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Double Standards and the Death of Civilization

February 17, 2016 3:01 pm / Leave a comment

“Don’t say what you’re thinking.”

“It doesn’t matter how you feel.”

“Honesty is not always the best policy.”

It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? And yet modern society has created an entire value system based on these axioms. It’s called political correctness.

At the same time, however, there seems to be a freakish disconnect between the cultural extremes of political correctness and libertinism. On the one hand, the list of socially unacceptable words, phrases, and ideas keeps growing longer; on the other hand, regard for verbal filtering plummets in virtual free-fall.

At first blush, we might explain this away as an obvious consequence of competing ideologies and worldviews. Certainly, the popularity of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz can be understood as a natural reaction to the vacuous rhetoric of our elected officials, and to the farcical condemnation of benign comments and legitimate opinions as “hate speech” by the chattering classes. When a prominent university attempts to censor of words like mothering, fathering, and American as “microaggressions,” the inevitable consequence will be an equal and opposite reaction from the other side of the ideological divide.

But what is truly baffling are the offenses committed by proponents of political correctness themselves.

Click here to read the whole article.

The Failure of Freedom

January 27, 2016 3:23 pm / Leave a comment

For those who care enough to learn the lessons of history, the echoes of the ancient past can be heard clearly amidst the discord of the chaotic present. If we want to understand the crisis of political leadership that plagues our country and our world, we have only to look back to earliest records of national governance, nearly 3000 years ago.

It was the 9th Century Before the Common Era. 391 years had passed since the Children of Israel first entered their land. For nearly four centuries, Jewish society had been plagued by divisiveness, political instability, and spiritual ambivalence. But at last, after the prophet Samuel spent his entire career teaching the Jews to more deeply respect the law and inspiring them to more profoundly appreciate their national mission, the people united in response to his invocations and dispatched emissaries to ask:

“Appoint a king to rule over us like all the other nations” (1 Samuel 8:5).

Seemingly, the Jews had finally come to their collective senses, recognizing that all their political and social strife stemmed from a pervasive national attitude in which “every man did what seemed right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). Without a strong executive office to pilot the ship of state, without a single voice of authority to bind many into one, the tribes of Israel remained a disconnected confederation of individuals who joined forces only when necessary and turned against one another whenever self-interest clashed with national purpose and identity.

240 years ago, another attempt was made to create a new nation, conceived in liberty, and built upon guiding principles of equality and justice.

Today, that same nation, blessed with more power, prosperity, freedom, and opportunity than any in the history of the modern world, confronts a political system crippled by bloat, inefficiency, and corruption. At a moment in time when we desperately need inspired leadership, we face a contest between a socialist and a sociopath in one party, a narcissist and a curmudgeon in the other. And while the frontrunners serenade us with siren-songs of high-sounding dreams and visions — all deeply divorced from reality — the few aspirants who attempt to set forth concrete policy proposals and plans of action wallow in low single digits.

Why is the electorate so eager to embrace the illusion of leadership and so unwilling to recognize the real hope of positive change?

Click here to read more.

Join Bernie to look for Amerika

January 25, 2016 2:22 pm / 6 Comments on Join Bernie to look for Amerika

Just when you thought this election cycle couldn’t get any wackier, the Sanders campaign has launched a new ad blending sixties-style images of protest marchers and flower children with Simon and Garfunkel’s pop-classic “America.” The unctuous 60-second commercial is brilliantly crafted to stir the heartstrings of starry-eyed liberals everywhere.

But here’s the irony: “America” is a ballad lamenting the failure of romanticism to flourish in a society bereft of direction and meaning, and about the disillusionment of a generation that had abandoned traditional values for a utopian fantasy only to find itself left with nothing:

“Kathy, I’m lost”, I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
“I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,
They’ve all come to look for America,
All come to look for America.

Even Art Garfunkel missed the contradiction of using his own song to endorse a socialist agenda. One might as reasonably use “Mrs. Robinson” in an ad for marriage counseling.

