RUTHFULLY YOURS

The two zealots who drove from Phoenix with automatic weapons, body armor, and the encouragement of Islamic State recruiters arrived in Garland, Texas, apparently bent on murder. They didn’t succeed. After wounding an unarmed man, they were gunned down by a traffic cop moonlighting as a security guard. But what they were really attacking was the Constitution of the United States, specifically the First Amendment. That fight continues.

As the gun battle unfolded, an ISIS propagandist who’d encouraged the doomed gunmen offered up a rationale for terrorism—on Twitter.

“Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire,” tweeted British-born ISIS fighter Junaid Hussain. “If there is no check on the freedom of your speech,” he added, “then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.”

Obviously, this is not a coherent philosophy around which civilization can be organized: You’re free to say what you want—unless I don’t like it, and then I can kill you. It’s not what most Americans would recognize as a legitimate religious tenet, either. It’s fascism, exactly what the organizers of the Garland event were highlighting.

In 1819, Joseph Perl, Hebrew literature’s first novelist, published The Revealer of Secrets. A riotous satire of the ḥasidic movement, it remains largely and unjustly forgotten.

With this essay, we inaugurate a series of fresh looks by Hillel Halkin at Zionist or proto-Zionist writers and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some are well known. Others, like the Galician Jewish writer Joseph Perl, deserve to be.

Exactly 200 years ago, a Hebrew book called Shivḥey ha-Besht (The Praises of the Baal Shem Tov), was published in the Belarussian town of Kopys. The Baal Shem Tov, the legendary founder of Ḥasidism, had died in 1760, more than a half-century previously, and the book’s author, Dov Ber of Linitz, was the son-in-law of a man who had been his secretary.

Shivḥey ha-Besht, a collection of stories about the Baal Shem, some of them heard by Dov Ber from his father-in-law, quickly went through many editions. In more ways than one, it was a literary milestone. It was the first written life of a figure known until then to his followers and detractors alike only by word of mouth. It also initiated a new Hebrew genre, the ḥasidic tale, which would proliferate in hundreds of volumes in the years to come. And though modeled on an earlier book, The Praises of the Ari, a hagiography of the Safed kabbalist Yitzḥak Luria Ashkenazi printed in 1629, it was written in prose never before seen in a published Hebrew work: simple, functional, and lively, yet riddled with grammatical errors, calque translations from Yiddish, and Yiddish and Slavic words whose Hebrew equivalents Dov Ber did not know or bother to look for. He was a ritual slaughterer, not a rabbi, and the rabbinic language of his times, with its scholarly conventions, densely compressive style, heavy mixture of Aramaic, and erudite allusions to biblical and rabbinic texts did not interest him and was probably beyond his ke

Do you know what’s really bad for the environment? Environmentalists.

There they are every day spewing more carbon, printing up posters, holding Earth Day rallies that create more trash than a year’s worth of tabloids and generally making a mess. They own giant homes, fly on jets to warn us that the the sky is falling and never stop bleating, crying and whining.

Their latest whinge is Mother’s Day because you’re not an official environmentalist until you ruin something for other people [2].

Like so many other aspects of our contemporary culture, historical facts are overlooked in favor of “feelings” and perceived “rights.” In today’s American high schools and universities, teachers are focused on aggrieved minorities, and “victims” of all kinds, rather than on historical truth. For example, many in the media and academia repeatedly herald the victimization of the Palestinian-Arabs. Some professors and media outlets have even inferred that the State of Israel was founded on “stolen” Palestinian land. While others accuse Israel of an illegal “occupation” – a lie that has become an accepted truth.

April 25 marked a significant historical date – unknown by most. On that date in 1920, members of the League of Nations, the UN predecessor, assembled at the Italian city of San Remo and signed a deed – the first in two millenniums – that granted the Jewish people total and exclusive ownership of the Land of Israel. Leaders of the victorious World War 1 allied countries, including the United States (observer, not a member), Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan along with 51 other states representing the League of Nations, signed the document.

The recent attack in Texas against a “draw Mohammed” event ended up with two dead jihadis and widespread criticism of event organizer Pamela Geller for “inciting” or “provoking” the assault on our First Amendment right to free speech. The hypocrisies and ignorance behind such criticism have been amply documented [2], including by some on the left [3]. But there’s another argument against actions and events like Geller’s that needs dismantling. This is the received wisdom that we should avoid criticizing Islamic doctrine or Mohammed because it will alienate moderate Muslims who otherwise would help us against the so-called “extremist” jihadists.

