Dara Horn has written a brilliant, illuminating, and terrifying book called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living.” It will be available on September 1, but in interviews, podcasts, and excerpts that have already appeared, it is clear that she is advancing a comprehensive understanding of antisemitism, addressing its roots, its dissemination, and a suggested approach through which it may be opposed going forward.

Just to whet your interest, I will summarize a few of her original and engrossing observations.

Antisemitism is a lie that people use to gain or maintain power. That lie is: “Jews destroy whatever it is that you value most.” Depending on the audience, this will result in a characterization of Jews as inferior, powerful, privileged, influential, subversive, cursed, arrogant, devious, shrewd, greedy, or . . . whatever else it is that threatens the audience’s specific society and political ideology.

This explains the amazing scope and diversity of the claims against Jews: if you are a medieval Christian, Jews threaten Christian faith and religious order; if you are a Nazi, Jews threaten racial purity; If you are a communist, Jews threaten the revolution and universal equality; if you are a right-wing nationalist, Jews threaten the nation and traditional culture; if you are a left-wing radical, Jews threaten racial justice and anti-colonialism. It is a shape-shifting, amorphous, incredibly flexible doctrine; Jews constitute the obstacle to whatever the society considers most valuable or righteous.

This, says Horn, not only provides a license to hate Jews and a rationale for doing so, but also makes it praiseworthy. One need no longer be ashamed of being an anti-semite because it is not bigotry but simple self-defense or self-preservation. The Jewish “victims” of what might formerly have been considered bigotry are actually dangerous oppressors, and opposing them is virtuous, not cowardly or bigoted.

Everyone should read it, and she should be put in charge of everything that she has the time and energy to be in charge of. After I have finished reading and digesting it, I hope to offer some thoughts. She has clearly identified the problem with great insight and acuity. I am especially interested in her proffered solution to the problem, which involves a deemphasis of the holocaust and victim status, and a strong, proud focus on the benefits this 3,000-year old culture has bequeathed to the world. This trust in our ability to educate ourselves and the world seems to me to be more than a bit optimistic, given the fractured state of the Jewish community and its woeful leadership, but that is not the subject of today’s essay. I’ll withhold judgment until I read the book.

Sobered and depressed by her analysis of the forces arrayed against us, I choose, today, to operate on a wholly different, far less analytic and intellectual, plane. I want to go back in time to those idyllic days when we could actually poke fun at antisemites as a bunch of illiterate, uneducated morons. Just for today, I want to forget that they are well-funded, well-organized, media-savvy, and whipping our butts in opinion polls.

I want to be more optimistic about our prospects against our enemies, and I am encouraged to attempt to do so by a news story about two brothers in upstate New York who were arrested yesterday after allegedly stealing an Israeli flag from outside a business, taking it home, and setting it on fire. Cormac Banco, 28, and Declan Banco, 31, were charged with hate crimes related to theft and criminal damage, as well as destroying evidence. Cormac was additionally charged with resisting arrest.

The incident occurred in Hornell, which is apparently, for some reason, a hotbed of antisemitism. In 2022, the city’s former Beth El Synagogue was targeted with neo-Nazi propaganda and swastikas.

So just for today, with your kind permission, I would like to pretend that it is bozos like them who are our real problem, not an incredibly orchestrated, pervasive, well-organized, and well-financed plot to eliminate Israel and the Jewish people. Following are my impromptu, smug, and condescending thoughts about these alleged miscreants, and I think that you will see, immediately, how my approach differs from Ms. Horn’s.

If these allegations are true, what better antisemites could you ever wish for? These are the images of how I picture the followers of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes. These are how I imagine the people who watch Cenk Uyghur and vote for Fishback and Bilzerian. These are the members of Mamdani’s, AOC’s, and Tlaib’s shock corps. Not the sharpest minds in the criminal community, they seem to be operating on a wavelength that bypasses intelligence and risk assessment entirely and proceeds directly to assured incarceration. They put their two heads together and came up with a master plan for getting caught redhanded. Two peas in a pod, with the pod, one hopes, in a maximum security prison.

Above, a joint mugshot of idiocy. A pair of absolute room-temperature intellects, suggesting that criminal stupidity may be hereditary. Two brothers sharing a single brain cell and a single prison cell. Heartwarming. They set out to make a political statement and ended up making a public service announcement for birth control. Somewhere out there, two parents are wishing they’d invested in a hobby, any hobby, instead of raising these two.

Seriously speaking, this is why you need to make sure your children acquire some social skills. It is pretty clear that these two had nothing else on their social calendars for a Friday night. On the plus side, if they ever sign up for a dating app they at least have mugshots to use as a profile picture. “Hobby”--property damage.

Nothing says “chronically single and deeply bitter about it” quite like channeling all that unused romantic energy into stealing a flag and setting it on fire in your own front yard. When your romantic prospects are so non-existent that the only thing you can successfully ignite is stolen police evidence, you’ve reached a whole new tier of lonely, a paradigm of incel-ness. Imagine being in your late 20s and early 30s and coordinating a felony with your brother because neither of you could find a single person willing to join you for dinner.

These are my antisemites of choice. I know that we will need to deal with the crisis described by Ms. Horn on an entirely different level, but, just for today, I am going to treasure my image of this knuckle-dragging pair of troglodytes and pretend that they are our problem.

So, thank you, Banco brothers. Your total stupidity, uselessness, and inadequacy give me hope, and so, you are my nominees for antisemites of the year. I only wish that you were all we had to deal with.

As the US presidential campaign kicks into high gear two years early, it becomes obvious whom the democrat candidates perceive as the front-runner. Shortly after AOC’s announcement on the subject, Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttegieg announced that they too would be freezing their eggs. Kamala Harris went a step further and said that she would not be freezing her eggs, since Trump’s inflationary policies had made the cost of eggs prohibitive. Instead, she will be freezing powdered eggs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., keeping all alternatives open and mindful of nutritional impact, will freeze egg whites.

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Guess what? There is no famine in Gaza. Reporting by Olivia Reingold in the Free Press suggests pretty strongly that the “miraculous” turnaround from famine to plenty was not that miraculous at all, since the putative famine was manufactured from whole cloth. Guess what else? Israel did not commit genocide in Gaza. Indeed, authoritative studies demonstrate that its performance in the war displayed an extraordinary level of restraint and sensitivity to civilian casualties compared to the actions of any army in the last hundred years. Israel had the wherewithal to commit genocide; just not the will.

Where do we go to get our reputation back?

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Given the opportunity, what percentage of the Israeli populace do you think would vote “None of the Above”? A) 80% B) 90%

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Can self-driving cars be programmed to drive into crowds at Christmas fairs in Germany? Can all the radio channels be preset to “Allahu Akbar”? If this can be accomplished, finally, at long last, AP headlines will get it right: “Van smashes into crowd; dozens hurt; no motive apparent.”

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More details are emerging on Mamdani Markets. This week the Mayor announced that no Israeli products will be sold at the stores. Additionally, in order to keep prices down, no food with kosher certification will be permitted. The Mamdani-designated store manager, Ima Biggit, explained, “This is a matter of economy, not religious discrimination. Manufacturers pay for kosher supervision, which adds to the cost of the product. We will, of course, carry subsidized halal foods, because that will compensate our Muslim customers for years of Islamophobia.” Also, plans are in the works to provide cash payments to competing groceries that are harmed by the taxpayer bankrolled city-owned stores. These cash payments will come from . . . taxpayers. Oh, to be young, stupid, and the Mayor of New York City.

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Speaking of Mamdani, it is depressing to think of the scourge of mounting anti-Semitism for which he has become a paradigm. Each day appears to add to the long list of prominent enemies who hate us: the Mayor himself; Marjorie Taylor Greene (according to Trump, “highly neurotic”); Tucker Carlson (“very low IQ individual”); Hasan Piker (US deserved 9/11–Hamas 1,000 times better than IDF); Candace Owens (need I say more?); Thomas Massie (“a real JERK”); and the tweedle dumb and dumbers–Cenk Uyghur, Joe Kent, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib. Come to think of it, maybe we are doing something right, because wouldn’t we be embarrassed to be supported by such losers?

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Mamdani, of Indian descent, was born in Uganda. What’s up with that? Could there possibly be some colonial empire stuff going on? Well, it turns out that statistically and historically, people of South Asian descent (Ugandan Asians) have occupied a disproportionately dominant position in trade, industry, and private wealth. That is, a tiny percentage of Asian colonists (like the Mamdani family) own an enormous portion of Ugandan wealth. When Idi Amin tried to get rid of them in 1972, the South Asian minority, numbering a miniscule 80,000, owned 90% of the nation’s businesses. After some ups and downs, they still dominate banking, hospitality, manufacturing, and real estate. Historically, members of the Asian population imported by the British colonial rulers were installed as the dominant force in commerce, trade and the professions. The black Africans were steered toward subsistence agriculture or low-wage labor. Mamdani still owns land in Uganda and the family owns an estate on Buziga Hill overlooking Lake Victoria; in New York it might be called a pied-a-terre. He’s a rich kid whose wealth was derived from the sweat of black Africans. Maybe he should offer some reparations before he starts confiscating the wealth of others. These rich socialists who never worked a day in their lives frost my ass.

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While we’re on the subject, Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, lives in a multi-million property in Bed-Stuy that was acquired (via an LLC) by his parents. All pigs are equal; some are more equal. Up the revolution!

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In response to a credible threat of an Iran-sponsored attack, President Trump surreptitiously left his splendid new Qatari luxury plane and was secreted away in a catering truck, along with a handful of trusted aides, leaving behind a bunch of less trusted aides and a planeload of highly dispensable journalists. He boarded a smaller jet that flew him to a military base in the UK, where he rendezvoused with his opulent Qatari jet for the trip home. There is probably no truth to the rumor that Qatar has supplied the US with a gold catering truck for use in future crises.

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Speaking of Iranian threats, here is some advice for those of you who may, unwisely, be considering the assassination of Barron Trump to collect the $10,000,000 bounty offered by Iran. Don’t do it. Aside from the fact that such an act would be evil and wrong, it is quite likely that the Iranian government would pay the bounty in rials. Because of the war and economic boycott, inflation has caused the rial to trade at the exchange rate of 2,000,000 to one dollar. 2,000,000 x 10,000,000 = 20,000,000,000,000. That is 20 trillion. Twelve zeroes. Take it from me. Trying to launder 20 trillion rials would not be a piece of cake. And you would likely have to pay taxes in dollars or shekels.

Also, it would be evil and wrong. A word to the wise is sufficient. May Barron live biz hundert und zwanzig.

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Abortion is now legal in Massachusetts at any time in the pregnancy and for any reason. One visualizes the nightmare scenario of a difficult labor ending in a decision to just go ahead and terminate it. In which case, had this solution been available 78 years ago, I might not be around to write this; consider the tragic loss to civilization. In what has become, essentially, a one-party state, nine Democrats with consciences abandoned the caucus to vote no. Profiles in courage. In an unrelated story, Lindsay Clancy is on trial in Massachusetts for strangling her three young children to death in her house in early 2023. Like Luigi Mangione, she has attracted a horde of internet defenders who say that post-partum depression could have driven any woman to the same despair and irrational behavior. What post-partum depression? Any Tuesday without playdates could have done the same. What is it with Massachusetts? The official motto of the state is “Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietum.” By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty. Or, more colloquially, “She seeks peace under liberty by means of the sword.” For some reason, I am reminded of that fictional course taught by a radical feminist at Enfield Tennis Academy in David Foster Wallace’s brilliant and psychotic novel, Infinite Jest: “The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault.”

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My erudite oldest brother, having read my piece on treatment of non-believers (specifically Usha Vance) under Sharia, queried as to the apparent absence of influential liberalizing movements in Islam, akin to conservative, reform, reconstructionist, or unaffiliated Jews. Are they all chareidi except when they run for American political office, he asks. Despite being way less erudite (he has been through shas six or nine times; I recently discovered that there was a gemara called Eruvin–who knew?) I have developed a theory about this.

Islam developed in the early seventh century, CE. It is thus 14 centuries old, give or take a few decades.

According to various traditions, Abraham was born in the year 1948 after creation (the early second millennium BCE). When Judaism was in its rambunctious childhood and adolescence, it was engaged in a bunch of internecine and external wars, as recounted in the Books of Kings. For example, Ahab, best known among Jews for his vile wife, Jezebel, and his struggles with the Prophet Elijah, was quite the warrior, fighting a series of wars with Aramean forces, joining (with his huge fleet of chariots) a massive coalition of 12 kings to oppose Shalmaneser, and subjugating Moab. Other kings were similarly engaged in conflict.

Christianity, in its present form, began in the first or second century CE. When it was 12 to 14 centuries old, it was engaged in a non-ending series of savage and costly wars, including the Crusades, the reconquista against the Caliphate, the Hundred Years War, the Italian Guelphs and Ghibellines Wars, not to mention the wars against the emerging Ottoman Empire.

So here’s my theory: This is the way religions and religious empires behave before they reach maturity. Islam is young, just past its century bar mitzvah. We should not have unrealistic expectations about its judgment or maturity. If we patiently wait six or seven hundred years, Islam will become more moderate, liberal, and evolved.

On the other hand, imagine Ahab or the Crusaders with nuclear weapons.

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Things are looking up. World Israel News, citing CNN, reports that Iran’s religious police have pulled back from enforcing the country’s strict Islamic dress laws, including mandatory hair covering, amid fears that enforcement could trigger mass protests and threaten regime stability.

However, reports that Iran will be participating alongside Israel in this year’s Eurovision festival may be premature.

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According to World Central Kitchen, six bundles of hashish weighing about 600 grams, plus another 160 grams of illegal substances were found hidden inside packages of canned peppers included in humanitarian food shipments to Gaza. Israel accused Hamas of once again exploiting aid channels. But . . . The Guardian reports that the UN and EU have accused Israel of withholding pharmaceuticals from the malnourished survivors of the genocide. Who is to say which is the right interpretation? Has the UN or the EU ever been accused of being biased or untruthful?

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The New York Times lost a defamation lawsuit for the first time in 50 years and will have to pay $7.4 million in punitive damages to an Alabama basketball player it claimed was at the scene of a shooting. I don’t want to go all lawyer on you, but do you have any idea how shoddy your reporting needs to be for a newspaper to lose a defamation suit in the United States? Well, for one thing, you must base your story on a source who was not present at the scene, but heard the facts from a different source, WHOM YOU NEVER INTERVIEW. Then, when you reach out to the subject’s family and get a categorical denial, you must disregard it. And your final source must tell you that a “white guy on the basketball team” (whose name he could not remember) was in the car. As the plaintiff’s lawyer said, the Times “had no corroboration, no verification, created an artificial deadline, and was willing to chase that deadline at the expense of a child.”

True.

Maybe they should just stick to what they are good at. Like Wordle.

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Final thought: I was wondering whether any of you might be able to help. According to Gemini, there are typically between 4,000 and 10,000 active political action committees (PACS) registered with the Federal Election Commission. Over 9,200 PACs made contributions to congressional candidates during the 2024 election cycle. Why do you suppose that the only one you read about every day is AIPAC? And why do you never hear about donors to PACs sponsored by labor unions, trade associations, businesses, single-issue organizations, etc.--only “AIPAC donors”? I will give you a hint. For greater clarity, I think “AIPAC donors” is spelled J-E-W-S.

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OK. Now you know what drove me to the whiskey diet. Feel free to join me. And if your weight is getting out of control, or you need a laugh, please go to Amazon and buy my “Manly Man’s Diet For Manly Men.” The royalties help provide me with snacks.

I am not, and have no desire to be, expert in sharia law. I have enough problems with halacha. I am given to understand that its adherents characterize Islam as a religion of peace, but I am also quite aware of the vicious crimes that have been perpetrated in its name. I have read Michel Houellebecq’s brilliant and terrifying book, Submission, and I have gleaned bits and pieces of information about sharia law available to the casual reader.

Anything in this essay that describes sharia law and its various interpretations is the result of quick and dirty research, cursory at best, made possible by the remarkable tools that search engines and artificial intelligence have made available to the amateur seeking enlightenment.

So why dip my toe into a complex field in which I have no real expertise? I am motivated to write this because of a dismissive, perhaps contemptuous, comment made by Abdulrahman el-Sayed, the Democrat candidate for United States Senator in Michigan, about Usha Vance, suggesting, apparently without any basis whatsoever, that J.D. Vance’s grandparents would have disapproved of her because, Abdulrahman suggested, she is Hindu and they were undoubtedly racists.

It should not surprise us that el-Sayed says disgusting things since he, like his good friend Hasan Piker, appears to be a wholly repulsive individual. But he also pronounces himself an adherent of sharia law. I know his hateful views on Jews and Israel. But after hearing his odious accusation against people he could not possibly know, I wondered how he, as a Muslim who follows sharia, felt about the status of non-believers who are neither Christian nor Jewish, and therefore not “People of the Book,” and how they are to be treated.

As a proponent and adherent of sharia in his personal life, does he interpret the theological superiority that Islam claims as the final uncorrupted revelation delivered to the Prophet Myhammad as a mandate for political dominance and the subjugation of non-Muslims? Don’t the majority of Michigan voters who are non-Muslim have the right to know his views on whether Muslims must strive for global political supremacy?

