First They Came For The Jews....851 recorded anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2014, more than doubling the total from 2013.

The Troubling Question in the French Jewish Community: Is It Time to Leave For Good?

Dubbed France's Kristallnacht, French Jews experienced a night of horror in Paris on July 13, 2014.

A demonstrator at a pro-Palestinian rally throws a rock toward riot police during a protest in Paris, June 19, 2014.

In 1182, the French expelled the Jew. Hundred of years later, on August 20-21, 1941, the French police rounded up the Jew, including little children, and sent them to Drancy--before the Germans even came, after which they were gassed in Aushwitz. Just last year, in 2014, 7,086 Jews left France for Israel, in the face of unremitting Jew-hatred. And here is why: thousands of Frenchmen, marching in the streets, shouting: JEWS, OUT OF FRANCE!!! JEWS, JEWS, JEWS!!! 

Marie Brenner reports on an incendiary wave of anti-Semitism in France and speaks firsthand to one of the hostages from the siege on the Hyper Cacher kosher market.

‘How can anyone be allowed to paint a swastika on the statue of Marianne, the goddess of French liberty, in the very center of the Place de la République?”

That was what the chairman of one of France’s most celebrated luxury brands was thinking last July, when a tall man in a black shirt and a kaffiyeh leapt to the ledge of Marianne’s pedestal and scrawled a black swastika. All around him, thousands of angry demonstrators were swarming the square with fake rockets, Palestinian and Hamas flags, even the black-and-white banners of ISIS. Here, barely a mile and a half from the Galeries Lafayette, the heart of bourgeois Paris, the chants: “MORT AUX JUIFS! MORT AUX JUIFS!” Death to the Jews. It was Saturday, July 26, 2014, and a pro-Palestinian demonstration turned into a day of terror in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods of the city.

“Do something! Do you see what is happening here?” the chairman said to a line of police officers watching the demonstration build to a frenzy. “What do you expect us to do?” one officer said, then looked away. For years, the chairman, a longtime anti-racism activist, has turned up at rallies like this one to see which politicians and which radical groups were present. (For reasons of personal safety, the chairman asked not to be identified for this story.) France’s endless demonstrations are a mainstay of the republic, a sacred right rooted in the legacy of Voltaire. But hate speech is a criminal offense—people may express their opinions, but not to the extent of insulting others based on their race, religion, or sex. The protest—against Israel’s Gaza policies—had been banned by the government, fearful of violence, following flare-ups in the preceding weeks. But if the police were to move in too quickly, the riots might continue all summer long—suburbs in flames, mobs in central Paris.

Photographs and videos of the swastika and its perpetrator, of protesters chanting “Kill the Jews,” and of the Palestinian, Hamas, and ISIS flags were sent in a rush to various groups in the Jewish community who assess threats. By early afternoon, some of these reached Sammy Ghozlan, a 72-year-old retired police commissioner who has spent his career working the banlieues, the belt of working-class, racially mixed suburbs that surround Paris. Ghozlan is a folk hero of the banlieues and has a nickname that is impossible to forget: le poulet cacher—“the kosher chicken.” (Poulet is slang for cop.) For 15 years, he has overseen France’s National Bureau for Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism—known by its French abbreviation, B.N.V.C.A.—a community hotline he founded that is funded by his police pension and whatever small donations he can come by. Its purpose is nothing less than to protect the Jews of France.

Sammy Ghozlan, photographed by Uriel Sinai, at his new home, in Netanya, Israel. By Uriel Sinai.

This past year, Ghozlan’s frequent bulletins—detailing attacks in parks, schools attacked, synagogues torched, assaults on the Métro—have clogged the in-boxes of reporters at Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Parisien, and of thousands of Jews throughout the banlieues. Ghozlan’s bulletins sometimes come twice a day, with claims that have also been backed up by hard numbers: according to a watchdog group, the Jewish Community Protection Service, or S.P.C.J., which reports statistics collected by the country’s Interior Ministry, there were 851 recorded anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2014, more than doubling the total from 2013. Ghozlan and his 19 volunteers are on the front lines in the most troubled areas, documenting, trying to confirm, hoping to get a reporter or a police prefect or a court to take action. There has been such an uptick, and such a flurry of alerts from Ghozlan over the past year, that there’s always a risk that his efforts will be shrugged off as yet another nuisance.

Just two weeks before the July 26 riot, Ghozlan’s texts and messages did not stop. It was Bastille Day weekend, and, on Sunday, July 13, he tracked the hundreds of protesters who rushed into the Marais, Paris’s historic Jewish quarter, stopping briefly at an empty synagogue on the Rue des Tournelles, near the Place des Vosges, and then racing, reportedly with iron bars, axes, and flags, toward the Rue de la Roquette, a boutique-and-café-lined street a few blocks from the apartment of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Their destination was the Don Isaac Abravanel synagogue. Inside, the 200 worshippers—including the chief rabbi of Paris—heard the howls from the crowd, estimated to number about 300: “Hitler was right!” “Jews, get out of France!” Audrey Zenouda, a policewoman who happened to be inside the synagogue, called her father, a retired policeman who works with Ghozlan at the B.N.V.C.A. “Do something. We are terrified here.”

“I knew that if anyone could get the police to take action it would be Sammy and the B.N.V.C.A.,” Zenouda later told me. Only six police officers were assigned to be on demonstration duty that day. “We are waiting for the assault police to arrive,” one told a reporter at the scene. After an hour, a counterterrorism force rescued the chief rabbi, but everyone else was left inside, behind doors barricaded from the inside with chairs and tables. Outside, members of a special security patrol and a dozen members of the self-trained Ligue de Défense Juive began chasing off the demonstrators with chairs and tables from nearby cafés, working with a small unit from the security force. Together, it took them three hours to disperse the crowd and safely evacuate the synagogue.

Almost immediately afterward, the reports of the July 13 demonstration would be challenged and debated. The numbers would be skeptically parsed—were there really so many?—and questions would be asked about actions that might have provoked the violence, as if carrying iron bars and axes around central Paris might be normal. In some circles, there were even accusations that the Jews “brought on the behavior,” as they always do.....


