Two
more new born have been infected with herpes virus in the last three
months after undergoing a controversial religious oral circumcision in
New York City.
These latest cases bring the total count to 13
infants since 2000, two of which suffered brain damage and two died from
the virus which can rapidly spread throughout its body.
The ultra Orthodox Jewish ritual of metzitzah b’peh
requires a practitioner to orally suck the penis of baby to ‘cleanse’
the open wound following its circumcision, making them vulnerable to the
virus.
The department of health says one of the latest
infants to contract the virus developed a fever and a lesion on its
scrotum, seven days after the procedure. The boy later tested positive
for HSV-1. That virus differs from HSV-2, the genital herpes, which is
contracted during sexual intercourse.
‘A herpes infection in a newborn baby has the risk of leading to
severe illness and death,’ Jay Varma, deputy commissioner for disease
control at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
told ABC News.
‘The reason is that the baby doesn’t have the same fully developed
immune system as an adult. Instead of staying in the genital area, it
extends throughout different organs in the body,’ he explained.
He said it’s too soon to tell whether the boys will suffer permanent effects.\
The identify of the rabbi who performed the circumcision is being
withheld by the boys’ parents, preventing the health department to step
in, they said.
Dangers: Since 2013 known cases of herpes
have resulted from the practice, two of which suffered brain damage and
two others died
The attempted kidnapping occurred last Monday at 4:39 p.m.
immediately after the girl left the B’Not Rachel High School at 1950
East 7th Street and was on her way home. An unidentified male approached
her in front of 1852 East 7th Street and put his arm around her and
tried to lure her.
“The suspect said, ‘Come here, come here,’” and didn’t let her go
away, until a staffer from a nearby school passed by and witnessed the
incident. The suspect then got scared and ran away, a NYPD Official told
JP.
When the girl arrived home and told her parents what happened, her mother immediately contacted the police.
“I was afraid for my life. The man was wearing nice black dressy
shoes and had a nice haircut,” the girl told investigators, according to
the NYPD official.
The suspect is a white male, approximately 20 years old, 5’8″ tall,
150 lbs., with brown eyes, short black hair and medium complexion. He
was last seen wearing a white-collared shirt, a black jacket, black
pants and black shoes.
Anyone with information regarding this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477)
The left’s problem with Jews has a long and miserable history
Simon Schama
Anti-Israel demonstrations are in danger of morphing into anti-Semitism, writes Simon Schama
Much
of the student left has “some kind of problem with Jews”, said the
bravely decent Alex Chalmers last week in his resignation statement as
co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club following a vote in favour
of Israeli Apartheid Week.
Labour’s national student organisation is
launching an inquiry but the “the problem with Jews” on the left is not
going away. In January a meeting of the Kings College London Israel
Society, gathered to hear from Ami Ayalon, a former head of Shin Bet,
the Israeli domestic intelligence service, who now champions a two-state solution, was violently interrupted by a chair-hurling, window-smashing crowd.
Last summer the Guardian columnist Owen Jones made
a courageous plea for
the left to confront this demon head on. Since then, however, criticism
of Israeli government policies has mutated into a rejection of Israel’s
right to exist; the Fatah position replaced by Hamas and Hizbollah
eliminationism. More darkly, support in the diaspora for Israel’s right
to survive is seen by the likes of Labour’s Gerald Kaufman, who accused
the government of being influenced in its Middle Eastern policy by “Jewish money”, as some sort of Jewish conspiracy.
The charge that anti-Zionism is morphing into
anti-Semitism is met with the retort that the former is being
disingenuously conflated with the latter. But when George Galloway (in
August 2014 during the last Gaza war) declared Bradford “an Israel-free
zone”; when French Jews
are unable to wear a yarmulke in public lest that invite assault, when
Holocaust Memorial day posters are defaced, it is evident that what we
are dealing with is, in Professor Alan Johnson’s accurate coinage, “anti-semitic anti-Zionism”.
The fact is that the terrorists who slaughtered customers at the
kosher supermarket in Paris did not ask their victims whether they were
Israelis, much less supporters of Israeli government policies. They were
murdered as Jews because in the attackers’ poisoned minds all Jews are
indivisibly incriminated as persecutors of the Palestinians and thus
fair game for murder.
When the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement singles
out Israel as the perpetrator of the world’s worst iniquities,
notwithstanding its right of self defence, it is legitimate to ask why
the left’s wrath does not extend, for example, to Russia which rains
down destruction on civilian populations in Syria?
With the retreat of Marxist socialism, militant energies have needed somewhere to go
Why
is it somehow proper to boycott Israeli academics and cultural
institutions, many of which are critical of government policy, but to
remain passive in the face of Saudi Arabia’s brutal punishment of anyone
whose exercise of freedom of conscience can be judged sacrilegious? Why
is the rage so conspicuously selective? Or, to put it another way, why
is it so much easier to hate the Jews?
Growing up in London in the shadow of world war two my pals and I
talked about who might be the bad guys, should evil come our way. We
agreed the Jew-haters would not wear brown shirts and jackboots but
would probably be like people on the bus. It is not the golf club
nose-holders we have to worry about now; it is those who, in their
indignation at the sufferings visited on the Palestinians, and their
indifference to almost-daily stabbings in the streets of Israel, have
discovered the excitement of saying the unspeakable, making hay with
history, so Israel is the new reich, and a military attack on Gaza
indistinguishable from the industrially processed incineration of
millions.
Enter the historian. And history says this: anti-Semitism has not
been caused by Zionism; it is precisely the other way round. Israel was
caused by the centuries-long dehumanisation of the Jews. The blood libel
which accused Jews of murdering Christian children in order to drain
their blood for the baking of Passover matzo began in medieval England
but never went away, reviving in 16th century Italy, 18th century
Poland, 19th century Syria and Bohemia, and 20th century Russia.