I am not so unsophisticated as to be unaware of the distinction between the manner in which the Quran classifies non-believers and the far more elaborate system of jurisprudence that has developed over the centuries. That is, I will not provide you with the non-nuanced answer that “non-believers must be killed.” I would imagine that not even Sayed and Piker believe that (Zionists excepted, of course).

In classical Islamic law, there appear to be three categories: 1) Muslims, 2) People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), principally Jews and Christians, and in some traditions, Zoroastrians, and 3) all other non-Muslims: mushrikun (polytheists), kuffar (unbelievers), and miscellaneous (it doesn’t matter much, since their fate is usually the same).

It goes without saying that ALL non-Muslims are denied equal rights under sharia, but the interesting thing for Usha is that classical Islamic scholars differed over the status and fate of people in the third category, which is, of course, her category. J.D. (and the majority of Michigan voters) should know what el-Sayed has planned for his family if the sharia law he espouses prevails.

To deal summarily with Jews and Christians, People of the Book: they enjoy “protected” status; after they are subjugated by force and accept Muslim political authority, they may be permitted to survive as Dhimmis by paying the jizya tax. Once they accept subordinate status, their religious identity may be maintained. Thank Allah for small favors.

If, however, one is a polytheist or atheist, absent exceptions for temporary treaties or arrangements, death or conversion are the only classical alternatives.

As noted, however, the various schools that developed disputed the classical status of pagans and polytheists. The Shafi’i school was most restrictive: jizya was not an available alternative to anyone but People of the Book or Zoroastrians; others were offered only conversion or death. If el-Sayed is one of those and his views prevail in this country, Usha is a goner.

The Hanafi and Maliki views were (somewhat) more tolerant. Under the former, non-Arab unbelievers could enroll for jizya (Arab unbelievers–apostates–were out of luck). Under the latter, jizya could be accepted from a number of classes of unbelievers. Thus, a Hindu or Buddhist might survive under an el-Sayed brand of sharia, depending on the school of thought to which he adheres.

Personally, I think it would be a good idea if he would let us know. It might be a factor in the decision-making process.

Just to be clear: survival as dhimmi is not that great. It does not mean that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator, etc. You don’t just get to pay an extra tax, like some millionaire or billionaire, and then be treated as equal to a Muslim. Be realistic, man. The jizya buys you protection for your life and property, permission to remain non-Muslim; protection of established religious institutions; in certain circumstances, exemption from military service; and freedom to practice one’s religion within prescribed limits. It does NOT exempt you from the tax (obviously), free you from submitting to Muslim political sovereignty, permit you to freely worship in public or build houses of worship, own weapons, or grant you full equality under the law (e.g., your testimony might not be accepted in court).

But, you say, this is France. Or England. Or Michigan? Or the United States? Get over it. Welcome to Sharia, baby.

Dhimmi may be protected, but they ain’t equal. On the other hand, it’s probably still better than being Hindu and excluded from Dhimmi status. There are only a few outcomes for them, none of them pleasant: convert to Islam, die in battle, or enter into some sort of time-bound treaty. This is not to say that every Hindu, Buddhist, or atheist living under sharia must be killed. If you are fortunate enough to fall under Hanafi tradition, you can pay the jizya and survive. Yippee!

To be fair, it must be noted that some Muslim scholars have debated whether these historical rules remain applicable in a modern nation. There were, after all, several mechanisms that developed, including jizya, treaties (mu’āhada), safe-conduct (amān), and various negotiated arrangements with conquered populations—that made the actual historical treatment of non-People of the Book considerably more complicated. But it’s fair to say that if el-Sayed’s branch of sharia is Shafi’i or Hanbali and prevails, Usha is either Muslim or dead; if he is Hanafi or Maliki and prevails, she gets to pay jizya and survive as a dhimmi.

If you were Usha or J.D., would you want to take a chance?

And, once again, equal citizenship is out of the question for any non-Muslim under sharia law.

In Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, sharia serves as the foundation for the entire legal code. In Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, and Morocco, sharia is identified in the constitution as a defining legal source. And el-Sayed calls Israel an apartheid state. What does he think about these Muslim states?

Won’t anyone from CNN ask him about this? For Usha’s sake?

I was under the weather this shabbat, had to pray in isolation at home, and, therefore, had extra time to think about the week’s Torah reading. So here’s a bonus retrospective for you (well, I think it’s a bonus; I acknowledge that reasonable people might differ).

The Nation of Israel engages in a war against its enemy. In the course of the successful campaign, a Jewish soldier sees a beautiful woman and desires her. The first part of Ki Teitzei details the process by which he can lawfully accomplish his objective, including a period during which she is made unattractive, presumably to dissuade him, a period of mourning for the parents and life she is leaving behind, and a list of legal protections for her after his desire (inevitably, suggests the Torah) wanes.

It is all very extraordinary and a bit bizarre. Even more perplexing is Rashi’s exegesis. Quoting the Talmud (Kiddushin 21b), Rashi explains that the whole concept of יפת תואר (“yifat to’ar,” a woman of beautiful form) is an accommodation to the יצר הרע (“yetzer hara,” the evil inclination). Had the Torah not devised and described a permissive procedure by which the soldier could indulge his desire, the Jewish soldier on foreign soil would nevertheless have engaged in the prohibited behavior. He would have been unable to overcome the desire or suppress his lust, because of the urging of his yetzer hara.

Better, reasons the gemara, that we should provide a methodology that may, if successful, discourage him from proceeding. If that first objective fails, then we must provide a legitimate pathway that authorizes the behavior. Provide a “heter,” permission, rather than have him commit the “aveira,” sin.

This is remarkable, almost beyond belief.

The Torah does not say that if your evil inclination prompts you to commit adultery, you may do so if you first follow certain procedures (the objects of your desire must not shower or brush their teeth for a week, after which anything goes), or if your evil inclination lusts after a McDonald’s cheeseburger and milkshake, you may indulge, but only after rendering it less desirable (e.g., leave it out in the sun until the special sauce curdles and the meat and cheese start to smell). If the sin remains attractive--if you still want it–you can have it. Of course there will be consequences. You may wind up hating the wife you so ardently desired; the children of such a union may be troubled, or trouble. The forbidden combination of foods might cause gastric distress.

After all, if the cheeseburger were not made permissible, the yetzer hara would have made you eat it anyway. If your neighbor’s wife were not permitted to you, the yetzer hara would have compelled you into the liaison.

Might as well circumscribe the prohibited behavior with certain strictures and then—go ahead and permit it.

Really?

And if your yetzer hara is of the variety that finds shabbat burdensome, does the Torah give you a pathway to avoid it? Better to permit watching television with one eye closed or without sound (just subtitles)? And if your yetzer hara isn’t crazy about fasting on Yom Kippur, are you allowed to eat foods that you don’t like, because, after all, given your yetzer hara, you are going to eat anyway?

Of course not. That is not how the system of Jewish Law works. Unlike the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, we don’t have “indulgences.” So what is going on here?

I submit that the idiosyncrasy of this approach is necessitated by and exists only in the context of war. It is not about the unique appeal of the beautiful woman. It is about the soldier, who is existing outside customary civilized constraints. He is engaged, perforce, in destruction and death; his entire value system is challenged and possibly impaired. Unbridled passions and tremendous pressure prevail. Putting aside his better nature and much of what he has been taught, he must transform himself into a killer. How is he to preserve his humanity and self-respect in these exceptional circumstances?

The Torah intervenes, recognizing the extraordinary circumstances and pressures, but insisting that the rule of law is not–can never be–completely overridden by the passions and requirements of war. There must be rules of engagement to preserve a modicum of humanity. Yet the Torah makes it clear that the law, Halacha, is relaxed in wartime in certain sanctioned ways, because the defense of the nation, pikuach nefesh, and the stresses of the battlefield make it necessary to accommodate the soldier so he can prevail on behalf of the entire nation. He must follow prescribed procedures, but the law is not blind to the uniquely stressful environment of the battlefield. War requires one to set aside some basic indicia of humanity; otherwise, one could not be an effective killing machine, and that would put the entire nation at risk.

Of course, this concept does not—may not—exist in times of peace.

What’s the practical implication? Sometimes, when one sees the restrictions placed on the Israeli army, actually endangering the soldiers in the service of what appears to be public relations, the wisdom of the Torah policy becomes manifest. Minimum standards must be maintained, but the soldiers must not be unrealistically shackled. Specifically, they should not be exposing themselves to higher levels of danger because of what the United Nations might say.

But the Torah doesn’t want to say (as the Rambam in hilchos melachim and the gemara in Chulin and the mishna in Eruvin do) that one is permitted to eat non-kosher meat when one is in the midst of battle, or requisition [steal] firewood, or be exempt from handwashing and d’mai, because it fears that people would take the heter as quotidian and translate it to their post-war activities. If you commit a sin a second time, say our Rabbis, you are likely to give yourself a heter for all future transgressions. If you start with a heter, well . . .

So the Torah chooses this highly atypical situation (a married, captive woman) to illustrate the principle of flexibility with respect to the armed forces. Afford the soldier who is protecting the welfare of the nation and its people some latitude. Understand his situation. Make accommodations in his favor--even if the result is not optimal-- but at least don’t turn him into a criminal or sinner. The Viet Nam experience demonstrated painfully what happens to a society when its soldiers are viewed as monsters rather than heroes. Our soldiers deserve better.

And once battle conditions no longer prevail, the permissive relaxation of the law ceases, because it was so limited and so circumscribed.

The Torah follows this parsha with the situation in which one wife is preferred over the other, suggesting that a marriage based exclusively on satisfying the appetites of the yetzer hara is doomed to spiral down into conflict and disintegrate.

[As an aside, this is one of those situations where the gap between God and us is made manifest and apparent. In the case of Isaac and Ishmael, God prefers the younger brother born of the preferred wife; in the case of Jacob and Esau, God prefers the younger brother, born of the same wife; in the case of Reuven and Yoseif, God prefers the younger brother born of the preferred wife (Yoseif gets pi shtayim, two shvatim; as the designated first-born, he is entitled to double).

The Torah tells us that we may not choose to emulate God in this. The Torah does not say that we should not do it, as it expresses most prohibitions. It says “לא יוכל לבכר” (he may not, he shall not take the liberty to, he shall not have the ability to, designate the first-born; he may not argue that he is following God’s precedent). When it comes to our wives and children, we may not make the same choice that God made because, as God would undoubtedly explain patiently if He were asked, He is God. He makes the rules. We follow them.]

Then comes the ben sorer umoreh, the rebellious son. Why is the parsha of ben sorer umoreh appended to the parsha of the yifat toar? The gemara in sanhedrin says that anyone who marries a yifat toar will ultimately have a rebellious child. But the gemara also reports one opinion that, in the entire cavalcade of Jewish history, there was never a case in which this law was executed. Indeed, the restrictions on a successful prosecution of a ben sorer umoreh render it implausible, if not impossible. The rule only applies for three months after the boy’s bar mitzvah, it requires the joint accusation of the father and the mother, it requires the child to be equally disobedient to both parents, who must be of equal status, and it requires the parents themselves to participate in the execution. Not even the most talented of writers could render this scenario credible.

Moreover, the ben sorer umoreh does not commit capital crimes--he eats and drinks too much and he doesn’t listen to his parents. He appears to be violating the positive commandments of kedoshim t’heyu (be holy), or kibud av v’em (honor parents). The death penalty does not attach to these violations. And yet, the ben sorer umoreh is stoned to death.

Why?

Again, as in the case of the yifat toar, because of what he will do in the future. בן סורר ומורה נהרג על שם סופו. Ultimately, he will not be able to satisfy himself with his parents’ possessions and he will become a murderous highwayman. Better, reason Chazal, that he should die innocent, before he commits these crimes, rather than guilty, after committing them.

I know that I should dispense with examples of how this appears to be a perversion of justice. You can supply them yourself. (But, just because it’s so much fun, I will start you off. Jaywalking? You will ultimately commit vehicular homicide; may as well kill you now. Glanced at an attractive woman, or man? You know what that might lead to. Off with his/her head.)

It should go without saying that punishing someone for (or on account of) crimes he will commit in the future is not consistent with the entire corpus of Jewish jurisprudence. It also resonates as unfair. Is there no hope that he will reform himself, do teshuva, meet a good woman who changes his life? Even if this whole situation is hypothetical, it must teach us something.

What?

Also, why the divergent results? The lustful soldier is likely to be seduced by the yetzer hara into committing a sin, so . . . we make the sin permissible. Voila! The ben sorer umoreh is likely to commit capital crimes in the future, so . . . we kill him now. The lack of symmetry here is striking, and almost incomprehensible, especially where the episodes are in such close proximity. Why does the adolescent get the short end of the stick?

Maybe that is the answer. The adolescent has reached the age of mitzvot without forming any attachment to the Jewish people, even his very own parents. There is no greater nihilist than an adolescent left to his own devices or malignant influences. His parents have no impact on him, notwithstanding their attempts at discipline. איננו שמע בקול אביו ובקול אמו ויסרו אתו ולא ישמע אליהם. He doesn’t listen to the voice of his father and the voice of his mother, though they punish him . . . and then, again, still . . . he does not listen to them. But the second time, it is in the future tense. He will not listen to them. He will never listen to them. This child is lost to the Jewish community.

I don’t know what the child psychologists have to say about this, but the Torah seems to say that in some extreme cases the personality is irrevocably shaped by the time a child becomes 13. How terrifying. How sad. But . . . what greater argument could the Torah adduce to persuade parents and the community at large that attention must be paid to our children, especially the ones at risk? The fact that the Torah places the onus on the parents to rat out their children and participate in the execution shows that the Torah is sending a message to the parents. Pay attention. Early. Always. Before it is too late. Because this child, any child, could be lost--and you must try to avoid that outcome. And not just the parents. וכל ישראל ישמעו ויראו. And the entire people of Israel will hear and see, or understand and take note, or understand and be afraid.

As noted, according to one opinion, there was never a ben sorer umoreh in all of Jewish history. Perhaps because the Torah is so vivid in telling parents of the consequences of neglect. The Torah records this law to terrify us into performing our duties as parents.

That leaves us with the soldier. Why is he not treated in a similar fashion? He will give in to the yetzer hara. Let’s kill him now. The answer is twofold: he is a noble hero and we owe him something. So he gets the benefit of the doubt. Remember that before he went to war, he had an opportunity to go home and avoid the danger. Among the interrogatories presented to the soldiers (new wife, new house, new vineyard?), he is asked whether he is afraid to fight. By choosing to volunteer and persist, he incurs our gratitude and admiration. Moreover, putting his own character aside, he is fighting for us. He is putting his life on the line . . . for us. For heroes like him, we can make an accommodation for the yetzer hara, as long as we harness it to the requirements of halacha.

That was probably longer than necessary, so I will provide a summary for those who skipped to the end: honor and respect our soldiers, pay careful and loving attention to your children, and steer clear of beautiful non-Jewish women.

My granddaughter has been blessed with a best friend whom she has loved since kindergarten. This friend will, God willing, be married this coming Sunday, b’sha’ah tova.

My granddaughter arranged her schedule and her finances and found a flight to Israel through Munich she could afford that would permit her to spend the Shabbat Kallah with her beloved friend, attend the wedding, spend the next day with family, including my wife, who misses her terribly, and visit the grave of her other grandmother, a”h.

She was in midflight on the last leg of her journey when the airport union of the Israel Airport Authority, in an unauthorized and unlawful strike, shut down the airport. The plane returned to Germany. There was no way for her to complete the trip and this morning she will fly back to the United States.

For some sins, there is no atonement.

Some of those airport workers will attend selichot services, seeking forgiveness for their transgressions. Even more will beat their chests and confess on Yom Kippur. And many will attend no service. Presumably, they will all go on with their lives, complacent in the knowledge that they have forcefully made their point to their employers and demonstrated how critical is their work, how profound is their dissatisfaction, and how potent is their ability to inflict pain.

For some sins, there is no atonement.

The Finance Ministry estimates that the strike at Ben Gurion cost the economy more than 30 million shekels, including lost fees and charges, lost economic output, delays in the arrival of goods, and a long list of additional factors.

How do you put a price on a broken heart?

Yom Kippur atones for sins against God. For transgressions against another person, the offender remains culpable until the victim is compensated and appeased. But what happens when the loss is incompensable? When no appeasement is possible?

For some sins, there is no atonement.

The Prime Minister, furious, expelled the unrepentant head of the union from Likud. But even repentance would not expunge the pain his workers selfishly inflicted on tens of thousands of innocents who relied upon them, who trusted them to fulfill their obligations, to do their jobs, to be human beings with human feelings and compassion.

What have we become when we are willing to stage sit-ins on highways with no regard for emergency medical vehicles, mothers on the way to retrieve their children, patients headed for dialysis or chemotherapy? Who are we when we put our petty grievances (or even our major grievances) before our concern for our fellows?

My granddaughter, thank God, was not in a dire medical situation. But she, and the thousands of travellers who stood in lines for hours, whose plans and vacations were wrecked, who wasted precious hours and days because airport workers believed they were understaffed, deserved better.

One imagines the “triumphant” workers, basking in the glory of their victory over the establishment. Look at what we have accomplished! Look how we shut down the airport, reversed the course of planes in midflight, and threw the entire system into chaos! See how powerful we are!

And they won’t pause for a moment to consider the pain, the inconvenience, the distress, and the aggravation they inflicted.

