The irony of having a "friend" in Washington

When George W Bush was running for re-election against John Kerry in 2004, I speculated with some of my friends that maybe it would be better for Kerry to win, because at least then you'd know who you're dealing with. With Bush, who was perceived as a "friend" of Israel, it'd be difficult to say "no" to any demands he places on Israel, even though you know the Palestinians will serially violate every single one of their obligations with impunity - because Bush is a friend, and we don't want to alienate our friends, right? But for Kerry, who is known to be more pro-Arab than Bush, there wouldn't be any illusions, and therefore no need to pander to him.

My friends swung me only on the basis that Bush was in favor of keeping US troops in Iraq, which is exactly where you want them if Iran was ever going to be subjected to the former Bush Doctrine of regime change for governments that support terrorism, while Kerry had promised a full pullout.

Four years later, I had the same debate, and still came out rooting for John McCain for the same reasons, muttering a quiet "baruch Dayan HaEmes" when the results showed Obama had won. And now we get to see my "friend in Washington" thesis in practice.

Obama has truly surpassed all my expectations for alienating Israelis. It really is amazing how he has swung Israeli public opinion since his inauguration: when he started out he had 31% of Israelis thinking he was pro-Israel, versus 14% who felt he was pro-Arab, and 40% felt he was neutral. The latest opinion polls have only 6% still thinking he's pro-Israel, 36% neutral, and fully 50% now feel he's pro-Arab. You gotta hand it to the guy - that is really amazing work. Not only has he debased himself by grovelling in front of the Muslim world with his cringing apologetics in Cairo, but he has succeeded in completely alienating Israelis to the extent that only 6% of us feel that he's on our side!

To me, this is very good news. He now has absolutely no leverage to extract any more stupid unliateral concessions out of us. Take today - the US State Department officially stated that they demand and end to all construction in Jerusalem suburbs on the "wrong" side of the Green Line, including "natural growth". Does anyone seriously believe that we're going to listen to a bombastic edict like that? Fuggedaboudit. Obama is just burning all his leverage with Israel, because no "friend" could make a demand like that, especially when we would be getting nothing in return. To a world of Islamist enemies, the USA has no concrete demands, just some touchy-feely stuff about trying to get to know each other better - but for Israel, the US's only staunch friend and ally - for Israel, the US knows how to make concrete demands.

And if we don't comply? What are they going to do - declare sanctions on us? Congress and Senate may be stacked with Democrats, but most of them are still pretty pro-Israel, to the extent that there's even been a rumbling among the Democrats themselves about Obama's Israel-unfriendly line. Sanctions not happening any time soon.

There really is great meaning to the "Baruch Dayan Haemes" blessing - we acknowledge G-d's greater judgment when things happen that appear to be bad. Obama's ascent to the presidency looks like really bad news, but I'll bet in the next 4 years Israel makes fewer stupid unilateral concessions than it did in any of the 4-year terms of Bush (Jr and Sr) or Clinton.

Supporting the Iranian revolution is a no-lose proposition!

Today I had to say a birkas shehecheyanu - it's the first time I've ever felt proud of a statement made by Shimon Peres!

Israel is to my knowledge the first and only country to have publicly supported the Iranian people in their quest for freedom. And we should be trumpeting this from the rooftops!

It's a no-lose proposition: if the Iranian regime falls (as we all hope it will), then the Iranian people will have a massive grudge against the people who passively watched them getting slaughtered amid mild statements of "reservations" about the fairness of the election, calls for "restraint" and "calm", and earnest attempts to "engage in dialogue" with the murderers. Conversely, those who stood up and cheered for the people, even if they could do nothing more than have the moral clarity to call Evil for what it is, will at least be remembered as friends.

And if the regime manages to crush the revolution - well, what have we lost? Are they going to hate us more than they already do? Are they going to want to drop a bomb on us ר"ל any more than they do now? And if they try to incite their people against us with the "Look! It's all a Zionist plot!" line, I think that would backfire on them in our favor. The Iranian regime has no more credibility with its people, and they're not going to buy the "Goldstein" argument any more. The fear society of Iran is cracking, and it will not last very much longer at all. And if the perception in the street is that Israel is the enemy of the Iranian regime, so much the better! When the Iranian people eventually are liberated, they may yet become our allies!

