RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jah’Keem Yisrael (formerly Alton Alexander Nolen), who beheaded one of his coworkers and was shot while in the process of trying to behead another on September 26 in Vaughan Foods, a food processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma, didn’t live in a vacuum. His mosque, the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, worked hard to distance itself from him before its leaders stopped talking to the media altogether, and has denounced his actions. That will probably be good enough for the clueless and politically correct Obamoid FBI, which has forgotten what the “I” stands for in its name, but it leaves too many questions unanswered. Chiefly this one: when Jah’Keem Yisrael went to his mosque, what kind of teachings did he hear?

Unfortunately, the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City doesn’t offer tapes or transcripts of Friday khutbas. And while they have been affecting a pose of being as moderate as the day is long, some clues to the contrary have appeared. Last week I received this insider report from a former member of the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City:

I went to the same mosque the Oklahoma Muslim who beheaded his co-worker today. I live ten minutes away!

The Imam was Imad Enchassi the last I heard. He was a friend of mine. He is a Lebanese-born Sunni who hates Israel. He once gave a sermon that the Israelis were trying to collapse al-Aqsa mosque by digging tunnels underneath it. They have no issue with Palestinian suicide bombings because, as it was explained to me, that is the only weapon the Palestinians have.

They sold Milestones in the book shop while I was there, which as you know calls for replacing all non-Islamic governments with Islamic ones. I remember listening to a tape a friend of mine, Yahya Graff, another white convert to Islam, had that prayed for the destruction of Israel and America.

The imam when I first converted, Suhaib Webb, is hailed as a moderate by liberals in the United States but he was the one that explicitly told me that according to Islam, three choices are to be given to non-Muslims: convert, pay the jizyah tax and live under Islamic rule, or jihad. They try very hard to whitewash Islam when the media is around, but they believe in their religion and the ultimate goal of an Islamic caliphate.

Then on September 30, I interviewed this man, who has left not only the Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City but also Islam as a whole. He gave more details to demonstrate that this mosque was not at all as “moderate” as its leaders claimed in the wake of the beheading:

Acting in the name of multiculturalism and inclusion, it was the West’s ‘free and open societies’ that afforded state funding to advocates of jihadism. How could they have been so misguided? How can they still refuse to recognise their mistake?

I. The Nurture of Sacred Violence within Western Multiculturalism

Western governments and their security agencies appear not only shocked by the ultra-violence of the new Islamic State (ISIS), but also surprised that jihadist recruits from Britain, Australia and Europe celebrate the killings they commit. Significantly, British and Australian jihadis promulgate the majority of the English-language posts and internet videos that glorify violent extremism.

They justify their methods on the grounds of their allegiance to a radical, anti-democratic, non-negotiable modern form of Islam committed to world purification and the violent restoration of the caliphate. In 1924, the Turkish modernising autocrat, Ataturk, dissolved the Ottoman caliphate, a lineal descendant of the Ummayad and Abbasid caliphates that dated back to the first centuries of Islam. In Mosul, in June 2014, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the nominal head of the Islamic State, declared its re-establishment and styled himself the new caliph, Ibrahim.

On the eve of the NATO summit in South Wales last month, the US President and UK Prime Minister declared that the way to contain the problem of global jihadism and its aspiration to a cyber-caliphate was to “invest in the building blocks of free and open societies, including creating a new and genuinely inclusive government in Iraq”.[1] Not only does such a response seem naive, it notably fails to address the problem of home-grown radicalism and how the ideology that legitimates and ultimately sanctifies violence emanated less from the Middle East and more from the radical Islamist NGOs that have proliferated across Europe and to a lesser extent Australia since the last decade of the Cold War.

In other words, it was the “free and open societies” of the West that tolerated and afforded state funding to the leading advocates of jihadism. In so doing, they incubated this distinctively illiberal, ideological mutation. European and Australian political elites acted in this curiously self-destructive manner, because, at the end of the Cold War, they came to share a commitment to multiculturalism and diversity as the basis for greater political inclusivity and enhanced global and social justice.

It was, however, in the UK that the political elites, their media and leading academics (together with their Australian offshoots, in a perverse postmodern version of the cultural cringe) most fervently embraced this post-imperial, multicultural commitment, and it was in its capital, Londonistan, that the new political religion found its most congenial home.

