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Jewish Journal

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December 19, 2014

Israel bypassed in Oscars race

Leave a Comment / Hollywood /

Israel is out, but a Polish Holocaust-related film is in, as movies from nine countries advanced on Nov. 19 in the Oscar race for best foreign-language film.

“Gett: The Trial of Vivian Amsalem,” Israel’s entry, did not make the cut. The film depicts the five-year legal struggle of an Orthodox wife to obtain a divorce from her reluctant husband.

However, “Ida,” an early favorite, made the short list. The sparse but powerful Polish movie traces the evolution of a young novitiate in a Catholic convent who, about to take her vows, learns that she is the daughter of Jewish parents killed during the Holocaust.

Among other strong contenders are Russia’s “Leviathan,” in which a simple worker battles a corrupt city hall, and Sweden’s “Force Majeure,” depicting a happy family on a ski vacation that is confronted by an avalanche.

While such traditional cinematic power houses as France, Italy and Germany failed to qualify, outsiders Mauritania (“Timbuktu), Estonia (“Tangerines”) and Georgia (“Corn Island”) made the cut.

Rounding out the list of nine are Argentina (“Wild Tales”), Holland (“Accused”) and Venezuela (“The Liberator”).

The slate of nine nominees will be winnowed down to five finalists when the 87th Academy Award nominations are announced on Jan. 15.

Oscar winners will hoist their trophies on Feb. 22 in a glamorous Hollywood ceremony, televised to 225 countries and territories throughout the world.

Israel bypassed in Oscars race Read More »

Judaism is the particular language through which Jews address humanity

Leave a Comment / Judaism, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis /

RABBI HAROLD M. SCHULWEIS was the spiritual leader of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, and author of many books, including For Those Who Can’t Believe, In God’s Mirror, Evil and the Morality of God, and Approaches to the Philosophy of Religion. He was the founding chairman of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, an organization that identifies and offers grants to those non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews threatened by the agents of Nazi savagery.

Reprinted with permission from “I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl,” edited by Ruth and Judea Pearl (Jewish Lights).

Some of my best Jewish friends share my humanistic concerns for the submerged communities, the lot of the poor, the weak, and the pariahs of society. But oddly enough, they see no connection between that universal interest and its Jewish roots. While never denying their Jewish ancestry, they find it difficult to articulate their Jewish identity. For them to declare, “I am Jewish” is a confession that, like Woody Allen’s, is appended with the coda, “guilty, with an explanation.” What is the explanation for their guilt and this inability to speak their Jewish identity with a full-throated voice? Declaring their Jewish identity appears as a compromise of their moral largesse, a betrayal of their universalistic vision. It is as if they hear the question of their Jewishness framed as a hard disjunctive: “Are you a Jew or a human being?” “Is your loyalty to your people or to humanity?”

My teacher, the philosopher Sydney Hook, confessed, in his book Out of Step, that during the Holocaust years he and many Jews like him were so enthralled by the promise of universalism that they came to regard the suffering of the Jewish people as mere parochial sentiment. “We did not for a moment deny our Jewish origin but disapproved of what we thought an excess of chauvinism.” It echoed the sentiment of Rosa Luxemberg, the internationalist socialist of Jewish descent. She turned on her fellow Jews in anger, declaring, “Why do you persist in pestering me with your peculiar Judenschmerz [Jewish pain]? I feel more deeply the wretchedness on the rubber plantations of Puto Maya …”

Doubtless, my friends are reacting to the kind of insularly Jewish particularism that confuses loyalty to Judaism and the Jewish people with chauvinistic provincialism. That type of paranoiac particularism suspects any cosmopolitan outlook as a threat to the fidelity of Jewish survival and to Jewish uniqueness. My friends are caught in the vise of either/or thinking that divides the world into “them” and “us” and forces choices of false options. The consequence of this split thinking leads to the twin fallacies of pseudo-particularism and pseudo-universalism, which tear apart the wholeness of Judaism and the unity of Jewish identity.

My universalistic Jewish friends are deaf to the uniqueness of Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism and consequently mute in expressing their Jewish identity. To paraphrase George Santayana, the effort to embrace humanity in general is as foolhardy as the attempt “to speak in general without using any language in particular.” Judaism is the particular language through which Jews address humanity. Although the Bible originates out of the needs, intuitions, and revelations of a particular people, its wisdom and ethics burst into the public domain of humanity.

