Category Archives: issues of morality or ethics

Something Is Wrong With Gazans

The solution to the long and ongoing war between Hamas and Israel is an obvious one, and it consists of two words: Gazan Spring.

Everyone knows the facts.  Hamas, pledged to Israel’s destruction, is the de facto government in Gaza.  In the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January, 2006, it won 74 out of 132 seats.  Even though the United States and the European Union refused to recognize Hamas’ right to govern any area of the Palestinian Authority, it took control of Gaza and, began to fight with Fatah, its Palestinian rival. Over subsequent years, clashes and truces between the two groups became the recurrent reality.  Many hundreds of Palestinians have been killed there by their fellow Palestinians.

Just before the recent spate of violence between Hamas and Israel, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas entered into an agreement with Hamas to form a unity government. That latest attempt to heal the rift between the Palestinian faction that aims to eradicate Israel and the one that professes to back a two-state solution was widely expected to eventually meet the fate of previous, similar Fatah-Hamas pacts, which fell apart as a result of the two groups’ inherently diametric stances.

Now, with Israel’s full-hearted campaign to undermine Hamas’ ability to target of Israeli population centers – with some missiles having reached as far as Tel Aviv and Yerushalayim – there seems little hope that Hamas will emerge with anything but the defiant pride of a gravely wounded but still standing “freedom fighter” or, to use the more apt term here, “terrorist.”

The key lies in the phrase “still standing.”  It was the Palestinian population that provided Hamas what legitimacy it has as an elected entity.  A population giveth, but it can also taketh away.  The media claims that there are many Gazans, perhaps even a majority of them, who are disillusioned, and deeply, with Hamas.

That would be no wonder.  Gaza’s infrastructure has been deteriorating for years; civil servants’ salaries haven’t been paid for months, and Hamas’ coffers (although, tragically, not its arsenals) are empty. The blockade of its ports and borders has prevented the building of new homes (with the tons of concrete smuggled into Gaza employed exclusively to reinforce the tunnels used to attack Israelis). Social services have faltered, corruption of officials has increased, Egypt has withdrawn its support from the government and now, once again, Hamas’ lust to kill Jews has brought the population a rain of bombs and their resultant casualties (mostly, but, unfortunately and inevitably, not all of them terrorists).

Any sane Gazan should recognize the origin of his problems.

And if there are sane Gazans, they have presumably heard that despotic rulers and oppressive governments have, for better or worse, been toppled by populaces over recent years in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.

Were there a similar uprising in Gaza, a Gazan Spring, Mr. Abbas would be relieved of the temptation, to which he cravenly succumbed, to make any new deal with the devil that is Hamas, and might be emboldened to do more toward making peace with Israel than just mouth the bluster and platitudes that have been his stock in trade until now.

Whether Israel could come to trust a Palestinian leader of a unified populace is not easily predictable.  But the removal of Hamas from governance and its relegation to a mere renegade terrorist group firmly rejected by the clear majority of Palestinians would certainly sweeten the pot for Israelis (who, through regular elections, choose governments to represent their collective will).

A Gazan Spring wouldn’t come without bloodshed.  Societal upheavals, particularly in the Arab world, seldom do.  But shouldn’t that world’s defiant slogan Ash-sha`b yurid isqat an-nizam (“the people want to bring down the regime”) be ringing out in Gaza City?  Shouldn’t the vision of a bomber-less sky over their heads and open borders, not to mention of an eventual Palestinian state living in cooperation and prosperity alongside Israel, motivate Gazans to stand up for their futures?

One has to wonder at the fact that it hasn’t, that after eight years of Hamas rule, with all the suffering they have brought, the Gazan street hasn’t seen fit to assert itself.  Perhaps the populace just lacks the courage and determination that so many other Middle Eastern peoples seem to possess.

Or perhaps – though one hopes it isn’t the case – Gazans just share the visceral and ugly animosity that is the lifeblood of Hamas and similar groups.

After all, as Chazal teach us, just as love can bend the clear line of reason, so can hatred.

© 2014 Hamodia

Agudath Israel Statement About Arrests in Murder of Arab Teen

Reports of arrests of members of the Jewish community in connection with the recent murder of an Arab youth, Muhammad Hussein Abu Khdeir, should fill us all with revulsion.

