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Klinghoffer Says Torture Is Good for You

2009-05-01T06:36:00.002-05:00

Klinghoffer’s habitual fast and easy treatment of our rabbinic tradition is notorious. (See my chapter “Yes, But Is It Jewish?” in my recent book, co-authored with Larry Yudelson, How Would God REALLY Vote: A Jewish Rebuttal to David Klinghoffer's Conservative Polemic.) But while in the past he made the effort to at least cherry pick citations and malign the ideas of others into submission (his essay on drugs in the Torah can be fully enjoyed only under the influence of LSD) – in the case of defending torture his argument comes down to “This rabbi said so in the Jewish Week.”

So while normally all one has to do to show Klinghoffer’s erroneous reading of Jewish texts is go back to those texts and examine them, in this case there are no texts to examine, only the assumption supposedly put out by Rabbi Michael J. Broyde. It wasn’t easy finding the original article, the JW has removed it from its website for some reason. But I found an unauthorized copy on a Muslim blog – don’t ask…

Except that after reading Broyde’s article, it turns out that he, too, doesn’t use a lick of Torah to justify torture, other than to declare: “In a recent monograph published by the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College as well as a forthcoming chapter in an Orthodox Forum volume, I have shown that torture is permissible and consistent with halacha.”

So, the guy Klinghoffer relies on completely and singularly to justify torturing people – also relies on a guy, himself in this case. I’m not much of a scholar, but even I can see the bottle is full of snake oil after shaking it vigorously a couple of times.

Except that we do have excellent rabbinic sources on the sole point Klinghoffer says that Broyde says that he said someplace else, namely that since the person in our charge has already forfeited his or her life, we might as well waterboard the sucker.

Nahmanides on the first chapter of Genesis, puts together the two fundamental reasons why torture is prohibited by the Torah.

He cites the prohibition on eating the blood of a kosher animal saying that we are entitled to benefit from the carcass after the slaughter, but not from the soul, which dwells in the blood of the animal. Mind you, this is an animal that has forfeited its life, yet we may not abuse its soul.

Then he cites Bva Matzia 32b: “The prohibition on torturing animals is a Torah-level commandment.”

Are we really permitted to treat another human being worse than an animal? Have we lost all notion of what the term Image of God means in terms of respecting even a condemned man?

Rashi in his commentary on Sanhedrin 45a explains why we execute women fully dressed, saying that the humiliation of the condemned person is worse than death. We must offer them, therefore, a “fine death” (mitah yafah), which includes a quick, painless execution, and avoiding insult and degradation. This is in the case of a person convicted of a capital crime, not just an enemy combatant captured on the battlefield!

Klinghoffer’s eagerness to support the most vicious impulses of our political landscapers is the domain of himself and his therapist. But his insistence on soiling our rabbinic tradition with his dark desires must be refuted and condemned by sane people everywhere.

Our Test Chat

2009-01-09T08:44:00.003-05:00

Yori Yanover: The UN Security Council has evenhandedly ordered both sides to stop shooting and Hamas promptly increased its rocket fire.

Ehud Tokatly: Right...

Yanover: One of the points mentioned in the Israeli press is the fact that the resolution ignores the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and the requirement of his release as a precondition to a ceasefire. Is this now the new pretext for continued fighting?

Tokatly: What do you mean?

Yanover: Even if Hamas stops rocketing, as long as they don't release Shalit, we keep fighting?

Tokatly: Don't think so. The whole UN thing is irrelevant. Hamas is not a State.

Yanover: The resolution "stresses the urgency of and calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza." How do you define "fully respected"? Fully means everybody.

Tokatly: And I can declare that I call for rains to start in Spain.

Yanover: Fine, but you should also know this: BEIRUT, Jan 09, 2009 (AFP) - Hamas rejects the UN resolution on Gaza as it is not in the best interest of the Palestinian people, an official with the militant group told AFP in Beirut. So Hamas is being very official with the rejection thing. Also, all the stories from news agencies today start with "Despite the UN resolution urging blah blah, Israel today killed babies."

Tokatly: I see. I think it's a mistake on all UN member states' part. They are totally confused. Our civilization is in danger, not Israel.

Yanover: Because there's a little Hamas waiting in the wings for Belgium and Denmark and Togo?

Tokatly: Not in the wings. INSIDE Belgium, France, Germany, Britain, Canada, the US and all others. People don't realize that Israel has been getting informal messages from Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries: Finish them off! We're doing them a service.

Yanover: Who are the "them" that we're supposed to finish off? Are they specific Gazan bad guys? International bad guys?

Tokatly: We're talking about the Hamas now, but two years ago we got the same messages about Hezbollah and they are all part of the global Islamist terror offensive on the organized world.

Yanover: But I don't think you're talking about a conspiracy. It sounds more like a huge cultural and social trend, almost like the waves of Mongol armies sweeping through the near east, on its way westward.

Tokatly: It's both. The breaking up of the modern political structure in the post-modern era invites the barbarian tribes to attack. It's like a faulty immune system that cannot handle a tiny, trivial virus.

Yanover: And the reason the virus is successful in picking up millions of supporters?

Tokatly: It's the same reason. The modern state, the concept of the 'nation-state', has let down all of us. The Islamists are using these feelings of bitterness to manipulate and incite the masses. Their motto is: 'Islam Is The Solution'.

Yanover: Except that the way it appears to an outsider is that its more nihilism than religion. It's about offering a life of care-free eternal war, with no responsibility other than killing, and with imagined afterlife rewards. This is deeply immoral, not religious.

Tokatly: You're right, but I think that we, Westerners, tend to underestimate the valid root causes, or even worse - completely misunderstand them.

Yanover: Please explain...

Tokatly: As I said, the root cause is the disintegration of the Free Society and its various ideologies. We don't believe in anything anymore, have no values, no morality, no solidarity, just relativity and plenty of subjective 'narratives'. This weakens us and turns the less-Western masses away from our ways.

Yanover: So what you're saying is that the way to respond to Hamas, Hizballah, Al Quaida, et al, is to change ourselves from the inside? If that's the case, I wish you all the best, but it doesn't look like we're ready for the effort. Meanwhile, all the other side has to do is point and yell: Kill that!

Tokatly: No, I'm saying that when you're ill, you first treat the symptoms, try to kill the virus without mercy. Not the poor, misguided, brainwashed masses, but the gangs that control them. Then you must look into your own problem and start a long process of deep healing. Otherwise, another virus will attack.

Yanover: Let me ask you about a different region of the world. In Afghanistan, President Obama is planning to increase US involvement manifold. History teaches us that any foreign power getting involved there ends up stuck in an unending war. Is there a non-military way of salvaging Afghanistan from the same Islamist forces?

Tokatly: The Afghan case proves my point. If you only use power, you will fail. There must be a real change. Just a hint: Islamists and the West have common values. We can work on sharing them, while fighting the negative forces.

Why I Tell My Friends It’ll Be 1964 All Over Again

2008-09-03T17:51:00.000-05:00

Listen to the two smartest Republicans alive foretelling the end of this Republican campaign. In all honesty, if McCain had a fighting chance before last Friday, he absolutely disintegrated with the Palin pick. The national vote may be close, but I see the Dems picking up 4-5 new states where no presidential democrat has walked in quite a while.

Listen to the exchange off-camera between MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, Mike Murphy and Peggy Noonan, when the show has gone to commercial. Early on, Noonan says “It's over.” Then she says, “I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives… but what's the narrative?”

And Murphy says, “You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism and this is cynical.”

Couldn’t put it better myself.

McCain Swiftboated – At Last

2008-09-03T06:01:00.002-05:00

I’ve been asking for the past 18 months why the experience of getting shot down during a mission of bombing civilians in Hanoi, and then sitting in a bamboo cage for five years, prepares you for the presidency. But maybe I wasn’t qualified to pose the question. Maybe there’s something in the experience of prison which builds up your ability to plan energy policy and economic renewal. But if that’s really the case, maybe our politicians should serve their prison terms before, not after they get elected. But I digress.

Dr. Phillip Butler knew McCain as a fellow POW. He makes all the points I thought needed to be made, except he doesn’t mention the Keating Five fiasco or the part about ditching your car-accident victim wife for a prettier, richer woman. But what Butler says is enough to stir the conversation in its proper direction.

Please don’t let John Sydney McCain anywhere near the red button!

Publisher’s Labor Day BBQ a Huge Success

2008-09-02T04:23:00.001-05:00

The Ben Yehuda Press annual Labor Day picnic was the best so far. Larry and Eve Yudelson, who own the not-so-fledgling-any-more publishing house, presented a satisfying program, comprised of members of their stable of authors, and two of their children, who sang and read with amazing talents, reminding the authors in the crowd of the old rule of the stage, never work with animals or kids.

I’ll probably go into more detail later, when I go through the business cards I stashed in my other shirt pocket, but for now let me tell you, I had HUGE loads of fun. Especially since I got to read for the first time from the print version of The Cabalist Daughter. But I have to say, I had even more fun reading and engaging the audience in the chapter on abortion from How Would God really Vote.

I’ve also decided, once and for all, to start the work of translating Dancing and Crying, which I co-authored in 1994, detailing the last two years in the life of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Might even be a cute gift package, Dancing and Daughter, part one as the non-fiction, part two as fiction, the perfect gift for the upcoming holidays.

Like Jimmy Carter said to McCain: Milk it for all it’s worth…

Klinghoffer’s Abortion Distortion

2008-09-01T10:14:00.000-05:00

In a few hours, I’ll be reading this segment from Larry Yudelson’s and my new book, “How Would God Really Vote.” I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Having read the chapter titled: Abortion: A Litmus Test, I must say that Klinghoffer is a decent writer, and he manages to do a lot with the scant support in scripture for his position. So I sat down and put together a reasonable response to Klinghoffer’s argument on how God votes on the abortion issue. But before I get there, I must share with you what Joseph Farah had to say about the book.

Joseph Farah is one of those Internet commentators whose diatribes your right-winger neighbor in shul is likely to send you until you threaten to filter out his emails. It was therefore a pleasure to read Farah’s disappointment in Klinhoffer’s effort: If that is a “conservative” agenda, I’m glad I am not a “conservative” but rather an independent-minded American faithful to the U.S. Constitution and guided by his own understanding of God’s Word.

[WorldNetDaily.com, June 4, 2008]

Farah is a pro-Israel Lebanese-American, and his attack is purely ideological and cannot be lamed on anti-Jewish sentiment. The fact that I can’t stand his writing doesn’t make it invalid. Millions of Christians and Jews adore him (see paragraph 3).

But Farah’s attack exposes the fundamental problem in Klinghoffer’s methodology, as he tries to pawn off a rabbinical approach to Torah text on a wide public that has no recognition of its roots nor its validity. Throughout the chapter, Klinghoffer mixes Biblical citations (accepted by Jews and Christians) with rabbinical citations (accepted only by Jews, and even then not all of us, really). It has to be a losing effort when it comes to fundamentalist Bible thumpers like Joseph Farah.

I actually loved Farah’s taunt of Klinghoffer the Conservative wannabe, specifically on the abortion chapter. Farah writes:

Here’s how I believe God would have us vote on [abortion]—and why: …There are many familiar passages of Scripture that have been used to show that killing unborn children, the most innocent of life, is not God’s way: Psalm 94:21, Ecclesiastes 11:5, Isaiah 59:7, Genesis 42:22, Proverbs 28:13, Deuteronomy 21:9, Psalm 139:13-16 and Luke 1:41-47 to name a few. But to make this simple, every time the Bible refers to a pregnant woman, it says she is “with child.” We don’t talk like that any more in our 21st century American culture because we don’t want to acknowledge the child until the day it is born—if it is allowed to be born. But check out how often the Bible refers to women “with child”: Genesis 16:4, Genesis 19:36, Genesis 38:24, Exodus 21:22, 1 Samuel 4:19, 2 Samuel 11:5, 2 Kings 8:12, Isaiah 26:17, Mathew 1:18, Mathew 1:23, Luke 2:5, 1 Thessalonians 5:3 and Revelation 12:2.

I don’t know from Revelation, Mathew, or Luke, but I did look up Farah’s citations from the Jewish Bible, which are way more extensive than Klinghoffer’s, but are about as credible about abortion as the evangelical proof that Jesus is mentioned in Jewish scripture. Total rubbish.

Psalm 94:21— . “They gang up against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the blood of the innocent.” The psalm is about how God will punish the wicked some day soon. How the verse is more about the killing of fetuses than about any other innocent person I fail to understand.

Ecclesiastics 11:5— . “Just as you do not know the way of the spirit or the bones in the pregnant belly, likewise you do not comprehend the works of God who makes everything.” And how is this a prohibition against abortion? Sheer nonsense.

Isaiah 59:7— . “Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood, their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and destruction are in their paths.” A pattern emerges: Every time Farah spots innocent blood, it’s gotta’ be a fetus. Interesting idea, especially when juxtaposed with the Christian idea of Original Sin, which suggests them fetuses is full of sin like the worst among us, un-saved folks…

Anyway, so Farah employs the evangelical tradition of raping the Biblical text until it gives up the ghost. I mean, he even brings Genesis 42:22, where Reuven cautions his brothers not to kill the child, as if the sons of Jacob were in the middle of an anti-abortion rally (the child in question is, of course, Joseph, who was 17 at the time, a story Farah should know, as he shares a first name with the lad).