Then again, there really could be no better theme song for the campaign of Bernie Sanders, a holdover from the hippie era passionately espousing grand ideas that could never work.

And, on the Republican side, Donald Trump, the alter-ego of Bernie Sanders, promises us a new America — trust me! — while truly viable candidates repeat the mistakes of 2012, forming a circular firing squad (to quote Mara Liasson) and all but ensuring that the general election will offer us a choice between one brand of demagoguery or another.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

A Week of Ironies — Iranian Hostages, Nikki Haley, and $1.5 Billion

January 14, 2016 3:38 pm / Leave a comment

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama patted himself on the back for making peace with Iran while, at that very moment, Iran held 10 American sailors in violation of international law and the Geneva Convention. The next day, Secretary John Kerry thanked the Iranians for not keeping the servicemen as hostages.

In the same speech, the president also lamented his failure to create an atmosphere of bipartisanship and cooperation, while passing up no opportunity to snipe at everyone who disagrees with him.

After South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley responded to the president’s address, the angriest voices loudly condemned her for condemning the angriest voices.

Hillary Clinton, who can boast the lowest national rating on trustworthiness since Richard Nixon, dismissed a new FBI investigation into her mishandling of classified information by declaring “that’s just not the way I treated classified information.” Transparency, at last.

However, none of this made much of an impression on an American public entranced by the dream of winning a 1.5 billion dollar lottery, even though about half of multimillion-dollar lottery winners eventually admit that sudden wealth proved more of a curse than a blessing.

Now that three winners are going to share the unprecedented payoff, they might want to take a page from the book of a middle-aged man in Atlanta who, back in the 1990s, won a $4 million dollar lottery – what was an exceptional amount for the time.

The winner had been working a double shift as a garbage collector. When asked what he intended to do after winning so much money, the man replied, “I’m going to quit one of my shifts.”

“Only one?” asked the incredulous reporter.

“A man has to have work,” replied the new millionaire.

State of the Union: Four Faces of Leadership

January 12, 2016 8:34 pm / Leave a comment

If we need another example of how upside-down our culture has become, we only have to look at the hype leading up to tonight’s State of the Union address by soon-to-be Former President Barack Obama. Even as the pundits all agree that the speech will be largely irrelevant and predictable, they can find little else to talk about.

Mr. Obama is expected to tell us how wonderful things are, how many of his goals he has achieved, and how much the quality of our lives has improved since he took office. The success of such an approach depends upon one of three factors:

that his claims are actually true;
that he can convince the people that his claims are actually true;
that he can pound home the message (with the cooperation of an obsequious media) until people think there must be something wrong with them if they don’t believe it.

Whether the president succeeds or not remains to be seen. But it’s illuminating to compare his style to other presidents and presidential hopefuls, past and present.

Click here to read the whole article.

Justice in Oregon — Color Blind and 20/20

January 5, 2016 3:41 pm / 1 Comment on Justice in Oregon — Color Blind and 20/20

A broken clock is right twice a day and, gratefully, the justice department has found the sweet spot — at least for the moment — in Oregon.

Certainly, the armed occupation of a national wildlife refuge is cause for concern. But it is not cause for panic and, in light of past notorious government interventions, definitely not cause for military confrontation.

In both the 1992 Ruby Ridge, Idaho, incident and the 1993 Branch Davidian raid in Waco, Texas, the level of intervention was clearly disproportionate to the danger posed and the resulting bloodshed largely indefensible. This is not to say that the government did not have just cause; rather, it failed to employ that resource that is more endangered than any other: common sense.

3 people died at Ruby Ridge; 76 died at Waco.

It’s heartening, therefore, that authorities are approaching the current crisis near Burns, Oregon, with circumspection. Of course, they can’t ignore the occupation. But with no one in danger, a wait-and-see strategy is the best of all available options.

