RUTHFULLY YOURS

In this historic confluence of dates, Thanksgiving and Chanukah, this is a reflection worth pondering….and pondering again…..rsk

The Pew survey, like the various more specific surveys of the Jewish community that come out from time to time, has told everyone in the Jewish organizational world what they already know. There is nothing in the survey that hasn’t been predicted, belabored and denied for decades. If its meaning had to be summed up in a single sentence, it would be that there can be no religion without revelation, no community without culture and no continuity without all of these.

It really is that simple which is why so many insist on making it so complicated.

What the Pew survey really says is that there are really two Jewish communities in America. One that is an actual structured community and the other uses that name but is a community in name only. Most of the responses go right past that obvious point to arguing about semantics, theology and the number of Jews who can dance on the head of a pin.

Daniel Gordis had a passionate and moving piece on the decline of Conservative Judaism that is also fundamentally wrong.

Gordis states, “What really doomed the movement is that Conservative Judaism ignored the deep existential human questions that religion is meant to address.” That confuses religion with philosophy. Religion does address existential questions, but it does so through faith.

The F-word, “Faith” only appears once in Gordis’ entire essay. “Non-Orthodox Judaism is simply disappearing in America. Judaism has long been a predominantly content-driven, rather than a faith-driven enterprise, but we now have a generation of Jews secularly successful and well-educated, but so Jewishly illiterate that nothing remains to bind them to their community or even to a sense that they hail from something worth preserving.”

Gordis hits the point and then drives away as quickly as he can. American Judaism is content-driven, but its content has to be driven by faith or the content has no integrity.

When Obama decided to turn his campaign into a permanent Super PAC, he was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back. But he was doing it to them before they did it to him.

Organizing for America gave him an independent source of power and influence at the expense of the Democratic Party. Obama was carelessly draining money and energy out of his own party because whatever common interests he had with a political party, that for all its leftward swing was still too conservative for his taste, were about to be fractured during his second term.

The Democratic Party might have been satisfied if he had retained his 2008 halo in 2015. But that was never going to happen. No matter how much the media slobbers over a politician, the voting public, at least those parts of it that don’t have Hope posters and Obama holograms hanging on their walls, eventually needs a break and someone to blame.

Even vice presidents turn on their own presidents once they begin running for office. Gore tried running as the antithesis of Bill Clinton at a time when everyone had grown sick of him and his scandals. Gore was just a less successful and even more hypocritical version of Bill Clinton; but the Democratic Party tried to build him an image as a stiff and serious fellow who spent a lot of time deep in thought and might be awkward at parties; but wouldn’t cheat on the entire country.

The Democratic Party already has an Anti-Obama in waiting. Hillary claims to be experienced where Obama was inexperienced and savvier about the practical details of getting things done.

The “Ready for Hillary” image is as phony as Gore’s serious ethical look; but it’s also a shot across Obama’s bow telling him that he’s going under the bus before the next election. With OFA, Obama, whose allegiance has always been to the left, not to anything as reactionary as an American political party, decided to throw them under the bus first.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed victory over the United States Sunday shortly after a historic nuclear agreement was reached in Geneva between the Islamic Republic and the 5+1 world powers.

Under the agreement, Iran, in return for sanctions relief, will keep much of its nuclear infrastructure, is limited to enriching uranium to the five percent level for six months, will convert its highly enriched uranium of 20 percent to harmless oxide and will allow more intrusive inspections of its nuclear plants by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which will be limited to only agreed-on facilities.

Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards, reported that Khamenei in a statement thanked President Hassan Rouhani and his negotiating team for their achievement in Geneva.

“I thank God that… the new government… was able to legitimize the Iranian nation’s nuclear program on the international stage and take the initial step in a way that the nuclear rights and the enrichment rights of the Iranian nation are acknowledged by world powers where before they had tried to deny them, and (the agreement will) open the way for future big strides in technical and economic progress,” Khamenei said.

Rouhani, speaking at an event for families of “martyred” Iranian nuclear scientists, said Iran will continue its nuclear progress. “No matter whether the world wants it or not, this path (to nuclear capability) will, God willing, continue to the peak,” he said.

The president who promised us that his health care legislation would allow us to keep our insurance plans and doctors now insists that his agreement with Iran will not allow it to keep a nuclear weapons program. What the two pledges have in common is that they are both lies. No matter how many times such statements are repeated and seconded by President Obama’s partisans and the press, they amount to fraud – serial, intentional and potentially fatal fraud.

Here’s the difference: Thousands of Americans may die as a result of Team Obama’s domestic policy misrepresentations concerning Obamacare that former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has correctly described as “criminal fraud.” But many times that number are at risk as a result of the Obamabomb deal with Iran that amounts to national security fraud.