 READ MORE:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/07/anti-semitism-france-hostage-hyper-cacher-kosher-market

With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning (Friday), that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". ...

“I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” he said. “From the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria they’ll come in, they’ll leave. But you don’t see this systemic march by ISIL across the terrain.”

Read more: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2015/11/14/obama-tells-abc-isis-is-contained-in-video-released-just-before-paris-attack-273754#ixzz3rUIDAzT6


"When this is happening in Israel, the world is silent, or they blame the Jews. Do they blame the French when Muslims murder scores of French people going about their business? Europe and America have only begun to taste Islamic terrorism, and the sooner they wake up to the reality that Islam seeks to destroy the West simply because they are not Muslim, the better chance they will have to save themselves from destruction."  

The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates

by Mark Steyn

As I write, Paris is under curfew for the first time since the German occupation, and the death toll from the multiple attacks stands at 158, the vast majority of them slaughtered during a concert at the Bataclan theatre, a delightful bit of 19th century Chinoiserie on the boulevard Voltaire. The last time I was there, if memory serves, was to see Julie Pietri. I'm so bloody sick of these savages shooting and bombing and killing and blowing up everything I like - whether it's the town where my little girl's favorite fondue restaurant is or my favorite hotel in Amman or the brave freespeecher who hosted me in Copenhagen ...or a music hall where I liked to go to hear a little jazz and pop and get away from the cares of the world for a couple of hours.

 But look at the photographs from Paris: there's nowhere to get away from it; the barbarians who yell "Allahu Akbar!" are there waiting for you ...when you go to a soccer match, you go to a concert, you go for a drink on a Friday night. They're there on the train... at the magazine office... in the Kosher supermarket... at the museum in Brussels... outside the barracks in Woolwich...

Twenty-four hours ago, I said on the radio apropos the latest campus "safe space" nonsense:

This is what we're going to be talking about when the mullahs nuke us.

Almost. When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world's leaders will fly in to "solve" a "problem" that doesn't exist rather than to address the one that does. But don't worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there'll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?

With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris and succeeded in getting two suicide bombers and a third bomb to within a few yards of the French president.

Visiting the Bataclan, M Hollande declared that "nous allons mener le combat, il sera impitoyable": We are going to wage a war that will be pitiless.

Does he mean it? Or is he just killing time until Obama and Cameron and Merkel and Justin Trudeau and Malcolm Turnbull fly in and they can all get back to talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century? By which time France and Germany and Belgium and Austria and the Netherlands will have been long washed away.

Among his other coy evasions, President Obama described tonight's events as "an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share".

But that's not true, is it? He's right that it's an attack not just on Paris or France. What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world - an attack on one portion of "humanity" by those who claim to speak for another portion of "humanity". And these are not "universal values" but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity. They were kinda sorta "universal" when the great powers were willing to enforce them around the world and the colonial subjects of ramshackle backwaters such as Aden, Sudan and the North-West Frontier Province were at least obliged to pay lip service to them. But the European empires retreated from the world, and those "universal values" are utterly alien to large parts of the map today.

And then Europe decided to invite millions of Muslims to settle in their countries. Most of those people don't want to participate actively in bringing about the death of diners and concertgoers and soccer fans, but at a certain level most of them either wish or are indifferent to the death of the societies in which they live - modern, pluralist, western societies and those "universal values" of which Barack Obama bleats. So, if you are either an active ISIS recruit or just a guy who's been fired up by social media, you have a very large comfort zone in which to swim, and which the authorities find almost impossible to penetrate.

And all Chancellor Merkel and the EU want to do is make that large comfort zone even larger by letting millions more "Syrian" "refugees" walk into the Continent and settle wherever they want. As I wrote after the Copenhagen attacks in February:

I would like to ask Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt what's their happy ending here? What's their roadmap for fewer "acts of violence" in the years ahead? Or are they riding on a wing and a prayer that they can manage the situation and hold it down to what cynical British civil servants used to call during the Irish "Troubles" "an acceptable level of violence"? In Pakistan and Nigeria, the citizenry are expected to live with the reality that every so often Boko Haram will kick open the door of the schoolhouse and kidnap your daughters for sex-slavery or the Taliban will gun down your kids and behead their teacher in front of the class. And it's all entirely "random", as President Obama would say, so you just have to put up with it once in a while, and it's tough if it's your kid, but that's just the way it is. If we're being honest here, isn't that all Mr Cameron and Miss Thorning-Schmidt are offering their citizens? Spasms of violence as a routine feature of life, but don't worry, we'll do our best to contain it - and you can help mitigate it by not going to "controversial" art events, or synagogues, or gay bars, or...

...or soccer matches, or concerts, or restaurants...

To repeat what I said a few days ago, I'm Islamed out. I'm tired of Islam 24/7, at Colorado colleges, Marseilles synagogues, Sydney coffee shops, day after day after day. The west cannot win this thing with a schizophrenic strategy of targeting things and people but not targeting the ideology, of intervening ineffectually overseas and not intervening at all when it comes to the remorseless Islamization and self-segregation of large segments of their own countries.

So I say again: What's the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious. And, if they're still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel's mad plan to reverse Germany's demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren't serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

So screw the candlelight vigil.

http://www.steynonline.com/7293/the-barbarians-are-inside-and-there-are-no-gates

Boukris was arrested in April and charged with predatory sexual assault against a child and first-degree sexual abuse, both felonies....

• Boy who says rabbinical student sexually assaulted him will testify



Haim Boukris, the South Fallsburg rabbinical student accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy, listens to opening statements during the beginning of his non-jury trial at the Sullivan County Courthouse on Thursday. 




MONTICELLO - The boy who said a South Fallsburg rabbinical student sexually assaulted him will testify about the alleged incident, according to Sullivan County Assistant District Attorney Eamonn Neary.