The broader relevance of the story arises from the inevitable accusations of racism by leaders in the black and Muslim communities. It’s only because the so-called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom are white, they say, that the government has not charged in with guns blazing.

Which is, of course, pure nonsense. Two dozen right-wing trespassers in the middle of nowhere is hardly comparable to Ferguson, Missouri, or San Bernardino, California.

The response is different because the situations are different. And in this case, stuck between the real fears that inaction will embolden extremists to further acts of defiance while over-reaction will provide the opportunity for martyrdom, wait-and-see offers the best possible compromise between unattractive alternatives.

It’s also arguable that the occupiers have legitimate grievances against government overreach, which has grown into a systemic malady, evidenced by a rash of executive orders and a culture of bureaucratic strong-arming. Compared with the nebulous jeremiads of the Occupy Wall Street crowd and, more recently, students at Yale and the University of Missouri, the very real plaints of the Oregon occupiers appear level-headed and downright mainstream.

Competent leadership is characterized by the ability to gauge every situation according to its unique combination of factors, risks, and potential consequences. One-size-fits-all solutions rarely prove effective, and accusations of inconsistency are childish at best, opportunistic at worst. What we need most in these troubled times is cool-headed calculation that looks to strike the sanest balance between principled action and pragmatic compromise.

When we start demanding that level of aptitude and integrity from our leaders, maybe we will find ourselves with leaders worthy of our confidence and trust.

A Short History of Mideast Violence

December 17, 2015 3:18 pm / Leave a comment

Seemingly without end, political groups, government officials, and media outlets continue to blame Israel for unrest in the Mideast. At best, they lament the “cycle of violence,” suggesting that both sides are equally to blame.

With so many outlets providing platforms for misinformation, it’s no surprise how many people believe that Israel is at fault for denying the rights of the Palestinian people to live peacefully in the land that has been theirs since time immemorial.

However, as New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say: “You’re entitled to your own opinions, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

So here are the facts.

Before 1920, even the concept of a Palestinian people did not exist. Arabs living in the region considered themselves part of greater Syria, until the French and British divided the region and ended hope of a single commonwealth. Only then, in a desperate attempt to create a national identity out of whole cloth, local Arabs proclaimed themselves Palestinians and begin lobbying for a country of their own.

And they got what they wanted. The next year, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill divided the region into what are now Jordan and Israel. The Arabs received 76% of the land. The rest was reserved as a Jewish homeland.

But even that was not enough. In 1947, the United Nations divided the remaining territory roughly in half, leaving Israel with 13% of the original Mandate. The Jews accepted the compromise. The Arabs launched a war against the Jews.

Between 540,000 and 720,000 Arabs fled Israel, encouraged by leaders who promised that they would return to their homes after the Jews had been pushed into the sea. Over 70 years later, about 5 million Arab refugees remain, many in squalid camps, unsettled by their own people because of their value as a bargaining chip to demand repatriation or restitution that Israel cannot afford to give.

All the way back in October, 1949, Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammad Salah A-Din told the Cairo journal Al-Masri that, “In demanding the return of the Palestinian refugees, the Arabs mean their return as masters, not slaves; or, to put it quite clearly — the intention is the termination of Israel.”

You can’t make peace with people who don’t want peace. On, 11 Dec 1948, the UN passed Resolution 194, frequently invoked by Arab leaders b/c it calls for repatriation of (or compensation for) all refugees (Article 11). Every Arab country voted against the resolution, which also guarantees access to holy sites (Article 7) and calls for commitment to peace.

Of course, no one ever mentions the 860,000 Jews who fled for safety from Arab lands at the same time, resettled by Israel without ever receiving restitution from the Arab countries that expropriated their homes and property.

We also don’t hear how, in 1949, Israel agreed to repatriate 100,000 Arabs as part of a peace negotiation; 35,000 were allowed to return, until repatriation was halted b/c of Arab refusal to make any compromises toward peace. In early 1950, the UN General Assembly established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, with an annual budget of $54 million. Arab governments refused to cooperate. In 1959, only $7 million had been used while another $28 million lay available in a fund that was never used.