For starters, there is no reason to disbelieve the Iranian mullahs when they whip crowds into a frenzy with the phrase “Death to America.” To the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that they are intent on achieving their stated goal of “a world without America.”

Among the most alarming such evidence can be found in the series of steps the Iranian regime has taken to operationalize its capability to deliver without warning a devastating, strategic electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack upon this country. Tests involving the launching of missiles off of barges in the Caspian Sea confer an ability to fire them from vessels off America’s coasts. Other experiments included the simulated delivery of a warhead to the missile’s apogee – precisely the scenario a congressional commission warned could be used to unleash EMP from high above the United States, inflicting catastrophic damage on the highly vulnerable electric grid and society below.

We are told that all that is missing is a nuclear warhead to place atop such missiles. Far from pushing that ominous day into the future, let alone foreclosing it altogether, Mr. Obama’s deal with Iran can only make its arrival more certain, and probably more near-term.

From today’s Algemeiner:

On a state visit to Moscow Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to assert himself over U.S. President Barack Obama as the main peacekeeper in the Iranian nuclear negotiations, just as Putin did over the chemical weapons in Syria, according to a report on Thursday in Russia’s Kommersant that cited unnamed diplomatic sources.

Kommersant said the deal on the table today from the world powers in Geneva stipulates a six-month suspension of work on Iran’s nuclear facilities, in exchange for releasing $3 billion of frozen assets in international banks and a reduction in sanctions that would provide Tehran with an another $10 billion.

The newspaper cited a source close to the Israeli government as saying, “Netanyahu understands that the deal, insisted on by the United States, will be concluded,” and he sees no way to influence Washington any further in the matter.

“The looming agreement with Iran would have been acceptable two years ago, but not now,” a source close to Netanyahu told Kommersant. “Sometimes a bad agreement is worse than none. North Korea, for example, turned out to acquire nuclear weapons within a month after a written contract” was signed, saying that they wouldn’t.

Its sources said Netanyahu’s goal in the visit to Moscow was to convince the Russian leadership to achieve the maximum possible from Tehran with real concessions formalized in a binding agreement.

Lady Gaga reportedly spent $25 million [1] on pop art to jazz up her new and apparently underwhelming album. In contrast, Miley Cyrus’ sexual twerking [2] at the MTV Music Video Awards earned her more millions by exposing her rather unimpressive anatomy. Both make the once vulgar Madonna seem like June Cleaver, but at least raise an existential question: how much lower can we go [3]?

Meanwhile, hip-hop artist Kanye West is promoting his own new music video [4]. He seems to be having sex with his girlfriend Kim Kardashian while riding a motorcycle. If you did not know that Kanye West was the singer of the background music, by the quality of the lyrics and beat, you might think that a fourth grader was spewing rhymed obscenities, in the fashion that Gaga and Cyrus make up with obscenity, both spoken and visual, what they lack in musical, dance, and artistic talent.

In the two-second attention spans of our app culture, a bare nipple, a potty-mouth obscenity, or a multimillionaire’s flippant reference to a “ho” earns followers and thus big money in a way that even once cutting-edge Elvis Presley’s melodies or an against-the-grain Van Gogh impressionistic painting or a T.S. Eliot poem could never quite seem so shockingly profitable.

Professors know that bored students do their Facebooking rather than listen to lectures. Commuters fear that texting while driving is more dangerous than drunk driving. Pedestrians are hit by other strollers whose heads are glued to iPhones. No one believes that such fixations arise from watching the History Channel, googling the Renaissance, or reading the Economist. No matter — in our therapeutic culture, in theory millions of students could do all those things, so the next new fad for our broke universities and trillion-dollar indebted college students is to provide them all with free iPads. Only the absence of an iPad robs us of future Edisons and Einsteins.

Oh Allah. Take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people…do not spare a single one of them. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.

So said Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi in a sermon on Al-Jazeera TV in January 2009. As the Anti-Defamation League notes in a helpful overview of Qaradawi’s life and dubious achievements, he has a “long record of inciting violence against Jews and Israel”—and, one should add, against others as well.

Yusuf al-Qaradawi was born in Egypt in 1926 and joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a student in 1942. He graduated from Al-Azhar University in 1953. From 1949 to 1961 he was arrested several times for his activities in the Brotherhood, and in 1961 he moved to Qatar where he lives to this day.

By now Qaradawi is one of the most influential theologians of the Sunni Muslim world. His weekly sermon on Al-Jazeera, “Sharia and Life,” has a worldwide audience of about 60 million. In 1999 he founded the website IslamOnline, which, as the ADL describes it, “contains articles and religious rulings which support violence against non-Muslims, as well as anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-American content.” And Qaradawi’s more than 40 books have been translated into many languages and disseminated throughout the world.

