January 21, 2016 Trump’s Inevitable Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Trump’s Inevitable

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

National Review: If Donald Trump handily wins Iowa, he’ll likely receive an endorsement from at least one Republican governor, and those two events could set him on a course to become the “inevitable” Republican nominee, Charles Krauthammer said tonight. “If Cruz loses Iowa, Trump wins convincingly, I think all he will need at that point is to have a single current establishment figure, meaning a sitting governor or a sitting senator endorse him,” Krauthammer said on Thursday’s Special Report. “If you get somebody today from the so-called establishment, who endorses him, I think it becomes a flood. At that point the dam breaks and you will get a rush of other establishment figures who will rally around him.” “And that could be the point at which he becomes inevitable as the nominee,” he added.

PATRICK BUCHANAN WRITES:

Is the Spectre of Trump (And Sam Francis) Haunting Davos?

The lights are burning late in Davos tonight.

At the World Economic Forum, keynoter Joe Biden warned global elites that the unraveling of the middle class in America and Europe has provided “fertile terrain for reactionary politicians, demagogues peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views.”

Evidence of a nationalist backlash, said Biden, may be seen in the third parties arising across Europe, and in the U.S. primaries.

But set aside Joe’s slurs–demagogues, xenophobia.

Who really belongs in the dock here? Who caused this crisis of political legitimacy now gripping the nations of the West?

Was it Donald Trump, who gives voice to the anger of those who believe themselves to have been betrayed? Or the elites who betrayed them?

Can that crowd at Davos not understand that it is despised because it is seen as having subordinated the interests of the nations and people in whose name it presumes to speak, to advance an agenda that serves, first and foremost, its own naked self-interest?

The political and economic elites of Davos have grow rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altars of globalization and a New World Order.

No more astute essay has been written this political season than that of Michael Brendan Dougherty in “This Week,” where he describes how, 20 years ago, my late friend Sam Francis predicted it all.

In Chronicles, in 1996, Francis, a paleoconservative and proud son of the South, wrote:

“[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interest and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better.”[From Household to Nation, March 1996 ]

What we saw through a glass darkly then, we now see face to face.

Is not Trump the personification of the populist-nationalist revolt Francis predicted?

And was it not presidents and Congresses of both parties who mired us in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, and negotiated the trade deals that have gutted American industry?

The bleeding of factories and manufacturing jobs abroad has produced the demoralization and decline of our middle class, along with the wage stagnation and shrinking participation in the labor force.

Is Trump responsible for that? Is Socialist Bernie Sanders, who voted against all those trade deals?

If not, who did this to us?

Was it not the Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats?

Americans never supported mass immigration.

It was against their will that scores of millions, here legally and illegally, almost all from Third World countries, whose masses have never been fully assimilated into any western nation, have poured into the USA.

Who voted for that?

Religious, racial, cultural diversity has put an end to the “bad” old America we grew up in, as we evolve into the “universal nation” of Ben Wattenberg, who once rhapsodized, “The non-Europeanization of America is heartening news of an almost transcendental quality.”

James Burnham, the ex-Trotskyite and Cold War geostrategist whose work Francis admired, called liberalism “the ideology of Western suicide.”

If the West embraces, internalizes and operates on the principles of liberalism, Burnham wrote, the West with meet an early death.

Among the dogmas of liberalism is the unproven assumption that peoples of all nationalities, tribes, cultures, creeds can coexist happily in nations, especially in a “creedal” nation like the USA, which has no ethnic core but rather is built upon ideas.

A corollary is that “diversity,” a new America and new Europe where all nations are multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual, is the future of the west and the model for mankind.

Yet, large and growing minorities in every country of Europe, and now in America, believe that not only is this proposition absurd, the end result could be national suicide.

And when one considers the millions who are flocking to Trump and Sanders, it is hard to believe that the establishments of the two parties, even if they defeat these challengers, can return to same old interventionist, trade, immigration and war policies.

For Trump is not the last of the populist-nationalists.

Given his success, other Republicans will emulate him. Already, other candidates are incorporating his message. The day Francis predicted was coming appears to have arrived.

Angela Merkel may have been Time‘s Person of the Year in 2015, but she will be lucky to survive in office in 2017, if she does not stop the invasion from Africa and the Middle East.

Posted in America, Donald Trump | Comments Off

Free Speech & Jewish Law

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

From New Jersey Jewish News:

Moderator Andrew Napolitano, a New Jersey Superior Court Judge from 1987 to 1995 and the current senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel, kicked off a broad discussion of First Amendment controversies with a question to Rabbi Shlomo Yaffe, dean of the Manhattan-based Institute of American and Talmudic Law.
“If there were no First Amendment would we still have the freedom of speech?” Napolitano asked him.
“Absolutely,” said Yaffe. “We know that God had freedom of speech. He spoke and the world came into being…. We have free will and the ability to express ourselves.”
First Amendment attorney Bruce Rosen of Florham Park was asked whether Kentucky’s Rowan County clerk Kim Davis was acting within her religious rights when she refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple.
“She had no business doing that,” said Rosen, although he questioned whether she should be jailed. “She took an oath — but should judges, when enforcing their decisions, use the most force necessary?”
“They ought to use as little force necessary as possible,” said New York University law professor Jeremy Waldron of Closter. “Of course we have to say, ‘The law must be obeyed.’ But there has to be some way for officials to at least absent themselves” when laws odious to their beliefs are being enforced.
Speaking of how talmudic law might apply in the Davis case, Yaffe said, “In general, Jewish law and tradition are extremely opposed to incarceration as fundamentally immoral unless it is to protect someone from inflicting real harm on another human being. There may be other sanctions and punishment” more appropriate.
Shifting the focus to the issue of hate speech, Napolitano showed a video excerpt of a talk by author Salman Rushdie, who defended the right of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish its broad attacks on religion. Rushdie spent years in hiding after his own writing offended Muslim clerics; 11 members of the Charlie Hebdo staff were murdered by Islamist gunmen in January.
Waldron defended the regulation of hate speech, which is stricter in France, Germany, and other Western democracies that have a “fear of intercommunal violence, fear that communities will erupt against each other, and this can be inflamed by a slow-acting poison.”
“What do you do,” asked Napolitano, “when an insular and discrete group — the Jewish people, the Catholics, whatever the case may be — cannot practice their religion because of the hatred generated by the use of free speech by people who don’t want their religious practices? Does that justify interference with their speech?”
“In my view it does,” said Waldron, “but it may be unconstitutional.”
Answering the same question indirectly, Yaffe said “Jewish law prohibits gossip.”
Napolitano reacted with amazement. “You gotta be kidding,” he said.
“The reason is, Jews are good at it,” said the rabbi. Then, as the laughter subsided, he said, “Jewish law and ethics cut across the grain of our discussion here because anything you say should be useful, helpful, and good.”
Asked to present “closing arguments” on their views of free speech, Waldron said, “People have a right to be protected from vicious defamations upon them on account of their religion. So if somebody says, ‘All Muslims are terrorists,’ we believe [Muslims] have a right to be protected against that defamation.”
“Freedom of speech is not free,” said Rosen. “There are consequences and blowbacks. The answer to speech that you can’t like or tolerate is more speech.”
“Each one of us should be asking ourselves, ‘What are you doing with this amazing gift of speech?’” said Yaffe. “Are you using it for empty, harmful, inane purposes, or are you using it to educate, to share, to argue, to disagree, to call out, to reveal the banality of misbehavior?
“Are you using your speech for responsible and good purposes, and if you are, Judaism demands that we create a society where the capacity for free speech should not be chilled.”

Marc B. Shapiro blogs:

Someone who read my earlier posts that discussed various punishments ordered by Jewish courts asked me about a quotation from R. Shlomo Yaffe, dean of the Institute of American and Talmudic Law, which offers a different perspective. See here. Before even getting to the particular quotation, let me say that I have real problems with some of what was said (or at least reported to have been said) at the recent conference on Jewish law reported on the link just given. For example, Rabbi Yaffe was asked, “If there were no First Amendment would we still have the freedom of speech?” The only correct answer has to be that without the First Amendment our freedom of speech will be endangered, and it could even become illegal to speak publicly about certain laws in the Torah (e.g., homosexuality), as this could be categorized as “hate speech”. But instead, Rabbi Yaffe replied: “Absolutely . . . We know that God had freedom of speech. He spoke and the world came into being. . . . We have free will and the ability to express ourselves.” How does this bit of darshanut answer a serious question about the importance of the First Amendment?

Professor Jeremy Waldron stated at the conference, “People have a right to be protected from vicious defamations upon them on account of their religion. So if somebody says, ‘All Muslims are terrorists,’ we believe [Muslims] have a right to be protected against that defamation.”[27] This is exactly why we need a First Amendment and why free speech must be protected. If it became illegal for some idiot to say, “All Muslims are terrorists,” then the next thing would be punishing people for saying that “Muslims are more likely to support terrorism than adherents of other religions,” and bans on the drawing of Muhammad’s picture and insulting the Prophet would not be far behind because after all, these are viewed by Muslims as defamations of their religion. (Muslims in Europe have already demanded that those insulting Muhammad not be protected by free speech laws.)

In other words, giving an inch in this matter would open up the floodgates and would be the end of free speech in America. As I already mentioned, this would also be a big problem for the traditional Jewish community, since it is only the constitutional guarantee of free speech that prevents “progressive” groups from legislating against “hate speech” found in religious communities. Based on the quote from Waldron, I would assume that he is a supporter of the “speech codes” that at one time were so popular at universities, until people began to realize the stifling effect they actually had on free speech. For those who are having trouble remembering what they learnt so many years ago: The First Amendment was created precisely in order to protect unpopular speech.

The particular quote from Rabbi Yaffe that I was asked about is the following: “In general, Jewish law and tradition are extremely opposed to incarceration as fundamentally immoral unless it is to protect someone from inflicting real harm on another human being.” What this means is that incarceration is only designed to protect the innocent, but Jewish law and tradition does not recognize incarceration as a means of punishment. This statement is simply false. Let us remember that incarceration must be seen as an improvement over the physical punishments I have detailed in earlier posts….

Jews always placed people in prison and Jews ran their own prisons. How else were they to punish criminals? Would you prefer corporal punishment or mutilation? Since when do we let the prisoner decide what his punishment should be? Different communities decided on different ways of punishing depending on what they thought would be more effective.

In medieval Spain they didn’t think that lashes were a good enough punishment, so they came up with even harsher physical punishments.

…So we should give lashes to white-collar criminals, including women? People who embezzle should be lashed? Sorry, that is not a sentiment that I share.