In fact, as early as 1960 King Hussein of Jordan admitted that “Arab leaders have approached the Palestine problem in an irresponsible manner… they have used the Palestine people for selfish political purposes. This is ridiculous and, I could say, even criminal.”

Khaled al-’Azm (Prime Minister of Syria 1948-49) wrote in his memoirs in 1973: “We have brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees, by calling upon them and pleading with them to leave their lands, their homes, their work and their business, and we have caused them to be barren and unemployed though each one of them had been working and qualified in a trade from which he could make a living.”

But the strategy of Arab leaders has always been to use the refugees as a pretext to reject peace in pursuit of their ultimate objective: genocide. Even after getting 87% of the mandatory territory in 1920 and 1947, they still rejected the UN partition, then tried to exterminate Israeli Jews in 1947, 1967, 1973, and have continued terror attacks until today.

By rejecting peace and inciting bloody uprisings, Arab leaders have condemned their own people to lives of poverty and violence. For years, families of suicide murderers were paid tens of thousands of dollars to encourage their “martyrdom.” Murders of Jews are celebrated and their perpetrators turned into heroes by naming streets and schools after them. Yasir Arafat, founder of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (which was established in 1964, three years before Israel had control of the West Bank region, Gaza, or the Golan Heights), embezzled billions of dollars that could have helped his own people.

There are many Palestinians who truly want peace, but any suspected of disloyalty to the power structure and the status quo are executed as sympathizers or collaborators, or else have their families threatened if they don’t “prove” themselves. And Palestinian children grow up in schools that teach hatred of and victimization by Israel, attend paramilitary camps that train them to kill Jews, and learn that the Holocaust is a myth fabricated by Jewish sympathizers in the Western World.

But facts don’t matter. Instead, again and again, Israel is smeared with the same slanderous refrain: occupation, oppression, expansion, apartheid. It doesn’t matter that Israeli Arabs enjoy greater prosperity, literacy, and life expectancy than the Arabs in the surrounding countries. Not to mention freedom. Just as it doesn’t matter that Israeli Arabs have been represented in every walk of life, including an Arab captain of the Tel Aviv football team, an Arab deputy speaker of Knesset, an Arab Supreme court justice, and an Arab Miss Israel.

It also doesn’t matter that all the way back in 2000, Yasir Arafat refused to accept Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer to return 94% of the West Bank to the PLO.

It doesn’t matter that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, after which Gazans destroyed the infrastructure of greenhouses left behind by the Israelis that could have fed them.

It doesn’t matter that Hamas leaders used their new autonomy to launch missiles against Israeli civilians, while using their own people as human shields in order to win over public opinion. It doesn’t matter that Hamas embezzled millions in humanitarian aid to build sophisticated terror tunnels under the border to attack Israelis.

It also doesn’t matter that the IDF goes to lengths no other country in the world would ever consider to minimize the collateral damage to Arab civilians, dropping leaflets warning of impending attacks and placing its own soldiers in far greater danger than the rules of warfare require or that make sense from a military point of view.

Instead, the propaganda campaign against Israel goes on, even when the casualties are Palestinians themselves. Like when a Palestinian girl stabs a Palestinian man whom she mistakenly believed to be Israeli, the headlines scream Palestinian teenager killed by Israeli forces. And like the 900 workers losing their jobs because the BDS zealots managed to coerce Sodastream to relocate over the green line; it doesn’t matter if a few hundred more martyrs are reduced to poverty if the ideologues can score a PR victory against Israel.

The European community and the Obama administration have ignored these facts and evidence to embrace political correctness and moral equivalence, thereby enabling Palestinian violence against Israeli Jews and prolonging the suffering of Jews and Arabs alike.

