America’s Moral Collapse in Afghanistan

Considering America’s shambolic retreat from Afghanistan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—who has spent much of her life warning of the dangers of Islamist radicals like the Taliban, and trying to protect the rights of Muslim women—takes President Biden to task for his claim that America’s “only vital national interest” in that country lies in “preventing a terrorist attack” on U.S. soil:

In reality, this chaotic, humiliating withdrawal significantly increases the risk of a terror attack on the U.S. homeland; . . . in intelligence terms Afghanistan is now a black hole. Even if we are able to extricate some of our Afghan intelligence assets, the U.S. has lost a key source of information on jihadist activity.

A little bit more imagination would also have revealed how China, Iran, and other current adversaries will likely use the Afghan fiasco to their advantage. . . . And what about our allies? Will India trust the U.S. as the leading partner of the “Quad” (along with Australia and Japan) designed to check the growing power of China? How about our European partners and the transatlantic alliance?

The second problem informing Biden’s approach concerns the moral decay of Western civilization. . . . We’ve become so focused on microaggressions in America that we have lost sight of the macroaggressions happening to women around the world. . . . In today’s perverse American culture, . . . more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights—to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space—are either removed or under serious threat.

What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline. [A segment of] American culture today tells us not to be proud of our country; not to believe in the superiority of American values; not to promote the rights we are afforded by our Constitution so that they can be enjoyed by people around the world.

Let us hope that enough Americans have not succumbed to this moral decay.

Read more at UnHerd

More about: Afghanistan, Joseph Biden, Taliban, U.S. Foreign policy

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