fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

August 11, 2015

Captured Hamas fighter provides terror tunnel information

Leave a Comment / Israel /

A captured Hamas fighter has provided information to Israeli security services about the location of tunnels between Gaza and Israel, planned attacks on Israel and the Hamas-Iran connection.

Ibrahim Shaer, 21, from Rafah in Gaza, was captured in a joint operation of the Shin Bet security service and the Israeli army in early July, the two agencies announced in statements Tuesday.

Shaer confessed to being involved in recent months in the digging of a terror tunnel from Rafah to the Kerem Shalom crossing, according to the Shin Bet. He said a road being paved by Hamas next to the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Israel is to be used for attacks against Israel.

Verifying the partnership between Iran and Hamas, Shaer confirmed that Iran supports the terrorist group’s military infrastructure. He said Iran transfers funds, advanced weaponry and electronic equipment to Hamas, and has trained Hamas operatives to infiltrate Israeli territory and airspace.

Shaer said Hamas was using materials brought to Gaza for reconstruction and rehabilitation to rebuild terror infrastructure and execute terrorist activities, and that Hamas leaders ordered operatives to use homes for weapon storage, including his own home.

The District Court of Beersheba on July 31 indicted Shaer for membership and association with illegal organizations, attempted murder, interaction with foreign spies, illegal military trainings and several weapons-related offenses.

Captured Hamas fighter provides terror tunnel information Read More »

Why Obama should welcome a ‘No’ vote on the Iran deal

Leave a Comment / David Suissa, Iran Deal, Is Featured?, Mobile-Homepage, Opinion /

I don’t know any proponent of President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal who doesn’t believe the deal can be improved. They would love the inspections regime, for example, to be closer to the “anytime, anywhere” ideal, so that we could be sure to catch the world’s best cheaters when they cheat.

And they would love to close those tricky loopholes, so we can ensure that the “snap-back sanctions” really do snap back and we can impose real penalties for cheating. Otherwise, what’s the point? If it’s so hard to catch the Iranians cheating, and it’s so hard to punish them when they do, can we really muster much love for this deal?

The truth is, there’s not much love for this deal even among my friends who support it. Rather, there’s grudging acceptance that, even with all its flaws, the deal is better than any alternative in terms of stopping, or at least slowing, the mullahs from getting their nuclear bomb.

It’s important not to demonize the proponents of the deal, who also want what’s best for America, Israel and the world. I may see things differently than they do, but I can’t impugn their motives. They think this is the best deal we can get; I think we can do a lot better.

President Obama is no fool. Deep down, he probably knows his deal is full of loopholes and could be improved. And he knows he’ll need more leverage if he wants to improve it. That’s why I think he shouldn’t be afraid of getting a rejection by Congress. What better leverage than the world’s most powerful and independent legislature saying no and asking for a better deal?

“Hey, don’t kill the messenger,” Obama would tell the mullahs. “Our Congress plays a very important role. They overrode my veto and are now asking for a better deal. Here is their list — let’s talk.”

Why are we so sure the Iranians would blow up the agreement if Congress rejects the deal and things do, indeed, go murky? Why are we so sure they would rush to build a nuclear bomb and forfeit all the international goodwill and legitimacy that this deal would provide?

I know, that’s easier said than done. A rejection in Congress would certainly create a big mess. As Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy writes, it would lead to a “murky” situation — not necessarily worse, but murky.

But you know what? Murky is what the Iranians do. It’s their comfort zone. Nothing they do is clean and simple. Their archetype is not the “Say what I mean, mean what I say” American ideal, but the merchant in the souk who, when negotiating, never says what he means or means what he says.

Why are we so sure the Iranians would blow up the agreement if Congress rejects the deal and things do, indeed, go murky? Why are we so sure they would rush to build a nuclear bomb and forfeit all the international goodwill and legitimacy that this deal provides?

The Iranians are not stupid. They can count. They know that a $23 trillion economy that controls so much of the world’s financial system can do plenty of damage to their sanctions relief. Why jeopardize their $150 billion payday now that they’re so close to a dream deal that will make their terror-sponsoring regime a legitimate international player?

As far as reopening negotiations after a deal has been “finalized,” my Iranian friends tell me this is a mullah specialty. They wait until you’re thoroughly invested in the deal … and then they pounce. That’s exactly what they did in Vienna. As soon as the Americans thought they had a deal, the Iranians ambushed them with some last-minute demands. 

So, what’s wrong with giving them a taste of their own medicine? It might even earn us a little respect: Hey, those Americans are not so naive, after all.

Instead of playing so tough with Congress and with his critics who want a better deal, President Obama should direct his toughness toward enemies who routinely and brazenly shout, “Death to America.” We must stop acting as if we are the weaker party with no leverage. 

