by Rabbi Shraga Simmons
Lag B',Omer marks the date of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai',s death. So why is it such a celebration?
13 YEARS IN THE CAVE
Rabbi Shimon was a great sage who lived during the Roman conquest of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. He was one of Rabbi Akiva's five students who -- despite terrible persecutions -- ensured that the Torah would not be forgotten.
The Talmud (Shabbat 33b) describes a seminal event in the life of Rabbi Shimon:
When the Romans outlawed the study of Torah, Rabbi Shimon spoke out against them. The Romans thus pronounced a death sentence against Rabbi Shimon, who was forced to go into hiding.
Rabbi Shimon and his son Elazar fled to a cave in the northern region of Israel. They had no means of subsistence, but a miracle occurred and a carob tree sprouted in the cave, along with a stream of water.
Rabbi Shimon and his son had no change of clothes. In order to preserve their clothes from wearing out, they each dug a deep hole, removed their clothes and buried themselves neck-deep in the sand. (Out of modesty, they wanted to be covered.) They would spend the entire day ...   more »

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday announced that indirect negotiations between Israel and Syria have been taking place in Ankara, Turkey since Monday.
Lawmakers from the opposition to Olmert's own Kadima Party immediately cried foul, accusing the prime minister of trying to divert attention from an increasingly severe corruption investigation that appears likely to end his political career.
In a statement released by his office, Olmert told Israelis that he had "begun indirect peace talks with the Syrians, under the auspices of Turkey. The two sides have declared their intention to conduct the negotiations in good faith and with openness."
Damascus confirmed that the talks are taking place, and Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem told the Agence France Presse (AFP) that Israel had already committed to a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Israel later denied that report.
Israeli opposition and coalition lawmakers wasted no time calling into question the fact that the talks with Syria began just as Olmert was sliding every closer to a forced resignation.
Olmert is currently under investigation for allegedly receiving bribes from wealthy US Jewish businessmen during his time as mayor of Jerusalem and then minister of industry and trade. The corruption scandal ...   more »

Shelly Paz
"We have many plans to improve this area. The Syrian side of the Golan is full of resorts and restaurants," Abdulkarim al-Jundi, a tour operator from Damascus and a member of the Syrian Tourism and Travel Association's board, told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday in a telephone interview.
Fouad Hilal, vice chairman of the Travel Association, did not sound as optimistic regarding the peace talks announced on Wednesday.
"I am sure the Syrian government has many projects, and I am sure they will be implemented when the Golan Heights are returned to Syria. But for the time being we don't foresee this happening," Hilal told Post by telephone.
While the Syrians may have been looking ahead to a future with the Golan, on the Israeli side Golan residents and tour operators just seemed worried.
"As a resident of the Golan Heights this news make me worry because they are talking about my home and my personal future," said Menahem Baruch, who runs Israel's only ski resort. "As manager of the Hermon ski site I am also aware of the fact that there were many talks and efforts to hold talks for many years and nothing came out of ...   more »

by Mark Steyn
Israel',s doom would be bad news for Europe.
Almost everywhere I went last week -- TV, radio, speeches -- I was asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don't recall being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which as a general rule is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity. Assuming President Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic fancies don't come to pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks don't fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic Monthly cover story: "Is Israel Finished?" Also the cover story in Canada's leading news magazine, Maclean's, which dispenses with the question mark: "Why Israel Can't Survive."
Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French colonial map-makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years -- Iraq to the Thirties, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel to the Forties. The only difference ...   more »