In 1980s Syria, Mustafa Tlass, Hafez al-Assad’s minister of defence, made his contribution with The Matzo of Zion, and last year the Israeli-Palestinian Islamist Raed Salah,
once invited to parliament by Jeremy Corbyn as an “honoured citizen”,
declared that Jews used blood for the dough of their “bread”.
In the 19th century virtual vampirism was added to the antisemitic
canon. And the left made its contribution to this refreshment of old
poison. Demonstrating that you do not have to be gentile to be an
anti-Semite, Karl Marx characterised Judaism as nothing more than the
cult of Mammon, and declared that the world needed emancipating from the
Jews. Others on the left — the social philosophers Bruno Bauer, Charles
Fourier and Pierre Prudhon and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin — echoed
the message: blood sucking, whether the physical or the economic kind,
was what Jews did.
For the Jews, the modern world turned out to be a lose-lose
proposition. Once reviled for obstinate traditionalism; their insistence
on keeping walled off from the rest (notwithstanding that it had been
Christians who had done the walling) they were now attacked for
integrating too well, speaking, dressing and working no differently but
always with the aim of global domination.
What was a Jew to do? The communist Moses Hess, who had been Marx’s
editor and friend, became persuaded, all too presciently, that the
socialist revolution would do nothing to normalise Jewish existence, not
least because so many socialists declared that emancipating the Jews
had been a terrible mistake. Hess concluded that only self-determination
could protect the Jews from the phobias of right and left alike. He
became the first socialist Zionist.
But that was to inflict an entirely colonial and alien enterprise
upon a Palestinian population, so the hostile narrative goes, who were
penalised for the sins of Europe. That the Palestinians did become
tragic casualties of a Judeo-Arab civil war over the country is
indisputable, just as the 700,000 Jews who were violently uprooted from
their homes in the Islamic world is equally undeniable. But to
characterise the country in which the language, the religion and the
cultural identity of the Jews was formed as purely a colonial anomaly is
the product of the kind of historical innocence which is oblivious of,
say, Jewish kabbalistic communities in Galilee in the 16th century or
the substantial native Jewish majority in Jerusalem in the late 19th
century.
None of this unbroken history of Jews and Judaism in Palestine is
likely to do much to cool the heat of the anti-colonial narrative of the
alien intruder, especially on the left. With the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the retreat of Marxist socialism around the world, militant
energies have needed somewhere to go.
The battle against inequalities under liberal capitalism has
mobilised some of that passion, but postcolonial guilt has fired up the
war against its prize whipping boy, Zionism, like no other cause. Every
such crusade needs a villain along with its banners and I wonder who
that could possibly be?
The writer is an FT contributing editor. He will be taking part in a debate on February 27 during Jewish Book Week.
by Rabbi Efrem Goldberg - Republished with permission from the author.
Last month marked thirty years since the tragic explosion of the
Space Shuttle Challenger. Seven crew members died after the shuttle
broke apart 73 seconds after takeoff. As I’m sure is the case with many
of you, I vividly remember exactly where I was when this catastrophic
event occurred. Along with many American children, my middle school
class was listening to a live broadcast of the launch over the class
speaker because Christa McAullife, an “ordinary” teacher from New
Hampshire was on the shuttle as the first person chosen to participate
in NASA’s Teacher in Space Project.
Even as children, when the Challenger exploded we understood that
something historically tragic had occurred. We were stunned and
searching for a way to understand what we had just heard. Our poor
teacher was thrust into an incredibly difficult position with no
preparation time or ability to craft a nuanced, sensitive, and
meaningful lesson plan.
His words that day were forever seared in my memory because of how
much they disturbed me, even at that young age. Without having the
chance to process what had just transpired, he turned to us, his
students and explained that he thought the Challenger had exploded
because man was getting too brazen and encroaching on God’s territory in
the heavens. God had struck down the Challenger, he said, because we
had violated the boundaries that separate us from Him.
In the town of Berditchev, there was a proud, self-proclaimed atheist
who shared with anyone who would listen his problems with a cruel,
uncaring God. The great Chassidic Master Rebbe Levi Yitzchak approached
him. After the atheist vociferously explained why he doesn’t believe in
God, Reb Levi Yitzchak turned to him and said, “You know, the God you
don’t believe in, I don’t believe in him either.”
When I heard my teacher describe with full confidence why God blew up
the Challenger, I didn’t yet know the story of Reb Levi Yitzchak, but I
did intuitively know that I didn’t believe in the God my teacher was
describing. Would God really kill seven innocent people in such horrific
fashion because they were involved in space exploration? That made no
sense to me and I wanted no part of such a God. Looking back, I am
tremendously grateful that I didn’t accept his reason and rejected his
acting as God’s spokesperson. I rejected it, but it confused me and
upset me to the extent that I remember it until this day, thirty years
later.
My middle school teacher didn’t have time to formulate his reaction,
but sadly, there are rabbis and teachers still today who, with plenty of
time and space to prepare, are still presenting themselves as God’s
spokespeople, communicating with full confidence the reasons and causes
for the world’s catastrophes, natural disasters, and human suffering.
One popular outreach rabbi has explicitly claimed in his online classes
to know why certain people were killed in the Holocaust and that “blind
children are being punished for watching pornography in previous lives”
and that “cancer is caused by sin in this life” and “Down syndrome and
autism are a result of a sin in a previous life.”
His loyal followers point to his success in attracting students and
cite his influence and impact on thousands of people as justification
for his method. However, the Torah never measured truth and authenticity
by popularity. By that measure, we should have folded to other
religions and ways of life long ago.
