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9/11: Understanding Criminal Motive Isn’t Apologizing for Murder!

Twenty Years On, We’ve Learned Nothing From 9/11

By Ron Paul

Ron Paul Institute

September 14, 2021

Nothing upset the Washington Beltway elites more than when in a 2007 presidential debate I pointed out the truth about the 9/11 attacks: they attacked us because we’ve been in the Middle East, sanctioning and bombing the civilian population, for decades. The 9/11 attackers were not motivated to commit suicide terrorism on the Twin Towers and Pentagon because they dislike our freedoms, as then-President Bush claimed. That was a self-serving lie.

They hated – and hate – us because we kill them for no reason. Day after day. Year after year. Right up until just a few days ago, when President Biden slaughtered Zemari Ahmadi and nine members of his family – including seven children – in Afghanistan. The Administration bragged about taking out a top ISIS target. But they lied. Ahmadi was just an aid worker, working for a California-based organization, bringing water to suffering Afghan village residents.

This horror has been repeated thousands of times, over and over, for decades. Does Washington believe these people are subhuman? That they somehow don’t care about their relatives being killed? That they don’t react as we would react if a foreign power slaughtered our families?

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously suggested in an interview that killing half a million Iraqi children with sanctions designed to remove Saddam Hussein from power was “worth it.” It was an admission that the lives of innocents mean nothing to the Washington elite, even as they paint their murderous interventions as some kind of “humanitarian liberation.” The slogan of the US foreign policy establishment really should be, “No Lives Matter.”

The Washington foreign policy elites – Republicans and Democrats – are deeply corrupt and act contrary to US national interests. They pretend that decades of indiscriminate bombing overseas are beneficial to the victims and keep us safer as well. That is how they are able, year after year, to convince Congress to hand over a trillion dollars – money taken directly and indirectly from average Americans. They use fear and lies for their own profit. And they call themselves patriots.

The Washington establishment lied to us because they did not want us to stop for a second and try to understand the motive for the 9/11 attacks. Police detectives are not apologists for killers when they try to look for a motive for the crime. But the Washington elite did not want us to think about why people might be motivated to suicide attack. That might endanger their 100-year gravy train.

What was the real message of 9/11 to Americans? Give up your freedoms for the false promise of security. It’s OK for the government to spy on all of us. It’s OK for the TSA to abuse us for the “privilege” of traveling in our own country. We must continue to bomb people overseas. Don’t worry it’s only temporary.

So, twenty years on what have we learned from 9/11? Absolutely nothing. And we all know what the philosopher George Santayana said about those incapable of learning from history. I desperately hope that somehow the United States will adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy, which would actually protect us from another attack. I truly wish Americans would demand that their leaders learn from history. The only way to make us safe is to end the reign of the Washington killing machine.

From Eurasia Review, here.

Chananya Weissman on Sellout Rabbis

Is your rabbi driving under the influence?

Many people believe that rabbis should never be suspected of being corrupted by money, prestige, or other external pressures. They believe that ironclad trust in the integrity of rabbis is praiseworthy, even a religious obligation. Just the opposite is true; such a belief is not only naive, but antithetical to the Torah.

Indeed, the Torah devotes many mitzvos to warning rabbinic judges against bribery, malpractice, bias, and other forms of corruption. After commanding us to appoint judges, the Torah warns that bribery of any kind “will blind the eyes of the wise and corrupt righteous words” (Devarim 16:19). Chazal add that even a great chacham who takes a bribe will not depart the world without blindness of the heart, and even a total tzaddik who takes a bribe will not depart the world without a confused mind (Kesubos 105A).

A judge does not even need to accept a bribe to be corrupted. Even thinking about a potential bribe is enough to incapacitate a rabbi from judging truthfully (Tanhuma 8, Rash on the Parsha).

This is not a hypothetical mitzvah like ben sorer u’moreh. Open up a book of navi to a random page and there is a good chance you will find a prophecy about the corruption of judges in ancient times (or you can just see the first chapter of Yeshaya).

Those who believe it wouldn’t happen today are willfully blind or mentally ill. Why wouldn’t it happen? What makes them believe the rabbis of today are more pious and impervious to corruption than their predecessors? Those who injected themselves with who-knows-what at the behest of such rabbis have taken a very foolish, un-Torah gamble with their lives, and will have to give an accounting for it in the next world. The rabbis who misled them will not be able to help; they will be judged separately.

How can we know whether or not a rabbi is “driving under the influence”? We cannot always know with certainty, but the Torah warns us that corruption comes with the territory. It is our responsibility to be cautious and look for the warning signs.

