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Dear Secretary of State, Antony Blinken,
Eight days after the October 7th Hamas massacre, you met with Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. During the course of this meeting, he stated:
“You said that you are a Jewish person and I am an Egyptian person who grew up next to Jews in Egypt. They have never been subjected to any form of oppression or targeting and it has never happened in our region that Jews were targeted in recent or old history.”
You appeared taken aback by his statement and did not counter its veracity, merely responding with “I come as a human being.”
Unfortunately, el-Sisi was propagating an old myth. Indeed, there were periods of fruitful Muslim-Jewish coexistence - the most impressive being the so-called Spanish Golden Age, which tragically ended with the massacre of approximately 4,000 Jews in Granada in 1066 - but to ignore the long-history of “oppression” and “targeting” is a vile form of revisionist history. Notably, this revisionist history is also propagated by the Hamas charter itself (Article 31).
To counter El-Sisi’s claim, let me start with a quote from Maimonides, who, ironically enough, wrote the following from Egypt in 1173:
“Remember, my co-religionists, that on account of the vast number of our sins, God has hurled us in the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us… Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they…All this notwithstanding, we do not escape this continued maltreatment which well nigh crushes us. No matter how much we suffer and elect to remain at peace with them, they stir up strife and sedition.” (Epistle to Yemen).
Muslim killings of civilian Jews from 622-2023:
I have surveyed the available historical record of Muslim killings of civilian Jews from 622-2023. I have identified over 90 incidents between 622-1896, which was prior to the First Zionist Congress, an additional 30 incidents between 1897-1947, prior to the establishment of the State of Israel, and 37 incidents between 1948-1966, prior to the so-called “occupation” of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. These fatal attacks throughout the generations have occurred in over 30 countries.
Notably, this tally does not include attempted killings, brutal woundings, rapes, lootings, forced conversions, Dhimmi-status religious discrimination and financial oppression, and numerous expulsions. For example, regarding attempted killings, while there were over 400 terrorist attacks by Muslims against Jewish civilians, in over 40 different countries (not including Israel), from the year 1968-2003, most did not result in deaths. Similarly, there have been over 1,500 terrorist attacks in Israel from 1948-2023, with many “merely” wounding civilians and not resulting in deaths.
Yet, numbers do not tell the story of these brutal and savage attacks. To give you a glimpse into the horror, below are four accounts of massacres.
In a letter from 1884, J. Matalon described the massacre in the small-town of Demnat, Morocco:
“Within the last hour, a letter has come from Demnat saying that, following the Governer’s receipt of a letter from the Sultan, he has redoubled his cruelty. Shops have been looted, the doors of houses battered in, women raped, children butchered, the Chief Rabbi Joseph Elmaleh, an old man over 80, has been beaten to death by the Governor. In fact, the only men left in Demnat are in prison, all the rest have fled.” (Quoted in Jews under Muslim Rule in the late Nineteenth Century, David Littman, p. 73).
Sir Martin Gilbert, the esteemed historian, described the blood libel of Shiraz, Iran, in 1910:
“On 21 May 1910, four years after equality of religious worship was established in Persia, Jews in the city of Shiraz were confronted with an outburst of anti-Jewish sentiment that was harsh even by the standards of the time. An eyewitness, Nissani Macchallah, a young Jewish teacher at the Alliance school, saw a sayyid - a Muslim dignitary - beating two elderly Jewish men with chains. When he intervened and remonstrated with the sayyid, the Muslim stabbed Macchallah to death.
"As a result of protests from the European Powers, the sayyid was sentenced to three months in prison, and an order was promulgated that called for respect for Jewish lives. To avenge the sayyid’s imprisonment, his followers falsely accused the Jews of killing a young Muslim girl near the Jewish cemetery. They also arranged for copies of the Koran to be thrown into the sewage of the Jewish Quarter in an attempt to provoke an anti-Jewish riot.
"On 31 October 1910 the director of the Alliance School in Shiraz, Tunisian-born Elie Nataf, sent a full account of what followed to his head office in Paris. A ‘frenzied mob’ headed for the Jewish Quarter, he wrote. It arrived at the same time as the soldiers who had been sent by the military governor to protect the Jews. But, ‘as if they were obeying orders,’ the soldiers were ‘the first to break into the Jewish houses, thereby giving the signal to plunder.’ Nataf continued: ‘The carnage and destruction which then occurred for six to seven hours is beyond the capacity of any pen to describe.’...Not one of the 260 houses in the Jewish Quarter was spared…The mob - these ‘fanatics’ - then turned against the Jews themselves…twelve Jews were killed and fifteen seriously injured…
"The riot was a devastating blow to the Jewish community. Five or six thousand Jews had lost everything…This occurred in the same decade as the pogroms in the Christian empire of the Russian Tsars - pogroms that were similar in so many of their details, and that were sending millions of Jews to seek refuge in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. ” (In Ishmael’s House, pp. 129-131).
Describing the pogrom of Safed, British Palestine, in 1929, David Hacohen writes:
"We set out on Saturday morning. … I could not believe my eyes. … I met some of the town's Jewish elders, who fell on my neck weeping bitterly. We went down alleys and steps to the old town. Inside the houses I saw the mutilated and burned bodies of the victims of the massacre, and the burned body of a woman tied to the grille of a window. Going from house to house, I counted ten bodies that had not yet been collected. I saw the destruction and the signs of fire. Even in my grimmest thoughts I had not imagined that this was how I would find Safed where "calm prevailed."
