JustASC

 Sarah Palin tells Barbara Walters:

I disagree with the Obama administration on [a settlement freeze]. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

I won’t comment on her politics (Americans for Peace Now was first out of the gate with a mighty jeer from the left; I’ll post the ZOA’s inevitable huzzah when they send it). But it’s hard to know what she means by Jews “flocking to Israel.” There’s no big refusenik population out there about to be set free. No big aliyot are anticipated (unless she knows something we don’t). Perhaps she’s thinking apocalyptically, as some are suggesting — some strains of Evangelical Christianity believe in the ingathering of the Jews in Israel as a harbinger of End Times.

Or perhaps she has a dated and even romantic view of Israel and the Diaspora attachment to it.

My guess is she was briefed on this and had the two key talking points: “natural growth of the settlements” and the idea that the U.S. has no right to dictate policy to Israel. But in between those two points she went rogue, and added some unnecessary and inaccurate color.

Back from Florida. Mitch Perry, a reporter and blogger for the local alternative weekly Creative Loafing, covered my speech there last night (quite well, I might add):

Despite claims by critics on the right and the left to the contrary , the New York Times continues to remain one of the most (if not the most) powerful media organizations in the U.S. And their op-ed columnists continue to have a major influence on political opinion and on our culture.

According to Andrew Silow-Carroll, the editor in chief of New Jersey Jewish News, several of the paper’s Jewish columnists also are representative of the different Jewish perspectives on political discourse regarding U.S. and Israel policies in 2009.

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HaZamir, the Jewish youth choir featuring kids from NJ and NY, performed with Debbie Friedman at Central Synagogue last Thursday in a fundraiser for  Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and its School of Sacred Music. 

And yes, that’s my daughter. She’s in the white shirt.

I’m off to Tampa tomorrow and Wednesday for a speech. Please don’t rob my house.

I get to stay in a hotel by the airport. Meanwhile, Ron Kaplan, our features editor and sports blogger, is also in Tampa, attending a weeklong kosher Yankees Fantasy Camp (which I think means participants get to work out with current and former Yankees and eat kosher food [at least I hope that's what it means -- if their fantasy involves Derek Jeter, a jar of shmaltz, and the soundtack of Yentl, I don't want to know about it]).

You can follow Ron’s adventures here.

Check out our latest NJJN video — that’s me talking about a new study on language by Hebrew Union College. I was going for a mellow, NPR vibe, but somehow come out sounding like Linus from Peanuts.

The Begin-Sadat Center For Strategic Studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University (BESA)  has distributed two articles on J Street, one critical by David Weinberg, and now a defense of the group by Dov Waxman. Weinberg called J Street a “new form of Jewish apostasy.” Waxman writes that J Street is “enlarging the pro-Israel tent, allowing more American Jews to identify themselves as being pro-Israel without having to be uncritical knee-jerk supporters of Israeli governments.”

I think it is pretty rare for one Jewish think tank to offer a forum for such divergent views. Every think tank in the Jewish world likes to call itself non-partisan and non-ideological, but each tends to be fairly predictable, consistent, and one-sided in the kinds of analysis it produces, right or left (proving “knee-jerk” is not just a symptom of the left).

Good for BESA for airing an internal disagreement, and adding to the wider debate in the Jewish community.

Jeff Yoskowitz is a former NJJN intern who has written for us about the “new Jewish food” movement. Now he’s involved in an enterprise called Negev Nectars, which is connecting small-scale Israeli farmers with American consumers. We exchanged e-mails earlier this week:

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I wrote earlier about the search for useful distinctions between someone “acting alone” and a terrorist. The Christian Science Monitor helps out:

In determining the true nature of the crime, the US must consider Al Qaeda’s “organized endeavor to radicalize individuals” and the extent to which Hasan had a political motive, says Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University and author of “Inside Terrorism.” (Hasan, wounded during the rampage and recuperating in the hospital, has not yet been charged.)

Terrorism is “violence designed to register some protest and/or to change the outcome of some political issue,” says Professor Hoffman. “Certainly this type of leaderless terrorism is not an organic phenomenon. Terrorist organizations are actively encouraging people – through the Internet and other means – to engage in violence of their own.”

Senator Lieberman’s Homeland Security committee has “looked closely at the role of the Internet in radicalization,” Hoffman adds.

Hoffman introduces an interesting concept: “leaderless terrorism.” That allows the terrorist label to be applied to someone who isn’t being necessarily directed, financed, or trained by a terror organization, but inspired by their “cause.”

But what if the shooter is nuts — how do we tell the difference between a pure act of political or religous murder and a crazed attack?

Hoffman, however, notes that a person’s psychological state does not necessarily dismiss terrorism as a motive in the attack.

“There is very much this gray area, but at the same time, the decision will be determined with psychological evaluations and then with how Major Hasan is charged,” he says. “I don’t see a nervous breakdown as being mutually exclusive of terrorism.

“It becomes a medical and legal issue,” he says, “not one that you can neatly demarcate in a definitional sense.”

 

Predictably enough, a certain kind of Jewish activist is eager to have the Fort Hood shootings labeled “terrorism.”

The soft, and sensible version of this impulse was expressed by Joe Lieberman:

LIEBERMAN: It’s — first, this was a terrible tragedy. Second, it’s too early — it’s premature to reach conclusions about what motivated Hasan. But it’s clear that he was, one, under personal stress and, two, if the reports that we’re receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism.

And therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact, it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11.

But I want to say very quickly we don’t know enough to say now, but there are very, very strong warning signs here that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act.

It’s not premature for Daniel Pipes, who identifies himself as a charter member of the “jihadi school,” who, “still in the minority, perceives Hasan’s attack as one of many Muslim efforts to vanquish infidels and impose Islamic law.” Any attempt to identify Hasan’s motives — or those of the Brooklyn Bridge shooter, or Meir Kahane’s killer, or the Beltway snipers (!) — as anything less than “Muslim-on-unbeliever violence,” Pipes rejects as ”weak, obfuscatory, and apologetic.

But we need more useful distinctions than the binary choice between “lone wolf” and “terrorist.” The label “terrorist” is only useful if it helps law enforcement identify, investigate, or prevent the clear path from an individual to a cell, network, or distinct movement of planners and funders. 

So let’s agree for argument’s sake that Hasan was on a mission to kill infidels. That’s a hate crime. But if he wasn’t directed or trained or being “run” by a larger operation (and let’s not rule out the possibility that he was), how is the terrorist tag useful? 

I’d like to hear Pipes explain why the distinction is important — it would help deflect the frequent criticism of him and his fans that they are just looking to demonize Islam.  Pipes gives a hint in his last sentence: “And thus will the army blind itself and not prepare for its next jihadi attack.” Just remind me how declaring the Ft. Hood attacks “the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11″ might prevent the next one, and the next one.

This story has got to give pause to advocates, like Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, of government funding for private, religious school education. In a nutshell, the British courts are debating whether the entrance criteria of one its publicly funded Jewish day schools are discriminatory. 

In an explosive decision, the court concluded that basing school admissions on a classic test of Judaism — whether one’s mother is Jewish — was by definition discriminatory. Whether the rationale was “benign or malignant, theological or supremacist,” the court wrote, “makes it no less and no more unlawful.”

The case rested on whether the school’s test of Jewishness was based on religion, which would be legal, or on race or ethnicity, which would not.

Fascinating sub-plots. Is matrilineal descent — the rule that says you’re Jewish by birth only if your mother is — racist? And do we want a secular court deciding either way?

The case also pits Britain’s non-Orthodox streams against the Orthodox.