The reason I’ve digressed so much with the Farah citations is to show what happens when you just roam in the scriptural text, picking verses that seem to fit your opinion. If, on top of it, you’re working from a translation of the Hebrew, you’re very likely to stray in both comical and tragic fashion. Unlike Farah, Klinghoffer is, ostensibly, bound by rabbinical tradition, which scorns that kind of unsubstantiated cherry picking, because the latter often yields grossly inedible cherries. So Klinghoffer’s search of legitimate Biblical comments on abortion ends up with this begrudging admission:

A liberal Bible interpreter, meanwhile, could confront us with the most troubling passage for the pro-life cause, Exodus 21:22-25, which has the merit of being a legal text.

You know something? Whether you’re a liberal interpreter or a troubled pro-lifer, why not read the verse as is? By the way, the strictly abortion-related verses are only Exodus 21:22-23: If men fight, and hurt a pregnant woman, so that her children exit her, and yet no tragedy follows, they shall be surely punished, according to what the woman’s husband will lay upon them, as determined by a judge. And if tragedy follows, then you shall exact a life for a life.

Klinghoffer stops short of taking the text to its logical conclusion, but, supposedly because he’s no liberal interpreter, would not declare the obvious kal vachomer1 (That’s a fortiori, for those of you who prefer your major-to-minor arguments described in Latin rather than Hebrew) here: If when you hit a woman accidentally and she loses her fetus you’re not a murderer, then of course if you extract her fetus with her consent you’re certainly not a murderer. There’s no other conclusion from this passage vis-à-vis the legality of a doctor performing an abortion. If he does it without consent he pays damages, if he does it with consent he probably should get paid for his trouble.

Now, the fact that the Torah does not call for the execution of abortion doctors does not mean that it promotes the use of abortion, most certainly not as a means of birth control. I do agree, then, with Klinghoffer’s assertion:

Though liberal Jewish groups, I’m sorry to say, like to cover this up, the rabbis of the Talmud, contemplating America in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, would say the hundreds of thousands of such murders are being committed by Americans against unborn babies every year.

I’m not so sure the rabbis of the Talmud would be describing abortions as murder even if they were suddenly resurrected in our time, but without a doubt they would have frowned on such a widespread practice. But the rabbis probably would also have differentiated the relative value of gentile and Jewish fetuses.

I’m not sure how they would have dealt with the notion of “pro choice,” which presupposes a woman’s ownership of her body. Intuitively, I would have assumed that the value of life and the duty of preserving life are so paramount, they supersede the claim of self-ownership. Yet the Talmud is not explicit on the prohibition of suicide, which is another example of executing self-ownership. Our rabbinical strict anti-suicide decisions are post-Talmudic. In fact, the Talmud

entertains cases in which suicide is not only permitted but encouraged (yehareg u’bal ya’avor).

Of course, sanctioned suicide is not the same as suicide by choice. Rather, these are cases of suicide for the sake of avoiding the transgression of one of the three superior laws (blasphemy, murder, and illicit sex), which could be interpreted to mean that we do not own our bodies, since on some rare occasions we are obligated to relinquish them. But an examination of later authors on this question of necessary suicide (or permitting oneself to be killed)—most explicitly in Maimonides’ Igeret HaShmad—reveals a reluctance to demand of Jews to be martyred rather than be forcibly converted (blasphemy). Maimonides states that one who does not rise to the challenge of martyrdom, and abandons Judaism under duress, is not considered an apostate and does not deserve any degradation or punishment.

So perhaps it can be said that Maimonides does offer tacit recognition of a personal choice regarding the preservation of one’s life when faced with defilement through a super-transgression.

All of which spells bad news for Klinghoffer, whose agenda, to remind you, is turning God into a card-carrying conservative.

So Klinghoffer picks Genesis 9:6 to try and promote his cause. On its face, the verse is as abortion-related as those Jospeh Farah quotes: He who sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made He man.

Klinghoffer brings a Talmudic citation from Rabbi Yishmael, which offers a different punctuation: He who sheds a person’s blood inside a person—his blood be shed. So we should extend the death penalty even to those who kill a fetus, which is the only “person inside a person.”

The problem with citing a single argument out of a huge, multi-page Talmudic discussion of the death penalty, is that it deprives the reader of an awareness of the numerous other arguments which do not make this point, and also of an appreciation of how minute this opinion is within the flow of the discussion. It also obscures the fact that the discussion is of the death penalty for gentiles, and that Rabbi Yishmael’s opinion concerns only a gentile who performs an abortion.

One thing is for certain – there is no suggestion, not even a hint, that the sages considered abortion a capital offense. As Menachem Elon—who authored the Encyclopedia Judaica article which Klinghoffer relies on extensively in this chapter—put it: “Thus abortion, although prohibited, does not constitute murder (Tos., Sanh. 59a; Hul. 33a).”

A bit later it’s a pleasure watching Klinghoffer trying to sell the rabbinical concept of the fetus being considered viable only after 40 days in the womb. But one loses one’s benign tendencies after reading the entire chapter and realizing the author has dealt with a whole bunch of esoteric stuff, even mixed in a citation from Paul John II, but neglected to discuss the central rabbinical argument in favor of abortion.

The basic Talmudic priorities regarding a conflict between the life of the mother and that of the fetus are delineated by Rashi on Sanhedrin 72b:

Regarding a woman having a difficult birth which threatens her life, the midwife may insert her hand and cut up the fetus and extract it in pieces, because as long as it hasn’t come out into the world it is not considered a living being and one may kill it to save its mother.

This is the core of our belief in the rabbinical permission to perform abortions. Not because the fetus isn’t a viable person until the 40th day of gestation, but because it is not viable until the very end of gestation. When it has taken its first breath it has become equal to its mother, two living human beings each with the right to life. Until it has completed its exit from the womb, even if it is stuck halfway, as long as it hasn’t taken a breath it’s still part of Mommy, and, sadly, we would terminate its life to save Mommy’s.

In other words, not only do the Rabbis permit late-term abortion, they actually base their entire understanding of the legal relationship between mother and fetus on the late-term conflict between those two lives, one which is fully realized and one which is still only potential. And in rabbinical law we always go with the life we have, not the life that might appear in the future.

Klinghoffer’s most serious offense against the reader is not the cherry picking and the quoting out of context, which are the tools of his trade.

It is his intentional deletion of the most important rabbinical ruling concerning the rights of a pregnant woman: She is superior to her fetus and may choose to terminate its life in extreme cases. How would God vote, then, pro-choice or pro-life? Pro-choice, with the obvious proviso that abortions must only be used as a last resort.

God would very likely avoid the pro-life candidate, because their position deprives women of their essential rights.

McCain Move Seals Obama Speech Zing

2008-09-01T04:24:00.001-05:00

The adage about being too smart by a half worked very nicely in Obama’s favor last Friday. Remember how the McCain campaign was “stealing his thunder” by diverting the media’s attention from his Thursday night’s acceptance speech to the hype of anticipation for the Republican VP announcement? They played the media, sending false text messages, lying regarding the whereabouts of various potential candidates for the job (and making many new enemies in the process) – and, indeed, they managed to divert public attention big time from the speech to the pick.

Now, there were two typical responses to Obama’s speech: The campaign savvy response, such as that of Pat Buchanan and Mike Murphy, both old Republican war horses, who couldn’t conceal their admiration, seeing the speech as the powerful weapon it was in advancing the Dem campaign. And then there was the reaction of speech writers, also Republican, like Peggy Noonan and Bill Safire, who gave the speech a fairly low grade, saying it was short on both facts and poetry.

And you know what? Noonan and Safire were right. And while the usual Foxnazi claptrap may no have gotten much track outside the Ditto realm, a more serious critique of Obama’s speech could hurt the Dem candidate because, let’s face it, his speech really was short on facts, packed with conjecture and almost brutally unfair – like a good campaign speech should be.

Had the McCain campaign waited until the first day of their convention to announce the VP, the media would have bitten and chewed the speech, and would have at least dulled down its glow in the memory of many viewers. But they chose to overwhelm the media with their Alaskan beauty queen move and with that virtually sealed the overall acceptance of the Buchanan-Murphy view, that the speech was the most amazing of its kind in presidential history (as Buchanan put it, more or less). That is now the common impression among some 38 million viewers. Not a bad thing at all.

Once again, the McCain campaign has shown it is long on tactics and painfully short on strategy.

Ultra-Christian Digs a Pit and Falls In It

2008-08-31T15:40:00.005-05:00

He who digs a pit shall fall in it, and he that rolls a stone, it shall return upon him (Proverbs 26:27)

What a pleasure to see God wreaking old fashioned poetic justice on sinners! In early August, a member of James Dobson’s ultra-Christian Focus on Family urged his followers to ask God for torrential downpours during the Obama acceptance speech, on August 28. Now, we all know that God showed her support for Obama back in July, when the senator from Illinois sank a 3-pointer in a Kuwait gym on his first try (see vid).

If I were a superstitious Republican, that would have been my cue to lay off the guy. But they didn’t. Stuart Shepard, apprenticing for James Dobson’s ultra-Christian Focus on Family, shot this "pray-for-rain" video, urging viewers to ask God for torrential downpours during the Obama acceptance speech, last August 28 (see vid).

Well, you want to mess with the ruler of the universe, you have only yourself to blame. Currently the threat of Hurricane Gustav, complete with torrential downpours, is threatening to drown Louisiana, and may delay and even scrap the Republican convention in St. Paul this week. At least Shepard showed some good taste in apologizing for his bad (see vid), although this was before he realized how he had drawn the wrath of heaven to the entire RNC.

Is this cool, or what? Also, remember the next verse in Proverbs: A lying tongue hates those that are crushed by it, and a flattering mouth works ruin. Republicans, you’re in a heap of it…

Priceless

2008-08-26T01:53:00.002-05:00

Why We Had to Set the Record Straight on God’s Vote

2008-08-25T22:32:00.003-05:00

In the past three months I’ve begun to listen to right-wing radio, especially to Rush Limbaugh, mostly for the pain. Few things in our political culture are more rewarding nowadays than hearing Rush’s scrambling to build up a Republican candidate he basically despises, while at the same time trying to shoot down his sexy, imaginative, sure handed Democratic opponent who’s endowed with Reagan-strength Teflon. It’s desperate times for Republicans, the kind that bring about many desperate measures, including, naturally, enlisting God as the newest McCain surrogate.

David Klinghoffer’s How Would God Vote?: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative is truly desperate, in its willingness to distort and misrepresent Jewish tradition, in hope of keeping a Republican in the White House for four more years. It’s not the first effort to manhandle the Divine for political gain – Republicans and Democrats have done it with equal doses of cynicism. But it’s the first such work I’m aware of that promotes itself as the views of an Orthodox Jew and hence, of the Bible.

Frankly, I don’t recall being this offended in a long time by an author claiming to be an Orthodox Jew.

If I had to pull the most infuriating quote out of the work, it would have to be Klinghoffer’s response to the YU Cardozo School of Law’s Innocence Project which, between 1989 and 2000, saved 28 death row inmates from wrongful executions. This effort, according to Klinghoffer, illustrates how “even traditional [Jewish] denominations have buckled” under the popular—and “liberal”—anti-Capital Punishment trend.

It boggles the mind: the idea that Jewish students in an Orthodox university are working hard to free inmates who were about to be killed for no good reason, is presented by Klinghoffer as a kind of failure of nerves, YU’s succumbing to the pressures of public opinion!

Regardless of their political inclinations, I believe Jews should celebrate the Innocence Project and the great service it does to society and to our national reputation as people who love the law. But to declare, on top of it, that God, too, would be somehow disappointed by the Innocence Project, because God is a registered Republican – that was classical blasphemy, and not even the fun kind.

Add to that the fact that Klinhoffer serves up such a mish mash of Jewish and Protestant ideas, misrepresents Biblical, Talmudic and post-Talmudic text, taking advantage of the limited Jewish schooling of his target audience – and the result is even more obnoxious than Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, the other blithely dishonest book that pissed me off this year. For one thing, Hitchens wasn’t singling out Judaism for his hack job.

So when Larry Yudelson suggested the project I responded enthusiastically (although he’s still responsible for three quarters of the content). We divided up the Klinghoffer book between us, picked the dozen or so most outrageous chapters, and called him on his distortions, misrepresentations and fabrications, then inserted a few very good jokes (we thought) and stitched it together, the perfect Bar Mitzvah gift, just in time for the Democratic Convention.

Finally, if you’re a thinking Jew who is aware of our great prophets’ messages of social justice in the face of human frailty, do you really think God would ever possibly vote Republican? Why, even Pat Robertson is having second thoughts…

How Would God REALLY Vote?A Jewish Response to David Klinghoffer
by Larry Yudelson and Yori Yanover

All Hail Vickipeeki

2007-05-21T07:04:00.000-05:00

If you haven’t seen the new big thing on the Jewish blogs, the trials and tribulations of Vickipeeki, you ain’t seen funny yet.

Modeled after the life of a Baltimore ex-member of a baby eating cult, this comic strip is to the Jewish Recovered Memory gang what Joseph N. Welch was to Senator Joe McCarthy (“Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”). If you’ve been following the saga of Vicki Polin and her devouring of unsuspecting rabbis, you’ll enjoy this strip, published fairly frequently by Salome Worch (wife of one of Vicki’s victims). If you were not in for the ride, the website provides a short history and the video of Vicki’s Oprah appearance (which earned her the nickname Dingo on this blog).

Enjoy the ride. Our favorite is the Satanic Seder.

http://www.vickipeeki.com/

Vicki and the Devil

2007-02-03T20:10:00.000-05:00

I don't do Vicki Polin material any more, but I was sent this clip and had to share it with you. You decide whether or not to share it with the world. It's an obvious edit, which I'm not crazy about. The anonymous editor collected most of the snippets with Vicki in them, from a 1989 show that featured a long row of memory recovery types.

Missing from the clip is the psychologist, who appears in the transcript. I would have liked to see that. Also missing is the part where Oprah tells the folks at home that not all Jews eat their children, only the bad ones.