Before committing more men and materiel overseas, it would seem “prudent”, to use Tony Abbott’s favourite epithet, to examine the character of this home-grown jihadist phenomenon, and why the media, academe, the political elites and, most disturbingly, the police and security agencies either discount its political appeal or attribute its “root causes” to social deprivation, marginalisation or anything other than the ideology that renders it seductive. How did this costly misunderstanding evolve, and what precisely is the basis of Islamism’s appeal to wealthy, often university-educated, second- and third-generation migrants from Asian or Middle Eastern provenance in Britain and Australia?

Third way multiculturalism and war

In order to understand how jihadism achieved its current status we need first to examine how British, and to a lesser extent Australian, elites prosecuted the war on terror abroad after 2001, whilst allowing elements of Islamism’s command-and-control sanctuary and state handouts in multicultural cities like London, Birmingham, Sydney and Melbourne. Multiculturalism’s classic manifestation as a security doctrine may be located in Tony Blair’s way post-1997, Rudd’s way in Australia after 2007, and latterly, Cameron’s way since 2011.

It required Anglospheric democracies to prosecute the war forcefully against those who resort to jihad (holy war) abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, whilst, at the same time, affording some of Islamism’s key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude at home. This reflects the fact that, whilst recognising that “today, conflicts rarely stay within national boundaries” and “interdependence defines the new world we live in”, Blairism and its watered-down Ruddite equivalent also wished to “celebrate the diversity in our country” and gain strength “from the cultures and races” in their midst, some of whose adherents drew upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict to render UK or Australian infrastructure a soft civilian target.[2]

Although, after February 2011, David Cameron sought to distance his government from a policy of “state-led multiculturalism” that, he argued, facilitated radicalisation, official policy nevertheless remained, at best, ambivalent. [3] Meanwhile the European Social Science Research Council (ESCRC), like the Australian Research Council (ARC), continues to disperse large grants to teams of sociologists, educationalists and psychologists to demonstrate that, despite some “concern” over the London bombings of July 2005, the model of successful multiculturalism remains intact.[4]

In the UK and Australia, this quasi-official doctrine of multiculturalism masked an incoherent policy oscillation between prosecution and celebration, complacency and arbitrariness. Thus, while Tony Blair, remained steadfast in his commitment to the war on terror abroad, until 2004 the British Home Office permitted self-styled sheikhs Abu Hamza al-Masri and Omar Bakri Mohamed to recruit for Al Qaeda from their state-subsidised mosque in Finsbury Park, North London, whilst Abu Qatada operated as Al Qaeda’s emir in Europe.

These leading figures in the protoplasmic Al Qaeda network sought the achievement—by jihad, if necessary—of a unified Islamic world. Groups like Omar Bakri Mohammed’s Al Muhajiroun (the migrants) and its breakaway front organisations like the Saviour Sect and Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Struggle), which, after 2002, extended its outreach activities to Sydney and Melbourne, dismissed the more moderate voices of diasporic Islam, who dissented from their promotion of a de-territorialised salafist utopia, as “chocolate Muslims”. The proselytising missionary work of groups like Hizb preached to a generation of alienated Muslim youth the inevitable confrontation of their creed with British and latterly Australian democracy’s decadent secularism.

Deracinated second- and third-generation migrants, thus, found solace not in the polymorphous joys of secularism and multiculturalism, but in a re-Islamisation that favoured “supranational [Islamist] organisations instead of ‘national’ Islamic movements”. Hizb ut-Tahrir exemplified this transition to a universalist mode of Islamic identity. As Olivier Roy explains:

this fundamentalist party based in London … was originally set up as a Palestinian Islamic movement in 1953. Officially non-violent, its ideas are nevertheless very radical. It advocates the immediate re-establishment of the caliphate … and the ultimate conversion of the entire world to Islam. Hizb ut-Tahrir is now a genuinely international movement. [5]

Ed Husain, a former member of Hizb, observed that the party “borrowed” its organisational structure and confrontational tactics from “radical socialists”. It functions as an elite vanguard party, recruiting from university campuses, which it finds particularly congenial. As Husain again observes,

At many universities the tactics of confrontation and consolidation of Muslim feeling under the leadership of Hizb activists were being adopted … What dumbfounded us was the fact that the authorities on campuses never stopped us. [6]

Prior to the London bombings of July 2005, the UK government, as with university campuses, did little to discourage Islamist activism or to encourage a sustained criticism of its questionable premises. The same was perhaps even truer of Australia where media and academic elites railed against Australia’s commitment to a US-inspired “violent peace” at the expense of a misunderstood and non-Western “other”.