Yisro advised Moshe to look for judges who would have the following characteristics: men of valor, God-fearing, men of truth, who hate profit. Yisro did not focus on scholarship and “expertise”, but on character (Shemos 18:21). The former can be acquired, but poor character combined with authority is an incurable cancer.

(Chazal teach us that Yisro included the three characteristics mentioned in Devarim 1:13 – wise, understanding, and known to their tribes – but the Torah emphasized character over intellectual traits. See Chizkuni to Devarim 1:15 and Devarim Rabba 1:7, which he cites.)

The most interesting trait that Yisro mentioned is hating profit. Who in the world hates to profit? We cannot survive without profiting in some way in business or through our labor. There is nothing wrong with turning a profit, or even with becoming wealthy, but a person of character is not obsessed with “increasing his growth”, or “maximizing his profits”. The blessing of Hashem is what makes one wealthy (Mishlei 10:22), not turning the curse of Adam into the purpose of one’s life. A person of character wishes he could devote all his time to loftier things, and has no interest in vain indulgences. He recognizes that an opportunity to make money is also a burden, one which may cast him adrift from his true purpose, not enable it.

Such a profit is something he hates.

Such a person is worthy to be a judge.

According to many commentaries, Moshe was unable to find enough men of such sterling character to fill the many courts, and had to settle for the other three traits. Again, if even Moshe was unable to find sufficient men of character and truth, who would not be lured by profits, why would anyone believe the rabbis of today are on a higher level? It is not even wishful thinking; it is recklessly delusional.

If a rabbi is drawn after money, it is almost certain that he will drive under the influence sooner or later. I’m not talking about rabbis who live a flamboyant lifestyle – they are a disgrace in any case – but about rabbis who have an appetite for profit.

Nowadays becoming a rabbi is not so much a calling as a profession. Kiruv is an industry. Positions in smaller communities are viewed as stepping stones to land more prestigious and prosperous opportunities. For most rabbis, Torah is a career; a crown to boost one’s ego and a spade with which to dig (against Avos 4:5). Such people are beholden to their materialistic aspirations. They know that one misstep can derail their career, and they will always play it safe. The more Torah they know, the better they will be able to cover for it.

In better times our sages were generally independent, creating natural separation between their finances and their expressed opinions on Torah matters. This separation gradually eroded, to the extent that most rabbis today are up to their noses in conflicts of interest. Those who maintain their objectivity in spite of that are superhuman, not the norm.

Indeed, this is why so few rabbis will say a provocative word about perverse “lifestyles”, the murder of unborn children, fighting our enemies, or anything else that might disturb the establishment. They are beholden to the establishment! In many cases they are salaried employees of the establishment. If they do not receive a paycheck directly from the government, their institution depends on the government, not to mention wealthy patrons who own the buildings and all those who preside within. Rabbis in prestigious positions are expendable and easily replaced, and they know it every second of every day.

In the times of Chazal this dynamic was unacceptable for any rabbi who wished to be taken seriously. A rabbi is forbidden to take money for judging or performing most other religious functions. Chazal instituted a special dispensation for judges to receive payment for their time, and only in such a manner that it will have no bearing on their objectivity (see Bechoros 29A).

In those days the people lived under a feudal system, and the king would appoint tax collectors to oversee various regions. The tax collector was granted autonomy in how he divided the regional tax burden among the individual citizens. Naturally, they showed favoritism to their inner circle, often absolving them of taxes entirely, and placed a heavy burden on those who crossed them, with the force of the government behind them.

Tax collectors were legalized gangsters who abused their positions, and Chazal viewed them accordingly. A Jew who became a tax collector was no longer regarded as a chaver; essentially, those who were scrupulous about halacha would stay away from him.

The great rabbis needed Rav Huna bar Chiya to clarify halachos for them, and sent Rabba, Rav Yosef, and eight hundred rabbinic emissaries to meet with him. Upon learning that Rav Huna had become a tax collector, they sent him the following message: “Go to your prestige, go to your former status.” As Rashi explains, “Let him go to the prestige that he chose for himself as a tax collector; we will not go to him.”

Rav Huna immediately sent them word that he resigned the position. Rav Yosef still refused to meet with him, but Rabba accepted Rav Huna back into the rabbinic society, in accordance with a later, more magnanimous ruling (Bechoros 31A).

We see that Chazal had zero tolerance for people who strayed after prestige and inappropriate ties with the government. Even if it was the greatest sage, whose wisdom they depended upon, he would be banished from the Talmudic discourse and his rulings rendered moot. One way or another they would get along without him. Torah must be pure.