Stranger than fiction?

You have nothing to lose. Get onto twitter and make sure everybody knows that Israel is supporting the Iranian people!

Rabbi Horowitz - The System Worked

After all the bad press we've been getting about the sexual molestation issues in our community, at last we have some good news from Rabbi Yakov Horowitz.

Note that in this case, they went straight to the police. Not to the tznius police, the real police. It was handled cleanly, discreetly, and with the full cooperation and support of the local Rabbonus.

Think we could manage that here?

The speech we wish Bibi could have given

Ah, if only we had a PM who had the guts to tell it like it is...

You want to have a prime minister who isn't afraid to mention G-d's name?
Sign up already!

Stan's right to have babies

It struck me that every one of Bibi's conditions for Palestinian statehood is very reasonable, yet even before the applause for his speech had died down, the Arabs had rejected every one of them offhand, and blamed him for setting unacceptable conditions. ("What?! You want our independence not to come at the expense of yours?! Outrageous!")

In effect, Bibi's nod to a Palestinian state is no more meaningful than Judith's proposal that Stan should have the right to have babies. Well played, man!

The best possible outcome x2

Yesterday there were two fairly significant events: Bibi Netanyahu's grand policy speech, and continued and escalating riots in Iran protesting the stolen election.

All told, I don't think things could have turned out better in either situation.

I'm not going to dissect Bibi's speech here; there are some very good analyses from Jameel and Barry Rubin, among others. I will just say that I think he played his hand very well. He made an offer to the Arabs that incensed the Right, but it's got as much chance of coming to fruition as, we have of, well, the Arabs acknowledging Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, with Jerusalem as its undivided capital, and not flooded with millions of Arab "refugees". He also had the guts to say "NO" to Obama's noxious demands that we effectively sterilize the Jews who live over the Green Line; and he gave a good lesson to the Prez about Jewish history in Eretz Yisrael not having started with the Holocaust. Just a pity that he failed to call for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Maybe he felt that he'd pushed his luck enough already... but still...

In summary, I would have been ecstatic if he'd given the speech that Moshe Feiglin wrote for him, but I don't think Bibi, given that he does not believe in G-d, could have done any better than he did last night.

Strangely enough, I'm much more captivated by the goings on in Iran than I am by the repercussions of Bibi's speech. Before the elections I was in contact with an 19-year-old Iranian programmer whom I met on StackOverflow. I asked him what his feeling was on the election, and he said he wasn't even going to bother to vote. There was originally a field of hundreds of candidates, but the list got sanitized by the mullahs until there were only 4 candidates who got the hechsher of Iran's Supreme Leadership. If they got the hechsher, that basically automatically disqualifies them as a real hope for the people. They could only choose between Bad, Filthy, Disgusting and Utterly Repulsive.

So I thought, perhaps it's actually worse if Ahmadinejad loses! Coz then the new guy can come in and pretend that he wants to talk with the West, while buying more and more time to continue developing nuclear weapons apace, and still spewing the same hatred and genocidal invective against Israel. At least if Ahmadinejad wins, he can't even fake moderation! It'll be more difficult to pretend that talking to him is going to help things - although I think Obama has already decided that he has no problem with Iran having the Bomb.

But lo and behold! The Iranian people turned out in their masses to vote for Bad instead of Utterly Repulsive - and when their votes were stolen, they decided they had had enough! They have tasted freedom, and they are not going to let go! And it's not just about rallying around the guy who lost. I don't think the Iranians just want a change in government; if they did, I wouldn't be so interested. I think they want a change in regime.

Take a look at all the Twitter traffic emanating from Iran. People aren't just chanting, "Down with Ahmadinejad," or "Long live Moussavi" - they are shouting, "Death to Khamenei!"