Martin Buber, criticized by those who urged him to liberate Hasidic tradition from its “confessional limitations” and to transcend it, offered an authentic Jewish response. He was not bound to step into the street in order to speak what he had heard to the world. He could remain in the door of his ancestral home and still share it with the world.

An authentic Jewish particularism is not contrary to the idea of universalism. It grasps both polarities in one hand. Jewish particularism does not segregate—its unitive embrace is expressed in this rabbinic statement from Tanna De-Ve-Eliyahu: “I call heaven and earth to witness that whether it be man or woman, slave or handmaiden, the Holy Spirit rests on each according to his deeds.” So the Russian Jewish refusenik Natan Sharansky understood the moral interdependence between Jewish particularism and universalism. While active on behalf of Jewish immigration, Sharansky struggled as well for the rights of Pentecostals, Catholics, Ukrainians, Crimeans, and Tartars. In the prison of the Soviet Union, he came to realize that “Only he who understands his own identity and already has become a free person can work effectively for the rights of others.” In retrospect he observed that helping other persecuted people became part of his own freedom only after he had returned to his Jewish roots. Sharansky cited Cynthia Ozick’s telling of the Jewish folk tale in which a naif asks the rabbi why one blows the shofar through the narrow side of the ram’s horn rather than through the wide side. The rabbi answered, “If you blow it into the wide end, no sound will be emitted. But if you blow through the narrow side, it will reach into the outer limits.” Like charity, compassion begins at home, but it does not end there.

Elie Wiesel, whose concern for Soviet Jewry similarly led him to a concern for peoples’ races and religions not his own, counseled, “If you try to start everywhere all at once, you get nowhere, but if you start with a single person, someone near to you, a friend or a neighbor, you can come nearer to the other.” In the celebrated biblical verse Leviticus 19:18, love of the other is linked to love of oneself. Egoism and altruism are not contradictions. The tradition cautions against that form of self-abnegation, which some declare to be the entry to selfless altruism. No more than love of one’s wife leads to misogyny does love of family lead to misanthropy.

I recall for my friends the masterful Hasidic tale in which a wealthy disciple of the rabbi boasts that he lives an abstemious life, eating dry bread and water. The rabbi chastises his parsimony and urges the wealthy man to drink of the finest of wines and eat of the tenderest of meats. When his other disciples wondered why he was upset with the rich man’s modest style of life, the rabbi answered, “I fear that if he is content with consuming bread and water, he will argue that the poor who come to him should be content with rocks and sand.”

To be Jewish is to live in a dynamic and dialectical relationship between the private and the public, the individual and the social, the unique and the universal. It is to seek the integration and harmony, articulated in Rabbi Hillel’s celebrated aphorism, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I live only for myself, of what good am I?”

In these parlous days, when great religions denigrate each other, it is important to remember the wisdom of our sages, who selected two separate readings for the first and the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. On the first day, we read of how Hagar and Ishmael, the heirs of Islam, were exiled but protected through the divine intervention of the Angel of God, who rescued the Egyptian wife of Abraham and their son Ishmael and promised that Ishmael would be made into a great nation (Gen. 21:14–21). And on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the congregation reads the story of Abraham and Isaac, the heir of Judaism, whom the Angel of the Lord saves from the sacrificial knife (Gen. 22:1–19). Both Ishmael and Isaac are God’s children and their genealogies are recorded in the Scriptures (Gen. 25:12–18). The particular-universal connection is exemplified in these twin readings on the Jewish New Year and, I have argued, also in all the major celebrations of the Jewish calendar. What else is the significance of the Rabbis’ selecting for public reading the Prophet Jonah on the Day of Atonement, and emphasizing the sacrifice of seventy animals on behalf of the seventy nations of the world in the liturgy of Sukkot? It is Jonah who initially refuses to prophesy against Nineveh because he is apprehensive lest God repent of His judgment. For this, Jonah is chastised, the pagan citizens do indeed repent, and God Himself repents of His judgment to punish Nineveh. The compassion of God is not restricted to one people. The Jewish tradition, properly understood, will not allow God to be segregated.

