The Homeland Security Program Made for Jewish Non-Profits

By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | July 13, 2012

While nothing in its policy guidelines say it’s supposed to be this way, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has distributed the vast majority of its nonprofit security grants to Jewish organizations.

During one three-year period (2007-2010), Jewish groups received 73% of DHS’ Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) awards. This share grew larger in 2011 (80%) and still larger in 2012 (97%).

In total dollars, Jewish institutions will take in $9.7 million in NSGP grants this year out of $10 million available.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano explained the results of the program’s grant awards this way: “Unfortunately there are risks attendant on the Jewish community that are not attendant on all other communities.”

The point of the NSGP funding is to help nonprofits at risk of terrorist attacks to better protect themselves. Orthodox Jewish groups in particular have done better than non-Orthodox Jewish groups in receiving assistance, presumably because they are more likely to be targeted by anti-Semitic movements. Of the 109 NSGP grants in 2012, 35 went to groups linked to Chabad, an orthodox Hasidic organization. A majority of the funding went to groups in the areas of New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Only a few the NSGP recipients this year were not Jewish. These included a San Diego church, a Planned Parenthood center in Washington and a New York City Catholic church.

DHS policy defines preferred recipients as those having “the highest risk of terrorism-related activity due to their ideology, beliefs and mission.”

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Obama assures Orthodox Jewish delegation of his “fidelity” to Israel

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | June 7, 2012

Nathan Guttman reports in the Forward that President Obama received a copy of George Washington’s historic letter to the Jewish community from a delegation of Orthodox rabbis and communal leaders visiting the White House on Tuesday. In the letter sent in 1790 to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President Washington promises that the United States would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” The political message behind the delegation’s gift was no doubt not lost on the current president, as he eagerly sought to dispel perceptions of his alleged “persecution” of the Jewish state. Writes Guttman:

According to accounts provided by participants in the closed-door meeting with Orthodox leaders, Obama, just as he did a week earlier with the Conservative movement, gave an open and detailed account of his relations with Israel, an issue that has won him criticism especially in Orthodox circles.

To the small group attending the meeting, Obama said there should be no doubt about his “fidelity” to Israel, adding a request to understand that disagreements do not necessarily impact the friendship between the nations.

When asked what lesson he had learned from attempts to broker an Israeli–Palestinian accord, the President responded that his key takeaway is that “it’s really hard” and that trying to get the parties to agree entails great potential for misunderstanding. Obama attempted to dispel the notion that he had pressured Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu unfairly and said that his administration was, in fact, “more attentive” to Israel than to the Palestinians.

Perhaps some group such as the Council for the National Interest should consider giving Obama a copy of another historic Washington document — his farewell address, in which the first president warns that:

a passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens, (who devote themselves to the favorite nation,) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.

The only problem is that they’d probably have to post it to the White House, as groups who fail to “devote themselves to the favorite nation” lack the access to the president — who reportedly only “dropped in on a meeting” the delegation was having with Obama’s Orthodox Jewish Chief of Staff Jacob Lew — afforded to those who do.

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Case dropped against authors, endorsers of gentile-killing manual

By Yossi Gurvitz | 972+ | May 29 2012

Israel’s attorney general decided to drop the case against racist book “Torat Ha’Melech” – since its racism was couched in religious terms.

The prosecution, backed by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, announced Monday that it is dropping the case against rabbis Yizhak Shapira, Yoseph Elizur, Dov Lior and Yizhak Ginzburg. The first two wrote a book called “Torat Ha’Melech” (The King’s Bible) two years ago. It is a religious treatise on the killing of gentiles – that is, when a Jew is permitted to kill a non-Jew. Lior and Ginzburg endorsed the book. It is worth noting that all four rabbis are state employees and belong to a state-funded yeshiva in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar.