The Jewish faith does not tolerate violence other than in self-defense and condemns murder as a grave crime.  To take the life of an innocent human being is not only an indefensible, evil act but, here, brings our people down to the level of our most implacable and cruel enemies.  It is a chillul Hashem, a desecration of G-d’s name.

The entire Jewish world was plunged into mourning at the news of the three innocent Jewish teens who were murdered several weeks ago by as-yet unapprehended parties.  And mourning was, and is, the proper response of individuals to such crimes, not misguided attempts by vigilantes to exact “revenge,” which is the Creator’s to dispense.

May the families of both the murdered Jewish boys and the murdered Arab boy be comforted.  And may governmental authorities successfully bring all the murderers to the justice that can be meted out in this world.

We beseech the Creator, the One who “makes peace in His heavens,” to send us the day soon when peace will reign over the Holy Land.

Agudath Israel Statement on the Murder of the Three Kidnapped Israeli Teens

Agudath Israel of America joins Jews and civilized people the world over in anguish and agony over the news of the vicious murders of the three boys kidnapped on June 12, Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-ad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach, Hy”d.

This horrific act is, in the end, not a crime against Israel or Jews alone, but against humanity – in both senses of the word.  It bespeaks the deepest and most revolting inhumanity imaginable, the seizing of innocent, idealistic young people and the casual snuffing out of their lives and futures.

Hamas and its allies, which now include the Palestinian Authority, are ultimately responsible for these premeditated, heinous murders.  The hatred and incitement that have characterized so much of the campaign to establish a new Arab state alongside Israel are what have yielded these young lifeless bodies, and all the death and destruction born of Arab terrorism over the years.

There are those who believe that all people are, deep down, good.  Hamas and its friends, along with other terrorist groups and rogue nations like Iran,  give the lie to that lovely but naïve fantasy.

It is our hope that the nations of the free world and their leaders fully confront that fact and comprehend its implications.

Musing: Stop and Wonder

Sometimes a statistic just makes you stop and wonder.

One such fact came near the start of an essay in Hillsdale College’s publication Imprimis.

Anthony Daniels, a British psychiatrist, writes: “By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home.  The child may be father of the man, but the television is father to the child.”

It’s unlikely that things are terribly different on this side of the pond.  The implications not only for the family but for society as a whole are… well, disquieting, to say the very least.

An Enlightened Letter-Writer Pinpoints the Ramapo Problem

A letter writer to the New York Jewish Week, although acknowledging that the state aid formula for public schools has wrought havoc on the East Ramapo School District’s ability to maintain important services to the district’s public school children, asserts that the formula “has little to do with the disaster that the East Ramapo School District has become, a fact that in itself is undoubtedly fostering anti-Semitism in the Hudson Valley and beyond.”

What fuels the Jew-hatred, the letter writer explains, is “that now one-third of the district’s children go to public school while the rest go to yeshivas. As the haredi population in the district increased, many middle class families moved…”

“There is a palpable fear,” he continues, “that the same thing could happen” in other nearby communities.  “With so many irrational reasons to be anti-Semitic throughout history, why does there have to be one that is arguably rational?”

So the problem, it seems, isn’t anything charedim have done.  The problem is that there are charedim.

Maybe deportation, or the relocation of the problem population to some sort of mandated area, might work.

Of Peoples… and People

Commuting to and from Manhattan daily on the Staten Island Ferry brings me into the vicinity of many a tourist. The boat sometimes resembles a United Nations General Assembly debate, without the translators.

When I hear German or a Slavic language spoken, I can’t help but recall the wry words of the late New York City mayor Ed Koch as he led the Ukrainian Day parade one year. He told the parade’s grand marshal: “You know, if this were the old country this wouldn’t be a parade, it would be a pogrom. I wouldn’t be walking down Fifth Avenue; I would be running… and you would be running after me.”

And I’m reminded, too, of the sentiment of my dear father, may he be well, who spent the war years first fleeing the Nazis and then in a Soviet Siberian labor camp. When I asked him many years ago how he feels when he meets a German non-Jew, he told me that any German “has to prove himself” to be free of the Jew-hatred that came to define his people. My father’s “default” view of a German (or, for that matter, Pole or Ukrainian or Romanian…) is “guilty,” or at least “suspect.”

And yet, he continued, if a German clearly disavows his elder countrymen’s embrace of evil, then he deserves to be seen and treated as just another human being. I imagine others might not be so willing to accept even the apparent good will of someone from the land and stock of those who unleashed the murder of millions of Jews (including my father’s parents and many of his siblings and other relatives). But that is how my father approaches things. And how I do, too.

