Pick-and-Choose-your-Own-Mitzvot "Judaisim"

Seen on "The Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies" website:

Student Comments

"The learning at Pardes is exactly what I was looking for. As a liberal Jew, it was essential for me to find a place where I could explore the sources of my tradition in a coed environment that is neither coercive nor judgmental. I can incorporate what I have learned into my daily life in the way that suits me."
Adam K
New York
Harvard University

In other words Avodah Zarah

Fwd: “Their Souls Are Screaming Out For What You Have”

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein:

Unlike many New Yorkers I know, I do not have an easy time listening to Michael Savage. I squirm when caught in a car in NY when the driver tunes in to his show. While appreciating his support for Israel, I find his manner over the top, and his content simplistic. All this makes his July 12 remarks more significant, for the pure genuineness of his observations.

Apparently invited to a leyl Shabbos dinner, he meets ten Chabad teenaged girls, and is overwhelmed by their purity. It leads him to contrast their life style with that of their non-religious peers, and to advise them not to be jealous of the lifestyles of cultural icons, because nothing that the beautiful people have holds a candle to what the G-d-fearing have. He notes how many belong in rehab – and can't stick it out. Why does their stardom fade and fizzle? Savage tells these girls quite simply: "Their souls are screaming out for what you have."

When to Doubt a Scientific 'Consensus'

Here is an article that I saw referenced on Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb's Blog That is worth showing here in full:

When to Doubt a Scientific 'Consensus'
By: Jay Richards
The American
March 16, 2010


Link to Original Article

A December 18 Washington Post poll, released on the final day of the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit, reported “four in ten Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment.” Nor is the poll an outlier. Several recent polls have found “climate change” skepticism rising faster than sea levels on Planet Algore (not to be confused with Planet Earth, where sea levels remain relatively stable).

Many of the doubt-inducing climate scientists and their media acolytes attribute this rising skepticism to the stupidity of Americans, philistines unable to appreciate that there is “a scientific consensus on climate change.” One of the benefits of the recent Climategate scandal, which revealed leading climate scientists manipulating data, methods, and peer review to exaggerate the evidence of significant global warming, may be to permanently deflate the rhetorical value of the phrase “scientific consensus.”

Even without the scandal, the very idea of scientific consensus should give us pause. “Consensus,” according to Merriam-Webster, means both “general agreement” and “group solidarity in sentiment and belief.” That pretty much sums up the dilemma. We want to know whether a scientific consensus is based on solid evidence and sound reasoning, or social pressure and groupthink.

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd. Many false ideas enjoyed consensus opinion at one time. Indeed, the “power of the paradigm” often shapes the thinking of scientists so strongly that they become unable to accurately summarize, let alone evaluate, radical alternatives. Question the paradigm, and some respond with dogmatic fanaticism.

We shouldn’t, of course, forget the other side of the coin. There are always cranks and conspiracy theorists. No matter how well founded a scientific consensus, there’s someone somewhere—easily accessible online—that thinks it’s all hokum. Sometimes these folks turn out to be right. But often, they’re just cranks whose counsel is best disregarded.

So what’s a non-scientist citizen, without the time to study the scientific details, to do? How is the ordinary citizen to distinguish, as Andrew Coyne puts it, “between genuine authority and mere received wisdom? Conversely, how do we tell crankish imperviousness to evidence from legitimate skepticism?” Are we obligated to trust whatever we’re told is based on a scientific consensus unless we can study the science ourselves? When can you doubt a consensus? When should you doubt it?

Your best bet is to look at the process that produced, maintains, and communicates the ostensible consensus. I don’t know of any exhaustive list of signs of suspicion, but, using climate change as a test study, I propose this checklist as a rough-and-ready list of signs for when to consider doubting a scientific “consensus,” whatever the subject. One of these signs may be enough to give pause. If they start to pile up, then it’s wise to be suspicious.

(1) When different claims get bundled together.

Usually, in scientific disputes, there is more than one claim at issue. With global warming, there’s the claim that our planet, on average, is getting warmer. There’s also the claim that human emissions are the main cause of it, that it’s going to be catastrophic, and that we have to transform civilization to deal with it. These are all different assertions with different bases of evidence. Evidence for warming, for instance, isn’t evidence for the cause of that warming. All the polar bears could drown, the glaciers melt, the sea levels rise 20 feet, Newfoundland become a popular place to tan, and that wouldn’t tell us a thing about what caused the warming. This is a matter of logic, not scientific evidence. The effect is not the same as the cause.

There’s a lot more agreement about (1) a modest warming trend since about 1850 than there is about (2) the cause of that trend. There’s even less agreement about (3) the dangers of that trend, or of (4) what to do about it. But these four propositions are frequently bundled together, so that if you doubt one, you’re labeled a climate change “skeptic” or “denier.” That’s just plain intellectually dishonest. When well-established claims are fused with separate, more controversial claims, and the entire conglomeration is covered with the label “consensus,” you have reason for doubt.

(2) When ad hominem attacks against dissenters predominate.

Personal attacks are common in any dispute simply because we’re human. It’s easier to insult than to the follow the thread of an argument. And just because someone makes an ad hominem argument, it doesn’t mean that their conclusion is wrong. But when the personal attacks are the first out of the gate, and when they seem to be growing in intensity and frequency, don your skeptic’s cap and look more closely at the evidence.

When it comes to climate change, ad hominems are all but ubiquitous. They are even smuggled into the way the debate is described. The common label “denier” is one example. Without actually making the argument, this label is supposed to call to mind the assertion of the “great climate scientist” Ellen Goodman: “I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.”

There’s an old legal proverb: If you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you have the law on your side, argue the law. If you have neither, attack the witness. When proponents of a scientific consensus lead with an attack on the witness, rather than on the arguments and evidence, be suspicious.

(3) When scientists are pressured to toe the party line.

The famous Lysenko affair in the former Soviet Union is often cited as an example of politics trumping good science. It’s a good example, but it’s often used to imply that such a thing could only happen in a totalitarian culture, that is, when all-powerful elites can control the flow of information. But this misses the almost equally powerful conspiracy of agreement, in which interlocking assumptions and interests combine to give the appearance of objectivity where none exists. For propaganda purposes, this voluntary conspiracy is even more powerful than a literal conspiracy by a dictatorial power, precisely because it looks like people have come to their position by a fair and independent evaluation of the evidence.

Tenure, job promotions, government grants, media accolades, social respectability, Wikipedia entries, and vanity can do what gulags do, only more subtly. Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the power of the majority in American society to erect “formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.” He could have been writing about climate science.

Climategate, and the dishonorable response to its revelations by some official scientific bodies, show that scientists are under pressure to toe the orthodox party line on climate change, and receive many benefits for doing so. That’s another reason for suspicion.

(4) When publishing and peer review in the discipline is cliquish.

Though it has its limits, the peer-review process is meant to provide checks and balances, to weed out bad and misleading work, and to bring some measure of objectivity to scientific research. At its best, it can do that. But when the same few people review and approve each other’s work, you invariably get conflicts of interest. This weakens the case for the supposed consensus, and becomes, instead, another reason to be suspicious. Nerds who follow the climate debate blogosphere have known for years about the cliquish nature of publishing and peer review in climate science (see here, for example).

(5) When dissenting opinions are excluded from the relevant peer-reviewed literature not because of weak evidence or bad arguments but as part of a strategy to marginalize dissent.

Besides mere cliquishness, the “peer review” process in climate science has, in some cases, been consciously, deliberately subverted to prevent dissenting views from being published. Again, denizens of the climate blogosphere have known about these problems for years, but Climategate revealed some of the gory details for the broader public. And again, this gives the lay public a reason to doubt the consensus.

(6) When the actual peer-reviewed literature is misrepresented.