My baser self wants to wish all these terrible things upon the workers, but I can’t bring myself even to desire their suffering. I hope they enjoy the weddings and anniversaries of their loved ones. I hope their vacations are not ruined by selfish, myopic, inconsiderate mercenaries. I hope that their lives stop being miserable, so they will no longer be blind to the feelings and welfare of others.

In the time of the Temple, even sacrifices could not atone for deliberate, rebellious sins against God. Those required repentance, confession, behavioral change, and, sometimes, suffering There is no sin that God cannot forgive.

Once again, I come face to face with the grim reality that I am not God.

Judaism does not have a category of sins that are intrinsically beyond atonement. I do.

Judaism does have a class of sins that exclude transgressors from the world to come. Without enumerating them, one can generalize that they are sins that damage the covenantal relationship, either with God, the Jewish people, or with basic human morality. Those sins constitute a rejection of communal identity and destiny. The world to come is not a reward; it is the soul’s natural state, when unsullied by sins that disfigure the soul and separate it from the values of the community.

Leaving fellow Jews stranded in the air or at the airport, without regard for their suffering and pain, comprises more than a moral failure; it is a fundamental rupture of the human and religious compact.

For some sins, there is no atonement.

May the wedding proceed in joy. May the chatan and kallah be blessed with a bayit ne’eman b’yisrael. May they and my granddaughter enjoy many smachot together.

And may the people of Israel become more considerate of one another.

I have a bunch of prefatory work before I get to my core message, and I am confident, knowing my audience, its relative age, and its somewhat circumscribed attention span, that some of you will not make it to the end. So, at the risk of removing the delicious frisson of anticipation you have grown to expect from my writing and I endeavor to satisfy, here’s where this thing is going to wind up:

This is the last time I will write about Tom Friedman (b’li neder: i.e., not accepting upon myself the stringencies of a vow, but simply stating my present intention).

“Why,” you ask, “voluntarily surrender such an easy target? Isn’t Friedman, with his fixations on Trump, Netanyahu, two-state solutions, and his own infallibility, the gift that keeps giving to people like you who delight in poking fun at the fatuous, self-important buffoons that you resemble?”

Well, yes, and that is where the moral issue arises, with interesting Jewish and halachic overtones.

Lo’eig larash (לועג לרש) is a principle of Jewish law based upon human dignity, especially the honor due to the deceased. The concept is based upon a verse from Proverbs (17:5), “He who mocks the poor blasphemes his Maker,” and its primary application is with respect to the performance in the presence of the dead of meritorious actions that they (being dead) are no longer able to perform. For example, one should not study Torah or expose tzitzit in a cemetery, because the dead can no longer engage in those mitzvot.

This is a beautiful concept. If one should be so sensitive to the “feelings” of the dead, how much more so should one refrain from taunting, or flaunting privilege before, a living person who is less fortunate? Thus the prohibition of lo’eig larash has expanded to include a broad array of situations involving compassion, understanding, empathy, and tact. The concept keeps one from piling on, bullying, embarrassing, or demeaning one less fortunate or incapable of defense.

Ultimately, lo’eig larash reflects the overarching Jewish legal and ethical commitment to preserve the profound honor, modesty, and dignity of every human being, alive or dead, even Tom Friedman.

Which brings me to the Joe Biden example (don’t worry, I’m drawing closer to Friedman and the end). Biden’s behavior in office with respect to enriching his family and using lawfare and weaponized justice to persecute his enemies, as well as his disappointing performance in failing to follow through on his commitments to Israel, made him an appropriate target. And I gleefully indulged, writing, for example, “it violates all credibility to use the words ‘Biden’ and ‘clever’ in a single sentence.” “Trump and Biden, “ I wrote, “Does anyone really think this is the best we can do?”

“Joe Biden was a two-bit political hack, in thrall to MBNA and the banking industry, back-slapping pal to segregationists, plagiarist, bereft of meaningful accomplishments, on the make and in politics because he lacked the skills to succeed elsewhere and any integrity that might have kept him from succeeding in politics.” Or “Joe Biden, eulogist for the grand Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan, who believes that his country is in the constant grip of institutional embedded racism, has no standing to demand that the freely, democratically elected government of Israel bow to his notion of what its policies should be.”

He was fair game. I pulled no punches and showed no mercy.

Then he had that debate, in which he was revealed to be a demented old man with diminished capacity, and I stopped writing about him. I could write about the elder abuse that was perpetrated upon him, the dishonesty of those who propped him up and lied about his mental acuity, the venality and lust for power of his family, but I couldn’t write about Joe.

He had entered the realm of lo’eig larash strictures, so I was silent, because he had become pitiful instead of contemptible.

“Contemptible.” You knew that I would find the appropriate segue to Tom Friedman. Your confidence is rewarded.

The catalog of Friedman’s offenses against decency, common sense, and Israel is extensive, but a few examples will suffice. He has always hated Netanyahu and Trump, because they pay him no attention. And he lusts for attention. The satraps of Saudi Arabia treat him like a king and concoct joint visions of a Middle East in which Israel plays a disappearing role. So he prefers them. Writing of the events of October 7, Friedman said that the carnage was inevitable once Israeli Jews brought a Torah scroll to Saudi Arabia and engaged in Jewish prayer there. How tone deaf and woing-headed is that?

Tom Friedman is to Middle East peace what Sam Bankman-Fried was to cryptocurrency. Yet he continues to act as if anyone cares what he says.

In a blog titled “Frequently Wrong But Never Uncertain: Why Does Anyone Listen To Tom Friedman?” I noted a few of his howlers. In 1999, he predicted that China would soon have a free press (“Oh, China’s leaders don’t know it yet, but . . .”). But . . . Tom knew. He suggested that Nancy Pelosi’s “utterly reckless, dangerous, and irresponsible” visit to Taiwan might result “in the U.S. being plunged into conflicts with a nuclear-armed Russia and a nuclear-armed China at the same time.”

Or . . . it might not result in that.

In 2003, Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq, writing that the establishment of a democratic state in the Middle East would force other countries in the region to liberalize and modernize.

But when the results of free elections in the only actual democratic state in the Middle East were not to his liking, he was prepared to jettison the entire enterprise. For Tom Friedman, Israel is done. Its benighted and racist populace elected representatives who will enact policies to destroy the free judiciary, disenfranchise Arabs, and oppress the LGBTQ community.

What a crock. How totally divorced from the reality on the ground. Yet Mr. Friedman, as noted, frequently wrong but never uncertain, proclaimed the demise of the Israel that “once existed” but has surrendered its claim to the support of American Jews, and presumably America itself, because some of the officials elected formerly held (and may even still hold) positions he considered extreme.

Tom has also (erroneously) advanced the fatuous proposition that countries with McDonald’s outlets do not engage in military actions against one another, that Ireland’s embrace of a globalization strategy would yield long-term economic success (written when the Irish economy had already begun its downward spiral to devastation), and China would never be able to grow and compete globally without a free flow of information.

It is, of course, his frequently stated, repeated, and repeated many times over, views on Israel that are most offensive. He has opposed Israel since his college days and he is a lousy journalist to boot. He has well-deserved all the contumely one can heap upon him.

And I was looking forward to writing about him every time he republished the same sad old column about how Trump got the Middle East wrong, and how Israel needs to accede to a terrorist state on its borders, and how America is finished with Israel, and how Netanyahu is an evil crypto-fascist.

But that ship has sailed. Tom has passed the bar into ludicrous, pitiful self-parody. He has out-Bidened Biden. He has fallen prey to that malady that apparently afflicts famous New York Times writers, convinced by one another of their brilliance and infallibility in that doctrinaire echo chamber in which they work, causing them to abandon all reason in the service of their chosen narrative and ideology.

So Economics Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, on the day following Trump’s first election, could confidently write, “If the question is when markets will recover, a first pass answer is never.” (On that date, 11/ 7/16, the Dow closed at a near record 18,259.6; it is now over 54,000, a compounded growth rate of 11.6%.) R.I.P. Paul Krugman.

So Nick Kristof, after being deluded about Cambodian child prostitutes, and ruining the life of an innocent man by accusing him of spreading anthrax, eventually descended into a fevered fantasy about trained dogs raping Palestinian prisoners. R.I.P. Nick Kristof.

And now Tom Friedman has written a column offering strategic electoral advice to AbdulRahman el-Sayed, anti-Zionist, friend and sponsor to anti-Semites and haters of the Constitution and America, on how he can salvage the Jewish vote and win the election in Michigan, as if that were a good thing. In it, he attacks the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, an entirely American enterprise that believes a strong Israel-America relationship is in the interests of both countries, as “drunk on its own power” (as anti-Semitic a trope as one can imagine), and choosing to be “pro-Netanyahu” instead of prioritizing American interests (ditto).

For a prominent Jew with a platform and megaphone that large to accuse a major American Jewish-affiliated organization of being un-American because of its loyalty to Israel is over the line. To take the side of politicians who hate Jews and Israel is over the line. It is an in-kind donation to Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson. Friedman went on in the column to attack American Jews and describe Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition partners as “a lot worse” than the Ku Klux Klan.

Tom Friedman is bitter and defeated, ugly and vituperative, self-hating and vicious, and, it appears, so consumed by enmity toward his people that he is no longer capable of rational analysis. Attacking him from this point forward is lo’eig larash, taunting the handicapped, criticizing the brain dead.

I won’t do it; he obviously can’t help himself.

Requiescat in Pacem, Tom Friedman.

(I am open to suggestions about future topics, now that the Tom Friedman well is dry.)

I am not going to describe the background in great detail, because you already know the basic story.

In 1947, a country was carved out of the British Empire to establish a homeland for what had long been the minority religion in the region. The concept was to “partition” the land to create two states, one for each of the religious communities living there.

All of the British efforts to establish a single state in which the rights of the two major resident communities could be protected had met insuperable obstacles. The demand for an independent, sovereign state for the minority religion was bitterly opposed by the majority. The only avenue open led to partition.

Partition itself, unfortunately, led to conflict. The formation of the new state led to bitter violence, much bloodshed, and a bloody migration. Hordes of people crossed borders in panic. There were riots, arson, and pitched battles. A great many people died. And even though the war ended, the status of some territories in the area remains disputed.

The impoverished state that emerged from the contemplated partition, eventually armed with a potent army and nuclear weapons, has fought four major wars since gaining independence and engaged in several other localized conflicts, military standoffs, and bloody border skirmishes. In addition to its violent international behavior, it discriminates domestically with brutality and harshness against its remaining religious minorities, which frequently face serious violence, economic discrimination, vandalism, arson and attacks against places of worship, and blasphemy accusations that frequently lead to violence, expropriation, or death.

Yes, Pakistan, which gained independence in 1947 and officially shed its dominion status and became the world’s first Islamic Republic on March 23, 1956, is hardly a model to be emulated. One wonders whether it should have been created in the first place or still has a right to exist. Perhaps we should check with Abdulrahman el-Sayed and Mayor Mamdani, who ostensibly oppose countries that, like Pakistan, prefer one religion over another.

Wait! What? Pakistan? I thought you were talking about . . . oh, never mind.

Isn’t Pakistan the great ally of the United States that is helping to mediate the war with Iran? Yup. Also the country whose Defense Minister, Khawaja Asif, just called Israel “evil,” a “curse for humanity,” a “cancerous state,” and a “common threat,” as he rallied Islamic nations to unite against Israel and annihilate it? Also the country that just entered into a trilateral defense pact with those two other paragons of freedom, enlightenment, and democracy, Turkey and Saudi Arabia?

Some neutral diplomatic mediator. Was Tucker Carlson not available?

Yes. Pakistan, which expelled over 5,000,000 (Pause–Think–Five–Million) refugees because they were Hindu and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands more. You may be amused (or appalled) to learn that when 15,000,000 Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were displaced in the partition, the international community played virtually no role in managing the humanitarian catastrophe. Just as was the case with the Jews displaced from Arab lands. Not a single descendant of those 15,000,000 is now classified as a refugee.

When do you get a UNRWA to take care of all your needs? Under what circumstances are you granted eternal refugee status? Only when you seek to blame the Jews.

In Pakistan, the world’s first Islamic Republic, young Christian and Hindu girls are forcibly converted and forced into marriage on a regular basis. Christians in Punjab and Hindus in Sindh are frequently targeted, suffering mob attacks, discrimination in employment and education, attacks on churches and temples, and the aforementioned forced conversion and marriage, often accompanied by abduction and sexual violence.

Remarkably, it is neither the harshly treated Hindus nor the oppressed Christians that bear the brunt of discrimination in Muslim Pakistan. The Ahmadiyya community, which is discriminated against by law, gets that dubious distinction.

The Ahmadis, founded in 1889, belong to a religious movement within Islam; they consider themselves Muslims, adhere to the Koran, the five pillars, and the six articles of faith, but differ from Shia and Sunni Muslims in their belief that the messiah/mahdi has already come (sort of like some other religion with which you may be familiar). They believe that the messiah was sent to revive Islam’s original teachings of peace and tolerance, reject “jihad of the sword” in favor of an intellectual and peaceful “jihad of the pen,” and engage in peaceful missionary work with the motto “love for all, hatred for none.”

Obviously that cannot be tolerated in Pakistan.

Pakistani laws prohibit Ahmadis from identifying themselves as Muslims, referring to their places of worship as mosques, or practicing Islamic rituals in public. They face prosecution for performing religious practices that other Muslims perform freely. For example, they may be arrested for participating in Friday prayers or celebrating Eid.

Apartheid, anyone? Or, even better, just briefly close your eyes again and imagine how the world would react if that treatment of a minority religion prevailed in Israel.

In Pakistan’s defense, it does not only discriminate against Hindus, Christians, and Ahmadis. According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and Human Rights Watch (the sources of substantially all the information on religious intolerance set forth above), it also discriminates against other Muslims, if they happen to belong to the disfavored Shi’a, who also experience significant religious persecution and violence. The Shi’a are frequently targeted under the extremely flexible (anyone may allege a transgression) and extremely strict blasphemy laws.

On the world stage, Pakistan is a nuclear power. While there is no evidence that it has directly sold or transferred its nuclear technology, it does appear to have turned a blind eye to the clandestine AQ Khan network that operated for twenty years, exporting centrifuge design, components, blueprints, and expertise; TIME called Pakistan a “nuclear bazaar.” It was the godfather to the nuclear capabilities of such model regimes as Iran, North Korea, and Libya. Not until 2004 did Pakistan begin to strengthen and implement export controls. Until then it was either complicit, tolerant, or negligent in supplying nuclear capabilities to rogue countries.

And it has the temerity, the gall, the brazen audacity, to criticize Israel and call it an evil curse? Pot, meet kettle.

In all candor, I, probably like you, don’t give two figs about Pakistan. I believe, without hard evidence, that Osama bin Laden could not have hidden in Abbottabad without the assistance or awareness of the Pakistan security establishment (the official Pakistan inquiry called it a “collective and sustained dereliction of duty”). It is widely accepted that Pakistan’s ISI actively helped birth, fund, and organize the Taliban movement. While ostensibly allied with the US in the War on Terror, Pakistan provided safe havens to Taliban forces.

Accordingly, in my view, Pakistan is to the civilized community of countries what the stuff you scrape off the sole is to shoes. So why take the time to write this? Because the very notion that Pakistan is a respected member of the international community, a mediator, an ally to the Western powers, a voice that is accorded any level of dignity or respect whatsoever, and a country that feels it is empowered to judge and revile Israel, while Israel, its moral superior by every conceivable standard, benchmark, or metric, is smeared and condemned, offends my soul and my intellect.

Pakistan is guilty of every charge it levels at Israel. No one seems to care.

How do you define anti-Semitism? See above.

I freely admit that my view of the Middle East has been shaped by the environment in which I was raised–Jewish, Zionist, Western. I have been conditioned, perhaps indoctrinated, to believe that the Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel. In addition, beyond my religious beliefs, which I acknowledge might not be persuasive to non-believers, I have studied the history of the Jews’ miraculous return to our historic homeland and the juridical basis (Balfour, San Remo, League of Nations, United Nations, and the successive defensive wars) establishing our right to the land.

Nevertheless, as a former academic, I try to be open to new arguments and evidence. I am not so doctrinaire as to dismiss any idea, no matter how seemingly outlandish, without reasonable and fair consideration.

When UNESCO designated Sebastia as a Palestinian World Heritage Site, my initial reaction was a combination of outrage and amusement. Samaria is full of Jewish history and there is a literary and historical record documenting it. “In the thirty-first year of King Asa of Judah, Omri became king over Israel-for twelve years. He reigned in Tirzah six years. Then he bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver; he built [a town] on the hill and named the town that he built Samaria, after Shemer, the owner of the hill.“ I Kings 16:23-24. Samaria is the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Israel, founded about 880 BCE and renamed Sebastia by Herod the Great in honor of Augustus.

Other than the Jews, there were no Palestinians in the time of Omri and none in the time of Herod.