All of which I shared with two German filmmakers a year or two ago. They had requested an interview, to be used in a documentary for broadcast in Germany that would focus on how Jews regard Germans today. I consented, if only because I had no reason to say no.

When the visitors, young people who clearly disavowed anti-Semitism, arrived at Agudath Israel of America’s offices and turned on their camera, I explained that there were Jews, of both my father’s generation and mine, who would always see Germans as evil; but others who would choose to judge an individual, in the end, no matter his genealogical or national baggage, as an individual.

What became of my comments, or the program, I can’t say. I don’t know anyone in Germany who saw the broadcast.

The interview comes to mind because of a recent Agence France-Presse report about Rainer Hoess, the grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, yimach shemo, who estimated that he was responsible for the deaths of two and a half million people, including at least a million Jews. He was found guilty of war crimes by Polish authorities and hanged near Auschwitz’s crematorium in 1947.

As a 12-year-old growing up in post-war Germany, Rainer was puzzled by negative feelings toward him that he sensed in his school gardener, a Holocaust survivor. A teacher revealed the truth about his infamous forebear.

Now 48, Rainer Hoess seeks to deal with that awful discovery by devoting his life to fighting the rise of neo-Nazi movements across Europe. At first sought out by such hate groups to join them as a “high profile” member, he turned the tables and condemned them unequivocally.

“Every time I have the chance to work against them,” he says, “I will do that.” And he has devoted the past four years to educating schoolchildren about the dangers of right-wing extremism, sadly on the rise in Europe. Last year alone, he addressed students in more than 70 schools in Germany, and has visited Israel.

There’s food for thought here, because it seems inevitable that people will generalize about groups, be they ethnic, national or even professional, whether the justification is conceived as based on genetics, environment or culture.

But our generalizations, however justified they may seem to us, should not figure in our judgments of the individual who has just introduced himself. That fellow might end up adding fodder to our assumption. But he might do just the opposite, and should be given the chance.

After all, there are generalizations, too, that others make about us Jews qua Jews, sadly; and about us Orthodox Jews as Orthodox Jews, sadder still. And, whether those generalizations are based on isolated, unrepresentative facts or pure fantasy, we want others to regard us not in their shadow, but in the revealing light of who we are. And we should give others the same courtesy.

© Hamodia 2014

Letter in Wall St. Journal

Don’t Confuse What Kosher Means

Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz is entitled to swear off meat if he chooses, but not to pass off his reasons for doing so as having anything to do with Orthodox Judaism.

June 5, 2014 12:20 p.m. ET
Shmuly Yanklowitz (“Why This Rabbi Is Swearing Off Kosher Meat,” Houses of Worship, May 30) is entitled to swear off meat if he chooses, but not to pass off his reasons for doing so as having anything to do with Orthodox Judaism.Jewish religious law prohibits the infliction of avoidable pain on animals, and the vast majority of kosher slaughterhouses, overseen and inspected by both governmental agencies and rabbinic supervisors, are entirely sensitive to that law and its implications.

“Kosher,” however, has nothing to do with health or “ethics.” There are Jewish ethical laws and Jewish ritual laws. Kashrut is entirely in the latter category. And it is simply not “Orthodox” to contend otherwise.

Rabbi Avi Shafran

Agudath Israel of America

New York

Children’s Programming

“Nahoul” is a giant bee, or, better, a man in a furry bee costume.  He is one of the intended-to-be-lovable characters on “Pioneers of Tomorrow,” a children’s television program produced in Gaza.

In a recent episode, Nahoul encourages a boy from Jenin to attack his Jewish neighbors.  “Punch them,” he advises.  “Turn their faces into tomatoes.”

“If his neighbors are Jewish or Zionist,” Rawan, the little girl host of the show adds helpfully, “that goes without saying.”  Nahoul then advises throwing stones at “the Jews.”

A bit later in the program, another little girl shares her hope to become a policewoman, so that she can “shoot the Jews.”

“All of them?” the host asks with a smile.

“Yes,” the other girl replies.

“Good.”

Nahoul is likely to meet the fate of other cuddly animals – like Farfour the Mouse, a rabbit and a bear – that were previously featured on the program only to suddenly disappear, the show’s little viewers being informed that each character had been “martyred” by Israelis.