No one could say it more clearly or simply than Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more ‎violence. If the Jews put ‎down their weapons ‎today, there would be no ‎more Israel.‎”

Expanded from an article originally published by Jewish World Review

Donald Trump: Obama 2.0

December 16, 2015 3:23 pm / Leave a comment

A magic rests on the lips of the king;
Let his mouth not betray him in judgment.
~Proverbs 16:10

However improbable it seemed at the start, it’s not hard to understand the initial popularity of Donald Trump. In an age of mealy-mouth, equivocating, do-nothing, business-as-usual, avaricious politicians, many found it refreshing to have a larger-than-life presence who seemed to speak his mind and didn’t pander to popular opinion. But by now the flirtation should have revealed itself for what it is — a cheap one-night stand with no basis for a solid relationship.

Donald Trump represents everything that is wrong with this country: arrogance, self-promotion, pettiness, bellicosity, irresponsibility, bigotry and, despite his hugely successful self-branding, dishonesty and insincerity. In truth, Donald Trump is exactly the opposite of the persona that originally made him so appealing; on closer inspection, he reveals himself to be nothing less than a fun-house reflection of Barack Obama.

Like Mr. Obama, Donald Trump believes in nothing but himself; each man genuinely believes he is the smartest person in the world, and each reacts with seething contempt toward anyone who questions or disagrees with him. Armed with the conviction that comes from infallibility, each will say whatever he has to say, without a flicker of shame, to advance his own personal agenda.

Mr. Trump had only good things to say about Hillary Clinton in his 2012 interview with Greta Van Susteren, but last July he told Meet the Press that Ms. Clinton was “the worst Secretary of State in history.” In 1999 he said, “I love universal health coverage,” but now he chastises the Republican congress for not putting an end to Obamacare. In 1999 he was “very pro-choice,” but now he’s anti-abortion. Apparently, this qualifies him to be president. in 2014, the Washington Post awarded President Obama for having told 3 of the 12 biggest political lies of the year. In 2013, it was 3 out of 10 — an average good enough for an MLB All-Star.

The issues are not the issue; brazen disregard for the truth is. Much more disturbing is the persistent popularity of Mr. Trump based on the illusion that “he tells it like it is.

Read the whole article here on Beliefnet.com.

Creating a Culture of Violence

December 4, 2015 2:28 pm / Leave a comment

I wish there was no reason to repost this essay. But with “random” violence becoming a cultural norm, we can’t run away from the root causes of radicalization, whether Muslim or otherwise. President Obama may not be totally off the mark in his belief that the West created this problem — but our contribution is not what he thinks, and his policies are only adding fuel to the fire.

Zebadiah Carter describes himself living in “an era when homicide kills more people than cancer and the favorite form of suicide is to take a rifle up some tower and keep shooting until the riot squad settles it.” In 1980, this remark by the main character in a Robert Heinlein novel sounded like the science fiction that it was. Now it echoes like a prophecy.

Read the whole article here:
http://yonasongoldson.com/2015/05/18/remembering-the-boston-bombing/

If You Could Be Supergirl

October 27, 2015 2:12 pm / Leave a comment

The new CBS drama “Supergirl” premiered last night to surprisingly positive reviews. (No, I didn’t watch it.) Critics liked the return to an all-American, disarmingly optimistic protagonist after the recent rash of moody, brooding, self-doubting superheroes who spend one moment saving the world and the next wallowing in their own personal angst.

Perhaps “Supergirl” is a step back toward lost innocence, and maybe a step forward toward a future when traditionalists don’t have to apologize for their commitment to traditional values.

We can only hope, and contemplate these thoughts on heroism, originally published in 2008 by Aish.com.

If You Could Be Superman

The question caught me off guard, which doesn’t happen often after 15 years in the classroom. “If you could have any superpower,” asked Aliza, the ‘reporter’ for the school newspaper, “which would you choose?”

I pondered my choices. Super strength? Invisibility? Mind control? X-ray vision? I wouldn’t like becoming a green mutant like the Incredible Hulk, but swinging on webbed ropes like Spiderman might be cool.

