Who are the supporters of terrorism in America? (A CA Guest Post)

According to the latest Gallup Poll, American Jews support terrorism at a significantly higher rate than American Muslims. And the group that has the highest rate of support for terrorism? Christians!

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/gallup-poll-reveals-common-ground-for-jewish-and-muslim-americans-1.376598

"Gallup poll reveals common ground for Jewish and Muslim Americans"

"According to the poll, 89% of Muslim Americans say there is never a justification for attacks on civilians, compared to 79% of Mormon Americans, 75% of Jewish Americans, and 71% of Protestant and Catholic Americans. It was also found that the frequency with which Muslim Americans — or any other faith group — attend religious services has no effect on whether they justify violence against civilians. "

To put this another way: 29% of Christians, 25% of Jews, and 21% of Mormons believe that at least sometimes, attacks on civilians are justified. This is borne out by history -- the United States, run mostly by Christians, has been bombing civilians as part of its wars since at least World War 2. (See: Firebombing of Tokyo, not to mention atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Christmas bombing of Hanoi), the Mormons have terrorist attacks in their history (See Mountain Meadows Massacre
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_massacre), and as for American Jews, well, look at what happened in New Square recently. On the other hand, only 11% of American Muslims believe that attacks on civilians are justified. Sure, in all cases, only a small minority endorses such attacks, but you only need one person...

By these numbers, I think we should all fear our Christian, Jewish, and Mormon neighbors more than our Muslim neighbors.

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Does YU's new Vice Provost know about this? Mascot Questions

As of last January, Y.U's Vice Provost is Lawrence Shiffman. Shiffman has an (earned)  Ph.D. degree from Brandeis University and is a specialist in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Judaism in Late Antiquity. In short, he knows what a Maccabee looks like.

Is this really how
Macabee soldiers dressed?

So inquiring minds are wondering: Did Dr. Shiffman sign off on his University's new mascot? Was he given a chance to say, "Hey, you know what, a Macabee might have had a beard; also, he might not have worn such fancy armor."

I say this not because I think mascots are required to be historically accurate, but because the press release announcing the introduction of this particular mascot claims: "The warrior in the logo is a historically accurate depiction of soldiers at that time and how the Maccabean army would most probably have dressed."

I'm no specialist, but I call B.S and would be most pleased to hear from an expert who can tell us the real deal.

Here's what I know: The skirt is accurate for a Greek soldier; so is the spear (though a hoplite would carry a sword, too.) I don't know if Macabees dressed like that, however. The shield is wrong (should be a circle) and the helmet is Illyrian, which strikes me as wrong, too, but I'm not sure. I'm most curious about the clean face. Did Macabees wear beards, or did they glorify cheek bones like other Greeks?

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Yeshiva University unveils (awful) new mascot

The YU Athletic department has unveiled a new mascot. Here's what it looks like (The text is from the YU press release)

The warrior in the logo is a historically accurate depiction of soldiers at that time and how the Maccabean army would most probably have dressed. The warrior intentionally features a spear as opposed to a sword. The spear is symbolic of the lower-grade weaponry the Maccabees used to defeat the better-armed and much larger Syrian Greek army. The defensive posture is indicative of the Jewish fighters’ desire to protect their land and way of life and symbolic of the Jewish people’s feelings toward the purpose of military confrontation.

The shield, the front of which can be seen here, is similar in shape to the Yeshiva University shield and on the shield are a lion from the Coat-of-Arms of Jerusalem and a menorah from the Coat-of-Arms of the State of Israel. Both tie in to the story of the Maccabees. The Jewish revolt against Antiochus liberated Jerusalem which is why Jerusalem’s lion symbol appears. Once the Temple was restored to Jewish control the Maccabees re-instituted the tradition of a constantly-lit menorah, thus that symbol.

My response:

Has YU lost its collective institutional mind? All of this overthinking/meta anlysis of the logo's deep, underlying, symbolic, significance makes good fodder for a press release, but its hooey. People don't care about what a logo represents.  They won't contemplate the figure, as if it was a museum piece, and remark on the crouched defensive pose or the spear vs sword symbolism. They aren't going to participate in seminars about What It Means or What It Says. People are going to reach a snap, impulsive judgement, and that judgement will be made according to a simple set of criteria, criteria that will vary based upon who is doing the judging:

Group: Students and Alumni
Criteria: Does it look cool?