The question of whether the majority of what are known as today’s Palestinians are descendants of recent immigrants or long-term indigenous populations has become highly contentious, as advocates for the Palestinian cause (notably Wikipedia) attempt to rewrite history. Nevertheless, the record and much evidence suggests that the most substantial portion of the Arab population descended from emigrants who arrived during the 19th and 20th century, including tens of thousands of Egyptian soldiers and peasants in the mid-nineteenth century when Ibrahim Pasha ruled (accounting for the ubiquity of the al-Masri name), an even greater number from Syria, Transjordan, and Lebanon, who arrived under Ottoman rule between 1890 and 1915, largely to support Zionist development, and a final influx during the British Mandate (1920-1948), driven by Jewish immigration, modernization, and development. As noted, recent efforts to document indigenous continuity and natural growth, adopted and advocated by Wikipedia and Palestinian apologists, are not persuasive, but have been widely disseminated.

UNESCO has willingly, even eagerly, allowed itself to be co-opted by the revisionist disinformation regime. In addition to the recent Sebastia howler, UNESCO has designated the birthplace of Jesus (Church of the Nativity and Pilgrimage Route in Bethlehem) as a Palestinian World Heritage Site. Without too much scoffing, because it is a bit unseemly, also listed as Palestinian sites are Hebron, Jericho, and the Saint Hilarion Monastery, none of which had any original connection whatsoever to Arabs, Islam, or Palestinians.

Oh, yes, also Jerusalem.

As mentioned, I was both skeptical, amused, and outraged, but also intellectually curious. I wrote to UNESCO and requested access to their archives to see whether any basis at all existed for what I took to be nothing but agitprop and hype. To my great surprise, they acceded to my request.

I have concluded the first round of research, having been provided complete access to their historical records. To say that I am shocked and a bit discombobulated would be an extreme understatement. But, intellectual honesty compels me to share some of my findings, in no particular order, since each one is an eye-opener, if not a revelation.

I need to reevaluate my entire belief system.

1. According to UNESCO, Fatriq Abdul Henry addressed the Virginia House of Burgesses before the Revolutionary War, as follows: “Is life so dear or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty Allah. I know not what others may say, but as for me, give me intifada or give me death.” In part because of that speech and in part because of the belief that developed in that colony that a martyr who died in the cause (shaheed) would spend eternity with seventy Virginians, the site has been proposed by UNESCO as a Palestinian World Heritage Site.

2. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument dating from between 3000-2000 BCE. It was formerly believed to be some sort of observatory because its layout is aligned with the sun at solstices. Some believe it was a burial ground and some believe it was a spiritual retreat. UNESCO has discovered that it was a kosher hotel that was the site of the first Palestinian terror attack in 2742 BCE, on the first night of Passover. All that was left was a ring of standing stones, each around 13 feet high, 7 feet wide, and weighing around 25 tons. UNESCO has conditionally designated it a Palestinian World Heritage Site because it is the last architectural site of note to be associated with Palestinians prior to terror tunnels.

3. Battle of Hastings. The Norman invasion of England was previously thought to have involved only the French, the Angles, and the Saxons. UNESCO has discovered that there was a huge influx of Muslim immigrants to both France and England from Palestine in the years 1010-1065 (the large current Arab population extant in those countries supports the hypothesis). UNESCO has declared Hastings a Palestinian World Heritage Site, because it has discovered that the entire dispute was over which country would have to absorb the Palestinian refugees of the other. Current events suggest that both lost.

4. Reich Chancellery, Berlin, Germany. On this proposed Palestinian World Heritage Site, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the fugitive Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, met with Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941. (While al-Husseini is an old Jerusalem name, it originally dates back to early Islamic history in Arabia–Mecca and Medina, circa 800 CE–from which it branched out across the Islamic world; sorry Wikipedia.) At the meeting al-Husseini agreed to marshall Arab support for the Axis and Hitler agreed to annihilate the Jews in Palestine when Germany prevailed. UNESCO thought this was an excellent arrangement; hence the designation.

5. London, England. In 1910, the London General Omnibus Company introduced the world’s first mass-produced motor bus. In 1911, a Palestinian terrorist tried to blow it up. An obvious choice for a UNESCO Palestinian World Heritage Site. Also in London, UNESCO took official note of the Thames Tunnel, the first modern tunnel successfully constructed under a navigable river. It connected Rotherhithe and Wapping; the first time Yahya Sinwar saw it, he said, “I can use it to kill Jews.” Slam dunk for a UNESCO Palestinian World Heritage Site.

6. Mount Sinai. Where God gave the Torah to the Palestinians.

7. Tel Aviv. Where the Palestinians established the first modern Palestinian city.

8. Nova Music Festival. Need I go on?

Well, there you have it. We really need to reevaluate the whole situation. It is quite inconceivable that a respected organization like UNESCO would allow itself to be used as a cat’s paw of a group of terrorist thugs.

So they must be right. The Palestinians were here first.

But we are still not going anywhere.

Apologies in advance for the length of this rant, but today, unfortunately, Spain is front of mind, and once I get started on Spain, I do tend to go on a bit. For those of you unfamiliar with Spain, imagine Guatemala, but without the charm and culture. Unless you consider killing bulls for sport charming.

I view Europe as a graveyard for Jews, so I am indifferent to most European countries and am rarely disappointed in them, because I have such low expectations. But, for some reason, probably not justified, Spain pisses me off. Of all the colonial powers, it seems to me to be the most anti-Semitic, arrogant, hypocritical, unrepentant, and vicious.

So, yes, I admit the charges. It was me. I am the Israeli Jew who sent the 70,000 Moroccans to Ceuta. All you people who have made fun of the nitwit Javier Bardem, the bloviating Cenk Uyghur, and the hundreds of conspiracist influencers for blaming the refugee influx on Israel and Jews–stop it! They are right. I did it.

And if Spain doesn’t start to shape up, I am going to keep doing it.

“Why Spain?” you ask. Well, for starters, those enclaves that they maintain on the Moroccan mainland are what one might call “occupied territory,” if one were to adopt Spain’s position with respect to Judea and Samaria. Ceuta and Melilla, the only remaining European-held territories on the African continent, are historically (prior to 1415) not Spanish. Morocco claims sovereignty and considers them occupied territories. Spain argues that its situation is vastly different from that of Israel, because, you know . . . Jews. The same standards just don’t apply.

Spain is correct; the situations are not analogous. Spain has no right to, and no pre-colonial history in, Ceuta and Melilla. There is no ancient Spanish presence there. Spaniards never developed the land before the time they colonized it by force. On the other hand, Israel has a three-thousand year history in Judea and Samaria, and Jews are the only extant population that could be described as indigenous.

So Spain should get the hell out. And until they do, I will continue to send Moroccans, who have at least as much right to be in Spain as Spain has to be in Ceuta.

Also, consider those Basque and Catalan communities within Spain that desire nothing but their autonomy and independence, but are kept tethered to Spain by force of arms. Spain complains about the lack of an Arab state in Palestine, even though there has never been such a thing, while it denies independence and cultural control to the Basque and Catalan minorities. Before Spain complains about the absence of a Palestinian state, shouldn’t it enable Basque and Catalan nations? Sheer hypocrisy.

And then there is Spain’s current Prime Minister, an unprincipled demagogue named Pedro Sanchez. He has governed without a budget for three years despite his former position that an inability to pass a budget should trigger elections. He avoided elections because his popularity has cratered under the weight of repeated public corruption and bribery scandals that have weakened his socialist government, as well as popular discontent over rampant unregulated immigration (even before I started sending Moroccans). His closest political allies and his closest family members are being investigated for corruption. He, in the unlikely event that he is not complicit, is undoubtedly aware of their guilt.

What to do? Change the topic. Like anti-Semitic despots of the past, blame the Jews. Pander to his socialist and immigrant base. Unlike his more accomplished Jew-hating predecessors, however, Sanchez’ choice of bigotry has been totally in line with his meager intellect and his pedestrian character–purely performative and as devoid of substance as the man himself.

In an act of statesmanship that would make Metternich or Palmerston spin in their graves, Sanchez boycotted Eurovision because Israel was competing. That’s right, Spaniards couldn’t watch a music competition because the sight of an Israeli performer would be too offensive. Even more puerile, at the EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg, he presented a proposal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the framework governing trade and political relations. Because adoption of such a proposal required unanimity, it never had a chance, though Ireland was applauding and giving the Nazi salute on the sidelines.

How pathetic! To place yourself center stage and proclaim your hatred for Jews as your most salient characteristic. And yet, sadly, how historically appropriate. Instead of doubling down on its vicious hatred, Spain should be recoiling in shame and apologizing to the world and, especially, the Jews.

Spanish animus to Jews didn’t start with Sanchez. Spain sponsored pogroms in 1391 that resulted in the murder and forced conversions of thousands of Jews; it adopted Limpieza de Sangre (“purity of blood”) statutes barring Jews, even those who had converted to Christianity, from offices, guilds, and universities; it tortured and burned Jews during the Inquisition; it expelled all its Jews in 1492; it denied its Jewish citizens passports that would have enabled them to escape Nazi death camps; it sent brigades (the Blue Division) to fight alongside the Wehrmacht; it adopted and institutionalized hereditary antisemitism that persisted for centuries. Spain continued to torture and kill former Jews (conversos) for two centuries after the expulsion, persecuting long after no practicing Jews remained.

And now Spain wants to blame Israel and the Jews for the consequences of its own immigration policies, or, more accurately, absence of immigration policies. A meaningless political pantomime, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. What sort of pissant bigotry is this? Has this worthless and contemptible politician no shame?

Spoiler alert: Nope. Not a shred. The demagogue has nothing in his half-witted arsenal other than meaningless gestures of hatred and envy.

Why doesn’t he just apologize and shut up?

Of course, Spain, which has the effrontery to call tiny Israel, on its own patch of land, a colonizer, was formerly a notable colonial power. The Spanish conquistadors and explorers such as Cortez, DeSoto, Pizzaro, Balboa, Coronado, and de Leon built an empire in the 16th century, spreading misery, violence, and disease around the world. And if they were not technically guilty of genocide with respect to the indigenous populations of the New World, they were far more guilty than the people Sanchez is currently accusing.

Since then, Spain has done little else of note other than fritter away its empire, losing the Eighty Years’ War (and the Netherlands); the Anglo-Spanish War (nice Armada; sorry it’s going down); the Thirty Years’ War; the War of Spanish Succession; the Spanish American Wars of Independence (losing Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia); the Chincha Islands War (Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia); and the Spanish-American War (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Philippines). They did ultimately manage to beat Napoleon, but only with the help of Wellington, and come on, they were fighting the French. Also, since they were on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, score that as only half a defeat (though the winning side needed the assistance of Nazi forces).

After the Civil War, as a gesture of friendship to Hitler, Franco banned Jewish religious services, marked Jewish identity on documents, compiled a registry of Jews, refused to repatriate most Spanish Jews living under Nazi occupation, essentially sealing their fates, and shut down Jewish organizations.

Franco, the fascist, was a cowardly, collaborating toady and an anti-Semite. Sanchez, the communist, is his appropriate heir.

And now, in its flaming mediocrity and flailing grasp for relevance, Spain, again playing the Nazi card, proclaims its hatred for Jews and the Jewish State.

Maybe the reason that Spain’s current antagonism is so irritating is the fact that there was once a brilliant Jewish presence in Spain that helped it shine before its light flickered and was extinguished seven centuries ago. In Muslim-ruled Spain between 900-1200 CE, Jewish culture flourished and made monumental contributions, holding high government positions (Hassdai ibn Shaprut, Shmuel ha-Nagid) and building influential centers of learning in Cordoba, Granada, and Toledo. Maimonides was born in Cordoba. Yehuda Halevi, ibn Gabirol and scores of poets, diplomats, physicians, scholars, and philosophers flourished.

And now Spanish universities, widely acknowledged to be the armpit of European higher learning, are in the forefront of the movement to discriminate against Israeli universities, scholars, and scientists.

Note to Pedro: Reverse your policies; perhaps we can help lead you out of the darkness.

As to the former Muslim control, it is worth noting that because Spain was once part of the Umma, Islam requires that it must again be brought under Islamic rule. Sanchez is, unknowingly, facilitating the return of Islam with his immigration policy.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sanchez was hoping that his fellow EU members would support him during this immigration crisis. Instead, all of the other members joined in a letter accusing him of responsibility. He reacted in anger and will undoubtedly ratchet up his anti-Semitism in response. When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Sanchez is a one-trick pony.

If he continues on this path, I may send another 250,000 Moroccans. I hope that he likes tagine, khobz, and couscous.

If you are wondering what you, who may lack the power over Moroccan emigrants that I possess, can do to send a message to this revolting despot who traffics in hatred and heartless manipulation, let me suggest the following.

Spain maintains a comprehensive network of trade and investment offices in the United States, primarily through ICEX Spain Trade and Investment. The offices are located in Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles. A new trade office just opened in Boston. Each of the states in which these offices are located has anti-boycott legislation. Contact your favorite politician and tell them there is no place for these offices while their government is discriminating against Israel. Or contact the offices yourself (the numbers are listed) and voice your displeasure. Send e-mails. Tell them to remove their hateful presence from the United States.

You get the idea. And . . . team on the ground in Morocco . . . pack your bags and stay alert for the next signal.

Now that I think about it, France and Macron, England and the new guy, and Ireland and Martin, aren’t much better, but I am out of space and you are probably out of patience. Next time, something lighter.

The Wall Street Journal printed a very long, and, in my view, very embarrassing, story about anti-Christian “spitting attacks” in Israel. It seems that a fairly small minority of unruly and undisciplined Israeli teenagers labor under the misimpression that spitting at or toward Christians is some sort of religious duty. The Journal’s reporter, Margherita Stancati, reports that there were “at least a dozen” spitting incidents on a recent afternoon when thousands of Israelis assembled in the Old City of Jerusalem for a national celebration marking the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967.

At least a dozen. Spitting incidents. Disgraceful. Truly disgraceful.

The Israeli government is embarrassed by these incidents, as am I. This is not proper behavior for anyone, especially not anyone who, by engaging in such reprehensible actions, brings dishonor upon the Jewish people and nation. The article reports that the Israeli government has appointed a new Arab Christian ambassador to improve relations with Christian communities, but that critics say that it isn’t doing enough.

The Journal notes that the anti-Christian behavior is a relatively recent phenomenon. But it appears to be growing, according to Yisca Harani, an Israeli scholar who monitors anti-Christian behavior. Her organization registered 107 incidents in the first half of 2026, more than double the 52 incidents two years earlier. The most common abuse appears to involve spitting on the ground.

The reporter suggests that the spitting problem involves only a small number of extremists, but may represent a broader problem because younger Israelis, lacking knowledge about Christianity, have become increasingly intolerant. They know about events of violence by European Christians toward Jews, they oppose Christian proselytizing, and they are resentful of Christian criticism of Israel. The reporter also reports a single instance in Lebanon where a soldier damaged a statue of Jesus (The story fails to note the facts that the soldier was incarcerated for 30 days in a military prison, an additional six soldiers who were present but did not interfere were disciplined, the IDF, Chief of Staff, and Prime Minister publicly condemned the act, and the IDF delivered a new replacement statue to the village–just a minor oversight, I’m sure–or maybe there wasn’t sufficient space.)

The story goes on to discuss Mike Huckabee’s successful efforts to overcome resistance in the Ministry of Interior to granting visas to visiting Evangelical groups that support Israel, as well as an encouraging anecdote about a woman who reported a spitting incident involving nuns to the head of the yeshiva whose students had committed the offense. On the next visit, the nuns were greeted with a warm “Shabbat Shalom!” by the students.

What follows is not an attempt to minimize the nature or impact of the repulsive behavior described above. We need to do better. The fact that we do way better than others does not mitigate the shame of such actions or diminish the need to improve our moral education. I offer no excuse.

But . . .

Last year, 3,490 Christians were killed in Nigeria in a nearly continuous program of village raids, abductions, and displacement. Christian communities in Sudan experienced armed attacks in which churches were burned to the ground. Mali, one of three African countries with maximum violence on the World Watch List, experienced numerous jihadist attacks and rural massacres. Leaving Africa for the moment, North Korea, which imprisons, tortures, and executes Christians, has ranked at the top of the list of persecuting countries for more than 20 years. In Pakistan, 84% of Christian women report sexual harassment and pressure to convert; more than 1,000 girls per year are forced into conversion and marriage. That is in addition to the periodic mob violence, harsh enforcement of blasphemy laws, and sexual violence.

I could go on about India, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, and China (10,000 churches attacked or closed in one year), but I think you get the point. About 375,000,000 Christians face high levels of persecution or discrimination worldwide. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 93% of Christians killed for their faith in the latest reporting period. In Nigeria alone, where the death toll is highest, over 2,000,000 Christians were displaced from their homes. In Asia, 40% of Christians experience persecution.

Obviously, the horror that goes on in Africa and Asia is not a sufficient, or any kind of, answer to the problem in Israel described in the Journal, but, given the exponential difference in degree of intensity and transgression, one must question the prominence that the Journal provided to this story. Viewed from here, the damage caused by its conspicuous and sensational placement, and its prejudicial headline, is almost incalculable. If there is a story to be emphasized about the persecution of Christians, and there most certainly is, this is not it.

I really do understand that journalists like being posted to Israel, where they are free to roam about and find news stories. Given the choice among Nigeria, Mali, Pakistan, and the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, who wouldn’t opt to live among the Jews, notwithstanding their occasional spitting rampages?