To declare one’s Jewish identity is to know how to sing the song that rises to holiness. The rabbinic philosopher and poet Abraham Isaac Kook caught the growing melody of the Jewish song: “There is one who sings the songs of his own self, and in himself finds everything. Then there is the one who sings the song of his people and cleaves with a tender love to Israel. And there is one whose spirit is in all worlds, and with all of them does he join in his song. The song of the self, the song of one’s people, the song of man, the song of the world—they all merge within him continually. And this song, in its completeness and its fullness, is to become the song of holiness” (Oroth Ha-Kodesh II, p. 458).

Judaism is the particular language through which Jews address humanity Read More »

Israel bombs Gaza militant base after rocket hits southern Israel

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Israel, Mobile-Homepage /

 Israeli aircraft bombed a Hamas militant base in the Gaza Strip on Friday for the first time since the end of a war in the territory, in response to a rocket that militants launched earlier in the day, the army said.

The bombs struck in the Khan Younis area in the southern Gaza Strip. Local hospital officials said there were no casualties. The militant rocket fired earlier landed in a field in southern Israel and did not cause casualties.

“The IDF (military) will not permit any attempt to undermine the security and jeopardize the well being of the civilians of Israel. The Hamas terrorist organization is responsible and accountable for today's attack against Israel,” military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner said in a statement.

Two previous cases of militant rockets landing in Israel have been recorded but there was no retaliation to them.

Israel launched its Gaza offensive on July 8 with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas. The fighting was ended by an Egyptian-brokered truce on August 26.

More than 2,100 Palestinians, most of them civilians, were killed in seven weeks of fighting, according to the Gaza health ministry. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed.

In a separate incident on Friday, four Palestinian protesters were shot in the legs by Israeli troops after they ignored warnings to keep away from the border fence between the coastal territory and the Jewish state, the military and Gaza medical officials said.

Israel bombs Gaza militant base after rocket hits southern Israel Read More »

“Chocolate Bar” and genetic disease research

Leave a Comment / Culture, Health /

A campaign started quietly by a couple of first-graders two years ago to help find a cure for a rare genetic disease passed the $1 million mark in late December, with donations streaming in from all 50 states and 60 countries across the globe.

The million-dollar achievement was celebrated in reports by major television networks as the perfect feel-good story, but the trigger for this global effort was a somber diagnosis at the birth of Jonah Pournazarian.
The playful, red-haired youngster was born weighing 4 pounds and with an extremely rare metabolic malfunction, known as glycogen storage disease (GSD).

Glycogen is a stored form of glucose, or sugar, which the body’s metabolism breaks down and converts into energy. Enzymes play a crucial part in this process, and when they malfunction, as in GSD, the metabolic process slows or shuts down completely.

GSD is predominantly a children’s disease, targeting different parts of the body and classified into 14 categories. Jonah’s case is identified as type 1b, in which glucose is stored in the liver and “can’t get out,” his doctor said. (Type 1a of the disease affects mainly Jewish kids of Ashkenazi descent.)

Type 1b of GSD is so rare — fewer than 100 children in this category have been identified in the United States — that medical researchers and potential grant-givers have long ignored it.

However, there was one person who decided to break through the indifference. His name is Dylan Siegel, who was Jonah’s best buddy when both were first-graders at the Wise School, affiliated with Stephen Wise Temple, a large Reform congregation in West Los Angeles.

One day two years ago, Dylan heard his mother talk about an effort to raise money among the temple’s members to support the work of a leading GSD researcher, and Dylan said he, too, wanted to give some money.

As Debra Siegel recalls, “I suggested to Dylan that he set up a lemonade stand, but he said he wanted to write a book.” She took her son’s plan as a childhood fantasy, but the next day Dylan presented his parents with the finished product.

The cover of the richly illustrated, 14-page booklet reads “Chocolate Bar by Dylan Siegel” and the tone is set in the first entry, which reads, “I like to go to Disneyland. That is so Chocolate Bar.”

Other “Chocolate Bar” (read: “awesome”) experiences recalled by the author-illustrator include going to the swimming pool, aquarium, bowling alley and so forth, ending with “I like to help my friends, that is the biggest Chocolate Bar.”

As with almost every first-time author, writing the book was just the beginning, but Dylan kept pushing the project. He drafted his father, a marketing consultant, for the production phase of the project. His dad ordered an initial print run of 200 copies of the book.

