The Zeitgeist

The Current Incarnation of ISIS is No Joke. Should the US Stop the Spread of Evil in the Middle East Yet Again?

   

The Isis TV show from the 70s, the ISIS logo from the TV show Archer and ISIS fighters in Iraq this week.

Back in the mid 70s there was a groundbreaking female superhero on Saturday morning TV called Isis. An American high school science teacher found a magic amulet on a archeological dig in Egypt  that allowed her to turn into the ancient goddess Isis who had superhuman powers to control the elements and use these powers to fight evil. The show only lasted a couple of seasons, not enough time for Isis to rid the world of all its bad guys.

For the past several years the word “ISIS” has stood for the “International Secret Intelligence Service,” the employment domicile for a clueless, cartoonishly suave James Bond-type of secret agent named Sterling Archer. Archer is quite literally a cartoon character. The series Archer is one of the adult animated comedies running on FX and Fox. Archer, the agent, and his team at ISIS are out to save the world for fun and profit. The characters on the show lack any moral grounding whatsoever, which is what makes it funny. 

Unfortunately in the last couple of weeks a whole different version of “ISIS” has burst upon the world’s consciousness. It also lacks any moral grounding, they’re not into acts of violence solely for kicks, they’re not here for our amusement and unlike their namesake super heroine, in their world view women have no rights whatsoever.

The ISIS that is dominating the news is the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant, meaning Syria, Lebanon, Israel) a brutal neo-Maoist group so extreme that they were booted out of Al Qaeda  .  Although thoroughly Sunni Muslim in its presentation, it could be a dead-ringer for the Khmer Rouge in their tactics, and strategy. Wiping out vast swaths of the Shiite Moslem population in Iraq and elsewhere doesn’t perturb them all that much. In fact, to realize their dream of a resurrected Sunni Caliphate any expediency is acceptable. This has been demonstrated by a series of videos detailing their unabashed brutality.

In the past week ISIS, with just a few thousand soldiers has conquered more than a third of Iraq as the Iraqi army in the Sunni parts of the country melted away as fast as the former South Vietnamese army did in the spring of 1975. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops just ran away, abandoned their equipment and abdicated their duty. Had even a fraction of them stood and fought, ISIS probably could have been thwarted. It remains to be seen whether the remnants of Iraq’s US-trained and US-equipped armed forces will make a stand in Baghdad and in the South of the country as the Kurds successfully have in the Northeast. If they don’t, it sure won’t be springtime for the Shiites who comprise about 60 percent of the country.

The utter collapse of Iraqi national institutions and of Iraqi national will in the Sunni regions of the country is highly edifying. As in South Vietnam it shows that a sense of nationhood, pride and purpose often can’t be imposed on people, it has to come from within. But sometimes that takes time.

Iraq was artificially created out of various and sundry provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I by Great Britain which was given that swath of territory as spoils of war (the French got Syria and Lebanon). 

As was typical in the colonial era, nations and borders were created by the Western powers without regard for the ethnic, religious, cultural or political cohesion of its inhabitants which has been the cause of much global bloodshed in the past 100 or so years.

In the case of Iraq, as we know, the Sunnis and the Shiites hate one another with a profound passion. However, it bears noting that this ISIS explosion is not a grassroots home-grown revolt against Shiite rule. The ISIS fighters have been recruited from across the Moslem world and imported to the region with an express goal of conquest and igniting conflict between Sunnis and Shiites to force a collapse of the state.

The conundrum for America (and it should be one for the European Union) is what to do about all this. Allowing Iraq’s vast oil reserves to fall into the hands of the most extreme Muslim terror group in the world is just not good for world stability. Allowing a Killing Fields type of ethnic cleansing of Iraq is not good on pure humanitarian grounds. Allowing the complete subjugation of Iraqi women is deplorable. Abandoning allies (hello, Ukraine!) like the Iraqi government does not one whit of good for US credibility around the world. Allowing Iran to fill the vacuum and in effect conquer Iraq won’t be good for US interests as it will set-off a humanitarian crisis with the Sunnis, it will put Iraq’s oil into the hands of the Iranian Ayatollahs who are building nuclear weapons and who already threaten stability in the region through their proxies Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and it would give Iran complete control of the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. That also wouldn’t be too good for Israel either. Allowing the waste of so much American blood and treasure (forget debating the wisdom of going into Iraq in the first place) if Iraq falls is a disgrace to the memory of our fallen soldiers and an admission that aside from Germany and Japan, we can’t straighten out any other countries for the betterment of their citizens and the world.

