RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON – Lawmakers are becoming increasingly frustrated over the federal government’s failure to implement a biometric exit tracking system to determine whether foreign nationals entering the country on a visa have departed on schedule.

The percentage of those remaining in the United States beyond the expiration of their visas remains relatively small. The Department of Homeland Security issued a report this week showing that of the nation’s nearly 45 million non-immigrant visitors in fiscal year 2015, only 1.17 percent, or 527,127 individuals, overstayed their visas.

So 98.83 percent of those holding visas left the U. S. on time and abided by the terms of their admission, according to DHS. But some members of the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which conducted a hearing on the issue this week, maintain the current system doesn’t go far enough in assuring compliance.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the subcommittee chairman and a strong critic of the Obama administration’s immigration policies, asserted that that the figures released by DHS prove that visa expiration dates under the current system “have become optional.”

“The administration does not believe that violating the terms of your visa should result in deportation,” Sessions said. “What we are witnessing is tantamount to an open border. Millions are free to come on temporary visas and no one is required to leave.”

[In the days just before the Messiah] a man’s enemies will be the members of his household …. —Sotah 49b (quoting Micah 7.6)

Among the many difficulties confronting Jews who are comfortable calling themselves Zionists is the phenomenon of Jew-washing.[1] Inspired by expressions such as “whitewashing” and “pinkwashing,” the idea is that if someone can count Jews among those endorsing his beliefs or behavior then his beliefs or behavior cannot be deemed antisemitic. Indeed if he can count Jews among his personal friends, if some of his “best friends” are Jews, then he cannot be deemed an antisemite. The problem for Zionists is clear: the fact that so many Jews are comfortable calling themselves anti-Zionists means that the underlying antisemitic nature of most forms of anti-Zionism is easily obscured.

The aim of this essay is to demonstrate what has sorely needed demonstrating for a long time: that Jew-washing simply doesn’t work. In fact it obviously doesn’t work, once you think about it even a little.

It’s commonly assumed that racism has a general nature: to be a racist is to display a certain negative attitude or behaviors toward all members of the targeted group. This assumption is reasonably grounded in the paradigmatic manifestations of racism throughout history. When medieval Christians hated Jews on the basis of religion, for example, they hated all Jews (we usually think), until they converted. When the Nazis hated Jews on the basis of race, they hated all Jews (we think) no matter what their creed, even those Jews who had converted and assimilated.

It makes sense: if you’re a Jew-hater, then you hate all Jews.

Except that it simply isn’t true.

Neither empirically, nor theoretically.

Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi’s S.S., famously complained that the Nazis’ fatal efficiency was often compromised because everyone had his favorite “A-1 Jew.”[2] There were very dedicated Nazis, filled with Jew-hatred, who still found room in their hearts not to hate some particular Jew or another, for whatever the reason. Those exceptions didn’t mean they weren’t Jew-haters, of course. But sometimes other considerations overrode their general hatred.

A pro-Israel professor won’t be on campus at Connecticut College when classes start Monday, missing the second straight semester since his 2014 Facebook post criticizing Hamas led to death threats and ostracism.

Andrew Pessin “requested and received a sabbatical for the Spring semester to continue his studies in Jewish philosophy and Israel studies,” Connecticut College spokeswoman Pamela Serfes said in an email last week. “He has been and continues to be a valued member of the Connecticut College faculty.”

The vague and misleading response glosses over the intensity of the campaign against Pessin — he first took a medical leave last spring as a smear campaign against him was at full throat. The controversy exposed an administration unwilling to enforce its own honor code to protect a professor against anti-Israel activists and a student journalist responsible for covering the very controversy she had joined.

The police were called to the Strand campus of King’s College London last night after an Israel Society event was protested by pro-Palestine student activists. Fire alarms were pulled and a window was smashed after student group KCL Action Palestine (KCLAP) attempted to disrupt the meeting, providing further proof, if it was ever needed, that anti-Israel student politics has taken an ugly and illiberal turn.

Ami Ayalon, politician and former head of the Israeli secret service, was giving a talk on Israeli security, as part of a tour organised by the group Yachad, which advocates the two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a statement, KCLAP called Ayalon a ‘war criminal’ and suggested his support for a two-state solution was only a cover for his desire for Israeli racial purity. The group said it was ‘unacceptable’ that KCL Israel Society had invited Ayalon. ‘To whitewash apartheid is not academic freedom’, it went on, ‘it is complicity with oppression’.

Footage from the event shows KCLAP banging on the windows of the room in which the talk was taking place, chanting ‘Free, Free Palestine’ and holding Palestinian flags and banners up against the glass. Meanwhile, footage taken inside the building shows Ayalon persisting with his talk, to a packed room of about 50 students, as chanting and fire alarms blare in the background.

There are some reports of chairs being thrown outside the meeting, and around 20 police officers were said to have appeared at Norfolk House after the three KCL security officers brought in to guard the event were overwhelmed. While one KCLAP activist seemed to suggest the group intended to enter the meeting only to ‘ask the questions that need to be asked’, the group’s denunciations of KCL Israel Society’s decision to hold the event at all seemed to suggest otherwise.

Oberlin College holds a position at or near the apex of a universe populated by the leftist and the further leftist American colleges and universities. But Jewish students are finding that Oberlin’s liberalism does not extend to any discussion that is not unequivocally scathing about the Jewish State.

In a place where every people’s right to self-determination is revered as an ideological imperative, that same right for the Jewish people is deemed not only unworthy, but as evidence of racism itself.

This month Oberlin reappeared center stage largely for a list of demands issued by its Black Student Union, a list which is notorious for several reasons. It is: very long (14 pages), wide-ranging (hiring, firing, health, prisoners given free tuition, the list goes on) and unequivocal.

