Meet Germany’s Jeremy Corbyn and Her Loyal Followers

While the Hizballah-loving Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership of Britain’s Labor party, Sahra Wagenknecht, one of two leaders of Germany’s hard-left die Linke party, recently made headlines by equating the aerial bombing campaign against Islamic State with the group’s own barbaric deeds. Her opinions are shared by her fellow party members, as Benjamin Weinthal reports:

Die Linke is a formidable force in German politics. . . . This amalgam of West German leftists, trade unionists, and East German communists (including many former Stasi officers) catapulted itself into the largest opposition bloc in the 2013 national election. . . .

Die Linke’s foreign-policy spokesman, the Bundestag deputy Wolfgang Gehrcke, has attended pro-Hizballah and pro-Hamas demonstrations in Germany. He participated in a 2006 rally where “We are all Hizballah” blared from the loudspeakers. Many of the party’s parliamentarians hold views from a catalogue of horrors. Christine Buchhloz, [for instance], supports the “legitimate resistance” of Hamas and Hizballah. . . .

Wagenknecht and Buchholz’s refusal to participate in the standing ovation for . . . Shimon Peres during his Holocaust remembrance speech in the Bundestag was praised by Germany’s neo-Nazi NPD party. [Furthermore], die Linke has a peculiar obsession with fanning the flames of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement in Germany.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Anti-Semitism, Germany, Hamas, Hizballah, Israeli-German relations, Jeremy Corbyn, Politics & Current Affairs

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society