At the synagogue’s Mitzvah Day, the two boys and their respective parents sold enough autographed books, at $20 each, and $5 chocolate bars (donated by a neighborhood food market) to raise about $7,000.

Augmenting the sales force were the boys’ two teachers, Orlee Raymond and Kimberly Snyder, sporting two-of-a-kind T-shirts, with the legend “1st Grade Is So Chocolate Bar.” (Full disclosure: Raymond is this reporter’s daughter and tipped me off to the story.)

In late 2012, the Jewish Journal ran an article about Jonah and Dylan and their mission to help find a cure for GSD.

The article came to the attention of a producer for NBC, who asked Chelsea Clinton, then doing feature segments for NBC, to look into the story.

She did. Clinton showed up at the Wise School, and the story aired on the national NBC evening news a short time later.

Amid the media’s generally gloomy string of disaster news, the Chocolate Bar segment resonated with viewers.

Other major TV networks, newspapers and social media spread the story across the globe with added interviews of Dylan, now 8, and Jonah, 9, and still closest of friends in third grade. The results have been spectacular.

By early December 2014, David Siegel, Dylan’s father and pro bono coordinator of the project, could report the sale of 25,000 Chocolate Bar books. Support for the project came from some 10,000 people, most of them mailed-in donations in the $20 range.

Outside the United States, letters and money came from 60 countries, ranging alphabetically from Argentina to Uruguay, including India, Kuwait, Nigeria, Slovakia, Mongolia, United Arab Emirates and Thailand.

Every Chocolate Bar dollar supports the GSD research of Dr. David A. Weinstein, initially at the Harvard Medical School and now at the University of Florida in Gainesville,  where he directs the largest GSD treatment and research program in the world.

The disease was almost always fatal, until researchers developed the first effective therapy for GSD in 1971. A major breakthrough came a decade later with the discovery of a simple “medication” in the form of corn starch, injected through a surgically implanted feeding tube.

However, the prescribed doses have to be administered every three hours, without fail. Missing just one dose can lead to a hospital stay or even death. It’s a grueling cycle for Jonah’s parents, Rabin and Lora Pournazarian, but, as the mother put it, “This [schedule] has become our way of life.”

Weinstein’s research, entirely underwritten by the Chocolate Bar campaign, has been able to extend the intervals between feedings, and his aim is to give his patients (and their parents) full nights of uninterrupted sleep.

In the long run, Weinstein is looking toward gene therapy as the cure for GSD, which has been successfully administered in dogs, which also get the disease. He hopes to start trials on humans when the federal Food and Drug Administration gives the green light.

Weinstein, who visits Israel frequently on a collaborative project at Israel’s Sheba Hospital in Ramat Gan, is upbeat about Jonah’s future. “Our treatment is working,” he said, “and I expect Jonah to do very well.”

For full information on Jonah’s and Dylan’s GSD campaign, visit “Chocolate Bar” and genetic disease research Read More »

Light One Candle for the new ABLE Disability Saving Accounts

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

As we celebrate Hanukkah by increasing the number of candles we light on each of the eight nights, bringing a warm glow to the longest, darkest days of the year, the disability community has been given a wonderful gift—a new federal program in 2015 called the ABLE Act, modeled on 529 college savings and investment programs which would allow people with disabilities the chance to finally save up money and still retain vital government benefits.

Once enacted by states, up to $100,000 could be accrued without risking eligibility for Social Security and other government programs. Funds could be used to pay for education, health care, transportation, housing and other expenses. According to the Jewish Federations of North America, “these funds would supplement, but not supplant, the benefits received from sources such as private insurance, Medicaid and the Supplemental Security Income program, providing new and valuable lines of support to people with disabilities and their families.” Individuals could deposit up to $14,000 annually under current gift-tax limitations. Under current law, the maximum people who receive SSI or SSDI can save is $2,000 if they want to keep getting government benefits.

Originally known as the Achieving a Better Life Experience, or ABLE, Act, the legislation that has been under consideration since 2006 was recently renamed the Stephen Beck, Jr. Achieving a Better Life Experience Act of 2014. A longtime proponent of the bill, Beck died unexpectedly earlier this month. Over 70 nonprofits and healthcare organizations have supported the ABLE Act, including many Jewish advocacy groups. This legislation has passed both the House and Senate and President Obama is expected to sign it into law soon.

