For months, the debate over under-16 yeshiva provision has too often been framed as though there were only two possible positions. On one side: safeguarding, modernity, and public responsibility. On the other: secrecy, backwardness, and resistance. It is an easy frame, and for some, a convenient one. But it is also badly misleading.

The Bishop saw something more important. He understood that the argument was not really about whether children should be safe. On that, there should be no dispute. It was about whether the British state still has the cultural intelligence to recognise that not every serious institution is a school in the modern secular sense.

A yeshivah is not a failed school. It is a different kind of institution.

That distinction may sound narrow. It is not. It goes to the heart of a much larger question in British public life: whether the state can still make room for forms of life that it did not design, does not instinctively understand, and cannot easily fit into a single regulatory template.

The issue arises in relation to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and particularly the danger that under-16 yeshivot may be treated as though they are simply unregistered schools operating under cover of religion. But that description already assumes the point at issue. For many in the Charedi community, the yeshiva ketanah is not an attempt to evade schooling rules. It is a form of full-time religious formation rooted in a long and coherent tradition of Torah education.

That does not place it beyond scrutiny. No serious person should argue that any institution, religious or otherwise, is immune from safeguarding requirements. But neither should safeguarding become a slogan under which the state quietly abolishes difference.

This is where conservatives ought to be especially alert. We are meant to understand that society is made up not only of individuals and the state, but of families, communities, churches, synagogues, schools, clubs, traditions, and inherited forms of moral life. We are meant to know that these “little platoons” matter precisely because they are not interchangeable units in a national system.

Yet modern bureaucratic culture repeatedly falls into the same temptation: if something looks unfamiliar, regulate it until it resembles something familiar. If an institution does not fit the existing categories, force it into one of them. If it resists, treat that resistance as evidence of guilt.

That is not wisdom. It is administrative impatience.

In the case of yeshivot, the category mistake is especially serious. Britain has long allowed for educational pluralism. It has recognised that parents may raise and educate their children in different ways, within the law, and that not every legitimate path is identical to the standard state model. For decades, parts of the Torah world have operated within a broader understanding of elective home education and religious study, not in a legal vacuum but in a different educational tradition.

The real question, therefore, is not whether the state has an interest. Of course it does. The real question is whether that interest can be exercised with discrimination, restraint, and respect for a minority community’s deeply held way of life.

Can government protect children without insisting on cultural sameness? Can it enforce safeguarding without acting as though every thick, inherited religious culture is merely a problem waiting to be normalised?

Those questions are not only Jewish questions. They concern the shape of a free country.

A mature society does not respond to every unfamiliar institution with panic. It asks calmer questions. Are children safe? Is there neglect? Is there abuse? Are basic legal duties being met? If the answer to such questions is satisfactory, then the burden lies on the state to justify why further intrusion is necessary. And if the proposed intrusion effectively means forcing a religious institution to cease being itself, that should trouble anyone with a serious commitment to liberty.

This is why the Bishop of Manchester’s intervention was so striking. He did not approach the matter as an insider to the yeshiva world. He approached it as a public moral question. And in doing so he performed a service not only to one Jewish community, but to Britain’s wider constitutional culture.

He recognised that when the state loses the ability to distinguish between harm and difference, liberty is in danger. He recognised that a society confident in its own values should not need to flatten every minority institution into the same shape. And he recognised, too, that religious freedom in Britain is not secured merely by warm words about tolerance, but by the harder work of careful classification, proportionate law, and institutional humility.

Too much current discussion proceeds as though any educational model that departs from late-modern assumptions must be suspect. But conservatism, at its best, begins from a different instinct. It knows that human beings are formed in particular traditions. It knows that moral worlds are handed down, not invented afresh by each generation. And it knows that the state, though necessary and often beneficent, is a crude instrument when it tries to replace the organic work of family and faith.

