The Arab mind at work….the once respectable, now antisemitic Haaretz newspaper…the French claim sovereignty in Yosh…

Phantom Nation 19Sept2016 – PODCAST

Antisemites and enemies of Israel like to re-write history to push their agendas. But Sha’i ben-Tekoa puts them to task as he explains to you the situation on the ground in Israel, including documented history as well as proofs from the Bible, that the Land of Israel, was given to the Children of Israel, and not the off-spring of Ishmael. Phantom Nation 05Sept2016 – PODCAST

{Originally posted to the PreOccupied Territory website}

The leader of the Israelites returned from atop Mount Sinai this morning to find the people in wild, cultic dance around the Two-State Solution, and brought the orgy to an end by smashing the divine Tablets of the Covenant, eyewitnesses report.

Moses came down from his forty-day communing with the Almighty, holding two stone tablets engraved by God with the Ten Statements He had made during the Revelation at Sinai last month, to be placed in a special Ark as a testament to the special relationship between the Lord and His people. On the final day of the session, God alerted Moses that the people had strayed from the divine path and begun to revere the Two-State Solution.

Upon hearing the news Moses descended from the mountain and beheld the uncontrolled passion with which the masses were dancing about the idol they had adopted, and which blinded them to the destructive path down which they had embarked. He smashed the Tablets, burned the Two-State Solution, ground up its ashes, cast them in water, and forced the people to drink the mixture as if they were wayward wives suspected of infidelity.

“He was fuming,” recalled his brother Aaron, who had proffered the Two-State Solution to the people when they were on the verge of panic amid fears that an apparent delay in their leader’s scheduled return meant he had disappeared, leaving them rudderless. “I was just trying to delay them and to keep things from getting out of hand before Moses would come back and restore clarity. But I messed up – I underestimated the desperate passion driving this phenomenon. When my friend Hur tried to resist they killed him. It was a disaster.” Aaron confessed he felt forced to go along with the Two-State Solution Zeitgeist even though he did not support the movement.

Israelites who had not participated in the orgiastic delusion were recruited to conduct a military action against the worshipers, and the Lord sent a plague to further decimate them, bringing the casualties from the Two-State-Solution affair to 3,000. Moses then beseeched the Almighty not to destroy the people for their sin, even though God offered to have Moses himself be the progenitor of the replacement nation. Instead, Moses told the people, the consequences of their distorted, frenzied thinking would be visited upon them for all eternity, a measure of which would be present in all the misfortunes the nation of Israel will suffer throughout all subsequent history.

A friend of mine related that his brother was on a business trip to Istanbul and went to pray in a local shul. He was quite surprised when one of the congregants waved to him. “I don’t know this man,” he thought. “He must be a really friendly person!” But then he noticed the man was waving to everyone in shul. And he was not the only one – every single person in shul was doing the same thing! After davening, they told him that this custom was based on the words of the Arizal, cited by the Magen Avraham (O.C., beginning of siman 46). He writes: “Before the morning tefillah one should accept upon himself the mitzvah of v’ahavtah le’reiacha kamocha – you shall love your fellow as yourself.” In order to fulfill this mitzvah properly, the custom of this congregation is to wave to each and every fellow Jew in shul.

But what is the Arizal’s reason – why is it so important to fulfill this mitzvah specifically before we start praying?

Plural Power

One who examines Shemoneh Esrei will notice something interesting: we speak in the plural form. For example, we ask Hashem to give us rain, to heal us, to forgive us, etc. That is, I come before Hashem as a representative of our nation – not for myself. Once a person has asked for everyone, he may add personal supplications, as long as he fulfills certain conditions (see Shulchan Aruch, O.C. siman 119). One example being at the end of Shemoneh Esrei when we say “Elokai, netzor leshoni mei’ra – My G-d, guard my tongue from evil… etc.” In general, though we use the plural form. In fact, the Gra in Sh’nos Eliyahu (Brachos 5:1) says that not only must we verbally ask in the plural form, we are not even allowed to think only about ourselves when we pray! But why not?

The Gemara (Brachos 30a) states that when a person prays he should always include himself as part of the community. Rashi explains that this will cause his prayer to be accepted. On a simple level, we can explain that one who includes himself with the tzibur will be answered in their merit, because the community usually has more merit than the individual.

However, I believe there is an even deeper reason why including ourselves with the tzibur helps our tefillos be accepted by Hashem. The whole concept of approaching Hashem in prayer is absolutely mind-boggling. How do we have the audacity to approach the Master of the Universe, who is holier and greater than anything we can possibly imagine, and expect that He is interested in hearing us? Only because Hashem tells us so in the Torah. “For who is a great nation that has G-d close to them like Hashem our G-d, whenever we call out to Him?” (Devorim 4:7). Hashem gave our nation the special privilege of turning to Him in prayer, and He has promised to listen to our prayers. And why did we merit this special closeness? Simply because He loves us, as stated throughout Tanach. The prophet Yirmiyahu (31:3) says in the name of Hashem: “I have loved you with an eternal love.” And Yeshaya (54:10) says even more: “For the mountains will depart and the hills will move, but My loving-kindness shall not depart from you, nor will My covenant of peace move away.”

Hashem’s love for our nation is so great that even though we sinned and were sent into exile, He still loves us. Hashem did not choose us because of our good deeds; rather, He has an unconditional love for us (Maharal, Netzach Yisroel, chapter 11). Therefore, even if we sin, He will not forsake us. On the contrary, He will make sure that we repent and perfect our ways, so that we will be worthy of Him dwelling amongst us.

A lengthy New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, portrays him as a spinmeister contemptuous of the foreign policy establishment who fed credulous journalists a misleading narrative to sell the Iran nuclear deal to the American people.