Discussion: I, personally, do not think it looks cool. I think it looks stiff, and boring, almost like a play-action figure. Perhaps you disagree, but to me he does not seem like a living, breathing, creature.  He looks like something that inhabits a 1980s cartoon. I half expect He-Man to appear.
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Group: YU Bashers, including RW O-Jews who have convinced themselves the school is a hotbed of homosexuality, Zionism, and modernity.
Criteria: Does this logo confirm our pre-existing opinions? / Can we use it to continue bashing YU?

Discussion:This new symbol plays directly into the second group's hands, giving them yet another cudgel with which to beat the school. The figure is wearing a dress (gay) appears at first glance to be Greek (modern, gay) and carries a shield adorned with the symbols of the state of Israel (modern, Zionist.)  If Elya Svei or Aryeh Levin wanted to design a caricature of the school, wouldn't they come up with something that looked like this new logo?

Now, let's be clear: I don't think Y.U is obligated to consider its opponents and their pathologies before choosing a mascot; however, I do think that before selecting an official symbol to represent the school, the person in charge needs to ask himself one simple question, namely: Is this "us"?

If the powers running Y.U imagine that a stiff, boring clayman, that neither wears nor carries any identifiable Jewish marks or apparatus is the right answer to that question, well, that's a serious problem, don't you think?

Additional criticism:
Despite all the side-matter blather about historical accuracy, this atrocity has no beard, and no tzitzis, while the genuine Maccabee slogan - Me Kumocha B'elim = ["Who is like you among the heavenly powers] - and the genuine Maccabee icon - a lion - are absent. Also, would a Macabee have worn top-of-the line Greek style armor? Weren't they poor, ragtag guerrilla fighters?


Gratuitous Nit Pick: The press release says "Once the Temple was restored to Jewish control the Maccabees re-instituted the tradition of a constantly-lit menorah, thus that symbol." Are we in Chelm? The picture on the shield is a menorah that is NOT lit. How do you represent the Chanuka miracle and all it represents, with an UNLIT menorah?

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Monetize your blog: A public service message for my friends in the blogging community

Make money from your Blog with BidVertiser
A PSA for the blogging community

Fellow bloggers, if you're looking for a way to monetize your blog, and to earn passive revenue as you continue publishing posts about the subjects you care about, I strongly suggest you consider BidVertiser.

I've been using this service for only a few weeks, and I am already pleased with the results. (I also get a small referral fee for making this recommendation so please take that disclosure into account.) The interface is easy to use, the ads are local and relevant, and the company has a great reputation for paying on time. Click here to go to BidVertiser, and learn more.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

DB

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Stewart v. O'Reilly -- again

So, last week I wrote a post in which I pointed out right-wingers such as Pam from Atlas Shrugs acted hypocritically in their treatment of the Norway shooting. Now I see Jon Stewart said the same things about Bill O'Reilly only he is, um, ... much, much funnier

LGF (a blog beloved by OJs before he started telling the truth about RWers) makes the Pam point even stronger.

Bonus after the jump

Well that didn't take long...

The UN is preparing to condemn Syria:

Note: I share this news not because I have special love for Syria or the UN (I hate one, and think the other is useless); rather, I wish to deprive certain people of a false propaganda statement. For all its numerous faults, shortcomings and acts of indecency, the UN got this one right.  When the spam starts hitting your email box announcing that the UN turned a blind eye to Syrian atrocities, respond with the truth.

Hat tip: FOZZIE

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Rick Perry has a Jeremiah Wright problem

Rick Perry, righteous Christian governor of Texas, is planning to kick off his campaign for president with a prayer meeting. Several leading evangelicals have, of course, endorsed the event. As ThinkProgress reports, many of these Christian leaders are lunatics, who are on the record as having espoused stupid, hateful ideas (Complete list after the jump.)

Why doesn't the man who would like to be your Republican candidate for president distance himself from these frightening people?  You'd think he'd at least dis-invite them from his pray along. I suppose he doesn't think Republican voters are likely to penalize him for mixing with such low-lifes. And that says a lot.

See the list after the jump

Does everyone really want Moshiach?