Geraldo Rivera on Fox News invoked this rationale in his hysterical attack on Geller for “spewing her hatred and making us all look like the intolerant jerks they are saying we are in the Middle East and elsewhere.” In other words, most Muslims dislike the jihadis, who have “hijacked” and “distorted” their faith, and want to support our efforts against them. But they are put off by our “insults” of Mohammed and our “intolerance” of the wonderful “religion of peace,” all of which serve to “recruit” new jihadists. Even Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham skirted this notion, advising against making any image of Mohammed, and thus in effect ratifying the legitimacy of the shari’a law against any representation of Mohammed, good or bad.

Israeli agricultural tech has proven itself, says top Indian official Davendra Fadnavis

The business of government is politics, but there’s a time to put politics on the shelf, according to Davendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister of the State of Maharashtra in India. “Everybody has to eat,” Fadnavis told The Times of Israel in an exclusive interview. “Israel’s agricultural and water technology is helping to satisfy global hunger. Who could disagree with that?”

India’s strategy in the past has been to keep Israel at arm’s length so as not to aggravate its relationship with the Arab world and its large Muslim minority. But that strategy goes out the window when it comes to engaging with Israel for its agricultural technology. Israel and India have extensive ag-tech ties, with government-level projects to improve growing techniques for a wide variety of crops, to dozens of business collaborations between private companies.

JTA — Plenty of mobile apps help consumers order meals for delivery or offer recipes.

But a new app developed by Israeli entrepreneurs will actually prepare the food for you on your kitchen counter.

While not quite as fantastical as it sounds — to use the app you also need a coffeemaker-sized appliance called The Genie — the invention promises to prepare mess-free, all-natural, healthy food in just seconds.

Described by one writer as “like a Keurig [coffeemaker] for food,” the device, which looks sort of like a fancy rice cooker, uses Keurig-like single-serving, disposable (but in this case recyclable) pods.

Genie creators Ayelet Carasso and Doron Marco told Reuters the food in the pods will be nutritious and free of preservatives, the ingredients kept fresh simply through freeze-drying technology.

“The dish can be anything, it can be a meal like chicken with rice, like couscous with vegetable or an amazing Ramen or even a chocolate soufflé or any other desert that you want,” Carasso told Reuters. (The product does not appear to have its own website yet, nor is it featured on the site of Marco and Carasso’s White Innovation company.)

‘Finally, neural networks that actually work.” So reads the headline in Wired, and, really, haven’t we all been waiting? (Yes, we have, even if we do not know it.) The article concerns artificial-intelligence innovator Jeff Dean, who as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota 25 years ago created a rudimentary “neural network” — a computer system sophisticated enough to learn — but was hobbled by the available computing power of the time. Now working at Google, he’s helping to create vastly powerful and subtle networks that recognize faces and spoken language.

A few pages over, there’s a wonderful if unintended counterpoint: a profile of Megan Smith, an ex-Googler whose official title these days is “chief technology officer” . . . of the United States government. She is the third person to hold that post, which was created under the Obama administration. “Why can’t the federal government have websites and digital services that are awesome?” she asks.

Why, indeed?

The Obama administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East and parts of North Africa has been a series of disasters – at times spectacular disasters – almost since day one. It is ironic that a man who claims to respect the dignity of every human being should have such an egregious record of abandoning people in need of his help, up to and including those specifically looking to him for aid. One needs only to point to a Middle Eastern country to find an example of his international incompetence.

No such discussion is complete without mentioning the site of some of Obama’s most flagrant failures to act: Iran. In 2009, arguably millions of Iranian protesters took to the streets demanding freedom, democracy, and human rights in what has come to be known as “The Green Movement.” Angered by the highly suspicious re-election of then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this overwhelmingly peaceful outburst of popular demonstrations has taken on a life of its own, standing for the fundamental dignity of a people and their right to self-govern. Rightly idolizing the United States for the principles of liberty and justice that are so basic as to be taken for granted by most Americans, the Iranian protesters began emulating their Western counterparts, dressing in jeans and other modern U.S. apparel. They even specifically sought help from President Barack Obama, chanting, “Obama, Obama, ya ba oona ya bama” (Farsi for “Obama, you are either with them or with us”) in the streets.

Many savvy political analysts believe the Democrats have a built in advantage in the Electoral College. Democrats have won four of the last six Presidential elections, and in all six races, they have won a collection of 18 states plus the District of Columbia, now totaling 242 Electoral College votes. These states include all of the New England states except New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia. Democrats have won 5 of the last 6 Presidential contests in New Hampshire, Iowa, and New Mexico, three states with 15 Electoral College votes. Since 270 Electoral College votes are needed for victory, if history is a guide, Democrats start off with a collection of states that puts them very close to victory. The blue wall is not mythology.