The airwaves in Gaza are tightly controlled by Hamas, the de facto government, and “Pioneers of Tomorrow” is part of that violent and hateful group’s effort to educate the region’s children about what Hamas considers their civic and religious duties.

They educate and we educate.

It might seem a novel thought, but it’s really an obvious one: The surest way to understand a society lies in the entertainment it offers its young.

American culture qua culture is largely aimless.  If it has ideals, they are high-sounding ones like “freedom” and “individuality” but which generally translate as “do what you will” and “I’m okay, you’re okay.”  Reportedly, much of the programming aimed at American children pays homage to the same.

Children’s fare in the Orthodox Jewish world is also telling.  And although it does not use television as a medium, it’s voluminous.  Whether in the form of books, compact discs, MP3s or cassette tapes, there is an astounding array of memorable musical offerings, characters, stories and performances that convey the ideas and ideals that inform the community, and that reflect its essence.  Jewish children are taught about Jewish history, about love for other Jews and for Eretz Yisroel, about the beauty of Shabbos and the meanings of yomim tovim, and about the performance of mitzvos; about the evils of jealousy and loshon hora and about the importance of Torah-study.

And then we have Hamas.

Shavuos approaches.  My wife and I will miss having our children with us.   (They’re all either married or in yeshiva –yes, the marrieds invited us to join them, but their father is a hopeless homebody.)  But when I go to the beis medrash on Shavuos night, I’ll remember all the Shavuos nights spent learning Torah with the little boys, later young men, whom we were privileged to raise, and all the subtle teaching of both them and their sisters that went on around the Shabbos table, and throughout the weeks and years.

And I will remember one Shavuos in particular, quite a few years back, when I was learning in a nearby shul – packed with others, many of them fathers and sons too – with one of our sons, then a 12-year-old.

We spent most of the night engrossed in Gemara.  We began with the sugya of tzaar ba’alei chayim in Bava Metzia, which he was studying in yeshiva, and then continued with the sugya of Yerushalayim nischalka l’shvotim in Yoma, which he and I were learning regularly together.

Dovie seemed entirely awake throughout it all, and asked the perceptive questions I had come to expect from him.

The experience was enthralling, as it always was, and while it was a challenge to concentrate (at times even to keep my eyes from closing) during Shacharis, Dovie and I both “made it” and then, hand in hand, walked home, where we promptly crashed.  But before my head touched my pillow (a millisecond or two before I entered REM sleep), I summoned the energy to thank HaKodosh Boruch Hu for sharing His Torah with us.

That silent prayer came back to me like a thunderclap a few days later, when I caught up on some reading I had missed (in the word’s most simple sense) over Yomtov.  Apparently, while Dovie and I were learning Torah, the presses at The Washington Times were printing a story datelined Gaza City.

It began with a description of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Abu Ali, being “lovingly dress[ed] by his mother in a costume of a suicide bomber, complete with small kaffiyeh, a belt of electrical tape and fake explosives made of plywood.”

“I encourage him, and he should do this,” said his mother; and Abu Ali himself apparently agreed. “I hope to be a martyr,” he said.  “I hope when I get to 14 or 15 to explode myself.”

My thoughts flashed back to Shavuos and to my own son, and I thanked Hashem again.

© Hamodia 2014

POSTSCRIPT:  It turns out that we will indeed be away from home for Shavuos, in Israel, for the bris of Dovie’s and his wife Devorah Rivkah’s  firstborn .  May we all know only happy occasions!

 

A Place Called Doubt

The term “botched execution,” much in the news of late because of the case of convicted murderer Clayton Darrell Lockett, might seem to imply that the condemned prisoner has remained alive.  Mr. Lockett, however, died, at least indirectly as a result of the lethal three-drug cocktail administered to him on April 29.  His death was technically due to a heart attack, after he showed signs of life and even tried to speak at a point when the drugs should have conclusively dispatched him and the official execution was halted.

It turns out that the intravenous line sending the drugs into his body might at some point simply have slipped out (his body was covered during the procedure) but his protracted death has brought the subject of lethal injection as a means of execution – and the death penalty itself – into the global spotlight.

Considering that the crime for which Mr. Lockett was sentenced to death was the shooting and burying alive of an acquaintance, it’s hard to argue that, even if Mr. Lockett had an unnecessarily protracted painful death, it was devoid of some measure of justice – to the degree justice can be attained in this world.