>>>Why should what the most appropriate punishments are be determined based on your “sentiments” rather than be based on Hashem’s sentiments?

Because there are no rules in the Torah regarding how to punish white collar criminals. This is for society at large to determine…

The man had no interest in being married to her. Refusing to give her the get was a punishment. This would just lead her to continue to commit adultery and the sin is much greater than if she would be divorced. Great poskim say that in such a situation the husband is obligated to give a get.

…Based on the comments and emails, I think it is fair to say that most people are shocked to see that e.g., dayanim refuse to order a sexual abuser or adulterer to divorce if that is what the wife wants. This is not something they were aware of. This is why the movie Gett made such an impact, since people were generally unaware of how the batei din operated and what was an acceptable ground for divorce…

In rabbinic literature רועה זונות generally means visiting a prostitute for sex, not running a business with harlots (although I did find one reference that used it in this way). The expression comes from Prov. 29:3…

There are loads of teshuvot dealing with a man who is a roeh zonot and it always means visits prostitutes…

I now know of a number of hasidic marriages in which husband and wife relate to each other not very differently than in non-hasidic marriages. They might not have known each other before they got married, but after marriage they have marriages built on trust. I know loads of American haredim and I don’t see any difference between their marriages and the marriages of non-haredim. In all the haredi marriages I know, trust is very important…

Again, it could be that the hasidim I know are themselves more modern (after all, they talk to me, host me in their homes etc. . . .) But I have to say, that the hasidic (non-chabad) marriages I know, and this includes Satmar, appear to me to be loving marriages and not “arrangements”. Of course there are plenty of hasidic marriages where this is not the case, but there are plenty of non-hasidic marriages where this is also not the case.

For those of us who didn’t grow up in that world, it all seems very foreign and would never work for us, but if you grow up in that system, you have different expectations. I think Shulem Deen’s recent memoir is relevant in this regard…

Originally I had an entire paragraph dealing with it which I wrote two months ago. I went on about how the IBD is being attacked while no one is saying a word about how two haredi rabbis have annulled a marriage, doing something much more radical than was ever done by the IBD. I had to delete it because in the last month no one cares anymore about the IBD and we see that many big haredi rabbis are indeed going after Rabbis Greenblatt and Kamenetsky.

As for the substance of the annulment, going only on what I have read (and maybe there is other information not publicly available), it appears to be a complete perversion of all halakhic standards. There is no way one can annul a marriage in this fashion without legitimizing the Rackman beit din. But what can they do now? Tell the woman she has to divorce her new husband? This would be a great personal tragedy for someone who has already suffered a great deal and she only got married because she was told it was OK. Also, think what it will do to emunat hakhamim if the head rabbi of the Agudah has to publicly declare that he made such a terrible mistake.

I have no information other than what I have read in the press. My judgment that this appears to be a terrible error is based on what I have read, and also based on what R. Hershel Schachter has recently said about the case. I hope that this is incorrect and that more information comes out. But if not, all it shows is that even great people (and R. Kamenetsky and R. Greenblatt are both great scholars with decades of good deeds and service to the Jewish people) can also make a serious mistake. It should be enough to point this out without trying to destroy them. Obviously there are troublemakers out there going from rabbi to rabbi getting them to sign documents attacking R. Kamenetsky and R. Greenblatt. Are these people doing this to uphold halakhah or to settle partisan scores?

But we saw this with what they did to R. Goren also. Unfortunately, halakhic disagreements turning into character assassination is nothing new.

See here at 33:30 where R. Schachter states that R. Greenblatt admits that he made a mistake because he didn’t have all the information.

So this should be the end of the matter since the posek admits he was wrong (misled)

Posted in Censorship, Marc B. Shapiro, Orthodoxy | Comments Off

The Agunah Problem, Part 1; Incarceration and Free Speech

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Marc B. Shapiro blogs:

As for the problem of women not being able to get a divorce because the man refuses, there are some important points that must be made which I don’t think everyone is aware of. Today, many people assume that a woman who wants out of a marriage, for whatever reason, has that right. After all, a woman is not a prisoner and a husband should not force her to be married to him if she doesn’t want to. However, this viewpoint is very much a modern approach.[6] If you look at the standard halakhic sources you will find that there is no obligation for a man to give his wife a divorce just because she wants it. Ever since R. Gershom, the same situation is also found in reverse, namely, a husband is not allowed to divorce his wife against her will just because he no longer wishes to be married to her. This approach to ending marriage is very much in line with how secular society use to operate before the introduction of no fault divorce…

However, it is the view in opposition to Maimonides that became the standard position, and it is this view that is recorded in the Shulhan Arukh[9] and followed by batei din. According to this approach, even if a woman says she can no longer live with her husband, he is not obligated to give her a get. What this can lead to is most vividly illustrated by the movie Gett, available here to watch for free for Amazon Prime members.

I have been told that the Beth Din of America operates on the principle that if one of the parties wants a divorce, for whatever reason, and there is no chance for reconciliation, then the Beit Din will instruct the other spouse to comply. But this is not how many other batei din operate. We have to be honest and acknowledge that the problem many women face is not because the dayanim are cruel or anti-women, but that it is Jewish law itself, or rather an interpretation of Jewish law, that is preventing them from receiving their divorces.