Here's the link. Enjoy. Below I've reprinted the transcript. The file is 7.5mb, and it's not being served up. It's slow, but not terribly so.

Vicki as Rachel on Oprah, May 1, 1989

OPRAH: As a child, my next guest was used also in worshipping the devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals and cannibalism. She says her family has been involved in rituals for generations. She is currently in extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she's blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood. Meet "Rachel," who is also in disguise to protect her identity. You come from generations of ritualistic abuse?

"RACHEL", Was Used In Satan Worship Rituals: Yes, my family has an extensive family tree, and they keep track of who's been involved and who hasn't been involved, and it’s gone back to like 1700.

OPRAH: And so you were ritually abused.

"RACHEL": Right. I was born into a family that believes in this.

OPRAH: Does everyone else think it's a nice Jewish family? From the outside, you appear to be a nice Jewish girl?

"RACHEL": Definitely.

OPRAH: And you all are worshipping the devil inside the home?

"RACHEL": Right. There's other Jewish families across the country. It's not just my own family.

OPRAH: Really? And so who knows about it? Lots of people now.

"RACHEL": Well, I talked to a police detective in the Chicago area, and several of my friends know, and I've spoke publicly before, and…

OPRAH: So when you were brought up in this kind of evilness, did you just think it was normal?

"RACHEL': I blocked out a lot of the memories I had because of my multiple personality disorder, but, yes. I mean, it's like if you grow up with something, you think it’s normal. I always thought something…

OPRAH: So what kinds of things? You don't have to give us the gory details, but what kinds of things went on in the family?

"RACHEL": Well, there would be rituals in which babies would be sacrificed, and you would have to, you know…

OPRAH: Whose babies?

"RACHEL": There were people who bred babies in our family. No one would know about it. A lot of people were overweight, so you couldn't tell if they were pregnant or not, or they would supposedly go away for awhile and then come back…

"RACHEL": The other thing I want to point out not all Jewish people sacrifice babies. I mean, it's not a very typical thing.

OPRAH: I think we kind of know that.

"RACHEL": I just want to point that out.

OPRAH: This is the first time I heard of any Jewish people sacrificing babies, but anyway--so you witnessed the sacrifice.

"RACHEL": Right. When I was very young, I was forced to participate in that-- in which I had to sacrifice an infant.

OPRAH: And the purpose of sacrifice is to what? Is to bring you what? What are you sacrificing for?

"RACHEL": For power...

OPRAH: Power. And so were you ever used? Were you ever used yourself?

"RACHEL": I was molested. I was raped several times.

OPRAH: What's your mother doing in all of this? What's her role in all of this?

"RACHEL": What is-- I'm not exactly- -what her role is-- I haven't, you know, recovered all of my memories, but her family was extremely involved. You know, she brought me to it. Both of my parents brought me to it.

OPRAH: And where is she now?

"RACHEL": She lives in the Chicago metropolitan area. She's on the human relations commission of the town that she lives in, and she's an upstanding citizen. Nobody would suspect her. Nobody would suspect anybody involved in it. There's police officers involved in it. There's, you know, doctors, lawyers, Indiana chiefs involved in it.

OPRAH: Are you kidding?

"RACHEL": I mean, it's not the person, you know, who looks scummy that's involved in it. It's someone who looks normal.…

OPRAH: Were you raised with a sense of right and wrong, “Rachel?”

“RACHEL: Yes. I mean, it’s like we, I had both. I mean, to the outside world, everything we did was proper and right, and then there were the nights that things changed, that things just got turned around. What was wrong was right, and what was right was wrong. That’s what helps to create some of theto develop MPD.

OPRAH: Multiple personality disorder.

“RACHEL”: Right, right.

OPRAH: I know a lot of people are shaking their heads here, and I'm sure that when you go back home, I mean, everyone's going to try to make you look like you're crazy.

"RACHEL": Oh, definitely.

OPRAH: Absolutely.

"RACHEL": They do that all the time.

OPRAH: It's very difficult to believe, so how is it that you come to believe these people, Tina?

Ms. GROSSMAN: Well, I've treated over 40 survivors of ritual abuse. Adult patients with multiple personality disorder, and from many states in this country as well as Canada. What we've seen and heard and gone through in the abreactions which is the remembered experiences of that- we are hearing the identical same things from these adults. Okay. These are not children that are three years old, and you can, as an adult, perhaps rationalize that this is fantasy material. These adults are saying things. They have never met each other before. They are describing identical rituals, just the same as, since I'm Jewish, you could go to New York or California and describe a seder in one state or another and, as a Jew, you would recognize it. This is the belief system in evil and the power that evil gives you, and so it has these certain rituals, so they are very similar with all of the survivors.

OPRAH: See, but I am very surprised because the Jewish faith is the Jewish faith. and worshipping the devil is not a part of the Jewish faith. I mean, Jewish people do not worship the devil.

Ms. GROSSMAN: But before there was Christ and before there was a system of one God, there was Paganism- and it still exists in the world, and in many cultures, you still find the belief that there is strength and power in the actual consumption of human flesh or animals' flesh.

OPRAH: Now in your family. did you all call it worshipping the devil, "Rachel?”

"RACHEL": No.

OPRAH: Or did you…

"RACHEL": I don't know.

OPRAH: It was just evil. these things you did.

"RACHEL": It was-- right.

OPRAH: Right.

"RACHEL": Well, I said it was evil, and they said it was good. There's a book that I had just come across called [Lilith's Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural by Howard Schwartz, New York, Oxford University Press, 1988] which is a book of Jewish mysticism and supernatural, and there's a lot in that book that relates to what I endured when I was a child.

OPRAH: I want to stop right here, though. because you know how people build prejudices. I want to make it very clear this is one Jewish person, so don't go around now saying to people, you know, "Those Jewish people, they're worshipping--'. This is just one person. Okay.

"RACHEL": Most Jewish people do not do what my family did.

OPRAH: Okay. Thank you very much.

"RACHEL": I mean, I don't know very many other Jewish people who would do what I did.

OPRAH: But you know how people hear one thing, and then go off and they say, "I heard on 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' today that…”

SPOILED CHILDREN, GROW UP

2006-07-19T14:01:00.000-05:00

The article below was written following a conversation between myself and the author, in which I expressed impatience at the rate at which the Hezbollah’s rule was being reversed in

Lebanon

by the Israeli military. I think what pissed him off most was my question regarding the possible diminishing fighting ability of the IDF. So, if you feel insulted by the text below, relax, it’s all my fault… But, to be more properly sober, I think there’s a lot of truth in Tokatly’s assertion. YY

It seems that Western Civilisation has lost its will to live. Faced with mortal threats, many Europeans and Americans are voicing ideas that support the cause of their enemies. Why do they do that? Do they really fail to understand the danger that hovers over their heads?

So it seems.

It is hard to believe that so many opinion-makers - in academic circles, political institutions and the mass media - have become enemy agents, who intend to destroy the free societies that offer them the comforts and opportunities upon which their lives are based. It is even less plausible to assume that so many people have turned into suicidal individuals. It seems rather clear that these influential persons have developed some kind of psychology that offers them an illusion of safety and immunity. Somehow, the dangers don't look real to them. As Sir Winston Churchill said: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

I would like to suggest that this mentality is essentially infantile. It has developed among prosperous and successful circles because their way of life has become more and more detached from the basics of human survival. They live in comfortable homes, drive smooth cars, work in air-conditioned offices, libraries and lecture halls, eat healthy foods and wear neat clothes. In short, they are spoiled and just like spoiled children, these grownups develop unrealistic expectations from reality. Here are a few examples:

Many Westerners tend to criticise the anti-terror policies of certain governments, such as the UK, USA and Israel. They point at the difficulties that law-abiding countries face in their struggle against criminal groups. Since Western leaders refuse to adopt the same terror strategies of the enemy, the battles tend to be long and indecisive. At this point, the Western Infantile reaction is divided into two opposing stands. Many would-be Liberals say:

What's The Point In Fighting Terrorism?

They express impatience and even despair. Sometimes, they even express glee at their own countries' failures, which "prove," according to them, that "there is no military solution to terror." The key word is "solution.” Just like spoiled children, they want to get immediate satisfaction and if they can't get what they want right now, they throw a tantrum and scream insults at the adult who disappoints them. However, any adult should know that sometimes it is not possible to supply the child with an immediate "solution.” Some problems in life require a longer process, much patience and acceptance of incomplete results. For example, one could say that law enforcement is a complete failure because the police keeps chasing the criminals and thus far, has failed in "solving" the problem, since there are still thieves, robbers, rapists and murderers in our cities. So should we abolish the police force, the courts and the entire legal system that failed so shamefully?

The opposite reaction goes:

Butcher The Bastards!

Essentially, the call for a more aggressive strategy against terror is the other side of the very same coin. The spoiled Western citizen demands from his leadership an immediate "solution,” even at the cost of losing the value system that ensures the rule of law and civil liberties. The would-be patriots delude themselves that an unrestrained military action can scare the terrorists "once and for all.” They cannot accept a reality in which chronic, malignant problems require long processes of healing.

Both sides share the same impatience and lack of moral strength to endure a period of ongoing pain and loss.

The enemy shows more strength and resilience, simply because they are less spoiled and more realistic in identifying the weaknesses of their foes. This is bad news for the West. Terrorism is a strategy of mental warfare. Terrorists cannot conquer territory through armed struggle. They can only break the spirit of their enemies and bring them down to their knees. Both infantile, hysterical reactions described above play into the terrorists' hands. The internal rift between the West's so-called "left" and "right" is a primary achievement for the terror organisations.

The Western immaturity goes even further. The pseudo-Liberals get carried away with their oppositional mentality and start questioning their own country's value system. They say:

It's All Our Own Fault!

They blame the West for all its troubles and thus, they justify the crimes perpetrated by the "oppressed" terrorists. It stems from a deep need to be loved, just like a spoiled child that demands constant attention and praise. The opposite reaction is of course:

It's All The Fault Of Islam!

This line, held by many right-wing Westerners, is rooted in the same infantile mentality. Just like a disappointed, spoiled child, they react with senseless rage against "everyone,” or at least against anyone who doesn't like them.

Both sides produce elaborate articles to prove their points. An average Westerner has the choice of putting all the blame either on Capitalist Imperialism or on Barbaric Islam.

However, any slightly less immature individual would have to admit that life is not always so simple. There are certain situations where both conflicting sides have some legitimate claims, as well as many errors and faults. The real "solution" to such situations is never one-sided.

If the West wishes to survive, it must sort out its own mental confusion. It should fight terrorism without hesitations, simply based on the universal principle of self-defence. At the same time, Western leaders should look into their own arrogance and moral faults and improve their own conduct. At the moment, the West is doing the exact opposite: It rewards aggressors and continues to neglect its own morality and noble values.

Perhaps the time has come for all of us to pray for the eyes of the blind to be opened and the spoiled children to grow up!

Ehud Tokatly
Jerusalem, July 2006

Liberate Gaza and Lebanon

2006-07-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

If the governments of Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are unwilling to disarm the Iranian controlled terror organization that operate in their territories, or if they are incapable of doing so, then they are not worthy of international recognition as legitimate regimes.

UN Security Council resolutions and International treaties define crimes against humanity as the "participation in and knowledge of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population, and the multiple commission of [such] acts ... against any civilian population" These international binding instruments go on to impose uniform mandatory counter-terrorist obligations on all states to "bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of terrorist attacks and stresses that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable." The ongoing terrorist aggression carried out by the Islamist criminals of Hezbollahand Hamas against uninvolved civilians within Israel's internationally recognized boundaries constitute a policy of premeditated crimes against humanity and the rulers of Lebanonand the PA are guilty of harboring and supporting these offenders.

Therefore, the international community, including the UN, USA, EU, G8 and NATO, must send a task force to liberate the people of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip from the terrorist occupation and the puppet governments that harbor them. They should enforce law and order until both these societies prove in actions that they are ready to operate within the parameters ofInternational Law.

The entire world knows full well that Israelwill keep the peace and respect her neighbors, as soon as the terrorists stoptheir criminal attacks.

Ehud Tokatly
Jerusalem

Her First Crazy

2006-06-08T08:16:00.000-05:00

While looking around the web, minding my own business, I ran into this copy of a letter, supposedly sent by Vicki Polin a.k.a. Rachel, to the ADL, which was trying, at the time, to put out the fire she started on the Oprah show.

As we’re in the course of studying in depth this sociopath’s style and modus operandi, it’s fascinating to see the Vicki Polin personality we all know and dread emerging here. Also, note the typical VP misspellings, as well as erratic style-jumps from academic to fourth-grade sentence structure. For VP experts, this find is a delight. I bolded the misspellings and grammatical oopses for your reading pleasure.

I transcribed as hard as I could, check out the jpeg for the original.

July 18, 1989

Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith
[All Chapters]
823 United Nations Plaza
New York, New York 10017

To whom it may concern,

In my eyes and the eyes of other Jewish Survivors of Ritual Abuse, you attempted to discredit us the same way the Revisionism Movement trys to discredit the fact that the Holocaust ever occurred.

I feel you owe each and every Jewish Survivor of Ritual Abuse an apology. I believe the Jewish Community needs to take it’s head out of the sand and open it’s eyes!!! Incest, Child sexual, and Ritual Abuse happens in Jewish Families. Jews are not exempt from perpetrating these crimes.

I understand that you felt that Oprah Winfrey was being Anti-Semitic by bringing up the issue I was from “A Nice Jewish Family”. I believe she was as shocked as you were. Our society believes the myth that Jews can’t be pedophiles, or abuse their own children. This is a “MYTH”, they do abuse children. There are even those who practice cannibalism, and perform human sacrifices. Believe me I saw it with my own eyes. I’ve come to the point in my life were I feel I need to bare-witness. I have and will continue to until I’m sure what I had to endure as a child is believed by you and others like you. I will do what ever is possible so what happened to me doesn’t happen to anyone else!