In next week’s parsha, Moshe pleads to Hashem – hodi’eini na es derachecha, make Your ways known to me so that I know You, so that I may find favor in Your eyes.” Moshe continues, “har’eini na es kevodecha – “Show me now Your glory.” What was Moshe requesting? What was it that he wanted to know?
Even more mysterious is Hashem’s response. “You cannot see my face,
for no human can see my face and live… you will see My back, but My face
may not be seen.” What is Hashem responding to Moshe?
The Talmud (Berachos 7a) explains that Moshe was requesting from God a
window into understanding the meaning and order of the universe. Moshe
sought insight into how God runs the world and an understanding of His
system of justice. In essence, by asking to see God’s face, Moshe is
saying, “God, let me see what you see.” Show me Your perspective of the
world and Your system for what happens.
Hashem responds, “Moshe, I cannot show you My face, you cannot see
through My eyes, because you are human and you are finite. By definition
you are incapable of fully comprehending My system of justice and of
appreciating the ultimate meaning and order of the universe. However,
you can see the back of My head. Once the event or experience is over,
there will come a time, whether in this world or the next, that you will
see retroactively why events unfolded the way they did and why
ultimately there is meaning and order to everything.”
While this dialogue in particular and the question of why bad things
happen to good people requires greater elucidation, one thing is clear
from this conversation. We are not empowered or entitled to claim to
understand how Hashem runs His world. Indeed, to assert that you know
with confidence Hashem’s ways and that you have access to His thinking
is an act of heresy.
It is understandable that people who are suffering would try to
identify exactly why Hashem is visiting this misery upon them. However,
it is an exercise in futility. Our mission is to reflect on our
circumstances and be motivated to grow, improve, and find a way to
become better as a result. But attempting to uncover exactly why Hashem
placed us in the particular position is something unattainable and a
poor use of energy and focus.
This week, hundreds of people gathered in Yerushalayim to pay tribute
to Dafna Meir Hy”d, who was murdered by a terrorist in her home in
Otniel a month ago. Her fifteen-year-old son Akiva spoke and ended by
saying:
And now, when everything has been cut
down, I stand across from Him, and I am silent. I stand across from the
Infinite, and I know that He did this just like He does everything. And
suddenly I see a picture that is a little bigger. Bigger than me. Bigger
than all of us. Master of the Universe, I want to say one thing to you,
just one: Thank You. Despite the difficulty. Thank you for fifteen and a
half years of light. Thank You for being with me at the most difficult
moments. And that You will be with me during even more difficult
moments. And also for all the other miracles which You have performed
for me. Thank You. You gave, and You took. May Your name be blessed
forever.
“Deracheha darchei noam – The Torah’s ways are pleasant.”
Hashem wants us to be uplifted and inspired, not feel dejected and
beaten down. He wants us to see others who are suffering and be filled
with sympathy and support, not with condemnation and judgment. He wants
us to bring our fellow Jews close to Torah with humility and
intellectual modesty, not bombastic statements and outrageous
proclamations.
Thirty years after the Challenger explosion, I continue to reject my
teacher’s explanation and I refuse to believe in His God. While I know
he meant well that day, our teacher failed us, his students. I implore
you to insist on teachers for your children, and leaders for yourself,
who understand and present that Hashem is in charge, we are incapable of
having access to His secrets and His ways and that “divrei chachamim b’nachas nishmaim – the words of the wise are most effective when delivered with pleasantness.”*
Thank
you again for taking a strong public stand on Marc Gafni with our
Change.org petition. The outpouring of support and particularly the
stories shared in the comments section have been heartwarming.
The
petition helped spark dozens of media pieces. Many leaders and
organizations have disassociated from Marc. We are definitely making
progress in preventing future harm!
However, Marc is still
attracting followers, partly due to ongoing support from several key
leaders, particularly Ken Wilber. Ken’s endorsements of Gafni and
discrediting of the victims’s testimonies have given Gafni the
credibility and prominence he’s needed to rise as a spiritual teacher
despite his scandal-ridden history. Wilber needs to be motivated to
break his silence and disavow his longtime alliance with Gafni, in order
to help dismantle Gafni’s network of support and his ability to do
future harm.
I'm writing today to ask for your help in putting
pressure on Wilber, who remains one of the most prominent public
defenders who has not broken with Marc.
Wilber is scheduled as a
presenter at the Wisdom 2.0 conference Feb. 20-22 and we feel that
conference producers should know that Wilber is enabling a serial abuser
and thus should not be featured at this gathering of more than 3000
high tech and spiritual leaders.
Could you take a minute and forward the below note (personalized however you see fit) to the conference organizers at sgordhamer@gmail.com and cat@wisdom2conference.com
RE: Raising my concern about Ken Wilber as a presenter
Dear Wisdom 2.0 producers,
Please
add my voice to the many raising grave concern about the damage you
will do by featuring Ken Wilber as a presenter in your upcoming
conference. I am asking that you please remove him as a presenter for
his protection of serial abuser Marc Gafni. Protecting a serial abuser
and enabling him to hurt more people is not the kind of conduct that is
worthy of a Wisdom 2.0 presenter, much less a trusted spiritual leader.
It is essential that we hold our spiritual leaders accountable and that
Wilber is held accountable for his support of Gafni. Associating him
with the quality of programming expected of Wisdom 2.0 cheapens and
discredits your important work.
I am a signatory to a Change.org
petition signed by more than 100 Rabbis and Jewish cultural leaders
strongly warned people about our knowledge of activities of Marc Gafni,
who has left a trail of decades of sexual abuse, lying, plagiarism, and
betrayals of trust. More than 3000 others have joined us, many with
direct testimonials you can read in the comments.
