RUTHFULLY YOURS

SLALOM OR SHALOM? RSK
“I laminate the siddurim,” says Rabbi Robbi of the prayer books she carries in a backpack on the slopes. “Otherwise, the pages get too wet.”

Picture this prayer service.

The temperature is -11ºC, the surrounding peaks reach 3,700 meters. Below is a sea of dramatic peaks and valleys blanketed in snow. The rabbi is leading the congregation in the singing of Mi Kamocha, “Who is like You, Lord among the mighty? Who is like You, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, doing wonders?” This is Crested Butte, Colorado, a home rule community in the American Rockies. Home rule means you can make your own, and Rabbi Robbi Sherwin does.

I met her this week because she came to Hadassah University Medical Center, clad in cowboy boots and a brown rodeo skirt with a guitar over her shoulder, using her vacation time to sing to terror survivors. But when she’s leading prayers at 3,000 meters up, both she and the congregants are on skis.

A stickler for punctilious prayer, I’m trying to work out the choreography: stepping forward and back, bowing, rising on tiptoes. Then I think of the exhilaration of communicating with the Creator so close to the heavenly domain, experiencing the surprisingly pleasant and theologically appropriate sensation of being tiny in relation to God’s overwhelming universe.

Among those praying are the regular members of B’nai Butte congregation, and tourists who have come to ski and snowboard in Colorado. Many would never walk into a synagogue – but this mountaintop synagogue doesn’t require walking into.

Naftali Bennett gave a spirited performance at the recent Saban Forum, but was far more convincing on what should not be done, than on what should be done.

You know, I just think you live in another reality. It’s what Steve Jobs called distorted reality thinking.
– Martin Indyk to Naftali Bennett, at the 2014 Saban Forum.

How many missiles need to fall on Ashkelon until you’ll wake up? How many? How many people need to die in our country until you wake up from this illusion?
– Naftali Bennett to Martin Indyk, at the 2014 Saban Forum.

Last weekend, the 11th annual Saban Forum convened in Washington, with its usual bevy of high-profile participants, to discuss the developments in the Middle East, Israel-US relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Hardly hospitable milieu

Funded by Democratic benefactor Haim Saban, and hosted by the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, the tenor of the Forum is usually left-wing on Mideast affairs, with a strong bent in favor of the two-state principle and the land-for-peace doctrine.

This year’s lineup included former US secretary of state for the Obama administration Hillary Clinton; the current US Secretary of State for the Obama administration, John Kerry; Labor Party head Isaac “Bugie” Herzog; Martin Indyk, Brookings vice president, until recently Kerry’s special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations; and Jeffrey Goldberg, the Obama-philic columnist seen widely as a mouth piece for the White House.

Clearly the Forum was hardly the most hospitable milieu for someone like Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, generally considered one of most hawkish/right-wing members of the government. As Bennett quipped, if he conducted “a poll here, probably Zehava Gal-On [head of the far-left Meretz party] would be prime minister and maybe Tzipi Livni No. 2.”

Not over their dead bodies.
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Cops are warning Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Melissa ​Mark-​Viverito to stay away from their funerals should they be ​killed in the line of duty.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association distributed a flier to members, blaring: “DON’T LET THEM INSULT YOUR SACRIFICE!” Cops were encouraged to sign and submit the “Don’t Insult My Sacrifice” waiver to ban the cop-bashing pols from their funerals.

“I, as a New York City police officer, request that Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito refrain from attending my funeral services in the event that I am killed in the line of duty,” the waiver states.

“Due to Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice.”

Officers can download the form on the PBA’s Web site and drop off a signed copy to their PBA delegates.

The mayor traditionally attends funerals for fallen officers.

As so-called right-wing, nationalist, anti-democratic extremists are what majority of Israeli voters want, left’s ongoing stinging attack is actually a scathing condemnation of voters themselves.Already for weeks, as the breakup of the coalition appeared imminent, the word “extremist” began appearing in the Israeli media at a somewhat bewildering pace.
Knesset members from Yesh Atid, Hatnua and other left-wing parties began driving home the message that Israel is being run by a bunch of right-wing, nationalist, anti-democratic extremists.
Similarly, Israeli columnists and other well-known public figures started churning out opinion pieces littered with basically the same accusations.