Rachel

CC. Oprah Winfrey, Believe The Children, DeL. Sinandl (?), Dale Griffis, PhD., Many Voice’s, Voice’s In Action, INC., Healing Hearts, YWCA-Women’s Serv. NOW-National Organization of Women, Pr. James Labre

Let’s Do It to Them Texas Style

2006-06-07T11:10:00.000-05:00

NY Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Can he do the Tomdelay?

The next watershed event in US politics will take place not in some backwater red state suckling on bluestate teats, but right here, in the Empire State, home to the now dead and gone specie once known as Liberal Republicans. According to John C. Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute, the most important political race in America will be the Democrats’ effort to take over the State Senate.

Only five, count them, 5 Senate seats separate the New York Democratic party from gaining the majority in both state houses, while Elliot Spitzer glides majestically into the big house in Albany.

What happens next is the stuff of GOP nightmares. There are 9 Republican seats in the NY Congressional delegation. By tradition and convention, as those districts have been drawn following the 2000 census, in 2002, they should expect to remain drawn that way until 2012.

But with complete control over everything, the NY Dems could borrow a page from the Tom Delay playbook, and run their markers up and down the Long Island and Upstate maps, making the Republican delegation all but extinct come 2008.

Do we want to see this coming? Well, being a frothing at the mouth Bush Hater, I’m insulted you even asked. If we can create 9 extra New York Democrats, we can retake America, boys and girls.

Last time I checked, New Yorkers were spending $1.25 for every $1. we receive from Washington. This means that those heaps of spiritual waste scheming to slowly bring us back to the 18th Century have been getting my extra quarter, to plan future assaults on the environment, scientific research and personal freedoms. Well, I want my quarter back, and I hope our NY Dems, who are far better warriors than the rest of the donkey party, will gerrymander the daylights out of the GOP.

REDRAW NEW YORK STATE, ADD 9 DEMOCRATS TO CONGRESS IN 2008

The only problem is that, while being a better class of Democrats, our representatives may consider themselves too refined and decent to engage in the Tom Delay Tango. That leaves it up to us to persuade the Dem leadership to both engage in actively seeking to take back the State Senate (we did have it once, for about 15 minutes), and that once we win those 4 local races for Democratic candidates, we push our decent and refined leadership to unsheathe the short knives and to go a-hacking.

Our country is already in the throes of a civil war, with the one difference being that our side hasn’t found out about it yet. We’re being impoverished and destroyed by the most backward elements of our society. It’s time to stop them. We have the power, we have the money, we have the skill. All we need now is the political will to decimate the NY State GOP. The rest of the victory thing will come surprisingly easily.

Get your Democratic representatives to join the effort to terminate the 35-27 Republican Senate majority in Albany. These races are the cheapest to win – get the party volunteers out there and convince several hundred local Democrats to turn out come election day, it doesn’t take much more than that. This is not presidential campaigning, people, this is the State Senate, for crying out loud.

Let’s add the act of Tomdelaying to the old tradition of Gerrymandering in New York State, and let’s TAKE BACK THE UNION!

I'm Rubber You're Glue. . .

2006-06-06T06:25:00.000-05:00

We bring the article as is, no touch-ups, no corrections. You read it, you decide for yourself what lurks inside that big heart. If you can trace some of the language to later behavior on the part of the author, feel free to comment. Remember, we didn't say it was original, but we do think it's revealing. Read and learn.

Self Protection from Projection

© (1996) Vicki Polin, MA, ATR, LCPC

Projection is one of the first defenses or protective mechanisms learned as a child. A child needs to feel a sense of importance. When this is threatened there becomes a need to feel a sense of some sort of magical power over another person, to feel safe, guiltless, important. When there is a conflict that is intolerable internally, a child will externalize the feelings on to someone or something. How many times have you heard stories bout a young child breaking something and saying "I didn't do it, Marc did it" or It just fell by itself". The child is unable to own his/her own feelings of guilt or shame. The same thing happens to us as adults.

But what do you do when you are the one who is being projected upon? What do you do with the feelings and protect yourself from feeling hurt? How do you disengage from the negative energy that is flowing? How do you NOT do unto others as they do unto you? The answers can be both simple and complex. The first step is being able to recognized a projection. The second step is learning not to internalize the feelings, in other words "Don't take it personally". Simple to say, yet extremely difficult to do. That's where remembering "I am rubber, you are glue..." comes in handy.

Most people want to have a good relationship with their family, friends, co-workers, yet experience difficulties because, as one client said "No one knows better than my parents and other family members how to push my buttons." "I get crazy and do and/or say things I wish I wouldn't."

Sometimes I do things that are self-destructive just to make the feelings go away." Some common self-abusive behaviors include self-mutilation, suicide attempts, sexual acting out, alcohol/chemical abuse, binge eating, starving, etc. These symptoms can be a result of something someone said, or caused by intense feelings that one just doesn't know what to do with. Sometimes it feels like people I care about are trying to get me upset." "It feels like they want me to hurt myself". These are also projections.

Remember "I am rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you" may help separate your feelings from someone else's projection. When you are feeling under attack and the child within is panicking, it may be helpful to remember this poem. Say it loudly to yourself when you feel that someone is saying negative things to you that do not seem to fit. It may help to stay separate from the intense feelings someone is trying to give to you. It can be a way to protect yourself instead of owning their feelings. Most important is that it may also help you with some of the intense feelings that may trigger some of your own negative reactions.

BEEN WAITING 6 YEARS FOR THIS

2006-06-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

The Truth about George W. Bush

This situation took place in 1984 in the State of Tennessee. It concerns a 41 year old woman [currently residing in Las Vegas], Victor Ashe and George Bush's encounter in 1984 during the senate debates between Al Gore, Jr., Victor Ashe and Ed McAteer. She was invited to come to Tennessee by Victor Ashe. While attending one of these debates she spoke briefly with Ed McAteer (Senatorial candidate in 1984 who debated alongside Al Gore, Jr. and Victor Ashe, and was responsible in part for the emergence of the Religious Right).

When this Las Vegas woman told us about her conversation with Ed McAteer we thought it was something that should be looked into. He was being treated for cancer so we had to move quickly to open a dialogue. We believed obtaining a death bed declaration [if it came down to that] of a man of Ed McAteer's stature in the Christian community [he was called the Godfather of the Religious Right] would have held tremendous weight. Ed [finally] coming forward to say what he witnessed or knew concerning this matter would have been unimpeachable. Ed was a staunch supporter of the state of Israel and quietly lobbied for the post of U.S. ambassador to Israel back in 2001 but was turned down for the position by none other than George W. Bush. It seems in George W. Bush's isolated bubble, ambassadorships are rewards set aside for friends and lovers only.

The Las Vegas woman was paid $15,000 to arrange sexual liaisons involving bisexual men for George W. Bush (then private citizen) and Victor Ashe (then a Tennessee State Senator). These adulterous bisexual affairs (3 encounters in all-3 different cities) took place in the state of Tennessee during the 1984 senate debates between, Al Gore, Jr., Victor Ashe and Ed McAteer. An African-American woman was invited to participate in this adulterous sexual encounter with George W. Bush and Victor Ashe immediately following the Chattanooga senatorial debate. This woman was paid $1,500. A few years later the Las Vegas woman was detained in Washington D.C. with Victor Ashe by the Metro D.C. police. She was released but Victor was taken into custody.

So confident was this woman that Ed would have remembered her [and their meeting] she had finally come forward and was prepared to tell it all. She will swear to the authenticity of what is being imparted here, which is the reason that we built this website so we could get this information out to you.

Leola McConnell, Democratic candidate for Governor of Nevada and professional dominatrix speaks out

"President Bush's speech to the nation Monday. If he doesn't say he's a gay American or at the least a bisexual one then he shouldn't be making one at all. And the notion that it would be in regards to writing bigotry into our nation's Constitution is reprehensible. Too bad it isn't me doing the rebuttal because in 1984, I watched him perform (with the enthusiasm of homosexual male who had done this many times before) a homosexual act on another man, namely Victor Ashe. Victor Ashe is the current Ambassador to the nation of Poland who should also come out like former Governor McGreevey of New Jersey and admit to being a gay American. Other homo-erotic acts were also performed by then private citizen George Bush because I performed one of them on him personally.

I am the woman this website (bushssecretlifein84.tripod.com) speaks of that has been posted on the net nearly two years now. None of this would be the business of anyone but President Bush's little ruse to save his failed presidency by using DOMA [Defense of Marriage Act] to divide Americans one from the other has to be exposed as the act of a desperate closeted homosexual man. The only crime in being GLBT is in the hiding. The President needs to come clean with the American people about his own past sexual behavior before he tries to besmirch the humanity of people in search of sincerely committing to the same bonds of matrimony he's afforded. He violated his own vows of monogamy having a homosexual affair with a long time family friend of whom his wife had no knowledge. His hypocrisy seems to know no bounds.

I had planned to run for governor of Nevada without going into any of this but his planned nationally televised address to the nation makes it necessary for me to address his attempt at division in as public a way as he picked to try this Bushification of reality regarding same sex marriages.

Sincerely,
Leola McConnell
Liberal Democratic candidate for Governor of Nevada"

I Need Some Time Off. I Want to Do New Things. I Want to Sleep More Hours

2006-06-05T08:26:00.000-05:00

This item was posted on JCN18.com in 1998. I'm re-posting it because we're getting old and someone should keep track of what happened when. Special thanks to Larry Yudelson, without whom this archival material would have gone back into the ether.

Interview with JCN's retiring Senior Editor Yori Yanover.

by Yori Yanover

We're sitting in Mr. Yanover's downtown office, separated by a lavish screen from the bedroom he shares with his wife of 21 years. Thankfully he and I encompass only one body, so the area is sufficiently spacious (can you say "sufficiently spacious" three times in a row really quickly?).

Yanover, a former journalist for US Hebrew rag Israel Shelanu and the US supplement of Yedioth Aharonoth, is surrounded today by a great deal of stuff he has acquired over the Internet, using his Visa card. He sports a Quantex with a 300 MH processor, 128 Megabyte Ram, 6 gigabyte hard-drive memory and 17 inch screen. He is very proud of these. He also owns a Umax scanner, Apple LaserWriter printer, a phone and an answering machine.

He also says he owns several books, but hasn't seen them recently. Yanover has been online since around October of 1994, when he was first reprimanded for posting inappropriate messages on the Compuserve Jewish message board. His claim that he merely mixed his messages to the sex forum with those for the Jewish discussion only made matters worse.

Getting hired as an editor for a new Jewish online venture was only a matter of time at that point.

Q: Why are you leaving JCN?

Yanover: Right to the point, eh? No chit-chat, the facts, Ma'am, only the --

Q: Come on, already…

Yanover: Look, I've been here since the beginning of time. I want to get into new things. I want to be off-line for a while. You have a problem with that?

Q: Well, since you're one of the only Webzine editors who actually gets paid for what he does...

Yanover: This is true, and I'm thankful for that. In fact, this may be a good spot to thank Niv Bleich, President of Advanced Standard, our parent company, for launching and running this great service.

Q: Any other thank-you notes before we continue?

Yanover: Literally dozens of people took part in creating this great tool of Jewish intercourse (are we getting an R rating for this?). I'll mention those who really imbued the site with their souls.

Adi Ben Jakob, our former technical director, who hated my essays in Yedioth so much, he decided he had to have me here, if only to raise the temperature; Yoram Ezra, who gave the zine its first graphic personality; Max Levitte, who created the Web guide and was our first news editor; Larry Yudelson, who really shaped the attitudes and ambition of JCN; Michal Mart, who yanked the site into the next generation of Internet interactivity; Tzvee Zahavy, who lent us a quality of distinction.

And, like I said, literally dozens of others whose lives crossed JCN's at one point or another and helped make it a truly fun spot.

Q: Is there JCN after Yori Yanover?

Yanover: Are you kidding? In many ways the game is just now starting. I believe the new editor, Eve Yudelson, is just the person to take JCN into the next Century, so to speak. She's young, she's totally unpredictable, and I'm looking forward to enjoying the fruits of her labor. I'm told the News department will undergo a quantum change, which I'll be following eagerly.

But first I'm getting off line for a few weeks. I may read a book.

Q: Who's your favorite author?

Yanover: Patricia Anthony, absolutely the best thing that's happened to sci-fi in ages.

Q: Why are you leaving JCN?

Yanover: I want to write a book. Maybe a sequel to my book on Lubavitch.

Q: Seriously, though, why are you leaving JCN?

Yanover: I need some time off. I want to do new things. I want to sleep more hours.

Q: What's your favorite corner on JCN?

Yanover: I love them all equally.

Q: What did you hate most on JCN?

Yanover: Deleting forum messages.

Yori Yanover is JCN's former senior editor.

What to Do with Gafni

2006-05-31T23:15:00.000-05:00

Anonymous writes (commenting on Anonymous Shnononymous)

First of all - as one of [Mordechai Gafni’s] victims, it was not only one time he molested a minor, it was two. No "investigations" were made into these matters regardless of what various Rabbonim might tell you. As a victim I can tell you an investigation was not done.

Gafni is a predator - he will not just miraculously "get well," he has never admitted what he did in his past and still maintains notions of "love" and "seduction" with regard to his victims who were minors at the time.

You can rant and rave all you want about Vicki Polin, Luke Ford etc., but what appears forgotten is the victims that are out there, real people with real feelings who were harmed. This includes Gafni's current victims and the any of the prior victims - who knows how many may emerge from the woodwork.