Gafni has
recently been called a "New Age Cosby" in the Huffington Post. There
have been more than 30 public articles about him in the last five weeks,
including in the New York Times, HuffingtonPost, New York Daily News,
Alternet, Forward, Tablet, Jewish Week, Times of Israel, Haaretz, and
Religious News Service.
Several victims have also gone forward
with their direct testimonials in recent weeks, including two who were
underage when molested and his third wife, who is as yet anonymous. In
addition, male spiritual leaders who were once friends and allies of
Gafni have written about how they were manipulated by him, and why they
no longer support him.
Despite
this extensive media coverage, Ken Wilber remains one of Gafni's most
prominent defenders and enablers, as a co-founder of the Center for
Integral Wisdom with him. Over the years he has issued several public
statements such as this one, http://www.marcgafni.com/resp/on-controversy-by-sally-kempton-and-ken-wilber/, in which he praises Gafni and discredits the people brave enough to tell the truth about Gafni’s abuse.
Wilber
claims to have researched Gafni's past and found nothing worse than him
being an "insensitive boyfriend," a comment in the New York Times
article that was devastating and infuriating to Gafni's many victims who
have experienced severe trauma.
We understand that Wilber has
actually been privy to many direct testimonies and in-depth allegations
and seems to have chosen to minimize this history publicly to protect
Gafni. I join with my fellow signatories in calling for you to
investigate this matter and to dismiss Wilber from your program unless
he makes a public disassociation and repudiation of Gafni.
We cannot risk having more lives traumatized.
Warmly,
X
Thank you all for your courage and for your commitment to ending ending this abuse, once and for all.
Ehud Olmert - The Ugly Face of Israeli Politicians
On Monday, Israelis were treated
to the awful spectacle of a former prime minister starting a jail
sentence. After a drawn out appeals process, Ehud Olmert, who served as
Israel’s leader from 2006 to 2009, began serving a 19-month sentence on corruption charges.
He’ll be housed in a special wing of one of the country’s largest
prisons along with the other white-collar criminals that can be trusted
to live with a man that was privy to the country’s national security
secrets. Among the few prisoners who fit into that category is Moshe
Katzav, who is serving out a sentence for rape.
The idea that a former prime minister and president
are currently doing time is a discouraging one for the Jewish state and
its friends. But though the crimes committed by both Olmert and Katzav
provide a not very attractive portrait of some members of the country’s
leading politicians, Israel’s supporters should actually take some grim
satisfaction from their humiliation. Say what you want about the
intemperate and sometimes downright crazy nature of Israeli politics, as
well as the unfortunate tone of much of its discourse or the not
particularly elevated nature of its popular culture. What happened to
Olmert proves that, for all of its flaws, Israel is a country where the
rule of law still reigns supreme.
Olmert is a product of the generation that came just
after Israel’s founders and the contrast between his behavior and his
predecessors speaks volumes. Whereas men like David Ben Gurion and
Menachem Begin lived simply, if not as ascetics, Olmert always lived
large. And in contrast to many of his colleagues who spent their
formative years in senior military positions (or his successor Benjamin
Netanyahu, who had been a commando as a young man and then served in
diplomatic posts until getting elected to the Knesset), Olmert was a
hotshot lawyer and political fixer. Like other American journalists who
met and interviewed him, I always thought that unlike most top Israeli
politicians, Olmert seemed to be a very familiar type and would have fit
in nicely in any urban political machine in the United States.
It is interesting that, even as he entered jail, Olmert was not only
still denying his guilt but also claiming that his downfall was a
political conspiracy. His intention is to muddy the waters of public
opinion to rebuild his tarnished legacy. That is, of course, nonsense.
If anything, the pace of the investigation of his crimes while serving
as mayor of Jerusalem was slowed by the fact that he was pushing ahead
with the peace process and some in the judicial establishment were
loath to disrupt his administration because of ethical lapses. Indeed,
there were many in Israel that thought the investigations of Ariel
Sharon’s sons’ dubious ethical behavior (which eventually led to a
corruption conviction for one of them) was also held back because of his
decision to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza as he began his journey
from the right to the center.
Olmert’s claims that the corruption case unfairly ended his political
career are also absurd. Though he entered office on the coat tails of
the fallen Sharon after the former general was stricken by illness,
Olmert was among Israel’s least popular prime ministers. His disastrous
conduct of the 2006 Lebanon War sealed his political fate and, even a
year later when I saw him in his office, he was in full bunker mode.
At that point, his poll ratings were in the single digits — actually
within the pollsters’ margin of error — leading some wags to question
whether anybody, including the prime minister’s wife, actually approved
of his conduct in office. But as a former Likudnik who joined the peace
camp, Olmert remained popular with American liberals and is, no doubt,
hoping he can resume getting lucrative speaking fees from credulous
Jewish groups after he is eventually sprung from jail.
But the real lesson about Olmert is not so much about his future
prospects as it is about the triumph of justice. Olmert’s attitude
toward his transgressions was the same we hear from a lot of American
politicians who are caught behaving badly: everybody does it. His
routine corruption and confidence that he could bribe witnesses into
silence (for which he was also convicted) are depressingly familiar. But
despite all the factors that might have led Israeli prosecutors into
giving him a pass, they pressed ahead and, despite the difficulties of
nailing an influential and wealthy individual who could afford a top
defense team, they won.
The contrast between Israeli law and what goes on in the Palestinian
territories is instructive. The Palestinian Authority is a notorious
kleptocracy as Fatah officials run the West Bank in a manner more
befitting mafia chieftains than political leaders. PA President Mahmoud
Abbas is, after all, currently serving the 11th year of the four-year term to which he was elected in 2005.