It's really amazing, seeing as I'm in the middle of rereading Natan Sharansky's The Case For Democracy - to see how perfectly accurate his words are. We are watching a fear society in its last stages before collapse. The people have tasted freedom, and the regime is being forced to spend every last iota of its power to repress them and beat them into submission. As his last throw of the die, Ahmadinejad is playing his only trump card - the bogeyman of "foreign enemies" who are plotting against Iran and trying to sabotage its internal affairs. Sharansky identified this, too - the only way to keep True Believers as TBs, and to prevent doublethinkers from becoming dissenters is to focus their attention on outside enemies, to serve as a rallying point. Looking at the footage of the Iranian riots, I think it's too late for that.

IMO it's going to go either one of three ways from here.

1. The mullahs carry out their own version of Tiananmen Square, crushing people's will to resist. Try papering over a massacre when you're trying to fake moderation to the West. Even Europe will have a hard time justifying doing business with Iran after that.
2. They will give in to pressure and either annul the election results or institute some kind of power sharing between the candidates. There will also have to be some kind of regime reform to accompany that if they want the people to calm down. Yet another crack in the fear society's brittle fortifications.
3. The people storm the Bastille, as it were, and literally throw the mullahs from power. Not so far-fetched; from what I'm reading on Twitter, the army has declared it will not fight against the protestors, and the government is being forced to use Hizbullah Arabs for crowd control, because the local Farsi police are to compassionate on their brethren.

I'm rooting for number 3. But whatever happens, Iran's fear society is crumbling, and we can look forward to the liberation of the Iranian people from their dictatorship sooner than you think. The only thing that can save them now is if the West, in its infuriating "realist" delusions, decides to give the mullahs and Ahmadinejad a hand-up, all in the name of "regional stability". Right now what the people of Iran really need is for the USA and Europe to come out publicly supporting their struggle for freedom. If they fail to do so, then when the Iranians finally do liberate themselves, they will resent us all the more for failing to come to their assistance.

You can also make a difference. Use the social networking web sites to post messages of encouragement to the Iranian people, who deserve freedom no less than any other nation on Earth. Tell them we are with them; encourage them to liberate themselves - and show them that they have friends in the Weat, and especially in Israel.

The News Revolution

When social networks like Facebook and Twitter started coming out, I took a look, and after much consideration decided that they were just a bloody waste of time.

Now, watching the stuff happening in Iran after their elections, I am coming to realize that we are actually watching nothing less than a revolution - the News Revolution.

I started realizing this during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, when my primary news source was not CNN, not the Jerusalem Post, and not Radio Kol Yisrael. It was Jameel @ The Muqata. Yes, a blog web site, which carried the most up to date news about how things were going for our boys in Gaza, where rockets were falling - and they had the scoop hours before the news appeared on any mainstream news source.

And now on Twitter, you can watch everything happening within Iran, as told by the Iranians, and uncensored by the politicos at CNN and BBC who prefer detente over confrontation, who prefer stability over freedom. All the stuff that you'll never see on CNN. And more - it is also serving as a mouthpiece for those people who otherwise could not express themselves - both for Iranians to sound off about how they long for freedom, and for outsiders to encourage them to pursue it.

This is the News Revolution, where the people are taking back the narrative from the journalists. No longer can the mainstream media black out all dissenting opinions and subtly mold popular consensus; no longer can they control what people are exposed to. The truth will out, and we will all be much better off for it!

Girsa d'yankusa

Jewish tradition has a very strong emphasis on "girsa d'yankusa" - the things you learn when you're young. On a fresh, impressionable mind, things make a much greater impact - so it's considered really important to start out on the right foot.

I can see how true this is of myself. I grew up in a pretty liberal household in South Africa, and the things I learned under my parents' tutelage have been the things that have most stuck with me in my life. Things like basic menschkeit and honesty. Having an open mind, and encouraging questioning. A deep seated revulsion at racism of any sort - I will never forget the telling off I got when, as a 6-year-old, I repeated a racist term I had learned from my schoolmates! I also imbibed a culture of activism, and having the courage to stand up for what you believe in, especially from my mother, who was arrested several times for anti-apartheid activities. People who haven't lived in a fear society usually don't fully appreciate just what kind of mesirus nefesh it takes to be a dissident, and actively work against the regime. My parents took great risks to do what they believed was right, and I can only pray that I can be a worthy heir to this spirit.