The goal of such a comprehensive and in all likelihood coordinated attack, one that has only intensified now that new elections have been formally announced, is obvious; the left wants to gain control of the Knesset, the only piece of the Israeli puzzle that in a fair and honest game is well beyond its reach.

As is well known, the majority of Jews in Israel have become increasingly right-wing over the years. This may be annoying to various liberal Jewish organizations in America or to the US State Department, but it’s a fact.

Moreover, after more than twenty years of the Oslo fiasco and all the suffering that it brought, together with a heightened awareness of the growing threat to Israel posed by Islamic forces from within and without, most Jews in Israel are fed up with the condescending and disconnected from reality attitude of the above mentioned MKs and their friends in the media who are still trying to convince us that the two-state solution is in our best interest.

Therefore, in such a scenario the only way for the left to have any chance of succeeding in the upcoming elections and in doing so regaining the one thing that has eluded it, outside of a few brief periods, since 1977, is by vilifying its opponents over and over again.

Europe itself is faltering. Natan Sharansky–the former Soviet dissident and Israeli author and politician ahs recently made the following observation in response to a query about resurgent anti-Semitism: “People always ask me, is there a future for Jews in Europe? But I’m more worried about the question, Is there a future for Europeans in Europe?”
He concluded: “But of course they can come here [to Israel]. There will always be a future for Europe in Israel.”

JERUSALEM–From the veranda of the King David Hotel here, it is possible to enjoy a drink while gazing appreciatively across a ravine at the impressive site of the Old City, an ancient enclosure of narrow cobbled streets that includes holy sites critical to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is also possible, in 2014, to stand up and walk there, should the spirit move you. The low ground (Jerusalem is a city of steep hills, built in the dusty mountains separating the coastal plain from the Jordan River—no one said pilgrimage should be easy) is bypassed by taking a detour through the sparkling new Mamilla mall, built as a Las Vegas-style nod to the architecture of the Old City. Within minutes the quarter-mile or so has been traversed, and you stand amidst various holies of holies.

This ability to travel from west to east Jerusalem is something in which Israelis take great pride, as between the end of Israel’s war of independence and 1967 the low ground marked the heavily militarized ‘green line’ between Israel and territory controlled by Jordan. The Six Day War ended that. The situation since has been a source of continuing grief, not only for Palestinians, but for fashionable academics, journalists, and politicians all over the world, who deplore the state of Israel for its success, and believe that its pretensions to a pluralist liberal-democracy conceal a nationalist and colonialist reality that the world would be better off without.

This week a police officer in Tennessee pulled over a driver whose car had temporary license plates that were not readable. The driver produced his driver’s license. That would be a driver’s license from Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi tells the police officer he is en route to transport a dead baby for a proper Muslim funeral. And the baby is in the trunk of the car. (Islamic law calls for burial within 24-hours after death.)

The officer asked to see the body.

No go. Saudi man tells officer it’s against his religion to do so.

Officer lets Saudi drive away.

Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky famously postulated that the test of a free society is the ability to express opinions in the town square without fear of reprisal. Most American colleges wouldn’t pass that test, according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire).

The foundation reports that 55% of the 437 colleges it surveyed this year maintain “severely restrictive” policies that “clearly and substantially prohibit protected speech.” They include 61 private schools and 180 public colleges. Incredibly, this represents progress from Fire’s survey seven years ago when 75% of colleges maintained restrictive free speech codes.

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough for First Amendment advocates this year was a Virginia law that bars “free-speech zones” on public campuses. As Fire explains, free-speech zones are a common tool that administrators use to restrict demonstrations to remote areas of campus. Colorado Mesa University limits free speech to “the concrete patio adjacent to the west door of the University Center.”

Such restrictions are unconstitutional, and many public colleges have lifted their quarantines after being threatened with lawsuits. In January a University of Hawaii administrator tried to stop students from handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside the campus’s free-speech zone. After students sued, the university revised its policies to allow free speech in “all areas generally available to students and the community.”

Meantime, campus speech police continue to stretch the bounds of what they prosecute under the banner of threats and intimidation. New Jersey’s Bergen Community College in January placed a professor on leave for posting an allegedly “threatening” picture on Google+ of his seven-year-old daughter doing yoga in a Game of Thrones T-shirt that read “I will take what is mine with fire & blood,” a quote from the TV show.