This is the week we mourn the destruction of the Temple, the week when we tell ourselves how much better things will be once the Davidic kingship is restored. Unfortunately the track record of the Davidic sovereigns, as recorded in Kings, Books I and II, doesn't inspire much faith in their leadership ability. With few exceptions, the kings of Judah were corrupt, evil, abusive men, who exercised absolute control over their impoverished subjects, compelling them to pay high taxes and fight unreasonable wars. Also - and this is something we often forget - many of the kings of Judah were idol worshipers who were unfaithful to God, and led the people away from Him. In fact, according to Jeremiah (who is believed to have authored the end of Kings II) aside from Josiah there was never a king like David "who turned to the LORD as he did—with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his strength, in accordance with all the Law of Moses."

And yet, in our daily prayers, we ask for God to restore this line of under-achiever and appoint David's rightful successor. How can this explained? Didn't Einstein say that an insane person does the same thing over and over again expecting different results? So given our previous experiences with Davidic kings (not to mention the rest of the world's experience with non-Davidic kings) wouldn't it be insane for us to expect a Jewish king to be anything but a corrupt, murderous, tax-crazed idol worshiper?

Deep down inside, I think the average Jew understands this. Sure, we pay lip service to the idea that we desire a king, but with the exception of a few people, who for the most part are dismissed as whackjobs, what have we done to make it happen? Nothing.

And our actions, I think, speak louder than our words. We know that kings are bad news. We know that appointing a king means losing many of the comforts and freedoms we've come to enjoy. And we know that even if the first king is a tzadik, like David was, his children and grandchildren are likely to follow in the footsteps of David's own descendants and become corrupted by their wealth and power.* So we say the words, three times daily, professing to desire a king, yet do nothing in our daily actions to speed things along.

*Historical note: This is precisely what happened when the Hashmonaim took power. The first generation was God-fearing. The grandchildren has Greek names, and were the sworn enemies of the Sages.

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Captain Israel Vanquishes Foreskin Man (in bad taste)

A Guest Post By E. Fink

I see on Elder of Zion that someone has drawn a nemesis to Foreskin Man. In this comic, Captain Israel defeats Foreskin Man in defense of religion and circumcision.

I find it offensive.

I don't believe that the way to defeat anti-Semites or haters of religion is to stoop to their level and put out better propoganda. That is what this comic does. It appeals to emotion, cashes in on stereotypes and uses guilt by association.

This is not the way to beat a circumcision ban. We win with reason and fairness. We don't need a superhero to defend us from Foreskin Man. We just need common sense.

That being said, it is a fun little comic...

Do You Believe In Dog?

By:Itchemeyer

Why do some people love Judaism, and some hate it? Now, some of you folks out there may think that your feelings on this matter are a choice that has some basis in logic. Allow me to disabuse you of that notion with a beautiful Mashal:

Gil Student's notes on blogging, how it has changed, and what it tells us about Jewish writers

Over at Modern-Orthoprax-&-Heterodox-The-Weekly-Magazine-for-Baalei-Sechel-formerly-known-as-XGH-formerly-known-as-GH-but-always-remembered-by-old-timers-as-The-Godol-Hador a 10 day old post discusses the decline and fall of Gil Student's Hirhurim.

Surprisingly, Gil Student b'kvodo'u'vatzmo commented on the post, and agrees with the analysis. Also, he provides a link to a 17 month old Hirhurim post, that I had not seen, a post in which something odd and unseemly is reported:

I don't like the 9 Days... but

What do the 9 Days do to you? Do they make you sad? Do you start to feel something in the air? Is it like you've entered another category of time?  Or do these days of required mourning feel to you like any other?

I am not a superstitious man. I don't agree that the 9-Days are a Bermuda-Triangle-like period of time, a time when bad things are more likely to happen. I think it's silly to avoid plane travel, for example, or to avoid going out alone at night during these days. There are no statistics which suggest that bad things occur during the 9-days any more often than they do during the rest of the year. If there were, wouldn't the non-Jews would have caught on by now?

But still, something strange and altogether emotional happens to me when we enter the 9-Days. I feel something, not unlike what I feel around the Yomin Noraim. I am more mellow, more serious.

