by Rabbi Mordechai Becher
Excerpt from "Gateway to Judaism" -- The What, How, and Why of Jewish Life (ArtScroll)
The Purim story begins about 900 years after the Exodus from Egypt. The Jews had been living in Israel continually, since they first entered with Joshua. For 410 years, King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem had been the focal point of Jewish spiritual and national life in Israel. The first major tragedy that the Jews of this era experienced was the division of the country into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judea. The northern kingdom was populated by ten of the twelve tribes. It was eventually invaded by the Assyrians under Sennacherib, who exiled the Jews. Sennacherib's policy of forced exile and assimilation directly caused the loss of the ten tribes to the Jewish people.
Less than a hundred years later, the Jews were dealt another terrible blow. This time, the Babylonian Empire under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar invaded Israel, destroyed the Temple1 and exiled almost all the remaining tribes (Judah, Benjamin, the Priests and the Levites) to Babylon (modern day Iraq -- two weeks by camel, seven minutes by Scud).
Jeremiah the prophet had warned the ...   more »

By Stan Goodenough
United States Vice President Richard Cheney is due to visit the Middle East in the coming days, according to Fox News Monday.
Cheney is scheduled to meet in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and in Ramallah with PLO chief terrorist Mahmoud Abbas.
But while he will visit with these two leaders, Fox News analysts said, the Vice President does not plan to "encroach" on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "turf" and will not meddle with efforts to carve a "State of Palestine" out of Israel's biblical homeland.
A statement released by Cheney's office said "President Bush has asked the vice president to travel to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank, and Turkey for discussions with these key partners on issues of mutual interest," Cheney's office stated.
The main focus of Cheney's visit is understood to be the Iranian nuclear threat.
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 Gerald A. Honigman
It’s not the first time that National Public Radio has committed such a travesty.
Right after eight young Jews were deliberately murdered--and many others wounded--in a Jerusalem yeshiva, NPR’s Linda Gradstein briefly mentioned the story on the air waves and then gave almost (if not) the same amount of time immediately afterwards to explaining how this came in response to Israel’s incursion into Gaza which left over one hundred Arabs dead, allegedly half civilians. Israel’s numbers greatly dispute the Arab ones. She then, as a footnote, added that the incursion was due to rocket fire from Gaza.  saw a movie recently, The Kingdom, about terrorism in Saudi Arabia. One of the scenes was telling, indeed.
When going after the leader of a terror group in a civilian apartment building, FBI and Saudi forces had to work their way through women, children and other alleged “innocents"--some of which turn out to be not so. A dangerous and complicated matter, to say the least. And another invalid, “innocent,” seated old man turned out to be the terror mastermind.
The above is a scene out of the predicament Israel faces daily in Gaza--with Arabs using kids as human shields, to ...   more »

Efforts by Egypt to put together a package deal that would include a cease-fire in Gaza and a new border arrangement between Gaza and Egypt was put on hold following Thursday's terrorist attack at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

 
 
 
Egyptian official: Syria may be thwarting ceasefire
Government officials in Jerusalem said Saturday night it was now unlikely that Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman would come here in the next few days for discussions on the matter. This would be the second time in a week that Suleiman has postponed a visit to Israel to discuss the situation in the South. Suleiman held talks in Egypt before Thursday's attack with Hamas and Islamic Jihad representatives, although no headway was reported on a cease-fire, with Hamas and Islamic Jihad demanding that Israel stop pursuing its members in the West Bank, something Israel has said it would not agree to do.
According to the officials, Egypt is waiting to see whether Hamas was responsible for the attack, because if it turns out that it was, it will be a sign that they are determined to continue their attacks, something that would render talks of a case-fire useless.
Meanwhile, the ...   more »

By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women's
magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to  become a suicide bomber.
At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya -- the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100  
women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 -- Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York
Times giving the following warning to her son: "if you're not going to  
follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don't want you."
Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led ...   more »

By Joel Mowbray 
A showdown could be looming between Congress and the Bush administration over a $150 million emergency aid package for the Palestinian Authority government led by President Mahmoud Abbas.
At issue is whether or not Mr. Abbas has either the capacity or desire to bring Palestinians closer to a peace deal with Israel, and it was his own words that triggered congressional wrath.
In an interview with Jordanian newspaper Al-Dastur last week, Mr. Abbas spoke with pride of violence he had waged in his past, suggested that terrorism could start anew in the future, and essentially backed away from repeated statements that he "recognizes" Israel's right to exist. A top congressional appropriator, Foreign Operations Chairman Nita Lowey, said flatly, "President Abbas' recent statements cast doubt on his willingness to take the steps necessary for peace with Israel."
But Mr. Abbas' comments alone likely would not have sparked this fracas. Just one day after news of the interview shocked key legislators and staffers, who learned of it last Thursday when it was translated into English by watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), the administration sent over its plan for $150 million in direct cash assistance to Abbas' PA.
"What ...   more »

By MATTHEW WAGNER 
Rabbi Ya'acov Shapira, head of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, made a decidedly militant speech on Sunday evening calling to replace the government and to continue building in all parts of the Land of Israel. "The blood of our brothers shouts to us from this land," Shapira said at a press conference in the library where many of the yeshiva students were wounded or killed on Thursday. The pockmarked floors evidenced where terrorist Ala Abu Dhaim "confirmed his kills" by shooting already-wounded victims in the head, and the bullet holes in the walls and bookshelves were clearly visible.
"Here in this holy place, on the Land of Israel, our students' blood was spilled. May God take vengeance," Shapira quoted from The Kuzari by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, who wrote that the first murder in human history, Cain's killing of Abel, was over the Land of Israel. Shapira - the son of Rabbi Avraham Shapira, the previous yeshiva head and former chief rabbi of Israel, who passed away in September - pointed out that his yeshiva served as a training base for rabbis and students who went out to settle all parts of the Land of Israel.
 The ...   more »

Islamic trust uses large stones to cover area that might house Second Temple-wall
By Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM – Did the Israeli police allow the Muslim custodians of the Temple Mount – Judaism's holiest site – to carry out illegal construction on the Mount last week that may have damaged antiquities and make it more difficult for archaeologists to find temple artifacts? 
That's the question being asked by Temple Mount activists and archaeologists here after it was discovered the Waqf, the Mount's Islamic custodians, last week used a heavy tractor to lay massive stone tiles over an area of the Mount some archaeologists believe a Second Temple wall was recently discovered.  
Pictures of the purported wall surfaced after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last summer gave the Waqf permission to use tractors to dig a 1300-foot trench around the periphery of the Mount. The Waqf claimed the trench was necessary to replace electrical cables outside mosques on the site.
Possible carved stone from Jewish Temple era exposed by digging at Temple Mount in Jerusalem
Allowing the use of bulldozers at any sensitive archaeological site is extremely unusual, particularly at the Temple Mount, which experts say contains sealed layers of artifacts as ...   more »

Mahmoud Abbas's official Palestinian Authority daily newspaper has honored the terrorist who gunned down eight Jewish high school students with the status of shahid, or holy Islamic martyr.
The official PA daily Al Hayat Al Jadida prominently placed a picture of the point blank killer on the front page, with the caption, "The Shahid Alaa Abu D'heim." In a page one article on the massacre at Mercaz HaRav Kook yeshiva, his crime is again defined as an act of martyrdom (shahada). 
Palestinian Media Watch says that in publishing the article, "the PA is sending its people a straightforward message of support for the terror murders and the murderer." According to the PA's interpretation of Islam, PMW explained, a human being can achieve no higher status than that of shahid.
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