By Jonathan Miller, on Fri Jun 29, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
Now we know why we are losing the global war on drugs — it’s the fault of the Zionists! Read the article below from JTA:
An Iranian vice president blamed “Zionists” for the global drug trade and said the Talmud encourages promoting addiction in non-Jewish communities. Iranian First Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi made the comments Tuesday as part of ceremonies marking International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking in Tehran.
He said evidence of the “Zionists'” direct involvement in illicit drugs is that fact that “you cannot find a single addict among the Zionists,” the semi-official Iranian FARS news service reported. Referring to the Talmud, he said, “The book teaches them how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother.”
I guess I need to reade my Talmud a little more carefully. And heed Abe Foxman’s words quoted later in the article:
“To all those who thought that anti-Semitism is a thing of the past, certainly this makes it very clear that it is alive and well again. What makes it more sinister and dangerous is the fact that it comes from a leader of a country that has vowed to destroy the Jewish state, and is making efforts to obtain the means to do it,” ADL National Director Abe Foxman said in a statement.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 27, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
As Presbyterians prepare to convene in Pittsburgh for their biennial General Assembly, and plan to consider a resolution to divest from companies that do business with Israel, here’s a stark reminder of moral choice they are making.
As I discussed in my Huffington Post column yesterday, Hewlett-Packard — one of the companies proposed to be boycotted —
is charged with selling “hardware to the Israeli Navy that is used for its operational communications, logistics and planning including the ongoing naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.” Yet, as an official report of the notoriously anti-Israel-leaning United Nations declared in 2011, the blockade was manifestly legal, and it was instituted for the very purposes of upholding the peace. Wrote the Palmer Commission: “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza…The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”
Yesterday, came this report from the Washington Free Beacon:
As Gaza militants renew violent rocket attacks on Israeli cities, a Hamas national security minister told a delegation of graduating police officers in the Gaza Strip that they should help liberate Israeli cities, such as Jerusalem, from Jewish control, according to a recently released translation of his remarks.
“None of you should give up playing with all the tools of force and equipment, which will bring us closer to our aspirations: Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Haifa, Akko, and Jaffa,” Hamas Minister Fathi Hammad declared during a Gaza police academy commencement ceremony on June 13, about a week before militants began firing hundreds of rockets into Southern Israel.
“The officers of the class graduating today will become the police chief of Jaffa, the police chief of Haifa, the police chief of Akko, the police chief of Lod, the police chief of Ramle, and of all other places,” said Hammad, an interior and national security minister said, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“Therefore, from this place, we declare to all those who usurped our lands that they must prepare to leave, because we have prepared for jihad,” said the Hamas official, which remains officially committed to the destruction of Israel. “You are going to leave, while we are summoned to battle. We are the owners of this land.”
Hammad’s remarks, which are routinely echoed by Hamas officials, provide context for the currently stalled peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.
I hope members of the General Assembly seriously consider whether the interests of peace are best serve by divesting from Israel, and taking the side of brutal thugs like Fathi Hammad who calls for Israel’s very destruction.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET
Were you aware that this coming week, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be taking a critical vote to divest from companies that do business in Israel?
Many of my Presbyterian friends and family were not aware, and they strongly oppose such action.
Please read my piece in today’s Huffington Post, and if you are moved to take action, I urge you to do so before the weekend’s convention:
On June 30, the biennial General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will consider the church’s divestment from three American companies because of their sales to Israel. This misguided, ineffectual proposal would have only one meaningful ramification — It would seriously deepen a growing chasm with one of the church’s strongest allies on nearly every issue of social justice: the Jewish people.
===
Although I am a devout Jew, I have always enjoyed a special kinship with the Presbyterian Church. My paternal cousins, though intermarriage, are active Presbyterians, and I have been proud to celebrate a lifetime of life cycle events at their church. As a child, when my small synagogue in Lexington, Kentucky could not field a basketball team, I played point guard for First Presbyterian; and as a requirement of my team membership, I attended church at least once a year. And with Presbyterian Church (USA)’s headquarters in nearby Louisville, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with several of its national leaders in my former roles as Kentucky’s State Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer.