I know — it’s messy. It would be so much easier to just approve the deal and move forward. That’s the American way. We love closure. We love neatness. 

This deal, however, is anything but neat, and it’s anything but over. Our dance with the Iranian mullahs has been a long and messy one. A rejection by the American Congress would continue this dance — only now, it would make clear who the lead dancer is.

David Suissa is president of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal and can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.

Why Obama should welcome a ‘No’ vote on the Iran deal Read More »

Hillary Clinton to hand over private email server to Justice Dept.

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, United States /

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has instructed her attorney to give the U.S. Justice Department her private email server and a thumb drive of work-related emails from her tenure as secretary of state, CNN reported on Tuesday, quoting a campaign spokeswoman.

Clinton's use of her private email for her work as America's top diplomat came to light in March and drew fire from political opponents who accused her of sidestepping transparency and record-keeping laws. The private account was linked to a server in her New York home.

Spokesmen for Clinton did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Justice Department spokeswoman said she did not have any information at this time to share with reporters.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently began looking into the security of the federal records and classified information contained among Clinton's emails. The U.S. government considers federal records to be government property.

The Justice Department has said the FBI began investigating after the inspector general who oversees the U.S. intelligence agencies, I. Charles McCullough III, formally notified them of his concern that there was classified information not in the government's control.

While secretary of state under President Barack Obama, Clinton eschewed an official state.gov email address in favor of a private clintonemail.com email account connected to a computer server in her New York home. At least one senior aide, Huma Abedin, also used the server for some work email. Clinton said the unusual arrangement broke no rules that were in force at the time.

Last December, she provided what she said were copies of all the work emails she had in her possession, nearly two years after she stepped down as secretary of state.

Clinton handed over about 30,000 emails she sent and received, although her staff have since acknowledged without explanation that some work emails are missing. She did not hand over another 30,000 emails from this period that she deemed personal and said she chose “not to keep.”

The State Department has been steadily releasing the emails to the public in keeping with Clinton's request after redacting parts of them to remove sensitive or classified information.

State Dept advised parts of two emails should be top-secret

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that the intelligence community recommended that parts of unreleased emails from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state should be upgraded to the top-secret level.

“Department employees circulated these emails on unclassified systems in 2009 and 2011 and ultimately some were forwarded to Secretary Clinton. They were not marked as classified,” State Department John Kirby said in a statement.

“These emails have not been released to the public,” the statement added. “While we work with the Director of National Intelligence to resolve whether, in fact, this material is actually classified, we are taking steps to ensure the information is protected and stored appropriately.”

Hillary Clinton to hand over private email server to Justice Dept. Read More »

Iran debate devolves with charges of ‘dual loyalty’ and ‘dog whistles’

Leave a Comment / United States /

The dredging up of the dual loyalty charge — that lawmakers who reject the Iran nuclear agreement and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is lobbying against it, are more closely aligned with Israel than the United States — illustrates just how tense the debate over the deal has become.

The charge came to the fore after Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the highest-ranking Jewish Democrat in the Senate, announced last week that he was opposing the deal reached July 14 between Iran and six world powers. A weekly cartoon on Daily Kos, a liberal website, depicted Schumer as a woodchuck, and in the course of a TV interview, the flag in the woodchuck’s office changes from American to Israeli and the moderator, a basset hound, calls Schumer a traitor. The cartoonist, Eric Lewis, has had drawings published in the New Yorker.

The cartoon has drawn outraged responses.

“There is room for a legitimate debate on the Iran deal, however charges” of disloyalty “against Senator Schumer — and any other members who articulate on fact-based but alternative views — are beyond inappropriate,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the new national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Times of Israel.

With most Republicans against the deal, Democrats have become the battleground — and Schumer has been under especially intense scrutiny. Congress has until late September to decide whether to reject the agreement.

The Democratic caucus generally defers to those within the party with the biggest stake in an issue, and traditionally has looked to its Jewish caucus, some 27 members, for leadership on Israel-related issues. Six have declared against the deal and 10 have declared for it. But Schumer’s coming out in opposition was seen as a watershed because he is line to succeed Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the party’s leader in the Senate who is retiring next year.

MoveOn, the liberal activist group, immediately launched a drive to defund Schumer, headlining one email to supporters, “Unbelievable. Schumer. War.” In an interview, Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn’s executive director, repudiated anti-Semitism in the debate, but said likening Schumer to those who want war was justified. Sheyman, who is Jewish, said Schumer’s Jewishness was not a factor in the MoveOn campaign.

“Part of the reason you’re seeing this is Chuck Schumer is the first and so far only Senate Democrat to come out against the deal and he is likely to be the next leader,” Sheyman said. (Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has indicated he will oppose the deal but has yet to formally declare.) “Siding with those who would take us into another war in the Middle East is not a comfortable path to be on.”