I only became religious at age 20, long past my "girsa d'yankusa" stage. And while I have intellectually accepted the ol malchus shamayim, internalizing it to the degree that it is a part of my personality is much more of a struggle, particularly where my religion might conflict with some of the things I learned as a child. I instinctively look for accommodations, and it's a constant challenge for me to be conscious of where the accommodation is justified, and where it's just a case of cognitive dissonance.

For example, I learned to live and let live. If someone else wants to do something that you disapprove of, unless it materially affects you, you should leave him alone to make his own choices. Judaism, on the other hand, is pretty strong about coercion, to the point where (in the presence of an authorized court) a Jew who eats pork can be flogged to within an inch of his life, and he can be sentenced to death for driving his car on shabbos. If that's not coercion, I don't know what is. But here I am, openly criticizing the ban on pork sales, advocating for civil marriage legislation, and quite willing to give directions to a Jew who is driving his car on shabbos. In each one of these instances I have, I believe, sound halachic reasons to back up my position, whether because the benefit of the coercion is outweighed by the loss, or because by giving the guy directions you are actually minimizing the chillul shabbos. But my position is not mainstream; I venture you'd find that most religious Jews would reflexively take exactly the opposite position to me in all of the above issues.

I was brought up with democracy as a fundamental value. People choose their leaders, and the leaders are answerable to their electorate, who will punish them if they fail to perform. Contrast Judaism, which on the face of things, does not have such a concept as leaders elected from the bottom up. The Jewish ideal is top-down: a king, appointed by Divine edict through a prophet, succeeded by his biological heirs, and wielding practically absolute power, albeit constrained by his own requirement to keep all the mitzvos of the Torah, as well as certain checks and balances that are under the control of the Sanhedrin. And the Sanhedrin itself is certainly not elected; it is appointed in much the same way (lehavdil elef havdolos) as the Israeli Supreme Court, only more so - there is not even a judicial selection committee for lay people to have their say; new dayanim on the Sanhedrin are appointed only by the existing members!

I reconcile this by saying that the Sanhedrin represented an unbroken chain of command from Moshe Rabbeinu and the 70 elders, who in turn appointed the best possible people to fill any vacancies. If you have a benevolent leadership like this, their judgment is probably way better than the judgment of a bunch of mostly ignorant lay people. After all, according to pure democratic principles, we have the absurd situation that a mentally retarded teenager's randomly chosen vote carries as much weight as the carefully considered position of a G-d fearing genius like Prof. Yisrael Aumann. But in our time, when we have no prophet to declare whom Hashem has chosen as king, and our Rabbinic chain of command has been all but broken, democracy is simply the best alternative we have left. We cannot continue to follow the paradigm of self-appointed, self-perpetuating structures, because look what happens if your original kernel is corrupt: you come out with an abomination like the Israeli Supreme Court, whose primary agenda appears to be stripping Israel of every last vestige of real Jewish values. We are therefore forced to fall back on the people's choice, both in terms of leadership and judiciary, because a leadership that is answerable to its people is far more likely to be benevolent than an unscrupulous dictatorship. (I include the judiciary in a guarded kind of way, because truthfully, we do have a Jewish judiciary even today - but there is no one beis din that is universally accepted by all factions, so unless all today's gedolei Torah can get together to appoint a Sanhedrin, a hypothetical Torah-true State of Israel would have no alternative but to have some kind of democratically appointed Sanhedrin, perhaps appointed by democratic vote among the gedolei hador.)

What about other clashes with Western values, such as "gender equality"? Yeah, yeah, I know all the apologetics about "separate but equal", and the different roles that men and women are supposed to play in Judaism. But am I happy to let my two sons split my entire inheritance, leaving my three daughters with nothing? Not a chance. Whatever the halachic devices are to do so, I fully intend to make sure that my daughters get their fair share of my estate. What is this? - do I think I'm smarter than the Torah? I'm uncomfortable with the dissonance between my professed beliefs and the fact that I simply don't want my inheritance to be distributed the way the Torah says it should be. Is that a bad thing?

I'm sure there are many other areas of my life where my worldview is colored by my secular/traditional upbringing, and is in conflict with authentic Jewish values - whatever those are.