None of this relieves religious communities of responsibility. They must be serious about child welfare, serious about engagement, and serious about explaining themselves to the wider public. But the wider public, and especially the state, has responsibilities too. One of them is not to confuse non-conformity with wrongdoing.

That is why this issue matters beyond the Charedi world. Today it may be a yeshivah. Tomorrow it may be another religious body, another minority institution, another community whose habits do not fit comfortably within official assumptions. Once the principle is established that legitimate difference is merely deviance awaiting correction, the space for freedom shrinks for everyone.

A confident Britain should be able to do better than that. It should be able to safeguard children while preserving liberty. It should be able to regulate carefully without erasing difference. And it should be able to admit that not every valuable institution is legible at first glance to Whitehall.

The Bishop of Manchester understood this. If ministers are wise, they will too.

Photo credit: Statue of Liberty by Firoz Ansari with CC BY-SA 4.0 license on Wikimedia Commons

When Tucker Carlson described the Book of Esther as celebrating a “genocide of Persians,” he did the world a favor. Not because his perspective was correct or well-informed, but just the opposite. His obvious lie, so clearly detached from reality, unwittingly revealed the true nature of the more contemporary charges of genocide leveled at the same People of Israel.

The Book of Esther offers no possibility for error regarding who was responsible for the violence. It tells us that Haman convinced the Persian king, whose empire stretched to the very limits of the civilized world, to issue a decree seeking annihilation of the Jews. When Queen Esther intervened, disclosing that she was a Jew herself, the king was bound by Persian law that his decrees not be rescinded. Instead he issued a second one, permitting the Jews to defend themselves. The fighting that followed, per the Biblical text, was not an offensive campaign, but self-defense against a genocidal mob.

The text emphasizes this in the same verse that tells us that 75,000 were killed (Esther 9:16). It tells us that, contrary to Carlson’s delusional retelling, the dead were neither Persians nor members of any one nation or faith. Instead, the casualties are described as “from those who hated them.” Their one unifying characteristic was that they had come out to kill Jews.

Yet in Carlson’s twisted version, all of this context was erased. The initiating threat vanished. The murderous mob disappeared. All that remained was a single statistic reframed as evidence of Jewish aggression, self-defense recast as “genocide.” Carlson only found the Book of Esther “controversial” after he had deprived the sacred text of both meaning and value.

This was no innocent misreading of the Bible. On the contrary, it exposed a broader pattern which is as evident regarding Israel the modern country as Israel the ancient people. The side responding to violence is recast as the initiator, while the culpability of those that launched the attack is ignored. The mechanism is simple: remove chronology, agency, and intent. Reduce everything to a single, emotionally charged statistic, and then use that casualty figure to invert reality.

And that brings us to the recent conflict in Gaza.

Here, too, numbers were presented without the events that produced them. The initiating attack was omitted, along with the stated intent of the attacking party. The distinction between targeting civilians and combatants was blurred or erased. And what remained was a false narrative in which the party responding to violence was portrayed as the aggressor, while the party that initiated the violence was treated as a passive backdrop.

To be clear, the parallel is not between Esther and Gaza as historical events, but between the use of the same rhetorical mechanism to distort them. In both cases, context is erased in favor of an immoral calculus in which the side with the lower casualty count is presumed to be the villain. Numbers alone determine guilt, while history is deemed irrelevant.

Reality, of course, does not work that way, but all too many political and media figures routinely partner with Haman’s ideological descendants to demonize Jews.

It is a criminal violation of the laws of warfare to store weapons in a school, or to use a hospital as a military base. Moreover, once this crime has been committed, the former school or hospital becomes a legitimate military target as a result. Yet Hamas knew that it could commit such crimes with impunity, because global media outlets would falsely report that Israel bombed a school or hospital, rather than the Hamas base that they had become.

To take a specific example, when Israel bombed the Hamas Command and Control center located in the Nasser Hospital building in Khan Younis, CNN reported upon the “outrage” that Israel bombed a hospital and “killed journalists, health workers and emergency response crews.” It failed to mention that the erstwhile hospital was a base for Hamas fighters that had been used to imprison hostages.