Oberlin BSU’s demands are not requests, they are non-negotiable and backed by the force of threat: “these are not polite requests, but concrete and unmalleable [sic] demands. Failure to meet them will result in a full and forceful response from the community you fail to support.”

The Demand Document – which was unsigned – was sent to Oberlin President Marvin Krislov earlier this month. On Wednesday, Jan. 20, Krislov responded with an invitation to dialogue, something already scorned in the initial move.

This Oberlin exchange arose in the context of the 2015 Revolution on American Universities. That RAU began in the fall semester, initially triggered by the Ferguson and Baltimore riots, followed by the melee at Missou, and the shrieking girl outburst at Yale. Princeton followed and eventually Oberlin joined in, with the biggest and most brazen set of demands of all.

I’ve been writing for Emunah Magazine for years. Emunah runs a network of residential homes and educational facilities for disadvantaged kids that change lives.

Dafna Meir, the mother of 6 murdered earlier this week by a 15 year-old Arab terror-teen, came from a difficult home background and was raised in Emunah’s Achuzat Sara Children’s Home in Bnei Brak.

Achuzat Sara is an oasis of order and stability in a rundown neighborhood peopled almost exclusively by poor, ultra-orthodox families. What’s most striking about Achuzat Sara is not its fancy building–it was built in the early 1960s–but the quiet dedication of its leadership and staff. Shmuel Ron, director of the home, moved his wife Ita and their four kids into the grounds when he started working there, back in the 1980s.

I interviewed Shmuel several years ago, and he told me, “My first job is to make the children feel comfortable here, to be a better place than the homes they came from. We give them a home that looks a lot like a house, not an institution,” he explained as he proudly showed me around the tidy, cluster-style accommodations, each headed by a Torah observant young couple.

“Our next goal is to take them as they are, and to help them go as far as possible,” Shmuel added.

Like a growing number of American expats living in Israel, I have spent the last few years contemplating renouncing my U.S. citizenship.

Contrary to popular belief among those familiar with my concern about where the country of my birth is headed, the dilemma with which I have been grappling has nothing to do with the fact that President Barack Obama was the people’s choice not only once, but twice.

No, I do not hold the view that if your candidate or party loses an election, the best response is to turn on your country. Nor did my leaving the shores nearly four decades ago of what used to be legitimately called the “land of the free and home of the brave” constitute emigration. It was, rather, an act of immigration — to my Jewish homeland. Possessing two passports never seemed problematic. The only disadvantage to it would turn out to be a financial one.

Initially, when all U.S. citizens residing abroad were informed in around the late 1980s that we had to file tax returns, even this was less of problem than a nuisance for American Israelis like me, who came to the Jewish state with no money, and proceeded to earn even less. This meant that the only real expense involved was the fee to an accountant who understood how to fill out the incomprehensible forms. It was a small price, literally and figuratively, to have to pay for the privilege of casting an absentee ballot in U.S. elections and of being able to sail through the citizens’ line when arriving at an American airport after a 12-hour flight. The other advantage was not having to obtain a visa to enter the United States, which Israelis are forced to do.

US Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro believes in “Land for Peace” and echoes the US Administration pressure on Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines: an 8-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, towered over by the mountain ridges of Judea & Samaria. Thus, the US Administration – unlike the US public and Congress – ignores the centrality of Judea & Samaria in Jewish history, religion, culture and nationalism, and provides another victory to wishful-thinking over the 1,400-year-old reality of inherent Mideast/Arab violence, unpredictability, tyranny, doublespeak and hate-education.

If Israel would have caved under US pressure to retreat from the Golan Heights – a site of Jewish battles against the Roman Empire – ISIS and other terrorists would be there, overlooking the Sea of Galilee, traumatizing northern Israel and beyond.

Israel’s former, dovish, Foreign Minister, Abba Eban stated (Der Spiegel, Nov. 5, 1969): “The map will never be the same as on June 4, 1967… [which is] for us something of a memory of Auschwitz….”

Mideast peace agreements are as durable as are Arab regimes, policies and accords, which have been – since the 7th century – the globe’s most shifty, intolerant, violent, volatile and treacherous, as currently reflected by the Arab Tsunami (gullibly known as the Arab Spring). The latter yielded abrupt power and ideological shifts in Egypt and Tunisia, transformed Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen into chaotic terror platforms, and lethally threatens all moderate Arab regimes. A regime change in Jordan would transform Israel’s most peaceful – to the most threatening – border.

“I’m proud of him.”

That’s what the father of Dafna Meir’s murderer said when the Palestinian media asked him what he thinks of his cold-blooded son Murad Adais.

On Sunday afternoon, Adais butchered Meir in her home, in front of her children.

Whether Adais Sr. is really happy that his son will rot in prison is less important than the fact that he said what he said to his home crowd.

He knows that his audience thinks his son is a hero. And so he played to his audience.

Since last September when the Palestinians began their current terrorist onslaught, killers like Adais have been characterized as lone wolves. But a study published last November in Mosaic online journal by Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar shows that this characterization is both wrong and unhelpful.

Polisar studied Palestinian public opinion data from surveys conducted by four independent research groups over the past 25 years. His data exposed three key aspects to Palestinian positions about Israel that all bear directly on the current Palestinian terrorist offensive.

His first finding is that throughout most of the past quarter-century a solid majority of Palestinians have supported terrorism against Israelis.

Thirty years ago, following the large-scale evacuation of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in Operation Moses, Menachem Begin launched a follow-up operation to rescue hundreds more languishing in Sudanese refugee camps. A BBC documentary tells the story. (Video, 24 minutes.)

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/01/saving-ethiopian-jews/