Rav Dov Fischer

Shalom!

I am so grateful that you have visited my site,

and I would love to hear from you after your visit. 

 

Please click here to Contact Rav Fischer

 

Please return -- often -- because I frequently contribute new writings and commentaries as issues arise and thoughts provoke.  See, for example, my post on the foolish notion of a "Two-State Solution" in the Middle East.  And, as of June 2010, please look for expanded commentary on American affairs and the Obama Administration, as well as for  expanded commentary on a wide range of social and religious issues concerning the Jewish community.  Please click here for my latest posts* and please check out some especially popular and continually pertinent archive commentaries by their broad subject headings on the left column.  I am available to speak to Jewish groups, church groups, and secular organizations -- also to debate responsible thinkers presenting conflicting viewpoints.

 -- Rav Dov Fischer

 "We Con the World" is here

* Latest posts and published articles include:

Problem-Solvers and Butt-Kickers: Americans Elected Unknowns Without Executive Skills to Lead the Free World [published in The American Thinker  06-14-10]

- Who Chose Hamas to Lead Them? : Gazans Seek Sympathy After Voting in Terrorists Who Vow to Exterminate Jews [published in Frontpagemag.com 06-10-10]

- The Hymn of the Hamas Flotilla:  We Con the World (song) [Click Here for Places You Can Find "We Con the World"]

- Talking Turkey: Where Is the Apology to Israel or, for That Matter, to the Armenians? [published in Frontpagemag.com 06-07-10]

-  Paying Palestinians Not to Work with Jews: Why Be in Contact with Apes and Pigs When You Can Live in a Refugee Camp at Home?  [published in Frontpagemag.com 06-04-10]

- Israel After the Flotilla Debacle: Maybe the Wake-Up Call Israel Needs Before Acquiescing to a "Two-State Solution" [published in The American Thinker 06-03-10]

- Never Letting a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: Will Obama Exploit the BP Oil Fiasco to Further His Environmentalist Agenda?  [published in Frontpagemag.com 06-03-10]

- The Flotilla of the Damned: A Flotilla-for-Fun to Attila the Hun?  [published in Orange County Jewish Life 07-10]

- Judaism's View on Same-Sex Marriage: An Orthodox Perspective [published in Jewishvaluesonline.org]

- Parshat D'varim: Back to School  (first published Aug. 2008) [re-published in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles 07-16-10]

- Parshat Korach: Give Your Rabbi a Break                 [published in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles 06-08-10]

- Not This Month: On the Emanuel School Crisis in Israel [published in Cross-Currents 06-28-10]

- A few thoughts on the UCI Muslim Student Union's annual Hate Israel Week

- An Open Letter to Jumanah Imad Albahri, the UCSD student who, with two words -- "For It" -- overnight became the poster child for anti-Jewish hate and bigotry in America

Visit the Song Six Times: This morning’s news carries the story that Israel, under pressure from butchers and hypocrites around the world, has apologized for sending the media a link to the viral YouTube hit “We Con the World.” Since Israel's ardent goal is to disassociate from the YouTube hit, perhaps the best step we can take to do our part, to help extend the impact of Israel's apology and to reflect our own shame as Jews that Israel could have done such a terrible thing to offend the feelings and sensitivities of Hamas and the Government that committed Genocide murdering 1.5 million Armenians between 1915-1918, is to revisit the video at YouTubesix times per person – one for each IDF soldier who was severely wounded by the peaceful travelers whose reality will never come to your TV -- and perhaps to urge everyone we know to also register our shame that Israel distributed the film by making six visits to the website today to see the truth that will never come to your TV.

KOCE-TV DEBATE: Rabbi Dov Fischer debates Hussam Ayloush, West Coast Regional Director of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), on issues ranging from Israel, the Middle East, and the anti-Israel student disruptions at UCI -- 13 fascinating minutes! Click here.

 

THE L.A. YESHIVA TEEN WHO REMINDS ME OF THE 1989 HERO IN FRONT OF THE TANK IN TIANANMEN SQUARE: If you have not yet seen what this lone Yeshiva High School teen did Wednesday in Los Angeles, click here , sit down for goose-bumps.   Then enroll your kid in a yeshiva.

 

Featured Articles of the Month - The Top Dozen or So: Please click here.

 

This Home Page also contains five major articles -- (i) on the "Two State Solution" proposed for the Middle East, (ii) on Jerusalem, (iii) on telling the world that we do not care anymore what they think, (iv) on the primacy of devoting a lifetime to aspire towards self-improvement and personal growth, in order to  foster living by Judaism's ethical standards in business and personal conduct, and (v) on the evils of slander and loshon horo -- appear in full text on this Home Page immediately below the ten bullet-pointed "Featured Articles of the Month."  They are considered by many to be five of my most important and timeless articles for all seasons in all years. These articles also appear elsewhere on this site.

 

For information on Rav Dov Fischer's groundbreaking part-time "Open Yeshiva" for O.C. Teens please click here.

  Featured Articles 

Featured Articles

 of the Month

 

The five articles below may be copied and distributed as long as:

(i) attribution is given to this website [www.ravfischer.com] as its source, 

 and (ii) no editing or other modification is done to the article in any way.

 

TWO STATE

 Grand Pyramid Scheme:

The Two-State Solution

As Final Solution

 

(Click here for a printable version of this study.)

   250px-Fatah-logo by karimii.         

     FATAH LOGO          HAMAS LOGO

    [note background:         [note top center:

       map of entire                map of entire

     pre-1967 Israel             pre-1967 Israel

    plus "West Bank,"         plus "West Bank,"

     Gaza, and Golan]          Gaza, and Golan]

 

 

                     

      Logo of P.L.O.        Logo of P.L.O.
       (English)                 (Arabic)
  [
note lower center:       [note lower center:

       map of entire                map of entire

     pre-1967 Israel             pre-1967 Israel

    plus "West Bank,"         plus "West Bank,"

     Gaza, and Golan]          Gaza, and Golan]

 

The Two-State Solution is indeed the most immoral suggestion of them all. It is a lie built on a foundation of mendacity. And, with it now having been sanctified in the President's Cairo Speech in Egypt, it can be termed The Grand Pyramid Scheme.

Back in President Barack Obama’s America, the laws on the books clearly prohibit people from telling African Americans that, "sorry, you can’t live in this neighborhood." Does anyone doubt that Justice
Sotomayor would uphold those laws?

The Bigotry of Banning Jews from Living in a Region

Imagine how many American communities over the years could have  resolved their racial issues simply by agreeing that Blacks need to be removed completely from "White neighborhoods," and Whites removed from "Black neighborhoods."   Maybe James von Brunn would not have gone on a shooting rampage at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum if there were a compromise agreement that Jews may not establish residential communities in or near Washington, D.C.  Separate but equal.  Quite a concept!