Because of the rhetorical force of the idea of peer review, there’s the temptation to misrepresent it. We’ve been told for years that the peer-reviewed literature is virtually unanimous in its support for human-induced climate change. In Science, Naomi Oreskes even produced a “study” of the relevant literature supposedly showing “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” In fact, there are plenty of dissenting papers in the literature, and this despite mounting evidence that the peer-review deck was stacked against them. The Climategate scandal also underscored this: The climate scientists at the center of the controversy complained in their emails about dissenting papers that managed to survive the peer-review booby traps they helped maintain, and fantasized about torpedoing a respected climate science journal with the temerity to publish a dissenting article.

(7) When consensus is declared hurriedly or before it even exists.

A well-rooted scientific consensus, like a mature oak, usually needs time to emerge. Scientists around the world have to do research, publish articles, read about other research, repeat experiments (where possible), have open debates, make their data and methods available, evaluate arguments, look at the trends, and so forth, before they eventually come to agreement. When scientists rush to declare a consensus, particularly when they claim a consensus that has yet to form, this should give any reasonable person pause.

In 1992, former Vice President Al Gore reassured his listeners, “Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.” In the real 1992, however, Gallup “reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren’t sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn’t think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.” Seventeen years later, in 2009, Gore apparently determined that he needed to revise his own revisionist history, asserting that the scientific debate over human-induced climate change had raged until as late as 1999, but now there was true consensus. Of course, 2009 is when Climategate broke, reminding us that what had smelled funny before might indeed be a little rotten.

(8) When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus.

It makes sense that chemists over time may come to unanimous conclusions about the results of some chemical reaction, since they can replicate the results over and over in their own labs. They can see the connection between the conditions and its effects. It’s easily testable. But many of the things under consideration in climate science are not like that. The evidence is scattered and hard to keep track of; it’s often indirect, imbedded in history and requiring all sorts of assumptions. You can’t rerun past climate to test it, as you can with chemistry experiments. And the headline-grabbing conclusions of climate scientists are based on complex computer models that climate scientists themselves concede do not accurately model the underlying reality, and receive their input, not from the data, but from the scientists interpreting the data. This isn’t the sort of scientific endeavor on which a wide, well-established consensus is easily rendered. In fact, if there really were a consensus on all the various claims surrounding climate science, that would be really suspicious. A fortiori, the claim of consensus is a bit suspicious as well.

(9) When “scientists say” or “science says” is a common locution.

In Newsweek’s April 28, 1975, issue, science editor Peter Gwynne claimed that “scientists are almost unanimous” that global cooling was underway. Now we are told, “Scientists say global warming will lead to the extinction of plant and animal species, the flooding of coastal areas from rising seas, more extreme weather, more drought and diseases spreading more widely.” “Scientists say” is hopelessly ambiguous. Your mind should immediately wonder: “Which ones?”

Other times this vague company of scientists becomes “SCIENCE,” as when we’re told “what science says is required to avoid catastrophic climate change.” “Science says” is an inherently weasely claim. “Science,” after all, is an abstract noun. It can’t say anything. Whenever you see that locution used to imply a consensus, it should trigger your baloney detector.

(10) When it is being used to justify dramatic political or economic policies.

Imagine hundreds of world leaders and nongovernmental organizations, science groups, and United Nations functionaries gathered for a meeting heralded as the most important conference since World War II, in which “the future of the world is being decided.” These officials seem to agree that institutions of “global governance” need to be established to reorder the world economy and massively restrict energy resources. Large numbers of them applaud wildly when socialist dictators denounce capitalism. Strange philosophical and metaphysical activism surrounds the gathering. And we are told by our president that all of this is based, not on fiction, but on science—that is, a scientific consensus that human activities, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, are leading to catastrophic climate change.

We don’t have to imagine that scenario, of course. It happened in Copenhagen, in December. Now, none of this disproves the hypothesis of catastrophic, human induced climate change. But it does describe an atmosphere that would be highly conducive to misrepresentation. And at the very least, when policy consequences, which claim to be based on science, are so profound, the evidence ought to be rock solid. “Extraordinary claims,” the late Carl Sagan often said, “require extraordinary evidence.” When the megaphones of consensus insist that there’s no time, that we have to move, MOVE, MOVE!, you have a right to be suspicious.

(11) When the “consensus” is maintained by an army of water-carrying journalists who defend it with uncritical and partisan zeal, and seem intent on helping certain scientists with their messaging rather than reporting on the field as objectively as possible.

Do I really need to elaborate on this point?

(12) When we keep being told that there’s a scientific consensus.

A scientific consensus should be based on scientific evidence. But a consensus is not itself the evidence. And with really well-established scientific theories, you never hear about consensus. No one talks about the consensus that the planets orbit the sun, that the hydrogen molecule is lighter than the oxygen molecule, that salt is sodium chloride, that light travels about 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum, that bacteria sometimes cause illness, or that blood carries oxygen to our organs. The very fact that we hear so much about a consensus on catastrophic, human-induced climate change is perhaps enough by itself to justify suspicion.

To adapt that old legal aphorism, when you’ve got decisive scientific evidence on your side, you argue the evidence. When you’ve got great arguments, you make the arguments. When you don’t have decisive evidence or great arguments, you claim consensus.

Jay Richards frequently writes for the Enterprise Blog and is a contributing editor of THE AMERICAN.

A message from Moshe, a handicapped boy, to his mother

torahnews.org 21 Cheshvan 5770

Mommy, I want to talk to you. Remember I told you the world would change again in the next few weeks? I challenge you to tell me it is not true. What surfaced yesterday (in the Ukraine and other news) is the indication that the world is changing and moving quickly into a very sinister and terrible direction.

The only way to survive such a situation is to cling to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. Only He can save us. The autistics have been telling people for years the same message. Now we are at the great turning point where all the bad in the world is surfacing and it makes a very frightening almost overwhelming picture. Hashem is now bringing us to the point, that no matter what, we must have total Bitachon only in Him. He is our only lifeline to eternity; nothing will save us except our connection to Hakadosh Boruch Hu.

For many years the autistics have been saying stock up with food and water. That is a good suggestion! But don't believe that it will save us. Hakadosh Boruch Hu can make one’s food and water disappear or render it unusable. Hashem can take stacks and stacks of dollars that are in or out of the bank and give them the worth of toilet paper. (By the way Mommy toilet paper will soon be worth more than the dollar)

So Mommy, take this message to heart and pass it on to other people. Whether you see it clearly or not, since Rosh Hashana the world has changed completely. The evil ones have quietly organized their plans and readied their armies and have put into place their sinister plans for mankind. But those who will hang onto Hashem and to His Torah will witness the downfall of the evil ones.

This war that we will soon face is being orchestrated by those who are the reincarnation of the Dor Haflogah. Once they declared war on Hashem Lo Oleinu and now again Lo Oleinu are declaring war on Hashem. They are fools and will be destroyed forever and Hashem will make it clear in the most miraculous ways that Hashem and only Hashem is the Creater and Ruler of the universe.

Hoshana Rabbah is "Al Aqsa Day"

DEBKA says 'Yusuf Qardawi, spiritual leader of the international Muslim Brotherhood movement, urged all Muslims everywhere to mark Oct. 9 as Al Aqsa Day and fight against the shrine's takeover by "the Jews." His influence is enough to bring inflamed Muslims streaming to Jerusalem in the coming days.'

. . . 'In attempting to pour oil on troubled waters, police suppressed information about the extent and gravity of the unrest'

The Religious Zionist left vs. The Jewish Character of Israel?

As any readers I have left may have noticed, I never have much time to post these days - with the responsibility of raising two Autistic toddlers.

However I read something this morning that I cannot ignore.

Arutz7 had an article today about how Barkat is supporting a lawsuit filed by the "Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah" movement with the Supreme Court "against a committee that selects rabbis in Jerusalem, charging that it is biased in favor of the hareidi-religious."

My immediate reaction was:

1. How can an "Orthodox" Jewish organization file suit in a secular court against the Rabbanut. Moreover, not just any secular court, but the "bastion" of the Eirev Rav



2. Doesn't the Orthodox Jewish community in Israel have enough trouble with the Supreme Court trying to help the reform and conservatives from undermining and breaking the monopoly of the Rabbanut.
   Now we have an "Orthodox Jewish" organization actively helping the Supreme Court to interfere with the inner workings of the Rabbanut.
   



