Boker tov, Boulder!

I don't often ask that you sign a petition

In this case, we need the numbers.

At One Jerusalem, you should read this post -  Israel in Mortal Peril - and follow the link at the end to sign the petition(s) to protect a unified Jerusalem and to Stop Iran.

What is it about "Mortal Peril" that is not getting through our thick heads (on stiff necks)??  Enough is enough. Surely there are more than 100,000 defenders of Jerusalem and Israel out there wandering the innernut.  We need a thousand times as many.

Let us not succumb to Mortal Peril.  Do everything you can.  Right now, we need a burst of energy. Dig deep.  DO something.  At the very least, sign the petition, join One Jerusalem, and be counted.

 

 

Bibi, don't go wobbly! It's better that we should bang our heads!

I don't like the sound of this:

JERUSALEM (AP) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says international pressure against construction in West Bank settlements cannot be ignored, indicating that building could be curbed.

Netanyahu spoke to party members in the parliament Monday, after the U.S. vetoed a Palestinian-backed resolution in the U.N. Security Council calling the settlements illegal.

Netanyahu said: "We are trying to maintain existing construction, but we must understand that we are facing a very difficult international reality," suggesting that new projects might not be approved.

Netanyahu said Israel could continue "banging our heads into the wall, but that's not how I do things."

 

I simply cannot believe that Israel isn't able to defend the rights of Jews to build, to build houses, apartment blocs, schools, hospitals...  whatever we choose to build. What is the harm of a building, or even tens or hundreds of buildings?

I am not one who should be shooting off my mouth to the Prime Minister of Israel but it seems to me that the Nazis also presented us with a "very difficult international reality" - at a time when Jews had no country of our own -  but there is no question that people of good conscience should have opposed and resisted that reality... for obvious reasons.

Okay, so maybe Mr. Netanyahu is right that this International Pressure (with a capital P) "cannot be ignored."  So we will not ignore it, we will - and we must - resist  it!  I will not believe that we the Jewish People are wrong to believe that we have a Gd-given right to our own self-determination in our own land, the right to live freely - and to build - in our own country.  If the only way a "Palestinian" people can achieve self-determination is at the expense of our own, then it should be clear.  If one or the other must perish, then let it not be us.

What happens behind closed "diplomatic" doors that makes every Israeli prime ministers start to go wobbly?  What is the nature of this Pressure?

Bibi, with all due respect and with deep love for Israel and the Jewish People, I beseech you... tell them all to Go to Hell.  Who are they to pressure us?  Did you happen to read Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post this afternoon? 

The perception that the Obama administration's Middle East policy is feeble, if not pathetic, grows daily.

Here in America, support for Israel is higher than support for President Obama! He is skating on very thin ice politically, and has his hands full imposing Change and Transformation on an unwilling populace that grows more annoyed with him every day. So why should you, whose policies no one is calling feeble or pathetic, cave in to American demands? Why should you, from your position of strength, concede anything whatsoever to another, whose relative position is weaker?  

And if it is not Obama from whom all this Pressure emanates, then who?  Your neighbors?  They are in chaos.  Europe? They are slowly crumbling, old and in decline.  Israel, on the other hand, is young and strong.  And I would here invoke the protection of the Holy One, blessed be He, but I am not so sure you would find it convincing.  Perhaps you have lost track, behind those closed doors, of who we are. Who you are.  Perhaps you should invite Natan Sharansky to speak to you of resistance; maybe it is time for him to tell you to Fear No Evil.

You, Mr. Prime Minister, are the first line of defense for the Jewish People.  You must not falter, but instead re-member this prayer from your days in Tzahal.

He Who blessed our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob -- may He bless the fighters of the Israel Defense Forces, who stand guard over our land and the cities of our God, from the border of the Lebanon to the desert of Egypt, and from the Great Sea unto the approach of the Aravah, on the land, in the air, and on the sea.

May the Almighty cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down before them. May the Holy One, Blessed is He, preserve and rescue our fighters from every trouble and distress and from every plague and illness, and may He send blessing and success in their every endeavor.

May He lead our enemies under our soldiers’ sway and may He grant them salvation and crown them with victory. And may there be fulfilled for them the verse: For it is the Lord your God, Who goes with you to battle your enemies for you to save you.

Now let us respond: Amen.

 

It is the Lord your Gd Who goes with you... to battle your enemies for you... to save you.  And if you yourself cannot resist this "Pressure," then take strength from your Gd, from your people and from your Land, for all together we CAN resist it. And we must.   