This sort of omission of relevant context happened far too often to be brushed away as an innocent error. In a just and decent world, CNN executives would have faced federal charges under the Antiterrorism Act for having provided material support to Hamas.

Such lies have a real human cost: Hamas puts journalists, doctors, and children at risk knowing both that Israel will risk her own soldiers’ lives to take more efforts to avoid harming them than would any other military force, and that despite this, when civilians are inevitably harmed, Israel rather than Hamas will be blamed. Gazan children died in the conflict because Hamas knew it could rely upon CNN to cover for its crimes.

Antisemitism does not merely harm Jews.

he Book of Esther is deliberately structured to highlight the reversal of fortune-the oppressed rising up against their would‑be oppressors. But the story is also careful to preserve the moral logic of that reversal. The Jews defend themselves; they do not plunder, nor do they initiate violence. The text is a celebration of survival, not slaughter.

When Carlson stripped away that context, he was not offering a “new interpretation” but a grotesque distortion. He took a story of self‑defense and deliverance and turned it into a false tale of aggression.

The lesson of Esther, and Carlson’s distortion thereof, is not that numbers are irrelevant, but that numbers without context are dangerous. They can reverse victims and villains. They can invert the moral order of a story. And they can mislead us into condemning those who are simply fighting for their survival.

In an age saturated with data but starved for context, the ancient text offers practical lessons as applicable today as at any time in the past.

Image Credit: Book of Esther by Anita Gould with CC BY-NC 2.0 license on Flickr

When a European government sends soldiers onto its streets to protect synagogues and Jewish schools, it is tempting to describe the move as a tough law-and-order response.

It is not.

It marks a more serious shift: from policing a society to defending it.

That distinction matters.

Police operate within a functioning civic order. Their presence assumes that public life, however imperfect, is broadly governed by law, consent, and deterrence.

Soldiers are different. Armies are not instruments of civic management; they are instruments of defence. They are deployed when the threat is no longer simply criminal, but organised, ideological, and resistant to the normal authority of the law.

When soldiers stand guard outside synagogues, a line has already been crossed.

I have seen this before.

In France, following the attacks on a kosher supermarket and the murders at a Jewish school in Toulouse, troops were deployed to protect Jewish institutions. I encountered this directly a year later, attending a gathering of the Conference of European Rabbis in Toulouse. The synagogue and community buildings were guarded by young soldiers, barely out of training, cradling automatic weapons.

It was, in one sense, reassuring.

But it also raised a more troubling question: how had things reached the point where even armed police were no longer sufficient, and the state had to reach for the army?

For decades, attending such gatherings across Europe, security had always been present — police outriders on motorcycles, flashing blue lights, traffic briefly halted, the visible choreography of the state in control. But that was policing. This is something else.

For years, rising antisemitism across Europe has been treated as a social problem to be managed rather than a threat to be confronted. The response has been familiar: statements of concern, educational initiatives, intermittent enforcement — accompanied by a marked reluctance to address the sources of hostility directly.

The result is a recognisable pattern: hesitation, escalation, and then emergency measures.

We are now seeing elements of this closer to home.

In recent days, even Hatzola ambulances — volunteer emergency responders whose sole purpose is to save life — have come under attack. When those providing medical assistance become targets, it is no longer credible to describe the problem as marginal.

Last Yom Kippur in Manchester, my colleague Rabbi Daniel Walker was forced to defend his synagogue from a violent attacker. The outer gates had already been rammed and breached before the confrontation reached the entrance itself. This was not a distant or abstract threat. It was immediate and physical.

In the days that followed, King Charles III visited the site and later became patron of the Community Security Trust — a welcome and important signal of national support.

But it also reflects a harder truth: that protection is increasingly required where once it was assumed.

The lesson for policymakers should be clear.

If threats of this kind are treated merely as issues of community relations or low-level disorder, the response will always lag behind reality. By the time soldiers are required, the failure has already occurred.