Chazal epitomized the integrity that we lack in our times. Here are just two of countless examples.

When the Jews made aliya in the times of Ezra, the Leviim did not join him. Ezra penalized them by instituting that maaser rishon would be given to the Kohanim instead of the Leviim. Centuries later, the sages wanted to gather a large enough group of rabbis to abolish this takana and return maaser rishon to the Leviim. They sought out the great Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, whose opinion would surely sway people, assuming he would support the initiative because he was a Levi and stood to gain from it.

Of course, he ruled the other way and upheld the takana (Maaser Sheni 31A).

Akavia ben Mahallel was known for outstanding wisdom and fear of sin. He ruled in four areas against the consensus of the other sages and stuck to his guns even after the halacha was established. His colleagues urged him to retract his opinion, for the sake of unity, after which they would make him the head judge.

Akavia replied: “Better for me to be called a fool all my days, rather than be wicked before God for an hour. They should not say that he retracted for the sake of a position of authority.” (See Ediyos 5:6.)

Woe to our society, in which most people would rather be wicked before God all their days than be called a name. Woe to our society, in which rabbis look the other way or say what is expected of them to keep their positions.

Indeed, if they look the other way in small matters, they will look the other way in big matters (Vayikra 20:4, Rashi from Toras Kohanim). This is Torah, and one who does not believe this does not believe the Torah.

Chazal foretold that in the days before Moshiach comes, the gathering place of sages will turn into a whorehouse (last Mishna of Sotah). These provocative words are theirs, not mine, and one who has a problem with them does not follow Chazal.

The vast majority of rabbis today are deeply under the influence of money, prestige, and ties to the establishment. Their ability to rule objectively has been hopelessly corrupted, and no amount of scholarship can compensate for this. On the contrary, the greater the scholarship, the greater their ability to fool themselves and others.

We are a generation of orphans, lacking gedolim we can trust in dark and confusing times. We have no choice but to take greater responsibility for our welfare than we might believe we are capable of, and turn to Hashem for clarity.

At the same time, we must take a critical look at our entire educational system and rabbinic establishment. We cannot wait for Moshiach to do all the work. If our society is churning out rabbis who behave like whores, who sell out the truth for profit and prestige, then we bear responsibility for changing this system from the ground up.

The first step is accepting the uncomfortable truth.

The second step is valuing integrity over “expertise”. Many people who favored the latter and got injected with who-knows-what have jeopardized everything with this mistake. May God clear their minds and save them.

The third step is stripping all the corrupt rabbis from their positions and prestige.

The fourth step is returning to the ways of old. We must establish a system in which rabbis can drive under the influence only of the Torah and their conscience.

We can do this. And we must.

__________________________

https://chananyaweissman.com/

The State of Israel’s Misandric Divorce Laws

Bezalel Smotrich: ‘Insane’ that divorced fathers shouldn’t have anything to eat

‘Discrimination against divorced fathers one of the worst crimes today in Israel, percentage of suicides is disproportionate,’ Smotrich says.

Yehonatan Gottlieb , Jul 08 , 2021 4:06 PM

MK Bezalel Smotrich, who heads the Knesset’s Religious Zionism party, has called on Welfare Minister Meir Cohen (Yesh Atid) to eliminate the discrimination against divorced fathers.

“One of the worst crimes happening today in the State of Israel is the discrimination against divorced fathers,” Smotrich said. “It’s a complex and complicated issue. It has a lot of facets and small letters.”

Smotrich recalled his pre-election promise to change how the issue is managed, prevent parental alienation, and prevent abuse of false allegations as a way of managing divorce.

“Attorneys make money off of giving the couple bad advice, telling them to submit false claims against each other and pass the buck to the children,” he emphasized.

Turning to Cohen, Smotrich said, “These are negative trends. Instead of us knowing how to isolate, and then dealing very seriously with true complaints, today we are encouraging false allegations as part of divorce disagreements.”

“The results are horrendous. The percentage of suicides among divorced fathers is disproportionate to every other part of the population in the State of Israel. The fact is that today there is no decent living stipend, no minimum that you leave the father before you start taking child support at astronomic levels. There’s no standard.

“I have no argument against this, that when both partners can allow themselves they should provide their children with everything they need with grace and abundance. But when Dad does not have anything to live off of, and he goes to live with his parents or on the floor in some storage room, and he doesn’t have anything to eat, and when he takes his children to his home he has no way of buying them food and he goes to collect donations to cover it – that’s something that’s completely insane.”