AIPAC’s president, Robert Cohen, on Monday in an email to supporters pushed back against what he said were the Obama administration’s misrepresentations of his pro-Israel lobbying group’s policy.

The differences arose last week in an exchange between Lee Rosenberg, an Obama backer and a past AIPAC president, and Obama at a meeting the president convened with Jewish leaders at the White House. At the meeting, attendees said, Obama noted TV ads paid for by an affiliate of AIPAC, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, and appeared to conflate them with other ads that liken Obama to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister widely seen as having appeased Hitler.

The CNFI ad addresses the substance of the deal and “does not single out the president in any way,” Cohen said in the email.

Online, some Obama critics lost no time in drawing a line between the Daily Kos cartoon and Obama’s rhetoric defending the deal.

“The president’s dog whistles are heard by the president’s dogs,” David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a senior editor at The Atlantic, tweeted.

A number of conservative commentators had already said that Obama was insinuating anti-Semitic tropes about dual loyalty in addresses he has delivered defending the deal.

Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser under Bush who is now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Obama in an Aug. 5 address at American University insinuated that AIPAC and other Jewish groups are counseling war with Iran.

Writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, Abrams quoted Obama from the speech: “Does anyone really doubt that the same voices now raised against this deal will be demanding that whoever is president bomb those nuclear facilities?” Obama asked.

“Who are these people who will be ‘demanding’ war?” Abrams wrote, and then said Obama was referring to AIPAC “and Jewish members of Congress like Chuck Schumer and Eliot Engel and Ted Deutch.”

Obama in his speech at American did say that “many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.” Yet he also explicitly distinguished opponents whose skepticism for the deal stems from support for Israel from Republican partisans, whom he accused of beating the drums for war, and he expressed sympathy for the pro-Israel outlook.

“I do think it is important to acknowledge another more understandable motivation behind the opposition to this deal, or at least skepticism to this deal,” he said, “and that is a sincere affinity for our friend and ally Israel. An affinity that, as someone who has been a stalwart friend to Israel throughout my career, I deeply share.”

Notably, the distinction between pro-Israel and partisan Republican opposition to the deal came a day after the White House meeting with Jewish leaders. Those attending the meeting said Obama had agreed to make the distinction clear going forward.

Iran debate devolves with charges of ‘dual loyalty’ and ‘dog whistles’ Read More »

10 years after Gaza disengagement, hundreds still without permanent homes

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Ask Aviel Eliaz and Itzik Wazana about their evacuation from Gaza 10 years ago this month and both will tell you it’s like a tree.

For Eliaz, it’s an olive tree sitting in a large pot in his front yard. He planted the tree in 2000 at his former home in the Gaza settlement of Nisanit, only to uproot it when Israel withdrew from the coastal strip. Uprooted, too, were the strip’s 8,000 residents.

His family was resettled along with hundreds of others in this city of cheap plaster prefab houses further up the coast. Eliaz stuck the tree in a pot, figuring he would replant it once he moved into the permanent house the government promised him. Ten years later it’s still there, its growth stunted and its branches thin.

“This is an ongoing trauma of 10 years of temporary life,” said Eliaz, head of the local council that governs Nitzan B. “We live in waiting. That’s how my kids feel. They’re waiting. They don’t have roots. When will we get a home? Will we get a home? We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there were times we didn’t.”

For Wazana, the tree is metaphorical. He had come to Netzarim, in southern Gaza, to help build a community and settle the land. After the evacuation, he knew that if he didn’t find a renewed purpose, his sense of mission would wither. So he and a group of 20 Netzarim families swapped one settlement for another, founding a new neighborhood in the West Bank city of Ariel.

“We wanted to see where we could take what we had to bring from Netzarim, in ideology, in Torah,” said Wazana, who runs a Jewish learning program for local college students. “It’s like a tree that’s uprooted. It shouldn’t dry out. We should replant it to keep bearing fruit.”

Eliaz and Wazana reflect the two diverging paths that evacuees have taken since the Gaza disengagement. Many have found new homes elsewhere in Israel, in some cases channeling their sense of loss into founding new communities. But more than one-fifth of the 1,600 families removed from Gaza remain unsettled, with many living in temporary houses in Nitzan B, an artificial town meant to function something like a halfway house.

“The state needs to get us out as fast as possible from this site,” said Malka Mordechai, 60, who was among Gush Katif’s founders and still takes antidepressants daily to handle the trauma of leaving. “We’re left here without friends. Just as they took us off of our home and our land, they should take us off this land to stability.”

Complaints of mismanagement have long dogged the process of resettling the Gaza evacuees. In 2010, a scathing government investigation found that the state’s initial budget for the resettlement, roughly $1 billion, was only a fraction of what was necessary. At the time, only 160 families had moved into permanent housing.

