Tonight is the eve of Yom Kippur the most important Jewish Holiday. Yoram Ettinger explains its meaning and Ruthie Blum expresses the faith and sense of gratitude when we wish for ourselves and those we love and admire to be inscribed in The Book of Life.
May the new year, 5,776 and still counting, bring us all peace and health. In observance of the holiday there will be no posting tomorrow….rsk
The Middle East Studies Association passed a resolution earlier this year praising calls for anti-Israel boycotts.
It has been a while since the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the largest and most influential professional body for the study of the region, whose 2,700-plus members inhabit departments of Middle East studies throughout the world, dropped its original designation as a “non-political learned society” to become a hotbed of anti-Israel invective. So deep has the rot settled that the association seems totally oblivious (or rather indifferent) to the fact that its recent endorsement of the anti-Israel de-legitimization campaign, and attendant efforts to obstruct the containment of resurgent anti-Semitism on U.S. campuses, have effectively crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew-baiting.
On February 15 of this year, a MESA referendum approved a resolution, passed by the membership during the association’s annual meeting three months earlier, which not only lauded the “calls for [anti-Israel] institutional boycott, divestment, and/or sanctions [BDS]” as “legitimate forms of non-violent political action” and deplored opposition to these exclusionary moves as an assault on the freedom of speech, but “strongly urge[d] MESA program committees to organize discussions at MESA annual meetings, and the MESA Board of Directors to create opportunities over the course of the year that provide platforms for a sustained discussion of the academic boycott and foster careful consideration of an appropriate position for MESA to assume.”
MESA has crossed the thin line between “normal” Israel-bashing and classical Jew-baiting.
A new batch of e-mails sent and received by top Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin during her time at the State Department were released by Judicial Watch on Monday.
Clinton’s team likely will point to one message, at least, as evidence that they secured classified information even while conducting government business on a private e-mail server. Judicial Watch, the conservative group embroiled in a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits to obtain Clinton’s correspondence, says that the e-mails show a lack of caution about sensitive information.
“These e-mails Judicial Watch forced out through a federal lawsuit show that Huma Abedin used her separate clintonemail.com account to conduct the most sensitive government business, endangering not only her safety but the safety of Hillary Clinton and countless others,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a Monday statement.
In one message, a State Department official e-mailed Abedin to suggest an earlier-than-planned arrival in Geneva, Switzerland following a visit to Russia, in part because they couldn’t access a classified network in St. Petersburg. “It would be a lot better for us to work through the night there (with access to classified) than be stuck in St. Pete with no classified at all,” the official wrote.
Abedin, who had “no idea about comms,” agreed that Clinton would need a secure workspace. “Makes total sense,” she replied.
The Obama administration maintains that its principal strategic response to the conflict in Syria is humanitarian, not military, and focused on human rights. In Syria as well as Iraq, the consequences of this policy have been shockingly deficient. The West is only now beginning to wake up to its catastrophic results, as Europe struggles with a mass migration of a magnitude the continent has not experienced since the 1940s.
In April, Assad began intensifying the barrel bombing of Aleppo and Damascus’s Sunni neighborhoods while streamlining the passport process. In June, the U.N. was forced, unconscionably, to slash Syrian refugee food rations for lack of funding. Whether it was then, or when human traffickers began operating rickety craft from the port of Izmir, Turkey — leading to some 3,000 drownings — at every juncture, the administration failed to lead a serious effort to mitigate the suffering. This explosion has been building for years. The administration slumbered instead of coordinating an effective allied effort to head off a dangerous and chaotic westward surge of hundreds of thousands, potentially tens of millions, of oppressed and poor migrants, with some terrorists among them.
And that’s not the half of it. In Syria and Iraq, there continues to develop a horrific human-rights crisis that evokes the darkest episodes of World War II. ISIS and other Islamist extremists are waging genocide, the most egregious of all human-rights atrocities, against Christians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, and other defenseless religious minorities, whom the administration, apart from last year’s airstrikes to help the Yazidis, has failed.
For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But “in the end,” what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists — in other words, their “empire of dirt”?
Hillary Clinton just released a brief video about the need for women to stand up to their sexual assaulters while demanding relief from society’s unwarranted doubts about their allegations: “It’s not enough to condemn campus sexual assault. We need to end campus sexual assault!” Who would not agree with that assertion?
Not long ago, she went after hedge-fund operators and the Wall Street insiders who connive, avoid taxes, and profit inordinately: “You see the top 25 hedge-fund managers making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined. And, often, paying a lower tax rate!” The liberal PolitiFact rated Ms. Clinton’s assertion as true.
Ms. Clinton, during this campaign season, has also sermonized on student loans and the crushing burden universities are putting on American youth, to the tune of $1 trillion in collective debt: “We need to make a quality education affordable and available to everyone willing to work for it without saddling them with decades of debt!” “Decades of debt” is no exaggeration.
How Trump should have responded to the town hall questioner who claimed Obama is a Muslim.
Everybody has pounced on Donald Trump for not confronting a questioner at a town hall meeting who said President Obama is a Muslim and “not even an American.” Trump ignored the statements and responded to the questioner’s concern about terrorist training camps with a vapid “We’re going to be looking at that.” But the critics have a point, though not the one they think. Trump should have made the question an opportunity to direct our attention to where it belongs––not on Obama’s biography, but on his actions and the need for Republicans to put more energy into the fight against them.