A top Palestinian journalist wrote last week that it is the Arab world, and not Israel, that is to blame for the so-called Palestinian "refugee crisis."
Jawad al Bashiti, a Jordan-based correspondent for the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam, noted in his May 13 editorial that during the "first war between Arabs and Israel...the 'Arab Salvation Army' came and told the Palestinians: 'We have come to you in order to liquidate the Zionists and their state. Leave your houses and villages, you will return to them in a few days safely."
Bashiti lamented that in evacuating Palestinians before doing battle with the Israelis, it was the Arabs who were in fact responsible for what the Arab world refers to as the "nakba," the catastrophe of Israel's successful rebirth in the biblical Land of Israel. Had those hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs not been removed, their descendants would likely continue to outnumber the Jews.
Israeli watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch, which translated Bashiti's article, pointed out a trend among Palestinian journalists who are becoming increasingly bold in blaming the Arab world, rather than Israel, over the refugee issue. Four other similar article written by leading Palestinian journalists over the past few years ...   more »

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate says Ahmadinejad must not be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons
Tal Rabinovsky Published:  
Words of warning: Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, the first bomb will target Tel Aviv, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Elie Wiesel warned at a renewable energy conference in Tel Aviv University Tuesday evening. 
Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an enemy that must not be allowed to acquire nuclear capabilities, Wiesel said, adding that "one thing is painfully clear. If something will happen here in Israel," world Jewry in its entirety would be at risk.
 Iran Threat 
Pelosi: All options open to stop Iran's nuclear program / Amnon Meranda 
Prime minister, Knesset members meet US speaker of the House, bipartisan congressional delegation; convey Israel's gratitude for lasting US support 
"What can be done against anti-Semitism? Against hate?" Wiesel asked during his lecture. He noted that in the Internet era anyone can call for murder and there would be no one to stop them.
'Use solar energy instead of Arab oil'
Meanwhile, President Shimon Peres, who also spoke at the event, said that It would be better for Israel to use solar energy rather than relying on Arab oil.
Peres noted that solar energy "is ...   more »

By Barak Ravid and Amos Harel
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has proposed in discussions with the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, that a naval blockade be imposed on Iran as one of several ways to pressure Iran into stopping its uranium enrichment program.
Although the White House denied a published report that U.S. President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran before the end of his term in January, the Bush administration is said not to have ruled out entirely the possibility of an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
A story in the Jerusalem Post quoted an unidentified official as claiming that a "senior member" of Bush's entourage to Israel last week made the statement about attacking Iran in a closed meeting. However, White House press secretary Dana Perino said the article is "not worth the paper it's written on." She added that the administration's preference and actions for dealing with Iran remain through peaceful diplomatic means.
Israelis who spoke to Bush and his entourage while they were in Israel last week said they had the impression that the military option "is on the table," and that the president felt a sense of deep obligation to ...   more »

By The Associated Press 
The organizer of a Palestinian investment conference says a Saudi company will invest in a $250 million construction project in the West Bank.
Conference organizer Hassan Abu Libdeh says the project would formally be announced Thursday. He identified the Saudi company as Al Ard Al Qabeda. Company official Fawaz Abdel Hadi says the construction will include office and apartment towers, malls and a hotel in the West Bank town of El Bireh, adjacent to Ramallah.
Abu Libdeh and Abdel Hadi say the Palestinian Investment Fund will be a partner in the project.
Original Source    more »

Every time there's a highly publicized shooting, out go the cries for stricter gun control laws, and it was no different with the recent murder of Philadelphia Police Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, in a letter to the state congressional delegation demanding re-enactment of the federal assault weapon ban, said, "Passing this legislation will go a long way to protecting those who put their lives on the line every day for us. … There is no excuse to do otherwise."
Gun control laws will not protect us from murderers. We need protection from the criminal justice system politicians have created. Let's look at it.
According to former Philly cop Michael P. Tremoglie's article "Who freed the cop-killers?" for the Philadelphia Daily News (May 8, 2008), all three murder suspects had extensive criminal records. Levon Warner was sentenced in 1997 to seven and a half to 15 years for robbery, one to five years for possessing an instrument of crime and five to 10 for criminal conspiracy. Howard Cain was convicted in 1996 on four counts of robbery and sentenced to five to 10 years on each count. Eric Floyd was sentenced to five ...   more »