3. Imagine the repercussions if the "Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah" movement succeed in helping the Supreme Court get involved in deciding what "type" of Rabbis may or may not be appointed by the Rabbanut.
   



4. Who says that the Rabbanut appointments should be democratic. Democracy is NOT a Jewish value. If there happened to be more reform Jews in Jerusalem, does that mean that a reform "rabbi" should be appointed



5. This also reminded me a little of how the sons of Shlomtzion HaMalkah approached the Romans to arbitrate between them about who should be her rightful successor. This set the ball in motion for Roman rule over Am Yisrael

The "Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah" movement and the New Israel Fund

However a quick view of the "Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah's" Website shows that they are hardly "Ne'emanei Torah" - Faithful to the Torah.

I guess it should have come as no surprise to find that the "Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah" movement, that is undermining the Rabbanut, is funded by the Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic New Israel Fund


It seems that the "Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah" movement gets more funding ($50,000) from the New Israel Fund than the Israel Masorti (Conservative) Movement ($39,000)

I was a little shocked therefore to see that Rabbi Shlomo Riskin sits on the Board of Governors of an organization that is funded by the New Israel Fund and by extension, the Anti-Semitic Ford Foundation.

Any regular reader of Arutz7 or Jewish pro-Israel blogs know exactly who the New Israel Fund is.

As a reminder, here are some results of a random search of articles from Arutz7 on NIF:

• 'New Israel Fund' Training Israel's Future Supreme Court Justices



• The Ford Foundation, the NIF and Bashing Israel



• Bishara represents the kind of "New Israel" that the New Israel Fund seeks to create.



• The New Israel Fund funds several left-wing and Arab organizations in Israel like Adalah, Mossawa, the Arab Human Rights Association



• New Israel Fund and Pro-Divestment Groups



• Anti-Semitism Free



• Funding Your Enemies

Livni taking orders/advice from Obama?

Is this an example of Obama trying to undermine the Netanyahu government?

I doubt Livni was capable of coming up with this idea by herself!

(IsraelNN.com) Tzipi Livni, head of the opposition Kadima party, announced on Monday that she is establishing a "shadow cabinet", in the tradition of British parliamentary democracy. Kadima is planning a very "active opposition" to the Netanyahu government.

The decision to form a shadow cabinet involves appointing individuals from within Kadima to head teams assigned

to monitor the activities of government ministries and to present alternative policies. The shadow "ministerial" staffs will generally be headed by Knesset members who headed the respective ministries in the past.

For her part, Livni will play the role of coordinating Kadima's diplomatic policies, what might be called a Shadow Foreign Minister to Israel's current Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. Former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Sha'ul Mofaz will shadow Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Monitoring Public Security Minister Yitzchak Aharonovitch will be former Public Security Minister Avi Dichter. Former Treasurer Roni Bar-On will head the shadow Finance Ministry, peering over the shoulders of Yuval Steinitz, the current Finance Minister, and of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who is also serving as Minister of Economic Strategy.

Former Environment Minister Gidon Ezra will follow environmental issues, shadowing Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan. The shadow Minister of Education will be former Education Ministry general manager Ronit Tirosh, monitoring the policies and actions of current Education Minister Gidon Sa'ar.

Former Deputy Immigrant Absorption Minister Marina Solodkin will follow absorption issues as they are handled by Absorption Minister Sofa Landver.

MK Yaakov Edry will follow the issue of development in the Negev and the Galilee, shadowing Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom in his role as Minister of the Development of the Negev and Galilee. Former Housing Minister Zev Boim will head a staff dealing with issues pertaining to Bedouins in the Negev, which will not directly shadow one specific ministry.

A Vicious Strain of Ancient Prejudice

I received the following extracts from an article in an email today:

EXTRACTS FROM HOWARD JACOBSON: LET'S SEE THE 'CRITICISM' OF ISRAEL FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS IN THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER.

-----I was once in Melbourne when bush fires were raging 20 or 30 miles north of the city. Even from that distance you could smell the burning. Fine fragments of ash, like slivers of charcoal confetti, covered the pavements. The very air was charred. It has been the same here these past couple of months with the fighting in Gaza. Only the air has been charred not with devastation but with hatred. And I don't mean the hatred of the warring parties for each other. I mean the hatred of Israel expressed in our streets, on our campuses, in our newspapers, on our radios and televisions, and now in our theatres.

-----A discriminatory, over-and-above hatred, inexplicable in its hysteria and virulence whatever justification is adduced for it; an unreasoning, deranged and as far as I can see irreversible revulsion that is poisoning everything we are supposed to believe in here - the free exchange of opinions, the clear-headedness of thinkers and teachers, the fine tracery of social interdependence we call community relations, modernity of outlook, tolerance, truth. You can taste the toxins on your tongue.

-----But I am not allowed to ascribe any of this to anti-Semitism. It is, I am assured, "criticism" of Israel, pure and simple. In the matter of Israel and the Palestinians this country has been heading towards a dictatorship of the one-minded for a long time; we seem now to have attained it. Deviate a fraction of a moral millimetre from the prevailing othodoxy and you are either not listened to or you are jeered at and abused, your reading of history trashed, your humanity itself called into question. I don't say that self-pityingly. As always with dictatorships of the mind, the worst harmed are not the ones not listened to, but the ones not listening. So leave them to it, has essentially been my philosophy. A life spent singing anti-Zionist carols in the company of Ken Livingstone and George Galloway is its own punishment.

-----Speaking on BBC television at the height of the recent fighting in Gaza, Richard Kemp, former commander of British Troops in Afghanistan and a senior military adviser to the British government, said the following: "I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare where any army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and deaths of civilians than the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) is doing today in Gaza."

-----But when it comes to Israel we hear no good, see no good, speak no good. We turn our backsides to what we do not want to know about and bury it in distaste, like our own ordure. We did it and go on doing it with all official contestation of the mortality figures provided by Hamas. We do it with Hamas's own private executions and their policy of deploying human shields. We do it with the sotto voce admission by the UN that "a clerical error" caused it to mis-describe the bombing of that UN school which at the time was all the proof we needed of Israel's savagery. It now turns out that Israel did not bomb the school at all. But there's no emotional mileage in a correction. The libel sticks, the retraction goes unnoticed.

----In recent years a laughably benign locution, "criticism", had become for what is in fact -a desire to word a country not just out of the commonwealth of nations but out of physical existence altogether. Richard Ingrams [editor of the magazine Private Eye] daydreams of the time when Israel will no longer be, an after-dinner sleep which is more than an old man's idle prophesying. It is for him a consummation devoutly to be wished. This week Bruce Anderson [political columnist] also looked to such a time, but in his case with profound regret. Israel has missed and goes on missing chances to be magnanimous, he argued, as no victor has ever been before.

-----What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak? In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps, and when the Ghetto rose up it was liquidated, the last 50,000 residents being either shot on the spot or sent to be murdered more hygienically in Treblinka.

-----Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those - it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.

-----Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn't happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.

----One particularly popular version, pseudo-scientific in tone, understands Zionism as a political form given to a psychological condition - Jews visiting upon others the traumas suffered by themselves, with Israel figuring as the torture room in which they do it. This is is pretty well the thesis of a new hate-fuelled little chamber-piece by Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, an audacious 10-minute encapsulation of Israel's moral collapse - the audacity residing in its ignorance or its dishonesty - currently playing at the Royal Court. The play is conceived in the form of a family roundelay, with different voices chiming in with suggestions as to the best way to bring up, protect, inform, and ultimately inflame into animality an unseen child in each of the chosen seven periods of contemporary Jewish history. It begins with the Holocaust, partly to establish the playwright's sympathetic bona fides ("Tell her not to come out even if she hears shouting"), partly to explain what has befallen Palestine, because no sooner are the Jews out of the hell of Hitler's Europe than they are constructing a parallel hell for Palestinians.