Neary said on Thursday that the boy has “gone through hell” ever since coming forward about the allegations against Haim Boukris. Neary also said the boy’s father will testify about how his son’s behavior changed following the alleged incident in 2011, when the boy was 11 years old.


“(The father) will testify about the abuse him and his son face in the community,” Neary said.


Both Neary and Kenneth Gribetz, the New City attorney representing the 29-year-old Boukris, delivered opening statements before Sullivan County Court Judge Frank LaBuda on Thursday.


Boukris was arrested in April and charged with predatory sexual assault against a child and first-degree sexual abuse, both felonies.


Gribetz said Boukris will also testify during the trial.


Boukris went through a difficult time after being accused by the boy, according to Gribetz. Gribetz then went after the DA’s office for bringing the case to trial because, he said, there’s “not a scintilla of scientific evidence” or any witnesses who saw the incident.


Gribetz also criticized the boy for taking three years after the alleged incident occurred to speak out.


“One thing is for certain, (the boy) was never ever molested by (Boukris),” Gribetz said. “This is an enormous miscarriage of justice.”


Neary went through some details about the incident. He said both Boukris and the boy - who were familiar with each other - were at a grocery store when Boukris offered the boy a ride.


It was in the car where Boukris performed oral sex on the boy in Fallsburg, according to Neary. Neary said Boukris then drove the boy to a nearby bungalow colony and took him into the woods. There, Neary said Boukris took off his clothes and undressed the boy. Boukris then forced the boy to perform oral sex on him, according to Neary.


After that, Neary said Boukris performed anal sex on the boy.


The day ended following opening statements because LaBuda must rule on several motions before him.


The trial will resume at 10 a.m. Monday.


abeam@th-record.com

http://www.recordonline.com/article/20151112/NEWS/151119763/101008

In 2010, the U.S. military created their unit, called the Cultural Support Teams, as a pilot program—the first of its kind—to test how women soldiers could access places and people that male soldiers could not....

 

SERVING WITH PURPOSE

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“I think it’s the capability of women to connect with other women that makes the difference on these missions, and that was the case with the Cultural Support Teams.”

They were told they’d be “part of history” five years ago, and yet the world had virtually no idea they existed until The New York Times best-selling author and journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon brought their story of courage, valor, and sisterhood to the spotlight in a new biographical novel.

In Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield, Lemmon tells the story of a group of women chosen to join their male comrades on special operations missions in Afghanistan. In 2010, the U.S. military created their unit, called the Cultural Support Teams, as a pilot program—the first of its kind—to test how women soldiers could access places and people that male soldiers could not.

As Gayle explained in a recent TED Talk, “If you want to understand what's happening in a community and in a home, you talk to women, whether you're talking about Southern Afghanistan or Southern California. But in this case, men could not talk to women because in a conservative and traditional society like Afghanistan, that would cause grave offense. 

 So you needed women soldiers out there.” 

The formation of the all-female troop marked the first time that women soldiers could join male soldiers throughout the Army, the National Guard, and the Reserves on special ops missions.


 Though women were banned from combat at the time of the team's creation—a 1994 Pentagon ruling restricted women from artillery, armor, infantry, and other combat roles—the Cultural Supports Teams could help combat teams on special assignments, thus being involved in combat themselves.

The restrictions of the ruling are expected to be lifted in January 2016, which would open all U.S. military jobs to women, unless services seek exceptions to the ban's review.

“It’s important that women are working and being deployed in all kinds of roles in the military right now,” Lemmon told TakePart. “I think it’s the capability of women to connect with other women that makes the difference on these missions, and that was the case with the Cultural Support Teams.”

Many of the male rangers said that without the help of the female soldiers, they would never have found some of the things they were looking for. For instance, Lemmon said that a female soldier found a piece of intel wrapped in a baby’s wet diaper. Another discovered a line of explosives that was set up between the house they were standing in and the place they were going to visit later that night.

One soldier stood out and became the focus of Lemmon’s novel: 1st Lt. Ashley White. At five foot three, she was known to her teammates as “the best of us,” someone who would bake bread before hitting the gym and would apologize for climbing a 15-foot rope using only her arms.

White was also the first in her unit to be killed—on a combat mission, along with two male rangers, on Oct. 22, 2011.

Stories like White's and those of her teammates are examples of the importance of female soldiers, and people like Lemmon are giving a voice to a demographic that’s largely underrepresented in the media.

“Gayle is sharing a story that is missing from today's narrative on veterans,” Kate Hoit, the director of communications for the veteran-focused campaign "Got Your 6", told TakePart. “We tend to hear about the men who have served—their heroism and triumphs—despite the undeniable sacrifices women in the military have made for years. Not only is she putting a face to women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she's showing a new generation of women what is possible.”

Two weeks ago, the Army announced that it officially was opening more than 19,700 field artillery jobs to enlisted women.

Though Lemmon says the program in Afghanistan is winding down as more troops are being pulled out, she says that some of the women on the Cultural Supports Teams are still deployed there. In October, Obama announced that 5,500 troops would remain in Afghanistan to continue fighting America’s longest standing war, but it’s unclear whether the Cultural Supports Teams will be among those troops.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/11/11/serving-with-purpose-women-in-the-military?cmpid=tpdaily-eml-2015-11-11

“Yell it from the loudspeakers.The Messiah is at the door.”

Rabbi Kanievsky: Messiah Could Come This Week

“You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.” (Leviticus 19:32)

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky.

Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky is one of the most prominent rabbis of this generation. He is a leader of the Haredi branch of Judaism and the author of numerous authoritative books on Jewish law. In a distinctly uncharacteristic manner, he has recently begun making declarations of the Messiah’s imminent arrival.

In a YouTube video posted on November 2nd of a recent lecture by Rabbi Shlomo Boyer, a respected teacher in Bnei Brak, Rabbi Boyer described how Rabbi Shteinman, the leader of Lithuanian Judaism, was about to travel to America for pressing reasons. He went to Rabbi Kanievsky to receive a blessing for a safe journey and success.