Other key details of the ABLE Act according to Bay Area attorney and trust expert Stephen W. Dale:


o Contributions into an ABLE Act can be made by any person such as parents, grandparents, and the person with a disability

o Deposits and income earned would not be taxed, same with account withdrawals

o Individuals will be limited to one ABLE account and total annual contributions by all individuals to any one account could be made up to the current gift tax limit, which is $14,000 in 2014

o Total contributions to an ABLE account would be subject to an overall limit matching a state's limit for all Section 529 accounts (in CA, that limit is $371,000)

o Individuals with ABLE accounts can keep their eligibility for means-tested benefits such as SSI and Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California)

o In the event the qualified beneficiary dies with remaining money in an ABLE Account, the state Medicaid plan that provided medical assistance to the beneficiary after the creation of the ABLE plan must be paid back first. After that payback, funds could be roll-overed to heirs.

o People who qualify for an ABLE account must be diagnosed with a disability before age 26 and either currently receive SSI/SSDI or be certified as meeting conditions similar to those required by SSI or SSDI.

I‘ve spent the last 12 months as a consultant to Bet Tzedek, coordinating a Community Needs Assessment (paid for by the Los Angeles Jewish Federation) on whether creating a Pooled Special Needs Trust for the LA Jewish Community would be helpful (the answer was YES!), and have heard from many parents and adult siblings of loved ones with serious disabilities. Across the board, family members have expressed their frustration with the current $2,000 asset ceiling, and the ABLE goes a long way in changing that. Light one more candle and Happy Hanukkah!

Light One Candle for the new ABLE Disability Saving Accounts Read More »

Learning Leadership from Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, z’l

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Judaism, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis /

Much will have been written over the next few days about the massive contribution that Rabbi Harold Schulweis has made to Jewish life in our time. Yet as an observer, participant and shaper of Jewish life, I feel that there is still more than can be said. Permit me to focus on his qualities of leadership.

Schulweis is one of the very few rabbis who deftly combined local and national leadership. A pulpit rabbi usually has to tend to his/her flock and only “goes national” if he/she loses the drive and the interest to serve their own congregation, when they feel the local stifling and  the need a larger forum, greater exposure and new challenges.  Quite often, as the rabbi goes national, the congregation feels honored by his/ her celebrity but often ignored by their rabbi is not there for them. And there is a price to be paid within the community for national leadership. Rabbi Schulweis was rooted in his congregation and used his own community not only to serve the local Jewish community or even greater Los Angeles, but as an incubator for national concerns. What began at VBS went national because Schulweis was able to balance the local, national and international and have his community think big with him. Other rabbis would be wise to emulate him, to be inspired by what he has achieved.

Charismatic leadership, those who lead not only by the authority of their office but by the power of their personal presence usually have great difficulty in managing transitions to the next generation. Charismatic leaders do not want to leave the stage or to cede his/her commanding presence to someone else. They are often self absorbed and do not mentor a younger, successor generation. Joshua was Moses’s servant, not his peer. Not so, Rabbi Schulweis. VBS was fortunate to have a virtually seamless transition between Rabbis Schulweis and Rabbi Ed Feinstein, his successor. Thus for two generations the congregation will have had one of the best, if not the very best pulpit rabbi in America. The credit must go to both men:  not only did Rabbi Feinstein revere his master and mentor, but Rabbi Schulweis understood that his ultimate success would only be enhanced by a worthy, well-trained successor. Such was his wisdom and also his commitment to his own community. He was able to choose wisely, willing to cede the stage and ultimately to leave the stage.

Think of other charismatic Jewish leaders and their problems of transition, and you will only appreciate his accomplishment even more. In the United States, charismatic leadership is usually replaced by management. Witness Chabad, where the Rebbe left no successor and presumed that the institutions he established would carry on in his absence. Think of corporate transitions from the founding generation to their successors and think of other synagogues where the transitions have been tense and left congregations bereft of leadership.

Students of history do not like to speculate in what if, but I cannot resist the temptation.