---The staccato form of the piece - every line beginning "Tell her" or "Don't tell her" - is skilfully contrived to suggest a people not just forever fraught and frightened but forever covert and deceitful. Nothing is true. Boasts are denials and denials are boasts. Everything is mediated through the desire to put the best face, first on fear, then on devious appropriation, and finally on evil. . . . .. The overall impression, nonetheless, is of a narrative slavishly in line with the familiar rhetoric, making little or nothing of the Jews' unbroken connection with the country going back to the Arab conquest more than a thousand years before, the piety felt for the land, the respect for its non-Jewish inhabitants (their rights must "be guarded and honoured punctiliously," Ben Gurion wrote in 1918), the waves of idealistic immigration which long predated the post-Holocaust influx with its twisted psychology, and the hopes of peaceful co-existence, for the tragic dashing of which Arab countries in their own obduracy and intolerance bear no less responsibility.

----- in this wantonly inflammatory piece, the Jews drop in on somewhere they have no right to be, despise, conquer, and at last revel in the spilling of Palestinian blood. There is a one-line equivocal mention of a suicide bomber, and ditto of rockets, both compromised by the "Tell her" device, otherwise no Arab lifts a finger against a Jew. "Tell her about Jerusalem," but no one tells her, for example, that the Jewish population of East Jersusalem was expelled at about the time our survivors turn up, that it was cleansed from the city and its sacred places desecrated or destroyed. Only in the crazed brains of Israelis can the motives for any of their subsequent actions be found.
Thus lie follows lie, omission follows omission, until, in the tenth and final minute, we have a stage populated by monsters who kill babies by design - "Tell her we killed the babies by mistake," one says, meaning don't tell her what we really did - who laugh when they see a dead Palestinian policeman ("Tell her they're animals... Tell her I wouldn't care if we wiped them out"), who consider themselves the "chosen people", and who admit to feeling happy when they see Palestinian "children covered in blood".
Anti-Semitic? No, no. Just criticism of Israel.

----Only imagine this as Seven Muslim Children and we know that the Royal Court would never have had the courage or the foolhardiness to stage it. Babies and laugh at murdered policemen ("Tell her we're the iron fist now") we will squeak no louder than a mouse when we are abused.
Caryl Churchill will argue that her play is about Israelis not Jews, but once you venture on to "chosen people" territory - feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase - once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. . . No, you don't have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.

. . . Michael Billington's somnolent review of the play in the Guardian. "Churchill shows us," he writes, "how Jewish children are bred to believe in the ‘otherness' of Palestinians..."
It is not just the adopted elision of Israeli children into Jewish children that is alarming, or the unquestioning acceptance of Caryl Churchill's offered insider knowledge of Israeli child-rearing, what's most chilling is that lazy use of the word "bred", so rich in eugenic and bestial connotations, but inadvertently slipped back into the conversation now, as truth. Fact: Jews breed children in order to deny Palestinians their humanity. Watching another play in the same week, Billington complains about its manipulation of racial stereotypes. He doesn't, you see, even notice the inconsistency.

Obama - Gog hint in Yechezkel 38

I was in Mea-Shearim today and someone showed me the following:

On the א of the first נשיא (President), every 7 letters spell out the name Obama in Hebrew:

יחזקאל פרק לח

א ויהי דבר-יהוה, אלי לאמר. ב בן-אדם, שים פניך אל-גוג ארץ המגוג--נשיא, ראש משך ותבל; והנבא, עליו. ג ואמרת, כה אמר אדני יהוה: הנני אליך, גוג--נשיא, ראש משך ותבל. ד ושובבתיך, ונתתי חחים בלחייך; והוצאתי אותך ואת-כל-חילך סוסים ופרשים, לבשי מכלול כלם--קהל רב צנה ומגן, תפשי חרבות כלם.

The Human Side of the Story - The Missing Photo

From Ohr Somayach


The Missing Photo by Rabbi Mendel Weinbach

The current craze among Jewish children of collecting picture cards of
Torah scholars and leaders will probably remind many of their American
parents and grandparents of the days when they collected cards of
sports stars. There was, however, one youngster of that generation who
collected photographs of great rabbis and pasted them into an album.

One place in that album was left blank and in it was written:

"Mordechai, if you learn seriously, some day your picture will be
here with the other gedolim."

The youngster took his self-imposed challenge seriously and eventually
became the Rosh Hayeshiva of Yeshivat Telshe in Cleveland, Rabbi
Mordechai Gifter of blessed memory.


(C) 2006 Ohr Somayach International - All rights reserved.

The Origin of the “Occupation” Myth

The Origin of the “Occupation” Myth

Howard Grief

The pernicious myth that the State of Israel has been an Occupier of “Arab lands” since the Six-Day War, comprising Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the Golan and Sinai, originated, astonishingly enough, with the legal establishment of the State, which could not fathom the fact that all these territories were either integral regions of the Jewish National Home or historically connected with the Land of Israel. The jurist whose thinking on the subject principally led to the spread of this evil myth was Meir Shamgar, the Military Advocate-General from 1961 to 1968, subsequently the Attorney-General and President of the Supreme Court. In the early 1960s he conceived of a plan of action to be implemented in the event that Israel conquered what he called “enemy territory” from the surrounding Arab states. Under that plan, it was decided that the rules of international law concerning warfare would be applied to any such territory instead of Israeli law. To this end, he conducted special training courses for platoon officers of the Military Advocate’s Corps to familiarize these officers with the laws of war, particularly the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which they carried with them in “movable emergency kits”. In addition, Shamgar prepared a manual for the military advocate giving precise instructions and guidelines for the IDF to follow.

Shamgar’s plan came to fruition in the Six-Day War when it was adopted by the Levi Eshkol National Unity Government. A four-pronged military government was set up to administer all the Jewish territories liberated from Arab rule in 1967. The decision to set up a regime of military government for these territories rather than to apply Israeli law is the reason why the territories were logically considered “occupied territories” by neutral or even friendly foreign opinion, as well as by a large segment of Israeli society. The irony of the situation created by the Six-Day War was that Israel was never obliged to apply the laws of war to what were constituent parts of the Jewish National Home and Land of Israel, since several international law documents dating back to 1920 and 1922 had already recognized exclusive Jewish legal rights over them. Moreover, two important Israeli constitutional laws required the immediate application of Israeli law to all liberated Jewish lands, namely, the Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance of 1948, as well as the Law of Return of 1950. In ignoring these constitutional laws and the leading precedent established in the War of Independence when Israeli law was automatically applied to areas beyond the U.N. Partition lines repossessed by the IDF, Shamgar committed a staggering violation of the Rule of Law.

Two recent Supreme Court judgments have taken Shamgar’s folly to new heights of absurdity. The President of the Court, Aharon Barak, has ruled that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are indeed governed by the rules of belligerent occupation without naming the state or people whose land has been occupied or noting when that state or people were recognized as the sovereign of the land. As a result of his rulings, Barak has completely undermined the Jewish legal case for the retention of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The only way to undo the tremendous legal and political harm committed by Israel’s most eminent jurists is for the Knesset to pass special legislation declaring that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not occupied territories, but rather the national patrimony of the Jewish People in whose name the State of Israel acts.

Leftist openly divorce themselves from Jewish Nation

A shocking admission by a leftist that he/they are divorced from the Jewish people and aligned with the arabs enemies (part of the Eirev-Rav)!!!

From IMRA

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Leftist poet Chaim Guri: Palestinian trees humanitarian concern, Jewish evacuees politics

Aaron Lerner Date: 12 February 2006

In a live interview broadcast on Israel Radio this morning, leftist author and poet Chaim Guri responded to criticism that while the Israeli Left is concerned about Palestinian olive trees that they express no humanitarian interest in the fate of the Jews who were evacuated from the Gaza Strip and have suffered greatly because the Government has failed to provide the compensation and other services.

Guri explained that the "plight of Palestinians is a humanitarian concern while the settlers removed from Gush Katif is politics."