I feel it is necessary to stress this since we can now better appreciate why certain rabbis have attempted to find solutions within Jewish law to the contemporary agunah problem. Many on the right don’t see why this is necessary and why batei din cannot just follow Jewish law as it has operated until now instead of looking for “solutions”. These people might not realize the difficult situation this puts women in, a situation that might have been tolerable years ago but for more and more Orthodox Jews that is no longer the case. On the other hand, many on the left think that it is a simple matter to solve the agunah problem, and that it is just cruel and insensitive rabbis preventing this. This too is a distortion as the rabbis’ hands are often tied by halakhah, and this remains the case no matter how much of a “rabbinic will” they have.

Let me illustrate what I am talking about. As an example of how sentiments have changed over the centuries, here is a passage from R. Hayyim Benveniste that I have cited in two previous posts. In Keneset ha-Gedolah, Even ha-Ezer 154, Hagahot Beit Yosef no. 59, in discussing when we can force a husband to give a divorce, R. Benveniste writes:

ובעל משפט צדק ח”א סי’ נ”ט כתב דאפי’ רודף אחריה בסכין להכותה אין כופין אותו לגרש ואפי’ לו’ לו שחייב להוציא

Can anyone imagine a posek, from even the most right-wing community, advocating such a viewpoint today? The logic behind this position, as can be seen by examining the original responsum in Mishpat Tzedek, is that even if the man is running after her with the knife, we don’t assume that he will actually kill her. He must be doing it just to scare her, and that is not enough of a reason to force him to divorce her, or even to tell him that he is obligated to do so. And if we are wrong, and he really does kill her? I guess the reply would be that this isn’t anything we could have anticipated even if we saw the knife in his hand. This example shows how some poskim from prior generations made it extremely difficult for women to receive a divorce…

It is simply not true that a woman unable to obtain a get from her husband “for whatever reason” is an agunah. I wish it were different, and I wish Maimonides’ ruling carried the day. But that is not the case, which means that an agunah has to be defined as one whose husband refuses to issue a get after ordered to do so by a beit din.

R. Zvi Hirsch Grodzinski, perhaps the leading talmudist and halakhist in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, discusses a case where a woman committed adultery (or only claimed to have done so; the matter is not clear, but for this post I am assuming she actually did commit adultery). She then wished to get divorced from her husband.[11] She must have had some connection to Judaism as she requested that her husband give her a get. I think most people would assume that in such a case, where the woman will no longer be living with her husband, that it is essential that the husband give her a get so that she is no longer committing adultery. With the get she can repent and move on with her life. Hopefully, she will be able to find another husband and live as pious Jew.
Yet just because most of us might intuitively feel this way, this does not mean all halakhists have to agree. R. Grodzinski concludes that the husband cannot be forced to give the get. To use today’s popular language, this meant that he was allowed to keep her as an agunah for the rest of her life. Of course, R. Grodzinski would deny that the woman was an agunah. Despite the woman’s adultery, I think most people will still be troubled reading the following words from R. Grodzinski, from which we see that he saw no problem in condemning her to live the rest of her life without receiving a get.
כ”ש בנ”ד שנאסרה עליו ע”י זנות דאין כופין אותו לגרשה בגט, כיון שהיא נתנה אצבע בין שיניה, וגרמה לעצמה במעשיה הרעים והוא לא עשה און, ולמה נכוף אותו ליתן לה גט, לא תבעל לו ותוצרר אלמנות חיות כל ימיה, הלא אינה מצווה על פו”ר, וכי בשביל שהיא הולכת אחרי שרירות לבה וזנתה תחתיו נכוף אותו לגרשה
I don’t think you need to be a member of JOFA or Open Orthodox to be upset by what R. Grodzinski writes, as it probably closed off any chance of repentance on the part of the woman. He also views the withholding of the get as a suitable form of punishment for the woman. Not being obligated in the commandment to procreate, she can be kept a “living widow”…

What is a woman supposed to do in a case like this? After learning that her husband frequented prostitutes she had even more reason not to want to return to him, and yet the beit din held that in such a case the husband did not have to give her a get since her initial reason for wanting to be divorced was something else. Again we see that a man can, if he chooses, prevent his wife from being free.
Also of interest are the three reasons the court suggests why a woman would not be happy if her husband was going to prostitutes: 1. He will be spending their money, 2. He will be using them as his sexual outlet and will not want to sleep with his wife, 3. He could pass on a disease to her.
While it is true that a wife’s anger will include reasons 1 and 3, these are not the main reasons she will be upset. For example, the husband could be as rich as a former New York governor and have used protection, yet the wife will still be devastated for the simple reason that his actions were a terrible breach of trust. More than anything else, modern marriages are based on trust. As for reason 2, it is hard to imagine that there is any modern woman who, if she discovered that her husband was going to prostitutes, would want to be divorced because of this reason…

These reasons undoubtedly reflect a different understanding of marriage, one which does not see the modern romantic notion of trust as the centerpiece of a marriage. Since people’s psychology has changed over the centuries, I don’t think that the reasons offered by medieval authorities operating in a completely different environment can determine what modern women will regard as “deal-breakers” when it comes to marriage. If a modern woman has different expectations of what marriage is than what people had years ago, I would think that this must be taken into account by a beit din in determining what situations require ordering the husband to give a get.
In fact, Sefer Agudah cites another reason why the court compels a husband visiting prostitutes to divorce his wife.