The task is not only to respond at the point of crisis, but to restore the conditions in which ordinary policing is sufficient.

That means:

• enforcing the law decisively
• confronting sources of incitement without hesitation
• and reasserting that public space in Britain is governed by law, not intimidation

A society in which people can worship freely without armed protection is not a luxury. It is a basic test of civic health.

Once that assumption begins to fail, restoring it is far harder than preserving it.

Cover Image: Dohány Street Synagogue by Jon Elbaz, accessed via Flickr with CC BY 2.0 Deed

The U.S. Department of Labor hosted a prayer service for employees this week despite warnings from legal experts that it appeared to violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, which mandates the separation of church and state.

The event Wednesday was billed as the “Inaugural Secretary’s Prayer Service,” according to an invitation sent to employees last week and viewed by MS NOW. The invitation came from the department’s Center for Faith, which was established after President Donald Trump’s executive order in February requiring the creation of such centers across federal agencies.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told attendees of the event — held in the auditorium at department headquarters in Washington and livestreamed — that she came up with the idea after attending a similar one hosted by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, according to two Labor Department employees who watched the livestream and spoke to MS NOW. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Besides Chavez-DeRemer, speakers at the event included the faith center’s director and other staff, and Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, a conservative nonprofit that “promotes classical Jewish values in public policy.” Menken is also a member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.

During the approximately 30-minute service, the speakers read Bible verses and sang the hymn “Amazing Grace,” the two employees said. Menken also made remarks against gay and transgender people, according to the two employees, who said they found the comments offensive.

“What I did not expect was the purposeful cruelty meted out for no reason whatsoever on a very small portion of the population,” one employee said. “It was despicable.”

Menken said he wasn’t paid to appear at the event and rejected the employees’ description of his comments as hateful.

“I would characterize my remarks as advocating for religious and civil liberty in the workplace,” he told MS NOW on Friday.

Rabbi Menken adds: What I told the reporter, but she did not include, is that “I would reserve that term [hate] for people who would force others to violate their beliefs.” Strangely, that was not included. She even linked to a report with my full remarks in relevant context, demonstrating for all to see that my comments were not remotely hateful, but, to the contrary, advocated for religious freedom as I said.

“We also live in a generation where too many, even in things that the Department of Labor deals with directly, are focused upon how to do it wrong, persecuting individuals based on their religious beliefs,” he added. “There are employers out there who will try to force even and, of course, in government to certify same-sex weddings, require preferred gender pronouns, force a baker to bake a cake celebrating something he doesn’t like, force nurses to perform abortions, endocrinologists to administer unnecessary and harmful hormones. And in too many firms, anyone with a Jewish name need not apply. Hanukkah tells us that not only that there is a right and a wrong, but there is an almighty God who stands with us when we fight to move in the right direction.”

It says a lot that MS NOW neither quoted my remarks to demonstrate the utter falsehood of the depiction of my remarks, nor used my quote pointing out where the the real hate is coming from. But it tells us nothing we didn’t already know.

Read the full article on MS NOW

At The Forward, however, schooling in the Orthodox Jewish world, like anything Orthodox, remains a bugbear of choice, even when there is no real story behind a censorious headline. It recently took a serious review of a tendentious film and slapped it with a title that’s pejorative and assumes the conclusion, to misportray one of Jewish education’s shining successes as not merely mundane, but a failure.

If the title of the article, “A new documentary shows what it looks like when Hasidic education fails,” wasn’t bad enough, the page title on their website was far less subtle, declaring that “Hasidic education fails children.”

The propaganda piece to which The Forward refers, however, was devoid of evidence that Chassidic education is failing anyone, much less that it “fails children” overall. Let’s be clear: By every relevant statistic, Chassidic education is markedly superior to anything offered in New York City public schools, and The Forward, like the filmmaker, simply did its level best to obfuscate the truth.