Only, that's a racist concept. Part of America's greatness is that we  evolved as a society over two centuries to reject that concept. See, e.g., Brown v. Board of Educ. of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686 (1954), overruling Plessy v. Ferguson,
163 U.S. 537; 16 S. Ct. 1138 (1896). Similarly, we are appalled by the bigotry in the Middle Ages and into the 1940s marked by governments segregating Jews from communities in Germany, Poland, Austria, or Hungary -- say, to relocate them into their own ghettoes. And it is equally bigoted today to advocate a public policy that forcibly would segregate Jews from communities in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") or anywhere else in Israel. But that bigotry-- what else can it be called? -- ironically defines the Obama Administration's Mideast program, now being pushed hard by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and being sold to American Jews in private meetings with the President's Jewish chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It is a policy aimed at ethnically cleansing Jews out of a region in the world, rendering it Judenrein. And it is a policy whose moral failing further is eroded by the colossal transformation of historical fact into hysterical fiction unfolding before our very eyes.

"Palestine" Is Another Name for Israel,

and That Entirety Is the Land that "Palestinian Arabs" Want for Their "Palestine" Country --

Not a "West Bank" Without a Name

The "West Bank" is not the west bank of anything. There is no waterway, ocean, sea, or river in Hebron or Tekoah or Karnei Shomron or Ariel. Nor in Shiloh, Maaleh Adumim, Beitar, Shechem, Gush Etzyon, or Beit Lechem (Bethlehem). The nomenclature is fallacious, itself reflecting history's great cover-up: There is no such thing as an "Arab Palestinian Homeland." That land always has been Jewish, except when it was up for grabs like a basketball "jump ball." The Arabs never came down with that ball to put it into play.

There is no "Palestinian people," and the only “Palestine” that ever existed was synonymous with the Jewish homeland that later was renamed "Israel." Rent a copy of the movie "Exodus.” Listen dispassionately to the dialogue. Don't take sides. Just listen for definitions. The British, fairly or unfairly, are depicted as the bad guys in the movie, trying to keep the Jews out of "Palestine." Paul Newman is trying to get the Jews into "Palestine." Everyone watching the movie perceives that "Palestine" is a name that refers synonymously with "Israel." Thus, what we seem to have here is a failure to communicate. It could not be simpler: For the past two thousand years, since the Romans renamed the land as they expelled and exiled its Jews, "Israel" always was "Palestine," and "Palestine" always was "Israel."

There never ever was an Arab Palestine entity. Who, after all, ever was its leader? Try to name any leader who ever in history led the sovereign "Palestinian Arab" people of "Arab Palestine." What year was it founded? What was the name of its capital city -- any capital city? Where is the drawing or photograph of its seat of government, or the place where its governmental leader lived? What was the name of its currency? Whose face, what slogan was on that currency? When did it fall? In which Olympic Games did it compete? Which issue of Encyclopedia Britannica had an entry for its government? Can anyone answer any one of these questions?  Anyone? Anyone?

Consider this way:  The American city of Palestine, Texas was founded in 1846.  It was so named in honor of an early settler there, Daniel Parker, who hailed from Palestine, Illinois.  That Palestine was charted in 1811.  It drew its name in 1678 from the French explorer, Jean LaMotte, who looked at the land and named it "Palestine" because it reminded him of the Biblical Promised Land of the Jews, flowing with milk and honey.  No one associated "Palestine" with the Arab community, not even in the 1600s.  Rather, the name was associated with the Jews and their Biblical Promised Land.  The same with Palestine, Arkansas and East Palestine, Ohio.   

"Palestinian Refugee Camps" and Logo Images Now Worn by Their Terror Groups Remind That the Goal Remains Now As When the  "P.L.O. -- Palestine Liberation Organization" was founded in 1964: to "Liberate Palestine" by Conquering and Destroying Israel

The "West Bank" and Gaza were theirs for the taking in 1964. But they did not want it. The PLO's founder, Ahmed Shukairy, and Yasser Arafat his successor wanted pre-1967 Israel. To this day, the logo on their stationery and on their respective terrorist uniforms is that of pre-1967 Israel. "Palestine" in the "West Bank" only? Two states? It is such a fabrication, such a lie. Just look at the facts on their ground: Understand that they have built “Palestinian Refugee Camps” in Jenin, in the "West Bank." How can a real people ("Palestinians") in their own real land ("Palestine") living under their own government (the "Palestine Authority") be dwelling in "refugee camps" in their own land? Similarly, how can they have Palestine "refugee camps" in Gaza, now that the land is under sovereign Hamas control?  These actual open facts on the ground evidence the mendacity, the lies, stuff, and nonsense.

Webster says that a "refugee" is "one who, in times of persecution or political commotion, flees to a foreign power or country for safety; as, the French refugees who left France after the revocation of the edict of Nantes." Merriam-Webster, in pertinent part, says that a "refugee" is "an individual who has left his or her native country and is unwilling or unable to return to it . . . ."  So: are these Arabs residing in Jenin and Gaza "refugee camps" indeed refugees -- these "Palestinians" living in the "West Bank" and Gaza under the "Palestinian Authority"? If so, from where do those "Palestinian" refugees originally hail? If the "West Bank" and Gaza are not the "homeland" to which they yearn so that they someday may be "liberated" from their "refugee" status -- well, where is their "homeland"? The answer could not be more clear and manifest: In the "West Bank" and Gaza they are "refugees." The "West Bank" is not their home, they know it, and they evidence it. They want Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. That is the home they ultimately seek, in their effort inexorably to destroy Israel. And that is the reason that no "Palestinian" leader can utter the words: "Yes, in any final peace agreement, we will recognize the land set aside for Israel as a Jewish nation-state."

And no amount of Jew-to-Jew lobbying by Rahm Emanuel can change the facts.  Rather, the integrity of the Jewish American community is compromised by the insult and patronizing attitude that presupposes a community can be influenced to act against its own interest merely by sending it an emissary who presents himself as "one of our own."  In Black America, there is a sad history of Caucasian carpetbaggers working through the quintessential "Uncle Tom."  We do not need an "Uncle Rahm."