Since then, the bulk of the evacuees have been resettled, but roughly 330 families remain without permanent homes mostly due to bureaucratic tangles, personal troubles or some combination of the two. Some had to wait years for housing lots and didn’t have the money to build on them once they were ready. Others were short on cash from the start. Still others claim the government promised them a lot, only to renege.

Friends of Gush Katif, a nonprofit that acts on behalf of the evacuees, says the process is finally nearing its end thanks to a government plan that would place temporary homes on the sites of the building lots where the evacuees are meant to permanently settle. But according to Eliaz, some families may not even be able to afford the price the government is asking for those temporary homes.

Nitzan B, meanwhile, looks almost like a ghost town. Approximately 300 of the 500 families who landed there initially have moved into permanent houses, many in nearby Beer Ganim, a town founded specifically to house Gaza evacuees. The houses of the families were torn down, leaving their lots abandoned and full of weeds.

The houses that are still inhabited are slowly deteriorating, their metal frames showing through the worn-out exterior, forming brown streaks on the walls. Power lines are down and sewage pipes routinely back up. When missiles fall from Gaza, instead of bomb shelters or reinforced rooms, residents make do with large open-ended concrete pipes at the end of each small street.

The town’s offices are adorned with mementos from the Gaza settlements — a road marker pointing to Gush Katif, the cluster of Jewish settlements that once stood across the strip’s coast, or an old sign from a produce store. Inside one of the buildings is an art exhibition marking the evacuation’s 10th anniversary. One piece shows the Israeli flag with one of its six points cut off. Another depicts a house at the end of a seemingly insolvable maze.

“It’s very hard to live here and raise kids here when you see your neighbor moving to permanent housing and the state comes with a bulldozer,” Eliaz said. “There’s a feeling of abandonment, that they forgot us here.”

Eliaz will soon move down the road, to Beer Ganim. The town looks like a huge construction site, as families trickle into new houses while others are being finished.

But difficulties remain there, too. There are few public buildings, some streets lack sidewalks and no permanent synagogue has been completed for the largely religious town. The residents also lack a community center or mikvah ritual bath.

“We have no playground for kids, no basketball court, no soccer field,” said Zipora Ben-Saadon, Beer Ganim’s manager. “They could have done this before we came. Everyone cries and says, ‘Why did we come here? We should have stayed in the temporary houses. There it was better.’”

That sense of regret is common among Nitzan B residents, who refer to the disengagement as “the expulsion.” But Wazana doesn’t share their sentiment. His group has founded a new neighborhood, Netzer Ariel, named after their old one. They organize volunteers for needy families, study programs for students at Ariel University and other community activities. Since a cohort of 20 families founded it decade ago, Netzer Ariel has ballooned to 100 families.

Another Netzarim evacuee, Eliyahu Ozan, took the same ethos in a different direction. Ozan is among the founders of Holot Halutza, a group of three agricultural towns on the Egyptian border. From its original cohort of some 50 evacuee families, Holot Halutza has swelled to 235 families who plant fields of cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables. Ozan said that after the evacuation, the most important thing was to keep building.

“This desire stayed with us,” he said. “We wanted to settle. We looked for the most deserted place in the world and we started to establish something.”

Wazana and Ozan both said that following the trauma of the evacuation, they couldn’t blame the residents of Nitzan B for not moving on. But Ozan said that he feels he has made up for what he lost. Ten years later, he’s happy.

“It’s like having a new child after a child was lost,” Ozan said. “There’s nothing more relieving than that.”

10 years after Gaza disengagement, hundreds still without permanent homes Read More »

Israel’s Supreme Court limits illegal migrants’ detention to 12 months

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that illegal migrants can only be held in a Negev detention facility for 12 months while a law is revised.

The provision in the current “anti-infiltration law” allowing the migrants to be held for up to 20 months at the Holot detention center is “disproportionate,” the court said.

The Knesset has six months to revise the law, which passed its final readings in December.

Several Israeli nongovernmental organizations have petitioned against the law.

Under the measure, an amendment to an existing infiltration law, illegal migrants can be held in closed detention centers for three months and then kept at the Holot open detention center in the Negev for up to 20 months, where they will be required to be present at a head count once a day rather than three times.

In September, the Supreme Court ordered the state to close the Holot center and struck down the section of the amendment that allows the illegal migrants to be held in closed detention for one year.

Had the new law not been passed before the Knesset dissolved, the court would have required the freeing of all 2,500 migrants being held at in Holot.

More than 40,000 Eritreans and Sudanese are in Israel, most illegally.

Prior to the court’s announcement of its decision, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said that invalidating the existing legislation would be a “declaration that south Tel Aviv is the official facility for accommodating infiltrators.”

Following the decision, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement that the court “has accepted in principle the state’s position, according to which the illegal influx of labor migrants is unacceptable and that they may be held in order to achieve the necessary deterrence. The ruling will be studied and the state will act to implement it.”