The local Jews gave me a detailed description of how the tragedy had started. The pogrom began on the afternoon of Thursday, August 29, and was carried out by Arabs from Safed and from the nearby villages, armed with weapons and tins of kerosene. Advancing on the street of the Sefardi Jews from Kfar Meron and Ein Zeitim, they looted and set fire to houses, urging each other on to continue with the killing. They slaughtered the schoolteacher, Aphriat, together with his wife and mother, and cut the lawyer, Toledano, to pieces with their knives.
Bursting into the orphanages, they smashed the children's heads and cut off their hands. I myself saw the victims. Yitshak Mammon, a native of Safed who lived with an Arab family, was murdered with indescribable brutality: he was stabbed again and again, until his body became a bloody sieve, and then he was trampled to death. Throughout the whole pogrom the police did not fire a single shot.” (Quoted from Time to Tell: An Israeli Life, 1898-1984, by David Hacohen)
Finally, the infamous “Farhud” of Bagdad in 1941:
This is where the the evils of Nazism met Muslim anti-Semitism, and an estimated 180-600 Jews were killed:
“Bands of enemies were wandering inside the Jewish quarters and were killing and looting. Such events lasted until midnight, and many were killed. Heads of children were cut off like sheep, old men were killed, while women were disgraced…This was how the night passed. In the morning the Jews did not know what had happened to their brothers during the night, and they went out for work as usual, but it was only a short interval given by the killers, after which they resumed their terrorism under the management of policemen and ex-soldiers.
"They began at 9:30 a.m., completing their program of the night before...Killing and looting lasted until 11 a.m. that day…Bodies of the dead were thrown on pavements on both sides of the street…Every Jewish home sustained the loss of one of its members, or it had at least had one of them wounded. The remaining people lived in terror.” (Quoted in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, by AG Bostom, p. 663-664).
Unfortunately, these accounts are chillingly similar to what occurred on October 7th, 2023. Hamas’s hideous massacre is part of a long history of Muslim antisemitism and terrorism that goes back centuries.
Secretary Blinken, next time you see el-Sisi, please do not be afraid or ashamed to “come as a Jew” and correct him on his revisionist history.
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| Salomon, Kotler, Kamenetsky |
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Measles deaths are surging worldwide, prompted by a wave of infections among unvaccinated children, public health experts say.
Deaths from measles increased by 43% globally in 2022 compared to the year before, resulting from an 18% increase in measles cases, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say in a new report published Thursday.
The estimated number of measles cases stands at 9 million and deaths at 136,000 for 2022, mostly among children, the report published Nov. 17 in the CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
“The increase in measles outbreaks and deaths is staggering, but unfortunately, not unexpected given the declining vaccination rates we've seen in the past few years,” John Vertefeuille, director of CDC's Global Immunization Division, said in a CDC news release. “Measles cases anywhere pose a risk to all countries and communities where people are under-vaccinated. Urgent, targeted efforts are critical to prevent measles disease and deaths.”
In 2022, 37 countries experienced large or disruptive measles outbreaks, compared with 22 countries the year before, the report noted.
There were 26 African nations that experienced a measles outbreak in 2022, along with six in the Eastern Mediterranean, two in Southwest Asia and one in Europe.
Measles is preventable through a two-dose vaccination, but there were still 33 million children who missed a measles vaccine dose -- nearly 22 million missed their first dose and another 11 million missed their second.
The global vaccine coverage rate stands at 83% for the first dose and 74% for the second, well under the 95% two-dose coverage that creates herd immunity and protects communities from outbreaks.
Low-income countries continue to have the lowest vaccination rates, at 66%.
Of the 22 million children who missed their first dose of measles vaccine, more than half live in just 10 countries: Angola, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Pakistan and Philippines.
“The lack of recovery in measles vaccine coverage in low-income countries following the pandemic is an alarm bell for action. Measles is called the inequity virus for good reason. It is the disease that will find and attack those who aren't protected,” said Kate O'Brien, WHO director for Immunization, Vaccine and Biologicals. “Children everywhere have the right to be protected by the lifesaving measles vaccine, no matter where they live.“
Relations between Israel and the Vatican have become tense in recent weeks.
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem, an ecumenical group of Christian leaders that includes the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, issued a joint statement in which they made no explicit mention of the Hamas atrocities. They included only a vague condemnation of any act that targets civilians.
The Israeli embassy to the Holy See criticized the statement’s “immoral linguistic ambiguity,” which failed to be clear about “what happened, who were the aggressors and who the victims. … It is especially unbelievable that such a sterile document was signed by people of faith.”
This controversy is only the latest in the fraught history of Israel-Vatican relations, which were officially established in Dec. 1993. Besides the Catholic Church’s historical antisemitism, the Vatican was long reluctant to formally recognize Israel for several reasons: Israel did not have internationally recognized borders, the status of Jerusalem and access to its holy sites had not been internationally guaranteed, and Catholics and their institutions were, the Church claimed, not adequately protected under Israeli law.