And I really do understand that an experienced journalist like Ms. Stancati, who has reported from over a dozen countries and is currently stationed in the Middle East, will write about a wide range of topics. But she knows what a real news story is and she must know what an impact a story like this could have. She covered the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, part of a team that was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting; she was cited for excellence in reporting on women’s issues.

One hundred seven spitting incidents in six months? How the mighty have fallen.

Perhaps this article was newsworthy; it is well-written and reasonably balanced, describing the negative activity in the context of government disapproval and attempts to address it, and finishing on a positive note. But the headline, beyond which many will not read, was “Spitting Attacks Show Rise of Anti-Christian Hate in Israel.” That is inflammatory, given the small number of people and incidents involved. And to the extent that the article even suggests that Christians fare better or would prefer to be in any Asian or African country other than Israel, the notion is risible.

I offer no defense for our bad behavior, but some context about the actual status and freedom afforded Christians in Israel would have been nice. Or maybe some editorial discretion.

Uganda unveiled a memorial to Yoni Netanyahu, h”yd, the only Israeli soldier to perish during the miraculous Entebbe rescue in 1976. The ceremony was led by Uganda’s army chief, General “Muhoozi” Kainerugaba, who praised his courage and sacrifice. Uganda has indicated that it plans to build stronger ties to Israel. This would appear to fit under the heading “truth is stranger than fiction,” but it is also interesting that in Swahili, “muhoozi” is slang for an unmentionable part of the human anatomy, usually used in conjunction with the word “mamdani.” And in Yiddish, which I believe is not yet widely spoken in Uganda, “Kaine-rug-aba” means “My Daddy does not wear a toupee.”

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Speaking of the Mayor, his recent behavior has reminded me that I need to apologize to my seventh grade teacher, Mr. Savitsky, because I now realize that I was both irreverent and wrong, a terrible combination. We were studying the story of Bilaam and I insisted that the story had to be allegorical, since it violated the laws of nature for an ass to speak human language so fluently. My sincere apologies. The performance of Bilaam’s ass was nothing compared to Mayor Mamdani’s speeches about the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US and all its terrible sins, his abortive plan to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu, and his $70,000,000 plan to open a few subsidized supermarkets in New York City. What a muhoozi!

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The supermarket plan is especially noteworthy. How do you spell “doomed to failure from the outset”? The private operators of the stores, who will be indemnified by the city’s taxpayers against loss and guaranteed a profit, will sell certain staples at 30% below the competitive retail price, but be free to charge market prices on everything else. So folks with a nutrition deficit can spend their subsidized savings on carbonated soda and Ho-Hos. There will be no restrictions on the clientele, since requirements for ID and residency are treife (haram) in Mamdani-world, so folks from the neighboring bodega that Mamdani plans to put out of business can avail themselves of the subsidy and resell at a profit. Also folks from Jersey City and Newark, just across the river. Also anyone who wants to sell bootleg eggs and milk. I can guarantee you that after the initial wave of unpunished and undeterred shoplifting, the bananas will be behind a glass partition, under lock and key, just like at all the local pharmacies. Or, come to think of it, that would only be the case if the operators weren’t indemnified against loss by the taxpayers. What do they care? The only uncertainty in the entire process will be how Mayor Muhoozi blames the Jews and Israel for the inevitable failure of the MamdaniMarkets.

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Speaking of Israel and its political geniuses. Finally arriving at the realization that Israel is getting its muhoozi whipped in the worldwide battle for hearts and minds, the Knesset authorized the grand sum of 1,000,000 shekels for a new Masa program that will offer a 6-week training program to seventy students, who will be expected to go forth and make Israel’s case to the world on college campuses and other venues.

1,000,000 shekels. 70 students. 6 weeks of training.

Game over. We win. (Even though the amounts involved wouldn’t even be a rounding error in the Qatar and Soros anti-Israel budgets.) Now the Knesset can go back to figuring out how to funnel more money to charedim. Bet it’s more than a million shekels.

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The Scarlet Lady, a Virgin Voyages cruise ship (note to self: is there some substitute word for “cruise” I can use without negative connotations?) bearing 2,000 gay voyagers, was denied permission to dock in both Turkey and Egypt, even though Patti LuPone was on board, or perhaps because Patti LuPone was on board. Egyptian President Sisi explained that the refusal was not discriminatory in any way, saying “We are Muslim. We do not discriminate. We hate all gay people. Free Palestine.” Turkish President Erdogan explained that the Turkish refusal was also not discriminatory in any way, saying, “We took this action in retaliation for the Zionist outrage of turning away the freedom flotilla. Also, being Muslim, we do not discriminate. We hate all gay people. Free Palestine.” The Alliance for LGBTQ Liberation condemned Israel, because . . . that’s what they do.

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Do you think anyone in the Israeli foreign service should point out to their counterparts in the US State Department that Pakistan, Egypt, and Turkey might not be the most unbiased interlocutors? Can we get Daniel Ortega to mediate the dispute between the US and Cuba? Has anyone noticed that all three of the mediators are Islamic? Was North Korea unavailable?

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Adventures in Hebrew: My wife’s conversational Hebrew is fairly fluent. Mine, obtained largely not from conversation, but from the Bible, is one level beneath humiliating. When I was younger, a young Tel Avivi lady I was trying to befriend told me that I spoke Hebrew “b’diuk k’mo yishayahu hanavi”--exactly like the prophet Isaiah. I don’t know how well Isaiah did in his adolescent ebefriending activities, but, as you can imagine, I struck out. (It might not have been just my language skills; the same thing happened repeatedly in the US, where I knew the language just fine.)

My misadventures in Hebrew are legendary. Trying to buy an electric coffee pot (kumkum), I entered the electronics store and requested a tumtum chashmali (electric idiot). I was advised that they were no longer in stock. So I have given up. After five decades of handling transactions that are “properly” the domain of the man of the house, I have made peace with my feminine side and now watch gratefully from the sidelines as Ahuva deals with construction, home repairs, and automotive. As to the last, we needed our annual inspection in order to renew our registration. She handled it like a pro, asking (and paying) for a “mivchan,” or test. But when she picked up the car, she found that they had provided a costly tune-up and oil change, but not the required inspection. After many phone calls and recriminations, some finger-pointing, and a tear or two, the matter was resolved to her satisfaction. It turns out that she used the wrong Hebrew word.

The correct Hebrew word is “test.” טסט.

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Speaking of automobiles, it will take more than an exaggerated fender bender to sideline Wonder-Rise and Super-Dan. Refuah sheleimah to Shoshanna Sarah bat Rachel and whatever Dan’s Hebrew name is. We need to go out to dinner again.

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Translations: A Primer For Trump Neophytes: “The time for talking is over” means “The time for talking has yet again begun.” “We are going to bomb the —-- out of them,” means “No reason to stock the safe room yet.” “The Strait of Hormuz is open” means “The Strait of Hormuz is closed.” “The Iranians are begging for a deal” means “The last person I spoke to was J.D. Vance.” “The only thing standing in the way of world peace is Israel” means “The last person I spoke to was J.D. Vance.” “Iran is about to be destroyed” means “The last person I spoke to was Pete Hegseth.” “Make America Great Again” means “Buy a Trump Meme Coin.”

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Why does he have to keep talking? He does much better when he is silent (if I recall correctly).

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Things I learned from the World Cup:

1. God’s favor is a big advantage, but God expects you to also develop your God-given talents to the fullest and to play better defense.

2. I would still rather watch (even) the WNBA (if Caitlyn Clark is playing). Update: Also Sophie.

3. If you love football [sic] played at a high level to a 0-0 conclusion, you will love Puffball, the new game I designed in which you can use neither your hands nor feet to touch the ping-pong ball, but must crawl on your hands and knees, advancing the ball by blowing on or at it. If you accidentally blow on an opponent, he or she must fall over, flop around, and pretend to be mortally wounded. In the more advanced version of the game, players wear blindfolds, so they are deprived of substantially all the senses that contribute to actual athletic ability. Why stop at half-measures? Puffball is the More Most Beautiful Game.

4. Since all games of Puffball end in scoreless ties, the victor is determined by the alcohol content in 15 randomly selected fans wearing team jerseys or body paint in team colors. In the more premier leagues, the entire game is dispensed with and the fans just drink for 90 minutes, which is the only way a sane person can get through a football [sic] game.

5. And, to extend condolences to Messi, the greatest player of all time, remember that Cristiano Ronaldo once explained defeat as follows: “We lost because we didn’t win.”

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Muhoozi Mamdani on social media: “I have been briefed on today’s horrifying stabbings on the Upper West Side, where an Asian man and a Jewish man were attacked. According to witness and victim statements, the perpetrator yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ during both attacks. No motive has been determined, though the NYPD’s initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor. There was no vehicle involved, so we are unable to suggest that it was one of those homophobic or antisemitic cars that the press customarily blames for attacks. We may be forced to evaluate these stabbings as potential hate crimes. It may be Islamophobia or Israeli false flag operations. Let me make one thing clear. Hateful and despicable attacks on Asians have no place in our city. Accordingly, my wife and I are moving to Dearborn, as soon as Mommy can arrange to have my weekly allowance deposited in a local bank.”

Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Its other members won a bunch of primaries and will be competing in the upcoming elections, many in districts in which their election is assured, so there will be a fair number of them in the next Congress. Here are some of the DSA’s policies: BDS, no military assistance to Israel, defund the police, disarm law enforcement officers, close all local jails, eliminate pre-trial detention, release all incarcerated individuals, socialize the energy, healthcare, housing, and finance industries, eliminate the US Senate and the Supreme Court, allow non-citizens to vote, abolish ICE, open borders.

I am trying to think of some way to make this funny, but . . . no luck.

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Finally, in case you were wondering, there is no word “Muhoozi,” but there should be. Like “sorrowscent,” the feeling you get when you are separated from a loved one. Or “chronoreset,” when one part of your life abruptly ends and you need to start over. Or “assurothump,” when you suddenly panic that your wallet is missing and pat your pockets to reassure yourself. Or “preluctance,” when your mind tells you to resist engaging in an activity you know you will enjoy. Or “chronoflux,” when it’s about to be Monday, but you feel that it was just Monday yesterday.

Feel free to use any of these, but let’s try to use muhoozi three or four times a day, especially if someone cuts you off when you are driving.

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Note: To the fortunate reader who happened to take the “over” in the Kalshi or Polymarket prediction markets on how many times the word “Muhoozi” would be used today on Substack, please Venmo my share. Thank you.

In case you hadn’t noticed the most important news of the day, because you were focused on the existential threat posed to the Western world by the maniacs and terrorists in Teheran, university athletic departments have finally abandoned all pretense of amateurism and fully immersed themselves in the glories of unfettered commerce and capitalism. They are finally acting like the professional, cash-hungry monoliths that they are.

First, players started getting paid by third parties for use of their names, images, and likenesses (NIL). Then, as a result of antitrust litigation, college athletic departments were authorized to share revenue with what are facetiously referred to in a giggle as “student-athletes.” College athletes change teams almost at will, following the money.

Now the last hurdle has been overcome. Colleges will display corporate logos on team uniforms.

This is not a joke (or, more accurately, it is a joke, but it is also actually happening): JPMorgan Chase has become the bank and jersey sponsor of the athletic department at The Ohio State University. For the bargain price of $17,000,000 a year, the bank will have its logo proudly displayed on team uniforms. No word on whether the bank will now be called JPMorgan Chase Buckeyes. Of course, not to be outdone, Notre Dame has announced that SoFi will be paying $18,000,000 for similar privileges with the Fighting Irish, now to be called the Fighting SoFIrish.

Fellow Jews and Zionists! Having lost the hasbara war to a well-financed and executed jihadi misinformation campaign, we need to take advantage of this opportunity while it is in its infancy. Rumors are already spreading that J Street has locked up Oberlin (the “Oberlin J Street Pro-Israel Anti-Zionists”), the Moslem Brotherhood is sponsoring Columbia (the “Columbia Lions Global Intifadists”), and a consortium comprised of the Goyim Defense League, KKK, and Tucker Carlson has the inside track at Harvard (the “Crimson Jew-Haters,” not to be confused with the Alabama Crimson Tide, sponsored by the detergent of the same name).

We can not afford to be left behind in this battle for the malleable and susceptible hearts and minds of ignorant college students and beer-guzzling sports fans.

Accordingly, I am starting a program to acquire athletic department sponsorships on behalf of organizations congenial to Judaism and Zionism, or, alternatively, sponsorships of Jewish teams by iconic brands. There is no more direct initiative to curry favor with the low-intellect, social-media intoxicated, sports fans of American college campuses. Contributions gratefully accepted.

Initially, we will go after the low-hanging fruit. Yeshiva University teams are already known as the Maccabees, or Macs. It will require only a minor change in design to attract McDonald’s as a corporate sponsor. The team will be called the Big Macs–in order to avoid the charge of false advertising, the extra revenue should enable them to recruit taller players. Happy Meals at participating restaurants will include small keychains with a map of Greater Israel and tefilas haderech attached. The menu will be revised to include schnitzelonim. Chassidische shechita available. (Passover Kashrus is not certified because of kitniyot.) Jewish Theological Seminary teams could be sponsored by Burger King; you can have both your hamburger and your Judaism your way, or any way you want.

The Providence College teams are called the Friars. If AIPAC or the Anti-Defamation League became their sponsors, how hard would it be to rename the team “Freiers”? Imagine: Manischewitz brings you the Nebraska Cornhuskers and the Matzo Ball Cheerleaders. The University of Charleston Chulents, sponsored by Aguda Women (whose pictures will not appear in advertising). The possibilities are endless.

Ohio University (OU) presents another easy and non-disruptive marketing opportunity. All they need to do is put the U inside the O and refrain from serving bacon at team breakfasts.

OU is proudly sponsored by the OU.

Before NYU ran headlong into the arms of the global intifada, it was affectionately known as NY Jew. Would it be hard to imagine the B’nai Brith logo on those violet uniforms? Hadassah for the women’s teams? Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion for those teams that welcome transsexual athletes (or Rabbis)?

Oregon is now known as the Ducks. If it were to be sponsored by Empire, it could expand to a full line of poultry and poultry products: Turkeys, Chicken, Giblets, Wings. If you think this is far-fetched (which I used to think was a Yiddish word, like spatula), consider that Tyson Foods, the world’s largest chicken assassin, is sponsoring the University of Arkansas football team. (In case you were wondering, 6,000,000 chickens a day and more than 2,100,000,000 a year. Talking about Tyson Foods, not the University of Arkansas.)

I think that any of the Seven Sisters would be proud to bear the Amit Women logo, and those athletes who agreed to make Aliyah could join the Mother in Israel program. Or they could just donate money from their NIL or athletic scholarships in lieu of actual child-bearing if they weren’t ready to start a family. The Amit Barnard Volleyball Mothers In Israel has a certain ring, no? After the games, tea and sugar kuchel could be served. The swimming team at Sarah Lawrence could be called “The Tznius Machatenesters,” and could be garbed in schvimkleid. Zibben schvimkleid schvesterin; what a swim meet that would be! Female spectators only. Separate hours at the pool. What a potential sanctification of the Lord’s name.

The Jesuit universities offer a special challenge, but also a special opportunity. If the Holy Cross Crusaders were sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the team jerseys could read “The Crusaders–Never Again.” The St. John’s team used to be called the Redmen, but the name was changed to the Red Storm in 1994 to adopt a more culturally sensitive and inclusive identity. If they were sponsored by Israel Bonds, would not a team called the St. John’s Blue and White Storm send a message of interfaith harmony and true cultural sensitivity? J-Date could sponsor Fordham or one or all of the Loyola teams, with the motto, “It’s OK to watch a Jesuit play basketball, but if you wish to preserve three thousand years of Jewish history and make your parents happy, visit us and see about finding an appropriate bashert.” Admittedly, it will be hard to get that on a uniform; I said it was a special challenge.

Mizrachi Tefachot, Bank Leumi, Israel Discount Bank, and Bank HaPoalim would be terrific sponsors for the University of Texas Longhorns or the Florida Gators. Imagine the appeal to rural Southern high school athletic recruits: “We are sponsored by Jewish banks.” The “student-athletes” will draw their own benighted conclusions, to the benefit of the teams.

Of course, the other alternative is erasing the malign influence of Qatari money and DEI from the campus, addressing the students in a way that demonstrates and requires respect for academic discipline and intellectual honesty, and educating them through revised but traditional curricula that actually strive for excellence and a morally defensible ethos. But that would be an awful lot of work.

Go Big Macs!

To compensate for the legal memo I wrote last time about Mayor Mamdani’s performative drivel with respect to arresting Prime Minister Netanyahu, I pledged to share what I consider a wonderful d’var torah based on an insight derived from the Vilna Gaon’s exegetical analysis of the Book of Joshua.

Two preliminary notes:

1. The Vilna Gaon (1720-1797) was a contemporary of George Washington (1732-1799). History does not record any meeting of the two or interaction by the Gaon with a cherry tree, but he is reputed to have known the entire Torah by heart at age 3, and to have delivered his first public address on the Talmud at age 7. By contrast, when I was 7, I was sent home with a note advising my parents that if I did not learn to tie my shoes, I would no longer be permitted to play outside during recess, because the teacher was tired of having to tend to my bruises when I tripped over my untied laces. The Gaon, a polymath and genius, revolutionized the study of Torah and his influence still extends throughout the Jewish world. While I have mastered the formerly elusive skill, I tend to buy footwear that requires no laces.