Israel’s Supreme Court limits illegal migrants’ detention to 12 months Read More »

Tel Aviv cheers new subway, bemoans its construction

Leave a Comment / Israel /

In 2011, when Los Angeles shut down a stretch of one of its busiest highways for a weekend of repairs, residents braced for a traffic jam “of biblical proportions.” Similar sentiments preceded the start of construction on Tel Aviv’s long-awaited light rail system last Sunday.

But rather than a few days of inconvenience, city officials warned that construction will likely cause extensive auto congestion in the center of Israel, already the country’s busiest corridor, for years to come.

“Switch to public transportation,” Brig. Gen. Yoram Ohayon, deputy commander of the Tel Aviv District police advised commuters at a press conference. “It will be easier to get to Tel Aviv and to move about inside it that way.”

The Tel Aviv rail system would be a welcome relief for the approximately half a million cars that flood the city daily from surrounding suburbs, and ultimately mitigate what has become a citywide parking lot of honking cars and buses navigating narrow one-way streets or feeding into a handful of major thoroughfares during rush hour.

But to make shakshuka, you’ve got to break a few eggs. And to give Tel Aviv a light rail system, you have to make a few traffic jams – and blow up a bridge or two.

So far, traffic in the city hasn’t been as bad as some feared during the first week of construction.

But officials expect that to change when several major junctions are closed in the near future, and in particular later this month when the 39-year-old Maariv Bridge is demolished to make room for the new Carlebach underground light rail station that will rise on its ruins.

However necessary the project may be, don’t expect Israelis to bear it quietly.

Business owners have bemoaned the disruption to parking, as well as the inevitable dust, debris and noise that drive away customers – not to mention a fear of invading rats.

One proprietor told Haaretz that the hundreds of thousands of shekels he had invested in his restaurant would go down the drain because of the deterrence to prospective diners. A local barber complained that, despite the financial losses he would incur, the city is not granting rebates on taxes or rent.

“Of course I’m happy that there’ll be a train,” he said. “But it’s at my expense.”

Another owner in the area took a more practical view, placing the country’s expenditures on this project in the context of Israel’s other expensive endeavors: “Let’s deal with this for a few years and in the end we’ll get something,” he said. “Not like the last war in which we invested money and came out with nothing.”

Officials working on the rail system’s initial Red Line, comprising 10 underground stations, said the area affected by increased traffic could span a radius of more than 25 miles — reaching as far north as the city of Netanya, Ashdod to the south and Modi’in to the east — an exacerbate an already overtaxed network of highways and roads.

Last week, NTA, the company charged with the execution of the system, also announced plans for the forthcoming Green Line, connecting Tel Aviv to Herzliya in the north and Holon in the south, with stops at Tel Aviv University and municipal business districts. (The plans are subject to pubic comment, and are pending approval.)

The Tel Aviv light rail project has been a pipe dream of residents and politicians in the coastal city for nearly two decades, with signs around town declaring the start of construction now comically out of date.

Jerusalem’s light rail system, which opened over budget in the fall of 2011, faced its own set of challenges and controversy, along with hope that it might unite a culturally divided city (a hope that was diminished after riots last summer).

NTA has released maps of the proposed transit lines and a list of benefits to the denizens of Tel Aviv, which include a reduction in pollution and a quicker, more efficient trip to work.

The government and NTA hope to alleviate some of the gridlock by adjusting traffic patterns, adding parking lots outside of town and expanding park-and-ride options (though some say not nearly enough), widening bus lanes and cracking down on private cars catching a ride on those dedicated bus lanes.

Adding to the effort to ease congestion, Israel Railways is planning to ramp up train service during peak hours, and additional buses have been added to the city’s arsenal.

The Tel Aviv police force is also preparing for the seismic shift in the city’s traffic habits by beefing up its staff by 160 officers to oversee the construction, Haaretz reported. Additionally, it will increase the number of workers at its call center to handle the expected onslaught of complaints.

Meanwhile, the Red Line, running between Petach Tikva and Bat Yam, is slated to open in 2021.

Tel Aviv cheers new subway, bemoans its construction Read More »

Emergency room: A city, in all its cruelty and kindness

Leave a Comment / California /

Mr. Twenty-Something is obviously in pain.  His face is contorted and his right shoulder doesn’t look like his left. He’s wearing a tank top, and the complex and colorful tattoos across his upper torso don’t conceal the deformity of the top of his right arm. Where the left shoulder had the expected dome of muscle extending from the edge of his collarbone, his right one is flat. Grimacing, he clutches his right hand to his body to prevent it from moving even a millimeter. 

As a gray-bearded emergency doctor, I recognize an anterior shoulder dislocation—while rushing past the open curtain on my way to see a 74-year-old woman with severe abdominal pain. It doesn’t take any longer than that; I have seen dislocations so many times by now. 