If we do not, they will take every advantage of our perceived weakness and act quickly to shove a "Palestinian state" down our throats. They will try to take Jerusalem from us. They have no right.  Better we should bang our heads on the wall.

 

Arlene from Israel writes:

... now I think is the appropriate time for us to deliver a message to Prime Minister Netanyahu.  He needs to know that he has enormous support if he will stand strong in making decisions that protect Israel's rights.  Implore him not to cave to international pressure.  Remind him that he must believe in Israel's value to the international community.

Please! Keep this very short and very direct, in a gracious manner.  No speeches, no history lessons.

Fax: 02-670-5369 (From the US: 011-972-2-670-5369)

E-mail: [email protected] and also [email protected] (underscore after pm) use both addresses

~~~~~~~~~~

Then, if you are inclined, please send a similar message to the following members of the Septet. This must be done today, if they are meeting tomorrow.  Indicate that you are writing with regard to the Septet meeting on Tuesday, at which there will be a discussion about Quartet involvement in the peace process.

In all instances, when faxing from the US: 011-972-2 followed by the regular seven digits.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman

Fax: 02-640-8921   E-mail: [email protected]

Minister of Internal Affairs Eli Yishai

Fax: 02-666-2909  E-mail: [email protected]

Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon

E-mail: [email protected]  (no fax number available)

Minister Benny Begin

E-mail: [email protected] (no fax number available)

 

At this trying time...

Frank Woodruff Buckles of Charles Town, West Virginia has passed away of natural causes at the ripe old age of 110.  He was the last remaining American "doughboy" who served our country in World War I.

 

... we were the typical cocky Americans no one wants around

until they need help winning a war."

 

President Bush met with WWI veteran Corporal Frank Buckles in March 2008.

 

 

WASHINGTON -- Congressman Allen West (FL-22) released the following statement today on the passing of the last United States veteran who served in World War I: 

“With the passing of the last American veteran of World War I, we say goodbye to a generation of Americans who showed the world that the United States was the most powerful defender of freedom and liberty on the face of the earth.  Frank Buckles embodied the spirit of a true American. He lied about his age so he could enlist in the Army at the age of 16. Like millions of Americans who came before him, and millions more who followed, Frank Buckles fought for his country at the hour of its greatest need for his generation. He is the epitome of the American citizen soldier. 

At this trying time in our nation’s history, we remember men like Frank Buckles – what they stood for, what they fought for, and what they lived for.” 

 

According to this profile published last year, Mr. Buckles had one last wish: "that his countrymen build a national memorial for those for whom he is the last representative, the World War I veterans."

It is a worthy wish, and readers can learn more about the World War I Memorial Foundation at www.wwimemorial.org. 

 

A documentary about the life of Frank Buckles is to be called "Pershing's Last Patriot."  If you'd like to contribute, go to 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frankbuckles/americas-last-ww-1-survivor-the-story-of-frank-buc

 

UPDATE: According to Don Surber, our Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV-3) plans to introduce legislation later today to authorize that Frank Buckles should like in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Amen to that, and thank you Shelley!

58% Favor Government Shutdown

 

"This manchild should be arrested for driving the economy under the influence of liberalism." (theblogprof)

 

Rasmussen:

... most voters would rather have a partial shutdown of the federal government than keep its spending at current levels.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) [of likely voters] says it’s better to have a partial shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut....

80% of Republicans -- and 59% of voters not affiliated with either major party -- think a shutdown is a better option ...

 

Democrats? Not so much.

Who is the No. 1 Lender (in the world) to the U.S. Gubmint?

If you guessed China or Japan... Surprise!  You're wrong.  

 

Inflation! by Robert Romano

http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=3113

 

.... First, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized, which has already cost taxpayers more than $150 billion. Bear Stearns and AIG got their $210 billion. The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program followed, but quickly abandoned its mission of purchasing devalued mortgage-backed securities (MBS), instead deferring to the Fed, which printed $1.25 trillion out of thin air to buy the Government Sponsored Enterprise paper. GM and Chrysler too got their bailouts totaling $80 billion.

Then, when Barack Obama took office, the $821 billion “stimulus” spending bill was enacted, and the Fed began expanding its U.S. treasuries holdings, first by $300 billion.

All told, it was a gargantuan, unprecedented $3.5 trillion expansion of government.