I spoke to the reporter, Jon Kalish, at some length, and the story he told was considerably more balanced than the documentary itself, to say nothing of the title The Forward attached to his work.

He recounts the filmmaker’s discussions with a woman with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics and psychology and another with a doctorate in English, both former members of the Chassidic community. The most ardent secularist would hardly call a high school graduate able to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, much less a Ph.D., an educational failure.

Kalish also noted that although Naftuli Moster, who founded the group Young Advocates for Fair Education (Yaffed), makes frequent appearances throughout the film as an advocate for changes to yeshivah education, Moster now concedes his approach was misguided. He even acknowledged to Kalish that the Chassidic community “is thriving despite the chaos and dysfunction surrounding us.” Needless to say, the documentary did not share Moster’s frank assessment of the community’s success.

What is most striking, though, is that neither the filmmaker, nor the reporter, nor his editors questioned the false assumption at the film’s heart. A good education is not measured by arbitrary bureaucratic assumptions, but by clear and inarguable indicators of adult success: The ability to hold a job, earn a good and stable income, avoid crime, nourish intellectual interests, demonstrate good study habits and cultivate critical thinking. Yeshivah graduates outperform in each and every one of these areas.

Yeshivahs also teach other skills that produce a happier outcome for students and society, yet remain sadly neglected in American public education. George Washington, Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all believed, for example, that education should nurture virtue and character, core elements of the yeshivah curriculum.

How to build and maintain a marriage, too, is taught in yeshivahs but not the public schools, despite mountainous evidence of the personal and societal benefits of providing a loving two-parent household to the next generation. Yeshivah students not only learn far more about legal proceedings and transactions, but they also learn the importance of being law-abiding citizens.

One of the best ways to authenticate a falsehood, however, is through accurate but irrelevant statistics. Thus, the film, like anti-yeshivah advocates, paid great attention to the poverty line, a somewhat arbitrary number that swells with family size, but not to income, as the figure that actually correlates with educational success.

On this basis, it misportrayed Chassidic Jews as hapless victims, denied the education they need to support themselves, and not so subtly belittled them for having more children. Though Hasidic neighborhoods are hardly the slums that the word “poverty” implies.

A skewed agenda was obvious throughout. On screen, a supposedly learned professor bemoaned that defenders of Chassidic education had failed to address the criticisms found in The New York Times, instead simply calling the paper antisemitic. As the author of a piece that addressed the Gray Lady’s lies and distortions, I know that his assertion was robustly false; it was the professor himself who ignored inconvenient evidence.

While I certainly highlighted the antisemitic tropes behind the caricature of Chassidim as foreign, money-grubbing, incapable of independent decision-making and worthy of the hatred directed against them, I also detailed how the Times had twisted reality.

For example, it claimed that yeshivahs were “flush with public money” by misrepresenting school bussing, COVID relief and school lunch funding as if they were pilfered from the public till. All of these government programs are or were offered universally, and were acclaimed by the Times and most New Yorkers, until the recipients were Chassidic Jewish schoolchildren.

Only willful blindness could explain a failure to perceive antisemitic bias in that shift. In actuality, parents sending their children to Jewish schools save the public nearly $3 billion a year in New York City alone.

Simply by putting a different title upon the writer’s work, The Forward could have offered a more dispassionate look at a biased film. By asking a few more critical questions, the reporter could have penetrated beyond the one-sided interviews and selected answers.

Ultimately, by conducting interviews with people on both sides of the question, the film could have offered a detailed and balanced assessment of reality worthy of being termed a documentary. All of these, of course, are valid critiques even before considering the abysmal state of New York’s public schools.

There were, indeed, profound failures throughout the process, but none pertained to Chassidic education. The Forward, like the filmmaker, owes an apology to the schools, to the parents and to their readers and viewers. This is especially true at a time when their defamatory portrayal offers antisemites a convenient pretense to rationalize bigotry and hatred against the Jewish community.