“The most toxic weapon in the Left’s post-colonial armoury is the concept of Holocaust Inversion, which Mike Carlton wields in his op-ed: that is, modern-day Israelis are the equivalent of the German Nazis while the plight of the Palestinians is comparable to that of the Jews of the Shoah. ”
We shall never know exactly how many Gazans have been murdered by their tyrannous subjugator over the years, let alone the number of Gazan homosexuals incarcerated and tortured, women brutalised and forced into the hijab against their will.

Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, excels at only two things—terrorism and propaganda. On August 26, 2014, an open-ended ceasefire began with Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri declaring to the world: “We have won.” What they had won did not seem entirely clear. This was the same deal Hamas had rejected—and Israel accepted—on July 15. But terrorism is propaganda and propaganda is terrorism, and so Zuhri felt free to boast that Hamas had accomplished “what no Arab army has done. We have defeated them.” With victories like this Hamas need never experience defeat.

Hamas is the first cousin of the Islamic State (IS). Hamas fighters might not bury civilians alive with their own shovels, but they fire off rockets in an attempt to entomb Jewish, Christian and Muslim civilians in Israel. Moreover, Hamas fires off rockets from hospitals, schools, mosques and built-up residential areas in Gaza with the express purpose of initiating retaliatory Israeli fire on those very same hospitals, schools, mosques and built-up residential areas. Hamas-style butchery could be categorised as more grotesque than IS atrocities because Hamas connives to bring about the burying alive of its own people for the purpose of advancing a propaganda agenda. Hamas dismisses the charge of adopting a human-shield strategy as a Zionist lie, although genuine investigative reporters in Gaza—including NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain—have now provided incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Should we believe the Islamic Resistance Movement or our lying eyes?

There are some who claim that Operation Protective Edge had its genesis in the June 12, 2014, abduction of the Israeli teenagers Gil-Ad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkal and Eyal Yifrah, and that the assault on Gaza was an expression of Israel’s blind fury that the boys were kidnapped and later found murdered. One major drawback to this argument is that Hamas began its unprovoked rocket attacks on the citizens of Israel on June 11, the day before the kidnapping. By the time the bodies of the three teenagers were discovered in the West Bank, on June 30, Hamas’s attack on Israel had been proceeding for nineteen days. On that day alone sixteen rockets were fired off, a number of them landing in the Negev. Hamas had been keen for war irrespective of—or, more likely, in conjunction with—the slaughter of the three Israeli boys. This is corroborated by the fact that Hamas, and not the Netanyahu administration, broke at least eleven ceasefire arrangements before August 26.

Barack Obama had a choice between liberalism and the Democratic party. He chose the latter, and it cost him dearly.

Liberalism, as an ideology, insists that government can do good and great things for the people and the world if the people running the government are smart liberals. The Democratic party says the exact same thing. But liberalism is an ideal, while the Democratic party is that ideal’s representative here in the real world — and in the real world, political parties always disappoint.

Just to be clear — and to avoid a lot of “Oh, yeah? What about Republicans?!” responses — this is true of the GOP, too. Conservative ideology holds that government should do only those things that only government can and should do, a list that is very short. For instance, government shouldn’t be in the business of playing favorites in the economy. It shouldn’t “pick winners and losers.” Rather, it should be a fair umpire and let competition work its magic. Alas, Republican politicians routinely fall short of this ideal, preferring to be pro-business rather than pro-market. That, in so many words, is why the Export-Import Bank is immortal.

But this was supposed to be liberalism’s moment. This was supposed to be a new Progressive Era. Obama came into office vowing to be “transformative,” just like Ronald Reagan — the difference being that Reagan ushered in an era of skepticism about government, while Obama wanted to usher in an era of hope and idealism about all the wonderful things government can do. In Obama’s mind, this put him at odds with Republicans, and in a partisan sense, it obviously did.

