HINT, HINT: Jew-Hatred Soars, but American Jews Still Living in Denial

Jews Fight Back!

The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and Manhattan began almost a year ago.  We have cellphone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing “Allahu Akbar” and from younger black and Hispanic men often yelling “dirty Jew.” They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks and stones, breaking bones and smashing eyes. There was no mainstream media discussion about this until a few weeks ago, and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.

You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society.

My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most Americans have no clue about what is happening in Boro Park, Williamsburg, or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the list of many officeholders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain — something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders. Beyond doubt, the establishment Jewish organizations would themselves be knocking down doors right alongside them. They, as they always do, would be proclaiming “how the most important Jewish value is the protection of minorities and fighting racism.” Actually, it is President Trump who has made more of an issue over anti-Jewish remarks coming from the mouths of high-profile members of minority communities than our own Jewish establishment “leadership.”

Many of those running Jewish organizations and non-Orthodox synagogue and temples have for decades made helping other minorities the centerpiece of their ideological life and, thus, will never spotlight the anti-Semitism coming from members of the minority community, since it would shatter all they believe in. It might get in the way of “dialogue,” which is their most precious template, though it usually is a dialogue of what we Jews can do for you and not what you can also do for us. Years after the 1992 Crown Heights pogroms, the ADL finally acknowledged that its unwillingness to defend the Lubavitch community was a fear of jeopardizing their loyalty to the Black civil rights movement.

Many American Jewish leaders, including rabbis, consider these issues more important than mere tribal Jewish concerns, while others have convinced themselves that it constitutes Judaism itself, universalism taking precedence over those matters of Jewishness that are labeled “parochial” and “tribal.” For them, more important than Jewish survival is the survival of progressivism and left-liberalism, their guiding light. They have redefined Judaism as leftwing progressivism. This is their “religion” and they are zealots for it. Even the few Jewish holidays observed have been stripped of the uniquely Jewish component and replaced by universalist themes that abhor the Jewish particular.

A people in constant need to display to others or affirm their own moral superiority will eventually not defend itself and puts its survival at risk. Virtue signaling is but another form of social climbing.                                                                                                                                    

II

This devaluing of things specifically Jewish explains how Jewish organizations have allowed Jewish children on college campuses to be bullied, spat upon, harassed, and forced to renounce support of Israel. The ADL and big-city federations have the funds to counteract the BDS movement on campuses, the know-how in doing so, and the clout and savvy to demonize the movement and the Muslim students behind it as full-fledged racists not acceptable on campus. But they haven’t. In fact, the ADL has assertively come out against those states proposing legislation against BDS.

Continue reading…

From American Thinker, here.

הגרי”ז: הלוא משנאיך ד’ אשנא ובתקוממיך אתקוטט

אודות המזרחי וכדו’, שמצד אחד הם מדברים על אהבת ישראל, ומאידך גיסא משתלחים בלשונם נגד החרדים לדבר ה’, היה מרגלא בפומיה דמרן הגרי”ז: כאשר נכנס אלי אחד מאנשי הדור הזה, ומדבר אודות אהבת ישראל, יודע אני כי את שלשה אלו: קודשא בריך הוא; החרדים לדברו; ואת תורתו, את שלשתם הוא שונא בוודאי…

(מפי בנו הרב רפאל זצ”ל, “זכור לדוד” עמ’ רטז)

הערה: הובא גם בפניני הגרי”ז, ראה כאן (אנגלית).

Politics Can Wait – FIRST Go to the Beis Medrash!

Parshas Veyeilech we just read begins:

וילך משה וידבר את הדברים האלה אל כל ישראל.

Pseudo-Yonasan:

ואזל משה למשכן בית אולפנא ומליל ית פתגמיא האלין עם כל ישראל.

We know they would gather by Ohel Mo’ed. But first Moshe went to study Torah.

Do Seatbelt Laws Kill More People in Total? Maybe Not, but They Do Kill More BYSTANDERS!

I (and the enraged Yehuda Segal) have written elsewhere against seatbelt laws, blindly amplified by various poskim. As it turns out, they likely do not kill more Jews in absolute numbers, but they do still redistribute risk unto innocent pedestrians. This is otherwise known as Moral Hazard.

A fine example of moral hazard, funnily-painfully enough, is this very act of  paskening, complete with Da’as Torah papacy (our rabbis are never wrong), social conformity enforced in the name of pseudo-halacha, vapid intuition, as opposed to Talmudic proof, on the part of modern decisors, כי רבים חללים הפילה — and in Nefashos, to boot, the mind-rotting negation of ואל תאמר קבלו דעתי, שהן רשאין ולא אתה and Chulin 6b מקום הניחו לי אבותי וכולי, and contempt of hard data in halacha (exceptions notwithstanding).

In short, we have ourselves the perverse multiplication of moral hazard by (1) third-party rabbis (2) relying on the interventionist state, father of manifold moral hazards, which, in turn, (3) ignores drivers’ moral hazard

Here is Wikipedia’s update of the research (abbreviated):

The reduction of predicted benefit from regulations that intend to increase safety is sometimes referred to as the Peltzman effect in recognition of Sam Peltzman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who published “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation” in the Journal of Political Economy in 1975 in which he controversially suggested that “offsets (due to risk compensation) are virtually complete, so that regulation has not decreased highway deaths”. A reanalysis of his original data found numerous errors and his model failed to predict fatality rates before regulation (Robertson 1977).

… But “Peltzman’s theory does not predict the magnitude of risk compensatory behavior.” Substantial further empirical work has found that the effect exists in many contexts but generally offsets less than half of the direct effect. In the U.S., motor vehicle fatalities per population declined by more than half from the beginning of regulation in the 1960s through 2012. Vehicle safety standards accounted for most of the reduction augmented by seat belt use laws, changes in the minimum drinking age, and reductions in teen driving (Robertson 2015).

The Peltzman effect can also result in a redistributing effect where the consequences of risky behavior are increasingly felt by innocent parties (see moral hazard). By way of example, if a risk-tolerant driver responds to driver-safety interventions, such as compulsory seat belts, crumple zones, ABS, etc. by driving faster with less attention, then this can result in increases in injuries and deaths to pedestrians.

Tosafos Bava Kama 27b s.v. H.G. Amai:

ה”ג אמאי פטור איבעי ליה לעיוני, אבל הך לא פריך אמאי חייב בנזקו כשהוזק איבעי ליה לעיוני כדפירשתי לעיל (דף כג. ד”ה ולחייב) דיותר יש לו לשמור שלא יזיק משלא יוזק ולא שייך כאן כל המשנה ובא אחר ושינה בו פטור (לעיל כ. כד:) דגבי אדם לא אמר הכי והא דאמר (לעיל דף כב.) הניח חנוני נרו מבחוץ בעל הגמל פטור ולא אמר איבעי ליה לעיוני וי”ל דדוקא במקום הליכתו אמרינן איבעי ליה לעיוני וקצת קשה הא דאמר רבא לעיל כי אית לך רשות לסגויי הא בהמה נמי איבעי לה לעיוני כדמוכח בהפרה (לקמן דף נב:) דשור פקח ביום פטור וליכא למימר בממלא רה”ר שאינה יכולה לעבור אלא דרך עליה דא”כ לבעוטי נמי אית לה רשותא.