This is just to underscore what should be the obvious fact that, on my own, I could never have come up with the interpretation I am about to present.

2. Both “Emet,” meaning truth, and “Chessed,” meaning loving-kindness, are attributes of God, sometimes combined (“rav chessed v’emet”), as well as the highest form of human constancy and kindness, the kindness that is faithfully performed, not merely promised (see, e.g. Genesis 47:29, in which Jacob asks Joseph for chessed v’emet, because burial is a kindness that is performed without expectation of reward). One might expect that “emet,” meaning truth, fidelity, faithfulness, and reliability would be opposed to “chessed” meaning kindness, charity, mercy, and love, but they are often yoked together in the Jewish Bible.

Now you are prepared to confront the mysterious and oft-cited final verse from the Prophet Micah, the less famous contemporary of Isaiah and Hoshea, which is recited in the liturgy a number of times (Micah is the source of some of the canon’s most memorable phrases):

תתן אמת ליעקב, חסד לאברהם, אשר נשבעת לאבותינו מימי קדם

Grant truth (emet) to Jacob, kindness (chessed) to Abraham, as you swore to our forefathers in days of old.

It’s very nice, and we recite it so often that we rarely think about it, but . . . it makes no sense. Why does Jacob, the grandson, precede Abraham? Where’s Isaac? I understand why we might request truth for Jacob, since he encountered (and possibly practiced) deceit throughout his life (Esau, Isaac, Lavan, his own children), but why would Abraham, whose very essence was chessed, need it bestowed upon him? And where, in the panoply of promises God made to our forefathers, is the oath containing emet and chessed? No part of the verse seems appropriate.

Come and hear what the Gaon has to say, and you will never again read this verse the same way.

The Gaon is commenting on the episode concerning the two spies sent by Joshua and Rachav, the prostitute (my fourth grade teacher, to her everlasting shame, told me that “zona” derived from the same word as “mazon” and that Rachav was the proprietress of a restaurant in Jericho; I forgive her). After Rachav saves the lives of the spies by hiding them and sending her fellow townsfolk on a wild goose chase, she explains that she knows that Jericho will fall to the Israelites and requests that, in recompense for her actions, her life and the life of her family be spared. Her request is phrased in the very terms we are examining, and, indeed, the spies promise her: ועשינו עמך חסד ואמת. When God gives us the land, we will treat you with kindness (chessed) and truth (emet).

The Gaon explains that the spies were setting forth both the basis and the nature of the payment. She, under no compulsion or commitment, in an act of kindness that she did not owe, had bestowed the gift of life upon them. Therefore, they owed her, out of duty and obligation, not kindness, her life in return. As to her family, the spies owed them nothing; saving them would be an act of kindness (chessed), not obligation (“emet”). The spies tell Rachav that they will repay her kindness (chessed) out of duty (emet), as they must, and will supplement their actions with kindness (chessed) of their own.

So, says the Gaon, “chessed” is given in the absence of any obligation; it is a gift bestowed out of kindness, charity, and love, not a debt that must be paid or an oath that must be fulfilled. “Emet,” on the other hand, is simply justice; one is required to fulfill an oath, repay a debt, keep a promise.

And now the phrase in Micah becomes crystal clear.

תתן אמת ליעקב, חסד לאברהם, אשר נשבעת לאבותינו מימי קדם

Give “emet” to Jacob; repay Your debt to him and fulfill Your vow. What is the nature of that vow? The chessed that You gave Abraham. In a totally unsolicited and freely given act of chessed, You promised the Land of Israel (or, as it was then known, Canaan) to Abraham’s descendants. You were under no compulsion to do so. But once You made the promise, gave the gift, performed the chessed, it was no longer in the realm of chessed; it was transformed into a debt, payable as an obligation to his descendants–emet l’Yaakov. Why not Isaac? Because not all of Isaac’s children were the beneficiaries of the promise; all of Jacob’s were.

So, using the Gaon’s lexicon, we can paraphrase the famous verse: In fulfillment of Your obligation, faithfully provide to Jacob, as emet, the benefit of that pledge that you freely bestowed upon Abraham, as chessed.

And if you have any lingering doubt as to the correctness of that interpretation, the final phrase of the verse settles it, “as you swore to our forefathers in days of old.” The gift of the land of Israel was indeed the covenantal subject of God’s pledge.

So the next time you hurry through the “Uva L’tzion” prayer and read

“תתן אמת ליעקב, חסד לאברהם, אשר נשבעת לאבותינו מימי קדם”

consider the Vilna Gaon’s explanation of what it is that you are requesting from God–nothing less than the Land of Israel.

A Rabbi whom I respect advised me that it both lowered the quality of my discourse and was beneath me to refer to Mayor Zohran Mamdani as Moron Zamdani. So I won’t.

The Mayor has expressed his intention to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu upon his arrival in New York to attend an event at the United Nations. Queried about this, he suggested that he was consulting with the city’s law department to determine whether this was within his legal powers.

I am sure that the city’s lawyers have other things on their plates, so here is some legal advice for His Honor: if you attempt to arrest the Prime Minister, you will be violating a number of federal laws, will be subject to civil suits, and could go to federal prison. So why don’t you just go back to driving all the wealthy taxpayers, law-abiding landlords, and non-subsidized supermarkets out of the city?

To begin with a primer for you, on easy to understand terms: U.S. cities and states have no (as in zero, zilch, nil) authority to enforce ICC warrants, and foreign policy—including arresting foreign leaders—is exclusively within the purview of the federal government. Compounding the folly of your criminal intention, the U.S. is not an ICC member state. If that were not sufficient to dissuade you, Congress has promulgated a law explicitly prohibiting cooperation with the ICC.

Given the fact that the U.S., which has sole and exclusive authority in the country to execute foreign policy and arrest foreign heads of government, and does not recognize ICC jurisdiction, forcibly detaining a foreign leader would be . . . wait for it . . . against the law that you swore to uphold.

In the absence of lawful authority (which is indeed absent because the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute), using the “instrumentalities of interstate commerce” to seize or confine another person is kidnapping under 18 USC §1201. That would apply even if the abducted person were not a foreign head of state. But, since we indeed are dealing with a foreign head of state, 18 USC §112 provides special federal protection. An attempt to “assault, strike, wound, imprison, or offer violence” to a protected foreign official is a federal felony. You might want to ask your lawyers for some of the words in that statute that you find challenging.

Just to add a lesser included count, which could well result in a longer sentence, 18 USC §878 prohibits threats, coercion, or attempts to impede foreign officials performing their duties while in the U.S. You may have already violated that one. I suggest that you consult with an attorney. If you use New York’s Finest or some other municipal authority to arrest someone without a valid legal basis, you would be violating civil rights under color of law. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?

Had you paid attention in high school, you might have learned that it is a usurpation of federal foreign powers to conduct foreign relations or enforce orders of an international tribunal. Those are exclusive federal powers. I know that’s three syllables, so let me help; “exclusive” means that the power is limited to the entity that has it. Attempting to arrest a foreign head of government is a direct intrusion into federal authority. Duh.

Since you purport to be observing “international law,” you might be interested in the fact that under both the Diplomatic Relations Act and accepted international law, foreign heads of government have immunity from arrest; violations of immunity could subject you to civil liability, as well as federal criminal charges.

Now, with respect to those corrupt and debased institutions, the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) and the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), 22 USC §7421 et seq. prohibits cooperation with the ICC and bars agencies and officials of the US from assisting ICC investigations and arrests. That law makes it explicit that ICC warrants have no legal force in the US, so attempting to enforce an ICC warrant would be a violation of law. As to the ICJ, in the absence of implementing legislation (and there is none), its judgments are not self‑executing in U.S. law. No federal statute authorizes any U.S. official—federal, state, or local—to enforce an ICJ order; thus, attempting to do so would be an unlawful assertion of authority.

Just in case this hasn’t penetrated the communist fog that may have taken over your cognitive abilities, given the absence of legal justification, (a) any physical force used to detain Netanyahu would constitute assault, (b) if you directed the police or others to assist, all participants could face conspiracy charges, and (c) you would have federal civil rights liability for false arrest or false imprisonment (citations available on request).

On reflection, I am quite certain that you know all of this, and if you don’t, it is highly likely that one of your lawyers told you within a few moments after you first raised the frivolous and imbecilic idea. Thus, your persistence in advancing the notion as though it were realistic or attainable reveals the extent to which your entire persona and agenda is performative rather than substantive. One looks at Jessica Tisch and sees what a smart, dedicated public servant can accomplish. And then one looks at you.

It’s probably too late, but why don’t you try to do your job in a way that might help your constituents and stop play-acting?

All of my grandchildren tolerate me. They adore my wife. I am their Grandpa and occasionally bestir myself to share my store of accumulated wisdom and abundant humor for their improvement and edification. She is their Bubby, who, out of unconditional, unadulterated love, engages with them, discusses their lives and interests, treats each one as an individual with individual charms and quirks, and thinks about ways to make them happy.

Ahuva is the best thing that ever happened to me.

My wife belongs to a group of grandmothers (Savta Mi’Modiin) who bake chocolate chip cookies for soldiers every Sunday. On Mondays, she goes with friends to Hatzalah in Bet Shemesh to pack emergency supply kits for first responders. On Tuesdays she attends classes at Midreshet Orot Techiya. (Attention, prospective home invaders: I am diligently on guard doing nothing while she is away. “They also serve who only stand and wait,” said Milton–or, as we call him, Moishy.)

The rest of the time, she recites tehillim for peace in Israel and the welfare of individual injured soldiers, whose names (including their mothers’ names) she knows by heart. (Special shout out for a refuah sheleimah to Avraham Yitzchak ben Masha; I am confident that the One in Charge subscribes to this substack.) She listens to OU’s shnayim mikra and nach yomi, as well as various educational programs on YouTube.

And she cares for and puts up with me.

If only she could get past the pigeons.

My lovely, beautiful, caring, charitable, and kind wife hates pigeons the way the Chofetz Chaim hated lashon hara, except a bit more because lashon hara didn’t crap all over the Chofetz Chaim’s balcony.

She doesn’t hate all animals. We once had an aquarium full of tropical fish until the big black one ate all the others, and then dropped dead of indigestion. We briefly had a bird, Rita Parakeeta, that died of old age while quite young, probably because of our lousy animal husbandry skills, leaving us with a great deal of bird food that we could not leave outside because . . . pigeons. I disposed of it surreptitiously, telling Ahuva that I had sold it to a passing Gentile in anticipation of Pesach.

She admires and takes pictures of the wild birds she sees on her daily morning nature walks, especially her beloved duchifat–the hoopoe.

But she is phobic and irrational when it comes to pigeons.

I try to explain to her that pigeons have a glorious history. They were prized pets, kept in carefully maintained dovecotes, providing entertainment through homing and racing contests, used as messengers between lovers, spies, and generals, eligible for sacrifice in the holy temple, and, before they became urban vermin, a good source of protein. It is said that Al Gore got his idea for the internet by watching a pigeon fly through the sky.

“If a pigeon can carry information through the ether,” he thought, “why not a massive, global system of interconnected computer networks?” While he was looking up and thinking that thought, he got a bad sunburn on his nose, which eventually led to his groundbreaking inconvenient ideas on global warming and climate change.

So the pigeon has made quite a contribution, I explained, hoping to redirect her passionate antipathy toward something constructive, like making a lukshen kugel–she used to make an amazing (salt and pepper) lukshen kugel before she was consumed by dedication to the South Beach Diet and animus toward pigeons.

She was unmoved. She detests the arrogant way they look, the ponderous way they walk, the incessant, unpleasant sounds they make, and the filth they indiscriminately leave behind them. Because I share some of the same characteristics and tendencies, I finally concluded, “Better them than me.”

So I authorized (as if she required my authorization!) retaliatory action. And this mild-mannered, loving former teacher and devoted, caring present grandmother and great-grandmother, k”ah, has gone to war.

Spoiler alert: she lost, like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Napoleon at Waterloo, the Japanese at Midway, and the French at Dien Bien Phu. In other words, decisively.

On the spiritual level, she prayed with great fervor for the accelerated rebuilding of the Holy Temple, so the pigeons could again be offered as sacrifices after childbirth— and she prayed for very, very large families.

After a bit of research, she invested in an effigy of a fierce looking owl, which she had me position, at great risk to my personal safety, on top of our pergola in a place she deemed most threatening to winged intruders. When the owl finally succumbed to my shoddy engineering skills and the strong March winds of the Israeli coastal plain, departing for destinations unknown, it was covered in pigeon excrement and, somehow, despite the laws of physics and nature, had acquired a terrified, defeated expression in place of its former ferocity.

For about seven shekels, we acquired from Temu scores of otherwise useless shiny blank metallic CDs whose reflections of the sun were supposed to be highly effective in terrorizing pigeons, and suspended them like so many sukkah decorations. No luck. To avoid the glare, we were required to don sunglasses during daylight hours until the CDs joined the owl in said unknown destinations; the pigeons remained.

She tried recordings of loud noises. The neighbors objected and the pigeons danced, which seemed to stimulate their bowels.

She considered a huge mesh screen, but it would have impeded our extraordinary panoramic views of the hills surrounding Jerusalem. We declined to be incarcerated by pigeons.

After consulting a pigeon removal expert, she then settled upon the stratagem of spikes placed on the parapet, which might have been quite effective, except that, heeding the advice of said expert, they were only installed on about half the length of the wall. To her dismay, the dastardly pigeons avoided the spikes and crapped twice as much on the unspiked, unprotected, and very vulnerable wall segment.

Instead of blaming his poor planning, Ahuva’s loathing for the feathered fiends became magnified. She felt that the pigeons, somehow, were mocking her. She didn’t quite cast lots to determine the best date upon which to wipe them out, but if she knew how to cast lots, or how to wipe them out, she would have.

She would interrupt her constant recital of Psalms and her perpetual internet Torah study (taught by brilliant, high-pitched instructors) to berate pigeons who arrived to strut on outer window sills or the balcony. “Oh no, you don’t,” she would say, flapping her hands and charging the window, like some huge, crazed pigeon. “Get out of here NOW!!! You don’t belong here.” Often she would do this in Hebrew, on the theory that they were, after all, Israeli pigeons.

Lukshen kugel appears ever less likely. The pigeons patrol our parapet like sentinels (על חומותיך . . . הפקדתי שומרים), heads moving back and forth in their rhythmic, ungainly promenade, cooing their ugly guttural chant, flaunting their victory as though our walls were the Strait of Hormuz and they are the Iranian Revolutionary Pigeon Guard. Ahuva mutters.

“Bleach,” she said one day, after consulting ChatGPT, “I’ll pour bleach all over the walls and balcony. It will obliterate the smells of food and previous pigeon inhabitants that attract them. That will drive them away.” For a while, we had the cleanest, whitest, outdoor surfaces in Modi’in, and we couldn’t go outside without K-95 masks.

Then we had bleached exteriors covered with pigeon excrement.

I love my wife. Everyone loves my wife. But we need help. Not advice; advice is useless. We need help.

I may never again get lukshen kugel—because of pigeons. Does anyone know where we can buy one of those Iron Dome things?

Postscript. We have ordered eight roles of reflective tape from Temu, guaranteed to terrify and repel unwanted flying visitors (“UFVs”). Stay tuned.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched a large, coordinated assault, breaching the Gaza restraining barrier, firing thousands of rockets, and infiltrating Israeli communities by land, sea, and air. Most targets of the violence were not military; civilian residents of kibbutzim on the border and unfortunate participants in the Nova music festival were indiscriminately victimized. About 1,200 unarmed men, women, and children were slaughtered; 240 hostages were abducted. Multiple investigations have documented the mass killings, summary executions, sexual assaults, and brutal torture committed during the attack, with many of the atrocities filmed and broadcast by the perpetrators.

1. It never happened.

2. It was a false flag operation, perpetrated by the Israelis.

3. It was entirely justified because of the (former) Israeli occupation of Gaza.

4. All of the above.

Has there ever been a movement that so vehemently spurned and disdained the truth? More to the point, how does one win, or even maintain, an argument with dishonest opponents who reject both truth and fidelity to historical facts? It is not that they, for the most part, are unaware of or dispute what actually happened (though, of course, they do that when convenient); they simply see truth as irrelevant, an inconsequential obstacle to the adoption of their preferred narrative, to be brushed aside, ridiculed, or simply dismissed.

We who know that a contrary objective truth exists experience the constant frustration of fighting an amorphous, indestructible blob of fraudulence, a hydra that sprouts mendacity whenever convenient and shows no shame or compunction about lying. There are no rules by which we can win when every argument we make, no matter how scrupulously documented or meticulously correct, is dismissed or opposed by pretense, disinformation, and misinformation.

Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “The British Museum’s Shameful Surrender to the Mob,” described and deplored the pusillanimous decision of the British Museum to “postpone” a public lecture on the Iron Age kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The lecture was to have been the “highlight of Britain’s first ever Jewish Culture Month.” Instead, it became another in a long list of lowlights, some of which Dr. Green describes, in which cultural institutions surrender to the heckler’s veto. It seems that a large number of the prospective attendees intended to disrupt the proceedings, so it was canceled. Dr. Green labeled it a defeat of liberal values that undergird British society and the pluralist heritage of humanity.

It certainly was that.