But as a matter of policy, Obama’s real challenge came from within. Government’s failures in recent years can be laid not at the feet of the Republican party but at the feet of the Democratic party. If you were to ask most serious liberal policy wonks how they would make government more effective, a good number of their answers would involve doing things the Democratic base of the party would never, ever allow.

Smart liberalism has no love for bureaucratic inefficiencies. There’s nothing inherent in liberalism that says public-sector unions should have a stranglehold on the government payroll the way they do. FDR loathed the idea of government workers unionizing.

Our lazy president skipped his daily briefings — and missed the rise of ISIS

If Obama always looks stunned by America’s throbbing foreign-policy headaches, it may be because more than half the time, Obama is not listening to warnings about national-security threats — literally.

On last Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Obama pointed fingers, yet again. This time it concerned his being surprised by the rise of ISIS. Obama said: “I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Obama should have fingered himself. He might have been able to anticipate ISIS’s steamrolling across Syria and Iraq if he had not blown off nearly 60 percent of his Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs) with America’s top intelligence officers.

The Government Accountability Institute, a conservative watchdog group, has analyzed the official White House calendar and Politico.com’s presidential schedule from Obama’s January 20, 2009, inauguration through September 29, 2014. Overall, Obama skipped 58 percent of his PDBs.

This outrage has gotten worse throughout Obama’s tenure. He missed 57.6 percent of his first-term PDBs, GAI calculates. In his second term, his truancy increased to 58.7 percent. So Obama was more AWOL from these interactive sessions after his reelection — even as the embers of the deadly Benghazi attack roared into pan-Libyan bedlam, Vladimir Putin snatched Crimea, Hamas’s rockets pummeled Israel, and America’s southern frontier became a moving sidewalk for illegal aliens from around the world.

Are significant chunks of the mainstream media in despair over Barack Obama? This past week, Obama used 60 Minutes to attempt to shift blame for the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS, endured a cover-up of White House security disasters by the Secret Service, and saw a government-agency report that he had skipped nearly 60 percent of his intelligence briefings.

The reaction from some longtime Obama defenders was swift and harsh. “President Obama this week committed professional suicide,” wrote former CNN host Piers Morgan, now an editor-at-large for Britain’s Daily Mail.

He called Obama’s throwing of the intelligence community under the bus a “shameless, reprehensible display of buck-passing” that will result in some analysts’ exacting “cold-blooded revenge on Obama by drip-feeding negative stories about him until he’s gone.” As for the Secret Service fiasco, Morgan said it was “no wonder the Secret Service gets complacent when The Boss exudes complacency from every pore.”

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of a sympathetic book on Obama’s first term, reported that Jarrett is an unusual presence in the White House: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, ‘I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”

Everyone expects a presidential spouse to weigh in on issues, but the reference to Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and the first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, is telling. Her outsize role in many presidential decisions is known to insiders, but she remains resolutely behind the scenes. So when Jarrett does enter the news, it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works.

This week, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business noted that President Obama was back visiting Chicago but “having to share headlines with Valerie Jarrett.” She began the week with a cameo appearance on CBS’s highly rated show The Good Wife. Then a column by Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jarrett “may be the worst abuser” of any executive-branch official with a Secret Service detail, using guards “round the clock” even while she was shopping, at the gym, or visiting friends in Chicago.

WASHINGTON – Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.), a member of the House Budget Committee, said education is the best way for the federal government to respond to the Ebola outbreak, rather than reduce the number of U.S. visas granted to citizens of West Africa nations.

Cárdenas also said the Ebola crisis demonstrates that reducing spending is the wrong approach.

“I think the best response is education. We have the best system of preventative measures in the world but yet at the same time we need to educate the communities, so I think it’s important that we not act in an alarmed fashion but just have responsible, methodical education,” said Cárdenas at the Noche de Gala for the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts on Wednesday night.

“It’s my understanding that when it comes to the actual hospitals and facilities that will have to receive individuals that may have Ebola, that we’re doing well there but again until we see them being challenged, we’ll have yet to see if they’re actually truly ready – but we’re getting strong assurances that they are, but the best thing is education,” Cárdenas also said.