In addition, the Vatican had concerns about the treatment of Palestinians in the disputed territories and feared that relations with Israel could have negative repercussions for Catholics in Arab countries.
This may explain why, to date, Pope Francis has not labelled Hamas a terrorist organization and has not met with families of Israeli hostages. The latter has not gone unnoticed, especially because the families were received by many leading national figures, including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
According to the Catholic news site Cruxnow, the pontiff’s behavior can be explained as “positioning the Vatican potentially to play a mediating and peace-making role.” In addition, “The bulk of the Christian population in the Holy Land is Arab and Palestinian, so Middle Eastern bishops and clergy tend to be strong supporters of the Palestinian cause.”
Moreover, Cruxnow sees a historic shift underway in terms of the Vatican’s interfaith priorities: “Since the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, Judaism has been the Church’s primordial relationship, unquestionably the highest priority in inter-religious dialogue. Under history’s first pope from the developing world, that’s no longer necessarily the case, as other relationships, especially the dialogue with Islam, have become at least an equally compelling perceived priority.”
Given this, it is not surprising that, since war broke out, Pope Francis has spoken with numerous world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, but there are no reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been among them.
The larger Catholic world has shown equal ambivalence towards the war. Among Eastern Catholic leaders, the Latin Catholic and Eastern churches in communion with Rome have issued what Israel deems a lukewarm and insufficient condemnations of Hamas. Their first communiqué, issued on Oct. 8, contained a generic statement “against any acts that target civilians, regardless of their nationality.” The next, on Oct. 13, decried the humanitarian situation in Gaza and called for de-escalation. It singled out only Israel in connection with humanitarian issues.
Putting geopolitics aside, Pope Francis’s refusal to firmly condemn Hamas as a terrorist group is a moral failure. If he did so, it would demonstrate a serious commitment to combat antisemitism by action rather than vague ritual condemnations.
This is part of a larger problem. For example, the Vatican has yet to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is opposed by many antisemites for including antisemitic tropes targeting Israel. In an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa this past May, the American Jewish Committee’s Representative in Italy and Liaison to the Holy See, Lisa Palmieri-Billig, asked Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Holy See’s Secretary for Relations with States, if it might adopt the IHRA definition in the future. He responded, “The answer is no, there isn’t any possibility. We feel that what comes out of Nostra Aetate and the position of the Popes for many decades now is very clear.”
Nostra Aetate famously condemned the Church’s historic antisemitism and rescinded the charge of deicide. This was commendable, but fossilizing the relationship between Jews and Catholics in a document that is now almost 60 years old does not help further that relationship.
Moreover, the current wave of antisemitic hatred involves tropes rooted in centuries of Catholic antisemitism. As an Italian Jew living in a predominantly Catholic country, I have seen this firsthand, such as images of a crucified Jesus used as a metaphor for the supposed plight of the Palestinians and Hamas. Together with statements like Gallagher’s, this puts the future of Catholic-Jewish dialogue in question.
On Oct. 27, Pope Francis issued a prayer for peace that also failed to condemn Hamas and its atrocities. As Chief Rabbi of Rome Riccardo Di Segni rightly stated in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on the same day, “Prayer is a weapon even if it does not shoot and its morality depends on its content. It is good to see multitudes gathering to ask for peace, looking beyond the terms of conflicts, wanting an end to suffering, but one must consider whether looking beyond does not mean flattening differences and making everyone equal; in every conflict there are not all the good guys on one side and all the bad guys on the other, but certainly there are those who are better and those who are worse. Prayer can become an alibi for unburdening one’s conscience, for establishing inappropriate equidistance, for erasing moral evaluations.”
Despite Francis’s problematic conduct, however, there are some courageous Catholic voices that have unequivocally condemned Hamas and expressed solidarity with Israel.
For example, the Vatican’s Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin stated in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano that Hamas’s attack was “inhuman” and “it is the right of those who are attacked to defend themselves.”
Similarly, on Oct. 11, Archbishop of Boston Sean O’Malley said, “This act of aggression requires a clear condemnation in human, moral and legal terms. Both the purpose of the attack and its barbaric methods are devoid of moral or legal justification. There is no room for moral ambiguity on this issue. Resisting such terrorism and aggression is the moral duty of states to be carried out within moral limits.”
The Vatican should listen carefully to O’Malley and Parolin, because not just its relationship with the Arab world and other political considerations are at stake. The Vatican’s reaction to the Oct. 7 massacre and its aftermath will play a decisive role in the future of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. If it continues to maintain its ambiguous position, the Holy See risks its entire relationship with Israel and world Jewry.
https://www.jns.org/the-vatican-is-risking-its-relationship-with-the-jewish-world/?_se=YW5uZS1tYXJpZS5mYXJvdXpAbGFwb3N0ZS5uZXQ%3D&utm_campaign=Morning+Syndicate+Thursday+16112023&utm_medium=email&utm_source=brevoDespite the fears of their opponents, the rabbis’ march did not cause an antisemitic backlash. Ironically, the president’s snub ended up giving the protest the front-page news coverage that the president and his advisers had hoped to avoid. As a result, the march helped galvanize public and congressional sympathy for rescue. That boosted the subsequent efforts on Capitol Hill by Jewish activists, which, combined with behind-the-scenes pressure from the Treasury Department, eventually compelled President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board. Despite receiving meager government funding and little cooperation from the president or other government agencies, the board played a major role in the rescue of more than 200,000 refugees during the final fifteen months of the war.