Guri went on to explain that the Palestinians were the "poor of one's own city" - thus qualifying for priority.

The phrase "poor of one's own city" is a phrase from Jewish law regarding priority in the distribution of limited resources in humanitarian cases.That, other things being equal (in terms of critical nature of need, etc.), one first takes care of one's own poor.

Settler leader Bentzi Lieberman responded on the program that when Guri says that he considers Palestinians who genuinely desire the eradication of Israel to have the same standing - if not higher standing - than fellow Jews - that this illustrates a seriously distorted morality on the part of this representative of the Israeli Left.

Dr Aaron Lerner on Amona

IMRA


Were the buildings "ticking bombs"

Israel Television Channel One Mabbat evening news reported that
100,000 attended the rally that had been organized over the course of two
days. This is a phenomenal success given both the time and the possible
chilling effect of fear of police violence.

For some reason, the bulk of the coverage has not focused on a very
straightforward issue: the Yesha Council put its reputation on the line
when it offered to commit to move or demolish the buildings within two weeks
in order to avoid a clash. This proposal constituted a major and dramatic
concession on the part of the settler community - something that the Yesha
Council leadership were able to offer only after long and painful
discussions with the people at Amona. The buildings at Amona were hardly
"ticking bombs" that had to be demolished within hours. So the very harsh
questions remains for the Olmert team to answer: even if you thought that
Yesha Council would not "deliver the goods", why did you deny them the
chance? Why, despite all the spins to the media that you want to work with
"moderate" Yesha leaders, did you send them back empty handed?

In the absence of any other explanation for the critical need to demolish
the buildings within hours rather than 14 days, one is only left with a
simple explanation: Olmert's polls found Kadima lost seats for the
compromise in Hebron earlier that week. His political advisors projected an
even greater drop in the polls if he "compromised" at Amona and postponed
the demolition for two weeks.

-----------------------------------------------

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Weekly Commentary: Breaking bones for Kadima victory? Aaron Lerner Date: 2 February 2006 There is no denying the logic behind the advice that acting prime minister Ehud Olmert's campaign advisors no doubt gave him to mark the formal opening of the Kadima Party's election campaign by breaking the bones of protesters at Amona. After all, overnight polling certainly would have shown that many potential Kadima voters were disappointed with the outcome in the Hebron market affair - with the Jews evacuating on their own volition as part of an understanding (confirmed by the IDF and denied by AG Mazuz) that other Jews can be expected to replace them in the buildings in a month or two. Heavily covered bone breaking no-nonsense "law enforcement" at Amona more than makes up for Hebron. Accepting the Yesha Council's proposal that they themselves would either re-locate or demolish the buildings within two weeks would have meant much more than a lost photo-op: it could have meant a drop of several percentage points in the polls for Kadima. And to make matters worse for the Kadima campaign team, accepting the Yesha Council's proposal would have given the Yesha Council more credibility in the eyes of the protesters - thus increasing the possibility that they would be also able to successfully broker other evacuations - thus denying the Kadima campaign team the bone breaking law enforcement imagery they sought not only at Amona but at the other locations slated for action before the elections. The numbers definitely favored confrontation over peaceful resolution. But with Kadima enjoying a huge lead in the polls was it really necessary for Mr. Olmert to put his campaign's interests ahead of those of the nation? Is it really so critical that Kadima polls 43 seats instead of 39? Perhaps Mr. Olmert's campaign advisors can't be faulted for wanting to maximize Kadima's victory at the polls at any cost, but that doesn't excuse Ehud Olmert for accepting their advice. Dr. Aaron Lerner, Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis) (Mail POB 982 Kfar Sava) Tel 972-9-7604719/Fax 972-3-7255730 INTERNET ADDRESS: imra@netvision.net.il Website: http://www.imra.org.il

Reb Zusia's Absolute Bitachon

I know I am a few days late, but better late than never.

A Simple Jew posted the famous story of "Reb Zusia is hungry". A recommended read, I have always liked that one.

I have two others I would like to share, but the second one will have to wait for some other posting, as I don't have too much time now.

Reb Zusia lived a very hard life, even by the standards of poverty stricken Poland. The shirt on his back was the only one he owned. He had no teeth, was always sick and never saw a doctor or took painkillers. He just learned Torah, and served Hashem with Bitachon.

Despite everything, Reb Zusia was continually happy.

A person once came to Reb Zusia's teacher, the Maggid of Mezerich, and asked him how can the Gemorah say that one has to say the Bracha on hearing bad news (Baruch Dayan HaEmet) with the same joy as when saying the Bracha upon hearing good news (HaTov VeHaMeitiv)? (Brachot 54a).

How is it possible to have the same joy upon hearing bad news as when hearing good news?

The Maggid told him to go ask the question to his attendant, Reb Zusia.

The person asked Reb Zusia the question, and Reb Zusia replied "You must have the wrong person."

"You are Reb Zusia right?"

"Yes!"

"The Maggid said that you could answer the question concerning how one can say the Bracha over bad events with the same joy as a Bracha over good events."

"Then you must surely have the wrong person."

"Why?"

"Because I never understood that statement either. You see, nothing bad has ever happened to me."

This was the same Reb Zusia who had no money, no clothes and no teeth. He had absolute Bitachon in Hashem and knew that whatever happened to him, was for the good.

Lubavitcher Rebbe's letter to Ben Gurion:

Extract from Orthodox and Israeli: When the Two Don't Mix by Avraham Shmuel Lewin. (Recommended reading!)

In a 1959 letter to Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, the Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote:

It was once fashionable in certain circles to suggest that the Jewish religion and religious observances are necessary for those living in the Diaspora – as a shield against assimilation. But for those who can find another "antidote" in the place of religion, particularly for those living in Eretz Israel, within their own society, where the atmosphere, language, etc. (apparently) serve as ample assurances, the Jewish religion was superfluous – what need had they to burden themselves with all its minutiae in their daily life? But the trend of developments in Eretz Israel in the last seven or eight years has increasingly emphasized the opposite view: That however vital the need for religion amongst Diaspora Jewry, it is needed even more for the Jews in Israel. One of the basic reasons for this is that it is precisely in Eretz Israel that there exists the danger that a new generation will grow up, a new type bearing the name of Israel but completely divorced from the past of our people and its eternal and essential values; and, moreover, hostile to it in its world outlook, culture and the content of its daily life; hostile – in spite of the fact that it will speak Hebrew, dwell in the land of the Patriarchs and wax enthusiastic over the Bible.

I feel sick to my stomach

It is now 5:00 AM in Jerusalem, and I have not been able to sleep all night!

(This from rotter.net)

Find the difference

The top picture says "lynch of a Jew in Ramallah"

The bottom picture says "lynch of a Settler (Jewish resident of The Land of Israel) in Amona"

Remember this?

(Someone sent me this interesting email)

It has been brought to my attention that this email was a hoax.

My apologies!

(Thanks to anonymous, yaak and anonymous)

In Israeli courts, self-defence = Murdering animals

The Eirev-Rav injustice system gets more and more ridiculous every day Elon Moreh Security Officer Sentenced to Eight Months in Jail For Killing Attack Dogs 13:16 Jan 31, '06 / 2 Shevat 5766

(IsraelNN.com) The deputy security officer of the Samaria town of Elon Moreh was sentenced to eight months in prison Monday for shooting in the air in response to Arab shepherds that were trespassing within the towns borders and shooting two of their dogs that attacked him. The man was convicted of "Murdering animals" and "violence against people." He says that he will appeal the decision, which calls into question how a security officer is able to protect the population under his watch without being punished with jail time.

How to be a successfull Israeli judge

If a religious Jew comes before you, he is guilty. If an arab comes before you he is innocent!

See post below!