Zionism Humanely Avoided the Moral Failings of America -- Itself the Greatest Beacon of Freedom Ever Created -- by Seeking to Build Fraternally Alongside Landed Neighbors Rather than to Force-and-Death-March Them into "Reservations" of Internal Exile

In America, we do have a variation on "internal refugee camps." They are called "Indian reservations" or "reservations for Native Americans," and they reflect not only adversely but deeply shamefully on those who put them there: American governments like that of the Andrew Jackson Administration, whose Government adopted and implemented terrible, horrible crimes of conscience against the Native Americans. This country's highest elected leaders, in full and open view, at some point 150-200 years ago made a chilling determination that has been swept from the American national conscience and institutional memory: For the United States, founded inexorably as a White European settler polity, to survive and flourish, with its borders open to new immigrants from around the world, there would need to be a complete and forcible uprooting and expulsion of the native American population -- "Indian Removal."  For example, "it will relieve the whole state of Mississippi, and the western part of Alabama, of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of Whites . . . enable them to pursue happiness in their own way, and under their own rude institutions . . . and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government, and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits, and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community."

Consequently, Native Americans were uprooted from Florida, from North Carolina, from Georgia, from states that many Americans today cannot imagine housed Native Americans. Their land was forcibly seized. Treaties and land contracts with them were breached notoriously and brazenly, torn up unilaterally, and they were forced on Hitler-like mass death marches to places "reserved" for them. This really happened in America. America did this, implemented in the open by our highest echelons and without mercy, to displace and uproot the Native American population.

I
t is deeply painful to visit the "Trail of Tears." Or to learn certain details of the Second Seminole War. There are monuments all along the miles and miles where the Native Americans walked their death marches. And they were resettled into reservations with such sops as permission to run casino gambling free from government interference.

That is what America did after our Government determined that, to create the kind of country envisioned by the Founding Fathers -- a country that truly has emerged in history as the greatest and most kind, benevolent, and charitable country that people ever have created, with the greatest respect and love for freedom and decency that any society ever has registered -- "those people had to go."  In all, by the time the U.S. federal government had ended "allotment" in 1934, that policy had cost Native Americans at least 90 million acres of their land, two-thirds of the land they had owned half a century earlier. Kenneth H. Bobroff, "Retelling Allotment: Indian Property Rights and the Myth of Common Ownership," 54 Vanderbilt L. Rev. 1559, 1561 & n.5 (2001) (citing
OFFICE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEP’T OF THE INTERIOR, INDIAN LAND TENURE, ECONOMIC STATUS AND POPULATION TRENDS 6 (1935)).

Today we compound the shame by designating our Native Americans as mascots for our sports teams: Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, Florida State Seminoles, Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Black Hawks.

But Israel never did that. As Jews lived in a land that was and has been our patrimony for 3,000 years, we engaged Arabs as neighbors. We engaged the Arab community with respect.  We desired to build with them.  So we encouraged their participation in our society, in our government, in our Parliament. Yes, Israel would be a Jewish nation-state, in a world that already recognizes more than twenty Arab states.  There are so many Arab countries, even with names like United Arab Emirates, that they even have an Arab League. And for us, as Jews, there is one country to which we trace our heritage and legacy. Until 1948 it was called "Palestine," and "Palestine" was renamed "Israel" when the country became independent.

Only One Jewish Homeland: Passionately Loved Without Interruption and Yearned-for Through 2,000 Years of Exile

This land of "Palestine" or "Israel" always has been the Jewish homeland. For 2,000 years -- from the time that the ancient Roman Empire conquered Jerusalem, expelled Jews from the Land, and re-named the land "Palestina" to eradicate its Jewish character in the popular memory -- to this day we have continued praying three times daily for a return to Palestine/Israel. We fasted several times every year in tearful memory of events that led to Jews being exiled from the land 2,600 years ago by the Babylonians and again 2,000 years ago by the ancient Romans. We adopted customs, at the core of our Jewish identity, to remember Palestine/Israel. So, in all our prayers these past 2,000 years, we have faced Palestine/Israel during our prayers. We literally coordinate our synagogue architecture to assure that we pray facing Palestine/Israel. In America, we pray facing East, and in Russia we pray facing West. In Africa, we pray facing North.

At all our weddings for these past 2,000 years, the groom breaks a glass under the wedding canopy in memory of the destruction of the Holy Temple in East Jerusalem and the exile from Palestine/Israel. When we visit someone whose relative has died, we console the mourner with our hopeful prayer: "May [G-d], the One Who is in Every Place, console you among the rest [of us], who mourn for [the fall 2,000 years ago] of Zion and Jerusalem." As we dance with the bride and groom, we sing -- as we have sung for 2,000 years-- "There yet again will be heard in cities throughout Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem the sounds of rejoicing and sounds of happiness, the sound of the groom and the sound of the bride." For 2,000 years we have taken a day out of our lives each summer to mourn for the fall of Jerusalem: devoting the night and day to reciting tearful lamentations, fasting, crying, dimming our lights for much of the day, refusing to sit comfortably on chairs but instead sitting on the floor or overturned chairs. For 2,000 years we have left partially unpainted a section of every home in which we have lived, partially incomplete to remind us that East Jerusalem, with her Temple destroyed, is partially incomplete. Even after our every meal, we have recited a prayer for 2,000 years asking that G-d restore and rebuild Jerusalem.

Do Americans -- the deepest, most patriotic of my countrymen -- know the precise day on which the British burned down the White House during the Madison Administration in the course of the War of 1812? The Temple in Jerusalem was burned on the Ninth Day of Av. How do we Americans commemorate that incineration of the White House? Jews have never forgotten the eternal connection with the Land of Israel. And Jews continued living in that land. In 1929, Arab marauders still were perpetrating massacres, trying to remove Jews, for once and for all, from the City of Hebron, the City where our Biblical ancestors -- Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah -- lie interred at the Cave of Makhpelah. New waves of Arab massacres from 1936-1939 sought to drive Jews out of Shechem/Nablus.  Within half a century, Jews were back.

Again.

In an Era of Mass Population Exchanges, the Arab World Hatefully Drove out 700,000 Jews and Confiscated All Their Property and Assets, Even as Israelis Pleaded with Their Arab Neighbors to Remain and Build a New Western Democracy Together

And yet, as a Jewish State was coming into being, we sought to live in peace with Arabs living there. Jews in Israel still seek to live in peace with them. Even as they forcibly expelled as many as 700,000 Jews from the various and respective Arab lands, lands like Yemen and Morocco, Syria and Iraq -- driving them out, confiscating their land and portable property, confiscating their liquid assets, driving them into exile between the late 1930s and early 1950s -- Israel was pleading with landed Arabs to remain within her borders, to remain and live side-by-side in peace.

Maybe many of those Arab residents would have remained behind if leaders of the invading Arab armies did not impel them to leave, to abandon their homes, essentially to get the heck out of the darned way during the planned extermination of the nascent Jewish State, as the Arab legions marched on Palestine/pre-Israel to drive the "Jews into the sea."