Qaradawi also has a vast institutional empire. Despite having been banned from the U.S. since 1999, he is chairman—in absentia—of the Michigan-based Islamic American University; founder and president of the Qatar-based International Association of Muslim Scholars; chairman and president of the Dublin-based European Council for Fatwa and Research; and president of the Saudi-based Union of Good, a “charity” organization that funnels money to Hamas and has been on the U.S. State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations since 2008.

The lavish praise over the Iran nuclear deal being heaped on EU foreign policy supremo Catherine Ashton, who failed to back the West during the Cold War, is itself a signal we should be deeply worried

Oh no. This is terrifying. Catherine Ashton, EU foreign policy chief and former vice-chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is being widely praised as chief broker of the Iran nuclear deal. Look who’s praising her, and look what they’re saying.

Guardian Europe Editor Ian Traynor said on Sunday, without irony, “The former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activist had brokered what looks like the biggest nuclear de-escalation of the era, the diplomatic breakthrough of the decade…”

Yes, that former CND activist who backed the wrong side during the Cold War and has never uttered a word of remorse or regret about it. It is her judgement we are relying on.

As if having the imprimatur of the Guardian wasn’t bad enough, here comes the EU’s very own Laurel and Hardy act.

“I would like to congratulate in particular Catherine Ashton, the high representative/vice-president of the European commission, for this accomplishment, which is a result of her tireless engagement and dedication to the issue over the last four years,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission.

At some critical point, everyone makes choices based on incentives and his own perception of self-interest. Somehow the Obama administration has forgotten that natural law.

A therapeutic sense of self-sacrifice is fine in the abstract, but in the concrete such magnanimity causes far more harm to the innocent than does a realistic appraisal of self-interest and a tragic acceptance of the flawed nature of man. The theme of the present administration is that it possesses the wisdom and resources to know better what people should do than they do themselves. From that premise arose most of catastrophes that have befallen this administration.

Consider the logic of Obamacare — a protocol that we lesser folk were supposed to learn about only after the bill was passed, in the expectation that eventually we will surely like it, although we are not able to know that yet. If you use medical care infrequently, you supposedly will rush to sign up to pay more for it, so that those who will pay less can use it more. I wish such idealism were innate to the human character, but nothing suggests that it is. Does providing more coverage at less cost to more people somehow lead to lower costs for all participants? If so, the entire history of capitalism would have to be rewritten. Is it true that the more you try to get onto a website and are stymied, the more you will redouble your efforts to log on? If that were true, wouldn’t Amazon rig its website to fail 20 percent of the time?

Would employers hire more full-time employees in order to up their health-insurance costs, or would they keep their work force small enough that the federal guidelines will allow them not to provide coverage? And how would those incentives affect overall job growth? Will employers decide to forgo more of their profits so that the nation’s unemployment rate will stabilize?

Consider the news that the IRS improperly refunded $132 billion to people who falsely claimed earned-income tax credits. Add in the fact that about 45 to 50 percent of all Americans already pay no federal income tax. Then factor in the idea that conservative groups were more likely to be targeted by the IRS’s tax-exempt division than other nonprofit organizations. What natural lessons do many citizens learn from the IRS that might govern their future behavior? Are they likely to feel a greater need to report cash income, or to worry about unauthorized income while on federal assistance?

Did administration explanations about Benghazi and the IRS scandals help reassure the American people that what the president said about Obamacare was likely to be true? Does serial disingenuousness finally ensure remorse and a return to veracity?

Does promising a new transparency and an end to lobbying and to the revolving door between government and the private sector at least display a heartfelt desire to change the system, even if in reality there is no end to any such influence peddling? Is it better to promise great things and then break those promises than to have never promised at all? Do we operate on the T-ball philosophy that effort and happy talk can substitute for achievement? Does continuously blaming a prior president drive home the message of his culpability, or appear tasteless and reveal a sense of inferiority?

NBC News and the Associated Press want you to know there is no such thing as black mob violence. Especially in the hundreds of cases of Knockout Game now receiving so much attention in local and national media across the country.

Ditto the Washington Post, ABC News and the Philadelphia Inquirer. And this weekend, the New York Times.

The rules of the Knockout Game are simple: Gather a group of black people. Find a white person. An Asian will do. Punch them in the face until they are knocked out. Or dead. Or your arms get tired.

If you relied on local and national news accounts, you would not know the violence has a racial component. But the video solves that problem.

Many episodes of black mob violence and mayhem — including the Knockout Game — are recorded on video and posted on YouTube. Or Facebook. Or even bragged about on Twitter

Many are documented in White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore it.

But that does not matter much to NBC and AP. Heck, the New York Times says the Knockout Game is probably just an “urban legend.”

With one difference: This time we have Big Foot on Video. Thousands of them.