Some 30 years ago, when the late chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary Gerson Cohen was felled by illness, there was a choice to be made as to who would lead the seminary and thus be the titular head of the Conservative Movement. Harold Schulweis’ name was bandied about. I am not sure that he wanted the job, at least not on the terms it might have been offered, but I am sure that he would have been considered the unsafe choice – too radical, too innovative, too divisive and not “conservative” enough. He would have had serious opposition from the religious right and also from the political right. Scholars would have felt that as a pulpit rabbi he was not scholarly enough to  satisfy the faculty, the the Cardinals of the movement. The Board of the Seminary made a “safe choice” in choosing one of the last distinguished “wissenschaft” scholar, committed to the historical study of Judaism who was bound to conserve what was important about the Conservative Movement and gently guide it into the future.

Sometimes the safe choice is not the wise choice and one can only imagine the multitude of innovative directions  Harold Schulweis might have taken the Conservative Movement were he as the pinnacle of its institutional leadership. I am certain that he enjoyed a better life at VBS than he would have at 3080 Broadway, but I am equally certain that the Conservative Movement traded safety for leadership and forfeited many opportunities.

Harold Schulweis was learned in the deepest sense of the term. He wrote important books not of technical scholarship but works that thought boldly and bravely about the Jewish future, the human future.

Harold Schulweis was an institutional builder who by his very leadership could transform the community and impact the world. Think of how be brought the intimacy of the Chavurah to VBS and how it made a large congregation into a place that felt like home. Think of the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous which allowed the Jewish people to fulfill their moral obligation to those who risked their lives to rescue Jews and brought them dignity and comfort in their old age. Think of Jewish World Watch, which takes seriously the commitment “Never Again.”

Harold Schulweis was wise. I know many smart people, many highly intelligent and learned people, but far fewer who are wise.  Before I moved to Los Angeles when we were creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I sought his guidance as to what inscriptions should be written on the walls of the Hall of Remembrance. He thought deeply about the issue, about the Holocaust and its remembrance and about the Americans and citizens of the world who would visit that Museum. He vast erudition allowed him to explore Scripture and Talmud, but also Holocaust writings and poetry, and he was pastoral, thinking of what word could challenge and comfort, could appropriately remember the past yet set an agenda for the future. From our many conversations, whether brief or long, I came away feeling that I was not only with a learned man, but a wise one.

Harold Schulweis also had demonstrated how to balance the particular and the universal. He would serve his community and speak to the world. He understood Jewish concerns and universal concerns and his many institutional achievements demonstrate that he believed that Jewish tradition had the capacity, responsibility and authority to speak to the world.

A great man walked among us, a towering giant of his generation, and we are better for it. His presence was a blessing, so too, his memory.

Learning Leadership from Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, z’l Read More »

What Pakistan wants: its people or terrorists

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Lead Story, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Worldwide /

Museum of death

Rows and rows of men stood in straight lines, hands folded in front of their chests, offering a Namaz-e-Janaza (prayer before burial) on Wednesday.  Some held their chests tighter as if to push back something that wanted to burst out; a howl, or a murmur or an injured heart. Some pretended to be strong and stood erect, ignoring the sound of those who wept through the prayers. Peshawar became a city of small coffins, too heavy to be buried.

The school walls were numb with thousands of bullet marks, and blood sprayed across. ‘These used to be freshly painted walls,’ a military officer showing me around said. The teachers' office was black like charcoal. One teacher was set on fire as she tried to stop militants from hurting the children, a student Ahmed who witnessed and survived his injuries at the Lady Reading Hospital said. ‘Blood dripped from her body, as her body was enflamed,’ he said. He said the militants also tried to slit throats of children. The principle of the school was shot and her throat was slit.

[12-year-old survivor: 'I witnessed the Peshawar massacre']

In the auditorium where most of the children were killed, broken chairs were strewn across the floor, slippery with blood. Books were wet in blood. School bags red with blood. Pencils boxes, broken eyeglasses and school shoes had been tossed around; a sight that preserved scenes from the assault. In one corner, there was a large dirty cloth with a heap of body parts; tiny fingers, portion of a palm, a small foot and some parts unrecognizable.

The military officer, who was helping a select group of journalists tour this place, broke into tears and said, “we have failed our children.” Too little, too late, I thought and said, “yes you have.”