Many Arabs did indeed flee, as a result. They opted to get out of the way. Not as many Arabs left Israel as the number of Jews who forcibly were driven out of the Arab lands at the time. But many left. Perhaps 400,000. Perhaps more. And the vast majority of those who chose to leave departed not from Gaza nor from the "West Bank" but from the core of Israel itself. That is why they do not perceive a "Palestine homeland" in the "West Bank" or Gaza as their home, as a resolution of anything. It would be like telling someone who fled France, for one reason or another, that he will be "restored" to a "home" in neighboring Germany.
Imagine your own situation: you have been forced out of your home, perhaps by a force majeure, in Teaneck, New Jersey or Brooklyn, New York -- and your insurance company offers you a replacement home in Boise, Idaho or Butte, Montana. Is that "good enough" a replacement, given that it all is in the same country? So, how does a "home" in Berlin restore exile from Paris? And how does a "home" in Bethlehem restore a perceived exile from Tel Aviv or Haifa?  Those questions' answers are the reasons that the logo of the uniform is what it is, why the "refugee camps" are where they are, and why the "Two-State Solution" fails by ignoring the reality that "Palestinian Arabs" cannot accept Tel Aviv, Haifa, and West Jerusalem as "Jewish."

Those Arabs who left Israel could have stayed. The Jews asked them to stay. Unlike the 700,000 Jews who were driven into exile from homes in Arab lands, those Arabs were not driven out. Unlike Native Americans, they were not driven off their lands. And unlike other exiles, they were put into concentration environments -- Arab "refugee camps" -- by their own people.

While the nascent State of Israel gamely was constructing a home and frantically was working to absorb the huge influx of landless, destitute Jewish exiles and refugees from Arab lands, the Arab world was building concentration camps and reservations for their own people, fellow Arabs, where those emigres would languish. Half a century later, while the Jewish refugees from Arab lands have seen their children become doctors and computer programmers, world leaders, attorneys, business moguls, plumbers, contractors, entertainment executives, and anything else out there, the children of those Arab emigres have become the victims of the world's most heinous example of cynical self-hatred. They remain in "refugee camps" that are historical anomalies and today are thoroughly anachronistic. They remain on international welfare, under the rubric of a cynically anti-Jewish United Nations agency, the "United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East" (UNRWA), which runs the camps and their schools, and has a vested interest -- namely, preserving their own existence, preserving their own continued employment and pay checks, presefving their jobs -- in perpetuating the historical crime of refusing to let the residents be absorbed into their local environments.

During the last century, the world has seen so many tragically painful "population exchanges" play themselves out on the world stage. Greek ethnics were forced out of Bulgaria and into Greece, while Bulgarian ethnics were forced from Greece into Bulgaria. In 1922, under the League of Nations, 1.25 million Greek Orthodox ethnics were transferred from Turkey, and half a million Moslems were transferred reciprocally to Turkey from Greece. Fridtjof Nansen, the guy who oversaw the population exchange, was awarded the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize for his effort. In 1940, under the Treaty of Craiova, there was a massive population exchange: 80,000 Romanian ethnics were forced into Bulgaria, and 65,000 Bulgarian ethnics forced out of Romania. After World War II, between 14-16 million ethnic Germans were transferred out of Central and Eastern Europe, and into Germany. Poland and the Soviet Union exchanged populations: between 1944 and 1946, some 2 million people, Polish ethnics sent to Poland from the Ukraine and Ukrainians sent out of Poland, were transferred. More than 5 million Hindus and Sikhs were forced to India from the regions that became Pakistan, and more than 6 million Moslems were pushed out of India and into Pakistan.

The Cynicism of the Fabricated

"Palestinian Refugee Problem" . . .

Where are the languishing Bulgarian refugee camps? Greek refugee camps? Romanian refugee camps? Polish refugee camps? German refugee camps? Ukrainian refugee camps? Hindu/Sikh refugee camps? Where are the Bosnian Moslem refugee camps?  Why is there no massive international welfare apparatus in the rubric of a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the [Bulgarian/Greek/ Romanian/Polish/German/Ukrainian/Hindu/Sikh/Bosnian/Vietnamese/ Cambodian/Rwandan/Darfur] refugees?

How is it that no one even thinks to ask?

And is it comprehensible that, at a time of national economic challenge within America, the United States funds more than one fourth the cost of this nonsense to the tune of nearly $100 million annually? By contrast, Saudi Arabia funds less than one percent ($2.5 million), and Kuwait less than that. Can there be anything that evidences more forcefully how cynical this entire mendacity is?  The OPEC oil cartel raises our oil costs to the point of disrupting our national economy, and we responsively fund a massive, multi-national welfare infrastructure for those of their people whom they, unique among all countries into which emigrants have sought haven,  have confined to concentration centers for more than half a century.

What people holds and concentrates its own brothers and sisters in "refugee camps" for half a century and more? And, to make matters more bizarre, these people in the UNRWA "Palestinian refugee camps" are the descendants of those who departed their homes voluntarily, gambling that their departure would facilitate the Arab Legions' rapid success in obliterating the Jewish presence from the face of the earth, driving the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, it was their leading spiritual leader of the time -- Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem -- who overtly and demonstratively allied the pan-Arab cause with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.  Yet, people who have persecuted the Berber minority of Algeria, the Coptic Christian minority of Egypt, the Bahai minority of Iran, Christians in Saudi Arabia -- even enslaving Black Christians in the Sudan -- would have the temerity to equate Zionism with racism and to compare Zionists to Nazis.  There are nations and peoples who, over the centuries, have ventured into Africa and forcibly expatriated tens of thousands of Black Africans to become slaves in theirs and others' countries on other continents.  But in all the world, in all of human history, Israel is the only country that ever expended national human and financial resources, risking her citizens' lives in daring midnight sorties and dangerous trans-continental rescue missions, aimed at liberating tens of thousands of Black Africans from persecution and bringing them out of Africa ,  out from slavery and into freedom

. . . And the Cynicism of Imposing on Israel a "Two State Solution" in the Face of America's Long-Term Commitments and Repeated Promises to a Time-Tested Friend and Ally

So what "Two-State Solution" are President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Rahm Emanuel talking about?

The irony is that this pressure from President Obama and Secretary Clinton comes at a time when not a single prominent political leader on the Israeli political scene even advocates building new Jewish communities ("settlements") in Judea and Samaria. There rarely before has been a more pliable Israeli government. All Bibi Netanyahu advocates, minimalistic and inadequate though it be, is the right for Jews to expand within a legal community for natural increase.