MK Slomoliansky: Supreme Court Not Interested in Justice or Integrity 18:35 Jan 29, '06 / 29 Tevet 5766

(IsraelNN.com) In response to the Supreme Court decision to reject the petition of residents of the community of Amona, MK Nissan Slomoliansky (NRP) pointed out that the law is being selectively applied to discriminate against Jews in Judea and Samaria."The Supreme Court proved today that they come to decisions according to the world view that suits them and not according to measures of justice and integrity," Slomoliansky said."It is very interesting that the hundreds of Arab homes with demolition orders against them remain standing, with the law going unenforced in their regard."

Ad Matai????

The Eirev Rav bend over backwards to sentence a clearly innocent Jew. They are doing everything they can against Jews and in favor of terrorists. Such a travesty of justice. He was not the first victim of the Eirev Rav injustice and unfortunately probably not the last. Doesn't the common Israeli on the street see the blatant injustice? Why don't people protest more aggressively? Daniel Pinner Found Guilty 17:00 Jan 29, '06 / 29 Tevet 5766 By Hillel Fendel

Daniel Pinner, who shot in the air when attacked by a rock-throwing Arab mob, was found guilty by the Be'er Sheva District Court of causing willful and malicious injury. He faces a 3-year sentence.

Pinner, who made Aliyah from England and lives in Kfar Tapuach, has been in prison for over seven months. He was arrested on June 22 for allegedly firing at and injuring an Arab on the Gush Katif beach. Pinner has maintained that he shot in the air in self-defense when a mob of some 50 Arabs threw rocks at him; Arab witnesses and participants admitted in court that they were throwing rocks. Pinner, 38, an unmarried teacher and licensed electrician, was in Gush Katif at the time to volunteer his services in the refurbishing of the Palm Beach Hotel for new families. Four days after the incident, he was arrested at home, with the police first claiming that he had shot an Arab in the chest, and then later in the leg. Even after months in jail, Pinner did not lose his sense of humor, describing his court hearings in the following manner: "...It was Wednesday 28 September, and I was up for the second hearing of my trial... Justice was proceeding at its usual sedate, calm pace, undisturbed by such concepts as presumption of innocence, factual evidence, or the right to a speedy trial. The hearing itself was comparatively brief - about an hour or so, in which two police officers in charge of the interrogation testified that: ... • yes, they found a spent cartridge from my Uzi; • no, they had not bothered to check the range or angle of fire to see if that could possibly have been the bullet which allegedly hit Nasser Wafi; • no, they had not been able to run an identity parade to ask the Arab eye-witnesses if I was the shooter; • no, they could not explain why it was impossible to do an identity parade; • no, they could not explain why the police did not think of photographing me in order to run a photographic identity parade." Atty. Baruch Ben-Yosef expressed disgust at the ruling, saying it "simply ignored all of our legal claims, such as the expert who said that it was impossible to ascertain whether the wound was even caused by a bullet... The judge believed the Arab witnesses, despite the discrepancies in their testimony." The ruling was handed down Sunday morning by Justice Rachel Barkai of the Be'er Sheva District Court. Ben-Yosef believes there are strong grounds to appeal to the Supreme Court, and Pinner is likely to do so. In the meanwhile, however, sentencing hearings are currently scheduled for March 8. A probation report must also be prepared for this purpose. He faces a possible three-year prison sentence. Click here for an article Pinner wrote last week

Baruch Dayan HaEmet

Bikur Holim Hospital Reports Rabbi Kaduri has Died 22:02 Jan 28, '06 / 28 Tevet 5766

(IsraelNN.com) Officials in Jerusalem's Bikur Holim Hospital reported a short time ago that leading Kaballist Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri has died.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

I have been feeling extremely negative about the current activities of the Eirev-Rav government, and it's injustice system here in Israel. My negative feelings have been growing steadily stronger.

But Chardal posted some interesting stories about Rav Yisrael Zeev Gustman Zt"l. It is a recommended read, not long, see them here.

The second story is about how Rav Gustman was in a car that was traveling past Ben-Yehuda street. Ben-Yehudah is not exactly the most Tsanuah (modest) place in town. The driver of the vehicle felt uncomfortable about this, but Rav Gustman started marveling about how the new buildings show how we are meriting to witness the rebuilding of Yerushalayim.

I had an immediate thought about this. I have heard several stories about other great Gedolim in which they have read the thoughts of the people they were talking to.

I wondered whether Rav Gustman was anticipating the thoughts of the person he was in the car with and chose to give him a message: Always look for the positive side of things.

Perhaps instead of lamenting about the Eirev-Rav government, I should be more like Rabbi Akiva, who when he saw a fox running out of the rubble of destroyed Yerushalayim, even then, chose to look on the bright side of things.

As Yeshayahu says:

מַה-נָּאווּ עַל-הֶהָרִים רַגְלֵי מְבַשֵּׂר, מַשְׁמִיעַ שָׁלוֹם מְבַשֵּׂר טוֹב--מַשְׁמִיעַ יְשׁוּעָה

All these negative things are, after all, sounds of the footsteps of the Mevaser.

And they only mean that he is coming closer and closer, and are therefore very pleasant sounds.

More signs of things to come!

While the "Israeli Police" and the "Israel Defence Forces" have turned into "Ishmael Defence Forces' and one of the primary enemies of faithfull Jews, the efforts to take Jerusalem away from the Jews continues: Plan to Internationalize Jerusalem May be Urged at Herzliya Conference 11:34 Jan 17, '06 / 17 Tevet 5766

(IsraelNN.com) The non-profit Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies has issued a study recommending that Jerusalem's holy sites be administered by an international body. The study likely will be presented at the annual Herzliya conference schedule to start this Saturday.

The center's research concluded that the "lack of trust between Israel and the Palestinian Authority" supports turning the authority over to an international committee to preserve holy sites. Jordan closed off non-Moslem sites during its occupation of the eastern part of the city. Israel re-opened up Christian and Jewish sites to visitors after Jordan retreated during the Six-Day War in 1967 and Israel reunited the capital.

Darwinism - Science or Secular Religion?

by Jonathan Rosenblum
Hamodia
January 11, 2006

In the early 1930s, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler set himself the task of battling the cult of science of his time. To his private students in London - mostly teenagers from Orthodox homes who attended public school - he first emphasized how circumscribed is the realm of science, and how little it has to say concerning the ultimate purposes of life.

Next Rabbi Dessler would show the inherent bias from which scientists too suffer. As one of his closest talmidim from that period, Rabbi Aryeh Carmell, puts it, "So successful did this method [of revealing the hidden premises and bias] prove that one of his followers, if faced with a conflict between a widely held contemporary view and a tenet of Torah, instead of putting himself on the defensive and groping for apologetics, will immediately endeavor to bring to light the bias, individual, social and otherwise, which has given rise to the divergent viewpoint."

Rabbi Dessler emphasized how the slightest self-interest is sufficient to prejudice the outcome of any decision-making process, and that this applied no less to scientific judgments than any other. He demonstrated the point by taking what might be a prototypical scientist for his example:

"Think of a person who, by the power of his intellect alone, wants to re-examine some fundamental problem - such as was the world created for a purpose. . . . Let us assume that the person possesses a keen intellect, is well-educated and well-informed. However, so far as character is concerned he is pretty average. He has never seriously tackled his moral failings. . . . [Now let us say that] we are talking about a very comprehensive problem . . . . On the solution will depend whether he will be obliged to struggle constantly with his baser desires, . . . or whether he will live with no restraints on his desires apart from those he deigns to place on them. . . ." Can we seriously believe, Rabbi Dessler asked, that he will arrive at a true conclusion merely by the exercise of his intellectual powers?

Scientists themselves have admitted their own susceptibility to various forms of bias. In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn describes scientists' resistance to abandoning a given paradigm until an acceptable alternative is proposed, no matter how much countervailing evidence has accumulated. Scientists are uncomfortable moving from a position of purported knowledge to one of ignorance. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the leading neo-Darwinists, discusses in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory the ways in which social and career incentives cause scientists to fail to fully grasp the import of the date they observe.

