Herz for . . .

At this time of celebration of America's Independence, I am inspired again by the courage it took to declare certain “truths”:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

To the crown, attendance of the Second Continental Congress was an act of “treason and rebellion.” We were at war when the Declaration was adopted and the Continental Congressmen put themselves at risk by signing. But I don't think they could help themselves, This was the expression of a vision within their grasp, but at the same time a bold act that would in time bring a new and vibrant model of republican government to this world.

As we look around the world, we should note how exceptional the realization of this vision was and remains. The notion that our fellow countrymen are born equal to us is quite remarkable in human history. Our country was born into a world of monarchies and empires. To this day, there are castes, and slavery, and attempts by religions to dominate the political sphere.

The notion of unalienable rights remain unrealized in most of the world. In 77 countries, homosexuality is a crime. Fewer than a third of the world's countries are considered to have a free press. There are still 30 million slaves in the world. “Three-quarters of the world's approximately 7 billion people live in countries with high government restrictions on religion or high social hostilities involving religion.” It seems our right to expression has not met the ideal our founders envisioned.

This week, the intolerance has been painfully real for me. It was witnessed in the finding of the bodies of three teenage students, two the age of my son, in Israel abducted and murdered simply because they were Jews. These people were deprived of their unalienable right to life simply because of who they are. Unfortunately the impetus to these killings remains as the widely held hatred of the other fostered by certain religions and peoples. America is still seen as the Great Satan. September 11 is still celebrated by Al-Qaida. ISIS, the “the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” have declared that they will liberate Spain. Riots break out in France when police carry out an identity check.

But the past few weeks have also brought us acts of bravery, of which I would like to highlight two in the hope that they will inspire us all to stand up for these “unalienable rights.” Two Israelis, who happen to be Arab, Yihye Zakaria Mahameed and Mohammad Zoabi stood up and denounced the kidnapping of the three students. They are now faced with threats of violence and death for celebrating life.

It appears to me that what we in the west hold as self-evident is not so evident to others; these are rights that we must be ever-vigilant to strengthen and maintain. And this is my blessing for the American people. We should stand proud, especially today, of the rights enjoyed by the people of our republic and of free nations the world over. We are where we are today because of our stand against tyranny and our willingness to put lives on the line for humanity's “inalienable rights.” May we be ever blessed by our Creator to be the light of freedom and act accordingly.

This is in response to the article, There is Nothing Random About the LAX Shooting, by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire

Here's the thing. We can admit that the ready availability of guns correlates with a greater amount of gun violence. However, we have a constitutional provision (the Second Amendment) that guarantees the right to bear arms, a provision written with our own revolution against tyranny in mind, one in which citizen soldiers took on a government to assert their inalienable rights. To register with the government every firearm gives it the ability to confiscate the ability to revolt against the next iteration of governmental tyranny. Perhaps this seems to many a distant eventuality that does not justify current access to arms; but it's there in the constitution and such change should be pursued at the constitutional level, where change is slow and deliberate, not the knee jerk reaction to current events.

Yes, guns make it easier to kill people, but there are many other factors we can address without changing the constitution, factors as simple as diet, the tacit acceptance of a certain social contract, access to mental health care, the effects of one size fits all (or I'd suggest doesn't fit anyone) schooling, the effects of poor parenting, ineffective policing, or the militarization of our police forces, basic training in self-defense, or crazy gunman preparedness.

For every person who picks up a gun and starts a shootin', I'd guess there are a thousand more who feel similarly broken or enraged, whom society has failed, but who simply don't express their anger or illness by shooting. The shooting is just a symptom of a larger social disease. Where is the desperate outcry to prevent the destruction of potential by the crack-pipe, alcohol, abuse, or even well-meaning government programs that strip people of their dignity?

There is really nothing random in our creation of dis-empowering dependencies either, and they do a lot more damage to the human spirit and our potential as a nation, and our willingness to take care of each other. We might actually have fewer shootings if we actually personally took on making a difference, instead of irrationally expecting another half-baked law to provide some remedy.