But it has nonetheless raised the question of whether the combination of drugs used by some states is the best method of execution, and aroused the ire of anti-capital punishment activists.

The latter’s activities, ironically, have increased the likelihood of messy executions.  Because the simplest and most humane means of causing a person’s death is not a combination of drugs but rather the straightforward administering of a barbiturate like sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, routinely used at low doses in medical procedures as anesthetics and invariably lethal in larger ones.  Under pressure from death penalty opponents, however, drug manufacturers have halted supplies of those drugs to U.S. prisons (and require all resellers to do the same).  Medical societies, moreover, do not permit physicians to participate in executions.

The drug issue, however, is resolvable, and prison personnel can be trained to competently place IVs and administer the substances.  What most people are really talking about when they talk about “drug cocktails” and “botched executions” is the death penalty itself.

From a Jewish perspective, even aside from the import of the Sheva Mitzvos B’nai Noach, the removal of a dangerous person from the world is wholly proper.  And many Torah-respecting Jews, as a result, consider the death penalty in the United States to be a good thing.

And yet there is the sobering fact that the wheels of American justice have on a number of occasions gone off track.  Just last month the murder conviction of Jonathan Fleming, 51, was vacated by a New York judge when evidence emerged proving that, despite an eyewitness’ claim, he was out of state when the crime took place.  New York has no death penalty, but if it did, the new evidence might have been discovered too late. As it is, Mr. Fleming spent nearly half his life behind bars.

Then, this month, Brooklyn prosecutors dismissed murder convictions against three brothers who spent decades in prison for two separate homicides. A discredited detective, it has been charged, convinced a drug addict to falsely finger them in the crimes.

Nearly 70 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged. Many of these cases were discovered not because of the normal appeals process, but rather as a result of new scientific techniques, investigations by journalists, and the work of expert attorneys, not available to the typical death row inmate.

So where does that leave a believing Jew on the topic of the death penalty?  In a place too many of us don’t seem to believe exists: doubt.

We’re quick to recognize many of the unhealthy influences of contemporary society on our own behavior.  Our times assault us with attitudes, crassness, immorality and materialism, and we do our best to prevent ourselves from being affected by it all.  One societal ill, however, that seems to have snuck in under our religious radar is something that thoroughly riddles American politics and media: the need to “take a side” on every issue, and to proclaim that we know what we really cannot.

The ailment infects pundits and would-be pundits even in the charedi world, and it is not to our credit that it rages unchecked.  To be sure, there is nothing wrong with having opinions on all sorts of matters.  But, all too often, conclusions are offered with urgent conviction but without the complete knowledge, comprehension or objectivity that truly intelligent opinion demands.

It would do us well to resist the compulsion to pontificate when the topic at hand – and the death penalty is but one example – should inspire instead a sort of humble ambivalence.

© 2014 Hamodia

 

Bias Vs. Backbone

A sports team owner’s base racism was all the talk of the world town last week.  But a more subtle – and thus more dangerous – prejudice has been on public display, too, of late.  It was largely ignored, however, likely because the bias revealed was against charedi  Jews.

The opportunity for expressing the bias was the situation in the Monsey-area East Ramapo school district, whose public schools service a largely minority population but where there are many yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs.  And a prominent salvo in the recent bias-barrage was fired by New York Times columnist Michael Powell, who pens a column in the paper highlighting people against whom the writer has rendered his personal judgment of guilt.

His villains in an April 7 offering titled “A School Board That Overlooks Its Obligation To Students” were the Orthodox Jewish members of that entity, which is charged with overseeing the workings and government funding of all schools in the district.  Of the approximately 30,000 school children in the district, roughly 22,000 are in yeshivos; the remaining 8,000 are in public schools.

Mr. Powell began his piece by lamenting the laying off of assistant principals, art teachers and a band leader at the district’s public schools, as well as the curtailing of athletics programs and the rise in some class sizes.

The problem, the writer informs us, began with the “migration” of “the Hasidic Jews of Brooklyn – the Satmar, the Bobover and other sects” to the area.  Intent on “recreat[ing] the shtetls of Eastern Europe,” he explains, the newcomers have been “voting in disciplined blocs,” resulting in “an Orthodox-dominated board” that has “ensured that the community’s geometric expansion would be accompanied by copious tax dollars for textbooks and school buses.”  In case the bad guys’ black hats aren’t sufficiently evident, he takes pains to add his assertion that “public education became an afterthought” to the board.  The piece is accompanied by a photograph of a sad-looking black mother hugging her even sadder-looking son.