NOWHERE IS THE BIAS OF SCIENTISTS on more prominent display than with respect to the ever roiling debates over Darwinian evolution. Supporters of Darwin often find it convenient to obfuscate the extent to which they view his theory of natural selection among random mutations as a full refutation of all religious belief. But others are more candid. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the best known present day defender of Darwin, famously claims, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." George Gaylord Simpson, another leading Darwinist, states the meaning of evolution: "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

Cornell University's William Provine plays the role of the prototypical scientist in Rabbi Dessler's example, proclaiming, "a world strictly organized in accordance with mechanistic principles . . . . implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws. "

These scientists cannot claim that these views are merely the outgrowth of the overwhelming empirical evidence in favor of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. That theory rests not on empirical observation but on a priori assumptions. In a 1981 lecture at the American Museum of Natural History, Colin Patterson, the chief paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum, observed that both creationism and Darwinian observation are scientifically vacuous concepts, which are held primarily on the basis of faith. Patterson related that he had asked the members of an evolutionary morphology seminar at the University of Chicago to tell him just one thing about evolution that they knew to be true. The response was a long and embarrassed silence.

The scientific naturalism of the Darwinists - the belief that everything can be explained by natural, material forces -- is ultimately founded on rhetorical legerdemain that has nothing to do with science. First step: exclude all non-natural causes as a priori inadmissible. Second step: If Darwinian evolution were true, it would explain the observed taxonomic similarities between different living things. Third step: Since no alternative explanation currently exists to explain those phenomena, Darwinism must be true. (This step, to which Darwinists inevitably have recourse whenever the holes in the theory are pointed out, Philip Johnson astutely notes in Darwin on Trial, is the equivalent of preventing a criminal defendant from presenting an alibi until he can produce the real criminal.) Fourth step: Since Darwinism is true, all explanations based on non-natural causes are vanquished. Note how that which was a priori excluded at the outset is now deemed to have been somehow disproved.

Colin Patterson was right that the Darwinian theory of life developing through trillions of micromutations, sifted by natural selection, is not scientific. A scientific theory, as defined by Karl Popper, must be falsifiable. When Einstein introduced his General Theory of Relativity, for instance, he offered at the same time a series of bold predictions based on the theory and by which it could be tested.

Instead of constructing such tests for their theory, Darwinists start by assuming the truth of theory and then looking for corroboration, a travesty of Popper’s definition of science. Studies of the fossil record, for instance, that fail to buttress the theory are deemed failures and never published. Gareth Nelson of the American Museum of National History describes the process by which Darwinian "ancestors" are picked: "We've got to have some ancestors. We’ll pick those. Why? Because we know that they have to be there, and these are the best candidates. That's by and large how it has worked. I'm not exaggerating."

According to Darwin, whales, rats, human beings, dophins and tigers all descended from a common small mammal. But the claimed creative power for natural selection has never been observed. The argument for such a power is based on wild extrapolation from the observation that black moths fare better vis-à-vis their natural predators against a sooty backdrop and light colored moths do better against a cleaner backdrop. The fact that different traits within one species may provide a comparative advantage in certain circumstances, however, is a very far cry from proving that natural selection can create new species or account for the vast differences between different species of mammals.

Nor have the Darwinists shown how natural selection could have produced complex systems based on interaction of many separate parts, none of which parts would offer any comparative advantage by itself. The human eye, hemoglobin, the avian feather, the poison of the blowfish (in which neither the poison nor the delivery system would confer any advantage absent the other) are just a few of the large number of examples that cannot be explained. The best Darwinists can offer in response are what Harvard professors Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin call "just-so" stories about how each of the postulated (but never observed) changes in each part of the system conferred some advantage.

Darwin's theory of gradual change through micromutations filtered through natural selection is filled with holes. Darwin's theory predicts a vast number of transitional types. But those transitional types are largely absent from the fossil record. Species and groups of species appear suddenly in the fossil record rather than at the end of a chain of evolutionary links. Gould calls the rarity of transitional forms "the trade secret of paleontology. Admits Niles Eldridge, "We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports the story of gradual adoptive change, all the while knowing that it has not."

Darwin himself stated "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive mutations, my theory would absolutely break down." But the fossil record fails to provide, according to paleontologist Stephen Stanley, a singe example of "major morphological transition." Moreover, leading prominent geneticists and mathematicians have concluded that the number of necessary mutations to produce complex systems, like human sight is impossible.

So despite themselves, latter day Darwinists have had to introduce major leaps, or "saltations", into their account of the development of life. Thus University of California geneticists Richard Goldschmidt hypothesized that stable macromutations must somehow be possible, and paleontologist Otto Schindewolf speculated that the first bird somehow hatched from a reptile egg. To account for the problems in the fossil record, Gould and Eldridge developed a theory of punctuated equilibrium, which again introduced large scale changes.

The result, however, was to save Darwin only by rejecting his abhorrence of saltations - i.e., by introducing a deus ex machina in the middle of his naturalistic theory. The terrible choice facing would be defenders of a purely naturalistic account of the development of life is, as Eldridge put it, between maintaining Darwin's theory, despite its notoriously poor fit with the facts, and positing models that require the "embrace of a rather dubious set of biological propositions."

That scientists are willing to engage in which such wild speculations, absent any mechanism explaining the large jumps in developmental stages they posit, only shows how deeply engrained is their bias in favor of purely natural causes. Some form of Darwinian evolution is, Philip Johnson puts it aptly, the "creation story of scientific naturalism."

The scientists could have spared themselves the effort of saving Darwin, for the effort to preserve a purely mechanistic universe ultimately breaks down in any event over the origin of life itself. Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle has described the chances of fashioning a living organism by accident from the pre-biotic soup as roughly equivalent to that of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and fashioning a Boeing 747. Even the simplest one-cell bacterial cell makes a spaceship seem low-tech by comparison.

Hoyle also discovered that the carbon, the basis of all organic life, could only have been created in the original solar pressure cooker because of the perfect nuclear resonance between two sets of simpler elements. His conclusion: "A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."

Just what we always believed.

Police State

The secular powers that be always complain that the religious elements in this country are anti-democratic.

But the sad truth that anyone who lives here knows, is that the secular are even more anti-democratic than they claim the religious to be, and their own claims of democracy are just lip service.

And if that were bad enough, they run a brutish and thuggish police state!

At the time of the demonstrations against the expulsion from Gaza for example, the police used to randomly pull religious Jews from public busses "just in case" they were on their way to a demonstration.

They also used to randomly confiscate the drivers license of bus drivers "just to make sure" they would not transport Jews to demonstrations.

Not to mention the terrible police brutality that was used even against little girls.

Now, with all the LIBEL against Jews, accusing them of chopping down arab olive trees, and Olmert giving the orders to "crack down on them", it seems that the police are once again randomly arresting Jews who just happen to possess olive branches.

Jewish Man Found With Olive Branches, Arrested

Friends of the Jewish man arrested in possession of olive branches say the man was simply collecting firewood.

When is this secular tyranny going to end???

New Arutz-7 News Scroller

I have added a News Scroller courtesy of Arutz-7.

Arutz-7 offers a free daily news email service:

Receive the most up-to-date news reports from Israel sent directly to your inbox each day.

In today's fast paced media environment, you need to receive all the day's comprehensive news in a concise, easy-to-read format. Arutz Sheva's Daily Email News Summary reports the latest Israeli current events and political developments.

Currently, over 55,000 individuals worldwide receive the Daily Email News Report each day, in four languages.

Subscribe online today at http://Subscribe.IsraelNationalNews.com

With Blessings from the Holy Land,
The Arutz Sheva News Team
www.IsraelNationalNews.com

Spielberg Phone Home

An excellent article on Spielberg's Munich film by Rabbi Benjamin Blech on Aish.com

Heroes: A True Story

A gem from Aish.com

Heroes: A True Story
by Sara Yoheved Rigler
God becomes believable when life becomes unbelievable. *

Anne was an abused child. When she grew up, she did what many abused kids inexplicably do: she married a man who turned out to be an abuser. When she realized the scope of the damage her husband was inflicting on their three children, Anne took the children and fled.