Image credit: A school bus for a yeshivah in New York. Oleg Yunakov via Wikimedia Commons.

By Nicole Weatherholtz at Newsmax

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, Coalition for Jewish Values managing director, told Newsmax on Friday that Passover is a “great example” of “how education can be done in a way that involves adults and children.”

“To put it in modern terms, it’s a great example of parental control of education because you have parents sitting down with their children, with their extended family, talking about the miracles that happened to the Jewish people back in Egypt, the miraculous rescue from horrible conditions of enslavement,” Menken said on “Wake Up America.” “There are so many things done in the Seder to convey that message to children, to keep them interested, to keep them aware – and awake, at that hour – and that’s a great part of the holiday, is just the way that the whole family comes together to bring this message alive.”

This year, the Jewish holiday of Passover, which celebrates the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, begins at sundown Saturday and ends at nightfall on April 20. During the first two nights of Passover, a Seder (candle-lit dinner) is eaten, which is comprised of ceremonial foods to commemorate the flight of the Israelites from Egypt, including unleavened bread called matzo that resembles a large, flat cracker.

Menken said the “whole point of the Seder” is to “recount” the miracles the Israelites encountered when Moses ordered Pharaoh to “let my people go.”

“It’s interesting how Passover manages to answer to each generation, but, certainly, you look at Pharaoh and, in fact, you can open the Book of Exodus and just read the story and think about how irrational Pharaoh was,” Menken said. “It wasn’t just that he didn’t know Joseph, who had saved the entire country; it was that he regarded Jews as a hostile force who would join with the enemies and then they would leave and go to their own place, all of which was horrible. Wow, doesn’t that sound a lot like what people are saying on campus?”

The rabbi was referring to the anti-Israel protests and antisemitism that roiled college campuses across the country last year. He reiterated how Passover is a model for education, going back thousands of years, that demonstrates how adults and children can be involved in a family-oriented style of learning.

“The one key element of the Seder is reciting, ‘This is what has stood for our fathers and us, that in every generation they rise over us to kill us,'” Menken said. “In every generation there’s going to be antisemites. They’re going to rise over us, to kill us, and God will save us from their hands.”

Photo Credit: Newsmax Screenshot.

Provoking outrage from the United Nations, human-rights organizations and Arab governments, Israel is blocking further aid to Gaza. It comes as the first phase of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has ended and Hamas refuses to agree to a U.S. proposal for a ceasefire extension. But even without this valid reason, and despite the condemnations, Israel has adopted the morally correct approach.

For more than a year, the Biden administration’s insistence that Israel provide support to its mortal enemies prolonged the conflict, trapped Palestinian civilians in a war zone, and condemned innocent hostages to months of torture, abuse and death.

There is a saying in the Midrash: “Those who are compassionate to the cruel will ultimately be cruel to the compassionate.”

The billions of dollars that have flowed into Gaza over the past two decades under the guise of humanitarian aid enabled the governing genocidal junta to solidify its control, arm for war and indoctrinate the Arab populace to seek death and destruction. Hamas then carried out the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust and has broadcast its intent to repeat its atrocities if allowed to survive. The requirement that Israel sustain the same terrorists it must eliminate only further demonstrates the truth of this aphorism.

Days after Oct. 7, 2023, I predicted and dismissed the disingenuous calls for “restraint” that would hound Israel in the aftermath of the slaughter. This did not reflect a lack of concern for the costs of war; it was born of a commitment to human rights and an opposition to antisemitic double standards. As I wrote then, world leaders and members of Congress don’t call for restraint when people are fighting totalitarian regimes or terrorists, unless the victims are Jews.

In late October 2023, amid closed border crossings into Gaza, Biden administration officials predicted a humanitarian crisis, saying that fuel supplies were expected to last “a couple of days.” They did not mention at that early date that Hamas was considering trading hostages for that fuel. Rafael Hayun, an analyst and civilian hacker who monitors Hamas communications, went further in a recent interview with Ami Magazine. He claimed that had the siege lasted longer, “we would have had everything,” with Hamas fighters flying a white flag and turning over Yahya Sinwar, architect of the Oct. 7 murderous assault, to Israel.

