Daniel Gordis
“Gentlemen, bow your heads.” Thirty-five years after I used to hear that phrase in Assembly each eighth-grade morning, I still remember the scene clearly. Several hundred of us Middle School and High School students, boys more than gentlemen, in our coats and ties, beginning our day at the private school I attended for a couple of years in Baltimore. The school day started with Assembly, which, in turn, always ended with the Lord’s Prayer. And just before the Prayer, the Headmaster would say, sternly but not unkindly, “Gentlemen, bow your heads.”
I didn’t bow my head. In the two years that I spent at that (quite excellent) school, I experimented with a few alternatives. At first, I tried the “slump,” which allowed me to keep my head up, but to have it no higher than anyone else’s bowed head, so I wouldn’t be terribly conspicuous. That worked for a while. But the simplest mode, I eventually discovered, was simply to sit in my chair, and not bow my head. That, after all, my parents had told me, was the deal they’d cut on my behalf with the School when I’d been admitted.
That latter pose, which worked well ...   more »

                                                      
 by Gerald A. Honigman
But, is Israel watching?
Recently, with problems on the horizon for President Bush and Secretary Rice’s proposed Middle East peace (of the grave) summit, Condi stated that she’d turn for advice to two former Presidents.
I’m convinced that this was a Divine, eleventh hour wake up call for Israel.
Now who, pray tell, is Condi turning to for such consultations?
Let’s take them one at a time…
Firstly, there’s Jimmy “Apartheid Israel” Carter, whose Carter Center and such receives a fortune in Arab donations…including from Osama bin Laden’s own Saudi cousins.
Arabs commit genocide against black Africans in the Sudan, butcher and gas Kurds, murder and burn down churches of Egyptian Copts, murder and subjugate North African Berbers, and so forth, but Mr. Peanut’s high power lens of moral scrutiny can only find an admittedly imperfect Israel --which has Arabs who side with Hamas in its own Parliament--to focus upon. Not to mention the one half of Israel’s Jews who fled so-called “Arab” lands, where they were commonly known as kilab yahud…Jew dogs.
Knowing full well that after the ’67 Six Day War, Israel was not required to return to the status quo ante (i.e., ...   more »

By Stan Goodenough
If Jerusalem is divided, and it's eastern part made the capital of "Palestine" - world Jewry will be forever cut off from the hope it has held onto for 2000 years, and be once and for all prohibited from ascending the Temple Mount and even from praying at the Western Wall.
This warning was clearly sounded in an interview the former PLO-appointed mufti of Jerusalem gave to The Jerusalem Post this week, excerpts of which were published Thursday.
Ikrema Sabri emphatically told the Post no Israelite temple had ever stood on the Temple Mount.
What's more, the cleric insisted, the Western Wall - whose massive stones the entire world knows to have been laid by Herod the Great during the Roman occupation of the Land of Israel - had nothing to do with any temple either.
"The wall is not part of the Jewish temple. It is just the western wall of the mosque. There is not a single stone with any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews.
"It was always only a mosque - all 144 dunams, the entire area," Sabri said.
"No Jews have the right to pray there. ... No Jewish ...   more »