Islamic State’s Strongest Recruiting Tool? Not What John Kerry Thinks

Secretary of State Kerry has revived the myth that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a prerequisite to the solution of all the Middle East’s problems. According to his recent statement, Muslim anguish over the plight of the Palestinians is “a cause of [IS] recruitment and of street anger and agitation.” Giving the lie to this claim is the enormous success of IS in drawing volunteers from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, where Muslims, even radical ones, rarely give thought to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The real reason for IS’s popularity lies elsewhere, according to Christina Lin:

Muslims in Southeast Asia were traditionally moderate and tolerant. But in the 40-odd years since the oil crisis and petrodollars became a windfall in the Muslim world, Saudi extremists have been proselytizing, and building mosques and madrassas that preach Wahhabism. [Former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew has] argued that this Wahhabi brand is a “venomous religion” that has radicalized Southeast Asian Muslims. . . . It would be more helpful for the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition if Secretary Kerry would ask his Saudi and Qatari friends to stop feeding those [flames].

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: ISIS, John Kerry, Linkage, Saudi Arabia, Southeast Asia, Wahhabism

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