…It deals with a man who committed adultery with a married woman, and his wife therefore wishes to divorce him. In such a case, contemporary Orthodox Jews of all persuasions would agree with the general view in society, that if the wife can forgive her husband and remain married, then it is no one else’s business what goes on in their lives. However, contemporary Orthodox Jews would also agree that if the betrayal is so devastating that the wife will never be able to trust her husband again, and she wants a divorce, then the husband should be required to give the divorce. To paraphrase what the Sefer Agudah said, this is certainly on the level of the things for which the Mishnah in Ketubot requires a husband to grant his wife if she requests if.
Yet the Hakham Zvi refuses to require the man to issue the divorce. One of the things he says is that even the Sefer Agudah would agree that in order to force a divorce the husband has to have been given prior warning not to visit prostitutes. In the case the Hakham Zvi was asked about, he says that there is another reason not to require the get, and that is that the man claims that he wishes to repent. So here we have a case where a man commits adultery, his wife cannot accept this and requests a divorce, and the man refuses and says he will repent. Today people would say that this woman is an agunah, as she is trapped in a marriage she doesn’t want to be in with a husband who cheated on her. Yet the Hakham Zvi rules in favor of the man that no divorce is required…

I think people will be shocked to learn that a woman who wants to divorce her husband because he went to a prostitute is being told by the beit din that she must stay with him if he promises not to do it again. But this only illustrates that the so-called agunah problem is inherent to the halakhic system, which according to the dominant interpretation does not recognize that a woman should be able to exit a marriage if she feels she can no longer live with her husband. There are literally hundreds of examples in the responsa literature and beit din proceedings where a woman is told that even though she wants to be divorced, there is no obligation on her husband to give her a get. Isn’t this where poskim must put their efforts to see if changes can be made? What a woman will tolerate today is not necessarily the same thing as what the Sages and earlier poskim assumed, and this is a point that was already made by halakhic authorities in prior generations.[19]
To further illustrate my point, R. Joseph Karo states that even if a husband is beating his wife he can’t be forced to divorce her.[20] She will obviously live apart from him, but R. Karo does not accept the view of some earlier authorities that the husband can be forced to issue her a divorce. This means that the woman is what we would today call an agunah, but the problem we are facing is not just about an evil man but arises from the halakhah itself. As we have just seen, according to R. Karo it is the halakhah that prevents us from forcing a husband to divorce his wife, even if he beats her…

There is another noteworthy decision given by the Supreme Rabbinic Court, again consisting of Rabbis Yitzhak Nissim, Bezalel Zolty, and Yosef Shalom Elyashiv.[24] The case was that a married man left his first wife and married another wife. The problem was that he never divorced the first wife, making him a bigamist. Furthermore, he refused to give his first wife a get. The woman therefore turned to the Beit Din asking them to force him to do so. The conclusion of the Beit Din was that while in this case, as opposed to the ones we saw earlier, the man was indeed obligated to divorce his wife, nevertheless the Beit Din could force him to do so. Since the Beit Din ruled that he was obligated to give the get, his not doing so would make the woman an agunah in the eyes of the court. But since the Beit Din felt that it was unable to force the man to issue the get, who knows how long (maybe her entire life) the woman was forced to remain an agunah. Unfortunately for the woman, R. Shaul Yisraeli, also a member of the Supreme Rabbinic Court, was not one of the dayanim in this case, since he wrote to R. Elyashiv arguing that the court should indeed force the husband to give the get…

R. Weinberg was asked about a man who was sent to jail for sexual abuse of young girls. Understandably, his wife wanted a divorce. The rabbi didn’t know what to do and therefore wrote to R. Weinberg. He mentions that he never had to deal with a case of sexual abuse and doesn’t know how to relate to it from a Jewish law perspective. He also assumes that there was no actual sexual relations but only fondling.
R. Weinberg, relying on the Hakham Zvi, states that the husband cannot be forced to divorce his wife, since he was never warned and there was no testimony in a beit din. He also says that one cannot rely on testimony given in a secular court, and makes the valid point that during that time, the Nazi era, there was a great deal of anti-Semitism and pleasure in making the Jews look bad.
None of this could have been of much comfort to the woman. We have no idea about her relationship with her husband. She might have already suspected him of being a pervert, or when he was arrested it might have clarified certain things that she wondered about. She might have confronted him after the arrest and seeing his reaction to her questions she knew he was guilty. Whatever the case, she no longer wished to remain married to someone she believed to be a sexual abuser. R. Weinberg was as open-minded a posek as one could imagine, yet even he was of the opinion that the husband could not be compelled to divorce his wife.
Today, if someone accused of sexual abuse refused to issue his wife a get, rabbis in the United States would call for protests in front of his house. Yet R. Weinberg does not see this as warranted. I think one of the most difficult things for people to grasp in his responsum, and in that of the Hakham Zvi, is the need for the husband to be warned. We are not talking about sentencing him in a beit din, where warning is a technical requirement, but whether or not the woman wants to live with him any more. In the two cases we have just seen, the issues of concern to the wives are one man’s visits to a prostitute and the other’s sexual abuse of children. Neither wife cared if her husband was “warned” in beit din since the offense is the same to her either before or after the “warning”.

Posted in Divorce, Marc B. Shapiro | Comments Off

Is There A Political Candidate For President Who Will Put America First?