But we don’t have to compare Israel to the Palestinians or the
corruption of other neighboring Arab countries where the rule of law is a
myth. Americans need to remember how we give some of our leaders a pass
when it comes to breaking the law. President Bill Clinton’s perjury
under oath was excused as just being about sex. His wife Hillary’s
blatant violations of U.S. security regulations for handling classified
and top secret material would land any lesser being than the former
secretary of state and likely Democratic Party presidential nominee in
jail. Indeed, many in the security apparatus, even famous people, have
been disgraced for less. Just ask former general and CIA director David
Petraeus if you don’t believe me.
Yet there aren’t many who think the hold of the rule of law in this
country is strong enough for the administration to give Mrs. Clinton the
same treatment others receive. I don’t think Hillary Clinton must go to
jail in order for Americans to be able to claim that their judicial
system is as impartial as that of Israel. But if she gets a pass for law
breaking, it will be a blot on the honor of the Justice Department.
American justice is generally the envy of the world, and we know that
of Israel is imperfect. But the sight of Olmert heading to jail where
he’ll share a cellblock with Katzav is a reminder of the Jewish state’s
high standards and ability to treat the mighty as being just as
accountable as the marginal. When the dust settles on the Clinton email
scandal, let’s hope Americans can say as much of their justice system.
The United States government has demanded that
Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our
customers. We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the
legal case at hand.
This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our customers and people around the country to understand what is at stake.
The Need for Encryption
Smartphones, led by iPhone, have become an essential part of our
lives. People use them to store an incredible amount of personal
information, from our private conversations to our photos, our music,
our notes, our calendars and contacts, our financial information and
health data, even where we have been and where we are going.
All that information needs to be protected from hackers and
criminals who want to access it, steal it, and use it without our
knowledge or permission. Customers expect Apple and other technology
companies to do everything in our power to protect their personal
information, and at Apple we are deeply committed to safeguarding their
data.
Compromising the security of our personal information can
ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has
become so important to all of us.
For many years, we have used encryption to protect our
customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep
their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach,
because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our
business.
The San Bernardino Case
We were shocked and outraged by the deadly act of terrorism in
San Bernardino last December. We mourn the loss of life and want justice
for all those whose lives were affected. The FBI asked us for help in
the days following the attack, and we have worked hard to support the
government’s efforts to solve this horrible crime. We have no sympathy
for terrorists.
When the FBI has requested data that’s in our possession, we
have provided it. Apple complies with valid subpoenas and search
warrants, as we have in the San Bernardino case. We have also made Apple
engineers available to advise the FBI, and we’ve offered our best ideas
on a number of investigative options at their disposal.
We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we
believe their intentions are good. Up to this point, we have done
everything that is both within our power and within the law to help
them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply
do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They
have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.
Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the
iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security
features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the
investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist
today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s
physical possession.
The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make
no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way
would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue
that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee
such control.
The Threat to Data Security
Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is
a simple, clean-cut solution. But it ignores both the basics of digital
security and the significance of what the government is demanding in
this case.
In today’s digital world, the “key” to an encrypted system is a
piece of information that unlocks the data, and it is only as secure as
the protections around it. Once the information is known, or a way to
bypass the code is revealed, the encryption can be defeated by anyone
with that knowledge.
The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on
one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could
be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical
world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening
hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and
homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.
The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and
undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers —
including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated
hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong
encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be
ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.
We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to
expose its customers to a greater risk of attack. For years,
cryptologists and national security experts have been warning against
weakening encryption. Doing so would hurt only the well-meaning and
law-abiding citizens who rely on companies like Apple to protect their
data. Criminals and bad actors will still encrypt, using tools that are
readily available to them.
A Dangerous Precedent
Rather than asking for legislative action through Congress, the
FBI is proposing an unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to
justify an expansion of its authority.
The government would have us remove security features and add
new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be
input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by
“brute force,” trying thousands or millions of combinations with the
speed of a modern computer.
The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If
the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock
your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to
capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy
and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your
messages, access your health records or financial data, track your
location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your
knowledge.
Opposing this order is not something we take lightly. We feel we
must speak up in the face of what we see as an overreach by the U.S.
government.
We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect
for American democracy and a love of our country. We believe it would be
in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the
implications.
While we believe the FBI’s intentions are good, it would be
wrong for the government to force us to build a backdoor into our
products. And ultimately, we fear that this demand would undermine the
very freedoms and liberty our government is meant to protect.
We take a closer look at Apple's clash with the FBI to see exactly what's got Tim Cook and co. so upset.
The
ongoing fight between companies and authorities over encryption reached
new heights this week as it was revealed that Apple has been asked by
the FBI to essentially build a backdoor into iPhone software.
Apple
CEO Tim Cook's open letter, published on the Apple website, lays out
exactly what the firm has been ordered to do and calls for a public
discussion on the matter of encryption.
But for many, especially
those outside the tech community, this conversation can seem
impenetrable, making a public discussion that much more difficult to
foster.
It seems then, that we could all do with a bit of a
refresher on the matter at hand, so as to prime ourselves for the
impending discussion. Here's a rundown of the situation as it stands.
What exactly has Apple been ordered to do?
In
December 2015, a married couple living in Redlands, California attacked
a training event held by the San Bernardino County Department of Public
Health. 14 people were killed and 22 were injured in the terrorist
shooting.
Following the event, an FBI investigation turned up an
iPhone belonging to Syed Farook, one of the perpetrators. A US Federal
judge then ordered Apple to provide investigators with access to the
phone's encrypted data, which according to the court papers, the firm
'declined to provide voluntarily'.
The court filing specifically
refers to Farook's iCloud account. Prosecutors say he seems to have
disabled the iCloud data feature a month and a half before the shooting,
leaving investigators unable to access evidence that only resides on
the phone and has not been backed up to the cloud.