U.S. health officials estimated on Thursday that the Liberian man hospitalized for Ebola in Texas had contact with as many as 100 people. The man was reportedly visiting the U.S. on a tourist visa. Cárdenas was asked if the U.S. should temporarily stop issuing visas to West African nations affected by Ebola.

“Again, that would be reacting in an alarmed fashion. I think that what we ought to do is education domestically and also education abroad and make sure that we have the kind of communication and the honesty with us and other governments that we need to be making sure that they understand the seriousness of it, and then respond after we find out if they are acting responsibly,” Cárdenas responded. “Then, we can go ahead and be more trusting, but otherwise, then we will take action just based on facts, not based on hyperbole, not based on being upset or reactionary.”

Administration Criticism That Israel ‘Poisons Atmosphere’ with Jerusalem Construction Is ‘Deplorable,’ Says Senator : BY Bridget Johnson

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) slammed as “deplorable” the White House’s condemnation of Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visiting, for housing construction in Jerusalem.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters yesterday that the U.S. is “deeply concerned by reports that Israeli government has moved forward with the planning process in the sensitive area — or in a sensitive area of east Jerusalem.”

“This step is contrary to Israel’s stated goal of negotiating a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians, and it would send a very troubling message if they were to proceed with tenders or construction in that area,” Earnest continued. “This development will only draw condemnation from the international community, distance Israel from even its closest allies, poison the atmosphere, not only with the Palestinians but also with the very Arab governments with which Prime Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to build relations.”

“It also would call into question Israel’s ultimate commitment to peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.”

Earnest said the construction issues “did come up in the conversations” between President Obama and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu told MSNBC today that the Obama administration “should get acquainted with the facts first.”

“I find that curious, because the criticism was leveled at a new neighborhood that was mixed. It had a substantial part of the apartments apportioned — parceled out to Arabs, to Palestinians alongside Jews. So it’s — why not have them live together?” Netanyahu said.

New evidence pried from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) proves the point I have posited here at Ordered Liberty: The federal government willfully intervened on behalf of al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki on October 10, 2002, undoing his arrest on felony fraud charges when he was detained at JFK International Airport in New York, and allowing him to walk away with a Saudi handler. As I argued over two years ago, the government’s story to the contrary – viz., that it was moved by sheer coincidence on the eve of Awlaki’s arrival to pull the plug on a weak case – does not pass the laugh test.

Twelve years ago, when the FBI intervened to “un-arrest” Awlaki despite the pendency of a valid felony warrant, he was a suspect – or, at the very least, a highly material witness – in the 9/11 conspiracy that resulted in the killing of nearly 3000 Americans. He went on to become one of al Qaeda’s most effective operatives. Awlaki is suspected of involvement in or incitement of the 2009 Fort Hood jihadist attack in which 13 U.S. soldiers were killed and many others wounded; the attempt to bomb a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009; the attempted bombing of Times Square in 2010; and the modernization of al Qaeda’s international recruitment practices.

In 2011, he was finally killed as an enemy-combatant by an American drone strike in Yemen.

Fox News chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge, who in 2012 broke the news about Awlaki’s mysterious un-arrest a decade earlier, has stayed on the case. So has Judicial Watch, thanks to whose FOIA lawsuit, the government has been compelled to turn over 900 pages of documents about its investigations of, and communications with, the jihadist. As Ms. Herridge’s new reporting elaborates, the FOIA disclosures show that Awlaki had numerous contacts with the FBI well into 2004 – when the 9/11 Commission was trying to locate him for an interview based on mounting evidence of his likely knowledge of, if not complicity in, the 9/11 conspiracy.

Consistent with our government’s seemingly incorrigible penchant to dismiss extremist Islamic incitement as harmless rhetoric, and to perceive Islamic supremacists as “moderate Islamists” with whom it can collaborate, law enforcement officials knew about Awlaki’s extensive contacts with some of the 9/11 suicide-hijackers but excused them as “random [and] the inevitable consequence of living in the small world of Islam in America.” Years later, law enforcement and military officials knew about but ignored startling jihadist communications between Awlaki and eventual Fort Hood killer Nidal Hasan.