Dear Anonymous,

For the record, I never met or spoke to Mordechai Gafni, and everything I know about him comes second hand. If you tell me he had illegal sex with two, rather than one minor, I must accept your version of the truth, because I don’t have a better, more direct source to rely on.

But I agree with you that the discussion of the ravages Gafni left behind, both earlier and later in his life, is overdue. Let me ask you then, what would you consider, in your personal case, to be the kind of arrangement after which you would feel that your grievance is satisfied?

Let’s line up the grievances as I’ve heard them, second hand:

Sex with an under-aged person
Sex with several women with false promises of marriage
Sex with students impressed by Gafni’s charisma

A reliable arbiter should investigate and assess the extent of the damage sustained by each individual woman. I suspect the range of assessed damages might be as varied as the range of women who have had the bad luck to be swayed by Gafni. But my sense is that as long as none of them suffered physical damage, the dollar value set on their mental anguish would be limited.

Broken promises of marriage can bring in some monetary rewards, but since most of the sexual complaints are by adult women, who were, basically, consenting, the sums will not be large. But, of course, the better the lawyer, the higher the rewards.

But I must warn you that pursuing this case to the end will require a great commitment on your part; you’ll basically have to put your personal and professional life aside and commit to suing Gafni. And if you’re not the first one to sue him, he might be broke by the time you win.

Which brings me to the sad and real aspect of recovering from the kind of injury you sustained: It’s not about punishing the SOB who hurt you. It rarely is. It’s about rediscovering the powers within you to move on. You said I was “ranting and raving,” so I would assume that you don’t think I’m your friend. So I’ll tell you what I would have told my daughter, if, God forbid, she were in your situation: Let the guy rot, move on, get back into life.

I’ll share with you a personal experience.

Many years ago, my wife and I lost our one-year old baby. It was an opportunistic bacteria that ran through her body in one weekend. Our pediatrician was negligent. It was our first child, we depended on him for judgment, and he was basically ignoring us, even when we called in the middle of the night. By the time we finally brought her in, he was shocked by her condition and had us take her to the emergency room, where she passed away.

After the first month of mourning, we went to see our lawyer about suing our doctor. We sat with a battery of attorneys, and they began to prep us, set dates for depositions, etc., until it became very clear to us that pursuing the case, in which we were undoubtedly right and the doctor undoubtedly wrong, would require about a five-year commitment on our part. We would be deposed, we would appear in court time and again, we would be asked to re-live the most painful time in our lives, again and again.

We balked. And decided to put our energies in recovering from the tragedy. Which we did, slowly. Incidentally, the pediatrician’s wife lost her pregnancy shortly thereafter and he left the field permanently. So karma is still alive and well. The fact is that today the only thing I feel for that doctor is pity. I think my wife and I are in much better shape than he.

In my view it is inappropriate for anyone to write what Mordechai Gafni should do or not do. He is an addict who’s hitting rock bottom, and he will or will not seek recovery. The public discussion of the quality of his mea culpa, or the mea culpi of various Renewal movement leaders is embarrassingly prurient. As individuals we have the right to declare what our own needs are, not what other people’s needs should be. After all, what do you want him to receive? Jail? Not going to happen, not here, not in Israel. I’d be extremely surprised if it does. So, if not jail, then what? Apology? From a sex addict so deep in his disease he can’t help sounding presidential when pretending to ask forgiveness? What’s the value of that? Maybe in six months, if he were to ask to see you and to make amends to you, out of a new commitment to recovery, then it might have value. Now he would probably benefit most from just admitting that his life has become unmanageable.

So it’s not about Gafni, it never was, it’s about you, how do you come out of this creepy experience a strong and recovered human being? I suspect there isn’t a single thing Gafni can do or that can be done to Gafni, which would get you to that path of recovery.

With sympathy and affection,

Yori Yanover

Anonymous Shnononymous

2006-05-29T10:35:00.000-05:00

(From an exchange on Luke Ford’s website)

Yori Yanover writes:

Luke -- With all due respect, the casual observer might jump to the conclusion that Vicki Polin and I are the only people you know who aren't anonymous. This is best shown by the most recent rush to kick Mordechai Gafni while he is conveniently on the ground. I don't mind the fact that his public apology, as well as the letters from Reb Zalman and several other Jewish Renewal folks be critiqued, even maligned. But must it all be done by anonymous rabbis and psychologists? Are we fresh out of people who can insult their fellow man and not hide behind the shield of anonymity? What's the justification for this protection, in the case of the two most recent rabbi and psychologist duo, for seeking to remain anonymous?

The Orthodox rabbi responds:

While Yori takes offence at the form – namely anonymous emails – though he should recognize that much of blogging and comments is an anonymous endeavor – what does he think about the content? I would assume that an astute social commentator as himself would have some response to the comment – and the authors identity should really be secondary. Or were the comments too strong – and if I did put my name would he have looked for ways to attack me – which is why he is frustrated at the anonymity. Was there any inaccuracy in my email? If yes he should point it out. If no – then why is the identity an issue? There have been hundreds of anonymous comments on this issue on blogs all over cyberspace – so I chose your blog which doesn’t take comments – which forces one to send you emails – why is this an issue?

Dear “Orthodox Rabbi Responds”

In a normative society, an accused has the right to face his accusers. It’s an elementary component of fairness and justice.

There are cases when the accusing party stands to be harmed, either by the accused or by a related agency; or when the accusing party is under aged, when we promote the protection of the accuser via anonymity.

But a grown Orthodox Rabbi like you, who faces his God three times a day and is at peace with his conscience, what justification does he have to don the hood of the anonymous witness?

My views on Gafni? I understand he’s been a brilliant teacher who couldn’t keep it in his pants. He broke the social code regarding employing one’s influence and status to get laid. He probably shouldn’t go back to teaching for a while, because, as I was led to understand, once he’s on a roll, he can’t help himself. The women he had sex with were not minors, save for one experience when he was much younger. In my view, Gafni should make amends in a serious, honest and meaningful way to the women he took advantage off, or he’ll never grow beyond this point of abuse and humiliation. If I were his spiritual consultant, I would recommend a detailed apology, including recanting his actions and a dollar value set on each offense. And then he gets forgiven and can start to seek the next step in seeking his spiritual wholesomeness.

I believe the prison system in every country is a horrible place which is against the spirit of Torah, degrading souls and subjecting human beings to daily abuse and torture. No crime at all should be punished with uprooting a person from his loved one and turning them into sodomized animals for a prescribed period of time. Prison is a crime against God and humans. Our Torah, as ORR knows well, prescribes the death penalty for intentional capital offenses, exile for unintentional capital offenses, and a detailed process of restitution for everything else. If a person is deemed chronically addicted to sexual assaults, we should probably consider long-term hospitalization. But advocating that Gafni, or any other human being, accept incarceration as justice, means turning a blind eye on the suffering and torment of the millions of incarcerated persons everywhere.

One last point, ORR says: “Or were the comments too strong and if I did put my name would he have looked for ways to attack me which is why he is frustrated at the anonymity.” That’s pure nastiness. As someone who gets a litany of my journalistic history, as well as reams of attributed writings I never authored plastered over endless screens every time I post my opinion, I resent the underhanded insult. If your record makes you vulnerable in this debate, what right do you have to comment on the sexual proclivities of another? If your record is solid, stop whining, ORR, be a man, put your name under your statement and argue like a grownup.

You know, Vicki Polin is a crazy lady, but at least she’s out there, name intact. Anonymity is a convenient way to stab someone in the dark and run away without having to watch them bleed. It’s cowardly and disturbingly pre-adolescent.

Yori Yanover

VICKI'S PATHOLOGY

2006-05-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

This comment was entered by an anonymous contributor to an earlier item on this blog. I re-publish the exchange because it is an excellent testimony regarding Polin.

Anonymous said...

Very good, Yanover. I agree there is a problem, especially in the US, both with abuse and with some pretty unnatural repression. You made excellant points. I do believe some of that crowd is hysterical, but then a survivor of abuse could be excused for that tendency....

Anonymous said...

in answer to anonymous above

You say: I do believe some of that crowd is hysterical, but then a survivor of abuse could be excused for that tendency.... but Vicki Polin is not a survivor. Her family never hurt her or incested or victimized her. She enjoyed the most non-controversial of middle-class jewish, Skokie Illinois childhoods. Her family are poster-children for the average in "average american." What's her excuse for hysteria, rabies? Yet she claimed, twenty years ago, and still maintains that her father incested her and made her pregnant five times and forced her to kill and eat her fetuses in Frankist Satanic rituals together with others in the Chicago Jewish Community.

Seriously, how come Rabbis J Blau and S Porter, M Dratch and H Bilet and others can't get enough of sucking up to her like as though she were Snow White? The answer is that she picked a great cover for her activities. Who could be against an organization that fights to uncover child-abuse and domestic violence hidden by Jewish families? No one with claim to decency, right? Who would dare speak out AGAINST such an organiation like her Awareness Center?

Her genius is to couch her activities in clever sloganspeak. Like communists who claim to be fighting against the exploitation of the working class, or nazi skinheads who claim to be fighting against the international conspiracy to oppress white people, Vicki Polin knows exactly what to say to shut you up when you disagree with her. Try it and see for yourself.

She gets people to come onto the internet and write in support of her work. But you won't find people willing to write in support of her, herself. Because Vicki Polin is a predator and the Jews of Baltimore where she currently lives and battens onto people know her for real. You wouldn't find them writing in support of her. She relies on people like you, anonymous, duped by her slogans into defending her integrity. The people who actually know her in real-life who come online to write about her only have the most damning things to say.

The exception to the rule that people who know her all hate, revile and can remember nothing good to say about her is Rabbi Shlomo Porter. He's someone who actually knows her but still protects her, he gives her money and ignores any complaints he hears about her predatory behaviors. There is speculation that he knew her back in her Chicago days, perhaps he's an old boyfriend of hers or she knows something about him he'd rather she not publicize, but for sure he's the exception which proves the rule. Ask anyone who interact with her, who invites her into his or her house for shabbat or lets her sleep over when she needs a place to crash, they'll all say more or less the same thing, she's a user. She uses the frum Jewish hospitality system. She knows how to use the system. You'll hear the same refrain whichever person you ask, in whichever community.

Even in Baltimore where she preys on the frum community who generally refrain from talking lashon hara about shabbat guests, there's a quiet and growing awareness that she is a manipulator of unusual skill and initiative.

And when she diagnoses someone at the shabbat meal table as "oh, you were probably incested by your father" any response in disagreement with her will earn you a label as a denial-monger and potential guest on her shit-list for later. Trust me on this, don't try it.

Mazal Tov, Hershy and Salome Worch

2006-05-27T20:32:00.000-05:00

On your coming wedding

Tuesday, 3rd Sivan, 5766, May 30th, 2006

We've waited for so long for this moment, along with all your sweet and holy friends, praying for this combination of high mitzvoth, from pidion shvuyim (redemption of captives) to chupah and kidushin, and all the mitzvoth in between.

Now, when the danger is lifted and Salome is among us in America, safe at last, it's time to rejoice.

May God bless you with many years of happiness and wealth.

Yori, Nancy and Yarden Yanover

Please consider this your invitation to join us at our Jewish Wedding ceremony

7:00 PM, Tuesday May 30th

Cong. Tiferet Israel, 6336 North Lincoln Ave, (cor. Drake) Chicago, IL 60659

We would be honored by your presence and the opportunity to dance and rejoice with you.

Yours truly,

J. Hershy & Salome Worch

CALL TO ACTION: CASE OF VICTORIA POLIN MA, ATR, LCPC

2006-05-25T15:01:00.000-05:00

Some of you may be aware of the fact that for the last five years there has been a movement to glorify the accomplishments of a woman named Vicki Polin and an organization called the Awareness Center. USAJewish.com firmly believes there is a problem in doing this. There have been numerous accusations that Vicki Polin abused the Jewish community's trust placed in her by attacking innocent persons, starting with her campaign to brand the Orthodox community of Chicago as Satan worshippers.

1. USAJewish.com is looking for survivors of Vicki Polin who would want to be interviewed by a journalist and have their story published. If you are interested, please contact Yori Yanover for more information.

2. USAJewish.com asks that whenever an article comes out regarding Vicki Polin you alert us, including a link on the page it was found.

3. USAJewish.com asks that you write letters to editors requesting accountability in the portrayal Vicki Polin and the Awareness Center. Please forward your letters to USAJewish.com and send a note giving us permission to publish your letter on our blog.

Vicki Polin is the most favorite Jewish author of both White Power and Muslim bloggers.

Thou shalt remove evil from among you. (Deut. 22:21)

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Ex. 22:17)

EDUCATE YOURSELF ON VICKI POLIN

Kindly read these posts detailing the serious issues associated with this porn monger:

To Luke Ford With Somewhat Apprehensive Affection

Show Her The Money

Consumer Alert: Before You Send Vicki Polin Money…

Beware The Sociopath Crusader

I Noticed Massive Traffic From Vicki Polin

2006-05-24T11:23:00.000-05:00

Nancy Barkdull a.k.a. "Jane"

...to openyeshiva.com. I'm getting a lot of hits since she's directing people in her calls to action, this week we registered over 1000 visits for the first time. And with the new spotlight she can put on me and mordechai gafni the topic is hotting up still more.

I followed one of the links to call to action Rabbi Worch BDSM and she's got quite a spread there on me. with a photo and bits from the front page of open kabbalah_101. I'm supposing it is in retaliation for my posting pics of her on the front page of Open Yeshiva and making fun of her.