“We need balance. We’re not against women, and we’re not against men. Divorce is an awful thing, and we need to strengthen the institution of the nuclear family. Preventive treatment is always better. The divorce rates in the West are awful and horrific. It’s awful for society, for parents, and for children,” he concluded.

From Arutz Sheva, here.

Jews Awaiting the Redemption davka in JERUSALEM

Via Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:

Soon after Napoleon’s campaign, the French historian Chateaubriand visited Jerusalem. There he found a tiny Jewish community whose persistence filled him with awe. Speaking of the Jewish settlement, he wrote:

It has seen Jerusalem destroyed seventeen times, yet there exists nothing in the world which can discourage it or prevent it from raising its eyes to Zion. He who beholds the Jews dispersed over the face of the earth, in keeping with the Word of God, lingers and marvels. But he will be struck with amazement, as at a miracle, who finds them still in Jerusalem and perceives even, who in law and justice are the masters of Judea, to exist as slaves and strangers in their own land; how despite all abuses they await the king who is to deliver them . . . If there is anything among the nations of the world marked with the stamp of the miraculous, this, in our opinion, is that miracle.

R. Mahler, A History of Modern Jewry 1780-1815, 621.

Academia Made Antisemitism Great Again

How did Hamas become the darling of the West?

Jewish Journal via JNS
By Judea Pearl

Western analysts will go to any absurd lengths to fabricate symmetry between Israel and Hamas, because symmetry is our new goddess of right and wrong.

In February 2009, I wrote an essay about a symposium at UCLA that marked the beginning of Hamas’s penetration into academic circles. I also described the culture of fear that had overtaken many of my colleagues, who felt it was unsafe to admit to supporting Israel. Twelve years later, in the wake of the most recent conflict between Israel and Gaza and the ensuing antisemitism on our campuses and in our streets, I have revised and updated my original essay, which is just as relevant today as it was when it was first written.

Remember Eugène Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”? Written in the late 1950s, the play describes the transformation of a quiet, peaceful town into anarchy when one after another of its residents is transformed into a lumbering, thick-skinned brute. Only Berenger, a stand-in for the playwright, tries to hold out against the collective rush into rhinocerism.

First, the townspeople notice a stray rhinoceros rumbling down the street. No one takes a great deal of notice other than to say that it “made a lot of dust.’’ It’s a “stupid quadruped not worth talking about,’’ although it does trample one woman’s cat.

Before long, an ethical debate develops over the rhino way of life versus the human way of life. “Why not just leave them alone,’’ a friend advises Berenger. ‘’You get used to it.’’ The debate is quickly muted into blind acceptance of the rhino ethic, and the entire town joins the marching herd. Berenger finds himself alone, partly resisting, partly enjoying the uncontrolled sounds coming out his own throat: “Honk, Honk, Honk.”

These sounds from Ionesco’s play have echoed in my ears twice. First in 2009, when Hamas gave its premier performance at UCLA and, second, this past week, when rhinos roamed the streets of Los Angeles shouting, “Honk, Honk, Honk.”

Let’s start in January 2009, when an email from a colleague at Indiana University queried: “Being at UCLA, you must know about this symposium…pretty bad.” Attached to it was Roberta Seid’s report on the now infamous “Human Rights and Gaza” symposium held a day earlier at UCLA.

To refresh readers’ memory, this symposium, organized by UCLA’s Center for Near East Studies (CNES), was billed as a discussion of human rights in Gaza. Instead, the director of the center, Susan Slyomovics, invited four speakers with long histories of demonizing Israel for a panel that Seid describes as a reenactment of a “1920 Munich beer hall.” Not only did the panelists portray Hamas as a guiltless, peace-seeking, unjustly provoked organization, but they also bashed Israel, its motives, its character, its birth and conception, and led the excited audience into chanting “Zionism is Nazism,” “F—, f— Israel,” in the best tradition of rhino liturgy.

But the primary impact of the event became evident the morning after, when unsuspecting, partially informed students woke up to read an article in the campus newspaper titled, “Scholars Say Attack on Gaza an Abuse of Human Rights,” to which the good name of the University of California was attached, and from which the word “terror” and the genocidal agenda of Hamas were conspicuously absent. This mock verdict, presented as an outcome of supposedly dispassionate scholarship, is where Hamas culture scored its first triumph—the first inch of academic respectability, the first inroad into Western minds.