Rabbi Kanievsky replied that he should not travel, saying, “It very well could be the Messiah will come this week. He can come at any moment. He is here with us already. Don’t travel.”

Rabbi Kanievsky has dedicated his life to Torah study and is generally not given to messianic or bombastic proclamations, but in the last year, this has changed dramatically. Last year, Rabbi Kanievsky announced the Messiah would come when the Shmittah year ended, which occurred on the Jewish New Year on September 13th. In August, the rabbi advised a young man,  “Gather your family and come to Israel. 

 Otherwise, there won’t be enough room for you on the airplanes.”  In April, close associates quoted him as instructing listeners to, “Yell it from the loudspeakers.The Messiah is at the door.”

When asked what needs to be done to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, the Rabbi replied that Jews must strengthen their belief and trust in God. 

After the massacre of Jews in the synagogue in Har Nof last November, Rabbi Kanievsky was asked to give some words of comfort to the people. He replied that the deaths were an atonement before the arrival of the Messiah, which would be arriving shortly.

https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/53387/rabbi-kanievsky-warns-friends-not-travel-because-messiah-can-come-any-moment-jewish-world/?utm_source=Breaking+Israel+News&utm_campaign=21a6f8316a-BIN_morning_11_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b6d3627f72-21a6f8316a-86615013#882MjhPjEbymXx1x.01

What I Would Say At This Year's Agudath Israel Convention!

                  LACK OF LEADERSHIP CONVENTION

(WHERE MORALITY MEANS NOTHING AND MONEY IS EVERYTHING!)

THE UOJ CLASSICS - REPOSTED FROM LAST YEAR:

I need no introduction Chaim Dovid, but thank you anyway.

I believe in Jewish Exceptionalism, not necessarily in the orthodox sense of the term (of course!). We were destined to be a great people only if we act as a great people. The same applies to us as Americans. We are a great nation because of the vision of the Founding Fathers' wisdom in setting up the rules and regulations called the Constitution, with the ability to add Amendments if deemed necessary, only after great scrutiny and consideration....And act with dignity in implementing the very basics of human needs with the understanding that societies can only exist if what is good for the individual members, is good, or should be good for society as a whole.

Perhaps the greatest of their visionary thinking, after vicious religious persecution that forced the Pilgrims to flee their country, was establishing a State with freedom of religion, or no religion; under these parameters did America become the greatest country to ever inhabit the planet, and scientific inquiry was able to flourish without the scrutiny of the ignorant and vile Church, creating and leading up to advances in medicine, for example, unthinkable a mere fifty years ago.

But as Jews we have the added privilege to have the Torah.

And as Chazal tell us, we didn't really want any rules. We were content initially, (before the Torah was forced on us), to worship false idols, many gods, Golden Cows, any cow, and Edward G. Robinson --- [born Emanuel Goldenberg; עמנואל גאָלדנבערג (Erev Rav - Cecile B. DeMille's version)] --- style leaders.

Leaders that lied to us, wreaked havoc on our value system, caused dissension among the desert nomads we once were, and guilty of every human weakness and acting out on that failing. Hashem, after offering His Torah to the rest of the nations, and being turned down, forced us slaves and nomads to accept the Torah, the literal and the implied, or he was going to lift up Har Sinai, and crush us to death. We were ingrates. Nothing He did earned our trust or respect. We acted like sub-humans regardless of all the chesed that He bestowed upon us.

And we are NO better today; you will be FORCED to accept the rule of law and protect our children first under all circumstances!

Our Erev Rav, want to tell us that the societal freaks that plague gentile children, don't plague Jewish children. A mere five years ago, a man who is the spiritual advisor to a whole city in New Jersey, told you publicly, that perhaps "one of those (freaks) slipped through his fingers, but that he/they had the matter under control according to his Torah".

Scroll down to the weekend program!

Rabbi Yisroel Belsky is a featured speaker on Shabbos. Chaim Neuhoff is a co-chair of a session that will discuss safety for your children. Rabbi Kaminetzky is another featured speaker, the man that moved Moshe Eisemann in middle of the night from his Philadelphia Yeshiva to Ner Israel in Baltimore once he confirmed the allegations of Eisemann's raping of boys in his yeshiva. And the bozo that is giving the keynote address Motzei Shabbos has in his kollel sitting today, a man who rapes baby girls in his family, and Shmuel Kaminetzky knows about it. Chaim Neuhoff, under the instruction and psak din of Sruli Belsky, participated viciously and with malice, in the cover-up for Yudi Kolko and Lipa Margulies & Co. (See hazmana below that was intended to stifle Eli Greenwald from speaking to the parent body of Torah Temima about Kolko)

Parents trusted their kids to these types that used their kids as "objects" - either making money off of them in their schools, summer camps, seminaries etc., and as we now know, that in every yeshiva and girls school, many kids were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by staff members, principals, teachers --- and these crimes were covered up by criminal circus midgets with long beards, like the ones sitting at your dais here tonight.

I look around this room and I know many of you; I find it incredible to believe that you are here showing support for this criminal enterprise. In effect, you have created "a race to the bottom" of what was once a beautiful heritage and tradition. Have you no shame? What will your legacy be, if not leaving the world a much worse place than how you found it? Your kids are ashamed of you --- and are voting with their souls, hearts and feet " out of here!"

Who do you think you're kidding? They see through you! They know that there's not a darn thing about your lifestyle that they want to have anything to do with!

Hashem had sent His messenger to America in September 1913 to set up shop with a model that would work for American Jewry. And a model that was mostly foolproof until the end of time. Children were to be cared for and loved by how you educated them and protected them from evil forces, within and outside our community. They were to be first and foremost bnei Torah in all its glory. Being a mensch was not optional! They needed to spend most of their school day with model rebbes/humans... not some garbage can with a lid that the sanitation department would refuse to pick up!