And even that now is to be proscribed, despite understandings with the prior American President and his Administration that America would respect that Israeli right if Israel would agree to abandon Gaza and pursue other parts of the ill-conceived "Road Map" structured by former President George W. Bush and his foreign affairs expert, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

So Israel ceded Gaza, and the Road Map played out by extending all of democracy's virtues to the now-liberated
Gazans. Freed to vote their hearts' content, they elected into office the worst terrorist goons freely elected to a democracy's high office since the National Socialists got out the vote in 1933 Germany. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, refuses to live in peace with Israel, and refuses to recognize prior signed treaties with Israel. Now, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Mr. Emanuel emulate Hamas in one of the three critical immoralities: they unilaterally abandon America's prior policy and refuse to abide by America’s understanding of the past that, if Israel compromises by ceding Gaza, she nevertheless may expand already established communities in Judea-Samaria to allow for natural increase.

For a team with the demonstrated ability to pull isolated passages from the Quran, it would be instructive to refresh consciences by recalling a few passages of the agreements that President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon reached, with the exchanges amplified between their respective advisors Condoleezza Rice and Dov Weisglas. America expressly contracted in writing to recognize new post-1949 and post-1967 realities: namely, that Israel now has major population centers in areas in Judea and Samaria, and therefore there will be no returning to the 1967 borders.

Nor does anyone else in the Judea-Samaria ("West Bank") region have a better, more legitimate claim to the land than does Israel. Mexico has a better claim to California and Texas than the terrorists of Fatah and Hamas have to Judea and Samaria. At least Mexico can tell you the years they were sovereign there, the Mexican governmental leaders who oversaw the land, the currency they circulated there, and the years that Mexico lost sovereignty over their land in California and Texas.

Pressuring Israel to Abandon Her Security While Turning a Blind Eye, Deaf Ear, and Silent Tongue Towards a Concerted Vitriolic Hate Campaign Against Jews That Has Poisoned Children's Minds and Adults' Hearts Through the Next Generation, Even as the Hate Campaign Materially Has Breached and Thus Has Rendered Void and Nugatory Every Israel-Arab Treaty

There is more, so much more. America expressly contracted -- in writing -- that, if Israel were to cede Gaza, America would require that Abbas and his "Palestinian Authority" stop the hate-filled anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement among the population he leads: the hate-filled TV telecasts, the hate-filled radio broadcasts, the hate-filled summer camps, the newspapers of hate and their crossword puzzles of hate, the school textbooks of hate. Yet the hate continues unabated. Even teaching hate to the youngest of children. There is no comment or condemnation by President Obama or Secretary Clinton, and Rahm Emanuel continues unabated as point man for selling the "Two-State Solution" to American Jewish groups.

No Israeli relinquishing of land to Mahmoud Abbas or
Hamas will bring anything but more Jewish suffering and more Jewish vulnerability, as the weapons Hamas placed in Gaza to ruin life in Israel's South (Sderot, Ashdod, Ashkelon) and the weapons Hezbollah placed in South Lebanon to reach into Israel's northern coastal plain (Haifa, Hadera) next aim to bring the cities of Tel Aviv under rocket fire exposure from Samaria and Jerusalem from Judea.

This is the reality on the ground -- so different from the effort painted by propagandists to score points.  Just as so much is confused about the everyday physical interface between Israelis and Arabs living in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank").  Understandably, when a foreign visitor sees long lines of "West Bank" Arabs waiting to be permitted through Israeli security check points to enter pre-1967 Israel, the delay seems curious.  "Why does Israel subject them to such intense inspection?" the visitor wonders.  "How terrible the life under 'occupation!'"

 

Well, a closer look reveals that terrorists -- with a proven record of bringing mass murder -- cross through those borders, too.  Some are armed with body explosives.  Others carry minuscule portions of explosives that, when combined with other minuscule items smuggled by other terror couriers in their cell, have caused horrific tragedy in the past.  And that is the reason for the security fence and the long, long, slow, slow lines at that fence. The fence  was built to reduce the carnage.  Indeed, upon reflection, is the experience of body inspections at that border all that different from the way that America treats aliens coming across our southern border?  Or through our airports?  To get into a domestic flight, even American citizens are expected to remove all their metal items -- even keys, pens, nickels, even a dime.  And even octogenarian travelers -- every single one of them -- have to remove their shoes for inspection.  And elderly people with heart pacemakers have to subject themselves to individualized security checking, full-body wanding.  As do people who have had metal splints or rods inserted into their limbs during surgery.

 

Meanwhile, in Israel, every Jewish Israeli must subject himself to inspection regularly throughout each day. Israelis must open their bags and purses for inspection, and submit to metal-detector body searches every time they enter a bank or post office, pick up a bottle of milk at the supermarket, enter a mall or train station, or visit a hospital or medical clinic. Young Israeli men and women are frisked closely and methodically before they enter nightclubs. These daily "humiliations" extend to body searches at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and even when attending regular synagogue services. Similarly, Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are surrounded by perimeter fences, with armed guards at schoolyard gates. By contrast, Arab schools and villages do not require such fences. Guards are not required at Arab shops, cafes, restaurants, movie theaters, wedding halls or schools. Arabs in the "West Bank" do not need armed guards to accompany their every school trip or youth movement hike -- because they are not targets of terrorism. Thus, the claim that Israel treats Arabs unfairly when slowly securing the safety as people enter pre-1967 Israel from the "West Bank" is mendacious.  Israel is fair and reasonable to them -- why else would they be lining up, seeking entry? (One does not see Jews lining up to enter Libya or Syria.)

 

The Facts on the Ground: Every Israeli Retreat Has Invited Anti-West Arab Terrorists to Arm and Militarize, Rain Unprecedented Destruction, and Launch New Deadly Battle Fronts of Rocket Fire at Israeli Cities That Previously Had Been Secure

In Israel, there are Orthodox religionists who debate with Jewish secularists whether Jews ever, under any circumstances, may depart from land that G-d promised in the Torah to the Jewish Patriarchs. That is a debate that fascinates and engages religionists (in whose number I am counted). "Realists," by contrast, simply need to look at the facts on the ground: Israel ceded land in Southern Lebanon in return for promises of peace. Instead, Hezbollah seized the region and has turned it into a rocket-firing gallery aimed at Israel. Israel ceded land in Gaza in return for promises of peace. Instead, Hamas seized the region and has turned it into a rocket-firing gallery aimed at Israel. Every single fact on the ground evidences that any Israeli cession to Abbas in Judea or Samaria will create a new front of incessant rocket barrage, and will add yet another rabidly anti-American, anti-West polity in the Middle East, which will arm itself and be armed by Iran and her cohorts.