I publish this one for my son Yakov (see below). Last week, his school took his class to Tel Chai for Shabbat. He rolled in after ten o'clock in at night. He was tired, so he asked us if he could stay home the next day. We said sure. He's a great young man, responsible about school, caring and all that. And if he says he'd like a day off, we generally have no problem with it. So he slept in and took it easy. The next day he went back to school. Apparently, a third of his class saw fit to take Sunday off. His teacher got pissed. He gave them all detention. When Yakov called me at three on Monday to let me know he'd be home late, I was livid. I told him to get on the damned bus and disregard the detention and told him, “we've got his back.”

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On Being Children

We have stopped being children, or is it honoring the child in ourselves. It seems to me that in our rush to make the world safer, we have taken away much of the joy of being alive.

We are afraid to let Hunter use the sign language for his name because it too much resembles a gun. A high school student gets kicked out of school for wearing a shirt with a picture of a gun on it. We let these same kids watch hours of movies and programming filled with violence, sex and death and somehow wonder when they bring that to school.

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I write to object to your outrageously biased television coverage of the situation in Israel, particularly the lack of balance in your story about the Jenin refugee camp. It is interesting that the BBC forgets the history of these so called refugee camps and the facts as to what was indeed found there.

These camps were formed by arabs after encouraging their own to evacuate areas where Jews lived so that Jews could be more easily driven into the sea. Let us set aside for a moment that the arabs that had made homes in what is now Israel came there for the most part within the last hundred and fifty years because jews provided jobs that paid multiples of what they could earn elsewhere. Most of these so called Palestinians came from what is now the south of Jordan. The people in these camps were there because their presence was politically useful to arabs who want to use a “right of return” to scuttle any prospects for peace. It is amazing that Israel has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from arab lands while arabs have done nothing to absorb their own. But this is also a digression.

I wrote of your lack of balance. You report on shattered lives and the misery brought upon arabs. You seem completely to ignore the misery brought upon the families of the Jews who have been killed or wounded. There are hundreds of dead and thousands of shattered lives because of atrocities committed by arabs against Jews. You neglect to note that many tons of munitions were found in Jenin. You seem to forget that children are used as soldiers by arabs and were indeed used to lure thirteen soldiers into an ambush in Jenin. You neglect to note that Jenin was the source of most suicide bombers and that suicide bombings have abated significantly since action began in the West Bank.

You seem to completely forget that in the west we have often destroyed whole cities in our wars without any real military purpose other than to demoralize our enemy. In Jenin, the Israelis should be hailed for going in with bulldozers and risking soldiers lives rather than indiscriminately bombing the entire camp out of existence.

But this is not new. You show the pictures of the “martyrs”, but downplay—if you even report—the celebrations in the streets when suicide bombers are successful in their missions, not only in Israel, but in the United States as well. Where was the outrage about the fact that the arabs who agreed to make peace immediately proceeded to build an army many times the size agreed in the Oslo accords. Where was the reporting on the teenage boys who were bludgeoned to death so badly that they could only be identified through dental records. Please show the world how that family continues to suffer.

Israelis want nothing more than peace. They have given land, risked their security and their lives for this goal. When their counterparts wanted peace they were able to reach agreements, notably with Egypt and Jordan. Where is the reporting of what Arafat says in arabic to his own people, of the intense hatred of Jews, and Americans, published in the official arab press, of the children’s primers that teach math by indicating that one rack equals one dead jew? I would suggest that the last of these constitutes a human rights violation.

When I look at your web site, I see you use reporters who clearly have a stake in this matter and therefor can not help being biased. Your reporting of atrocities against jews is muted and your report allegations of arabs against jews as fact. Why?

Frankly, I do not gladly watch the BBC, but I feel I must. This is because I see in it the renewal of the hatred of the Jews that brought about the holocaust in the first place. Why is it that when a relatively small number of Jews comes to a desert and makes it green, the 300 million arabs surrounding their state, with the complicity of the rest of the world, makes such a concerted effort to destroy it? And then, why is the BBC a part of this complicity? I thank God for the few Americans in power that can see this clearly.