They needed to be educated as proud Americans, with full knowledge of most every subject taught in American secular schools (at the time). They needed to understand that they would one day need to go out in the world and either be a proud supporter of Torah institutions, or become a member or founder of a Torah institution. There was no gray area;... in order to support Torah, you had to appreciate what you learned as a child. And you had to love it, not loathe or fear it! In order to "stay in chinuch" you had to excel in your abilities, in your emunah, in your middos, and wisdom of the printed Torah and its spirit. And that required that you had to give up the so-called good-life, "without ever having to say you're sorry!" There had to be mesiras nefesh, knowing that your ben Torah neighbor that has gone to work, may have a nicer car than you.

Look at you! Look at what you have become! Either felons, or felons that have not been caught yet!

You trusted your kids to lowlifes, degenerates and perverts! They'd sell you down the river in a second, the second you stopped giving them money, or not as much as they wanted from you! And then your kid would be out on the street too, because he "did not measure up"! Which guy at the dais here has to be concerned about mundane issues like paying their mortgage, or tuition? Do they even have a mortgage? Or was it paid off with your money combined with whatever they could steal from Uncle Sam?

So why are you here?

There was a reason that Dr. Joseph Kaminetzky was appointed the head of Torah Umesorah. He graduated from Columbia University and had the wisdom needed in every area of education, and was rightfully in charge of the curriculum in each and every Torah Umesorah affiliated school.

It was no coincidence that Dr. David Stern was selected as menahel/principal of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. He too was a graduate of Columbia University and a rabbi at one of the early Young Israel synagogues.

And when Rabbi Alexander Linchner z"l left his position at Mesifta Torah Vodaath to focus full time on the building of Boys Town Jerusalem, he hired Rabbi Moshe Lonner PhD, to be the high school secular studies principal; with the same intent, gusto and spirit that his father in-law had in appointing Drs. Kaminetzky and Stern to their respective positions.

So how did we get here? What group of ignoramuses led us down this path of "the more ignorant, the more uneducated, the more dumb" -- the better? "Where are the lomdim?" an ultra-orthodox rabbi recently bellowed! Where are the Torah scholars?

What have you done to your kids and their kids?

Go back to the original model set up by Hakodesh Baruch Hu Himself; pick the few select students to toil in Torah, to stay in chinuch, and to be a model for your grandchildren. Get rid of the gangsters running the American yeshiva system and its affiliated organizations -- they have already destroyed two complete generations.

You will hear from the likes of psycho misfit Avremel Schorr, who will tell you the "dangers of the new technologies". "GET RID OF THEM" - he will hyperventilate! And I say...it's here to stay and only in the developmental stages --- you must educate your children with love and patience about the appropriate uses for these devices....BANS DO NOT WORK and are the products of sick and ignorant minds!

Supporting Agudath Israel in any way, will only encourage them to continue to run a parallel justice system to shield themselves and their institutions from illegal and nefarious conduct --- with total disregard and abandonment of societal protections that we must have in place for the safety of our kids, ourselves and our Jewish families. You saw what transpires under the bais din system run by these very criminals.

And finally...

My advocacy for the causes that are close to my heart are who I am, proudly. I have no other motive other than to see the betterment of all of humankind. I am a product of an illustrious family and upbringing, and would have preferred to do my work anonymously - as a true chesed shel emes, in the realm of a mes mitzvah. Those that I work with, know I spurn the spotlight, have distributed my own funds to the necessary professionals and costs associated with protecting kids, under a pseudonym, and postmarked from cities that I hoped could not be traced back to me. My father and grandfather sat in the back of the shul as I do. That was not meant to be - but the only "being" that I will explain it to when the time comes, is THE "Yodea Machshavot" - but of course, He already would have known that.

Chazak
UOJ

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE:

  

HOW SOME "GOYIM" DEAL WITH CHILD SEX-ABUSE COVERUPS:CLICK ON LINK BELOW
http://news.yahoo.com/scandal-leaves-paternos-reputation-tatters-163331841.html

What Agudath Israel & All Jews Can Learn From The "Goyim"! THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE KISSED THEIR RELIGION GOODBYE! Deal With This At Your "Feel-Good" about Nothing Convention - Where Lies & BS Prevail!

The Catholic Church’s Sins Are Ours

It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.

“Spotlight” — which opens in New York, Los Angeles and Boston on Friday and nationwide later this month — chronicles the painstaking manner in which editors and writers at The Boston Globe documented a pattern of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests and the concealment of these crimes by Catholic leaders.

Because of the movie’s focus on the digging and dot-connecting that go into investigative reporting, it has invited comparisons to “All the President’s Men.”

But it isn’t about journalism. Or, for that matter, Catholicism.

It’s about the damage done when we genuflect too readily before society’s temples, be they religious or governmental. It’s about the danger of faith that’s truly blind.

It takes place in 2001 and 2002, and that time frame itself is a remarkable reflection of how steadfastly most Americans resist any intrusion into religious groups, any indictment of religious officials.

Eight years earlier, James Porter was convicted of sexually abusing 28 children in the 1960s, when he was in the Catholic priesthood. He was believed to have abused about 100 boys and girls in all, most of them in Massachusetts.

Major newspapers and television networks covered the Porter story, noting a growing number of cases of abuse by priests. Porter’s sentencing in December 1993 was preceded by two books that traced the staggering dimensions of such behavior. The first was “Lead Us Not Into Temptation,” by Jason Berry.

 The second was “A Gospel of Shame,” with which I’m even more familiar. I’m one of its two authors.

But despite all of that attention, Americans kept being shocked whenever a fresh tally of abusive priests was done or new predators were exposed. They clung to disbelief.

“Spotlight” is admirably blunt on this point, suggesting that the Globe staff — which, in the end, did the definitive reporting on church leaders’ complicity in the abuse — long ignored an epidemic right before their eyes.

Why?

 For some of the same reasons that others did. Many journalists, parents, police officers and lawyers didn’t want to think ill of men of the cloth, or they weren’t eager to get on the bad side of the church, with its fearsome authority and supposed pipeline to God. (After the coverage of the Porter case, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston announced, “We call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”)

“Spotlight” lays out the many ways in which deference to religion protected abusers and their abettors. At one point in the movie, a man who was molested as a boy tells a Globe reporter about a visit his mother got from the bishop, who was asking her not to press charges.