I used to love the mystery and intrigue of a challenging diagnosis. I thought it was thrilling to order X-rays and tests and use complicated maneuvers to arrive at the truth of what was ailing my patients. Not anymore. I am running my whole shift. I don’t have time to play House. At the county hospital in Salinas, California, that sort of self-gratification is a rare luxury. We are busy tonight; it is always busy. Very busy.  There are 20 patients waiting to be seen; crying babies in the hallway; prisoners surrounded by guards to my right; and a sweet, little old lady to my left who I know has kidney cancer. She does not know yet.  Neither does her frail little husband sitting nervously at her bedside. His eyes are flitting around the mayhem, not given privacy by a flimsy, open curtain. I will tell them when I get a chance.

Monterey County is a microcosm of the United States in 2015. You have on the coast Tiffany & Co. jewels, Pebble Beach, movie stars, and Rolls-Royces. There are services, order, and plenty. In Salinas, we have open-air drug markets, mass homelessness, multiple families living in tiny abodes, scabies, mentally ill people running into the street, and children who threaten and swear at their protectors and authorities.  

But we also have young parents literally breaking their backs stooped over in the fields working to improve their children’s lives. Community workers come into our emergency department in the middle of the night to counsel gunshot victims and show them the way to a better life. We have law enforcement officers risking their lives to protect the weak and innocent. We have agricultural leaders donating huge amounts of money for medical equipment rather than taking that money as profit. We have EMS workers running non-stop for 12 or 24 hours to save the lives of people who spit, vomit, and urinate on them (and sometimes take swings at them). We have fire fighters running into fires and toxic spills to haul out people they never met and who will never know their names. And we have young men with dislocated shoulders giving up their emergency department waiting-room chairs to pregnant women with small children.

Salinas is a crucible. We have the best and the worst of human experience. The heat and pressure generated by the poverty, deprivation, conflict, and abandonment separate the gold of human kindness from the filth of human evil, making each clearly visible.

To work in the emergency department in Salinas is to watch all the behaviors, the pure metal and the dirty dross, swirl around each other.

So, I really needed to get to this dude’s shoulder. He has a shot of pain medicine in him now, but he’s still in a world of hurt. The quick and easy way to get the arm bone back into the shoulder joint doesn’t work.  I write all the orders to get him sedated, fold up sheets to wrap around him to provide traction and counter-traction to his shoulder, and get him hooked up to the monitor. My awesome nurse and respiratory therapist are standing by.  Showtime…

Then an announcement blares out of the loudspeaker:  “CODE TRAUMA—Emergency Department—Room 7.  CODE TRAUMA—Emergency Department—Room 7.”  Damn! Sorry, shoulder guy. Gotta go.

As we scramble to pull on plastic gowns, shoe covers, face shields, and gloves, we hear from another nurse, “ETA 5 minutes.  Twenty-something male, motor vehicle crash, 100 miles-per-hour, ejected from open convertible, no seatbelt, unresponsive, EMS trying to get vital signs.” Gulp. Minutes later I am placing a breathing tube down the man’s throat when we here from the overhead again, “CODE TRAUMA—Emergency Department —Room 6. CODE TRAUMA—Emergency Department—Room 6.” And from the nurse, “It’s the driver from the same wreck. ETA 3 minutes.”

It is a Sunday evening in Salinas. The orange glow from the ambulance bay doors down the hall suggests another beautiful Pacific sunset. The other emergency doctor on duty with me has just been told by his methamphetamine-and-alcohol-intoxicated patient that he and his family will be murdered. I get back to the shoulder guy’s little slot. His is next to the little old lady now, everyone having been shuffled around to make room and order from chaos. She and her husband know about the kidney mass now.  He stares blankly at the floor. She flashes me a little smile as I dash past.

I say to Mr. Twenty-Something, “Sir, I am so sorry that you have had to wait so long!” 

He gives me a pained smile as he says, “That’s okay doc, I know those guys needed you more.”

Craig Walls is an emergency doctor in Salinas, California.

This essay is part of Salinas: California's Richest Poor City, a special project of Zócalo Public Square and The California Wellness Foundation.

Emergency room: A city, in all its cruelty and kindness Read More »

Meet ‘RaBBi-Q’ — Kansas City’s kosher BBQ star

Leave a Comment / Food, Is Featured? /

Mendel Segal wears two particular titles that each reflect a devotion to tradition, imply an unending pursuit of precision and command immediate respect.

One is rabbi. The other is pitmaster.

The 33-year-old Orthodox rabbi (and follower of the late Lubavitcher rebbe) is readying to oversee the fourth annual Kansas City Kosher BBQ Festival on Sunday, an event that is expected to attract as many as 4,000 attendees.