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Michael Scheuer writes:

Donald Trump: This candidate has given few details about his views on foreign policy, save that he will be tougher on Mexico and China, will deport all illegal aliens and close the border, and will stop making the kind of free trade agreements that kill U.S. manufacturing and so the ability of lower-income Americans to move into the middle class. He also suggested that if America is forced to go to war to defend itself he will use U.S. military forces to annihilate the enemy. He has given no indication that he would intervene abroad unnecessarily or launch offensive wars, like those in Iraq and Libya. All of this sounds good, but he must speak more clearly and with conviction if he wants voters to believe that he will — unlike his Republican and Democratic competitors — make foreign-policy decisions solely on the basis of what is best for America’s relatively few and never abstract national interests. What is most intriguing and encouraging about Trump is that he is not politically correct, he is admirable in his ready combativeness, he speaks like an American not an effete and clueless Ivy-League theoretician, and he is making enemies of America’s most dangerous internal enemies. On the last point, watch Fox’s Brett Baier and his usually excellent “Special Report” each evening and there you will see George Will and Charles Krauthammer twist every question posed to them in a way that permits them to defame and pour vitriol on Trump. And then listen to one of the Grand Masters of disloyal Israel-First-ism, Bill Kristol, who has long passed the apoplectic stage in his hatred of Trump and his staying power in polls of Republican voters. Finally, look at the large number of former U.S. general officers who have endorsed Jeb Bush. These men and their still serving colleagues have lost every war America has fought since VJ Day in 1945, and not one has shown any qualms about getting their young Marines and soldiers killed or maimed in wars they know their president does not intend to win. Overall a candidate that has deliberately and enthusiastically made enemies of the war-mongering and interventionist Republican and Democratic establishments, America’s worst domestic enemies, and a gang of decrepit and lick-spittle generals is surely worth careful, open-minded, and probably favorable consideration.

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School Integration? Not in Israel

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

If I had kids, I would want to raise them in an Orthodox Jewish cocoon.

My expectation is that every group has the same rights as my group. What’s wrong with whites wanting to raise their kids in white schools? Or Chinese wanting to send their kids to Chinese schools?

I prefer to live in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. Why shouldn’t whites prefer to live in white neighborhoods?

I would want to raise my kids in an Orthodox sheltered environment. I prefer, most of the time, not to navigate diversity. I prefer people like myself. Most people prefer to live, marry, work, worship and socialize with their own kind.

From New Observer Online:

Last week’s attempt by delegates at the Modern Language Association Convention in Austin, Texas, to condemn Israel for having racially segregated schools, has once again highlighted the US Jewish lobby’s hypocrisy on the topic.
An opinion piece in the LA Times newspaper by Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, titled “Why Israel’s schools merit a US boycott” revealed that Israel maintains two separate educational systems for its citizens—one for Jewish children and another for the Palestinian children.
This structure, he said, “reinforces the profound segregation of Israeli society in everything from matters of citizenship and marriage to housing rights.”
In addition, he said, Israel invests three times as much on a per capita basis in the education of Jewish children than Palestinian children.
“The consequences are obvious,” he wrote, “Schools for Palestinians in Israel are overcrowded and poorly equipped, lacking in libraries, labs, arts facilities, and recreational space in comparison with schools for Jewish students.”
Furthermore, he continued, “Palestinian children often have to travel greater distances than their Jewish peers to get to school, thanks to a state ban on the construction of schools in certain Palestinian towns.”
A November 2013 article in the Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post confirmed that Israel has racially segregated schools. The article, titled “Terra incognita: Is separate education working in Israel?” said that of the 2,008,100 students in Israel in 2013, the “percent of students studying in mixed Arab-Jewish schools is effectively 0.”
The article went on to quote Catherine Rottenberg, an assistant professor at Ben-Gurion University, as saying that “even though 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab, Jewish and Arab children rarely if ever get to know each other as they grow up. They go to separate schools, play in different neighborhood playgrounds…”
The Jerusalem Post article went on to explain that this racially-segregated school system is enshrined in Israeli law: “When the Knesset passed a Compulsory Education Law in 1949, it instituted a segregation of the education system into an Arab-only system for Arabs, and a segmented Jewish system of religious, secular, and other streams for Jews.”
The system was supposed to be “separate but equal,” but, as the Jerusalem Post article admits, “The prime minister’s special consultant S. Dabon told him in 1957: ‘What is the goal of Arab education? It can be assumed: education of its citizens benefits both the state and themselves, and so that they should not constitute a fifth column or active potential for surrounding enemies.’”
This school segregation even extends to the so-called “Falasha” or “Ethiopian Jews,” the Jerusalem Post article goes on to admit.
“We’ve even seen cases of schools that became almost entirely Ethiopian, or catered exclusively to the children of foreign workers,” it says.
The Israeli Ynet news service, in an article published only in Hebrew (but which can be translated using internet tools), announced that even kindergarteners in Tel Aviv attend racially segregated schools.
Ynet said that the city authorities had built a whole new set of preschools for black children after Jews threatened to keep their children at home rather than allow them to go school with the African non-Jews.
Israelis have, of course, the right to maintain their own schools and educational system. There is nothing wrong with this—and in fact it is a sign of a healthy community that wishes to maintain its own cultural and racial identity.
However, in America, all Israel-supporting Jewish organizations are firmly against segregated schooling, and always lead the attack on any whites who even dare suggest such a thing for Europeans.
For example, Jonathan Greenblatt’s Anti-Defamation League (which is supported by all official Jewish organizations in the US, religious and secular alike), has a special campaign devoted to attacking any last vestige of school segregation—even when it is simply the result of geographic isolation and a lack of nonwhites in a school district.
In a section titled “60 Years Later, the Legacy Unfulfilled,” the ADL website says that the “promise of equal access to quality education remains unfulfilled.”

