CEO: Orthodox Jews Are “Cancer” To Be “Excised” December 12, 2007

Here’s one to warm your spirits — because I know stories like this always fill me with joy.

Just lovely. Yeah, this one from Globes Online is a real winner:

Zohar Zisapel: Yeshiva students arrangement is a cancer: “The current situation is the result of the political activism of the haredim.”

Diana Bahur-Nir 10 Dec 07 13:10

“When Ben Gurion made his arrangement with the haredim (ultra-orthodox), he saw only a few dozen yeshiva students. Today, this has developed into a cancerous growth that must be excised so that it does not become even more malignant,” said RAD Data Communications Ltd. founder and chairman Zohar Zisapel at the “Israel’s wasted human capital” panel at the “Globes” Israel Business Conference 2007 yesterday.

Zisapel added, “We must revert to the original arrangement, and set a quota of a few dozen outstanding yeshiva students, for whom the Torah is their vocation, which is what the religious world really needs as a reservoir of future rabbis. The current situation is the result of the political activism of the haredim.

Zisapel said, “When studying Aramaic and Gemara instead of mathematics and English, few 20-year olds will be able to join the academic world, not only in computers, but also in other professions.”

Wasted human capital? Has a magic wand been waved, making absolutely all aspects of the Israeli labor force hospitable for non-modern Orthodox Jews? While one can not disagree with the fact that the kollel system has become way too much of a legislated part of the haredi lifecycle — “cancerous growth”?

Unmitigated anti-haredi prejudice not even given the courtesy of a thin veil of rhetoric to use as a cover, the “Aramaic and Gemara” line was only a codeword for “get secularized”. Drop the whole Torah thing. Learn “mathematics and English” (as if one can not learn from English-speaking Torah giants, or find trigonometry in Tosafos). Get “enlightened” and Westernized.

How 1705.

Terrorists, Lies, and Videotape December 10, 2007

What I want to know is why this is just supposed to be OK, supposed to be an acceptable exercise of executive power.

This past weekend (because things like this always get published on Saturdays), it was brought to light that, despite being warned by the Justice Department and the White House against doing so, the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were among the first three terror suspects to be detained and interrogated by the C.I.A. in secret prisons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hundreds of hours of video were destroyed in 2005, with the videos showing “severe interrogation techniques” used on the two alleged al-Qaeda operatives. Apparently psychologists were also involved.

The House Intelligence Committee warned against destroying the tapes, as did the White House and Justice Department, but Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, didn’t even respond to their directive, reversed Congress’ decision, and ordered the tapes destroyed. The tapes were ordered to be destroyed in November 2005 because, as the New York Times reports, the tapes “could have set off controversies about the legality of the interrogations and generate a backlash in the Middle East.”

CBS News’ Kevin Drum speculates as to what the tapes would have shown, quoting a gloss to Ron Suskind’s One Percent Doctrine:

They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep.

Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

Then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, three officials have said, knew about the videos and urged the CIA not to destroy them:

Intelligence officials say the decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s covert-operations division. Even former CIA director Porter Goss did not know the tapes were destroyed. The White House said today President Bush didn’t know either.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked, “What would cause the CIA to take this action? The answer is obvious — coverup.”

Attorneys for one Yemeni detainee pointed to a June 10, 2005 directive which requires that the government “preserve and maintain all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees.”

But Mr. Rodriguez somehow circumvented all of that.

And now the White House is all of a sudden going silent as to why the CIA would do this. What are they trying to coverup?

Don’t tell me it’s torture, because that’s old news. Abu Ghraib resulted in court martials and convictions, and Gitmo has become a household word in most politically aware circles. Perhaps we have no real idea as to the extent of the torture which was being employed in these interrogation techniques. If the CIA was so concerned that there would be “controversies as to the legality” of these techniques worldwide, setting off a backlash, that they would destroy videos in defiance of the White House, Justice Department, and Congress, maybe waterboarding is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

Some officials are saying Rodriguez only acted to protect subordinates, that he was a good guy (hero, even) “concerned about how all this would end,” that he didn’t want some “GS-12s” to get in trouble. (This obviously conflicts with the “legality-slash-backlash” official story. But this is politics — we can’t get bogged down by truth and consistency.)

And, in the end, it’s still possible that two tapes still exist. If this is true, if they ever come to light, this will all have been for naught and Mr. Rodriguez’s boys could still go down for 20 years, and the protesting from Jakarta to Jenin could still happen.

Abu Zubaydah may never recover from his experiences. Will our country ever recover from the tarnished image we’ve given ourselves worldwide?

Israeli Religious Schools - Not For Ethiopian Students? December 6, 2007

Today on Missing the Point: Israeli Knesset Member Ophir Pines-Paz (Labor).

Pines-Paz misses the gigantic pink elephant of religious school reform in the room, and instead advocates that, to remedy the poor treatment of Ethiopian students in religious schools, simply moving the students to secular schools.