The main theme of the book was that pretty much everything goes; in a notorious paragraph, Shapira and Elizur – rabbis in the infamousleery yeshiva, which the ISA (Shin Bet) tried to close down – claimed that

there is reason to believe harming children, if there is reason to think they will grow up to harm us, is permitted; and in such a case, the harm should be directed specifically at them, and not just while harming grown-ups.

For “harm,” read “kill.” There’s much more there, including permission to kill any gentile which does not follow the “Laws of the Sons of Noah,” which conveniently enough encompasses the vast majority of mankind, if by killing that gentile you intended to punish him for not following a divine mandate he was not aware of. All Christians, pagans and atheists are ipso facto non-Noah-observant, and can be slain at will.

Naturally, even in the decayed state of the only Jewish theocracy in the Middle East, this raised some eyebrows. An investigation went on leisurely, as the rabbis resisted being interrogated and the police was always leery of them. There were several large congregations of rabbis expressing support for the investigated rabbis; some of them would say afterwards they did not support the book in any way, but that they just could not stand aside while a rabbi was interrogated for preaching the torah. It is worth noting no serious rabbinical figure took on debunking the book, and, while it does contain some errors, is basically sound – according to Jewish law, that is.

The investigation has now petered out miserably. The most alarming part of the decision is its reasoning: Attorney General Weinstein noted that while Torat Ha’Melech contained severe racist terms, he did not have grounds for conviction, since the rabbis couched their incitement to racism in religious terms. Weinstein wrote that the law allowed for punishing someone who implicitly incited to racism was, well, his intention to such incitement, the law specifically exempted “religious studies” from prosecution.

Weinstein is certainly correct. The Israeli criminal code – article 144c(b) – is explicit: “publishing a quotation out of religious tracts and prayer books, or maintaining a religion’s practice, would not be considered a felony according to article 144b, so long as it was not done purposefully to incitement to violence.” Since Shapira and Elizur went to the trouble of writing 230 pages of incitement to racism, replete with scholarly quotations, they are off the hook.

Basically what this decision means is that Israel’s hate speech laws are dead. Jewish racism is religious by nature. This is not an accident: the Knesset was moved to write the prohibition against racism after Meir Martin Kahane was elected in 1984, and used it as a platform for vile racism – though it seems mild compared to what we’re seeing these days from Danon, Regev, and the rest of the litter.

However, the legislators found themselves in a quandary: outlawing racism without granting religion an exemption would basically outlaw Orthodox Judaism, which is racist to the core. A male Orthodox Jew thanks Jehova every morning for not being made a gentile; for not being made a woman; and for not being made a slave. (Women praise Jehova for “creating me as he saw fit.”)

The daily prayer Shmone Esre, repeated three times a day contains a curse against Christians and other heretics; and other prayers basically call for the fall of the gentile nations.  The Havdala, the prayer separating the Sabbath from the work week, contains the phrase “He who separated light from darkness, between holiness and the secular, between Israel and the nations.” There are various nasty and racist Jewish laws (Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef recently reminded us the only reason Jewish doctors are allowed to treat gentiles on the Sabbath is for fear of being sacked if they won’t), which would be illegal to impart if the law was to have any teeth.

So they had to grant religion (read: Orthodox Judaism) an exemption. By doing so, they fatally weakened the law. It became so brittle, even Kahane voted for the law which was supposed to outlaw him.

While this was the law for some 25 years now, the prosecution did everything it could to avoid testing it. There is only one rabbi I can think of, Ido Alba, who was prosecuted for violating it; he wrote a book named “an investigation into the religious edicts regarding the killing of a gentile.” But that was in the 1990s, soon after the Goldstein massacre (Alba was a fan), and presumably Alba was not cautious enough. There is reason to think that, under the careful Weinstein, Alba would not have been prosecuted at all.

So, if you want to spout racism in Israel, wear your yarmulke, quote your Maimonides, and you’ll be fine and dandy. This was basically the case for 25 years; now the prosecution openly admits it.

One does wonder, though, whether an Imam expounding away the religious edicts of Jihad would fare just as well under the scrutiny of Weinstein.

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