Missing that point, Republicans who already dislike Trump were quick to condemn him. Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News that Trump should have “immediately sort of undermined and denied the premise” of the question, a sentiment shared by NRO’s Charles C.W. Cooke. Long-shot presidential candidate Lindsey Graham said Trump missed a chance to put the man “in his place.” Many pundits held up as a model John McCain, who while campaigning in 2008 corrected a woman who said Obama is an Arab. They seem to forget that despite McCain’s high-minded praise of Obama, he still lost.
What China’s beleaguered president could learn from his visit to the U.S.
Dear President Xi,
Welcome back! The last time you were stateside—at the Sunnylands estate in California a couple of years ago—you seemed to be at the top of your game. China’s GDP was about to overtake America’s. You were cracking down on corruption, liberalizing markets, setting the pace for what you called “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Upper East Siders competed to place their toddlers in Mandarin immersion programs. Newspaper columnists fantasized about the U.S. becoming “China for one day.”
Now your stock market has fizzled, your economy is sinking under the weight of unsustainable debts and zombie companies, your neighbors despise you, and every affluent Chinese is getting a second passport and snapping up a foreign home. Even in Beijing, word is out that behind that enigmatic smile you’re a man overmatched by your job. And out of your depth.
Maybe you’re even thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice to be America for one day?
Yes, America, perhaps the only country on earth that can be serially led by second- or third-rate presidents—and somehow always manage to come up trumps (so to speak). America, where half of college-age Americans can’t find New York state on a map—even as those same young Americans lead the world in innovation. America, where Cornel West is celebrated as an intellectual, Miley Cyrus as an artist, Jonathan Franzen as a novelist and Kim Kardashian as a beauty—and yet remains the cultural dynamo of the world.
“Catholics understand that while the pope speaks for God on matters of faith and morals, his infallibility does not extend to his economics or environmentalism. We hope he enjoys his visit to the land of the free, and that the education goes both ways.”
Pope Francis arrives Tuesday on his first visit to the United States, and the welcome event illustrates his unique and paradoxical appeal. The Argentine pope is being celebrated more for his embrace of progressive economics than for the Catholic Church’s moral teachings.
Millions of American Catholics will of course welcome the pope as a spiritual messenger and the head of a religion of some 1.2 billion world-wide. As a pastoral shepherd he has set a Christian example that Americans of all faiths might emulate with his modest life-style and manifest concern for the poor and least powerful. His public American itinerary—to a Harlem school, a Philadelphia prison—reflects this pastoral mission. He is a man of God who avoids the ostentatious trappings of man.
Yet the pope will also visit the White House and speak to Congress, and this is where his tour takes on an extra-religious resonance. Pope Francis has overtly embraced the contemporary progressive political agenda of income redistribution and government economic control to reduce climate change.
Why is it only the Jewish state, and not Iraq or Syria, that is pressured to split into parts?
The Assads in Syria and the Sunni-Muslim Saddam Hussein (now deceased) are examples of minorities ruling over majority populations not of their own ethnic or religious branch. The fall of Saddam’s Iraq was like Humpty Dumpty: once broken, it cannot be put together again. In the Syrian civil-war, the Sunni-Muslim majority is determined to end the Assad dictatorial rule through unprecedented violence and mayhem. Atrocities are perpetrated by both the Assad regime and the Islamic State. It has resulted in fracturing Syria. Millions of Iraqis and Syrians are now displaced, streaming toward European shores. It is fair to ask why the U.S. and the West in general are not openly supporting the new realities in the Levant.
The George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama administrations have displayed double standards toward Israel with respect to the “two-state solution.” One can legitimately ask why not apply the three-state solution to Iraq and the five-state solution to Syria? Why is it that, according to Obama, the Jewish state can be split into parts (two states), while the artificial colonial creations of Iraq and Syria must remain unitary states? In the case of Israel, the territory it occupies from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean was recognized by the League of Nations as the historical homeland of the Jews.
The pontiff’s visit gave the Castros what they wanted.
In 1960, Cuban bishops declared that “Catholicism and Communism respond to two totally different concepts of man and the world which it will never be possible to conciliate.” Pope Francis however contends that Communism is really Christianity. “The Communists have stolen our flag,” he said.
The Cuban bishops condemned Communism as “a system which brutally denies the most fundamental rights of the human being.” Pope Francis’ criticisms of the Castro regime were limited to oblique references, a plea for religious freedom for Catholics and general criticisms that could apply to Cuba or any one of a number of other places. He failed to even reiterate his old criticisms of the regime.
Cuban dissidents were kept from meeting Pope Francis and even the “passing greeting” that had been planned was shut down when the Communist authorities detained political dissidents. When the protesters risked their freedom to get near him, they were arrested without receiving any acknowledgement from the pope. The Castros got their meetings and their publicity.
The oppressed, whom Pope Francis claimed to speak for during his visit and during his international travels, were left out in the cold. They were treated to another oblique reference, as Pope Francis expressed his desire to “embrace especially all those who for various reasons I will not be able to meet.”
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