Like I said, file this Ha’aretz piece by Ruth Sinai under “Missing the Point”:

Placing Ethiopian immigrant children in religious schools “has greatly harmed the group’s integration into the wider society, and has left them a coerced religious sector,” Labor MK Ophir Pines-Paz said yesterday.

Due to the Chief Rabbinate’s strict conversion requirements, the majority of Ethiopian children attend state religious schools.

“No ethnic group or immigrant group is required to study in one system. We need to stop discriminating against the Ethiopian sector and to endlessly find faults with their Jewishness,” Pines-Paz said in initiating a bill to facilitate secular education for Ethiopian children.

This week, a state religious school in Petah Tikva was found to have isolated four second-grade Ethiopian pupils from the other children, teaching them in a separate classroom and scheduling their recess at a different hour. The school reportedly said the Ethiopian children were not religious enough to mix with the other children.

“Although it is very late, the time has come to redeem the [Ethiopian] sector from the isolation that was forced upon it,” Pines-Paz said.

Not religious enough?? Where anyone gets off making such an assessment in a religious school where all students are bound to the same code of dress and conduct is beyond me. They’re not shomer Shabbat? Shomer kashrut? Who are these Torah giants that are these other kids’ parents?

I would think that this would show, with stark clarity, how bad that 2nd-grade teacher needed to be fired. I would think that this would show how badly that school needed a new principal. I would think that this would show how far the State Religious School system has strayed from achieving its goal of providing a Torah education for all G-d-fearing families who so desire it for their children. I would think that this would show how badly reform is needed in the dati school system.

Perhaps this could be fixed with legislation. Perhaps some sort of oversight commission is the key, or maybe increased parent involvement could fix the schools. The key word is “fix the schools”.

Instead, Ophir Pines-Paz has chosen to advocate taking these children out of the school, and the Torah out of their curricula, and putting them in secular schools. This assumes that - a) the racism that was the root cause of their inferior treatment in the religious school somehow won’t be there in secular schools, and b) that this is just the status quo for religious schools, who should be left to arbitrarily choose when to segregate students like this.

Getting rid of Torah education as an alternative for Ethiopian students is not an option. Nor is advocating a Torah-free alternative as an option for religious Ethiopian students. The Chief Rabbinate and religious education system must be made to provide equal Torah education for all its students, and to treat all its students with dignity. If a child truly isn’t religious, then this should be examined — without respect to color or ancestry.

The Jews will come back from all four corners of the Earth — looking quite differently from each other — and they will all need to learn Torah in the Holy Land. G-d willing the Holy Land will have teachers willing to teach them.

Jewish-Muslim Unity In the News December 3, 2007

The Muslim Council of Britain has finally voted to end its almost seven-year boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day:

“The MCB has always placed a lot of emphasis on inter-faith work and building ties … so this was becoming a problem.” — MCB assistant general secretary, Inayat Bunglawala

In Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, the 6th Annual Dialogue Project Teach-In was a huge success with people of all religious stripes coming together for “no feuding, just talking”:

At another session, an imam explained that Christians and Jews were to be respected and welcomed as equals in true Muslim nations. He went on to explain that much of the radicalism associated with Islam was not consonant with a true interpretation of the faith.

“Many of the fatwas that get issued, they are issued by scholars who are unqualified and therefore they are unacceptable,” said the imam.

In South Africa, Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Dr Warren Goldstein and the Premier of the Western Cape, Ebrahim Rasool will speak on “Jews and Muslims: Faith, Community and Country” at the Chief Rabbi’s Enriching Tomorrows: Sharing Ideas for the Future public speaking forum.

Rightwing British politicans scheduled to speak at the Oxford Forum at Oxford University in England were greeted last week by a joint protest from Oxford’s Union of Jewish Students and Islamic Society:

The Union of Jewish Students and Oxford University’s Islamic Society carried a huge banner marked with the symbols of both organisations. Some Muslim demonstrators carried posters proclaiming “Hands off our Jews”, while the Jewish Society carried others saying “Hands off our Muslims”.

This beautiful interfaith “holiday service” would have been better if it had a rabbi, but whatever…

And finally, in Washington, DC leaders of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities came together to fight a common problem: poverty and inequality, two things all faiths consider to be front-burner issues.

May we see the end of religion-driven violence speedily in our days, and may all religious leaders come to realize the huge benefits reaped by humanity when bridges are built instead of walls.

Katrina: 27 Months Later, More Homeless

It’s a crime and a crying shame. Why this is just supposed to be taken as an inevitable part of life in a first-world country such as America is beyond me. Today’s New York Times clues us into a crisis that those of us with foresight most likely saw coming.

Basically, there’s not enough housing for all the people who lived there previously. This is causing an “acute” housing shortage, and landlords are asking for up to $1,100 a month for units which went for less than 1/3 that price before the storm:

Inside trailer No. 27 here at the A. L. Davis Playground, where the government set up a camp last year for displaced residents of Hurricane Katrina, Tracy Bernard’s meager possessions are all packed up, even though she has nowhere to go.