https://x.com/HolocaustMuseum/status/1578080209596710914?s=20
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| 1943 |
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| 2023 |
The Rabbis' March was a demonstration in support of American and allied action to stop the destruction of European Jewry. It took place in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur. It was organized by Hillel Kook, nephew of the chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine and head of the Bergson Group, and involved more than 400 rabbis, mostly members of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada,[1] from New York and cities throughout the Eastern United States. It was the only such protest in Washington during the Holocaust.
The rabbis were received at steps of the Capitol by the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the Speaker of the House. After prayers for the war effort at the Lincoln Memorial the rabbis marched to the White House to plead with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were informed that the President was busy all day and were instead received by Vice President Henry Wallace. It was later learned that Roosevelt had several free hours that afternoon, but had avoided meeting the delegation out of concern regarding diplomatic neutrality and on the advice of some of his Jewish aides and several prominent American Jews, many of whom thought the protest would stir up anti-Semitism. Both Stephen Wise (head of the World Jewish Congress) and Samuel Rosenman (the President's advisor, speech writer and head of the American Jewish Committee) claimed that the protesting rabbis, many of whom were both Orthodox as well as recent immigrants (or first-generation Americans), "were not representative of American Jewry" and not the kind of Jews he should meet. In the November 1943 issue of his journal Opinion, Wise referred to the march as a "painful and even lamentable exhibition", calling it "propaganda by stunts" and accused the rabbis of offending the dignity of the Jewish people.[2][3] Disappointed and angered by the President's failure to meet with them, the rabbis stood in front of the White House where they were met by Senator William Warren Barbour and others, and refused to read their petition aloud, instead handing it off to the Presidential secretary, Marvin McIntyre.
The march garnered much media attention, much of it focused on what was seen as the cold and insulting dismissal of many important community leaders, as well as the people in Europe they were fighting for. The headline in the Washington Times Herald read: "Rabbis Report 'Cold Welcome' at the White House." Editors of The Jewish Daily Forward commented, "Would a similar delegation of 500 Catholic priests have been thus treated?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbis%27_march_(1943)#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-N0827-318,_KZ_Auschwitz,_Ankunft_ungarischer_Juden.jpg |
| Joel Teitelbaum Breeder Of The Neturei Karta Ideology |
Yoel Teitelbaum was famous for his vocal opposition to Zionism in all arenas and never acknowledged that Zionists had saved his life during the Holocaust. He encouraged his followers in Israel to form self-sufficient communities without assistance from the State of Israel and forbade any official engagement with it.
Before World War II, most Hasidic rabbis, as well as many other prominent Orthodox rabbis and leaders, believed that God had promised to return the Jewish people to the Land of Israel under the leadership of the Moshiach, who would arrive when the Jewish people had merited redemption. While awaiting the Moshiach, the Jewish people were to perform the mitzvot and were not to antagonize or rebel against the Gentile nations of the world. In the years following the Holocaust, Teitelbaum strengthened this position.
In Teitelbaum's view, the founding of the modern State of Israel by secular and religious Jews, rather than the Moshiach, violated a Jewish commandment that Jews should wait for the Messiah. Moreover, Teitelbaum taught that the existence of the State of Israel was actually preventing the Messiah from coming.[10]
The leader of the reclusive Satmar hasidic group, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, known as the "Satmar Rebbe," has publicly denounced the Neturei Karta group for their recent conduct, particularly their involvement in protests alongside “enemies of Israel.”
The rebbe's speech, shared on social media, included pointed remarks, stating, "It's a terrible desecration of God's name to support murderers in the name of the holy Torah and God's name." He lambasted the group for lacking traditional values and boundaries and acting without Torah guidance.
Last week, members of the extreme sect visited Jenin and met with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah leaders. According to a post on social media covering the visit, the representatives of Neturei Karta said: "We want to live in co-existence and in peace, our Jewish brothers want it too. We wish to live peacefully together with equal rights, on the basis that we all stand firm against occupation."
Members of the extreme group also demonstrated in New York with anti-Israel protests, where at times, antisemitic signs were held.
Satmar, a major hasidic group, is known for its extreme conservatism and anti-Zionism. Based in New York post-WWII, it maintains a strong Yiddish education and media system. Leadership split post-2006 between Moshe Teitelbaum's sons, Aaron and Zalman Leib, each overseeing separate communities.
Neturei Karta is a haredi Jewish group established in 1938 in Jerusalem, opposing Zionism and advocating for the "peaceful dismantling" of Israel, believing Jewish statehood must await the Messiah, with notable presences in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim and Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet.
The Satmar Rebbe stressed, "There are those who have no tradition of ancestors, act independently, thinking they understand more than previous righteous leaders." He noted the distress this caused his predecessor, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, who also spoke against such actions."
https://matzav.com/photos-thousands-led-by-satmar-rebbe-rally-against-israel-in-front-of-un/
These statements not only reflect the Satmar community's non-Zionist stance but also their preference for avoiding public political activism, in contrast to Neturei Karta's active opposition to the state of Israel.