At the time, critics, including Americans for Limited Government (ALG), predicted that once the economy began to move again, strong inflation would follow, weakening the recovery. In “The Sky’s the Limit,” published on Jan. 14, 2009, I wrote, “the prediction is not for instant inflation, but that once market-based thawing does apparently begin to ensue, and all the excessive liquidity finds its way into the marketplace, demand will spike in one area or another and thus so will prices. There will be another asset bubble. And then the politicians will dutifully declare that the ‘recovery’ has ensued.”

Fast forward two years, add into the mix the Fed’s $600 billion QE2, ObamaCare, the Dodd-Frank financial takeover bill, and over $2 trillion in new government debt since Obama’s first budget was adopted, and the seeds of inflation have not only been planted, but watered and fertilized.

 

The Fed’s share of the national debt has soared, from $475 billion in Jan. 2009 to more than $1.2 trillion today. That now makes the central bank the number one lender to the U.S. government in the world, more than China or Japan.

Overall, the Fed’s total balance sheet has expanded from $896 billion in Aug. 2007 when its latest round of quantitative easing began, to over $2.5 trillion today, a 187 percent increase.

 

Now, prices are following suit....

 

 

"The Arc of History Does Not Bend Itself"

 

Rick Richman contends that the President is Standing on the Sidelines of History:

 

In one sense, Barack Obama is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Famous for his eloquence, he has nothing to say about world historical events, emerging after a week in the latest one to announce he instructed his administration to provide “options.”  Elected as a clarion for change, he issues a let-me-be-clear statement that the United States has had nothing to do with change sweeping the Middle East. A prior Democratic president wanted every nation to know we would bear any burden to assure the success of liberty in the world; the current president can hardly bear the burden of speaking up about it.

It is a portrait of a president who wants nothing to do with foreign affairs if he can help it.... [as] emphasized in his West Point speech .... “the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own" ....

 

 

 

 

.... what we are witnessing in the Middle East today is something that may have started with Internet pictures of Iraqis voting with purple fingers in real elections.

 

 

The arc of history does not bend itself: it is people who bend it — and not those standing on the sidelines drinking slurpees.

 

 

Your prayers are needed

 

May Omri Menachem ben Esther - achinu (our brother) - be blessed with a refuah shleimah -- a full, complete and long-lasting healing and recovery of both body and spirit. Amen.

 

 

In defense of marriage

This is not about the United States statutes which constitute the law known as DOMA, recently called into question by the President's refusal, with his Attorney General, to defend it in court.  This is about the reality.

 

 Archie Granot: Jerusalem Ketubah

 

I've been reading Aryeh Kaplan's wedding guidebook called Made in Heaven, as quite soon The Husband and I will bring Yeshiva Son to the chupah, B"H.  It's an amazing book, so amazing in fact that I'm typing out a couple of pages (pp. 2- 5) here so that you can share in some of its wisdom.

 

Whenever a person meets the special "one," it is something of a miracle. Somehow, through a particular set of coincidences and chains of events, Gd has brought them together.  It is a miracle that will bring happiness to the couple, and in a sense, begin the creation of a new world.

In addition to the factors that brought the couple together, there are also the factors that brought them into existence.  These factors also trace their beginnings all the way back to creation.  Pondering this, we see every marriage a being initiated at the very beginning of time. Thus, every marriage is like a crossroads in eternity.

Consider for a moment the ancestry of the boy and girl.  Each one obviously has two partents... four grandparents... eight great-grandparents... 16 great-great-grandparents, and 32 great-great-great-grandparents.

The calculations then become a bit more difficult... But the results are fascinating.  A few minutes with a pocket calculator, and it becomes obvious that going back ten generations, a person has 1,024 ancestors.  Back twenty generations, he has 1,048,576 -- over a million!

After this, the numbers become almost absurd.  After thirty generations the number of one's ancestors would be ... over a billion.  After forty generations, it would be 1,099,511,627,776 -- over a trillion!

This last number is obviously absurd.  It is greater than the total number of people who have ever lived.  No one can have more ancestors than there are people.  This number simply means that the ancestral lines cross....

In any case, it takes fewer than forty generations for a person to find a number of ancestors that is greater than the total population of the world.  But forty generations is not an impossibly long time.  If we consider the average generation to be around 25 years, forty generations is only one thousand years.

This is a fascinating point.  If we trace a single person's ancetry back for a thousand years (actually, much less), we find that he can possibly be descended from every human being alive at the time.

To put it another way, it took [one thousand years and] the entire world population of one thousand years ago to provide the unique ingredients of heredity and environment that produced the unique individual as he is today....

