DNA evidence has proven with 99.9 percent confidence that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is dead, two officials in U.S. President Barack Obama\’s administration said Monday.
As details of the special operation that took out Osama bin Laden continue to unfold, rabbis in Los Angeles are pulling from biblical verses, Jewish traditions and their own gut reactions to help formulate an appropriate Jewish response to the news. Early Monday morning, Rabbi David Wolpe posted this on Facebook:
Our community is nervous. The delegitimization campaign against Israel has traveled beyond the borders of Arab states and the Third World to Western European societies, and it\’s even finding a beachhead in North America. Even within the Jewish community there are increasing numbers whose discomfort with Israel’s policies has morphed into alienation.
The United States has no choice but to kill al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden during the raid on his hideout in Pakistan, President Barack Obama\’s top counter terrorism adviser said Monday.
Holocaust survivors and members of the public are reading the names of Holocaust victims at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The reading at the museum\’s Hall of Remembrance began Sunday and will last through May 8.
Skeptics and optimists in Israel are squaring off following the surprise reconciliation between the two rival Palestinian factions. The skeptics argue that by mending fences with Hamas, a terrorist organization that denies Israel’s right to exist, the secular Fatah party led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has shown it\’s not genuinely committed to peace with Israel. The optimists contend that a unified Palestinian leadership presents Israel with a rare opportunity to make peace with the entire Palestinian people — religious and secular, in Gaza and the West Bank.
An angry exchange over the Zionist credentials of the incoming president of the Reform movement has intensified and exploded onto the public stage. The conflict pits the movement’s leadership against a group of dissidents who say they represent a growing number of Reform Jews upset by the movement’s “leftward shift.”
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