There are those of you who will insist that these unhappy feelings are caused by something real in the air, the koach zmaniyot, for example. But I don't buy it. As Heshel said, "A psychological reaction is no proof of an ontological fact." Others say the melancholy comes from being deprived of protein, but don't thik that's true either. I am a big fan of fish, and I expect to enjoy a large slice of it every evening this week.The hot weather isn't the problem either. I like 90 + temperatures.

In my humble opinion, this strange gloom that overtakes me year after year is simply one of the by-products of my all-too-successful Jewish education.

I was taught to be sad during the 9-Day, and so I am.

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What I learned from the comment survey

Thanks to all of you who took the time to complete my survey on the current commenting system.

No surprise here, but most of you think it sucks. You say it looks bad (agreed), responds slowly (agreed) and that threads and conversations are hard to follow. I am not sure I agree with the last complaint, but enough of you took the other side to convince me that this was a problem that had to be fixed. As you may have noticed, threads are now published in chronological order with the oldest comment on top.

I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that many of you value the old comment threads, and return to them with a fair amount of frequency. I do this, too. One of you said my comments "are an important historical record of the development of the J-blogosphere,"; many others told me that they've found the old comments to be a reliable source of laughs and information. I agree with this, too. I also agree with the woman who said "Losing them would be a tragedy", though I hasten to point out that and I'm not patting myself on the back when I share these compliments: You wrote the comments; not me. I'm merely the person with the responsibility of preserving them. Sort of like how the owner of a landmark may have done nothing to contribute to the historical significance of his building, but still holds a responsibility to keep the place in good shape.

Now that I've heard from you, I intend to take that responsibility very seriously. Here's my promise:

1. I will not delete any comments that are more than a week old (I will continue to delete abusive and disruptive comments when they are new)
2. I will never switch to a comment system that jeopardizes the existing comments.
3. I will continue to pay JS-Kit/Echo$10 per month to maintain the archive (By the way it costs $10 per month to keep the old threads active. If you value the old comments as much as the survey results suggest, please help out by tossing a few shekels into the plate.)

Meanwhile, I will also continue to search for a way to implement Disqus on this site, without sacrificing the 500,000 plus comments this site has collected over the last 6 years,

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Quick survey about my commenting system

R' Mordecai Gifter's shocking solution to an ambiguity in Numbers 33:2

I see from Josh of ParshaBlog that R' Mordecai Gifter's has something of a a shocking solution to an ambiguity in Numbers 33:2 . Here's the verse:

וַיִּכְתֹּ֨ב מֹשֶׁ֜ה אֶת־מֹוצָאֵיהֶ֛ם לְמַסְעֵיהֶ֖ם עַל־פִּ֣י יְהוָ֑ה וְאֵ֥לֶּה מַסְעֵיהֶ֖ם לְמֹוצָאֵיהֶֽם׃

There is an ambiguity here that's hard to capture in English. King James renders it

Another question for A Wise Man

A guest post by Philo

This is a response to/continuation of/inspired by AZIGRA's post earlier today:

Dear Wise Man,

My wife and I have always trained our daughters to value intellectual development and education. We sent them to a highly regarded Jewish high school that had both exceptional limudei kodesh and secular studies. My older daughter was accepted at Yale and planned to go there after her year of seminary in Israel. She was planning to become a lawyer.

We sent her to B'not HaTorah, a highly regarded seminary in Israel. The black hat wearing Rav of the seminary assured us that it was a place of the utmost intellectual development that would give her a deep connection to her yahadut that would ensure she stays true to her Judaism through her years of college and law school.

But she came back from Israel intending to go to a teacher's seminary in Boro Park instead of Yale. She wants to get her teacher's certificate quickly and meanwhile is telling me that I have to find her a shidduch, a nice yeshiva boy who is planning to learn in kollel while she supports him.

My question is this: My younger daughter, now in 12th grade, has been accepted at Harvard and will be in a pre-med program. How can we be sure she will still go to Harvard and become a doctor after we be'ezrat hashem, of course send her to B'not HaTorah for a wonderful year of learning like her older sister?

Sincerely, concerned father

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GUEST POST - ADVICE COLUMN FOR YOUNG FRUM BOYS AND GIRLS

This is the first in a new series of advice columns for young frum boys and girls. Am I a certified therapist? No. So what? You don't really need much of an education to respond to the sorts of problems the young frum ones suffer from.

BY @AZIGRA