Europe Pays Homage to Iran’s Bloodstained New President

Last Thursday, the Islamic Republic swore in its new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a veteran leader who has presided over some of the regime’s most murderous acts of oppression. Yet neither Raisi’s record nor his country’s most recent acts of piracy, kidnapping, and war-making deterred the EU from sending a delegate to the ceremony. Fiamma Nirenstein observes:

First in line at the party—and seated in the front row at the ceremony—were the Hamas politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ziad al-Nakhaleh, and the Hizballah deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem (whose Lebanon-based, Iran-backed organization had just fired a barrage of missiles at Israel). . . . In the row right behind them, wearing a red tie, sat Enrique Mora, deputy secretary-general of the European External Action Service, the European Union’s diplomatic body, who officially added the above organizations to the EU blacklist—and who’s been leading Europe in the talks in Vienna to breathe new life into the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal with Iran.

[H]ow can Europe pay homage to a country that has made the destruction of the Jewish state and hatred of America its principal banner? How can it celebrate a government that invites and honors those who plan the murder of women and children on buses and pizzerias and supplies them with money?

The ayatollahs can be pleased with themselves. While terrorists take their place prominently in the first row, we in Europe, without a word, situate ourselves behind them in the second row.

Read more at JNS

More about: Diplomacy, Europe, Hizballah, Iran

 

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