“She put out freakin’ cookies,” the man says.

When the cookies finally went away, many Catholic leaders insisted that the church was being persecuted, and the crimes of priests exaggerated, by spiteful secularists.

But if anything, the church had been coddled, benefiting from the American way of giving religion a free pass and excusing religious institutions not just from taxes but from rules that apply to other organizations.

A 2006 series in The Times, “In God’s Name,” noted that since 1989, “more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use.” That was before the Supreme Court, in its Hobby Lobby decision, allowed some employers to claim religion as grounds to disobey certain heath insurance mandates.

A story in The Times this week described how various religions are permitted to use internal arbitration procedures to settle disputes that belong in civil court. It cited a federal judge’s ruling that a former Scientologist had to take his claim that Scientology had defrauded him of tens of thousands of dollars before a panel of current Scientologists.

To cloak sexual abuse and shield abusive priests, Catholic leaders and their lawyers routinely leaned on the church’s privileged status, invoking freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and the secrecy of the confessional. They thus delayed a reckoning.

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says a character in “Spotlight.” Indeed it does: a village too cowed, and a village too credulous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/opinion/the-catholic-churchs-sins-are-ours.html?_r=0\

JACOB PERLOW/ SAMUEL KAMINETZKY - WHAT WOULD YOUR MOTHERS SAY!?

http://bdnews24.com/entertainment/2015/11/01/survivors-of-clergy-sex-abuse-hope-spotlight-film-brings-victims-forward

Ninety-two Israeli Arab Muslims have committed terrorist attacks. They are not under occupation (and have better freedoms and living standards than most of the Arab world has). So clearly these attacks are not about any political dispute; they are driven by the same hateful incitement that rejects any state for the Jews....

An Idiot’s Guide for the Media on How to Do Your Job Properly

An imaginary newspaper report about 9/11

What if your Newspapers were run by Terrorists?

A new instructive video shows what news reports would look like if they applied their outrageous Israel-reporting techniques to terrorist attacks in the rest of the world. In the hope of lessening the egregious anti-Israel bias, here are some pointers to members of the media:

1) Your job is to report facts, not reinforce a narrative. Really. The facts matter – they form the basis for judgments. So here are some facts for you, meticulously documented and updated (with details and graphs worthy of a data scientist) in a shared Google spreadsheet by Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho. According to his data, in the fifty days from September 11 through October 31, there have been 1,315 Arab Muslim attacks on Jews, including stabbings, bombings, rock-throwing, etc. That’s about 26 attacks per day resulting in the murder of 11 innocent Jews. Adjusted for the US population, that’s over 1,000 knife, bomb and other attacks per day that kill 440 people during fifty days of terror. How would the US react to that?

2) Remember that the weaker party can be wrong. Actually, when a Palestinian man stabs a 70-year old woman, he’s not even the weaker party. Sometimes Palestinians do indefensible things. Sometimes Israel is guilty of only trying to protect its citizens from insanely hateful violence. And as an honest reporter, you should try to show this.

3) Properly identify the terrorist and the victim when reporting on casualties, and describe the main causal sequence of events with relevant context. That’s how you avoid headlines like “Jewish man uses his neck to attack the blade of Palestinian’s knife.” The BBC’s distortions were actually not far from that when they effectively turned terrorists into victims. The BBC’s bias is so egregious that even its former chief complained.

4) Do your homework on this region. Learn its basic history so that you don’t moronically suggest (as the NY Times did) that Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount. Otherwise it looks like you’re trying to support Palestinian revisionism against basic facts and endless archaeological evidence (including what a 10-year old recently discovered).

5) Learn the history of this conflict enough to know that Pallywood has been actively deceiving journalists for at least 15 years now, in an effort to delegitimize Israel. Before publishing “information” fed to you by fixers and “eyewitnesses,” realize that even Amnesty International has admitted the unreliability of “eyewitnesses” in this conflict. The most galling Pallywood example from this latest round of Arab terrorism is the inflammatory lie – by “moderate” Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas – that Israeli forces had “executed” a 13-year old. The truth: he was treated in the same Israeli hospital caring for the boy he tried to murder.

Such lies can kill. Because when it comes to this conflict, Arab leaders know that violence replaces reason at the slightest provocation – like hooligans at a football game incited to attack the opponents of their beloved team. So inciting lies are very much a weapon. The media should know this and expose the falsehoods, rather than blindly proliferate them. Journalists should know that “reporting” inflammatory claims can produce mob violence, and should therefore be doubly careful about checking facts, unless of course their goal is to trigger riots (which do produce more sensational news stories).

6) Learn the history of this conflict enough to know that Arab Muslims have been killing Jews in this area for over a century, with shifting excuses over time.

7) Stop trying to use the latest of those shifting excuses to justify the unjustifiable (here, too, the BBC is an offender). No alleged grievance warrants randomly stabbing people in the street. The average Syrian is infinitely worse off than anyone in Gaza or the West Bank, but Syrian teens aren’t randomly stabbing civilians. Countless refugees from Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere have risked their lives for the hope of a better future in Europe. And yet there are virtually no Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza among the millions desperate to reach Europe. So random stabbings don’t reflect some miserably unfair existence – they are the product of raw hatred and incitement.

8) Take note of nuances. Ninety-two Israeli Arab Muslims have committed terrorist attacks. They are not under occupation (and have better freedoms and living standards than most of the Arab world has). So clearly these attacks are not about any political dispute; they are driven by the same hateful incitement that rejects any state for the Jews.

9) Show cause and effect (ideally one before the other), and not just effect. When you show only Israeli responses to attacks, it makes Israelis look as if they wake up every morning asking how they can hurt Arabs. Israelis actually have better things to do with their mornings. Like cure cancer and stuff. But when people are trying to kill them, they understandably get a bit distracted. If the world could keep Israelis safer, cancer might get cured faster.