If Israel retreats from any land in Judea or Samaria, it first will fall into the hands of Mahmoud Abbas, who lived a life as Arafat's Number Two (ancient history?), denies there was a Holocaust as described by Western historians (recent history?), and who explicitly rejects the notion that Israel can be called a "Jewish State" (this week's history).
And he and his Fatah terrorists are the least of the problem because they already are out-polled among their residents by
Hamas, who won the last election -- freedom, democracy, as promised under the Road Map's vision -- and who transparently are bent on destroying Israel (as well as Abbas himself).

The Grand "Two-State" Pyramid Scheme should remain in Cairo and at the Pyramids. The "Two-State Solution" is nothing but another term for a "Final Solution."

We Jews do not do so well with Final Solutions.

 

.

JERSUALEM

Los Angeles Jewish Journal

November 2, 2007

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/searchview.php?id=18431

We Have the Right

to an Indivisible Jerusalem

Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky invites a forthright open dialogue, a conversation about Jerusalem. Contemplating Israeli talks with those governing the autonomous Arab enclaves of Judea and Samaria -- Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestine Authority -- Rabbi Kanefsky writes that it is time for us to be honest about the story of Jerusalem. Employing the pages of The Jewish Journal, he particularly challenges those in the Orthodox Zionist community to converse, to be honest about Jerusalem.

I accept his invitation in these pages for this dialogue, for this discussion, for this honest telling of our claim to an eternally undivided capital city of Jerusalem.

Ever since I learned to pray, I learned about Jerusalem. In time as a boy, I learned to pray three times every day in my "Sh'moneh Esrai" prayer for the return to and the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. Since childhood, every time I have eaten a meal with bread, I have recited prayers of thanks for the food -- and for the rebuilding of united Jerusalem. If I eat a cookie, I follow with a prayer of thanks -- and for the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

I am not unique. For 2,000 years and more, my people have cried for Jerusalem and laughed for her. As much as I have come to love America in my lifetime -- because this country has been so good to me and my people -- I have no clue what day on the calendar the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. But I know that it was on the ninth of Av that the Babylonians burned the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. And it was the same day that Rome burned the rebuilt Temple.

This is where honesty begins in my dialogue with Rabbi Kanefsky. It may sound militaristic to him or strangely uncompromising. But my claim to Jerusalem is eternal and unyielding to a Jerusalem indivisible and united, because no one in my family line, going back to the beginning of the exile, ever yielded our claim to Jerusalem.

We were driven out by Babylonians, and we outlasted them and returned. We were exiled by Romans, and we outlasted them and returned. They built an Arch of Titus in Italy to glorify in taking down our Jerusalem, and we have outlived them and their empire, and we have returned.

We got married, and we broke a glass under the chuppah to remember a Jerusalem that had fallen, even as we recited the blessing moments earlier under that same canopy that the day will come when, once again, the sounds of joy and gladness, the celebrations of the groom and bride, will be heard in Jerusalem and her outskirts.

No one compromises on capital cities. America moved her capital around -- from Philadelphia to New York to Washington, D.C. -- but she never offered to split it with the British or Jefferson Davis. No one offers to split Damascus or Beirut or Cairo or Baghdad for peace. No one offers to split Paris or London or Madrid or Prague.

Even the experience with Berlin is instructive. The world forced onto the Germans -- veritably shoved it right down their throats -- the division of Berlin. It barely lasted half a century before the wall came down and the city was reunited.

We owe no apologies, no explanations. From 1948 to 1967, King Hussein of Jordan wrongfully was regnant over East Jerusalem. He made no effort to treat it as New Amman. Nor did any Arab ruler in all of history before him ever act to make Jerusalem a capital.

Jerusalem simply was not and never has been all that central to Arabia or Islam. Muslim prayers are directed toward Mecca and Medina. By contrast, praying from my locus in Southern California, I face east toward Jerusalem.

There is a corruption in the dialogue when I am challenged to speak "honestly" in defense of my right to see Jerusalem remain the eternally indivisible capital of Israel and the Jewish People. The Jews came back to Jerusalem with no less right than did America march to Washington, D.C.

If there is something wrong with entering a city by liberating it in battle, then it was equally wrong for any Arab conqueror before Israel to have entered the same city. But if a military victory places Arab negotiators at the table and drives out the British, who drove out the Ottomans, then a Jewish army's successful victory in a war of self-defense trumps all other secular-based claims to "right over might."

Because, despite any revisionist attempt to rewrite what happened in 1967, the fact remains that Israel was not looking to expand her borders but to live. And in 1948, she compromised so much more than any other nation has compromised, just to gain the ratification of a U.N. body that never has been in Israel's pocket.

Rabbi Kanefsky's call for honest conversation, for honesty from Orthodox Zionists, is an invitation to recall how the dialogue even came to begin. It began because Jews and our institutions and landmarks were driven out by marauders. And the Arab world, primarily the Jordanians, aimed to eradicate what was left.

There were synagogues in Jerusalem -- the Ramban Synagogue, the Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, shuls all over East Jerusalem -- that Jordan razed to the ground. They converted one venerable shul to a cheese factory, another to a stall for goats. They uprooted tombstones from the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives and used them for pavement, for construction, even for latrines. They banned us from the Western Wall.

Jerusalem belonged to my ancestors. It belonged to my grandparents in Poland and Russia. It belongs to me. That's the honest story.



 

Whole World Wrong

The Jewish Forward  

April 19, 2002

We're Right,

the Whole World's Wrong

By DOV FISCHER

"The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraw. I don't think the whole world, including the friends of the Israeli people and government, can be wrong."

— Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General,

speaking in Madrid, Spain

At this moment in time, many Jews who love and support Israel hear the soft voice within, asking the question to which Kofi Annan recently alluded in Madrid: Can we alone be right, while the whole world around is wrong?

The evidence that we are standing on the other side of the "whole world" is manifest. The Arab League is united in condemnation, and Egyptian students march for an end to their country's diplomatic relations with Israel that were engraved at Camp David. The United Nations Security Council roundly condemns Israel several times in mere weeks, and its human rights commission again takes up the Durban chant against Zionism that was silenced by September 11. The European Union is rife with talk of boycotting the Jewish state. Synagogue attacks in France give vent to the feeling expressed with gentility by the French diplomat who termed Israel "that sh—-y little state." All three major political parties in Germany vie to lead their nation in condemning Israel. England accuses Israel of using British-made tanks illegally. Mobs attack Jews from Ukraine to Belgium to the Netherlands. The pope condemns Israel for its military presence outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, while armed Arab terrorists repose inside, holding monks and nuns as icons for terror.