I learned from these experiences about the wide spectrum of values shared by Jews and Presbyterians. First and foremost is a passion for social justice — whether our inspiration comes from the Hebrew Prophets or the Gospels of Jesus, one of our most sacred missions is to serve the poor, promote the rights of the disenfranchised, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. It’s no wonder that over the past several decades, Jews and Presbyterians have walked arm in arm in efforts to establish equal rights for women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians; to battle callous government policies that exacerbate income inequality; and to promote peace throughout the world.
A serious cleavage in the interfaith relationship emerged, however, upon passage of a policy by the 2004 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for a “phased, selective” divestment of Israel. After strong protest by Jewish groups — as well as many Presbyterian parishioners — the 2006 General Assembly reversed course, calling for “corporate engagement” to promote peaceful solutions in the Middle East.
This February, however, citing the failure of corporate engagement to produce results, the church’s General Assembly Mission Council recommended that the church divest its stock from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard “until they have ceased profiting from non-peaceful activities in Israel-Palestine.” The church will consider this resolution at its 220th General Assembly meeting that begins June 30 in Pittsburgh.
Unfortunately, the church’s proposed actions have little grounding in reality. Caterpillar, for example, does not actually sell equipment to Israel; it sells tractors to the U.S. government which then transfers them to about 150 countries around the globe, including Israel. To address the church’s objectives, Caterpillar would have to refuse to sell bulldozers to its own government, a move that would level a devastating,, if not existential blow to the company, its shareholders, and its thousands of U.S. employees.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard is charged with selling “hardware to the Israeli Navy that is used for its operational communications, logistics and planning including the ongoing naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.” Yet, as an official report of the notoriously anti-Israel-leaning United Nations declared in 2011, the blockade was manifestly legal and instituted for the very purposes of upholding the peace: “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza…The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
No, the RP hasn’t suddenly become a man of the cloth. The following beautiful words were part of a sermon delivered by Rabbi Jonathan Miller of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham, Alabama on June 24, 2012, delivered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham:
Rabbi Jonathan Miller
I have a love affair with the State of Israel. I love its geography, from the sea to the desert to the mountains and hills. I love the orange groves and the high tech office parks. I love the oases and desert watercourses and the short lived blossoms on the hills after the rains. I love the golden city of Jerusalem, the city of such promise—the promise of the coming of the Lord and the coming together of all peoples. I love the people of Israel: the farmers and high tech innovators, the citizen soldiers and the doctors, the actors and the filmmakers, the mystics and the professors, the journalists and the scientists, the dancers and the store clerks and even the beggars on the street—they are mostly short tempered, quick to make decisions, overly generous, colorful and sweet. They will let you know their opinion before they have thought it out themselves.
I love Hebrew. After two thousand years of lying in books read by scholars and holy people, it is now used on the street by cops and crooks and little children on the playground. Hebrew is the only dead language in human history that has been reinvented by a people to use in their everyday life. The resurrection of Hebrew represents the triumph of the human spirit over the hopelessness of human pessimism.
And I love the people of Israel. I love how the cultures mix in this energetic melting pot. I love how the Jews, my people have flocked from the ghettos of Eastern Europe and the Soviet gulags, from the Ethiopian desert and the villages of Arabia, from the casbahs in Morocco to the hill tribe settlements in India, from France, from Egypt, from Yemen, from Tunisia, from Iraq, from Iran, from Rumania, South Africa and the United States—all colors, all stripes, a holy concoction of believers and non-believers, educated and primitive, to create a nation and a culture from the cauldrons of hate and the hopelessness of exile. Like my own country, the United States of America, Israel is to me that beacon of hope that expresses the fundamental truth of the human condition: that our destiny is in our own hands; that in the future, we are not subject to defeat just because we have been defeated in the past. Israel to me is the world’s quintessential symbol of the fact that the human spirit cannot easily be vanquished.
Read the rest of… Rabbi Jonathan Miller: Why This Liberal Jew Loves Israel
By Jason Atkinson, on Fri Jun 22, 2012 at 5:00 PM ET
RP Jason Atkinson helps you kick off your weekend with his latest film about last weekend’s adventures with his kids. Mostly filmed with GoPro, Gunder and Pomp fished the Deschutes with their old Dad’s guiding:
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 21, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET
For those of you who’ve heard the recent news about Facebook’s acquisition of Face.com, a facial recognition startup based in Israel, that’s just a tip of the melted desert iceberg.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jun 12, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
On June 26th, there will be an election in Brooklyn between Hakeem Jeffries, a New York State Assemblyman and New York City Councilman, Charles Barron. While the Daily News this week endorsed Jeffries in the Democratic Primary (which will essentially be the election in this heavily-Democratic district), the retiring Member of Congress Ed Towns, and the Amsterdam News, have endorsed Barron. This race is neck in neck and the turnout will be lowimmediately.