But, for now, I am less interested in the fact that it happened than in the reason for the planned incitement and violence.

Dr. Green suggests that it is part of a “campaign to delegitimize the modern State of Israel by denying or suppressing the historical truths that the Jewish people are indigenous to the Levant, and that modern Israel stands on the same ground as their sovereign states did in the ancient past.”

Denying or suppressing historical truth. Who does that? Why? Consider an entire movement whose strategy for success is based on the ability to tell and sell lies, the denial of truth, the distortion of history, the promulgation of a wholly fabricated narrative. What sort of society consciously, passionately, and vehemently builds itself on a foundation of deception and prevarication?

Make no mistake. They willfully deny or suppress the truth for no other reason than that it is inconvenient for their politics and ideology. The Palestinian narrative within the anti-Zionist movement depends upon a web of deceit for its very existence. Truth, not Israel, is its most dangerous enemy and an almost unfathomable wealth of resources are expended to maintain false pretenses and suppress accuracy.

Historically and analytically, a number of ideological movements could fairly be characterized as “enemies to truth.” There is an academic perspective that presents “truth” merely as a social and contextual construct, usually as a pretext for social power; proponents challenge the concept of objective reality, leaving no persuasive objective method to challenge an ideology. Too charitable and intellectual a way to describe our lecture disrupters, most of whom could not articulate a rational point of view, or a coherent sentence.

Another example is embodied in the new conspiracism, which simply denies the truth of established facts, aiming to sow distrust in all information sources. Fake news. Artificial intelligence. Too ambitious for our imbeciles, who themselves manipulate the information sources through social media.

A third just challenges all established knowledge and systems on the basis that, irrespective of their truth, they are utilized as a tool of the elite to enslave the masses. That allows the multiplicity of self-styled victims to align themselves against progress, reality, history, and truth. Thus, The New York Times, in thrall to progressive doctrine, can promote a fabricated narrative about the founding of America in 1619, disregarding all historical evidence to the contrary. Thus, Mahmoud Abbas can deny that there was ever a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

But the ideological deniers of truth closest to our Brown Shirts were . . . the original Brown Shirts and their antecedents and followers. Fascism not only disregards truth; it sees no value in truth. Extreme ideologies on both the right and the left achieve consensus and power by creating alternative realities through propaganda, distorting historical facts, and shouting down anyone who opposes them, especially if the opposition is based on the “truth” that they scorn, not because it is untrue, but because it is irrelevant and does not advance their objective.

The buffoons who riot in the streets and shut down the lectures remind me of the dull and detached 5th grader, who, being queried by his teacher about the difference between ignorance and apathy, stared blankly and sullenly into space and responded, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

That, even more than “from the river to the sea,” sums it up. They don’t know. They don’t care. And they have erected a carapace of malicious ignorance and noxious apathy that insulates them from enlightenment. They have replaced testable, evidentiary knowledge with “alternative facts,” ideological myths, or manufactured narratives.

The enemies of truth have historically been totalitarian, fascist, or religious extremists, willing to subordinate truth to their pursuit of power. In the cases of religious fanaticism, racial supremacy, and political radicalism, doctrine prevails over science, economics, and history. A factual counterargument simply does not engage with dogmatic certainty. Ideological hatred of the other–Jews, Blacks, Muslims, immigrants–outweighs rational discourse. Any ideology can become an enemy of truth when it becomes rigid, totalizing, or immune to evidence.

The current progressive pro-Palestine movement exhibits all these patterns: moral absolutism, with no room for dialogue or an opposing view; binary oppressor/oppressed categories, with no nuance or analysis; dismissal of opposing opinions and facts as not only incorrect but immoral; recreation of history to fit the ideology; and elevation of identity over other values and criteria. It suppresses nuance, complexity, and dissent in order to advance a single principle. As it becomes ever more rigid, it becomes ever more hostile to the truth.

Free Palestine. From what? To what purpose? Upon what model will free Palestine be based? Nazi Germany? Iran?

I doubt that any movement has ever been as antagonistic and antipathetic to the truth than the current Palestinian and progressive crusade against Israel.

I almost hesitate to repeat the now familiar catalog of falsehoods: The Jewish history in Israel is less than a few centuries old. No Jewish Temple existed in Jerusalem. Even children whose great-grandparents were born outside Israel are Palestinian refugees. There were no Jews expelled from Arab countries. Hamas committed no rape, torture, or atrocities on October 7. Gaza could not have chosen peace after the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. The Israelis used starvation as a military tactic. The Israelis targeted civilians, especially children. There is, or was, an Arab State called Palestine. And, of course, genocide, apartheid, rape, organ theft, etc.

Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies.

And rehearsing the well-known responses seems an exercise in futility: Indisputable historical records and archaeology establish an indigenous 3000 year old Jewish presence, including sovereign nations and Temples known throughout antiquity. The Palestinian “refugee” problem has been created and maintained as a weapon against Israel; no displaced persons from other regions, including the even greater number of Jews fleeing Arab lands, have ever been treated in this manner. The atrocities of October 7 are well-documented and indisputable. Israel voluntarily withdrew from Gaza in 2005; the Arabs chose war instead of peace and prosperity. There is no famine in Gaza; shortages of food, to the extent that they exist, have been created by Hamas for purposes of profit and propaganda. Hamas used civilians and civilian infrastructure as shields; Israel sought, in an unprecedented manner, to avoid civilian casualties. No Arab state called Palestine has ever existed; when the Arabs had an opportunity to create one, prior to 1967, or accept agreements that would have established one thereafter, they declined to do so. There is no apartheid in Israel. And Israel is the only party in this dispute that neither desires nor has tried to commit genocide.

But . . . what’s the point?

I am not confident that there is an effective tool to rebut liars who not only control the media and the means of distribution, but also preach to a malleable, pliable, mindless audience of automatons programmed to pledge fealty to a synthetic web of malicious lies. Blaming incompetent hasbara and the ineffectual Jewish institutional response is easy (and justified, in part), but it is hard to imagine how Israel and the Jewish community could have adequately prepared themselves for and warded off this massive, well-organized, extravagantly financed assault on truth.

What can you do but sputter in futility when adversaries with billions to spend and hundreds of millions of followers on social media falsely accuse you of pederasty, genocide, apartheid, corruption, and myriad other evil and foul behaviors, dismiss your documented denials as spurious, or, worse, confirmation of the allegations, and call for your extermination?

We better figure out an answer soon.

Rohypnol (“Ro”) Khanna, the pseudo-socialist with an estimated net worth in excess of $230 million, mostly sourced from his wife’s inherited wealth, is the representative of California’s 17th district, a senior member of the Democrat caucus, and the owner of one of the most fabulous mansions (8,000 sq. ft., 7 bedrooms) in Washington, D.C. He is reputed to be looking for a bigger place, sufficient to house his ego.

He traveled to Israel to get some headlines. He came to the right place. His motorcade tried to make its way to an Arab village that had been the site of an altercation between Jewish residents and local townsfolk, and, undoubtedly by accident, entered a closed military zone. The motorcade was stopped by local Jewish residents. The IDF and police were called. The participants were advised of the risks and permitted to proceed. The whole thing took less than 60 minutes. But the press release that they had been “detained” by “armed settlers” instantly made its way around the world. The Congressman then had his picture taken with some local Arabs and, mission accomplished, headed back to his five-star hotel. Rich people and successful corporations are abandoning his district in droves. The homelessness issue in California persists. The Arab village in question is located in Area C, supposedly under Israeli control, and every bit of construction in it was built after 2007 and was built unlawfully, a blatant effort to criminally create facts on the ground.

The tour organizer is now marketing its services to other prospective Democrat presidential candidates, with a money-back guarantee if at least one confrontation with “armed settlers” is not prompted by the itinerary. Following Rahm Israel (I am not kidding, though his parents could more accurately have named him Quisling) Emanuel and Rohypnol Khanna, every aspiring Democratic presidential candidate is going to have to make his or her or their or whatever way here to demonstrate progressive anti-semitic credentials.

If you just add a “Y” and rearrange the letters, the word “Democrat” forms the anagram “Rat Comedy.” Probably a coincidence.

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I suppose that this is nothing more than beating a dead horse, but sometimes the hypocrisy is so blatant, the ignorance so profound, the venality so obvious, the fraudulence so palpable that the poor, decaying, stinking, dead horse just needs to be flayed a bit more. I speak, of course, of the Mayor of New York City, the paradigmatic deceased equine, Moron Zamdani. His Dishonor has explicitly stated that he cannot endorse Israel as a Jewish state because he opposes any nation privileging one religion over another. Therefore, he boycotted the Israel Day Parade.

He did, however, attend an event honoring Pakistan and its community. Psst! Moron: Pakistan was formed on August 14, 1947 through the partition of British India. It was established as a sovereign, independent nation to serve as a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, with the goal of protecting their religious, cultural, and political rights, and allowing them to live in accordance with their own faith, free from the political dominance of a Hindu-majority population. (The partition resulted in the expulsion of close to 15 million refugees, not a single one of whose descendants is classified as a refugee by the United Nations, restricted to refugee camps, or in receipt of massive aid from the UN or the EU; imagine that!)

When this was explained to His Dishonor, he said . . . absolutely nothing. Remarkable that a dead horse continues to generate such horse____.

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You have to give him credit for finding the right spouse. Mrs. Moron skipped July 4 celebrations to leave the country and co-host a luxury (5 days, $5,000, travel not included) women’s spiritual wellness retreat in Corsica. The retreat’s focus was the Virgin Mary, who was characterized as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation.”

Pause. Breathe. Consider.

When Mary journeyed to Bethlehem, there were no Palestinian Arabs in evidence in Judea, as Israel was then known, and they didn’t show up from Arabia, Egypt, and Syria until about 800 years after Mary passed away. Mary (Maryam) was Jewish. Joseph was Jewish. Jesus was Jewish. All of his apostles were Jewish. Everyone in the story except for the Romans who killed him were Jewish.

Except for Judas. Judas Iscariot was probably Palestinian, and his middle name was probably Mamdani, which, in ancient Aramaic, means “horse___.”

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Back to Rohypnol Khanna. To his credit he, a Hindu, has defended the rights of Muslims in India (those that didn’t make it to Pakistan). But he also invited Prime Minister Modi, who has referred to India’s Muslims as “infiltrators,” to address Congress. Meanwhile, his focus on Israel appears to have temporarily blinded him to the fact that incidents involving police or mob violence or vigilantism regularly result in Muslim deaths in a number of Indian states; religious tensions and targeted mass violence against Muslims, especially during Ramadan and Holi, routinely involve vandalism of Muslim residences, places of business, and places of worship; and hate speech and incitement by Hindu extremist groups, politicians, and religious leaders proceed with impunity. Mass hate rallies are frequent and many state-level leaders agitate for boycotts against Muslims. The open discrimination against Muslims in access to education and livelihood persists, and they are culturally marginalized. What should be most troubling to Ro are the cow protection laws, with provisions empowering and authorizing quasi-official violent vigilantism against Muslim meat-eaters. One searches in vain to find Ro making fact-finding trips in an attempt to address these outrages.

In partial justification for Rep. Khanna’s focus on Israel, rather than the violence and discrimination carried out by his coreligionists against Muslims, it must be noted, in all fairness, that these atrocities in India are not being perpetrated by Jews, and, therefore, there is little political advantage in pursuing them.

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Query: why is it OK for Ro Khanna to say terrible things about the duly elected Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, but unacceptable for Israelis to taunt Ro Khanna?

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I hesitate to write about anyone or anything when I have just had the humbling and uplifting experience of seeing it done better by someone else. Amit Segal’s Noon in Israel is a masterful eulogy for, as well as a comprehensive description of the accomplishments of, Lindsey Graham, of blessed memory. He stood for Israel and America at a time when there was no bi-partisan good feeling and cooperation. So while Scoop Jackson, John McCain, and Joe Lieberman were equally or more supportive, none of them had to face down the wall of enmity Graham confronted regularly. He never faltered. He realized more clearly than anyone that defense of Israel and defense of America were one and the same thing. We have lost a friend that will not be easy to replace. Baruch Dayan Ha’Emet. May he rest in well-deserved peace.

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I was going to just report the following news story and let you draw your own conclusions, but I am so gobsmacked, astonished, delighted, and bemused that I fear I will not be able to contain myself.

To summarize: a bunch of lowlife miscreants, criminals, and thugs invaded the US Capitol on January 6 with the goal of violently interfering with the lawful processes of American democracy. Putting aside the fact that the government may have been overzealous in prosecuting them, each one of them deserved to be punished. Many were convicted. President Trump, however, lawfully pardoned them. The judge who presided over the motions by the DOJ to dismiss the remnants of the case against the leaders of the riot (or insurrection) had no sympathy for their actions, and clearly believed that they were guilty. Yet he saw no basis in preserving the convictions, given the fact that the executive branch of government had made its intentions clear. It would not prosecute the crimes. So the judge granted the government’s motion and dismissed the remnants of the case.

Judge Kelly acknowledged that the President’s views might be “fiction,” and he made it clear that he did not endorse the position of the government, pronouncing the occurrences of January 6 “a perilous event” and an “assault on the constitutional imperative for a peaceful transfer of power between presidents.” But he also acknowledged the need to preserve “our constitutional framework” and defer to the executive branch in the exercise of its Constitutional power.

Wow! In America, no huge surprise, I guess. But for us Israelis, stop and let that sink in. A judge–one of the anointed elite–confronted by a policy with which he strongly disagreed, restrained himself from substituting his personal preference for his obligation to carry out his duties under the law. But, I can see the members of the High Court gasping, he KNEW that he was right; he KNEW that Trump was wrong. How could he abandon his moral duty to do the right thing?

Answer: because he is a judge, charged with applying the law, not with reshaping the law to conform to his own preference. Judicial restraint. Judicial humility.

I’m not sure that words exist to translate that into Hebrew these days.

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Finally, the prosecution in the Charlie Kirk case has skillfully presented incontrovertible evidence that his murder was committed by Tyler Robinson. Observers, seeing the devastating evidence laid out in a persuasive and overwhelming manner, have called it an “open and shut case.” The evidence includes texts in which Robinson confesses the murder to his roommate/lover. “I did it.” The charges include aggravated murder, felony use of a firearm, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and committing a violent act in the presence of a child.

But doubts persist. Candace Owens, that genius, states her unequivocal belief that Robinson is innocent and that the prosecution’s case “doesn’t add up.” Robinson, she says, was nowhere near the campus. The surveillance footage of his wandering around the campus presented by the prosecution can undoubtedly be explained. UFOs perhaps. Israeli sleight of hand or photoshopping. She points to a number of more likely perpetrators. The widow, Erika Kirk. The Mossad and Bibi Netanyahu, fearful that Charlie Kirk was going to abandon his fervent support for Israel. “Paid influencers.” The FBI and the ATF.

While her arguments are compelling, I think that this one time, Candace may be wrong. The people that she accuses of committing the crime were so busy fixing the World Cup match to assure that Egypt lost to Argentina that they could not possibly have devoted any time or effort to the assassination.

Perhaps it was other Jews. The Rothschilds? Where was Sara?

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I think I’ll step away from the news for a bit. It’s getting too easy.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee seeks candidates for the upcoming election in Maine. Ideally, applicants should be tattoo-free, though benign symbols like eagles, hammers, and sickles will not be disqualifying. If you have texted pictures of these tattoos to (more than 12) women to whom you are not married, please ascertain whether they are Republicans or Democrats. If they are Democrats, you will need recommendations from Moron Zamdani or Bernie Sanders to advance to the next stage. Don’t sweat the Republican ladies; no one pays any attention to them. Tattoos of Nazi symbols may, and of Stars of David will, be disqualifying. Foreskins are a plus (unless they display Nazi tattoos). We require an affidavit from one of your parents or your current partner to the effect that you have not engaged in sexual abuse of any kind for a period of at least three months prior to your application; if you are unable to produce a document of that nature, a statement by Elizabeth Warren to the effect that you are “my kind of man, a man who not only has the values, but . . . believes in accountability” or Chris Murphy that you are ”pretty impressive,” or Ruben Gallego that you are an “authentic man” who “is not antisemitic” will suffice. Gallego’s testimony that you are an “authentic man” will carry extra weight since he served his then wife with divorce papers when she was nine months pregnant and demanded that she cover his attorney’s fees.

If you attended a prep school like Hotchkiss, or if your sole source of income is your mother’s restaurant, or if you purchased your house with a loan from your father, you will not be disqualified so long as you issue a statement opposing effete capitalism and identifying with average Joes. If you have pictures of Susan Collins in an SS uniform, photoshopped, AI, or otherwise, please submit them. These will be especially helpful if you have impugned the integrity of those who served in the US Armed Services. Please supply a list of the texts you have deleted from Reddit; if the file is too large to attach, please send it separately in a plain brown wrapper. Note: if you have raped anyone, please certify that it happened A) because you were going through a bunch of stress, B) were unhappy for one reason or another, or C) were drunk out of your everloving mind, so . . . no harm, no foul. Additionally, we will only consider candidates who endorse open borders, abortion on demand, confiscatory taxes on millionaires (other than Senator Sanders) and billionaires, voting rights for undocumented . . . uh . . . visitors, and free, free Palestine. (Also, if the “large forces” are aligned against you, as with the previous candidate, even though you have done NOTHING wrong, please let us know so that we may plan accordingly.)