The question is more than a variation on the genie-in-the-bottle scenario. Three wishes make narrowing the field of possibilities much easier, and focus on what you want to have, as opposed to who you want to be.

Ironically, it was two Jews who brought the whole genre of superheroes into the collective consciousness of popular culture. In 1933 Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, responded to Hitler’s rise to power in Germany by reinventing their comic character, Superman, as a defender of truth, justice, and the American way. The only time they couldn’t work on their project was Thursday nights, when their “drawing board” was confiscated by Joe’s mother, who used it to knead the dough for her Shabbos challah.

Batman, Spiderman, Captain America, and the Green Lantern were all created by Jews as well. For the not-yet assimilated Jew trying to find his place in gentile society, the invincible alter ego of the mild-mannered misfit was the perfect symbol of cultural ambivalence.

Jewish tradition has its share of larger than life heroes. Samson defeated the Philistines with superhuman strength. Jacob’s son Naftali possessed supernatural speed. The biblical prophets predicted the future and performed countless miracles, including at least two incidents of resurrecting the dead. The kabbalistic literature includes credible accounts of sages possessing knowledge of other’s secret thoughts or personal histories.

A proper understanding of these narratives requires an appreciation that the personalities in the Bible are not cartoon characters. Moses was infinitely greater than Charlton Heston could ever make him out to be, and the memory of Samson is poorly served by his common portrayal as a World Wrestling Federation caricature. The biblical heroes of Judaism were real people who, through extraordinary dedication and self-sacrifice, achieved extraordinary things.

THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF POWER

Nevertheless, there is a critical point in common between the heroes of Jewish tradition and the heroes of comic book fantasy: all recognized that their unique talents and abilities obligated them in service beyond individual self-interest. As Cliff Robertson says to Tobey Maguire in Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”.

The heroes of the Bible did not seek greatness. Moses tried to argue his way out of the yoke of national leadership. The prophet Jeremiah protested that he was too young and inexperienced to rebuke his fellow Jews. Samson’s divine mission was prophesied before his birth. Yet each of them rose to the responsibility imposed upon him by the power with which he was endowed by his Creator.

Consider the structure of the Jew’s daily prayer, composed by the sages to include every possible category of request. We ask for knowledge, so that we can know the difference between right and wrong. We ask for forgiveness, repentance, redemption from our problems, health, guidance, and for the arrival of the messianic era. In short, we ask for the Almighty to bestow upon us the resources we need to help bring His plan for creation closer to its fulfillment.

None of which requires superpower.

THE REAL HEROES

So what should one ask of his Creator? It is with this request that the devout Jew begins his day: Bring us not into the hands of careless sin or wanton transgression, nor into the hands of trials or disgrace; let us not fall under the dominion of the inclination to do evil, and distance us from wicked men and every wicked companion. We do not ask for super power to defeat our enemies, but for the inner strength and the divine protection to rule over ourselves.

The attraction of superhuman power and the mystique of superheroes springs forth from a romantic adventurism that renders ordinary life unsatisfying by comparison. We find our lives mundane and therefore long for the excitement of fantasy. We discard the value of the everyday and seek to live vicariously through the imagined and the unattainable.

It is noteworthy, therefore, that Biblical Hebrew contains no word for either romance or adventure. These are concepts of the modern world, both of them betraying the modern world’s dissatisfaction with reality.

So what superpower would I ask for? I still can’t say. And when I asked a group of my students, not one would commit to an answer. Perhaps our reticence comes from our innate appreciation that we are already supermen by virtue of the soul that resides within us. How else to explain the courage that compels human beings to battle daily against ignorance, prejudice, laziness, impatience, dishonesty, and deceit. To conquer those enemies, day after day and year after year, and to return to the fight when they have conquered us — this is the measure of true heroism.

We don’t need super powers to become extraordinary. Striving to fulfill the potential with which we were endowed by our Creator makes us the greatest heroes of all.

Yonason Goldson