Naturally, when students complained to me about how abused and frightened they felt during the symposium and how concerned they were about the direction taken by the Center for Near East Studies, I felt terribly guilty. “We should have anticipated such travesties,” I told myself, “we, the Jewish faculty at UCLA, should have preempted it with a true symposium on human rights, one that honestly tackles the tough moral and legal dilemmas that the Gaza situation presents to civilized society: How does society protect the human rights of a civilian population in which rocket-launching terrorists are hiding? How does one reconcile the right of a country to defend itself with the wrong of killing women and children when the former entails the latter? What is a legitimate military target?”

In 2009, these were new dilemmas that had not surfaced prior to the days of rockets and missiles, and we, the Jewish faculty, ought to have pioneered their study. Instead, we allowed Hamas’s sympathizers to frame the academic agenda. How can we face our students from the safety of our offices, I thought, when they deal with anti-Israel abuse on a daily basis—in the cafeteria, the library and the classroom—and as alarming reports of mob violence are arriving from other campuses?

Burdened with guilt, I called some colleagues, but quickly realized that a few had already made the shift to a strange-sounding language, not unlike “Honk, Honk.” Some had entered the debate phase, arguing over the rhino way of life versus the human way of life, and the majority, while still speaking in a familiar English vocabulary, were frightened beyond anything I had seen at UCLA in the 40 years that I had served on its faculty.

Colleagues told me about lecturers whose appointments were terminated, professors whose promotion committees received “incriminating” letters, and about the impossibility of revealing one’s pro-Israel convictions without losing grants, editorial board memberships, or invitations to panels and conferences. And all, literally all, swore me into strict secrecy. Together, we entered the era of “the new Marranos.”

Exaggeration? Jewish paranoia? Hardly. I invite skeptics to repeat the private experiment that I conducted among Jewish faculty in a reception hosted in 2008 by the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA. I asked each of them privately: “Tell me, aren’t you a Zionist?” I then counted the number of times my conversant would look to the right, then to the left, before whispering: “Yes, but….” I am sure that anyone who repeats this experiment will be as alarmed as I was about the level of academic terror that has descended on U.S. campuses, especially in the humanities and political and social sciences. Our generation of Jewish students are paying dearly for the failure of our academic leadership to acknowledge, assess and form a unified front to combat this academic terror.

And this brings me to 2021 and to the latest war in Gaza. To the New York Times front page depicting the victims of Israel’s defense operation, as if they had never heard the word “Hamas” or read Hamas’s charter. To CNN’s anchor Fareed Zakaria asserting that Israel is a military superpower, hence Hamas does not pose an existential threat to it. To NYT analyst Nicholas Kristof asserting (in an interview with Bill Maher) that Israel, too, positions its military headquarters among civilians. To UCLA Department of Asian American Studies stating (on its official university website) its “Solidarity with Palestine” and its authoritative understanding that such “violence and intimidation are but the latest manifestation of seventy-three years of settler colonialism, racial apartheid, and occupation.”

To the statement of scholars of Jewish Studies and Israel Studies from various universities who, in the Forward, condemned “the state violence that the Israeli government and its security forces have been carrying out in Gaza.” To members of If Not Now, saying Kaddish for fallen Hamas fighters (among other victims). And, finally, to the mob roaming the streets of Los Angeles and shouting, “Honk, Honk, From the River to the Sea.”

Looking back on the past 12 years, there is no question that Hamas has gained a major uplift in status and respectability. It has become, in fact, the darling of the West. True, seasoned commentators remember to add the obligatory, “We are not condoning Hamas, of course, but….”

But what?

Doesn’t Fareed Zakaria imply that it is not the end of the world if 300,000 Israeli children continue to bleed sleeplessly for another 20 years under Hamas rockets? Didn’t Nicholas Kristof imply that if those children suffer post-traumatic scars for the rest of their lives that it is Israel’s problem because Israel, too, positions its headquarters in civilian areas? Western analysts will go to any absurd lengths to fabricate symmetry between Israel and Hamas, because symmetry is our new goddess of right and wrong.

But let’s not forget that it all started in academia, with a herd of passionate intellectuals who managed to hijack the name of their academic institution, which hardly cared. Do not blame them. After all, intellectuals are trained to cheer their peers when the marching band starts playing, and academic institutions are too slow to understand what is being done in their names. Sadly, as Ionesco understood so well, we are all herd-honking organisms. Please take another look at the rhinos roaming the streets of Los Angeles, here, and see for yourself how hard it is to hold back and not join them with: Honk, Honk!

Judea Pearl is a chancellor professor at UCLA, co-author of “The Book of Why” and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (www.danielpearl.org), named after his son. He and his wife, Ruth, are editors of “I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl” (Jewish Light, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

This article was first published by the Jewish Journal.

From Janglo, here.