10) Articles should contain a logical subject and verb, preferably in a way that indicates who did what. According to CNN, Joseph’s Tomb spontaneously “catches fire.” CNN would rather change the laws of physics than blame Muslims for trying to burn a Jewish holy site. But there is a long list of non-Muslim sites that have been desecrated or destroyed by Muslims – from the Buddhas of Bamiyan razed by the Taliban to the countless monuments and churches destroyed by the Islamic State. History is also littered with Islamic conquests that converted non-Muslim holy sites into mosques.

11) Israeli lives matter. Getting both sides of the story means including photos and profiles of Israeli victims of Arab terrorism at least as often as you include photos and profiles of Arab attackers who were killed while trying to murder innocent Israelis. In case you’re not sure what it’s actually like to survive a stabbing attack, Kay Wilson’s TED Talk is a must-watch for some valuable context (and a reminder of what a life-affirming culture looks like, as opposed to the death cult trying to stamp it out).

12) Don’t be afraid to present Gazans as they present themselves (brandishing butcher knives and calling for Jewish blood). Show this Palestinian mother who celebrates that her child was killed trying to murder Israelis and who hopes that she and her other children all die for the same “cause.” Showing the Palestinian death cult of Jew-hatred that runs from crib to coffin might help observers understand why there’s still no peace.
Just for some context, when was the last time that you saw a video of a Jewish mother hoping that she and her children can all die for the sake of murdering some Germans to avenge the German Nazi murder of six million Jews (which seems a bit worse than praying on a contested holy site)?

13) If you want to falsify information to sanitize Palestinian terror, as NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin did, try not to do so on live TV, because you’ll look really biased (and stupid).

14) It’s better to research whether the maps you display on your “news” broadcast were produced by anti-Israel propagandists BEFORE you broadcast them, because otherwise you’ll look as biased (and stupid) as NBC/MSNBC did.

15) To ensure that your reporting is fair and consistent, consider how a similar event was covered in other countries/contexts. For a strikingly convenient example, contrast how differently NBC News (again!) reports on airstrikes taking place in two neighboring Mideast conflicts, within just eight days of each other:
On October 3, NBC News used this headline to report that 60 Russian airstrikes in Syria killed 39 civilians: “Russia Launches New Wave of Airstrikes in Syria.” On October 11, NBC News used a much more personalized headline – with victim profiles – when reporting on one Israeli air strike that killed two civilians: “Israeli Strike in Gaza Kills Palestinian Woman, Child as Violence Continues.” So are two Gazan civilians more worthy of attention and sympathy than 39 Syrian civilians?

Ironically, despite your endless bias in favor of Palestinian terrorists, they thank you by posing as journalists in order to stab Israelis – a deceit that only undermines the trust that combatants have in the label “PRESS” and potentially endangers true war correspondents.

Each small instance of bias may seem like a mere “journalistic microagression” against Israel, but its cumulative effect is toxic and sometimes deadly. At best, the persistent anti-Israel bias poisons many millions – from voters to policy-makers – against Israel.  Even worse, it can lead to anti-Semitic violence, by mobs and/or individuals thugs, as is so often the case in Europe.

You journalists are key to a fair and civilized world. Start acting like it.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/11/03/an-idiots-guide-for-the-media-on-how-to-do-your-job-properly/

Pick a "Kol Koreh" / Rabbinic Proclamation That Works For You!

GUEST POST:

by Daniel Schwartz Esq.

So, The Jewish people are suffering a wave of random terrorist stabbing attacks in our homeland. Islamic State is now making videos in Hebrew threatening annihilation of the Jewish people. Anti Semitism the world over abides and in some places rears its ugly head more often and louder than it has in the recent past. Iran marches on toward the bomb; which they say will be pointed at Tel Aviv, once they get it.

 But here in America, rabbinic leadership [sic], both its Modern Orthodox and Chareidi varieties, has determined that the greatest threat to Jewish survival, the two headed devil that has to be beheaded, are a growing group of uppity women who want to dedicate their professional lives to service of the Jewish people and a sub denomination that both supports those rebellious women and dares to ask and ponder questions on Jewish belief and practice to which there are no simple and pat answers.

 Around a year ago, when three boys in Israel were kidnapped and murdered, we all extolled the unity that was engendered by that horrific crime. We all knew in our hearts that our strength as a people lies in our fraternal love and unified voice. Well, that's what we projected. But it was a lie, the worst kind of self deception.

 The existential threat has not abated. The barbarians remain at the gate. And the threat grows with each day. Achdut? Areivut? Not this time, I guess. The "Gedoilim" have a new idea. Before "they" kill us, we'll kill each other- with words. Let me know how that works out for you.

Why would we trust information that doesn’t ever change? Information shifts perspective, deepening understanding.

Science Doesn't Find Truth, It Understands Change

 

People love the benefits of science. They generally like the advances made in technology, biology, psychology, chemistry, and physics. And yet, there seems to be confusion about what science is and how we perceive it, which has led to a strange backlash against pursuing knowledge. In a recent and riveting piece for Aeon, David P. Barash, a professor of psychology and biology at the University of Washington, dissects our modern suspicion of science with razor-sharp insight.

NASA Just Released The Largest Photo Ever Taken. What It Shows Will Shake You Up.

The video shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the Galaxy, stretching over 40,000 light-years. Nature is truly breathtaking and immensely vast...

The public distrusts science because it appears to change, Barash says. One day nerve cells don’t regenerate; the next day they do. Sugar is good; wait no bad; wait no evil — "wake me up when you make a decision," the weary public mumbles. But Barash points out that it’s only our paradigm that is shifting; not the actual truth, just our understanding of it.

That is something that seems difficult for people to understand. For example, if there is “breaking news” on TV, information starts rolling in to help us understand what happened. The event itself doesn’t change based on what we know or don’t know about it. So it is with science — the truths are always going to be true, regardless of the information we have. To continue with the news analogy, the reporters do research to find the facts. The facts give context. With science, the research being done by its practitioners gives us context to understand the story of the universe.