... if one could look at the world of a thousand years ago, every person one saw would most probably be an ancestor of the young man or woman standing here today.  Every marriage that took place one thousand years ago would have led to this unique person as he is today.  If one man in the past had married one woman instead of another, his children would have been different.  This, in turn, would have affected all subsequent generations -- to this very day.

This has awesome implications.  A single marriage one thousand years ago could have changed every single person alive today.  A marriage is therefore an event of tremendous consequence.  It is a miraculous event in more ways than one.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ZALMY BERKOWITZ

Now let us assume that our boy and girl marry.  Assume that they have a "small" family of only two children.  And assume that each of their descendants also has a similar family, averaging two children.

We again see that the number of descendants doubles in each generation....  [such that] after ten generations this couple has 1024 descendants.... And after only 24 generations -- a mere 600 years -- there will be 16,777,216 descendants.  This is very close to the current world Jewish population.

Thus, when a couple decides to marry, it is much more than a personal decision....

.... The Torah tells us that Adam was a single individual.  Yet, all the billions of people alive today are descendants of Adam and Eve.  Every couple who marries is just like Adam and Eve. In the course of time, their descendants will number in the millions, forming a huge population.

It is obvious that if Gd is concerned with the destiny of even the most insignificant individual, then He is all the more concerned with the population of the entire world.  But every marriage can, in time, produce an entire world population. Creating a marriage is therefore just like creating an entire world.

 

Change & Uncertainty

Thousands flee the violence in Libya into Tunisia 

 

Scholar says Mideast unrest is a change the world should believe in - latest update 08:30 25.02.11

 

"I don't agree that there's nothing in the middle between either sending the Marines or wringing our hands. We're not going to send the Marines, that's not going to happen, but wringing our hands is morally and strategically problematic. If it takes declaring the Ghadafi regime illegitimate, an outlaw regime, if we say this unequivocally, not through the secretary of state, not through Vice President Biden, but through Barack Obama himself, standing up in broad daylight saying, 'Look, we've seen all we need to see from this regime, we don't think Muammar Gadhafi is redeemable, and we call upon the Libyan people to hold these criminals accountable' - this would make a tremendous amount of difference."  -- Fouad Ajami

 

This is interesting, as the very next day (yesterday) Pres. Obama declared that Gadhafi must leave Libya 'now'.

So when do we look for that "tremendous amount of difference" to start kicking in?  I hope it's immediately apparent. I wish I could be as optimistic as Ajami.  

As he explains it,

"Not everyone is Mohamed Atta," responds Ajami, referring to the young Egyptian who was one of the September 11 hijackers. "I don't think that I want to hold Atta as a rebuke to those young people, and what they are showing us - that they are willing to stay peaceful in revolution. And I can't tell them, 'Look, you are all pathological Mohamed Attas.' It's just completely cruel. Because people come because of the love of their country and because they've defeated the fear of death squads. I won't break faith with these people until I see something that calls for breaking faith with them. Before that, I won't condemn them. I saw Libyan people conquering fear with all they know about the cruelty of the monster Muammar Gadhafi and telling us they wish to be free of his tyranny. I don't think it's much of a choice. When you see history, and you see it to be noble, you have to respond. You can't hold previous afflictions and maladies against them. So my conscience is clear on this one - this is a good revolution."

 

I, on the other hand, never did have "faith with" these people, so there is nothing there to break.  And in my jaundiced view of history, I see very little that is noble... except perhaps the timeless Jewish doctrine of uncertainty to which Rabbi Wein lately referred.  

May we be blessed in these days of Change & Uncertainty to grasp "the essence of Torah values"

... that good is ultimately a wiser path in life than evil, that faith in God is a necessary component in personal and national Jewish life and that by raising generations of loyal and committed Jews, the certainty of Jewish survival and accomplishments will conquer the uncertainties of the circumstances of general human existence.

 

See also this interview with Bibi in The Telegraph (UK): "Hope must defeat anxiety."  :)

Guess What?

 

"Palestine has never been anything but a myth

used as a channel for Muslim anger."

The riots in Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Iran were not about a few Jewish villages on one side of a line on a map that has been redrawn half a dozen times in the 20th century.

The trouble with the Muslim world does not lie in the vineyards of the Judean Hills, the glass factories of Ariel, the academies of the revived Maccabean town of Modi'in Illit, the solar panel plants of Nazareth Illit, the dairies of Carmel or the fruit orchards of Gush Etzion....

-- Daniel Greenfield at Arutz Sheva

How does he do it?