The new information corroborates my suggestion here two years ago that, in letting Awlaki go rather than arresting him on the pending fraud charge, the government was “acting on the misguided hope of using him as an informant.” This is not only cause for potential embarrassment in its own right; it adds to the concerns over the circumstances of Awlaki’s death.

1. Yom Kippur commemorates God’s forgiveness for the sin of the Golden Calf and God’s covenant with the Jewish people.

2. Yom Kippur is a day of forgiveness only for sins committed against God. It is customary to dedicate the eve of Yom Kippur to apologies for sins committed against fellow human beings. However, an apology or compensation are not sufficient if they do not elicit an expressed forgiveness by the injured person. One is commanded to be community-sensitive and invite everyone, including transgressors, to participate in Yom Kippur services. Thus, Yom Kippur underlines unity, as synagogues become a platform for the righteous and the sinner.

3. Yom Kippur’s focus on seeking forgiveness highlights humility, fallibility, faith, soul-searching, compassion, thoughtfulness, being considerate, accepting responsibility and magnanimity. Speaking ill of other people (“evil tongue,” Le’shon Ha’Ra, in Hebrew) may not be forgiven.

4. Yom Kippur is a happy Jewish Holiday, replacing vindictiveness and rage with peace-of-mind and peaceful co-existence between God and human beings and, primarily, between human beings.

5. Yom Kippur is observed on the tenth day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, whose astrological sign is Libra (♎). Libra symbolizes the key themes of Yom Kippur: scales, justice, balance, truth, symmetry, sensitivity and optimism. Libra is ruled by the planet Venus (Noga, נגה, in Hebrew), which reflects divine light and love of the other person. (Noga is the name of my oldest granddaughter). The numerical value of the Hebrew letters of נגה is 58 (נ-50, ג-3, ה-5), just like the numerical value of אזן, which is the Hebrew word for “ear,” as well as, the Hebrew root of “listening,” “balance” and “scale.”

6. Yom Kippur is observed on the tenth day of Tishrei – an Acadian word for forgiveness and Genesis. Ten has special significance in Judaism: God’s abbreviation is the tenth Hebrew letter (Yod – י); there are ten attributes of God – Divine perfection – which were highlighted during the Creation; the Ten Commandments; the Ten Plagues; there are ten reasons for blowing the Shofar; The Prayer of Veedooi – וידוי (confession/reaffirmation in Hebrew), is recited ten times during Yom Kippur one is commanded to extend a 10% gift to God (tithe); Ten Martyrs (Jewish leaders) were tortured/murdered by the Roman Empire; there were ten generations between Adam and Noah and between Noah and Abraham; a ten worshipper quorum (Minyan in Hebrew) is required for a collective Jewish prayer; etc.

7. The Hebrew word Kippur, כיפור (atonement/repentance), is a derivative of the Biblical word Kaporet כפורת,, the cover of the Holy Ark at the Sanctuary, and Kopher, כופר, the cover of Noah’s Ark and the Holy Altar at the Temple. Yom Kippur resembles a spiritual cover (dome), which separates between the holy and the mundane, between spiritualism and materialism. The Kippah, כיפה (skullcap, Yarmulka’), which covers one’s head during prayers, reflects a spiritual dome.

8. The Hebrew spelling of “fast” (צם/צום) – abstinence from food – reflects the substance of Yom Kippur. The Hebrew word for “fast” is the root of the Hebrew word for “reduction” and “shrinking” (צמצום) of one’s wrong-doing. It is also the root of the Hebrew words for “slave” (צמית) and “eternity” (צמיתות) – eternal enslavement to God, but not to human beings. “Fast” is also the root of עצמי (being oneself),עצום (awesome), עצמה (power),עצמאות (independence), which are gained through the process of fasting, soul-searching, spiritual-enhancement and faith in God.

9. A Memorial Candle, in remembrance of one’s parents, is lit during Yom Kippur. This reaffirms the “Honor Thy Father and Mother Commandment,” providing another opportunity to ask forgiveness of one’s parent(s), as well as, asking forgiveness on their behalf.

10. The Scroll of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur. It demonstrates that repentance and forgiveness is universal. Among its lessons: commanding one to assume responsibility; getting involved socially/politically; sounding the alarm when wrong-doing is committed anywhere in the world; displaying compassion for all peoples and adhering to faith and optimism in defiance of all odds.