I also noticed "Jane" i.e. Nancy Barkdull has re-entered the list in jousting with you there. This is no doubt in sync with her newfound need to come snooping on all my web pages where I have stat counters. she visits all my web pages, Livejournal, Openyeshiva, kabbalah_101, at least once a day. I doubt she's looking for a snailmail address to send money to pay me what she borrowed from me...

I think the inivitation from Luke Ford (to give him an interview) comes on the back of these activities, he's acting at the urging of Vicki and Nancy and there is nothing benign in his intent.

's'what I fink

Hershy Worch

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Tshuvah Via Fratricide

2006-05-24T11:20:00.000-05:00

What a delightful passage in Yisrael Medad's Kick them when they're down entry:

"Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar should also join the call for a full investigation, especially in light of the corruption allegations hanging over Metzger's head. Their support for an investigation of Gafni/Winyarz would do something to repair the damage those allegations have done to the profession of 'rabbi,' and would strengthen ultra-Orthodox claims to be concerned for the ethical make up of this country."

This may mark a path for repent for Gafni, too, in the best fashion of TV's Law and Order plea bargaining scenes: All he has to do is expose a rabbi even more depraved and call for his public humiliation. This is the funniest thing to hit the Jewish blogs ever.

Falsely Accused, and Trying to Prevent a Repeat Episode

2006-05-24T11:16:00.000-05:00

A sobering note in the midst of the witch hunters' bowl...

A reputation is a fragile and precious thing.

It's true if you're a poor synagogue caretaker, and it's true if you're a Westchester lawyer.

Just ask Alfredo Vargas and Andrew M. Labella. Mr. Vargas was the loyal, indispensable caretaker at Congregation Adat Yisrael until his life was ruined in 2000 by a false accusation of raping a 4-year-old girl.

He was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to prison, then granted a new trial after congregants and other supporters, convinced that he could not have committed the crime and saying the girl's family had a history of alleging sexual abuse, rallied to his defense.

At the second trial last year, after the girl picked out two jurors as her assailant, he was acquitted but then deported to Nicaragua because he was in the United States illegally. (He entered legally in 1969 but failed to maintain legal status.)

Mr. Vargas, 69, now living with a sister in Nicaragua, won't get his old life back. The congregation has disbanded. He's not likely to return to the United States. He contracted lymphoma in prison and has had difficulty finding any work in Nicaragua.

Read more...

The Missing Link

2006-05-23T15:30:00.000-05:00

Hi, Luke,

You may or may not know that the "Survivors" website is re-posting your entry on Dr. Aviva Weisbord from 5/21. I discovered it on my daily scanning of my own name online, which I do in anticipation of, perhaps, some day, joining the ranks of shame on VP's websites and mailing lists. The most interesting aspect of this re-post is the fact that all of the links from your original piece are copied copiously, save for one. Guess which (hint - it's in the following paragraph)...

Phil Jacobs, along with Gary Rosenblatt, were given the story of Vicki Polin's 1989 appearance on Oprah before anybody but never published anything on it. About six months after Phil and Gary had the story, I was given it by Yori Yanover and, after ascertaining the transcript's accuracy, immediately published it.

Have a day of peace,

YY

(Needless to say, Mr. Ford was not surprised...)

Yori Yanover Denies Engaging in BDSM

2006-05-21T06:33:00.000-05:00

"BDSM" are the initials for bondage-domination-sadism-masochism continuum of power-play games.

Dear Luke,

In the past, when you presented some bizarre notes about a guy using my name to rile up demonstrators against the WTO in Seattle, you wondered why I hadn't protested this misuse of my name, insinuating that by not doing that at the time, I must accept the fallout (there was none, but that's a different story).

Although this logic is reminiscent of the opening chapters of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where an alien ship destroys the earth to make room for an intergalactic highway, telling the inhabitants they had ample time to contest the move in an office only a few light-years away, there was probably some practical wisdom in what you wrote.

Indeed, I've made it my habit to google myself at least once a week, just to stay on top of things. And what I don't find myself, I get by email. Like the email I received late Friday afternoon from a close friend: “Jewish Survivors is claiming now that you do BDSM games with all your friends -- and you don't invite us?!?!?!?”

I sighed, looked at my watch and went to my already closed Mozilla again, to discover the following sweet note on Jewish Survivors of Sexual Violence Speak Out: “I can't stop asking myself if Yori Yanover is also into BDSM like his friends? Let's not forget to mention his buddy Rabbi David Lipman who is a convicted child molester. I'm trying to remember if he's also friends with convicted sex offender, Kabbalah Coach - Rabbi Michael Ozair too?

“Luke Ford's been writing about it all week on his blog.”

I scanned up and down your blog and couldn’t find any mention of my name. Perhaps you did write about my taste for rough stuff and it escaped me. You’re welcome to set me straight.

Now, lest the scourge of Seattle repeat itself, I must stand in the city square -- your blog -- and proclaim that I never engaged in BDSM (which, not surprisingly, does not stand for Beis Din Shliach Mitzvah), nor is BDSM in any other way part of my erotic menu. I do not condemn consenting adults who enjoy it, I simply do not find it appealing in the least. It is sad that one’s reputation can be trashed so easily, but such is life.

One must wonder, however, what was the basis for that "casual" remark? I am not a public servant in any way. I am a private businessman and an author. I do not have employees nor students. I am not a rabbi. I was never accused by anyone of any sexual or other misconduct. Why, then, can an anonymous website make dark innuendos about me and get away with it, merely because they took care to add a question mark at the end of the nasty remark?

I’ll tell you why: Because I exposed Vicki Polin’s appearance on Oprah, where she “confessed” her ties to a satanic Jewish cult, baby-munching and all. I deprived her of credibility in a way she can never restore. And when the tape of that appearance, currently in the hands of one of her victims, will make it to the web, as it will, eventually, she will remain bereft of parnosah. This is why she hates me so much, and "can't stop thinking" about me. This is why she considers it par for the course to assault my reputation, even though I meet none of her definitions for people she normally torments. I’m the guy who proved she’s crazy.

So, anyway, the record is set straight again, I do not now, nor have I ever before engaged in BDSM. I welcome future inquiries regarding my bedroom habits, although I may be forced to charge a small fee.

Yori Yanover

The Scourge of Anonymity

2006-05-18T13:37:00.000-05:00

My exchange with Mary Wilbur on canonist.com

She wrote:

Misquotation, misrepresentation, disinformation, stupidity and ignorance spin the web of the world.

Anyone who has ever used credit, opened a bank account, or been employed (unless their documents are forged, falsified, or stolen) was, is, and always will be monitored. Privacy was finished the moment the fed started to collect income taxes (Taft) and issue Social Security cards (F. Roosevelt).

I wrote:

True enough. And so, credit card companies, for instance, have made it their policy to accept customer fraud claims first and ask questions later. As inconvenient, even damaging, as it is to vendors, they must accept this, or face the worse alternative, which is the loss of customers’ trust in their credit card companies and credit card purchasing.

Likewise, I believe, in the marketplace of ideas, because of the vast possibilities for fraud, we should believe the accused and not the accuser, as our initial response. We should suspect claims of misconduct coming from anonymous sources. We should discard such claims when they’re not swiftly followed by official complaints to the authorities.

As we’ve learned from the Gafni and the few other abuse cases currently in the news, complaints coming from real people, in real police stations, are being treated seriously. This is why we opened those police stations tro begin with. But when we encounter anonymous accusers, we should opt, out of hand, to discard the accuser and believe the accused. Otherwise we end up with renegade institutions like the so-called Awareness Center, which makes its living on publishing anonymous pornographic notes in an endless parade of shame and ruin.

Anonymity, like secrecy, has a way of becoming toxic and malignant with extensive, habitual use. Quickly enough, it becomes a powerful destructive weapon, instead of a means to protect the weak.

A 20-year veteran of the Internet, active in online publishing since before Al Gore invented it, I care a great deal about the cumulative effect of toxic anonymity. In my opinion, it has long since departed from the region of free speech and has entered the area of cowardly terrorism.

Post Gafni Erotica

2006-05-15T10:56:00.000-05:00

There are many notes that come to mind following the public humiliation of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni and the many good and decent people who have supported him. I’ll list them without any particular order.

For the longest time I’ve been troubled by the fact that nearly all the rabbis targeted by the Vicki Polin crowd have been egalitarian men of faith, whose mission has been to bring women into the synagogue. My thinking used to be that the kind of accusations Rabbi Mordechai Tendler and others have received were par for the course they had chosen. You spend time with women, married and otherwise, you’ll end up giving someone the wrong impression, and before you know it, your animal spirit gets the best of you. It makes no difference whether you did or did not do what you’re accused of. You exposed yourself by the very mission you’ve undertaken.

In the lexicon of the sex-victim cartel, there is no difference between a gang rape in some back alley and a liaison between a mature woman and her rabbi

But I think this is too pat an explanation, which is why I like this other thought I saw online someplace: Charismatic holy teachers have giant evil inclinations. Our Talmud teaches that anyone bigger than his friend has a bigger sex drive, too. It’s not easy, bringing people closer to the transcendental and not getting turned on by it. It revs you up, you become free of the set of moral codes which guide most of us – not because you consciously choose to drop them, it just happens.

The hasidic masters of the 18th and 19th Centuries guarded themselves with an ascetic lifestyle, many refusing to even look at a woman, much less permit one into their chambers. Indeed, when hasidic tales mention a master who went out of his way on behalf of a woman, his act is considered a brave thing, because he dared risk his piety to help a fellow human being, even a woman.

Alas, our pro-woman modern-Orthodox and New Age rabbis do not have this shield to guard and protect them. They permit and encourage women to come closer, and, like I said, they expose themselves to harm.

There’s only one device which can protect them under these dangerous conditions, in which their own resolve is being tested, and in which they stand to become objectified by men and women they’ve inspired: No secrets.

Secrecy is the source of all evil. Secrecy is a manifestation of fear and self loathing. Secrecy is the foundation of addiction. When we say to our children, “Don’t tell Mommy,” or “Don’t tell Daddy,” we imbue them with the seed of addiction. When a spiritual teacher says “Don’t tell anyone,” he has just substituted addiction for intimacy. That lies and other self-destructive actions follow is only to be expected.

Still, I cannot help but wonder about the blurring of the notion of personal responsibility as it is posited by the victimization crowd. In the lexicon of the sex-victim cartel, there is no difference between a gang rape in some back alley and a liaison between a mature woman and her rabbi. The term “predator” is assigned by these folks to, basically, any male who’s been accused by a female of sexual misconduct. It is an effective term, bone-chilling in its imagery, bringing to mind a wily puma flexing its powerful muscles to leap at an unsuspecting antelope. This image is so powerful, it automatically assigns the role of antelope to the female accuser, bypassing our critical evaluation. In many cases, unfortunately, it empowers the accusing woman into a puma, but one so wily and muscular, she destroys her prey irredeemably.

Behind the attempt to shame rabbis for their misjudgment lies a medieval urge to suppress our liberated spirits

I cannot shake the disturbing feeling that by elevating the liaison between a grownup woman and her rabbi to the status of rape we’re absolving women of sexual responsibility. Of course, women in the workplace, or in any other setup in which the man has the power advantage, are in a different predicament. In their case, being forced to consent to sex is a violation of their civil rights. But is it rape? Is the injury of having sex with one’s boss in some seedy hotel room equal to a physical rape in some dark alley?

When we lose our capacity to recognize degrees in evil, we run the risk of losing our capacity to avoid being evil. This is why the “Awareness Center” has destroyed so many innocent lives, with its ritualized pornography and its abandon of judgment and hesitation. This is why the few rabbis who are still affiliated with this center frighten me with their taste for the “guilty until proven otherwise” approach to conflict resolution. One of them, a Rabbi Blau from YU, even accused me of harassing him, because I criticized his actions online. Imagine that. I dared write that the great inquisitor was wrong. Ah, the things his Excellency must endure…

But recognizing degrees in evil is crucial to our development as individuals and as a society. And demanding personal responsibility of all grownups who are not feeble minded is also crucial to our public mental health. And magical thinking, by which we assign overwhelming powers of sexual suggestion to this or that rabbi, serves to infantilize us as a society. Just as no one can be hypnotized against their will, or made to do anything under hypnosis which they loath, so is the notion of irresistible sexual suggestion ridiculous and puerile. It is fine for a child to claim the candy made him eat it – but we expect grown men and women to exert more introspection and personal responsibility.

Alas, having been forced to live in the vicinity of Christians and Muslims these many centuries, we’ve absorbed these two cultures’ warped approach to eroticism and sexuality. It is mind boggling to me how the erotic sanity of our Talmudic sages, never mind our Biblical prophets, has been so eroded, to the point where we find the abhorrence of sexuality so appealing. In a regime of fear, with our phones and emails under scrutiny of government agents, we are being robbed of the eroticism which is so essential to our mental health. We need touching, we need looking, we need hugging and kissing, or we go crazy. And every time some sexual misanthrope celebrates the demise of a rabbi so addicted to his erotic needs he hurts others, we as a society lose another bit of our entitlement to a carefree erotic consciousness.

When examining the bloodthirsty charge of a few insane individuals to punish prominent spiritual leaders who supported Gafni, I urge you to weigh not just the civil rights of Gafni’s accusers, but also the future of our civilized and sane sexuality. Remember, behind the attempt to shame rabbis for their misjudgment lies a medieval urge to suppress our liberated spirits.

Now, as often is the case, I expect the cabal of sexual hysteria to quote this article out of context, email it around and altogether employ their typical crass methods to confuse what should be a gentle and complex discussion. As always, this cannot be avoided, and all I can do is express my profound gratitude at being me and not them.

