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Adapted from the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of righteous memory

In the Zohar it is written that in Egypt our speech was in exile. Therefore the redemptive process began when we finally started to groan and to scream. In Rebbe Nachman’s essay, Bo el Paraoh, he states, Moshe is the idea of silence which is higher than speech. Moshe is in confrontation with Pharaoh, who symbolizes the ultimate heresy. According to Rebbe Nachman, through the tune of the tzaddik … all heresy is annulled. A tune is a wordless voice, capable of expressing our deepest truths that we are unable to articulate verbally, reminiscent of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah.

By Caroline B. Glick

European and American perfidy in dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program apparently has no end. This week we were subject to banner headlines announcing that the EU has decided to enact an oil embargo on Iran. It was only when we got past the bombast that we discovered that the embargo is only set to come into force on July 1.

Following its European colleagues, the Obama administration announced it is also ratcheting up its sanctions against Iran� in two months. Sometime in late March, the US will begin sanctioning Iran's third largest bank.

At the same time as the Europeans and the Americans announced their phony sanctions, they reportedly dispatched their Turkish colleagues to Teheran to set up a new round of nuclear talks with the ayatollahs. If the past is any guide, we can expect for the Iranians to agree to sit down and talk just before the oil embargo is scheduled to be enforced. And the Europeans — with US support — will use the existence of talks to postpone indefinitely the implementation of the embargo.

There is nothing new in this game of fake sanctions. And what it shows more than anything is that the Europeans and the Americans are more concerned with pressuring Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear installations than they are in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

On Jan. 9, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Muhammad Ahmad Hussein, a close associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, stressed that all Israeli territory was Muslim Waqf land, had been since 637 C.E., and would be forever. The mufti made his comments at a rally for Fatah, which Abbas heads, that was broadcast on the official state television station. The mufti also called for the killing of Jews to hasten the Islamic Resurrection. His sentiments have become rooted in the Palestinian consciousness, with the help of the Palestinian Authority educational system, as a poll from July 2011 shows. Conducted by liberal-democratic American pollster Stanley Greenberg, an associate of former President Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the poll found that 73 percent of Palestinians viewed killing Jews as a springboard to Judgment Day. On March 27, 2010, Abbas declared: "Jerusalem and all its surrounding areas are holy lands promised by Allah. We must do everything we can to save them from the Jewish threat."

This principle of "holy land" is permanent, and is stronger than any leader or passing policy, and it applies to any land that was ever under Islamic control. It is an inseparable part of the legacy of Muhammad and Islamic law, especially at this time of the surge of the trans-national Muslim Brotherhood, which views Allah, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, jihad and martyrdom as the goal, the law, the leader, the way and the exalted aspiration. Their loyalty to the "holy land" obligates Muslims to "holy war" and the restoration of sovereignty in the Philippines, Thailand, parts of China, Kashmir, Chechnya, Israel, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere.

85% Israeli Jews say Jewish holidays important; over 50% support instituting civil marriage.

By YONI DAYAN
Israpundit
January 26, 2012

Israeli Jews are becoming more religious, according to a study published Thursday by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) in conjunction with AVI CHAI. The survey, entitled “A Portrait of Israeli Jews: Beliefs, Observance, and Values of Israeli Jews,” examined levels of religiosity of Israeli Jews in comparison with levels in the 1990s.

Based on its prequel studies undertaken in 1991 and 1990, the report stated that there was a marked decline in attachment to Jewish tradition and religion prior to the turn of the century, probably as a result of mass immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. The reversal of the trend, from 1999 to 2009, reflects either that the Slavic immigrants have been integrated into secular Israeli society or that that the orthodox and ultra-orthodox (haredi) communities are increasing in democratic weight.