Life has not been easy for Anne. Although she is a college graduate, she cannot use her diploma since she is in hiding under an assumed name. She supports her children by cleaning houses and taking in ironing.

Money is scarce. Half her meager monthly income goes to pay psychotherapists for her children. The kids, especially the boys, are aggressive, belligerent, and rebellious. They feel they got a raw deal in life. Since their father is not around, they blame their mother. It doesn't help that she has no money to give them to buy the things the other kids have, not even treats. The oldest, 14-year-old Nate, was caught stealing candy at the local supermarket.

A strong, strapping boy, Nate often gets into fights with the neighborhood kids and with his younger siblings. Verbal sparring matches between Nate and his twelve-year-old brother Donny sound like a script out of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Like many people who were abused by their fathers, Anne has a hard time forging a relationship with God. Since moving to a Jewish neighborhood and living among religious people whose lifestyle she admires, Anne has set new goals for her family. They now keep Shabbat and kashrut, and the children go to religious schools. As much as she appreciates the beauty of Judaism, however, Anne has a host of gripes against God.

"I don't blame him for the marriage," she says. "I went into that with my eyes open. But why did God have to give me such monsters for parents? And why, even now, does He have to make my life so difficult?"

Anne suffers from a battery of minor health problems. Frequently, she must choose between buying a new pair of shoes for one of the kids or paying the electric bill. The telephone company recently disconnected her telephone. "It's easier to live without a telephone than without electricity," she explains to me. "My kids are afraid of the dark."

Last Friday, Anne called me. (Someone lent her money to pay her phone bill.) "I'm about to have a nervous breakdown," she told me grimly. "On top of everything else, my iron broke. How does God expect me to earn money without my iron? And I can't afford a new one."

On Saturday night, after Shabbat, I telephoned Anne with the good news that a neighbor of mine had an extra iron which she was willing to give her. She informed me that over Shabbat the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom had broken down. She had no money to call a plumber.

"I just wish God would lighten up on me," Anne complained.

I didn't know what to say. She certainly does have a difficult lot in life, I thought. I tried desperately to summon up a spiritual perspective which would lift her out of her depression.

"God does give you a lot of challenges," I said finally. "But who knows? Even all the stuff you suffer -- the broken iron, the broken plumbing -- may be God's mercy instead of giving you something worse like..." Here I faltered. What could be worse than all the hardships she has endured?

NOTHING CHANGES; EVERYTHING CHANGES

The next morning, Sunday, Nate needed to go to the nearest big city. He stood at the entrance of their small town in order to hitch a ride. A white Mitsubishi with three women he knew stopped to pick him up. Nate got into the car and asked them where in the city they were headed.

When they told him, Nate had second thoughts. He didn't really have money for bus fare in the city. Maybe he could get a ride which would take him closer to his destination. On the other hand, maybe he couldn't. For a split second, he vacillated. Then Nate thanked the three women and got out of the car.

Five minutes later, the father of one of Nate's friends picked him up. They had traveled no more than a few minutes down the highway when the traffic stopped dead. Nate got out of the car to see what the trouble was.

He saw the road splattered with blood. Then he saw a hand lying on the road. Then a foot. Horrified, his eyes moved to the two vehicles which had collided: a bus and the white Mitsubishi, now crushed like a discarded tin can.

All three women were dead.

As soon as Nate reached the city, he called his mother. His voice was shaking. "I was in the car," he repeated over and over again. "Five minutes before the accident, I was in the car. I'm not even sure why I got out." Anne could not remember the last time she had heard Nate crying.

When Anne called me a few hours later, she was still trembling so hard I felt like the telephone wires were shaking. "Do you realize how close he came to being killed?" she asked me, trying desperately to convey her sense that her son had been miraculously plucked out of the doomed vehicle just in the nick of time.

She had one pressing question for me: "How do I thank God?"

Nothing had changed. Anne still had no money, no good job prospects, poor health, broken plumbing, and three scarred kids. But suddenly, in the split second that it takes two vehicles to collide on the highway, everything had changed. Her eldest son was alive.

She felt like a woman blessed beyond words.

GIVING IT BACK TO GOD

The accident was Sunday. On Monday evening, while Anne was washing dishes in the kitchen, her eight-year-old daughter came running in. "Mom, there's a flood."

Anne rushed upstairs to see two inches of water covering the whole upstairs floor, gushing out from under the bathroom door where Donny had gone to take a bath. All she could think of was the electronic game always sitting, plugged in, on the floor of her sons' bedroom. Yelling to her daughter to stay downstairs, she ran to the bedroom. Water covered the floor except for the corner where the game lay.

Next she ran to the bathroom. Flinging open the door, she saw Donny floating face down in the tub. Her heart stopped. She grabbed his body and yanked him out of the tub. Donny burst into laughter. He had been playing dead. He had not noticed the bathtub overflowing.

Anne took a deep breath and surveyed the damage. They were in the process of moving to a smaller apartment; packed suitcases and boxes lay all over the floor of the hallway and bedrooms. Now everything was soaked. She would have to unpack, hang up every item of clothing, every sheet and blanket, and throw away what could not be salvaged.

She returned to the bathroom and motioned Donny to come to her. Donny knew that look on his mother's face, that look of tension, of being so overwhelmed that she lost control. People often parent the way they were parented. Donny put his hand over his face and flinched.

Then something miraculous happened. More miraculous than Nate getting out of the car. More miraculous than the water not reaching the electronic game. Instead of slapping her son, Anne cradled his face in her two hands and said, "I'm really upset about all the work you caused me, and all the ruined stuff. But you're my child, and I love you no matter what you do." And she bent down and kissed his forehead.

All she could think of was: "Thank God my children are alive."

MOMENTOUS ACTIONS

That very same night, Nate was rehearsing for a school play. During the break, one of the teachers gave Nate money to go to the pizza parlor and buy pizza for all the performers.

Nate was chosen to go because he had a spiffy new bike. His aunt had sent him $250 for a super-duper bike, a Bar Mitzvah present that was a year late, because it had taken her a that long to save the money. Nate had purchased the bike, the only truly wonderful object he owned, two weeks before. Because there was no money left over to buy a lock, Nate never left the bike unattended.

That Monday night, Nate took the bike into the pizza parlor with him. A gang of kids, a year younger than Nate, was hanging out in there. Nate knew them. A couple months before he had helped these same kids drag a load of wood up a hill. He had seen them struggling, and because he was bigger, he had helped them.

When Nate turned to order the pizzas, the kids grabbed his bike, took it outside, and slammed it against a wall so hard they demolished the bike. Nate came running outside after them to find his precious bike a mangled carcass.

Nate's first thought was: "How could they do this to me? I helped them!"

His second thought was: "I want to kill them."

His third thought was: "I promised my mother I won't fight or swear anymore."

His fourth thought was: "Violence doesn't help. Even if I cream them, it won't bring my bike back."

Then Nate did something so momentous its effect will be felt for generations: Nate refrained from beating up the boys who had destroyed his bike. In so overcoming his past and his tendency toward violence, Nate picked up a machete made of his aspiration to become a better person and, with one mighty blow, severed a chain of violence which stretched back generations. The Talmud says: "Who is a hero? He who overcomes his own self."

Nate left the pizza parlor dragging the remains of his new bike. If I were a filmmaker, I would shoot the scene in slow motion, like the climax of "Chariots of Fire," when the Olympic runner breaks through the finish line. I would play a score of triumphant music in the background, with lots of trumpets. I would have fireworks going off in the night sky above Nate and his mangled bike.

And that's probably how it looked in the higher worlds. But in this physical world there was simply a tearful boy dragging home the mangled mess that had been his most prized possession.

One thing is certain: Few happenings that took place in the world that Monday night, including the events that grabbed the next morning's headlines, were as significant as Nate's and Anne's victories over violence. They are models of true heroism.

* Rabbi David Aaron, Director, Isralight

This article is featured in Aish.com's book:Heaven on Earth