Ned Lamont for Senate

2006-05-08T08:17:00.000-05:00

Ned Lamont for Senate

Yours truly just spent $25 in contribution to the Ned Lamont for Senate campaign. It felt good. I’ve spent $25 and more in the past with much less gratification. I’ve taken the family to a lousy movie, and with popcorn and cokes we spent well over $25 and felt terrible afterwards. But not this time.

Net Lamont is a liberal businessman from Greenwich, Connecticut, who’s running for the Democratic party’s nomination against Joe Lieberman. I can’t stand Joe Lieberman. Yes, I know in the 2000 campaign I was crazy for Joe, I thought he represented everything that was wonderful about Jews in America – an Orthodox Jew who could climb to the second-highest post in the nation without having to dilute his faith.

I got into some bruising fights with Orthodox Jews who criticized Joe for his ambiguous answers on embarrassing halachic questions. If you Google it you’re bound to find it. I haven’t changed my opinion about those debates, although I wish I had been less bruising (and bruised). But what upsets me the most is how I could have been so wrong about Joe Lieberman himself. What a sellout he turned out to be, what a hack.

So I want him unseated, and I just spent $25 to help do it. Frankly, I don’t even care if Ned Lamont can defeat his Republican opponent in November, should he defeat JL in the primary. Joe is a Republican in Democrat clothing anyway. I feel he should be punished for brown nosing the worst administration we’ve had since the late 1920’s.

Go, Ned, go!

Lieberman's plight reflects party divided by war

Criticized for supporting Bush, the Conn. senator faces real competition for the first time since '88.
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst

HARTFORD, Conn. - Behold the downward trajectory of Joe Lieberman's political fortunes.

In 2000, Connecticut's junior senator came within a few hanging chads of becoming vice president of the United States. In 2004, he ran for president but was blown out in the Democratic primaries by liberal voters who deemed him too hawkish on Iraq and too chummy with the commander in chief.

And now, in 2006, he has been reduced to ringing up local Democrats in his own backyard, seeking their help as he tries to save his job. Such is the plight of a politician who has become a punching bag for the antiwar base of his own party - and a national symbol of how this war is sowing bitter divisions among Democrats.
Lieberman now faces real competition for the first time since 1988 - from Ned Lamont, an affluent cable-TV entrepreneur and staunch war critic who is poised to challenge Lieberman in an August Democratic primary, with financial backing from the liberal bloggers who routinely assail the senator in language unfit for a family newspaper.

Office Pool – Vote Up or Down on Rove Indictment

2006-04-27T07:46:00.000-05:00

Lawrence O’Donnell on the Huffinton Post today says the question of whether or not Karl Rove will be indicted any time soon depends on who is behind his Grand Jury appearance. If it was the prosecutor, Fitzgerald, who asked Rove to show, it means there isn’t yet enough evidence to indict. On the other hand, if it’s Rove who asked for it, it means his lawyer knows something’s coming down and he pushed his client to speak up before the indictment is decided.

My sense is that you don’t resign your White House Position unless you think you’re becoming a liability in 4-3-2… So I believe there is an indictment coming. But my track record on major predictions stinks. I predicted a Kerry win in ’04, for crying out loud.

So, what do you think? And, please, try to use your name, or any name, when you comment. The anonymous thing is starting to annoy me. Thanks.

God’s Next Problem

2006-04-27T05:39:00.000-05:00

A friend of ours was the editor of the Discovery-Times Channel’s new, compelling 1-hour documentary, God's Next Army, about Patrick Henry College, a six-year-old evangelical college on the outskirts of Washington, DC, which is intent on becoming Christianity's answer to the Ivy League, but more than that, is planning to conquer the battlefield of American politics.

The kids on the steps of Congress (from the HPC photo gallery)

As documentaries go, this one is extremely fair-minded in the way it permits its subjects to make their case to the viewer. The image which emerges from the many interviews onscreen is of an homogenous student body, 99% blond-white, most of whom were home-schooled by highly motivated, evangelical parents. Their teachers, too, appear cleancut, poised, friendly and self-assured. Overall, old-leftie prejudices aside, this crowd appears as non-threatening and promising as they come.

You’re prepared to forgive them the fact that they teach everything “through the Bible.” Who cares if their biology teacher employs Creationism? Who cares, even, if the school’s president, Michael Farris, poo poos the value of liberal arts and the classics, vowing instead to use the biblical prism in his approach to learning. You can go a long way with a biblical prism, and Creationism doesn’t scare me, and neither does the theory of Evolution, by the way.

Well, OK, the literalism of one Science teacher was a bit of a surprise, as she explained all geological changes being the result of the Deluge. I mean, it’s a cute Toireh, with the boiling waters turning the dinosaurs into soup, but away from the Shabbat lunch table it seems less than scientifically useful. But, again, what do I know (and care).

Here’s where the thing starts unraveling. PHC prepares its students, in the most unabashed way, to be tomorrow’s leaders of the Republican party and the world. As such they’re trained to beat the pants off of all other college debate teams. They are focused, informed, fast on their feet and, apparently, lethal.

It’s tough to understand the difference between a sharp debater and an actual scholar. They often appear very similar. I’ve long since given up on 24-hour news shows with their relentless matches, but those are the places where you can see master debaters who know nothing at all about much of anything, but defeat their opponents, hands down.

Frighteningly enough, in the American marketplace of ideas, a good debater usually beats out a good scholar. Hey, this nation always chooses the good looking, friendly seeming guy over his opponent in presidential races. Kennedy over Nixon, Clinton over Dole, Bush over Gore.

But even more scary is the agenda these supposedly Christian lads and lasses are carrying out into the world, and, most emphatically, into the power halls of DC. It’s all about prohibiting same-sex marriages and abortions, and, amazingly, about revoking the estate tax. That last one is justified biblically with some verse about God owning the whole world, “not the state.” But, wait a minute, you want to ask, if God owns it, how come your grandchildren get to keep it? Oh, stop it with your logic, this is America, we can barely understand the slogans, you want we should hear your rebuttals?

Here’s what’s missing from these whitebread Americans’ Christian agenda, as they peddle their pitches in congressional offices, on behalf of God’s Official Party: Any empathy for the poor, for the sick, for the elderly. Any concern for the well being of the planet. Maybe it’s there and the film has neglected to show it, but, somehow, I don’t think so.

The evangelical Me generation has managed to shape the gospel in its own image at HPC, and it’s soldiering up to retake what it sees as its rightful inheritance. It’s not as bad as bikers and neo Nazis, but it comes pretty close. Bikers and neo-Nazis you can still call the cops on, in many cities. These guys will be your cops.

Israeli Law May Be the Funniest

2006-04-27T04:44:00.000-05:00

Hagai Amir

The Yediot Aharonot Ynet website in English is quite selective about the items it chooses to translate and publish. Which is why you’d be deprived of this amazing story unless yours truly rolls up his sleeves and translates away, like in the old days.

HAGAI AMIR GETS A YEAR IN JAIL FOR THREATENING SHARON’S LIFE

Hagai Amir, who is serving a 16-year prison term for his involvement in the Yitzhak Rabin murder (Yigal Amir, the shooter, is his brother – YY) was sentenced this morning (Thursday) in a Netanya Court to a year in jail, following his conviction for threatening the life of former premier Ariel Sharon…

The prosecution argued that on October 31, 2004, Hagai Amir asked a guard at the Ashmoret prison to dial his parents’ and sister’s numbers for him, so he could talk to them. After there was no response from the two phone numbers, Amir said to the guards: “What are you afraid of, that I would finish off Sharon?” After which he told them, “I can make one phone call and get Sharon finished and blown up.”

The judge, Ruth Lorech, warned about the threat posed by imprisoned persons who have already been convicted for involvement in the assassination of a sitting premier.
Do you get the feeling her honor is not trusting so much the competence of the Israeli prison system?

I’ll tell you, the things they send people to jail for… Used to be the response to the threat above would have been, “Oh yeah? You and what army.” But that’s how children settled such conflicts. Governments have ways of making you regret having a mouth at all…

I Did My Civic Duty Thing and It Cost Me Next to Nothing

2006-04-26T15:36:00.000-05:00

Before

After

Yesterday, my wife and I come back from our health walk in the East River Park, and as we’re crossing the pedestrian bridge over the FDR Drive, we see two workmen on an impossibly tall, tram-worthy cherry picker, hosing the side of the Williamsburg Bridge with enormous force.
I’m quite dense on environmental issues, but my wife spotted the problem right away: “They should be covered up, they can’t just let all that [expletive] spray out to the street,” she said. Indeed, the [expletive] was overflowing, ripe with exhaust soot, led, seagull droppings and whatnot.

My call to the 311 office landed me on a 10-minute hold. So I called our local community board 3 office instead and explained the problem. They were responsive, intelligent and swift. This morning I’m coming back from my health walk and voila – the cherry picker was covered up in blue plastic sheets.

Thank you, thank you, I was just trying to do the right thing. Thank you. No, thank you!

My Brother-in-Law Sent This

2006-04-26T15:16:00.000-05:00

A wealthy man was having an affair with an Italian woman for several years. One night, during one of their rendezvous, she confided in him that she was pregnant. Not wanting to ruin his reputation or his marriage, he offered to pay her a large sum of money if she would go to Italy to secretly have the child. If she stayed in Italy to raise the child, he would also provide child support until the child turned 18.

She agreed, but asked how he would know when the baby was born. To keep it discreet, he told her to simply mail him a post card, and write "Spaghetti" on the back. He would then arrange for child support payments to begin. One day, about 9 months later, he came home to his confused wife. Honey, she said, "You received a very strange post card today." "Oh, just give it to me and I'll explain it," he said. The wife obeyed and watched as her husband read the card, turned white and fainted.

On the card was written: "Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti. Two with meatballs, one without."

How We Deal With Dishonesty and Hypocrisy

2006-04-26T15:06:00.000-05:00

No site uses my name and work without permission more than the Jewish Survivors of Sexual Violence Speak Out blog, run by the multi-personalities of Vicki Polin, Mara and Dina Tamar. She quotes my work out of context, she tries to show me up by using a photograph taken by my daughter to illustrate a humor piece. She hates my guts, and most of all she hates the fact that I exposed her as Rachel, the young freaky woman who went on the Oprah Winfrey show and accused the Jews of Chicago of being a Satanic cult.

But the most annoying thing she does is publish my entries on this blog on her own website, add some curses, innuendo and misinformation, and invite herself, posing as anonymous readers, to trash me. Then, when I attempt to answer the idiotic charges in a polite and civilized manner, she simply blocks me.

So here’s what we gonna’ do, for the sake of decency: I’ll go back to visit Dingo and her wild band of 1 on a regular basis, copy and paste her comments and respond to them.

We can do a lot with this concept, you know. Keep coming back, it works if you work it…

Look What They’ve Done to my Speech, Ma’

2006-04-26T05:17:00.000-05:00

I told a friend of mine in Jerusalem about the case of Rabbi David Lipman and I could hear over the phone how his jaw dropped. Sometimes we need to hear familiar news as it is reflected through the eyes of someone in a slightly different culture to refresh your sense of horror.

The state of Arizona received a report from a Child Protective Services hotline complaint, the cops went to Lipman’s office to question him about inappropriate touching of his (step) daughter and he responded in a self-incriminating manner. He then proceeded to mess his own case up in a fantastic way, disappearing for several months, neglecting to make his court appearance, in short, being self-destructive.

The state launched some 13 complains of child sexual abuse against Lipman, which he initially was not present to answer. All the complaints stemmed from his daughter’s report to someone in or connected to the CPS system.

Now check this out: The cops impounded Lipman’s office computer and discovered pornographic material on its drive, including, reportedly, child pornography.

For the possession of this material, Lipman got 13.5 years in jail.

For the child sexual abuse conviction he got probation. This was because his daughter, who complained about his misbehavior, pleaded with the judge not to add more time to his sentence.

This is American Democracy, 2006. It is twisted, cruel, hysterical and injurious. But I, like many Americans, have grown callused to this frightening bit of medieval justice. It took the shocked and awed response of my friend to remind me of what has been happening to our free speech over the past couple of decades.

In the 1960’s Phil Ochs sang Mississippi, find yourself another country. I think it’s time for Arizona to go looking, too.

''Magical'' Afternoon of Izbicer Study in Chicago

2006-04-24T00:32:00.000-05:00

An interview with Rabbi Hershy Worch, following his Sunday study session with Rabb Mordechai Gafni( much publicized by the enemies of both participants).

USAJ: So, how did it go? What's the No Exit Cafe like?

Hershy Worch: It's a performance, exhibition, artsy, trendy place in an area of Chicago where the arts and poorer housing live side by side

USAJ: Rogers Park?

Worch: East Rogers Park. Well away from the Orthodox neighborhood.

USAJ: It's an international neighborhood, a lot like Brooklyn's Atlantic Ave.

Worch: Yes. not on such a big scale, but yes.

USAJ: How many people showed?

Worch: Fewer than 20.

USAJ: More than 15?

Worch: Yes, about

USAJ: All of them Izbicer aficionados?

Worch: Not all – all of them connected either to me or to Mordechai or to both and to Izbicy Torah. All members of congregations of the searching spirit. People who study Torah, who study Jewish meditation

USAJ: What's the difference between the Izbicer and the rest of the hasidic scholars?

Worch: He is about three or four hundred years ahead of them.

USAJ: Wait -- I'm doing the math...

Worch: He was active about 175 years to 150 years ago, and he's still at least 150 years ahead of any contemporary thinkers.

USAJ: What's the 20-word essence of his methodology?

Worch: The goal it to reach intimacy with one's own personal truth.

USAJ: Inside the context of Mitzvot?

Worch: Everyone has their own personal truth which is the divine originality in the person.

USAJ: Sans commandments?

