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Read one of the Ari&Ari travelogues on Mishpacha here…

An excerpt:

One of the goals of this last trip, aside from helping out the Nairobi community, was to visit a small, relatively new emerging Jewish-identified community in Kasuku, in the rural highlands. This “emerging” community is one of the many groups around the world who have left Christianity and have announced themselves as being Jewish. While they are certainly not halachically Jewish, their devotion to mitzvos and Torah learning is inspiring. There are pockets of such communities all over Africa, which is a fascinating topic in and of itself.

What’s driving these former Christians, who’ve decided to throw in their lot with the Jews? Without a doubt, the Internet and its wide access — even in rural locations — is responsible for the lion’s share of East Africa’s emerging communities — we call it “YouTube Judaism.” Today, many of these people listen to shiurim in English, and some even have an online chavrusa. Today, a rabbi in Brooklyn can learn with an Igbo tribesman in rural Nigeria and answer the questions that would never have been explained before.

While generally there is an understood prohibition about teaching Torah to non-Jews, in the last 200 years many poskim have been lenient — including Rav Ovadiah Yosef and Rav Moshe Feinstein — primarily regarding individuals who want to learn. (The Rambam ruled that one may teach Torah to Christians but not Muslims, as Christians accept the Divine authority of Tanach). What about today’s phenomenon, when entire communities — in Africa, South America, and other venues — want to take on Jewish practice and have been learning about Judaism for years, often on a hopeful, although not always realistic, path to conversion? We’ve discussed it with rabbanim who’ve given us specific direction in individual cases.

Read the rest here…

What’s Holding the Arab World Back?

Jan 30, 2017

What’s holding the Arab world back? Why, by nearly every measure, are Muslim nations so far behind the West economically, culturally and scientifically? Bret Stephens, Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal, explains.

Continue reading…

From YouTube, here.

Just Keep Quiet and Nobody Will Notice

Ogden Nash

There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don’t mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because I think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.
You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren’t caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologize publicly for their wife’s housekeeping or their husband’s jests;
If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn’t by Scott,
And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,
But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.
I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,
Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,
And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don’t spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.

From here.

A new study from Northwestern University has concluded that the majority of “Covid19” patients put on ventilators were actually killed by bacterial pneumonia, not the alleged virus.

You can read that paper here.

This should not come as a shock to any regular OffG reader – or indeed anyone who tried to keep themselves informed during the “pandemic”. Mechanical ventilation is not a treatment for respiratory infection, and quite often makes the situation worse.

Deliberate, institutional misuse of mechanical ventilation probably killed huge numbers of patients during the so-called “first wave”. We cover this in great detail in our “40 Facts” covid cribsheet.

Predictably enough, though, mainstream talking heads are not ready to admit this, and the Northwestern paper has produced a wave of somewhat fevered revisionism among the dwindling covidiot class.

See, for example, this tweet from “Dr Craig Spencer”:

You know why we intubated people for Covid in March 2020?

Because otherwise they were going to die. Full. Stop.

I remember a patient rolling in with an oxygen saturation of 42%, breathing twice as fast as normal, struggling on a face mask with oxygen all the way up.

What to do?

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) May 19, 2023

Ironically, while he is accusing others of revisionism, he is the one rewriting history. Ventilators were never recommended for treating Covid, but rather for preventing transmission.

The WHO, CDC, NHS and ECDC all published guidelines instructing healthcare workers to put “Covid patients” on respirators as early as possible, and in every case it was classed as an “infection control measure”.

This is not new information, it was all known at the time.

Further, it was known, that this policy was potentially doing harm, having been reported in mainstream articles (such as this one from Time or this one from The Spectator) as early as April 2020.

But it’s not just the “ventilators saved lives” crowd who are rewriting history, even this new discussion recognizing the role ventilators played in Covid stops several steps short of the truth, characterizing it as a mistake or a panic reaction.

It was neither. It was deliberate policy.

This was recorded by whistle-blowers and becomes glaringly obvious when you consider that, in the US, the CARES Act paid out bonus money to hospitals for ventilating “covid patients”.

Continue reading…

From OFF-Guardian, here.

Trees

BY JOYCE KILMER

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

(From here.)