After the court
order was issued, Apple CEO Tim Cook posted an open letter explaining
the company's opposition to the ruling. In it, he describes the
government's demands as follows:
One
of these security features which the FBI wants disabled is one which
deletes all the user data after a certain amount of failed passcode
entries. Investigators risk losing all the information on Farook's phone
if they continue to try to guess the passcode incorrectly, hence why
they want that particular feature disabled.
If Apple is unable to
disable the auto-erase function, the court order states that the firm
should create software that enables them to do so.
Apple has been given five days to respond.
Why is this a big deal?
The
debate over data encryption and when, or even if, authorities should
have the right to order its removal, has been going for some time.
Tensions have somewhat increased since the Edward Snowden revelations
which exposed massive government surveillance in both the United States
and UK.
Apple's latest run-in with the authorities therefore seems
more salient than it would have even five or so years ago, especially
as companies, including Apple, ramped up their security features in the
wake of the Snowden leaks.
Palestinian
incitement reared its ugly head again this week with a violent new
animated video calling for the murder of Israelis making the rounds on
social media. Whether stabbings, shootings, or car rammings, every
method of murder is praised in this short but hate-filled cartoon, which
is aimed at young viewers. Most of the attackers in the current wave of terror have been under the age of 25, and some have been as young as 12.
The 50-second clip opens with a
Palestinian man watching videos on his laptop when he sees images of the
dead body of a female terrorist. The image likely refers to a recent
incident in which a Palestinian woman was shot after she attempted to stab IDF soldiers in Hebron.
With his anger properly incited, the
man grabs up a knife and goes out to the street with intent to carry out
terror attacks against Israelis, civilians and soldiers alike. As he
walks, images of dead Palestinian “martyrs” flash on the walls,
presumably to bolster his confidence and encourage him to continue what
they started.
The video then becomes quite graphic, depicting the stabbing of IDF soldiers and car rammings, similar to the one carried out
in Jerusalem in December which left nearly a dozen people injured. The
video serves as a sort of how-to: terrorists are shown stabbing soldiers
and civilians in the neck and other sensitive areas on the body.
At the very end of the cartoon, the terrorist is seen entering paradise, reaping his heavenly reward for his horrific actions. This video is only the latest in the
onslaught of anti-Israel propaganda disseminated by Palestinian
terrorists whose goal is to kill Israeli Jews. Only last week, a
pro-Hamas music group released their own music video
with calls to “Blow the roof off the bus,” referring to reinstating the
method of suicide bombers who blow up Israeli buses, a type of attack
common during the Second Intifada.
It is all of our responsibility to make sure that our own children are safe and the children in our community are safe.
It has come to my attention that Mendel Tevel is back in Los Angeles - he is a convicted Child Sex Offender.
We all need to ensure that he does not engage with children anywhere
(Shuls, schools etc...) in a way that would put them at risk. Please
spread the word.
If any illegal activity is observed, legal authorities must be informed immediately!
WASHINGTON—Moving quickly to begin the process of filling
the unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama
spent much of the weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual
abortion doctors to replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources
confirmed Monday. “These are all exemplary candidates with strong
homosexual values and proven records of performing partial-birth
abortions, but am I missing anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself
while reviewing his list of queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist
Planned Parenthood employees, all of whom were also said to be black
immigrants. “I definitely have enough post-op transsexuals on the list,
but it is a little light on pre-op candidates. And I should probably add
a cop killer or two on here just to round out my options.” Sources
later confirmed that Obama was attempting to rapidly narrow the list
down to the single best nominee to submit to the Senate in hopes of
wrapping up confirmation hearings before his choice had to leave to
attend the Hajj pilgrimage.
Listen: Here’s what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has to say about black students at elite colleges.http://cnn.it/1mflUi4
Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court on Friday released audio of controversial comments
made by Justice Antonin Scalia suggesting that some African-Americans
might be better off at "less-advanced"universities, language that has
caused a national uproar and spurred condemnation from elected officials including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Rep. John Lewis.
"There
are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get
them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed
to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school
where they do well," Scalia said Wednesday during oral arguments in a
case involving a race-conscious college admissions plan. The 79-year-old
justice, speaking to a hushed courtroom, then referenced a
friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case. "One of the briefs pointed
out that most of the black scientists in this country don't come from
schools like the University of Texas," he said, "they come from lesser
schools where they do not feel that they're being pushed ahead in
classes that are too fast for them."
“Marty belongs in the pantheon of great Jewish heroes,” Josh Singer, a
co-writer of the Oscar-nominated film “Spotlight,” said during a recent
interview at a Santa Monica coffee house.
He was discussing the real-life newsman at the center of the
much-lauded film about how Boston Globe reporters exposed a conspiracy
of silence about pedophile priests some 15 years ago. Martin Baron,
then the Globe’s brand-new editor, seems rather stiff and hardly heroic
as he attends a meeting with the newspaper’s investigative team on his
first day of work in 2001.
To be sure, it’s not the most welcoming environment for this former
editor of the Miami Herald. Boston’s media had already pointedly noted
that Baron – who in real life is now executive editor of the Washington
Post – was to become the first Jewish editor at a publication whose
readers were 53 percent Catholic, while Baron’s reporters on the Globe’s
investigative team all were raised Catholic.
And one character remarks
that not only was the new editor coming from Florida, he was also an
“unmarried man from the Jewish faith who hates baseball” in a town
obsessed with the Red Sox.
Later in the film, a church leader
insinuates that Baron is a meddling outsider as he gives the editor a
copy of the church’s Catechism, advising him to “think of it as the
Cardinal’s guide to Boston.”