In addition to finding that Israeli society as a whole has become more religious, the IDI study stated that both the orthodox and haredi communities “observe religious precepts more stringently than they did in the past.” This trend was not present in either of the “secular but not anti-religious” and “secular and anti-religious” groups, who have not become more religious since the 90s.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's speech at the U.N. on Sept. 23 and the Palestinian Authority’s education system reaffirm the fact that Jewish settlements within pre-1967 Israel – and not in Judea and Samaria – are the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In his U.N. speech, Abbas highlighted the “63-year-old occupation” since 1948. This message is reinforced throughout the Palestinian school education system. He heralded the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was established three years before the 1967 war and before the establishment of contemporary Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, as his supreme authority. Abbas denies that Jewish history has any roots between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Thus, the primary cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not the Judea and Samaria settlements, but the existence of the Jewish state.

Freezing Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria diverts attention away from the core cause of the conflict. Moreover, it constitutes an obstacle to peace by reflecting submission to pressure, thus fueling further pressure, radicalizing Arab demands, intensifying Arab terrorism and eroding Israel’s posture of deterrence, while the only peace that is possible is deterrence-driven peace.

In Jerusalem vs. Athens (1983), I raise the question of why (strictly speaking) there is no present tense in the Torah, only the “past” and the “future.” Here is the explanation.

The past tense signifies that which is completed, the future tense that which is incomplete. Strange as it may seem, however, the tenses may be reversed merely by prefixing the verb with the Hebrew letter Vav, formed, note well, by a basically vertical line (|). This reversal of the past and future tenses accords with the hermeneutical principle, “there is no sequential time in the Torah.” The Torah is beyond time, which is to say there is no before-and-after relation in any sequence of events (Babylonian Talmud, Psachim 6b). (One could learn this from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity which denies a before-and-after relation between spatially separated events for all observers in all states of motion.)

The denial of strict chronological sequence in the Torah extends even to the Prophets (as may be seen in Rashi’s commentary in Isaiah 1:1). To be sure, prophecy is oriented, or so it seems, toward the future. Only the “future” should be regarded as“having always been,” as an infinite set of potential or virtual existences or worlds (like an indeterminate “wave front” becoming a particle by introducing an “observer,” as taught by Quantum Physics). From this one conclude that the future is the source of history, of freedom, of life, of creativity!

The Weekly Standard 

Here's the full text of Mitch Daniels's response to the State of the Union, as prepared for delivery:

“The status of ‘loyal opposition’ imposes on those out of power some serious responsibilities: to show respect for the Presidency and its occupant, to express agreement where it exists. Republicans tonight salute our President, for instance, for his aggressive pursuit of the murderers of 9/11, and for bravely backing long overdue changes in public education. I personally would add to that list admiration for the strong family commitment that he and the First Lady have displayed to a nation sorely needing such examples.

“On these evenings, Presidents naturally seek to find the sunny side of our national condition. But when President Obama claims that the state of our union is anything but grave, he must know in his heart that this is not true.

“The President did not cause the economic and fiscal crises that continue in America tonight. But he was elected on a promise to fix them, and he cannot claim that the last three years have made things anything but worse: the percentage of Americans with a job is at the lowest in decades. One in five men of prime working age, and nearly half of all persons under 30, did not go to work today.

“In three short years, an unprecedented explosion of spending, with borrowed money, has added trillions to an already unaffordable national debt. And yet, the President has put us on a course to make it radically worse in the years ahead. The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy; it borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK
Jerusalem Post
January 23, 2012

By Eli Glogauer
Israpundit
January 23, 2012

In October 2011, I did not find out that captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was going to be released by reading newspaper articles or watching television reports, but because an entire street was closed off to allow for the singing and dancing brought on by the announcement. Many Israeli teenagers are in the army, making a noticeable difference in the lives of their neighbors. While American college freshmen learn how to read and analyze articles about weapons and warfare, 18-year-old Israeli soldiers are trained in how to protect their families and friends. It is not fair for the rest of the world to judge Israel for doing what it takes to survive. How can we understand the mentality of a country that survives despite a day-to-day struggle? How many other countries have to fight for recognition from their neighbors? How many had to fend off war on three different borders mere hours being declared a country? Would any other country be raked over the coals for standing up to the threat of nuclear war?