As our tools and abilities to investigate on micro and macro levels become rapidly more sophisticated, it should be expected that old information will be invalidated and new information will be discovered.

 We are capable of forgiving public figures for mistakes (especially if they go on a late show and act cute), yet forgiving scientists for misjudging or misunderstanding something makes us assume that the entire endeavor is faulty. This type of black-and-white thinking is evident throughout modern society, particularly in politics, where nuance and gray areas have basically been eradicated. We ask from science that it be completely accurate all the time, a set of rules that go unchanging. Yet, our understanding of the world is constantly changing and evolving.

Neil deGrasse Tyson explains where future scientific breakthroughs will come from:

Why would we trust information that doesn’t ever change? Information shifts perspective, deepening understanding. As our tools and abilities to investigate on micro and macro levels become rapidly more sophisticated, it should be expected that old information will be invalidated and new information will be discovered. The fact that things are changing at the speed that they are is encouraging! It means that we are becoming increasingly more informed and knowledgeable, that our methods are refined and tools more precise. If there was a greater lag time between discoveries, it would be a sign that our methods of research were as outdated and inaccurate as they were when we thought the Earth was flat.

Our culture doesn’t like science because it doesn’t offer a quick, easy answer that you can hang on to and use when you play Trivial Pursuit. Science is an ongoing investigation and observation. Instead of dismissing it just because it’s fluid and complex, maybe we should take a step back and do an observation all our own: look at how quickly we are advancing. Faster than ever before. More sophisticated than ever before. What an exciting time to be alive. After all, thanks to science, your lifespan is a whole lot longer than our ancestors. Maybe we’re scared of knowledge, because the more we find out about the universe, the smaller we feel. But I can’t help but be in awe of our achievements, and the continuing discoveries being made every single day all over the planet. Science is only how we understand reality; it’s nothing to be apprehensive about. Or as the great Bill Nye once said, science rules.

--

Lori Chandler is a writer and comedian living in Brooklyn, NY. She has been published in The New York Times and on CollegeHumor. You can follow her on Twitter @LilBoodleChild to keep up with her latest pieces, performance dates, and wry observations. 

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/if-you-think-science-is-the-enemy-you-dont-know-what-science-is

Another American victim of Palestinian terrorism was buried this week. Does it matter that he was an American? Why should the American government, or American Jews, take any more interest in the latest victim than in any other victims?

Another American Victim of Palestinian Terror: Why it Matters

Author:

Stephen M. Flatow / JNS.org

 

 

Richard Lakin, who succumbed to wounds he sustained in a terrorist attack on a bus in Jerusalem.

JNS.org – Another American victim of Palestinian terrorism was buried this week. Does it matter that he was an American? Why should the American government, or American Jews, take any more interest in the latest victim than in any other victims?

Richard Lakin, a 76-year-old former Connecticut school principal, died Oct. 27 of wounds he suffered in a recent Palestinian terrorist attack in Jerusalem. He was the 137th American citizen murdered by Palestinian terrorists since the 1960s.

Since he was an American citizen, Lakin’s death will merit a brief mention in many American newspapers, and newspapers in his hometown will give more extensive coverage.

That’s the first reason the American identity of these victims matters. If not for the sense that “he was one of us,” these terror victims would be completely forgotten. Newspapers have limited space. They choose the stories they will cover based primarily on what they think will interest their readers. They believe that Americans will care more about other Americans than about other victims, and that residents of Connecticut will be more interested in what happens to other residents of their state than residents of other states. And that’s a reasonable assumption, whether we like it or not.

Richard Lakin was Jewish. As a result, American Jews will take a particular interest in what happened to him. And they should. The organized American Jewish community actively encourages Jews to visit Israel. The community, as my family does through the Alisa Flatow Memorial Scholarship Fund, also supports “study abroad” programs at Israeli schools, seminaries, and universities in order to attract American Jewish college students to study there for a semester or a year. And a number of Jewish organizations provide financial assistance and other incentives to American Jews to move to Israel.

These American Jewish initiatives to send Jews to Israel are an expression of the strength and warmth of the ties that bind Israel and the Diaspora. We derive inspiration and spiritual sustenance from our relationship with the Jewish state. We want our children to share in that. And if we are going to encourage American Jews to go to Israel, then we have a special obligation to care, and to act, if any of those Jews are harmed by Palestinian terrorists in Israel.

Moreover, American Jews have the ability to make a difference. Our relationship with the White House and Congress, our electoral clout as a community, and our skills at reaching out to the wider public enable us to influence America’s policy on these issues.

The American public should care, too. The people of the United States have always had a special attachment to Israel, because the Jewish state shares our democratic, humanitarian, and Judeo-Christian  values. Americans who visit or even live in Israel are putting into practice the heartfelt sentiments of millions of their fellow American citizens.

American taxpayers should care for another reason: the US government sends $500 million of their tax dollars to the Palestinian Authority (PA) every year. So the public has a right to expect the government to intervene when PA employees or PA-incited terrorists murder our citizens, or when the PA names streets, parks, and soccer teams after murderers of Americans.

The American government, too, has a special obligation with regard to American victims of Palestinian terrorism.

First, there is a legal obligation. American citizens, whether they are visiting, studying, or living abroad, are still American citizens. They pay taxes just like the rest of us, and in return the US government has a legal responsibility to act when they are harmed by terrorists abroad just as it would have an obligation to act if they are harmed by terrorists within the US.

Second, the US government has a strategic obligation to act. Fighting Palestinian terrorism must be part of America’s global war on terror. Bringing Palestinian killers of Americans to trial in the US would contribute significantly to anti-terror efforts, by making it clear to Palestinian terrorists that they could face the death penalty, or at least life in prison with no hope of release in a prisoner exchange — something that is not the case when they kill Israelis.

So, yes, it is relevant that Richard Lakin was an American. It’s not just a question of narrow national pride, or ethnic solidarity, or curiosity. For important moral, legal, and strategic reasons, the American victims of Palestinian terrorism should matter to American Jews, to the American public, and to the American government.

 

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.