Worch: Once a person is in touch with it, he teaches that it is not absolutely necessary to be bound to the entirety of the Divrei Torah.

USAJ: Wow.

Worch: Because the p’rat (individual) becomes more important. The p’rat is the individual Torah of each person. An example we talked about was Mordechai, whom the Izbicer uses as an example. Mordechai had an understanding of his individual truth which, by the way, sprang from his relationship to Saul and the story with Agag, King of Amalek.

Mordechai knew he had to provoke and needle and act as the catalytic incendiary to Haman, even though he jeopardized all of Israel for no good purpose. He put us all in mortal danger for a non halachich whim of his. But, you see, when a person follows his truth he brings Ge'ula (redemption) to the world, because he reveals the divine in a new way

USAJ: Did you get the sense Gafni has a satisfying grasp on the Izbicer?

Worch: He has an encyclopedic grasp of Izbicy. Astonishing. He knows it backwards and forwards. We share many insights, we disagree on much, but that is because Izbicy is so deep, not because either of us is necessarily wrong.

USAJ: For instance?

Worch: In the concept of Desire and desire of Desire I think Gafni and I have different ideas because my derech (methodology) in Izbicy is very emotive, Gafni is very scholarly: The empty space, the idea of tzimtzum as Desire. Mordechai may have seen Izbicy as the natural outgrowth of the Torah of the Arizal, but I see a total rejection of the same. We didn’t really have time to pursue it. I think the Izbicy rejects the Ari in subtle ways. Natural catastrophe does not dominate Izbicy thinking. Not even as the backdrop.

USAJ: In your version, the Izbicer is both completely ascetic and at the same time seeing desire as the natural plateau on which God and Man correspond.

Worch: I think Mordechai sees Desire in Izbicy as the lens through which we look at the Torah God and the World, while I see Desire as God. Desire is the Shechina. But, as I said, we did not have time to pursue this thought.

USAJ: Which introduces the conflict of how can the Deity have wants.

Worch: Right. the Zohar talks of Shabbes Mincha as being ra'ava d'ra'avin, Desire for Desire. it precedes Creation.

USAJ: V'ani tefilati -- et ratzon…

Worch: Precisely. And also the death of Moses is Shabbes Mincha, because Moshe is the ultimate desire, min hamayim m'shitihu, from desire he is drawn. So Moshe's death is desire of desire, which is the place between the end of the Torah and its beginning, the burial place of Moshe. We did not talk of this though.

USAJ: Did the audience follow?

Worch: The audience is very knowledgeable and intuitive. They know a good thing when they hear it. Between Mordechai Gafni and me we have about 60 years of Izbicy study.

USAJ: No brawls?

Worch: We did not argue except about one concept, about chauvinism in Izbicy. The Izbicy contrasts the nefesh Israel with the nefesh of the goy. There is no comparison in Izbicy where the Israel has a shoresh (root) in chayim amiti (true life) while the goy does not, no real life force. Gafni's interpretation is that Izbicy is a product of his epoch. He is enlightened but his enlightenment can only be expressed through the zeitgeist at the stage of human development and evolution that was then.

USAJ: It's a bit insulting to the old master.

Worch: Yes, but the mystical experience can continue to be reexamined and mined for nuggets as human consciousness evolves beyond parochial ethnocentrism.

USAJ: Future plans?

Worch: We talked of the importance of having a yearly symposium of Izbicy scholars who can meet and present papers. It was a magical afternoon. Everyone who attended could feel it in the atmosphere sparking huge thoughts that could have started conversations lasting weeks. We were hurrying to finish thoughts so we could move on and cover the main material but everyone got the impression we were swimming on the surface of an ocean.

The Haute Couture of Public Shaming

2006-04-23T13:41:00.000-05:00

The other day I received an urgent email from a friend of a very good friend. He asked that I be made aware of an “urgent” email sent out by Vicki “Dingo” Polin of the “Awareness Center.”

Polin writes below a verse from Leviticus 19:16 – You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people. Neither shall you stand idly by the blood of your neighbor. I am God – which defines the parameters of reporting another man’s actions. One should not be spreading baseless rumors, but, at the same time, if there is a critical situation, whereby someone’s blood is about to be spilled, or similarly dire circumstances, then you should do your best to intervene. And pray to God for inspiration and intuition, meaning, be sure your actions are for the sake of heaven.

Under that ambitious slogan, Polin is sending a blanket email with the subject: URGENT - Gafni and Worch Speaking in Chicago? Below which she states, in her unique version of the English language: According to a blog ran by Yori Yanover, Rabbis Marc Gafni and Hershy Worch are planning on speaking at a cafe in Chicago…I understand that the majority of Jews would not attend this function, the problem is that many unsuspecting, unaffiliated Jew's and non-Jews may attend.

Please call the "No Exit Cafe" to help verify that Marc Winiarz (AKA: Mordechai Gafni, and Hershy Worch are speaking. If they are, please WARN the owners of the cafe that both of these individuals have serious allegations of sexual violence made against them.

No Exit Cafe: (773) 743-3355

She adds links to her website, which I consider pornography under the guise of public service.

I wrote the friend’s friend:

The woman who sent you this email participated in the Oprah show in the 1980's where she accused the Jews of Chicago of belonging to a Satanic cult. She said she was forced to eat her own babies, which were the fruit of sex with her father. Go to my website for the full transcript, the video is to follow, I hope, soon. She and a small group of her allies -- there are not more than 4 or 5 of them -- have made it their task to destroy rabbis, whether they have a smidgen of proof or they don't. She is quoted by numerous White Power and Jihad websites, showing that rabbis are, indeed, "sexual predators" and "mind-manipulators." It is a mitzvah, in my view, to support her victims in any way possible.

One of her minions has attacked me personally, published the names of my wife and child online, published a list of my clients, urging people to call on them and convince them to stop advertising in my magazine. He urged people to report me to the IRS. He tried to torpedo a local event I was hosting, by sending anonymous emails to the participants, accusing me of terrible things.

I don't know much about Gafni, but I know my friend Hershy, and I support him as I will support all of my friends, without limit. That woman has attempted to destroy my friend with similar allegations, of being able to control the minds of females with a Svengali-like hypnotic power. The source was a dejected girlfriend who copied his hard drive and used private content plus her own embellishment to ruin him. At this point I don't even care to explain why the claim of mind manipulation is BS -- if you think it can be done, I say bottle it and sell it. In my view this Polin woman is the sick conductor of a witch hunt, and I am determined to stop her. For now, as far as I'm concerned, whenever she says it's night, it is day.

To which he responded:

Let me assure you that I don't believe in mind - control but yes I do recognize many charismatic figure including Rabbis who use their charisma for exploitation. My info. on Gafni does not come at all from Vicki Polin but from several other totally reliable sources (including his own admission of having committed many years ago what is now considered statutory rape of a minor). I have never heard of your friend hershy and i do not rely on Polin's website for info. The reason I sent this to you was my sense that maybe you did not know of Gafni's past and that you should know it - if you are hosting or promoting him in any way. I hope sending you this did not cause harmful agmat nefesh to you- I had no idea you had a history with the Polin website people.

To which I say:

According to my own sources, Gafni was 19 at the time, and the girl was 14, and they did not have sex as it was defined by the legal system at the time. Incidentally, he was not a rabbinical student at the time.

Do you really see merit in destroying him?

What about Polin's other most recent "call to action," against Peter Yarrow, of "Peter, Paul and Mary," who will be performing at the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation next Saturday evening. According to her (atrocious spelling in the original), "Peter Yarrow plead guilty to taking immoral and improper liberties' with a 14-year-old girl back in 1970." Do you really endorse this?

Are you aware that Polin's allegations are highly prized by numerous anti-Semitic sites? Are you aware of the amount of hard-core pornography she has online, posing as information? Are you aware of her accusing the Chicago Jewish community of being involved in a vast Satanic cult?

Case after case on this terrible woman's website is rumor and innuendo, supported by nothing except the faulty judgment of some YU rabbis who have since abandoned her, but refuse to take responsibility for the horror they helped create. If anyone should be stopped, and by stopped I mean be brought to trial on charges of unmitigated slander, quite in line with the verse from Va'Yikra that she quotes in her email, it’s this horrible woman.

Mordechai Gafni and Hershy Worch in Open Discussion of the Izbicer

2006-04-20T21:49:00.000-05:00

A gig for Chicagoans...
There will be a Symposium at the
No Exit Cafe
6970 N. Glenwood, Chicago

this coming Sunday afternoon with Rabbi Gafni and J. Hershy Worch and friends - between 3:00 pm and 4:30 pm.

If you'd like to come and meet some of the other local Chevrah, you'd be most welcome. Bring your questions and curiosity...

Yours truly will be listening online via Skype and might get into the discussion if they'll let me...

When The Mind Plays Tricks

2006-03-30T08:42:00.000-05:00

by Rosie Waterhouse

NOTE: In the coming months, this website will be examining the roots of the memory recovery cult, which is at the foundation of countless modern anti-Semitic diatribes, including, of course, the prize jewel of ant-Semitic websites, Vicki Polin's "Awareness" center. This page will attempt to study in earnest this modern-day blood libel, to enable us to understand just why it is so toxic and so dangerous. "We've got a lot to cover," to parapphrase the opening lines of the most noted modern-day anti-Semitic tract, the "Greenbaum Speech," which we'll analyze in the near future.

I welcome comments, preferably by readers with names and identities. Please keep in mind that I'm also learning ths stuff for the first time, and so I'm likely to know less than many readers. But I believe ths will be a worthwhile trip.

Thanks for visiting,

Yori Yanover

What do stories of alien abduction and false memories of child sexual abuse have in common? Most of them, it seems, emerge during some form of psychotherapy.

The dangers of misguided therapy were highlighted when psychologists from Britain and the US met at a conference, Remembering Trauma, at the Royal Society of Medicine in London this month. According to one survey, 3.7 million Americans believe they have been abducted by space aliens and experimented upon, or forced to have sex to produce hybrid children as part of an extraterrestrial fast-breeder programme. A recent BBC poll found that at least 300 people in Britain hold similar beliefs.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in a panic that spread across the English-speaking world, people claimed to have recovered long-forgotten memories of "Satanic" abuse in bizarre rituals by devil-worshipping cults which raped and murdered children, drank blood, ate faeces and impregnated women to breed babies for sacrifice. As no forensic evidence has been found anywhere to corroborate any such stories, most of us would conclude they, too, were false.

But claims by adolescents and adults that they have suddenly realised that they were sexually abused in their childhood are less easily dismissed. During the 1990s, many psychotherapists latched on to a theory that victims of incest and sexual abuse had been so traumatised that they repressed the memory. And so therapists used techniques including hypnosis and regression therapy to assist memory recovery. Most doctors in the mental health field now accept that some so-called recovered memories can be false memories unwittingly induced in therapy by leading questions and suggestions.

Now some researchers go further, arguing that it is impossible to have forgotten a truly traumatic event. All recovered memories are therefore necessarily false in the same way as memories of alien abduction. Richard McNally, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says: "The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma, rendering them inaccessible to awareness, is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical evidence." McNally studied Vietnam veterans who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and concluded that their memories were all too clear and had never been forgotten. But research on people who claimed to have been abused during rituals of secret Satanic cults showed that most of them recovered the "memories" during psychotherapy. And when he studied people who believed they had been abducted by aliens, he found that the majority had undergone "quasi-hypnotic" memory recovery sessions.

Is the same true of many "victims" of "ordinary" childhood sexual abuse? Janet Boakes, head of psychotherapy services at St George's Hospital, London, told the conference: "Most clinicians now accept the reality of the 'false memory syndrome', but few recognise that they could themselves be responsible for creating or fostering false memories."

In the past five years, Boakes has been retained by the defence in nearly 100 cases involving "historical" allegations of sexual abuse. Of these, 65 cases involved criminal prosecutions and, in more than three-quarters of them, the complainant had received a "therapeutic intervention" that ranged from counselling to long-term psychiatric in-patient care.

And those responsible for engendering false memories were not just unregistered, unqualified quacks. Boakes reported that 73 per cent of the therapists involved were employed by the NHS and 7 per cent by social services departments, with just 20 per cent in private practice.

"Sometimes," she said, "clinicians seem to suspend all critical faculties when given a history of abuse and fail to recognise a prima facie unlikely tale. I think of a young woman who claimed that her father raped her on the grand piano in the garden shed. Her father was a local music teacher working from home. One imagines that if he really kept his piano in the garden shed, he would have been the talk of the neighbourhood."

Boakes cited another "but not untypical" case of a woman with gynaecological problems, who, after hearing a talk about incest, became anxious when she saw a pillow and hot-water bottle. As her mental health deteriorated, she was referred to a community psychiatric nurse who gave her The Courage to Heal, known as the bible of the recovered-memory movement. The book encourages a belief that many of life's problems are rooted in forgotten sexual abuse. Over a few weeks, the patient recovered "memories" of being sexually abused by her grandfather, father and husband. Eventually, she accused five men and two women of abusing her. "Often, she would announce a couple of days in advance that she felt a memory coming through," said Boakes.

She advises therapists: "Avoid any treatment aimed at facilitating or recovering memory, If the patient gets worse, review the case from the beginning. Consider whether you could have got it wrong. There is good evidence that the mental health of patients treated for sexual abuse that did not happen may deteriorate alarmingly as their view of themselves and their world is rewritten. Some of them never recover."

Publication Information: Article Title: When the Mind Plays Tricks. Contributors: Rosie Waterhouse - author. Magazine Title: New Statesman. Volume: 132. Issue: 4655. Publication Date: September 15, 2003. Page Number: 15+. COPYRIGHT 2003 New Statesman, Ltd.; COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group