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President Trump appeared excited to deal with the new Iranian leaders, optimistically calling them “very rational people” who were “nice to deal with.” Vice-President Vance averred that the thugs atop the Revolutionary Guard Corps wanted to “turn over a new leaf,” realizing that the way they have done business with the US for the past 47 years has been a mistake. Vance further proclaimed that the relationship between Iran and the US had been fundamentally transformed. Then, as a result of his having “got to know them,” President Trump referred to them as “evil, sick people,” “liars,” and “scum,” and resumed bombing the crap out of them. Secretary of State Rubio can’t seem to wipe that smile off his face. He better not let the President see it.

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President Trump has apparently agreed to sell Turkey advanced stealth F-35 fighters, notwithstanding a law forbidding such sale as a result of Turkey’s purchase of Russian anti-aircraft equipment. The President has expressed warm feelings toward Turkish President and Turkey-in-Chief Recep Tayyip Erdogan, describing the two of them as warm friends with great chemistry. He has expressed genuine affection for the Turkish strongman, scourge of journalists, Kurds, and Zionists, calling him “terrific.” President Trump was especially grateful to Erdogan for agreeing not to fight alongside Iran against the United States in the recent hostilities. Yes, that’s right. He had to convince our NATO partner not to take up arms against us, and wants to reward him for his beneficence. I have started a countdown to the date when President Trump “gets to know” Erdogan. 10-9-8 . . .

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Egyptian sports commentators have blamed Israel, FIFA, and the United States for their team’s loss to Argentina in the World Cup, pointing to the well-known fact that Milei is friendly with Netanyahu and prayed at the Western Wall. I have seen the replay of the penalty that may have cost the Egyptians the winning goal, and, though it grieves me to say it, the Egyptian sports commentators are right. Sorry, Egypt. Let’s call it even for the slavery thing and the business with the sons and the Nile.

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Lesson learned the hard way: Never explain to your wife that it’s the washer and dryer that actually do the laundry.

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You may know of Karim Khan as the anti-Zionist chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. It is alleged that he filed arrest warrant requests against Israeli officials in haste, dispensing with the customary investigative procedures in order to preempt sexual mistreatment charges against himself. He then pressured the female employee victim to remain quiet in order not to sabotage his effort to help the Palestinian cause. Then an internal report was leaked to the NY Times that established the accuser’s credibility and found Khan’s denials “devoid of credibility.” Anti-semite. Anti-Zionist. Sexual abuser. It appears that he checks all the boxes, lending credence to news accounts that he has moved to Maine and will be running for Senate as a Democrat. Elizabeth Warren thinks that he is her type of man.

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Gavin Newsom understands that the California ballot initiative imposing a 5% tax on the assets of billionaires residing in the state might–just might–result in having fewer billionaires reside in his state. He opposed the initiative because he was concerned about the resulting economic risk of billionaire flight and the competitive disadvantage in which it would place California. However, he has just endorsed a NATIONAL minimum wealth tax on folks with net worths over $100 million, together with a few zingers involving borrowing against stock portfolios and death taxes. So he isn’t doctrinally opposed to confiscating either people’s property so long as he doesn’t have to suffer a single consequence. This may be a problem with the new democracy; there were always more poor people than rich people. It’s just that they weren’t previously educated to believe that everything was the fault of the rich people, the hard workers, the achievers, the successful. It starts with free buses. One hopes that it ends with Moron Zamdani, Melat Kiros (“9/11 was the inevitable consequence of the US forcing people to believe that an act of violence was the only response”), Claire Valdez (“Israel should be sanctioned in the same way as South Africa was”), Darializa Avila Chevalier (“Every dollar that we send to Israel is a dollar that is stolen from the mouths of our children”), Katie Wilson (“Boycott Starbucks”–in SEATTLE!!), Nithya Raman (“Defund the police”), and Brad Lander (at his son’s bris, took it upon himself to renounce, on behalf of his son, the right of return to Israel). But it’s going to be hard to convince college-educated folks who can’t find jobs in Gender Studies that free stuff might not be the answer. God help me, but Graham Platner is looking better and better.

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Ending on a non-funny and uplifting thought, just for a change. This week’s parsha records 42 separate trips undertaken by the (soon to be) Israelites during their sojourn in the desert, from that place to this place, from this place to that place. Aside from some lists of names in Genesis and the interminable description of sacrificial rites in Leviticus, it is arguably the most boring text in the Bible. Why not just a single verse saying that they spent 38 years traveling from place to place in the desert? Two reasons. First of all, the Torah points out that every time they moved, it was “ahl pi hashem,” at God’s command, reminding us that everything that happens to us, even if seemingly insignificant, is not happenstance, but ordained–for a reason. There’s that personal responsibility thing that the aforementioned politicians seem not to understand. Second, and more important, the Torah is telling us that when you arrive at your destination, don’t forget who you are and where you’ve been, even if they are not the most flattering or prestigious places to be from. Remember where you’ve been and what a struggle it was to get here; it will make you more receptive to the needs of others. And remember–never forget–who you are and how you want people to perceive you. (A hearty thank you to my parents, a”h, for that lesson.)

I neglected to write anything about July 4 because I thought pretty much every other English speaker of Jewish descent in the world would be sharing his or her thoughts and . . . I was right. About a zillion words have been written on every possible aspect of the semiquincentennial and, as pertains to Israel and Jews, every possible connection, from Biblical inspiration for the colonies, Jewish contributions to America, American inspiration for the Israeli Declaration of Independence, and the on-and-off love affair between America and the “only democracy in the Middle East,” from Truman to Trump. There were also some stomach-turning “I despise and revile the America that gave me opportunity and made me rich and successful” disquisitions from the Nikole Hannah-Joneses, Hassan Pikers and Moron Zamdanis of the world.

But no one wrote the piece that I was going to write, so here goes.

America, that amazingly successful experiment in constitutional republicanism and capitalism, is 250 years old, but approximately 172 years ago it was 78 years old, just like the State of Israel is now. In 1854, or thereabouts, at age 78, America had joined the family of independent nations, having triumphed in its arguably treasonous and certainly perilous Revolutionary War, expanded its borders continentally, fought and emerged victorious in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, achieved remarkable economic and technological success, and was . . . in awful political shape.

Sound familiar?

In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which triggered violent conflict and sectional polarization, resulting in a near collapse of the political system and auguring the actual disintegration that occurred a few years later. With the Missouri Compromise canceled and new territories open to slavery based on “popular sovereignty,” “Bleeding Kansas” became a violent battleground, replete with guerilla warfare and massacres. The existing political parties shattered. A new party, the Republican Party, combined the anti-slavery elements of a number of parties like the Whigs and Free-Soil Democrats, the Democratic Party split, and it became clear that few were in the mood for compromise. Radicals like John Brown were moving into the ascendancy and society became polarized by geography and ideology. Then, about two years later, the Supreme Court issued the worst decision in its history, the Dred Scott decision, and conflict and civil war began to appear inevitable.

The good news is that the union survived, right prevailed, the nation thrived, and here the US is at 250.

And here Israel is at 78. Notwithstanding our economic, technological, and military success, we have never been so polarized. Old political parties and affiliations shatter and reform on a daily basis. Legislative initiatives are adopted hastily and peremptorily thwarted by a Court that seems to have no notion of limits or restraint. The most extreme elements, seemingly incapable of even appearing civil, have become more empowered; few are in the mood for compromise. The best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Sound familiar?

Of course, by 1854, America was shielded by two huge oceans and had subdued its southern neighbor, so it could at least pursue its self-destructive course without too much fear of outside interference. We, surrounded by enemies, do not have that luxury.

That is what I was going to write about. What we, at 78, can–and must–learn from a 78-year old America if we are to survive without cataclysm and catastrophe. How to avoid the consequences of our own Kansas-Nebraska Act.

And then I had another idea. While 1854 might have been the inflection point that made the Civil War inevitable, it was also the year that Lincoln ended a five-year hiatus from politics and launched a series of highly popular and wonderfully impassioned lectures opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, including a legendary 3-hour oration at the Illinois State Fair in Peoria in response to a speech by Stephen A. Douglas. This was the turning point of his career.

So I was thinking, what if we had a Lincoln, one capable of speeches like that or the Second Inaugural Address, or the Gettysburg Address? What would our Lincoln say to us? Would we listen? Fully acknowledging that I am borrowing liberally from Israel’s Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s masterpiece (which was, of course, only half as long), I imagine the following:

The venue? Har Herzl. The occasion? Some act of violence, or legislative provocation, or judicial excess. Or all of the above.

Imagine . . . a hushed gathering . . . a dignified and humble orator, speaking from the heart to a beloved people:

“Fourscore less two years ago, thirty-seven brave visionaries of every political and religious stripe signed a document that declared the establishment of a new nation upon this ancient land, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that a state could be both Jewish and democratic, offering refuge and a homeland to Jews in the birthplace of the Jewish people, and, at the same time, promising to develop a country that would exist for the benefit of all its inhabitants. These dreamers–Centrists, Revisionists, Socialists, Rabbis, Communists, Immigrants, Labor Leaders–imagined a nation based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel, that would ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex, guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; and safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.

“Under constant attack and threat of annihilation, in the shadow of the holocaust that had just befallen their people, they extended an offer of peace and cooperation to all their neighbors and appealed to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land, in order to engage in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East. They implored the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the building of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its institutions.

“We, the beneficiaries of that dream, have fought, and labored, and suffered, and faced setbacks, and won glorious victories in its pursuit and fulfillment. And now the dream itself is threatened by our own intolerance and rigidity.

“We are met on the hallowed ground set aside as a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live. We have come here to appeal to the residents of the land to act in such a way that will assure that they did not die in vain.

“But, in a larger sense, we can say nothing that these brave soldiers have not already said through their actions, their bravery, their sacrifice, their love for people, land, and country. From the kibbutz and the hesder yeshiva, immigrants right off the boat and great grandchildren of those who arrived with the first Aliyah–they were together as one in the battle; they are together in death. Those who rest here speak eloquently from the grave. They tell us that we too are all together in this work and that only together will we survive.

“It is for us, the living, to be dedicated to the unfinished work and the great task remaining before us, to ensure that Israel’s promise of a Jewish State, offering opportunity, equality, and freedom to all, survives our own selfish limitations, and that we carry on the work that those who rest here have so nobly advanced, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. We here resolve to act in such a way that will ensure that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation–under God–shall have a new birth of freedom and tolerance, understanding and love, that this glorious Jewish State, standing alone and unique among the nations, to which we returned after millennia of exile, hope, and prayer, making the deserts bloom, reviving the Hebrew language, building a thriving community and economy, bringing the blessings of opportunity, dignity, freedom, progress, and honest toil to Jews in their national homeland and to all the land’s inhabitants, shall not perish from internal strife.

“The Jewish people have a natural right to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State. That right must be nurtured, and treasured, and protected against those, inside or outside our community, who would deny it or prevent us from preserving it.

“We here, together as one, pledge ourselves to that effort.”

Do you think anyone would listen?

In the 1988 Presidential debate, George Bush was asked a question to which he responded in his typically insipid manner, and Michael Dukakis rolled his eyes and looked heavenward. Saturday Night Live translated this moment into a timeless skit with Dana Carvey, as Bush, saying “a thousand points of light, wouldn’t be prudent, stay the course,” and Jon Lovett responding, “I can’t believe that I’m losing to this guy.”

That’s how I feel.

We seem to be losing ground to our countless enemies. They, for the most part, are ignorant idiots. They say things about us as a people that should make no sense to a reasonably bright third grader. They accuse us of crimes that we would never even contemplate. They start wars, hide behind children, and point fingers at us when children are casualties. They steal food we send them and accuse us of starving people. They kidnap, rape, torture, and murder us, and criticize us for trying to defend ourselves from annihilation.

And yet, the Vice-President of the United States can lecture us, telling us that we should not be quick to state our opinion about our survival, because we risk losing the only friend we have in the world.

We are the only friendless nation in the world and the only one that has to justify its existence. How bizarre is that?

Is this a joke?

The nepo baby, rich kid, America-hating, anti-Semite buddies of Zohran Mamdani (do you think his anger toward America and Jews derives from being called Moron Zamdani throughout his formative years?), none of whom have ever worked a day in their lives (how many black slaves labored in the Mamdani estate in Uganda?), got elected as Socialist Democrats in New York espousing an anti-Israel foreign policy, as if that would affect the lives of their constituents. Imagine voting for a useless Columbia graduate student in Mideast Studies to set policy in Washington. Why are we Jews even relevant to NY politics, given the deep problems the city faces? Why does the Mayor of NY have a foreign policy and why is he disturbed that there is one–count them, one–Jewish state in the universe? Does he too think that he will be able to blame us for his forthcoming, inevitable failure?

I think that radio host Sid Rosenberg was being too temperate and reasonable when he called Mayor Moron an “America hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach.” Also unfair to cockroaches.

There are 15 million Jews in the world. The following countries have about 15-18 million inhabitants: Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Ecuador, Zambia, and Cambodia. No one is questioning their right to exist. No one is suggesting that any of them is responsible for all the bad things that befall mankind. No one gives a damn about them.

Auf mir gezugt.

But no, we are in the news every day, forced to defend ourselves from imminent destruction or obliteration on a continuous basis. We are the only people in Europe whose children must be guarded in schools from those who would murder them.

Why? What is the matter with you people? Could you please take a moment and think: are the Jews really that critical to my happiness and well-being? And if you think we are, think again, because you are either intellectually disabled or you have been horribly miseducated.

If you think that the Jews and the Palestinians are at the core of the world’s problems, including bias against gay people, the fallout from the slave trade, communism, capitalism, pederasty, sexual abuse, income inequality, immigration, inflation, then not only were you born ignorant, but you have labored mightily to remain stupid.

It’s not us. It’s the Zambians. Just listen to how ridiculous that is.

Why was there no Palestinian state formed between 1948 and 1967, when Gaza and the West Bank belonged to Egypt and Jordan, respectively? Why did the Arabs determine to maintain Palestinians as the world’s only eternal refugees, refusing to allow them to assimilate? Why are Jews the only indigenous people in the world barred from claiming a right to their homeland, even after the world decided they should have a state of their own in that homeland?

I realize that everyone is entitled to an opinion, but if you think that the world’s troubles are caused by Jews, your opinion is stupid. There are 15 million of us in the entire world. There are 90 million people in Iran, and a few billion in Asia. There are 47 million Black Americans and 7.5 million Jews in America. There are significant numbers of Indians (5.2 million), Chinese ( 5.4 million), Filipinos (4.5 million), and Vietnamese (2.3 million). And yet, and yet, most hate crimes are perpetrated against Jews.

What is wrong with you people?

Granted, we have punched above our weight in certain sectors. We played an outsized role in the development of Hollywood. We win a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. We were in the forefront of the labor movement (which featured Jewish garment workers striking against Jewish factory owners). We were communists, socialists, and capitalists. We fought for civil rights, and for feminism, and gay rights (and, regrettably, against civil rights, feminism, and gay rights, because, notwithstanding your idiocy, we are not monolithic–we argue among ourselves all the time.)

But, for God’s sake, there have never been more than 15 million of us, and we had to struggle to get to that number after you killed a third of us in the 1940s.

Think. Just think. Close your eyes, grit your teeth, and think. Can we really be to blame for all, most, any of the country’s problems? Your problems?

If Palestine were free from the river to the sea tomorrow and the Palestinians did what they wanted with the resident Jews (in case you are wondering, it’s what the other Arab nations did to their Jewish populations after 1948–mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and expulsion), would it change your life one iota? Would it change anything if every Jew vanished from the earth tomorrow? Would Iran or China or Russia become more friendly? Would gasoline be cheaper?

Let’s look at that 15 million number. Most of us are shleppers like me, wage slaves, middle class, overweight. Some of us are still Democrats (God help them). Some support Bibi and some detest him. Many of us are married to non-Jews. A bunch sit and study Torah every day. Some keep kosher and observe the Sabbath. Most don’t. We are short and tall, liberal and conservative, garrulous and taciturn. Some of us live in Europe, where we are too worried about getting killed walking in the street to do much harm. Many of us live in Israel, constantly aware of the proximity of the bomb shelters as we make our ways through fraught lives. Most of us in Israel emigrated from Arab lands (in numbers greater than Palestinians who became “refugees”). We are men, women, secular, religious, left, right, gay, straight, brown, black, white, rich, poor, middle-class.

We are just like everyone else, except we think that we were chosen to play an exemplary role in the moral universe by God. Is that so bad? In any event, you needn’t be jealous. It hasn’t worked out that well for us.

Take a good hard look and tell me what frightens you about us, what engenders such hate. Then look in the mirror and explain to yourself that you have been barking up the wrong tree. It’s actually the Guatemalans. Cambodians?

We gave you Jesus, Moses, Jerry Seinfeld, polio vaccine, streptomycin, lightning fast semiconductors, Waze, instant messaging, psychoanalysis, Fiddler on the Roof, bagels, cream cheese, and lox, Billy Joel, Einstein, Marx, the Marx Brothers, Irving Berlin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Steven Spielberg, Stan Lee.

The world would be less bright, less funny, less quiet had we never existed.

Why don’t you just leave us alone? (I wanted to say the —- alone, but my wife won’t let me.)