Segal — known as “RaBBi-Q” to his fans and fellow competitors on the circuit — is a kosher barbecue champion in more ways than one, standing (and cooking) at the forefront of a rising movement within a distinctly American subculture.

“I just want to energize people,” Segal said from his home in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas. “Kosher can be fun.”

After a long, slow burn, kosher barbecue is catching fire: New restaurants and food trucks are popping up from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, the number of kosher barbecue events across the country has tripled, from a handful to more than a dozen. Many credit Segal’s passion and leadership as a major spark.

“Mendel’s been instrumental in changing kosher barbecue everywhere you can see,” said Mordechai Striks, a New York City psychologist and paramedic who took home the all-around title at last year’s Southern New England Kosher BBQ Championship. “He’s involved in every competition. People look to him because he runs a damn tight ship and he does it right.”

In the few years since he dived whole hog — well, minus the hog — into the national scene, Segal has racked up wins in kosher contests as well as on the mainstream barbecue circuit. In the latter he is seen as a worthy competitor and not just a curiosity — long, bristly beards aren’t so uncommon among barbecue buffs, though the tzitzit, or ritual fringes, worn by observant Jewish men under their clothes sometimes raise eyebrows. This summer he launched his own line of Mendel’s Kansas City BBQ Sauce and BBQ Rub (“Don’t worry, it’s kosher,” the packaging reassures), available in seven states.

“It happens that I’m obsessed with barbecue,” said Simon Majumdar, a Food Network regular who met Segal in 2012 while in Kansas City researching his book “Fed, White, and Blue: Finding America With My Fork.” “And what I say is that Mendel’s not making kosher barbecue — he’s making really, really terrific barbecue that happens to be kosher.”

 

Segal is as surprised as anyone to find an apron and tongs are now the tools of his trade. While he saw rabbinic ordination as a way of capping off his yeshiva training, professional ambitions led him to the wholesale diamond business and commercial real estate. Family — specifically, his wife’s — brought him to Kansas from his native Chicago just in time for the 2008 recession. Though he had no experience in food, “other than as an avid eater,” he applied for an opening in the kosher deli department of a local grocery store.

“I’m living in my in-laws’ basement with my wife and one kid, and a job’s a job, so you do what you gotta do, right?” he said.

Regular customers started referring to the department as “Mendel’s,” and contacts led to his current job as executive director of the community’s kosher supervisory Vaad HaKashruth in 2012. His first order of business was to plan a fundraiser.

Around this time he’d gotten his first taste of authentic Kansas City smoked brisket at a kosher event specially catered by Jack Stack, one of the most respected barbecue joints in town.

“I was like, ‘Wow!’” he said. “It was like nothing I’d ever had before.”

Inspired by a longstanding kosher contest in Memphis, one of Kansas City’s rival barbecue cities, Segal enlisted a couple of local Jewish enthusiasts and a professional adviser: Andy Groneman, a cooking instructor and 20-year vet of the competitive barbecue circuit. Segal’s committee recruited a dozen barbecue teams, mostly first-timers, and was hopeful the August 2012 event could draw as many as a thousand people. More than twice that showed up.

For the first festival, Segal had hired a kosher caterer to sell barbecue concessions. The second year he took on the task of slow cooking more than a ton of meat himself.

“It was just crazy,” he said. “But it went well. And the next year I got better at it.”

Segal is proudest of his burnt ends, which in Kansas City’s melting pot of barbecue styles is considered the local delicacy. (When a brisket is done cooking, the point end is returned to the smoker until it develops charred “bark” and is then served cubed or chopped.) The most satisfying moment of his young cooking career came when he overheard two cops working the event: “One said to the other, ‘I wonder where they got these burnt ends from — these are the best burnt ends I’ve ever had.’”

Soon, Segal was hitting the road, competing in barbecue fests as often as his schedule would allow.

His mission is twofold: “First, I want people who keep kosher to not have to suffer with subpar food categories,” he said. “If they want barbecue, they should be able to get good barbecue.”

To that end, Segal has facilitated the growth of several new kosher barbecue festivals, from Long Island to Chicago to Dallas. (See below.)

The second goal, however, is broader. Segal brings in professionals to do demos, and many of the competitors are non-Jewish and/or non-kosher-keeping cooks intrigued by the challenge of the constraints of kashrut. (Pork, big in most contests, cannot be used, of course, and sauces and rubs must be strictly kosher.)

From the beginning, Segal sought the blessing of the Kansas City Barbeque Society, the governing body of competitive barbecue that this year will sanction more than 450 contests worldwide. Segal’s became the first-ever kosher event on the list, and this year Dallas and Fairfield, Connecticut, are following suit.

