Ban Iran from the Olympics

The Olympic games have a long history of making nice to brutal and anti-Semitic regimes—from the 1936 Olympics held in Nazi Germany, to the 1980 games in the USSR, to the fact that it took nearly half a century for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to commemorate the murder of Jewish athletes at the 1972 Munich games. Likewise, the IOC has turned a blind eye to the way the Islamic Republic treats its own athletes. Emily Schrader argues that the IOC should ban Iran from competing:

Consider Navid Afkari, the Iranian wrestling champion. Afkari will never get to compete in the Olympics, despite being a world-class athlete, because he was murdered by the Iranian regime for opposing the government.

[Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic] has sent at least one . . . athlete to represent the country who also happens to have been an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps fighter in Syria from 2013 to 2015. Javad Foroughi, whom Iran claims is a nurse who learned to shoot only a few years ago, won the gold medal for men’s ten-meter air-pistol shooting last week. In an interview from earlier this year, he speaks candidly about how he was sent to Syria repeatedly and stationed near Damascus to “stand guard” in the midst of the Syrian civil war.

It’s not as if Iran conducts its business in a sportsmanlike fashion in any case—Iran has been throwing matches to avoid Israelis for years, repeatedly forcing athletes to resign rather than face Israeli athletes. In one of the most famous cases, the Iranian wrestler Saeed Mollaei threw a match in judo to avoid facing an Israeli, only to defect later and compete for another country after fleeing to Berlin.

It is well known and documented . . . that the state of Iran violates every principle the Olympic games [claim to] represent. . . . The IOC must ban Iran from the Olympic games.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: 1936 Olympics, Anti-Semitism, Iran, Munich Olympics, olympics

 

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