According to writer David Samuels, Rhodes oversaw a “war room” whose task was to sell the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to Congress ahead of crucial votes last fall that failed to kill the agreement.

“In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters,” Samuels wrote.

“We created an echo chamber,” he quoted Rhodes as admitting. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

According to Samuels’s piece, the strategy included the White House’s TheIranDeal Twitter feed. Rhodes used groups like the Ploughshares Fund, which advocates the elimination of nuclear weapons and lobbied for the JCPOA.

“We drove them crazy,” Samuels quotes Rhodes as saying of the opponents of the nuclear deal.

Samuels wrote that Rhodes does not think much of the journalists the war room was using to spread its narrative: “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes was quoted as telling him. “They literally know nothing.”

According to the article, the administration put out a deliberately misleading narrative about the way the nuclear negotiations came about, linking them to the rise in 2013 of the “moderate” President Hasan Rouhani at the expense of “hardliners,” ushering in a supposedly new political reality in Iran.

In fact in 2012 State Department director of policy planning Jake Sullivan – a close aide of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – began holding talks with the Iranians in Oman and elsewhere, and he and Deputy Secretary of State William Burns drew up the framework of what would eventually become the JCPOA three months before the election that brought Rouhani to office.

Obama was known by insiders to have wanted to make a deal with Iran from the beginning of his presidency in 2009, but the idea that the rise of “moderates” provided the opportunity was “largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal,” Samuels wrote.

Samuels argued that the misleading narrative was useful for the administration.

“By obtaining broad public currency for the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their neighbors and with America, Obama was able to evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that his administration was making,” he wrote.

He characterized the approach as part of a broader strategy – helping the U.S. to extricate itself from existing regional alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey, with the ultimate goal of U.S. “disengagement from the Middle East.”

It’s an objective, Samuels said, that Rhodes – a determined critic of the Iraq war – views with a sense of “urgency.”

The profile depicts Rhodes as being comfortable in spinning the issue to the American people.

“I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” Samuels quotes Rhodes as telling him. “But that’s impossible.”

Rhodes holds a dim view of the foreign policy establishment, according to Samuels, referring to it contemptuously as “the Blob,” and including in that grouping Hillary Clinton; Obama’s first defense secretary Robert Gates; and “editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere.”

Before the Nazis occupied Hungary, my revered father, HaRav HaGaon Avraham HaLevi Jungreis, zt”l, was the chief Orthodox rabbi of Szeged, the second largest city in Hungary (not to be confused with Sziget).

As the clouds that had already engulfed other parts of Europe began gathering over Hungary, our home became a gathering place not only for Jews from our city but also for community leaders from the provinces. The discussions went on late into the night.

“What to do?” everyone asked.

The answer to that question, the conclusion to all such discussions, was always the same: “Surely the civilized world will never countenance such beastly evil. People will protest and Germany will find itself a pariah among the family of nations.”

I have often thought about those conversations. Why were we so blind to our horrific reality? Simply put, there was nothing much we could do. We had no weapons. We had no friends. There was no place to run. No place to hide. Hitler was determined to annihilate every Jew and he kept meticulous records of the Jewish populations in the countries he conquered.

Some years ago I was invited to speak at Fort Hood to over 40,000 U.S. military personnel. After one of my presentations some officers asked if they could invite their families to listen to me. They wanted their wives and children to know about the Holocaust. When I concluded my address, an adorable little girl stood up.

“Rebbetzin, Ma’am,” she said in her innocent sweet voice, “why didn’t you call the police?”

For a moment I was so astounded I could only stare at the precious child. What an American question! And then I explained to the little girl that there were no police we could call. The police were as cruel as the Nazis. In many cases they were Nazis. Jewish blood was cheap and could be shed with impunity. The question from the little girl continues to haunt me.

When the sinister darkness of the Holocaust finally lifted, I heard the cry “never again” – “never again will we allow such satanic evil to take place; never again.” Those words have become a clarion call. Tourists visit the sites where the death camps operated and nations build Holocaust museums to ensure that people learn from the past.

Under such circumstances, who could be a Holocaust denier? It’s there for all to see. And yet, incredibly, the Holocaust denial movement is alive and well.

But the problem extends well beyond out-and-out Holocaust deniers. Let a Jew raise his hand to defend himself and otherwise placid people suddenly become seething cauldrons of Jew hatred.

How can it be that those who protest Israel’s defensive actions always remain silent while thousands of missiles are launched at Israeli cities and villages? Or while terrorists blow themselves up as suicide bombers, taking with them innocent men, women, and children? Or, as we have seen almost every day for several months now, while Palestinians armed with knives go looking for Jews to stab?

Only when Israel strikes back do the nations of world finally find their voices.

Those of us who refuse to learn from our past can’t understand it. It’s not because we’re so naïve but rather because most Jews are liberals who want to believe in a higher civilization –one that shuns cruelty and barbaric savagery.

So what is the solution? The Torah that tells us we are “a nation destined to dwell alone…and not considered among the nations of the world.” But it is in that very loneliness that we find our strength. It is in that very loneliness that we turn to our G-d, for He is the only One who can help us – and the sooner we realize that the faster and the mightier our salvation will be.

We are one family united by our faith, our Torah. If our brethren are hurting, we all hurt. If their blood is being shed, we all bleed. If they are in jeopardy, we are all jeopardized.

We are Am Yisrael – one family, indivisible in ahavas Yisrael, in our love for one another. To us every Yiddishe neshamah is precious, and even vast oceans cannot separate us.

May we strive for the gift of shalom and may Hashem bless us with everlasting shalom. As we say in our daily prayers, “Hashem oz l’amo yitein, Hashem yevareich es amo bashalom” – Hashem grants strength to His people; Hashem blesses His people with peace.”