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"The organization has spent the last several years grappling with revelations that its national leaders suppressed reports of abuse and resisted reform for decades. The brief, abuse survivors and those critical of the church say, offers the first clear look at the church’s true position on whether its leaders can be held accountable for abuse." You have to think about preserving the membership and preserving what we stand for.” |
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| Southern Baptists met in New Orleans in June |
For six months, almost no one took notice of the brief filed quietly by Southern Baptists in a case winding its way to the Kentucky Supreme Court.
At the center of the case is a woman whose father, a police officer, was convicted in 2020 of sexually abusing her over a period of years when she was a child. The woman later sued several parties, including the Louisville Police Department, saying they knew about the abuse and had a duty to report it. Now, the state’s highest court is considering whether sex abuse victims can have more time to sue “non-perpetrators” — institutions or their leaders that are obligated to protect children from such abuse.
None of it appeared to have anything to do with the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But in April, lawyers representing the denomination filed an amicus brief opposing expansion of the statute of limitations for lawsuits against third parties, including religious institutions.
The brief, reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal in October, landed like a bombshell in Southern Baptist circles. The organization has spent the last several years grappling with revelations that its national leaders suppressed reports of abuse and resisted reform for decades. The brief, abuse survivors and those critical of the church say, offers the first clear look at the church’s true position on whether its leaders can be held accountable for abuse.
It has led to a flurry of blistering reactions and efforts by S.B.C. leaders to distance themselves from the brief, which they characterize as a decision driven by lawyers. The brief says that the denomination has a “strong interest in the statute-of-limitations issue” in the case, and argues that a 2021 state law allowing abuse victims to sue third-party “non-perpetrators” was not intended to be applied retroactively.
“I’ve never seen such unmitigated and justified anger among Southern Baptists,” said Russell Moore, the former head of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who is now the editor in chief of Christianity Today.
The brief has disrupted continuing reform efforts in the denomination, which have gained momentum since an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News in 2019 revealed that hundreds of Southern Baptist leaders had pleaded guilty or had been convicted of sex crimes in recent decades.
Since then, the denomination has passed a resolution calling abuse both a sin and a crime, commissioned and published a third-party investigation into its handling of abuse and pledged to create a searchable database of people who have been credibly accused of abuse in Southern Baptist settings.
The denomination’s president, Bart Barber, who has supported abuse reforms, said in a statement that he takes “full responsibility” for the denomination joining the brief. He said he was asked for approval by the S.B.C.’s legal team and regrets not giving it the attention he should have. “I know that my credibility with you is harmed by this, perhaps irreparably,” he wrote in an open statement to Southern Baptists.
Yet, in that same statement, he said he is undecided on the matter. “I am not sure exactly what I think about statutes of limitation. I think they are a mixed bag,” he wrote. “I am uncomfortable with the harm statutes of limitations can do, but I also think that they play a valid role in the law sometimes.”
States including California and New York have expanded the statutes of limitations for filing civil suits in abuse cases. About a dozen Catholic dioceses in the United States are currently in bankruptcy proceedings.
Victims and their advocates say that the brief undercuts the intentions of the thousands of local pastors and other delegates at the denomination’s annual meeting who have consistently supported reform efforts.
In the last several years of votes on the meeting floor, “abuse reform is undefeated,” said Mike Keahbone, a pastor in Oklahoma who is on the denomination’s executive committee and its Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, established last year.
Mr. Keahbone said that members of the executive committee, the denomination’s top leadership body, were not informed about its lawyers’ intentions to join the brief.
“This is exactly what us survivors have been saying all along,” Ms. Woodson said, describing the denomination as an institution that, when push comes to shove, operates as coldly as a business.
Ms. Woodson and two other survivors issued a statement calling the brief a “disgusting” move to “actively detonate any and all measures of justice that are rightfully ours as victims of abuse.”
The parties signing onto the brief include Lifeway Christian Resources, the denomination’s publishing arm, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Both are defendants in a suit filed in Kentucky by a woman who says that her father, a Baptist pastor, abused her for years and that employees of various institutions failed to protect her.
Al Mohler Jr., the seminary’s president, said in a statement that in “questions of law” the seminary must defer to legal counsel. A Lifeway spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Jonathan Whitehead, a lawyer who often represents religious institutions in court, said that while the goal of rectifying abuse is a noble one, it may be too much to expect the denomination to provide pastoral support to victims, to accept legal responsibility for past abuses and to protect its own existence.
“It’s awfully hard to be the party of care and the party of responsibility at the same time.”
For reform advocates, the episode has been disturbing.
“We’re absolutely alienating women, and we’re alienating generations like millennials,” said Keith Myer, a pastor in Maryland who organized a fund-raiser to help abuse victims attend the annual meeting this summer. “It can’t just be about preserving our institutions. You have to think about preserving the membership and preserving what we stand for.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/us/baptists-abuse-kentucky.html
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| יְהוָה, יְהוָה, אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן |
I landed in Israel and went straight to a funeral.