Posted in ADL, Israel | Comments Off

Did A Serial-Killer Set Up Steven Avery?

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

This makes sense.

Observer: Remember that one time I asked if true-crime stories like Making a Murderer–the Netflix doc centered on the bizarre murder of Wisconsin’s Teresa Halbach, for which Steven Avery is still in prison— lead to dangerous, outlandish theories based on much speculation and little evidence?

Well, here. we. go.

John Cameron is a former police sergeant and FBI cold case task force worker, who has the arrest of at least one child killer/cannibal on his resume. In recent years, Mr. Cameron has been documenting the history of Edward Wayne Edwards who, according to Cameron, has been killing for 66 years, each time framing a guiltless person for the crime. Now officially, Mr. Edwards has been convicted of five murders. There is a theory, however, he committed many, many more between 1945 and 1996, including the Zodiac Killer murders.

So what are we looking at in terms of evidence? For one, Mr. Wayne Edwards was living about an hour from Mr. Avery when the murder took place. He had also already committed a murder in Wisconsin, in 1980, when he took the lives of Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew. Furthermore, Mr. Cameron posits Mr. Edwards had a habit of committing murders on Halloween, the night Teresa Halbach appeared, and of showing up at the trials of his victims. Mr. Cameron believes he spotted the serial killer in this photo, a still from Making a Murderer‘s six episode.

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JJ: Jewish leaders pledge to restore ethical behavior

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

This effort won’t make much of a difference. Jewish leadership has historically been based on wealth and scholarship. Selecting leadership primarily for “goodness” is probably not evolutionarily advantageous.

Jewish historical patterns aren’t going to change on a dime.

Also, consider the many competing obligations of a Jewish leader. He has obligations to Jews, to his funders, to his sect, and to his peers. A rabbi who’s a great fundraiser but has some ethical problems is not usually going to lose his leadership position. Sexual problems did not remove King David and many other Jewish leaders over the years. Jews are more tolerant of these ethical foibles than white Protestants.

In my experience, the most charismatic rabbis with the most devoted followings are running some kind of scam. Think about the Museum of Tolerance and the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the ADL and the SPLC. They fundraise by running a scam (scaring old Jews that the Cossacks are coming).

Jewish Journal:

A national effort is underway to restore ethical behavior to a Jewish community that has been tarnished by high-profile scandals — clergy and other leaders engaged in sexual abuse, mikveh voyeurism and more.
“Declaration on Ethics in Jewish Leadership” began circulating among Jewish leaders last month and outlines 10 ethical principles expected of Jewish organizations. The letter has since drawn signatures of more than 350 Jewish leaders, including approximately 30 from Los Angeles.
Local supporters include Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR; Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills Senior Rabbi Jonathan Aaron; Leo Baeck Temple Senior Rabbi Ken Chasen; Rabbi Morley Feinstein of University Synagogue; Rabbi Noah Farkas of Valley Beth Shalom; Isa Aron and Rabbi Rachel Adler, professors at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles; and Rabbi Mark Borovitz of Beit T’Shuvah.
Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., and a member of the committee that authored the declaration, said in a phone interview that it’s time to ask some tough questions.
“There has been evidence of ethical lapses among Jewish leaders and I think the question to ask is, ‘Are there more ethical failings in our time or are they simply being reported more often thanks to the good work of investigative journalists and thanks to a greater willingness of people to act as whistleblowers?’
“I don’t know the answer to that. The fact these scandals are being exposed is important because sunshine, they say, is the greatest disinfectant. The more these things are exposed, the greater likelihood they will come to be regarded in the community as unacceptable.”
The declaration’s authors’ efforts began this past summer, when New York’s The Jewish Week published a letter by Susanna Heschel, professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College, about Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt. He is a New York rabbi who took young, naked boys to a sauna but nonetheless has remained the leader of his synagogue, Riverdale Jewish Center. Its publication prompted Medoff to contact Heschel about doing something about scandalous activity in the community, and they worked on the declaration together.

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Racial bean-counting is making schools unsafe

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

New York Post:

Black students misbehave more often. Tragically, school administrators are so fearful of saying it that they’re being intimidated into ceding control of classrooms to violent, disruptive students.

That’s the story in New York City, where serious crimes in schools are soaring. Forcible sex offenses are up 90 percent year over year, according to state statistics. Assaults with weapons causing serious injuries are up 69 percent.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has implemented the Obama administration’s policy of replacing suspensions with “restorative justice” — a kind of talk therapy — even for serious offenses such as insubordination, fighting, arson, assaults and marijuana possession.

The only penalty for a student at Adlai Stevenson High School in The Bronx caught with seven bags of marijuana on him was being handed a warning card that said, “Please bring this card home to your parent(s)/guardian so you can discuss the matter with them.”

Sounds more like “Leave It to Beaver” than 2016. It would be laughable — if it weren’t so destructive.