About a month ago, workers for the Federal Emergency Management Agency swept through her trailer park, a bleak tableau of housing of the last resort, taping eviction notices on the flimsy aluminum doors. Thousands of other trailer residents across Louisiana were informed by FEMA last week that they too would be evicted in the next six months…

More than two years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is suffering from an acute shortage of housing that has nearly doubled the cost of rental units in the city…Before the storm, more than half of the city’s population rented housing. Yet official attention to help revive the shattered rental home and apartment market has been scant.

…Last week, the city housing authority approved the demolition of 4,000 public housing units at five projects damaged by the storm. In their place, the authority plans to build mixed-income projects, large parts of which will not be affordable to previous residents.

Many residents were assigned FEMA “caseworkers” who were to address their needs and help them move from the transitional housing in trailers to more permanent residences. There’s just one catch:

…[I]n interviews at trailer parks last week, a reporter found that some residents had not spoken with a caseworker in weeks, even though they were scheduled to be evicted within days.

“The caseworker is very hard to get in touch with,” said Martin Blossom, a pizza cook who lives in a trailer and who is not sure where he will move in the next few days. “I haven’t talked with the caseworker for two weeks.”

Others said the information they got from caseworkers was useless. Ramona Jones said her counselor gave her several listings, but some of the apartments were not ready for habitation by her eviction date — or they were, in her words, “rat holes.” Landlords are asking $1,100 a month or more. Though Ms. Jones and others are eligible for financial assistance to help pay the high rents, many are reluctant, knowing that, like the trailers, the assistance could disappear, leaving them stranded with huge bills.

They’re basing their fears, of course, on the fact that “leaving them stranded” was precisely what FEMA did during the storm and in those crucial days afterwards.

The homeless population of New Orleans has doubled and is growing.

I can not help but think — no, better yet, I realize — that this is part of a grand scheme. A standard of living on the level of New York or LA (because I’m not even paying $1,100 a month in Brooklyn) would sufficiently insure that the lower-income residents would be marginalized exclusively to the (environmentally unsafe, structurally unsound, et al.) neighborhoods they could afford. And when combined with the fact that studies are returning wage differentials between white and non-white men in the neighborhood of 39 percent, this implies that you’re going to chronically see poor black homeless people in the streets in New Orleans (just like the days immediately following the storm), even though the poor encamped on the steps of City Hall are, at present, ethnically diverse.

Pushed from apartments to trailers and from trailers to tents, the middle- and low-income residents of New Orleans just keep getting screwed by this pro-gentrification MO. Sufficient affordable housing has still not been built, and homeless advocates say it may take far too long to build enough housing units to shelter all the city’s displaced. And more and more, we hear the same rhetoric from the unrealistic “pick yourself up by your bootstraps” crowd:

“It’s the next step in the recovery,” said Ronnie Simpson, a FEMA spokesman. “It’s the individual’s responsibility to go out and find what’s suitable for them.”

“We know it’s a tough decision, and that’s not lost on us,” he said, but “more and more housing becomes available every day, that’s a fact. The sooner you begin the process, the better. You want to start early and pick what’s right for your family.” He added: “We’re very sensitive to the fact that this isn’t an easy move. But it’s a necessary move.”

What’s the next step in the recovery?

Michael Reeves, 45, sleeps on the grass outside City Hall. He used to rent a one-bedroom in the Ninth Ward for $350 before the storm. “Ain’t nothing left but the ground,” he said. “We didn’t have nowhere to go so we came here.”

May G-d have mercy on them, and may these poor Katrina victims get justice, speedily.

…And Another Reason I Rhyme in Aramaic

One love to A Simple Jew for telling me this beautiful piece of Zohar I never knew before, praising the Aramaic language — shedding more of a light onto the reasoning behind why G-d chose it as the language for the first vernacular translation of the Torah:

“The Aramaic language is certain to subjugate the Sitra Achra and break its strength, elevating the glory of the Blessed Holy One. It breaks powerful locks, fetters, chains, and all klippos. Hashem then remembers His Name and His children.”

The Sitra Achra literally means the “Other Side” where all evil forces are said to “originate from”. More loosely, it’s the sum total of all the evil forces in the universe at any point in time.

Hashem’s “remembering His Name” means that the G-d’s Attribute of Mercy (which corresponds to the Tetragrammaton/”L-rd”, as opposed to Elokim/”G-d”, the Attribute of Judgment) comes to the forefront — to the “front of His Mind” so to speak — and this, in turn, causes G-d to deal with us in mercy and kindness and not strict judgment. And all the “chains and locks” that separate us from our Creator, all of these are broken down — by using the first language of the streets, the first language of exile.

The concluding words of the Zohar which follow the above quote are no less beautiful:

.זכאין אינון עמא קדישא, דקב”ה יהב לון אורייתא קדישא, למזכי בי’ לעלמא דאתי
Praiseworthy are the Holy Nation, that the Holy One, Blessed is He gave them the Torah, in order to hook them up in the Next World.