It was at a small cemetery surrounded by cypress trees and flowering bougainvillea. Being laid to rest were Dana Bachar, a kindergarten teacher, and Carmel, her 15-year-old son, who loved the waves. They were murdered by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri, near Gaza. Carmel was buried with his surfboard while his father, Avida, who had lost a leg in the attack and was in a wheelchair, looked on and wept.
Several hundred people were present, friends and strangers alike. The mourners were distinctly secular and, in their dress, casual. Be’eri was well known for its pro-peace sympathies: It had a special fund to give financial help to Gazans who came to the kibbutz on work permits, and kibbutzniks would often volunteer to drive sick Palestinians to an oncology center in southern Israel.
“They were to the left of Meretz” is how one leading Israeli political figure described the kibbutz’s political sympathies, referring to the most progressive political party in Israel. Hamas must have known this. It butchered the people there all the same. The group may have had several objectives on Oct. 7, from derailing an Israeli-Saudi peace deal to getting Hezbollah to open a second front. But not the least of its aims was to kill Jews for its own sake, to instill a sense of terror so visceral and vivid that it would imprint itself on Israel’s psyche for generations. In that, it has succeeded.
What, I wondered, will it take for the country to recover? Surely a decisive military victory over Hamas, for the sake of deterrence if not justice. But any kind of military victory would be far from sufficient.
I have been coming to Israel for 40 years, through good times and bad. I’ve never seen it in a more damaged state than it is in now — a state in which grief competes with fury and where the target of fury is split between the terrorists who committed the atrocities and the political leadership that left the country exposed to attack.
And beneath the fury, fear.
From the funeral, I drove (with a brief roadside stop to take cover from incoming rocket fire) to the morgue at the Shura Army Base, where a forensics team opened trailer-size containers of bagged corpses in cold storage. Even at low temperatures, the smell left no doubt as to what was inside. Gilad Bahat, a police investigator, described examining babies who had been shot and burned, people who had been decapitated after being killed and a gruesome hodgepodge of hard-to-identify arms, skulls and other remains.
“Never have we seen such a sight,” Bahat said. He’s been on the force for 27 years.
Later, at an army headquarters in Tel Aviv, I was given a private screening of some 46 minutes of footage of the events of Oct. 7, assembled from security cameras, smartphone videos recorded by victims and survivors, and the GoPro footage taken by the terrorists themselves. I watched as one terrorist casually murdered a father with a hand grenade and then raided his fridge while two orphaned boys whimpered in fear. I watched another who tried to behead a wounded Thai field worker with a garden hoe while shouting “Allahu akbar.” I listened to a third who, in a phone call to his parents, boasted, “I killed more than 10 Jews with my bare hands!”
I also visited Kibbutz Nir Oz, which lost a quarter of its approximately 400 members to murder and kidnapping. I saw bedroom floors and bunk-bed mattresses soaked in blood. I saw incinerated homes and graffiti in Arabic taking ownership of the crime: “Al-Qassam Brigade.” I met Hadas Calderon, who lost her mother and her niece on Oct. 7, and whose two children and ex-husband are now, as best as she knows, hostages in Gaza. “The world has to scream,” she said. “Bring the children home now.”
Words such as “evil,” “horror,” “blood bath” and “terror” tend to exist, for most of us, on a conceptual or hyperbolic plane. Not for Israelis. They are under no illusions that had the Hamas terrorists been able to kill 100 or 1,000 times as many of them as they did on Oct. 7, they would have done so without hesitation.
That’s a point that needs to factor in to any thoughtful analysis of the Jewish state’s predicament. There’s an asymmetry in this conflict, but it’s not about the preponderance of military power. Israel’s goal in this war is political and strategic: to defeat Hamas as the reigning power in Gaza, even though there will be unavoidable cost in innocent lives, since Hamas operates among civilians. But Hamas’s goal is only secondarily political. Fundamentally, it’s homicidal: to end Israel as a state by slaughtering every Jew within it. How can critics of Israeli policy insist on a unilateral cease-fire or other forms of restraint against Hamas if they can’t offer a credible answer to a reasonable Israeli question: How can we go on like this?
The day after the Bachars’ funeral, I traveled to Camp Iftach, a small military base a few hundred yards north of the Gaza border. It was Oct. 25, a day after Hamas had attempted, unsuccessfully, a seaborne infiltration of the nearby beachside kibbutz of Zikim. The entire area was on high alert.
Getting to the camp meant driving my car at high speed from military checkpoint to checkpoint, tailing an Israeli Army Humvee on sandy roads surrounded by fields burned to ash by falling rockets. The camp itself was a collection of concrete bunkers, with hundreds of shell casings from the pitched battles of Oct. 7 littering the pavement outside.
One of the senior officers on base is Lt. Col. Tom Elgarat, whose careworn face looks much older than his 41 years. When I met him, he was getting his soldiers ready for the ground invasion that would begin a few days later.
“This cannot go on,” he said. “If you have to lose life, if you have to take life, this cannot go on.”
By “this,” Elgarat meant the matzav, the situation, in which Israelis now find themselves. He lives in Tel Aviv, where his wife was trying to hold things together while schools were closed and the kids were home. But he grew up in Nir Oz. One of his cousins there, he says, is “alive by pure chance,” having been barricaded with her family for hours. “I want to look in her face and say, you can go back to your house.” Two of his uncles and one of his best friends are among the hostages.