What about you?
What was the "theme" of your upbringing?
How does that mesh with your current lifestyle?
What dissonances do you experience in your life?
What lessons have you learned, and what advice do you have for others to deal with dissonances?

The safest place for your life's savings?

With the world's financial crisis, many people have joked that the safest place for your money is under your mattress.

Well, apparently that's not necessarily so!

An Israeli woman mistakenly threw out a mattress with $1 million inside, setting off a frantic search through tons of garbage at a number of landfill sites.

The woman told Army Radio that she bought her elderly mother a new mattress as a surprise on Monday and threw out the old one, only to discover that her mother had hidden her life savings inside.

But look at what she has to say about this misfortune - a profound Jewish response:

For her part, Anat said it could be worse. "People have to take everything in proportion and thank God for the good and the bad," she said.

Kol hakavod, Anat! That is a kiddush Hashem. May He restore your mother's lost money!

Calling cat lovers!

A few weeks ago, one of our neighbors' kids brought home a cat that somebody else had had as a pet, and didn't want it anymore. I'm sure the story has grown legs, but apparently the original owner was about to dump it somewhere, and our neighbor's kid had rachmonus on the thing and brought it home.

Problem 1: she didn't clear it with her parents. So she wasn't allowed to keep it in the house, and it started wandering from house to house in our complex, picking up whatever scraps it could beg or steal.

Problem 2: it started becoming apparent after a week or two that either this cat had been eating really well, or it had a few buns in the oven. On shabbos a week ago we settled that question; it lay down in our next-door neighbors' garden and proceeded - much to the delight of a capacity crowd of local children, and much to the chagrin of the family whose garden was serving as the grandstand - to deliver six teeny tiny (and very cute) little kittens. (One has since died; the remaining 5 look pretty strong.)

Problem 3: Now this cat has officially adopted our complex as its home, and she is becoming more and more emphatic about her rights to whatever any household happens to be eating, cooking or defrosting at any given time. This past shabbos she had the chutzpah to take advantage of our open front door to sneak up to our second floor, and one by one she deposited her kittens on the pull-out bed in our 2nd bedroom.

Now the neighbors are growing restless, and this cat is fast becoming felix non gratus...

Are there any cat lovers out there? There are 5 really cute kittens just waiting for a good home. My daughter got very excited about them and went and took a bunch of photos, just so you can see that they really are cute. If you want the mommy, too, you can have them all now; if you just want a kitten, we'll hand them out as soon as they don't need their mother anymore. (Incidentally, does anyone know offhand what age that is?)

Please be in touch by email: sbehr.at.sabreton.com

---

Update 20 July 2009:
The kittens are now weaned and ready to go to a good, loving home! They are healthy, strong, amazingly cute, friendly and love to play with children.

Please be in touch to claim your kitten!

UPDATE 27 July 2009:
The neighbors have had enough. Ultimatum - the cats have to go... today.

This is your last opportunity to get yourself a strong, healthy, de-flead, hand-tame and very cute kitten.

Email: sbehr.at.sabreton.com or phone 02 999 1342

Venomous drink?

Just a little bit of fun... I spotted this sign in my local supermarket today:

RC = ארסי = poisonous, venomous, toxic, virulent

Man, does that stuff pack a punch!

Barack Obama as John Lennon

I just read the full text of President Obama's Cairo speech.

He really sounds genuine. I think he honestly, truthfully wants to make the world a better place.

But to call him naïve would disrespectful to naïveté.
The leader of the free world, in front of billions of viewers, metaphorically sat down, lit up a joint and started singing "Imagine" by John Lennon.
The real kicker was his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. Marei d'chulei alma! The man sounds like an 18-year-old at a university "Ban The Bomb" protest!

I feel an icy chill when I consider that for the next 4 years at least, we have a guy with the maturity and subtlety of a teenager leading the greatest world power at a time of international crisis.

To put it mildly, the next 4 years are going to be Interesting Times...

Spin

Here's a short video clip called "Spin", which I think carries some very deep and profound messages. Watch it and tell me what you think...



Hattip: Mois