Unabashed, the reserved but intense Baron (played by Liev Schreiber)
tells his reporters he wants them to look into the highest echelons of
the church, because he’s noted a news item about a priest accused of
child abuse. He wants to see if there’s more to the story.
The movie unfurls as a tense procedural drama about how Baron and his
investigative reporters, members of a unit known as “Spotlight,”
meticulously research and ultimately publish a Pulitzer Prize-winning
series unearthing story after story of how church leaders protected
priests accused of child abuse at the expense of the accusers’ families,
shuffling the abusive priests, some repeat offenders, from parish to
parish while clandestinely settling cases through payoffs to victims.
Throughout the investigation, Baron remains unperturbed by threats from
community leaders, refusing to back down as he pushes his reporters to
confront church officials – initially by going to court to force the
diocese to turn over incriminating sealed documents. “You want to sue
the church?” one character incredulously remarks in the film. That sort
of thing just hadn’t been done before in Boston. And Baron makes it
clear that he doesn’t just want more stories about pedophile priests; he
wants evidence of church cover-ups of abuse.
“We’re going after the system,” Schreiber says in the film. Baron’s
attitude stands in stark contrast to that of previous Globe editors, who
had put out “a vibe from the top down of ‘no more priests; we’re done
with that,’” Singer said.
The film has received laudatory reviews and been favorably compared to
the iconic Watergate journalism film “All the King’s Men.” It has also
received six Academy Award nominations, including for best picture and
best original screenplay, for Singer and Tom McCarthy, the latter of
whom is also the movie’s director.
Singer, who grew up in a Conservative Jewish home near Philadelphia,
said he was drawn to the project, in part, because, “when you’re raised
Jewish, there’s something in our Bible stories that’s all about raising
one’s hand up against the status quo. It’s Abraham having the temerity
to break all of those idols in a land where everyone is worshipping
them. Or David, a guy with a slingshot, standing up to a giant and
knocking him down.”
Pretty lofty comparisons for the likes of a journalist. Yet, he
continues, “Marty is a guy who went into a town where he was a total
outsider, as a Jew in a pretty Catholic city, and where the Boston Globe
was a Yankee Catholic institution. To go in there and say, we’re going
to take on the church, on his very first day – that took a lot of
bravery and chutzpah.”
Singer, who is in his 40s, has a Jewish father; his mother, born to a
Jewish father and a Catholic mother, converted to Judaism before he was
born. Singer grew up singing in his synagogue’s choir; he went on to
graduate magna cum laude from Yale and to earn both a law degree and a
master’s degree in business from Harvard before trying his hand at
screenwriting.
He wrote a spec script on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that earned
him a place in the writers’ room on TV’s “The West Wing” in the early
2000s; another script exploring why a “nice Jewish boy” like George
Gershwin would write the great African-American opera “Porgy and Bess”
landed him the job penning the 2013 WikiLeaks drama, “The Fifth Estate.”
A desire to delve more deeply into how investigative journalists work
spurred Singer to sign on to “Spotlight” when director McCarthy came
calling in 2012. “It was clear that we were going to tell the story
through the eyes of the journalists,” he said. “We felt like there was a
good detective story there.”
The screenwriters’ research process was often akin to investigating the
investigators; they spent hours speaking with almost every character in
the film.
Valuable insight about church culture came courtesy of Richard Sipe, a
former priest who had spent decades studying the psychology of pedophile
clergy. It is believed that about half of priests violate their vows
of celibacy at some time, Sipe told the screenwriters, so a culture of
secrecy prevails within the priesthood that can lead to tolerating and
even protecting abusers.
“These priests are predators, so they look for kids from troubled homes
who aren’t likely to complain,” Singer said. “One survivor‘s father
had just committed suicide, and his mother was schizophrenic. And
they’re all from pretty poor families where the church is held in high
regard.”
The screenwriters met with victims of egregious abuse -- among them
Phil Saviano, founder of the Survivors Network of those Abused by
Priests (SNAP); Saviano described how his parish priest began telling
him dirty jokes and showing him pornography at age 11, “until one day he
asks you to give him a blow job – and how do you say no to God?” His
character says these words in the film.
Spotlight reporter Sacha Pfeiffer recounted how she urged another
victim to eschew the word, “molest” in favor of explicit descriptions of
his abuse. “We also wanted to be very specific with our language and
terminology,” Singer said of the script – even though the screenwriters
avoided flashbacks to scenes of abuse as too sensationalistic.
Singer insists that “Spotlight” does not take issue with the Catholic
religion, but rather the institution of the church. The movie, as well,
explores “the wrestling of how one maintains faith in the face of
something like this” – especially for Sipe and the Spotlight team’s
lapsed Catholic reporters.
Even so, the Jewish screenwriter said he would have had trepidations
about exposing abuse within another religious institution had McCarthy
not been raised devoutly Catholic.
So far, the church has responded mostly positively to the film, which
screened recently for the Vatican’s sexual abuse commission, Singer
said. “But a lot of public statements from the church have been trying
to make sure that this is perceived as something in the past,” he
added. “However, the abuse is still going on and they haven’t done
enough. They still need to push for greater transparency and
accountability not only for the priests who abuse these kids, but also
the prelates who have turned a blind eye in the past. The Pope
announced that he was bringing a tribunal to hold bishops and others
accountable, but he’s not announced who’s on the tribunal, what the
punishments will be and how the tribunal will work.”
The film also not so subtly makes a case for the need for more
investigative journalism at a time when newspapers are slashing budgets
or folding. “The bottom line is that we’ve had more than a dozen
metropolitan dailies go out of business in the United States with tens
of thousands of employees losing their jobs,” Singer said.
“At the Los Angeles Times, we used to have 19 people covering the state
legislature, and now there are four. I don’t know how you can pick up
on graft and corruption with four reporters versus 19, so I think this
is a real problem. When we don’t have enough reporters on the ground,
that’s when people get hurt.”