Then one Ari Hart, representing a Jewish social justice organization, Uri L’Tzedek, jumped aboard the bandwagon with an opinion piece in the New York Jewish Week.  Insinuating that the school board members are contemporary Shylocks, he righteously invokes Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt”l, who forbade yeshivos from taking government funds for which they do not qualify.  The article was titled “East Ramapo’s Children Are Suffering.”

What is really suffering here, though, is truth.

State funding to all school districts, including East Ramapo, is based on a statutory formula involving property values, income levels and public school student numbers.  Wealthier districts, fairly, receive less government funding than poorer ones.

For most school districts, where the large majority of students attend public schools, the state aid formula accurately identifies districts that are poor and require more aid, and those that are wealthy and require less aid.

East Ramapo, however, because of its odd student demographic and relatively high property values, is funded, following the formula, as if it were one of the wealthiest school districts in the state – when it is in fact one of the poorest.

The critics seem unaware (or choose to ignore) that all schoolchildren, even Orthodox ones, need textbooks and a way to get to school, and are legally entitled to both. School boards are thus mandated to allocate the funds necessary to meet those needs for both public and nonpublic school students; they would be in violation of the law were they to neglect that obligation.  Unfortunately, because of the state allocation formula and substantial budget cuts over recent years, insufficient funds have remained to support public school programs in the district than had existed in years past.

The East Ramapo School Board’s members have disbursed the funds entrusted to them the only way they could – the only way any responsible school board could possibly do so.

Why, then, their vilification?  Good question.  There are, I believe, two answers.  One is that a common, if mindless, conclusion when members of ethnic minorities level charges of wrongdoing against others is that the latter are guilty until proven innocent – in some cases, as here, even afterward.  Secondly, while there are crass bigots like Donald Sterling there are also more “refined” ones, who take care to hide their bigotries behind a mask of high-mindedness.

Something, however, happened this past week that should give pause to those intent on assuming the worst about charedi Jews and on trumpeting their assumptions.

At a press conference in Monsey, some 75 people gathered to speak, hear or report on a new initiative, “Community United for Formula Change,” launched by a group of local charedi, black and Latino activists, who are working together to address the problem of the East Ramapo school district’s inadequate funding.  Among those involved in the initiative are Chassidic rabbis, pastors of Latino and Haitian churches, and American-born black community members.

I was privileged to be present at the conference, as a representative of Agudath Israel of America, which is concerned with the acrimony in East Ramapo and is backing a bill in Albany that would allow an alternative state educational funding formula to be used in Rockland County.  I was struck by the friendship, unified spirit and determination among the multi-ethnic backers of the initiative.

One black speaker at the press conference, Brendel Charles (a councilwoman for the town of Ramapo, but who attended as a parent of two public school children), told Tablet magazine that “she originally believed the problem was that the ultra-Orthodox members of the board were making decisions without regard to others in the community.”

“I thought that there could be a possibility that there was something wrong,” she said, “that there could be a prejudice of [their] thinking, ‘We don’t have to give them that [they felt], because it doesn’t really matter’.”

She recalled hearing another parent suggest that “Well, we want to send the Jews back to Israel.”  Worse things were in fact said openly at school board meetings. One speaker compared the board to “Pontius Pilate washing his hands, or the soldier who has committed war crimes who claims he was only following orders.”

But when Ms. Charles’ husband joined the East Ramapo school board, she recounted, he quickly “realized that… the school board members weren’t trying to hurt the public school kids,” but rather that “we don’t have the money” to provide the services needed.

Ms. Charles, according to Tablet, “criticized those in her community who have allowed the situation to deteriorate” and is quoted as saying, “It’s been a war.  It’s become religious against non-religious, black against white, them against us.  ‘Their children are getting everything, our children are not.’  And that’s the wrong energy.  The color is green.  We don’t have enough money.  That’s the problem.”

Michael Powell, Ari Hart and others like them would do well to hear those words well, and to realize that people of good will and intelligence, of different colors and creeds, understand what needs to be done in East Ramapo.  And, rather than rabble-rouse or prance around on bandwagons, they have chosen the constructive path, and set themselves to the task at hand.

© 2014 Hamodia