Barron has questioned the legitimacy of Israel’s existence, calling the Israeli government “the biggest terrorist in the world.” In 2009, hejoined former anti-Israel congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on a Viva Palestine convoy to undermine the Israeli blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza, which he has compared to a “concentration death camp.” He said, “There’s too many children and women and innocent men of Gaza dying because you’re isolating them and not allowing anything in. It’s like having a concentration death camp.”
At a 2002 rally in support of reparations for slavery, Barron said: “I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”
For a compilation of Barron’s statements, click here:
And be sure to watch this stunning video:
If any of this makes you want to jump to action, click here to support Barron’s primary opponent, Hakeem Jeffries.
Remember the RP’s highly critical take on Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism? Apparently, the RP is not alone…on either side of the issue.
Here’s a brilliant piece by New York‘s Jason Zengerle on Beinart and the controversy surrounding his book:
“I’m really not a radical.”
It is late April, a month after his new book about American Jews, Israel, and their tangled, often tortured relationship has hit the shelves, and Peter Beinart is on the defensive. He’s sitting in his office at the City University of New York. Although he’s now worked at CUNY for two years, the small, windowless cube—more befitting a research assistant than a tenured journalism and political-science professor—is filled with unpacked cardboard boxes and little else. But more square footage, or a view, or some family photographs would do little to lift the sense of siege that pervades the room. “I’m trying to live as a critic of Israel’s policies, from a moral perspective, inside the Jewish community,” Beinart says, “and inside the fairly mainstream Jewish community, which is where I feel most at home.”
Now that home has become something of a war zone. At his shul—“It’s an Orthodox synagogue on the Upper West Side,” he says, “but it’s probably better not to mention its name”—he is suddenly a controversial congregant. At the Jewish day school where he sends his young children, other parents now look at him askance. Even members of Beinart’s own family are furious at him. And yet it’s the impact his book has had on his professional home—namely the community of center-left American Jewish writer-intellectuals where Beinart has spent his career—that has been most painful.
From the moment it was published, The Crisis of Zionism has dominated the American Jewish political discourse. The book argues that Israeli policies—chief among them the occupation of Palestinian lands—threaten the democratic character of Israel and the Zionist project in general, and that it’s the responsibility of American Jews to help change those policies. Marc Tracy, who edits the Scroll, the blog of the Jewish online magazine Tablet, says, “There was definitely a period where the Scroll might as well have been renamed ‘the Peter Beinart Blog.’ Everything was about him.” Politically conservative Jews attacked the book—not unpredictably. “Why does [Beinart] hate Israel so?” Daniel Gordis asked in his review for the Jerusalem Post, before answering: “Beinart’s problem isn’t really with Israel. It’s with Judaism.” The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, writing for Tablet, branded The Crisis of Zionism “an act of moral solipsism.” But withering reviews have come from Beinart’s ideological allies on the Jewish center-left as well. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Rosen—a mild-mannered Jewish public intellectual whose most recent book was a meditation on bird-watching—savaged Beinart for his “Manichaean simplicities” and for “employ[ing] several formulations favored by anti-Semites.” Tablet editor Alana Newhouse panned the book in the Washington Post for introducing “its own repressive litmus test, this one to determine who can be considered both a liberal American and a Zionist.”
By Chris Schulz, RP Staff, on Fri Jun 8, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
If you are tired are living on this planet then you will shortly be able to begin the application process to be one of the first humans to live on Mars. [yahoo.com]
The infamous Exxon Valdez is causing controversy again as it is about to be dismantled for scrap. [latimes.com]
A look at the effort put forth to research Hawaiian songbirds. [nytimes.com]
Hopefully you got a look at Venus earlier this week. These astronomical movements are still teaching us much about the universe. [npr.org]