(Therefore the importance of dedicated and aggressive Bloggers! Just sayin'. P.M.)
Since last year, when Assemblyman Dov Hikind
invited his radio show listeners to discuss an explosive topic — sexual
abuse of children in the Orthodox Jewish community — he says he has
collected more than 1,000 complaints and the names of 60 accused sexual
predators.
He
has kept those stories under lock and key in his Brooklyn office, he
says, because the people who said they were victims had sworn him to
secrecy, fearful of becoming outcasts in a community where perceived
troublemakers risk losing employment, housing and even marriage
prospects.
But
a prominent lawyer representing a half dozen former yeshiva students
who say in a civil lawsuit that they were sexually abused by a teacher
in Borough Park, Brooklyn, had Mr. Hikind served with a subpoena this
week, demanding that he surrender those files.
Mr. Hikind has refused. “I will go to jail for 10 years first,” he said on Wednesday.
The
legal conflict has revealed a deep tension within the Orthodox
community that has been reported in the Jewish weekly press, and has
been the almost exclusive topic of discussion on some Orthodox Jewish
Web sites like failedmessiah.com and unorthodoxjews.blogspot.com in the months since Mr. Hikind brought up sexual abuse.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind asked radio listeners to talk
about sex abuse, and they did.Credit
Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
“I’ve
been shocked and overwhelmed at the magnitude of the problem,” said Mr.
Hikind, an Orthodox Jew and a Democrat who represents the predominantly
Orthodox community of Borough Park.
The
victims have come to his office in a steady stream to tell their
stories, he said. “Abusive teachers and rabbis in the schools,” he said.
“Pedophiles on the streets. Incest in the home.”
Michael
G. Dowd, the lawyer who had Mr. Hikind served with the subpoena, has
been a leading advocate for plaintiffs who say they were abused by Roman
Catholic priests. He represents six men who say they were abused by
Rabbi Yehuda Kolko, a teacher at Yeshiva Torah Temimah in Brooklyn.
Rabbi Kolko, who was charged with sexual abuse in 2006, pleaded guilty
to a lesser charge and has left the school.
Mr.
Dowd’s subpoena demands that the assemblyman turn over not just
complaints that Mr. Hikind may have received against Rabbi Kolko, but
“any and all reports of sexual abuse at any yeshiva and/or by any rabbi
or employee of a yeshiva in New York City.” Mr. Dowd said they were
crucial to proving his clients’ contention that sexual abuse was
commonplace and routinely covered up by administrators in yeshivas.
He
described Mr. Hikind’s refusal as “misguided.” While he said that he
planned to have the subpoena enforced, he also said that he understood
the reluctance to cross the powers that be in the Orthodox community.
“The lead rabbis have the kind of power to shut people up that the
Catholic Church had 50, 60 years ago,” he said.
Mr.
Hikind said that every complaint he received was in complete
confidence, with the understanding that “under no circumstances would
their names be known in the community.”
“There
is no way in the world, when people have come to me and spilled their
hearts out to me, and shared the most intimate and private things with
me, hoping I will do something to address the larger, overall issue,
that I would ever betray their trust,” he said.
Mr.
Hikind said he was responding to talk in the community about unreported
sex abuse when he decided to devote three shows in a row to the topic
on his weekly radio program, which is broadcast Saturday nights on WMCA-AM (570). The response was immediate and broad, coming not only from Brooklyn but from upstate New York and New Jersey as well.
He
has been trying to enlist leaders of the Borough Park community to help
deal with the problem, with mixed success. “There is a cultural taboo
about this kind of thing, and especially about going to secular
authorities with sexual abuse issues,” he said.
In
September, a clinical psychologist who initially agreed to head a task
force on the issue, Rabbi Benzion Twerski, resigned after a week. In a
letter to a Jewish weekly newspaper, he said he left under pressure
brought by his children, who told him they were made to feel “shamed” by
his participation.
Mr.
Hikind said that of all the people who said they had been victims, “99
percent would not go to the police under any circumstances — that is
just the reality.”
But
Joel Engelman, 23, who grew up in the Orthodox community of
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and who helped found a group of victims called
Survivors for Justice, said that while “well-intentioned,” Mr. Hikind
had a classic misunderstanding about sexual predators that is embedded
in insular communities like the Catholic priesthood or the Orthodox
world. “The community cannot police itself,” he said. “This has been
shown again and again.”
In
his own case, Mr. Engelman said, a complaint he brought to the
attention of administrators at the United Talmudical Academy against a
teacher who sexually violated him when he was 8 years old led to the
teacher’s brief suspension and subsequent reinstatement. Mr. Engelman
has since brought a civil suit against the teacher and the school.
Prof.
Marci Hamilton, who teaches at the Yeshiva University School of Law and
is an expert in sexual abuse by religious leaders, said Mr. Hikind’s
refusal to turn over the names of alleged predators, if not his entire
case file, was “outrageous.”
She said that Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, “should already have convened a grand jury” to investigate.
Jerry
Schmetterer, Mr. Hynes’s spokesman, said, “If someone has information
about a sex crime, he or she should bring that information to our sex
crimes unit, and we will investigate what needs to be investigated.”
Correction: November 20, 2008 An article in some editions on Thursday about a subpoena served
on Assemblyman Dov Hikind of Brooklyn, who says he collected more than
1,000 complaints and accusations after inviting listeners to his radio
show to comment on child sexual abuse among Orthodox Jews, misstated the
academic position of Marci Hamilton, an expert on the sexual abuse of
children by religious leaders. She is on the faculty at Yeshiva
University School of Law; she is not a visiting professor there.