Taliban released a statement saying they attacked Army Public School because these children were to grow up to become soldiers in Pak Military. The fact is although the Army Public School chain – with many branches across the country – is run by the military, it works like a private school. Many of its students are not children of military officials, but doctors, engineers, journalists, laborers and daily wage workers. They come from all kinds of backgrounds and aspire to all kinds of careers ahead of their school years.

One survivor, Ahsan Ali, 14 year old said he wanted to be an astronaut. He was shot in the leg and shoulder. After three bullets and a lot of bleeding, he lost consciousness, but he recalls the last scenes before that. “My friends and I hid behind the door, but they saw us, grabbed us by our arms and threw us on the ground. Then started shooting,” he said all his friends died, and being the only one saved among his friends, he has a renewed purpose in life. “I will take revenge from the Taliban. I will murder them, like they murdered my friends.”

Last week after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, when Malala Yusufzai saw her blood stained uniform again displayed at Oslo's Nobel Peace Centre, she broke into tears. There are more than 130 such uniforms stained with blood now. But their story is different from Malala's. Many mothers in Peshawar told me their children are too afraid to go to school. ‘Mama please don’t ask us to go to school,’ they say. The fear among younger children and anger among the teenage boys may be temporary, but the trauma has transformed their minds. Malala's campaign for child education has bigger challenges in countries where children are used as weapons of war. 

Pakistan’s inexcusable security failure

Their beards, long thick curls are easily identifiable in a city like Peshawar. No one can pull off that appearance without turning heads. They came with heavy weapons and suicide vests, at an un-busy hour. It isn’t very difficult to spot terrorists looking like that in a city that has strict security check point at every corner, including the neighborhoods.

One of my friends who lives in the Cantonment area has to present his National ID card at a security point every day when he goes home. They know his face, his name, his car number, but still ask his identification every day.

These efficient check posts did not notice large men with appearances uniquely like that of the Taliban when eight of them walked down the street from their vehicle to the school, where they climbed the walls, shot the guards and broke in.

One excuse for this security overlaps the state Military presented was that the militants had set fire to their vehicle before entering school, to distract security personnel nearby.

That excuse shows sheer lack of efficiency. Pakistan has no dearth of experience in facing sudden, large-scale attacks in unexpected locations, and the military soldiers took about 7.5 hours to handle half a dozen militants.

On the day of 148 funerals – mostly for children ages 6 to 17 – Pakistan’s PM lead an All party conference bringing together political players across the board, including his staunch opponent Imran Khan. Khan, who dramatically rose to popularity in Pakistan, is said to be under the wing of the country’s military and has spent several months bringing hundreds of thousands of supporters to the streets protesting to oust Sharif for corruption. Since their coming together on one table seemed unlikely only days ago, this meeting was taken optimistically by many Pakistanis who are frustrated with political instability in the country. 

Unfortunately the meeting did not produce much, except a plan to form a counter-terrorism team. Many such teams have been formed before, during many such debilitating times, and none have been effective. Such horrific attacks require quick remedies not tedious commissions or brainstorming sessions that in the past have proven to waste time. Despite the fact that the prime minister said he will make no distinction between good, and bad Taliban, he did not present any plan to deal with all the banned terrorist groups the state has been harboring for more than a decade. It did not call out on militant groups like LeT, JuD, LeJ, JeM, SSP and ASWJ, which are responsible for anti-India sentiment and sectarian violence of massive scale. That was supposed to be the first and foremost step. Of course, it’s not easy to kill your own creation, but Pakistan needs to choose its friends and enemies.

As all of India mourned with Pakistan, from Indian Prime Minister Modi sharing his condolences, to India’s school children who observed two minutes of silence during school assemblies, to Bollywood celebrities who went on social media calling out on Taliban brutality in bold tweets and letters, a Pakistani court granted bail to Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, the man accused of masterminding the most brutal attack on India in Mumbai, in 2008, that killed 166 people. It’s a gross kind of response from Pakistan.

Later, television channels that are often accused of biasses towards military interest ran back to back panel discussions, twisting facts to accuse India, Israel and the U.S. for sponsoring terrorism in Pakistan. One TV anchor, Mubashir Lucman, displayed an image of a New York Times correspondent Adam B. Ellick, calling him an American agent and one of the terrorists in the Peshawar school attack. These kind of conspiracy theories have emerged from every horrific incident in Pakistan, and they efficaciously fuel confusion among the masses, dividing the country between pro Taliban and anti Taliban sentiment. Weakening their hearts and minds to see with clarity and keep them from uniting against terrorism.

