I do not know Chaim Amsellem MK personally, but here is a man unafraid to speak the truth. This is an extract from an article that appeared in Haaretz this week: The Shas leadership ousted Chaim Amsellem from the party on Monday, but the so-called renegade lawmaker continues to make waves. Three weeks ago, Amsellem made controversial comments to the…
General Topics
Anglo History
After the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, there was no official Jewish presence in England until the time of Oliver Cromwell. In 1655 he convened a conference in Whitehall to discuss the official readmittance of Jews to England. But, with opposition from the Church and the merchants, no official decision was taken. Yet a blind eye was…
Politics & Religion
Several things are clear to me from the US midterm elections. Only a minority care enough to vote. Most people do not trust politicians. Most people are not wedded to any particular political party, even if there might be a family tradition of loyalty to one. Voters are pragmatists. If it works they’ll stick to it, and if not they’ll…
Soros
George Soros is, like me, an admirer of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies. I completely agree with Soros on almost every issue, except that he has no interest at all in anything spiritual. When I met him briefly at a conference in Vienna many years ago, his disconnect from anything Jewish reminded me of a man who…
Der Judenstaat
In 1896 Herzl published Der Judenstaat, in which he set out a vision of a Jewish state. It would be a state in which all citizens, of whatever religion or race, would have equal rights and be encouraged to participate as fully as Jews could (in theory) in other modern states of Christian or Muslim character and origin. I have…
Statistics, Lies, and the New York Times
An op-ed appeared in the New York Times on October 9th pointing out how much murder actually costs a country. It quoted research at Iowa State University that calculated that each murder costs society $17.25 million in victim’s costs, loss of earnings, and the justice, punitive, and prevention systems. Sounds like a lot, but I’m prepared to believe it. The…