by Daniel Pipes
Accounts from Turkey suggest that the government is attempting a bold re-interpretation of Islam.
Its unusually named ministry of religion, the "Presidency of Religious Affairs and the Religious Charitable Foundation," has undertaken a three-year "Hadith Project" systematically to review 162,000 hadith reports and winnow them down to some 10,000, with the goal of separating original Islam from the accretions of fourteen centuries.
The hadith reports contain information about the sayings and actions of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. They augment the Koran and have had a major role in shaping the Shari‘a (Islamic law), thereby deeply influencing Muslim life. Despite their importance, Muslim reformers have devoted little scrutiny to them, due to their vast size, unwieldy nature, and the challenge of discerning "sound" from "weak" hadiths.
One of the project's 85 theology professors, Ismail Hakki Unal of Ankara University, explains its goal: "The Koran is our basic guide. Anything that conflicts with that, we are trying to eliminate." The project website explained that its work is "an important step for carrying the universal message of the Prophet of Islam to the twenty-first century."
Mehmet Görmez, a senior lecturer in hadith at Ankara University and the vice-president of ...   more »

By Margret Kopala
Explaining its recent decision to legalize same-sex "marriage," the Supreme Court of California rightly refrained from offering any judgment about it as policy; rather, the court limited its consideration to the constitutional validity of same-sex "marriage." But like Canadian same-sex "marriage" advocates, it erred when it compared the ban on same-sex "marriage" with the ban on interracial marriage that was overturned in 1948.
The issue is not who is allowed on the "bus," but rather, who is driving the bus. Few would allow the blind or otherwise incapacitated to do this job. Though marriage performs many functions, it is also society's premier institution for conceiving and nurturing children, and this involves gender specific roles. The bus being the family, the question becomes who should be its designated driver?
The argument placed by counsel for the Government of Alberta before Canada's Supreme Court in 2004 on this issue is even more to the point. Any change to the opposite sex requirement of marriage is a change to the nature of marriage itself, he said. Equality guarantees are not a vehicle for remaking fundamental social institutions in an effort to manage questions of social status and approval. Only by ...   more »

Chuck Baldwin
As we approach Memorial Day, we can anticipate the usual speeches and photo stunts from various and sundry politicos, each of them touting their heartfelt "support" for America's men and women in uniform. I submit that much of this political grandstanding is merely empty rhetoric.
Most of us probably recall that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is quoted as having said that soldiers are just "dumb, stupid animals to be used" as pawns by the political and commercial elite. Obviously, even the most anti-military Democrat would never be so brazen as to say what Kissinger said. In practice, however, both Democrats and Republicans demonstrate disdain for our brave military people by the way their unconstitutional policies abuse and misuse them.
Whenever the White House sends our troops overseas to serve as United Nations "peacekeepers," they abuse our military. Whenever our troops are put under foreign commanders, our military is abused.
I remind you that back in 2003, Bush announced to the U.N. that the reason he had invaded Iraq was for the purpose of securing "the credibility of the United Nations." Unfortunately, various Presidential administrations — both Republican and Democrat — have also used our armed forces ...   more »

'State provides a broad statutory basis for education by parents in California'
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other officials have told an appeals court there's no need to dig into state constitutional issues regarding homeschooling since state laws already provide for that choice for parents.
The recommendations come in an amicus brief from California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. and others on behalf of the state and its governor.
A ruling from the Court of Appeal in the 2nd District, Division 3 in a dispute stemming from a juvenile case earlier had declared that the state constitution provided no right for parents to school their children at home, threatening the education choice for hundreds of thousands of families across the state.
WND broke the story in February when that ruling was released, but it later simply was dropped when the same panel of judges agreed to rehear the case.
The panel, in announcing the rehearing, invited several interested parties to submit amicus briefs of the question of the constitutionality of homeschooling in California, including the state and its education department as well as several teachers' unions.
Now the brief from Brown and Schwarzenegger said the court ...   more »