Even as Israel worked to provide Gazan hospitals with fuel, the Biden administration forced Israel to surrender its critical bargaining chips and supply Hamas with all the fuel it needed, plus enough food and other aid to stock every pantry in Gaza. This is why—after months of cries from the United Nations and others of “impending famine”—healthy, well-fed Hamas fighters and supporters were dancing and cheering as they paraded the coffins of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, babies they kidnapped and slaughters had slaughtered. The only emaciated victims in sight were the surviving hostages they had deliberately starved.

None of these lies were incidental, they are key to the strategies of Hamas and its Iranian, Qatari and European allies throughout the conflict. For nearly two decades Hamas built tunnels under civilian buildings and stored weapons in mosques, schools and shelters. They set up a data center beneath and borrowed connectivity from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) headquarters. Palestinian Authority officials noted that Hamas was maximizing civilian casualties for PR reasons, while world outlets unanimously blamed Israel for Hamas Health Ministry death counts so inflated and unrealistic as to be statistically impossible. Despite the cries of “genocide,” Israel remains the only party in the conflict working to save civilians from harm, and it has succeeded to an unprecedented degree.

It is also worth considering how innocent Gazan civilians truly are. During the Nazi era, civilians in every country under Hitler’s control—including Germany, Poland, France, Holland, Austria and Hungary—saved Jews from harm at great personal risk. Since Oct. 7, Israel has broadcast Arabic-language announcements on radio, television, social media and in print, promising security and a generous financial reward to anyone helping rescue a hostage. Not one Gazan has responded. Instead, they participated in the kidnappings, rapes, imprisonment, humiliation, torture of hostages and desecration of their bodies.

Where are the decent, innocent Gazans? Sadly, they are dead. Hamas has long since murdered anyone identified as gay or as a supporter of the Palestinian Authority, as well as anyone who opposed their iron-fisted and antisemitic agenda.

The withholding of aid has always been, and remains, a just and moral course of action. Hamas must release the hostages, abandon its explicitly genocidal mission and permanently disband. Aid should only come afterward to support the de-Nazification and rebuilding of Gaza. Until then, blame for all of the suffering in both Israel and the Strip must be placed firmly at the feet of the terrorists and their supporters around the world.

Photo Credit: Israel Foreign Ministry video on X/Twitter.

CJV President Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld issued the following statement:

The accusation of “genocide” against Israel is not merely risible, but was created by Jew-haters anxious to cover for the atrocities committed by the Hamas terror organization and its declared intent to implement Hitler’s Final Solution.
 
Pope John XXIII prayed in 1963, ‘Forgive us for the curse we falsely attached to their name as Jews.” Pope Francis should recall these words by his predecessor, and the improvement in Catholic-Jewish relations they helped bring about.

Photo Credit: “General Audience with Pope Francis” by Catholic Church of England and Wales on Flickr.

CJV President Rabbi Yoel Schonfeld issued the following statement:

While the First Amendment requires that even the most repugnant voices have a chance to be heard, the first obligation of a university is to provide a safe environment in which students can learn. The judge simply ignored the fact that the rally will, like similar events at schools across the country, descend into not just glorification of hatred but actual harassment and threats to the safety of Jewish students—the reason the University correctly decided to prohibit the event in the first place.

We commend Governor Moore for the correct tenor of his response, recognizing that incitement to violence is unacceptable, and that October 7 should be remembered for the “heinous terrorist attack on Israel that took innocent lives.” Instead, thanks to distortion of law by a federal judge, that day will see students and others march across the UMD campus in support of bigotry and hate, couched in the obscene claim that it is somehow “genocidal” to halt the effort of the genocidal Hamas terror organization to murder innocent Jews.

Image credit: Ryan Kosmides at Unsplash