U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration have made it their mission to condemn any move that Israel makes to build settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Apparently, the Obama presidency considers Israel’s attempts to provide shelter for its citizens a more serious threat than the killing of political protesters in Syria or, say, the looming threat posed by Iran’s quest to acquire nuclear capabilities.

On Nov. 18, 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report that calculated that Iran currently has sufficient fuel to produce four nuclear weapons. Instead of concentrating on the threats posed by countries that are actually endangering the lives of civilians, Obama has chosen to keep the focus on the actions of a country that is only interested in doing what it considers best for its citizens and whose actions are not currently endangering lives. While on his crusade to turn the public against the only real democracy in the Middle East, Obama has failed to address the damage that he had a hand in causing: three years ago, Obama extended a hand of friendship to Tehran, stating that Iran should “have some right to nuclear energy, provided… that its aspirations are peaceful.”

For most people, the mere fact that Israel has periodic, multiparty elections convinces them that Israel is a democracy. This is naive. Democratic elections do not necessarily render the government of a country accountable to the governed, and without accountability, there is no genuine democracy. Nevertheless, although accountability is lacking in Israeli government, Israeli society is pretty democratic.

A better guide to understanding “democracy in Israel” is Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America. For Tocqueville, the decisive principle of America is not democratic elections or even its structure of government, but equality of conditions. Equality of conditions means that no citizen is bound by law to the station of his birth. Equality of conditions enables any citizen to rise on the socio-economic ladder. A person of humble origin may become a country’s leader. Hence, nepotism aside, there are no hereditary privileges or privileged class.

However, although a country may be democratic from a sociological perspective, it may also be very undemocratic from a political perspective. Thus, despite democratic elections, Members of the Knesset and those who become cabinet ministers are not individually elected by and accountable to the voters in multi-district or geographic-constituency elections. They can ignore public opinion with impunity—and do so even on matters involving the borders of the country. Recall how Likud Prime Minister Sharon adopted Labor’s policy of “unilateral disengagement,” a policy rejected by an overwhelming majority of the voters in the January 2003 election.

Now add Israel’s Supreme Court. Here is a self-perpetuating oligarchy whose rulings often violate the abiding beliefs and values of a large majority of Israel’s population. The popularly elected Knesset is excluded from the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court judges, whose appointment, as I have shown elsewhere, is very much controlled by the Court’s Chief Justice.

The conclusion is obvious: Israel’s structure of governance oscillates between prime ministerial and judicial despotism. This is why the title of one of my books is The Myth of Israeli Democracy.

"...We are witnessing the deliberate murder of a superpower."

By Alan Caruba
Accuracy in Media
January 23, 2012

By Dave Gaubatz
Family Security Matters
January 18, 2012

In the last five years I have personally visited over 250 Islamic Centers, Mosques, and Islamic Schools throughout America. The goal of my research has been to determine what Islamic leaders are teaching the young and innocent Muslim children. The findings are abhorrent, sad, unbelievable, frightening, and most disturbing is the fact our government is keeping this dangerous fact from the American people. Muslim children attending mosques and Islamic schools are being taught to hate America, our government, our military personnel, and its non Muslim population. In this article I will identify three significant mosques in America that are leading the way in teaching Muslim children to hate and to influence them to commit violent acts inside our country.

There is a paradox in Moshe Feiglin’s long-standing decision to compete with Binyamin Netanyahu for the leadership of the Likud Party.

Before discussing this paradox, let me make it perfectly clear that if I were asked ”Who do you prefer as Israel’s Prime Minster, Feiglin or Netanyahu,” I would unhesitatingly choose Mr. Feiglin. The mere fact that Mr. Netanyahu decided, on June 14, 2009, to endorse the establishment of an Arab state in Judea and Samaria utterly disqualifies him as Israel’s Prime Minister. I deem that decision treason—to say nothing of its being a sacrilege. But then, as a political scientist, I have to ask: “Why didn’t the Likud Party in the Knesset and beyond rise up, call for an emergency meeting of the Likud Central Committee, and demand Netanyahu’s resignation?”