We Jews are bemused. Are we the only ones who see the unrelenting suicide bombings of women and children at pizza stores, of teenagers at a discotheque, of families at a Seder celebration? After 19 months of slaughter at open-air fruit markets and bus stations and bat mitzvah parties, deadly shootings of motorists, stabbings of school children in caves, has no one seen this but us? Do we alone notice that the attacks target Jewish and Arab civilians alike throughout pre-June 1967 Israel, from Haifa to Hadera, West Jerusalem to Beersheba?

The whole world demands Israel take risks for peace with Yasser Arafat — again. Are we the only ones who perceive that, after he was conferred a Nobel peace prize and given authority to create a new polity and a new atmosphere for coexistence, he desecrated the next eight years by wielding television to inculcate grotesque images of murder, radio to disseminate a culture of hate, schools and summer camps to train young people to murder the Jews they were being taught to hate? Can no one but us decipher the receipts he signed, authorizing funds to purchase weapons of terror?

The whole world endorses President Bush's call for war against terrorists and those who harbor them. The United States invades Afghanistan to uproot the infrastructure of terror and hunkers down there for seven months, preparing to extend the incursion into Pakistan. Aerial bombs strafe cities. Thousands of civilian non-combatants are believed dead. The Taliban government crumbles, but the incursion continues. We must find Osama bin Laden. We must find Mullah Omar. We must reach Daniel Pearl's killers. And we yet shall begin the mother of all incursions into Iraq.

We Jews see this. We also see the same "whole world" roundly condemn Israel for its incursion into a jungle of terror. Israel will not drop incendiary payloads from the air on civilians, so Israeli reservists, husbands and fathers, die in house-to-house fighting in Jenin, where the terrorists booby-trap buildings, station snipers and outfit children as human bombs. Israel asks that Arafat turn over the assassins of an Israeli cabinet minister and the mastermind of the Karine-A affair that tried to smuggle 50 tons of explosives to his minions. But the whole world wants Israel instead to pull back while the bombers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade and the Tanzim play for time. Doesn't the whole world see what we see? Can we alone be right?

Well, yes. If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history. From our first patriarch to Israel's precision-targeted destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981, which laid the foundation for a successful Operation Desert Storm and the rescue of Kuwait, our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.

We have confronted the question many times. The whole world was polytheistic, and we alone preached belief in one God. We preached a Day of Rest, and the whole ancient world mocked us as lazy people. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. They said we crucified a Jew — as if the Romans would have allowed any of its subjects to do such a thing, as if Jews ever had such a punishment in our code — and we insisted such a thing was beyond impossible. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. In the Middle Ages, the whole world said that we use children's blood to make matzo; we denied it. They said that we poisoned the wells of Europe, and we denied it. We were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades. The blood libels and Talmud burnings in England and France, leading those nations to expel Jews for centuries. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition. The ghettoes and the Mortara case in Italy. Dreyfus in France. Beilis in Russia and a century's persecution of Soviet Jewry. The Holocaust. Kurt Waldheim in Austria. Each time, Europe stood by silently — or actively participated in murdering us — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.

Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans, the Vatican proffer their aggregated insights into and accumulated knowledge of the ethics of massacre. And the Europeans. Although we appreciate a half-century of West European democracy more than we appreciated the prior millennia of European brutality, we recognize who they are, what they have done — and what's what. We know, if they don't, that they need Arab oil more than they need Jewish philosophy and creativity. We remember that the food they eat is grown from soil fertilized by 2,000 years of Jewish blood they have sprinkled onto it. Atavistic Jew-hatred lingers in the air into which the ashes rose from the crematoria. Finally, the best of Europe truly are wracked by the burdened conscience of what they, their parents and their bubbes and zeides did, or failed to do, in the 1940s. So, instead of confronting a shameful past that belies their self-vaunted Romantic civilization, they seek now to assuage their consciences with the mendacity that Israel 2002 is no different from Europe 1942.

Yes, once again, we are right and the whole world is wrong. It doesn't change a thing, but after 25 centuries it's nice to know.

 

Self Improvement

Los Angeles Jewish Journal

April 29, 2009

http://www.jewishjournal.com/torah_portion/article/dont_do_well_do_good_20090429/

Separating the Holy

from the Despicable

“Tell the entire assemblage of Israel: you shall be holy
because I the L-rd your G-d am holy.” (Vayikra 19:2)

This week’s Torah portion lays out a comprehensive array of Divinely ordained commandments that define the range of Judaism’s unique values. Legislated to an assemblage of just-liberated slaves, these are the concepts and aspirations taught orally to Moshe at Sinai and thereafter transmitted in an appendix – the Written Torah. Through them, we were sculpted into an entity greater than mere physical emancipation could have offered. We were made holy.

In Judaism, “holiness” is epitomized by separation -- "separateness." “Behold [they comprise] a Nation that shall dwell alone.” (Bamidbar 23:9). We are holy because we are separate.

These laws separated us from the surrounding world. Don’t just fear your Dad but also your Mom; don’t just cuddle up to Mom with honor but also honor your Dad. And, yet, remember that both your parents, no less than you, answer to the Creator; their authority extends only within Torah’s parameters.

Yes, be really careful to observe all the detailed rituals governing animal sacrifice, and carefully observe all kinds of esoteric laws: Refrain from donning garments made from a combination of both linen and wool. Don’t shave with a razor blade or obliterate your sideburns or get caught up in a societal tattooing craze. Tatt too will pass. Don’t go to fortune-tellers, and don’t erect statues.

But also remember that, as part of being holy – of being different – your Creator will hold you accountable for cursing deaf people and for tripping up the blind, even if they are oblivious to your deeds. He will demand you account for conducting business dealings deceitfully, for failing to leave a corner of your field’s produce as open-pickings for the poor. Don’t you dare steal or deal falsely. If you invoke His name in a false oath, if you perjure yourself in a court filing, you will have to account. Don’t you dare cheat your neighbor, and don’t you rob, and don’t you withhold your employee’s wages past payday. Don’t you dare.

Maybe the late-night TV talk show hosts make fun of elderly people, but not you. When you see someone with white hair, you get up from your cozy chair and you stand out of respect, and you honor that time-worn face. She has endured it all, and she has earned your reverence.

So it’s not just about meticulously observing 39 rules that define Jewish Sabbath observance – although that, too, is central to the very concept of a Jewish People. Nor is it only about eating kosher and avoiding forbidden mixtures. Rather, it also is about being honest, ethical, trustworthy, and thus noble. Your scales must be honest when you weigh a pound of meat or a hill of beans. Your every transaction must be honest; even your resumés must be truthful: where you went to school, the degrees you truly earned. A holy nation is not led by crooks, nor does it honor them.

That is what makes a great people. Such separateness makes “holy.”