To question the ills, one needs a will

Pakistan, in it’s thick and thin, has proven to be a terrorism apologist state. Politicians do it for politics and the military does it to maintain their strategic assets. What the Pakistani military needs to be asked is why are these strategic assets needed? If India is a threat, is Pakistan's military so weak that it cannot handle the threat on its own? With a budget of $6.98 billion in a crumbling economy, where common man suffers sparing a piece of his bread, a portion of his shelter to make a contribution to the military, what kind of security does the military give back to its people? Why does a nuclear state need to harbor terrorists and proxies as strategic assets? Can Pakistan as a state justify its failures?

Pakistani politicians, military and public administration has successfully been able to dissolve public anger and has dissipated important questions, by making sentimental statements, blaming the US, blaming India, blaming Israel, blaming the ‘bad Taliban’, playing as apologists for either the ‘good Taliban’ or the good militants.

Pakistani military claims to have killed scores of terrorists in the recent operation called Zarb-e-Azb, has released no names or identification of these terrorists. This military operation has not worked, just like other military operations after which militants in the country have always reemerged from a new place with new capacities to disrupt the state. Two major attacks including Karachi Airport attach and the Peshawar school attack both after the operation in Waziristan are the proof.

On Thursday, Pakistani Taliban – the group that took credit for the massacre – released a statement saying they will target more children and continue to attack all civilian in Pakistan. Ofcourse they will. It’s easy for them in a country where the state has yet not decided whether it wants its people or its terrorists.

What Pakistan wants: its people or terrorists Read More »

A military miracle: Chanukah care for U.S. armed forces personnel

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On Chanukah, Jews around the world pay tribute to the Maccabees, a small band of Jewish soldiers who pulled off an improbable military victory.

Members of the Israel Defense Forces carry on that legacy today, and for Hanukkah, they too are recognized alongside their Maccabean predecessors with organizations across political stripes visiting military bases and bringing party supplies.

But for Jewish soldiers in the United States armed forces, this is less of a reality.

“Within the collective Jewish community, there is a lot of focus on the IDF. I don’t think there is even an awareness that there are Jews in the [U.S.] military,” says Rabbi Ephraim Travis, a chaplain in the U.S. military.

One person who is aware is Ava Hamburger, a founder of an organization called Kosher Troops. For the last seven years, she and co-founder Sara Fuerst have been sending care packages to American-Jewish servicemen and women across the globe. They deliver some 5,000 kosher food packages each year, most of which go out during the holidays. They’ve sent matzah to Micronesia, challah to Kuwait and gefilte fish to Germany.

“Once, we sent rugelach to a guy stationed in the Middle East,” said Hamburger. “He was worried that someone might find out he was Jewish. Instead, another soldier approached him and said ‘you’re Jewish too?!’”

Especially on Chanukah, Hamburger says sending the packages takes special significance.

“I’m not out there defending anyone,” she said. “I’m here enjoying my freedoms, so I want to support and show gratitude to those who are.”

Jews make up a tiny minority of the U.S. Armed Forces (estimates range between 5,000 to 10,000, or roughly one half of one percent of active military personnel), making the holiday season a challenge for some soldiers — not just to express their faith, but to tap into the same sense of joy and celebration that other soldiers experience. Many army installations have tree-lighting ceremonies, potluck dinners with a Christmas ham or a party accompanied by Santa Claus himself.

Even with the care packages — which go a long way — celebrating Hanukkah isn’t always easy. At Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Travis was stationed for two recent Chanukahs, he would organize one party that would last “maybe” three hours.

“Just because it’s Hanukkah doesn’t mean that work starts late the next morning,” he said.

The events generally included members of different faiths as well as Jewish soldiers whom he previously didn’t know were Jewish. Some Jewish soldiers, he notes, otherwise avoid singling themselves out as Jewish. “The army is all about unity, and people don’t want to be ostracized or stick out based on their faith,” he said.

The donations from Kosher Troops allowed Travis to hold the party, to light candles, and to “get together, enjoy each others company, and relish the opportunity to celebrate a Jewish holiday in uniform.”

And that, he says, is a “blessing.”

A military miracle: Chanukah care for U.S. armed forces personnel Read More »