it now needs to be brought to a vote on the Senate floor.
(Senator Chuck Schumer, where are you?)
This summer, the voices supporting and excusing Hamas’s use of sexual assault as legitimate resistance and calling for the end of the Jewish state will be reported on by every American and international news outlet at the Democratic National Convention.
The chaos of what may now be an open con-
vention and the demonstrators knowing that the more egregious their antics, the more they will garner increased coverage, will magnify the general mood of anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred. Combine that with an ongoing war in Gaza, a possible war in the north and Judea and Samaria a tinderbox, and you have all the makings of a “Zionism is racism” festival with fainthearted liberal Democratic Zionists at the convention intimidated much like the Jewish college students. Sounds like 1939 Germany.
However, I believe the American people are not far-left or far-right, but overwhelmingly people who know the Israel-haters and antisemites are dangerous crazies. Americans yearn for normality and a leader we can be proud of. They know Zionism is not racism and that excusing radical Islamist behavior and intimidation is wrong for America.
But we must get past this anarchy and the election season to find a new balance and let saner heads prevail. Americans of goodwill must not be fatigued or intimidated by the voices of hatred.
The Chosen Paper
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