The issue of Israel’s internally displaced people gets short shrift in most news accounts. But it’s central to the way in which Israelis perceive the war. There are now more than 150,000 Israelis — proportionately the equivalent of about 5.3 million Americans — who were forced out of their homes by the attacks of Oct. 7. Small cities like Sderot, near Gaza, and Kiryat Shmona, near Lebanon, are now mostly ghost towns and will remain that way if the government can’t secure its borders.
Should that happen, sizable parts of Israel’s already minuscule territory would become essentially uninhabitable. That, in turn, would mean the failure of the Jewish state to maintain a safe homeland, presaging the end of Zionism itself. It’s why Israelis think of this war as existential and why they’re willing to put aside their fury at Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, for a while, to win the war.
Will they win?
If the question is whether Israel will be able to defeat Hamas, the answer is almost certainly yes: Israeli military planners have been war-gaming an invasion of Gaza for decades and, despite the intelligence blunders of Oct. 7, have tools and tactics that can flush Hamas’s fighters out of their maze of tunnels. Nor is the Israeli public likely to be swayed by civilian casualties into supporting any kind of cease-fire in the military campaign until Hamas is defeated and the hostages are returned. Israelis spent 18 years watching Hamas turn to its military advantage every Israeli concession — including free electricity, cash transfers of Qatari funds, work permits for Gazans, thousands of truckloads of humanitarian goods. Israelis won’t get fooled again.
But while Israelis are still processing the horror from the south, the threat of war looms on every side. Around the world, too many people are showing their true colors when it comes to their feelings about Jews, and darkness in the West has made it feel colder in Israel.
A few days after my visit to Camp Iftach, I drove north to Metula, a picturesque Israeli village on a finger of land surrounded on three sides by Lebanon. Other than a handful of soldiers, it was mostly deserted; it would almost surely be captured by Hezbollah in the early hours of a full-scale conflict, which would make the Gaza front look like child’s play.
In the West Bank, nightly Israeli security raids against Hamas and allied terror cells in cities like Jenin and Nablus are largely what stand in the way between the unpopular and corrupt Palestinian Authority and a Hamas coup. Compounding the tension is a sharp uptick in settler violence, with some seeing the crisis as an “opportunity to vent their spleen with M-16s,” as an Israeli reporter put it to me. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, has even suggested effectively banning the Palestinian olive harvest, ostensibly for security reasons. “That would be like banning the Super Bowl,” the reporter observed. It would guarantee an explosion.
And then there’s the wider world. Vladimir Putin, whom Netanyahu did so much to court over more than a decade, has all but openly thrown his support behind Hamas, in part because of Russia’s deepening alliance with Hamas’s patrons in Iran. In China, state-run and social media have veered sharply into open antisemitism. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom Israel had been engaged in a careful rapprochement, has reverted to Islamist form. “Hamas is not a terrorist organization,” he told members of his parliamentary group late last month, but a “mujahedeen liberation group struggling to protect its people and lands.”
Just as frightening to many Israelis I spoke with was the turn against Israel in the West, a turn that, increasingly, is nakedly pro-Hamas and antisemitic. It’s visible in more than just the attempted firebombing of a synagogue in Berlin or the chants of “gas the Jews” in Sydney, Australia. It’s also in the sheer indifference among educated elites to Israeli suffering — typified by college-age students tearing down campus posters of kidnapped Israeli civilians.
“The effort on campuses and progressive circles to equate Zionism with all that is evil prepared the ground for the hardening belief that ‘the Jews had it coming,’” Einat Wilf, a Harvard graduate and former member of the Knesset for the Labor Party, told me. To many Israelis, there’s a distinct echo of what happened at German universities beginning about a century ago.
It may be that what started near Gaza will end there, too. But there’s a growing sense among Israelis, as well as many Jews in the diaspora, that what happened on Oct. 7 may be the opening act of something much larger and worse: another worldwide war against the Jews.
A few days after my visit to Camp Iftach, as Israeli troops prepared to enter Gaza, I got a WhatsApp message from Elgarat: “Tonight is the start of the changing process that will bring Israel to a better place. But for my family and many friends, it is too late. All I can do now is focus on the mission. After this is all done, the time for sorrow and grief will come.”
Elgarat had clarity of purpose. But for many Israelis, what comes next seems much more muddled, especially politically. What can Israelis do about a government whose machinations had already created more turmoil and division than Israel had ever seen, whose incompetence and neglect had given Hamas a free hand, yet seems immovable?
“Toppling Bibi will be harder than toppling Hamas,” Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist and the author of “Bibi,” an acclaimed biography of Netanyahu, told me when I had dinner with him in Jerusalem.
Pfeffer’s view isn’t widely shared among Israeli political analysts, who think that massive protests or defections by Likud lawmakers or their coalition partners will quickly bring down the government once the war ends. My guess is that Pfeffer is right: The government, to adapt a line often attributed to Ben Franklin, will hang together because otherwise it will hang separately. And if one of the Oct. 7 lessons for many Israelis is that a right-wing government failed, another lesson is that right-wing ideology was vindicated, at least insofar as a Palestinian state is concerned. If tens of thousands of Israelis were put at mortal risk when Gaza became a quasi-state after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, what would it mean to put millions of Israelis at risk along much longer borders if the same process were to be repeated in the West Bank? That’s a thought that will weigh heavily on Israelis’ minds if there’s even a whisper of a chance that Hamas or a similar group might come to power.