Currently, the kosher contests are part of the K.C. society’s Competitor Series, which doesn’t award standings points or qualify teams for the American Royal World Series of Barbecue in October — the largest such event on earth, with more than 550 teams. A kosher competition could never meet the society’s current championship rules, which require entries in pork ribs and pork butt (Segal enlists “my treif guy” to cook the pork on separate equipment for the society’s events). But the rabbi has been in talks with society officials about creating a kosher subdivision with its own playoff and championship.

Once the whirlwind of the weekend passes, Segal will hit the stretch run of the season and then focus on the next steps for his product line, such as introducing prepared items that can ship to kosher-food deserts. And of course he’ll keep spreading the barbecue faith.

Segal’s short-term goal is to enter the American Royal, where he would make make history in more ways than one: first rabbi to compete, first Orthodox Jew to compete, first Shabbat to be kept at the Royal. And since this year’s event also falls during the intermediate days of Sukkot, “I guess I’d have to build the first-ever sukkah at the Royal, too,” he said, laughing.

Kosher Competition Heats Up

In the past few years, kosher-certified competitive barbecue has caught fire, sparking new contests across the country. Here’s a tasty sampling of this year’s coming festivities.

Kansas City Kosher BBQ Festival
Overland Park, Kansas
Aug. 16

Southern New England Kosher BBQ Championship
Fairfield, Connecticut
Aug. 30

Long Island Kosher BBQ Championship
Westbury, New York
Date TBA

Totally Kosher Rib Burn-Off
Pepper Pike, Ohio
Sept. 7

Charlotte Kosher BBQ Championship
Charlotte, North Carolina
Sept. 7

Atlanta Kosher BBQ Competition and Festival
Dunwoody, Georgia
Oct. 18

ASBEE Kosher Barbecue Championship
Memphis, Tennessee
Oct. 18

Dallas Kosher Barbecue Championship
Dallas, Texas
Oct. 25

JCC Barbecue Cook-Off & Festival
Las Vegas, Nevada
Oct. 25

The Texas Kosher BBQ Championship
San Antonio, Texas
Nov. 8

Meet ‘RaBBi-Q’ — Kansas City’s kosher BBQ star Read More »

Kerry: No automatic return of sanctions if Iran breaks arms embargo

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Mobile, Worldwide /

Violations of an arms embargo by Iran or restrictions on its missile program would not force an automatic reinstatement or “snapback” of United Nations sanctions under a landmark nuclear deal, although other options would be available, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Tuesday.

“The arms embargo is not tied to snapback,” Kerry said. “It is tied to a separate set of obligations. So they are not in material breach of the nuclear agreement for violating the arms piece of it.”

Speaking at a Reuters Newsmaker event, Kerry said a new structure would be created to replace a U.N. panel of experts that has been monitoring compliance with the U.N. sanctions regime. Under the nuclear deal that panel will be abolished in the coming months.

The U.N. arms embargo and ballistic missile sanctions were the most difficult sticking points toward the conclusion of marathon negotiations between Iran and six world powers last month.

Iran, backed by Russia and China, had wanted those restrictions to be terminated under the nuclear agreement, which was completed on July 14, but a compromise was struck under which the arms embargo would remain for up to five years and the missile restrictions for up to eight years.

Under the nuclear deal, sanctions on Iran would be lifted in exchange for long-term curbs on its nuclear program.

Failure to comply with limitations on that program can lead to an automatic reimposition of all U.N. sanctions, the so-called U.N. sanctions snapback.

Until now it had not been entirely clear if a breach of the arms embargo and missile sanctions could lead to a sanctions snapback.

Even without a restoration of U.N. sanctions, Kerry said the United States and its allies would have “ample tools at our disposal” if Iran violated the arms embargo and missile sanctions.

“There is a specific U.N. resolution outside of this agreement that prohibits them from sending weapons to Hezbollah. There is a separate and specific U.N. resolution that prohibits them from sending weapons to the Shia militia in Iraq,” he said.

Kerry added that similar U.N. restrictions banned arms sales to the Houthis in Yemen, North Korea and other potential recipients of weapons from Iran.

Tehran has consistently violated the U.N. arms embargo and missile sanctions. Since 2010, those breaches have been documented by the U.N. panel of experts on Iran.

Kerry said a new U.N. monitoring mechanism would have to be created to replace the panel of experts, suggesting that much of the monitoring work could be done by the United States and its allies on their own.

“We're not dependent on the U.N. to do that and I think Israel and others are much happier that we're not,” he said. “We will depend on our own intel community, on our own military, on our own information, we will work with Israel, we will work with others.”

Iran's senior nuclear negotiator Abbas Araqchi made clear last month that Tehran had no intention of complying with the arms embargo and missile sanctions.

“Whenever it’s needed to send arms to our allies in the region, we will do so,” he said. “We are not ashamed of it.”

Kerry: No automatic return of sanctions if Iran breaks arms embargo Read More »