The de Blasio administration is touting a dramatic decrease in school suspensions. That’s only because the unruly students are allowed to stay in the classroom, continuing to disrupt. Last week, at a United Federation of Teachers meeting, 81 percent of teachers said their students are losing learning opportunities because of the disorder and violence.

No one believes black students should be treated differently from others. The notion that racist educators are to blame for more suspensions and expulsions of black students is preposterous, says Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald. Teaching is “the most liberal occupation.”

A primary cause of student discipline problems is the breakdown of families, Mac Donald says, which is especially severe among African-Americans. These households are missing fathers. When discipline isn’t enforced at home, students don’t behave in school, either.

Or on the streets. Mac Donald points out that the homicide rate among males age 14 to 17 — high schoolers — is nearly 10 times higher for blacks than for whites.

Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter group, is lambasting de Blasio for misrepresenting what’s happening in schools. City Hall claims school crime is down, but the pols are playing numbers games, mixing minor infractions with major crimes.

In terms of serious and violent crime, schools are more dangerous than before. Assaults are up a shocking 40 percent in one year.

Posted in Blacks, Crime, Education | Comments Off

More fallout from ‘crusading Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely’

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

Newsweek reports:

On October 9, 2015, a former Philadelphia altar boy reported to the office of Dr. Stephen Mechanick to undergo a court-ordered forensic psychiatric evaluation. It took nearly three hours because the two men had a lot of ground to cover. Daniel Gallagher is a slender 27-year-old with a wispy beard who is better known as “Billy Doe.” Under that pseudonym, he made national headlines in 2011 when he claimed to have been serially raped as a fifth- and sixth-grader at St. Jerome’s parish by two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher.

Gallagher subsequently became the Philadelphia district attorney’s star witness at two historic criminal trials. His graphic testimony helped convict three alleged assailants, as well as Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s former secretary for clergy, who was found guilty of endangering the welfare of a child. The monsignor became the first Catholic administrator in the country to go to jail for failing to adequately supervise a sexually abusive priest.

The Billy Doe rape story was so sensational it attracted the attention of crusading Rolling Stone writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely. She described Billy Doe in a 2011 story, “The Catholic Church’s Secret Sex-Crime Files,” as a “sweet, gentle kid with boyish good looks” who had been callously “passed around” from predator to predator. According to the charges recounted by Erdely, two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher “raped and sodomized the 10-year-old, sometimes making him perform stripteases or getting him drunk on sacramental wine after Mass.”

Erdely is the same reporter who later wrote about “Jackie,” a University of Virginia student who claimed she was gang-raped by seven men at a fraternity party. The 2014 story, which dominated headlines and cable TV news for weeks, was subsequently exposed as a hoax by “Jackie,” retracted by Rolling Stone and is now the subject of a couple of libel suits.

Judging from Mechanick’s report, Billy Doe has as much credibility as Jackie. In a 40-page report obtained by Newsweek, the forensic psychiatrist recounted Gallagher’s test results from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test known as the MMPI-2:

“The client is apparently immature and self-indulgent, manipulating others to his own ends…. He refuses to accept responsibility for his problems. He may have an exaggerated or grandiose idea of his own capabilities and personal worth. He is likely to be hedonistic and may overuse alcohol or drugs. He appears to be quite impulsive, and he may act out against others without considering the consequences…. Paranoid features and externalization of blame are likely to be present…. His manipulative and self-serving behavior may cause great difficulties for people close to him…. An individual with this profile is usually viewed as having a Personality Disorder, probably a Paranoid or Passive-Aggressive Personality. Symptoms of a delusional disorder are prominent in his clinical pattern.”

On top of bombing out on the MMPI-2, Gallagher admitted he lied and provided “unreliable information” to Mechanick about his substance abuse and psychiatric history, as well as his personal and medical background…

Talk to the eight defense lawyers in the criminal cases and they’ll all tell you Daniel Gallagher is a chronic liar, a junkie hustler and a confabulator. They can’t believe how lucky he’s been. After the DA got Gallagher out of jail so he could tell his stories of sexual abuse, he was arrested twice on charges of drug possession, including one bust for possession with intent to distribute 56 bags of heroin. But, thanks to his criminal lawyer, that heroin was thrown out of court as evidence. A subsequent drug bust, on charges of possession of a controlled substance, also disappeared after nine continuances in 18 months, when the DA let Gallagher into an accelerated rehab program for which he ordinarily would not have been eligible.

Today, Daniel Gallagher is a free man with a clean record living in Florida with his new wife, who’s expecting the couple’s first child. And, thanks to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, he’s also a multimillionaire.

Posted in Abuse, Journalism | Comments Off

Court Lets E.U. Nations Curb Immigrant Welfare

Posted on January 21, 2016 by Luke Ford

New York Times:

BERLIN — The European Union’s top court put its thumb on the scale of one of the bloc’s most divisive issues Tuesday, ruling in effect that richer countries can limit access to welfare benefits for citizens from poorer ones.

In the decision, the European Court of Justice ruled that a Romanian woman [gypsy] who had immigrated to Germany was not entitled to unemployment benefits because she had made no effort to find a job.

While the ruling is limited in scope, it may provide some political cover to governments, like those in Britain and Germany, that have complained of “welfare tourism” and faced strong opposition at home over immigration policies because of it.

The decision may also provide a safety valve of sorts to relieve pressures within the European Union over immigration, which have grown more profound during the long economic crisis and as the bloc has expanded to include poorer members, like Romania and Bulgaria.

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