At McNeese State University in Louisiana, students can be punished for bullying if they make “remarks that would be viewed by others in the community as abusive and offensive,” regardless of whether that’s their intent. The University of West Alabama bans “cyberbullying,” which can include sending “harsh text messages or emails.” Would that include scathing evaluations that professors email to students?

Imagine the first one eighth Cherokee, four eighths liar, three eighths dumb, all around woman as President?…..Yikes….but lie for lie Hillary is no bargain either….I’m hoping for a real cat fight….rsk

A group of more than 300 hundred former Obama staffers have written an open letter urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president of the United States. “We helped elect Barack Obama — now we’re calling on Elizabeth Warren to run in 2016,” the letter is titled.

We believed in an unlikely candidate who no one thought had a chance.

We worked for him — and against all odds, we won in Iowa.

We organized like no campaign had organized before — and won the Democratic primary.

We built a movement — and the country elected the first-ever African American president.

We know that the improbable is far from impossible.

Now, former staffers from President Obama’s campaigns, along with former staffers from OFA, are joining with the thousands of Americans who are calling on Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016.

Rising income inequality is the challenge of our times, and we want someone who will stand up for working families and take on the Wall Street banks and special interests that took down our economy.

We urge Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2016.

There is a mounting public backlash over what many perceive as the government’s indifference to the growing influence of Islam in German society. This backlash represents a potentially significant turning point.

Despite efforts by German politicians and the media to portray PEGIDA as neo-Nazi, the group has taken great pains to distance itself from Germany’s extreme right. The group says that it is “apolitical” and that its main objective is to preserve what is left of Germany’s Judeo-Christian culture and values.

“Many people in Germany have legitimate concerns about the spread of radical Islamic ideology, which promotes violence against non-Muslims, robs women and girls of their natural rights, and seeks to require the application of Sharia law…. Because the rule of law, tolerance and freedom of religion are fundamental Western values, the PEGIDA movement must leave no doubt that it is precisely these values that it seeks to defend.” — Bernd Lucke, leader, Alternative for Germany Party and professor of macroeconomics, Hamburg University.

Thousands of German citizens have been taking to the streets to protest the growing “Islamization” of their country.

The protests are part of a burgeoning grassroots movement made up of ordinary citizens who are calling for an end to runaway immigration and the spread of Islamic Sharia law in Germany.

The guardians of German multiculturalism are fighting back: they are seeking to delegitimize the protesters by branding them as “neo-Nazis” and by claiming that the Islamization of Germany is a myth contrived by misinformed citizens.

But there is a mounting public backlash over what many perceive as the government’s indifference to the growing influence of Islam in German society. This backlash represents a potentially significant turning point—one that implies that the days of unrestrained German multiculturalism may be coming to an end.

Especially when Al Sharpton is talking.

Cutting the pretense of free exchange and diversity of opinion would be more honest.

Activists outraged at the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are not only causing traffic jams and disrupting holiday shopping. They have a new target: President Obama, who the radicals say isn’t doing enough to rectify injustice.

What about opening investigations into the white police officers who killed the unarmed Brown and Garner, what about inviting Al Sharpton and Bill de Blasio to the White House, condemning the decisions of grand juries not to indict the policemen, and calling the ensuing unrest, which has included looting and arson, “necessary” to prick “the country’s conscience”?

Meh. Those things do not appease the Left, which never takes yes for an answer.

“Mr. Obama has not been the kind of champion for racial justice that many African-Americans say this moment demands,” reports a disappointed New York Times. For example, Obama “has not stood behind the protestors.” He has not “linked arms with civil rights leaders.” He hasn’t even posed in an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt.

The activists don’t want Obama in the Oval Office. They want him on the picket line. They want to bully the president “into seizing on the post-Ferguson anger.” And they might be winning: “White House advisers say addressing the nation’s racial conflicts is now an imperative for the president’s final years in office.”

Uh-oh. If the president has any sense, he’ll make sure this pledge is as worthless as his red lines in Syria. Sixty-seven percent of adults rate their local police good or excellent, according to a recent poll. A majority of the public already disapproves of Obama on race. As do 57 percent of whites. Does the unpopular Obama (or do his potential Democratic successors) really want to see how high this president’s disapproval rating can go?