Greatness is not measured by the size of your bat mitzvah smorgasbord or the layout of your backyard pool, but by how you acquired them. Your fancy car and your home landscaping and the jewelry in your safe do not define you. Your deeds define you. As Rabbi Emanuel Rackman taught: It is not enough to do well; you must do good.

Whom do we honor? At our every organizational banquet, our every special event, do we make room on the dais to honor at least one person of modest means whose presence is grounded exclusively in her kindness, her goodness, her nobility of character?

Money is great. And many profoundly wealthy people also justly populate the platform of the noble, those blessed with dignity and grace of character. But is wealth the standard we employ in selecting our nobles, our honorees? Can a Holy Nation count among its leaders those whose wealth is bound with mendacity? Those who became rich by ruining others or those who climbed ladders by destroying the reputations of others?

Not a holy nation. Not a nation separated and set apart by the command of their Creator to deal honestly, to judge honestly, and never to do unto others what they would not want done to them.

That is the striking message of this week’s Torah portion. It should be mandatory reading for every banquet committee and every nominating committee in organized American Jewish life. Its message is that extraordinary. And we all should study it, too.

 

Courage Facing Loshon Horo

COURAGE UNDER FIRE:

SO HOW DOES A JEW RESPOND WHEN CAUGHT UNEXPECTEDLY IN A LOSHON HORO ENVIRONMENT, AMID GOSSIPERS AND SLANDERERS?

 One of the most difficult aspects of Jewish life is dealing with the grave sin of loshon horo.  The Chofetz Chaim, author of the Mishneh B’rurah compendium on the Shulkhan Arukh that serves as the defining halakhic work for Ashkenazic Jewry in the modern era, nevertheless attached his name to his other great life’s work – on the laws of loshon horo.  He felt that tackling the complexity of loshon horo law was the greater contribution he made in his lifetime.  So he took his great sobriquet from a verse couplet in Tehillim (Psalms 34:13-14):  “Who is the man who desires life, (mi ha-ish he-chofetz chaim) who loves days to see good?  Restrain your tongue from evil and your lips from manipulation.”  And HaRav Yisroel Meir Kagan HaKohen, zt”l, took for himself the name “Chofetz Chaim” as the name by which he would be remembered.

 

The laws of loshon horo are numerous.  For example, with Ehud Barak recently having announced that he is seeking to return to political leadership in Israel, it is not at all loshon horo to remind people of how Israel fared the last time he led the Jewish State.  It is not loshon horo to speak of Neturei Karta – the clowns in Hasidic garb who attend Fatah events and Holocaust Denial conferences to ally with our enemies – with the utmost contempt.  It is not  loshon horo to refer to Jimmy Karta, the 39th American President and a bigot against the State of Israel, with the utmost contempt.  When someone inquires whether a fellow or lady is suitable as a pending wedding match or as a business partner, the halakhah permits and requires candor.  There are many more examples of these principles.

 

On the other hand, in a different context, even a “roll of the eyes” can be a grave sin.  Or a smirk.  Or a snicker.  When the intention is to reduce a person a notch by conveying a negative meaning that is forbidden under halakhah, the conveyor of the loshon horo can lose his place in the World to Come for all eternity.  And, for good measure, Rav Avigdor Miller zt”l teaches that the conveyor and transmitter of the loshon horo is saddled with all the sins and punishment of the person he intends to degrade.

 

The challenge that is most difficult for most of us is how to respond when, unexpectedly, we find ourselves caught in a loshon horo environment.  One time, Ellen and I were invited to a Shabbat dinner at someone’s home.  (It was not in Orange County.)  Other guests were invited, too.  As often happens at a Shabbat table, conversation ensued, shifting from one Jewish subject to another.  Suddenly, the discussion moved into laws of kashrut – and, from there, into one person’s ridiculing a Rav who grants kashrut certifications.  The discussion reached beyond nuanced philosophical differences of rabbinical schools of thought – for example, some halakhic authorities are stricter about Cholov Yisroel than are others – and transcended into loshon horo and, worse, hotza’at shem ra’.

 

Loshon  horo is an infection, very contagious, so much so that it needs to be quarantined.  It sneaks into a conversation, often introduced cleverly and surreptitiously by someone whose agenda – whose personal axe-to-grind – manipulates the discussion into that direction.  And, as happened that night at that Shabbat table, Ellen and I suddenly and unexpectedly found ourselves embedded in a loshon horo environment.  This prominent Rav was being derided and smeared by a person who absolutely did not know what he was talking about.  We were caught off-guard.

 

But what to do?  What indeed to do?  To make a scene?  To break the ambiance?  To ruin dessert?  What to do?  Because, alas, silence is often tantamount to agreement.

 

In the 'Harry Potter" series of children's books, author J.K. Rowling puts a profound thought into the mouth of one of her characters:  "It takes courage to stand up to your enemies.  It takes even greater courage to stand up to your friends."  And that is indeed the only prescriptive that exists in the face of finding oneself in that bind. 

 

To speak up -- because silence is not an option.  To risk losing a friend -- to risk becoming unwelcome at the weekly poker game -- because losing Paradise is not an option.  To realize that someone willing to jeopardize your place in the World to Come may just not be the best friend in your rolodex. 

 

In the movie "Gentleman's Agreement," a 1950s-era Oscar winner as Best Picture for its depiction of a non-Jewish journalist who poses as a Jew in snooty Connecticut and Manhattan to learn from an insider's perspective that Jew-hatred exists even among the upper crust, there is a memorable scene. A non-Jewish woman, late in the movie, recounts that she was enjoying supper as an invited guest at a dinner table, breaking bread with such upper crust, when someone started telling anti-Jewish jokes.  She angrily recounts the incident later, among a group of people who oppose anti-Semitism, telling them approximately these words: "I was so mad.  You have no idea.  I was furious."

 

In approximately these words, one of the listeners then asks her: “So what did you do ?  Did you speak out?  Did you object to that humor?   Did you convey your sentiments in any way?”  And she responds, her face looking down into her napkin, “No.  I sat there silently.  I allowed it to continue.  I did not have the courage to speak out.”

 

Loshon horo is the ultimate anti-Semitism, a violation of the essence of Torah values, emanating from within the Jewish community, derogating one or more Jewish souls, assassinating an innocent Jew’s character, causing pain and suffering to its victims and targets, to family and friends.  Even as it threatens the eternal souls of those drawn within its ambit, often innocent bystanders caught unexpectedly in the oral terrorist’s cross-fire.

 

The only way to respond, when unexpectedly finding oneself caught in a loshon horo environment, is to speak out with courage.  To say “My spouse and I did not come here to listen to this.  Nor do we want our children exposed to this poisonous environment.  We reject what is being said.  And if it happens again, we will leave this environment and not return.” 

 

That is courage under fire, Jewish-style.