Even so, it’s hard to overstate the breadth of public disgust with Netanyahu — not only for his failure to heed loud warnings from his generals before Oct. 7 about the military’s diminished readiness, but even more so for his refusal to take responsibility, much less apologize, for his role in the debacle. Seventy-six percent of Israelis think he should resign, according to a recent poll. Ministers can’t show their faces at funerals, shivas or hospital waiting rooms for fear of being yelled at and chased out.
Perhaps nobody feels this disgust more acutely than Amir Tibon, a correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Tibon became internationally famous last month after his family’s rescue, by his 62-year-old father, Noam (a retired general), when his kibbutz was overrun by Hamas terrorists. “Saba higea” — “Grandpa is here,” the words with which Amir’s 3-year-old daughter greeted Noam after 10 hours of terrified silence in their safe room — have since become words of pride and hope to Israelis desperately in need of both.
I went to see Amir in a kibbutz in the north, where he and his family were living with relatives. Amir pointed to his shirt: borrowed from a cousin. His car: also borrowed. His pants: from a giveaway rack collected by volunteers.
Amir hails from that segment of Israeli society that Netanyahu and his allies had spent the previous year demonizing: “elites,” “Ashkenazim,” “anarchists,” “leftists.” It’s true that by the terms of Israel’s political discourse, he and his neighbors tilted left; they had certainly been at the forefront of efforts to stop Netanyahu’s efforts to destroy the power of the Supreme Court. But it’s also true that on Oct. 7, it was largely his segment of society that became the embodiment of Zionism, as both its martyrs and its heroes.
I asked Amir what needed to change going forward. His first answer: More people would need permits to carry personal sidearms. “We were trained all our lives to trust the government and trust the military,” he said. “After this, people are going to trust themselves.”
His second: “Zero tolerance for semi-corrupt political appointments,” he said, a clear reference to characters such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right nebbish who holds the position of minister for national security. “Israelis are under too many threats and exposed on too many fronts to accept a mediocre, amateurish, self-interested rule by people who are not trustworthy.”
The Tibon family’s story is testimony that on Oct. 7, Israel’s people were far better than its government. Amir told me of sitting with a member of his kibbutz’s security team “who fought this insane battle, underarmed” against the hundred-odd Hamas terrorists who entered the Nahal Oz kibbutz that morning. “You cannot avoid a sense of despair when you see the leadership we have,” he told me. “And you can’t avoid a sense of pride when you see the citizens who saved lives on that day.”
There were other points of hope mixed into the general gloom of Israeli life today. I met reservists who had dropped busy careers and flown in from Chicago, Dubai and Melbourne, Australia, to rejoin their old units. A sergeant on Elgarat’s staff who goes by the nickname Cholo — he was D.J.’ing large parties in Brazil but flew back to Israel immediately after Oct. 7 to serve — was clear about where he stood: “I am not supporting this government, but I will go to the army.”
Not many countries can inspire such a willingness to sacrifice in times of crisis. It’s how Israel pulled through in the past, particularly during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, where a costly victory helped ease the pain of an initial debacle and where an eventual peace redeemed the price of both.
Also hopeful was the willingness of Israelis to acknowledge failure — and to seek to learn from it.
Nobody in Israel, including in the highest echelons of its defense establishment, disputes the military and intelligence sides of the failure. The lessons from it, tactical and strategic, are sure to be digested in the months ahead. Chief among them: Don’t try to answer a strategic problem, such as Hamas’s rule in Gaza, with a purely technogical solution, like the various wonder weapons that were supposed to keep the group in check.
But the country’s long-term fortunes will depend on its ability to recognize and correct the political failures that led to Oct. 7. Over dozens of conversations here, a few core questions emerged:
Will Israelis finally see the danger of electing tough-talking narcissists who practice the politics of mass polarization? And will they understand that politics in a Jewish state — which is as much a family as it is a polity — can’t be conducted by one narrow majority jamming its ideas down the throats of a bitterly opposed minority?
Will they see the folly of dividing themselves into a multitude of separate and mutually antagonistic tribes — Jewish and Arab; Ashkenazi and Mizrahi; left wing and right wing; secular and religious — so that they can tear one another to political pieces in full view of their foes?
Will they recognize that Israel’s single greatest strategic asset is the devoted patriotism that its people feel for their state — a feeling that will inevitably suffer if their government repeatedly comprises freeloaders, bigots, tax cheats and ideological arsonists?
Will they understand that the ultimate purpose of Zionism is self-rule for the Jewish people, not indefinite rule over others? A plausible Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel may be years or even decades away, given the wretched state of Palestinian politics. But Israel also has a long-term responsibility to safeguard the possibility of such a state against attempts to abort it.
Finally, will Israelis remember that the responsibility that falls on them now is a responsibility not for them alone? “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in 1968. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.”
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