Unfortunately, what’s needed is for the West to man-up and send in a multi-national force (Americans, Brits, French, Germans, etc.) and squash ISIS (which has ambitions of spreading their Islamic revolution to London and New York). It won’t take many planes or drones. ISIS has no air force. It won’t even take many troops to confront the several thousand ISIS fighters. What it will take is will power and if there’s absence of that we will be left only with the words of the 18^th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

The Zeitgeist

Haredim on the Front Lines 

On Wednesday, March 12^th the Knesset forever changed the shape of Israeli society by passing a law which will conscript most Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) young men into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) starting in 2017.

Heretofore completely exempt from national service, the proposal for this sea change in Israel spurred no end of opposition and protest from Haredi circles. Because Haredi men did not serve in the IDF they also were not allowed to join the general workforce until middle age. This created a huge bubble of Haredi men learning fulltime – the largest number of 24/7 Torah scholars probably ever in the entirety of Jewish history.

The non national service situation also created a culture of pervasive poverty and dependency on the state for basic sustenance that earned the enmity and resentment of the majority of non-Haredi Israelis who had to both foot the bill to subsidize Haredi life and also send their sons and daughters into the IDF to protect the state and everyone in it, Haredim included. Non-Haredi Israelis felt unfairly put-upon in a country that takes much in taxes and asks many for serious national and personal sacrifices.

Some of the more strident charges against military service emanating from the Haredi community were that “the IDF secularizes its conscripts and will strip Torah from our kids,” “the IDF is a completely secular institution” and that “the Zionists wish to destroy our Torah way of life in general.” This visceral revulsion towards serving in the IDF emanates from the 18^th and 19^th Century days in Czarist Russia and Poland where Jewish adolescents were forcibly stripped from their homes and communities for 25 years of military duty and often were never seen or heard from again. That Israel is a Jewish state defending Jews from violent anti-Semites doesn’t begin to dawn on the Haredi consciousness.

The Haredi charges of forced secularization in the IDF completely ignore the near universal participation of National-Religious (Da’ati Leumi) or Religious Zionist boys in the IDF. The National Religious young men (and many young women who do some kind of national service as well) typically are at the forefront of elite IDF units while still wearing their kippot, while still putting on tefilin in the mornings, while still keeping kosher and in many cases while still continuing their Torah studies in the hesder yeshiva program that combines IDF service with yeshiva study. Rather than have their religious beliefs stripped from them by the IDF, many a secular soldier has been inspired and brought closer to Judaism and observance by the example of the Kippa Seruga (knitted kippa) boys. Eighteen years of religious education along with a strong home life have equipped the National Religious soldier to go forth into the world while holding on to his values. Haredim ignore these facts because they don’t consider the National Religious to be authentically Orthodox or Orthodox enough. This is often true in the U.S. as well where the American equivalents of Modern and Centrist Orthodoxy find their legitimacy (and that of many of its rabbis) under passive aggressive assault by U.S. and Israeli Haredi institutions, but that’s the subject of another article.

In defense of their non-service in the IDF (and to a lesser extent, non-participation in the workforce) Haredim have stated that their prayer and Torah study offer supernatural protection to the state that is invaluable and incalculable.

The Haredi justification and rationalization of non-participation in national service (prayer and study) may have some validity but for the fact that Haredi synagogues and yeshivot do not pray for the State of Israel or for the IDF. Their siddurim (prayer books) don’t carry the prayers for the State of Israel or the IDF. Moreover a great many Haredi institutions still reject the legitimacy of the very existence of the State of Israel or of any Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah. Sometimes this rejection is quiet and sometimes overt, but there nevertheless.

This hasn’t stopped Haredim from accepting Israeli citizenship, from taking extensive welfare and child subsidy payments or from also accepting financial subsidies for their schools and other institutions from the state. To keep the money flowing and protect their interests, Haredim have political parties that sit in the Knesset, much as the Arabs too have Members of Knesset who disavow loyalty to and the legitimacy of the state. This also arouses the ire of the average Israeli, even more so than with the Arabs because the Haredim, being Jews, are seen as an ungrateful, parasitic fifth-column.

There is an analogy to the willful Haredi blindness to the fact that Israel is the best thing to happen to the Jewish people in more than 2,000 years, that the IDF is probably the most important existential institution the Jewish people have at this time and that G-d’s miracles can be seen daily around every street corner and turn in the road in Israel – that of Balaam and his donkey. In Bamidbar (Numbers) chapter 22 we find the pagan prophet Balaam en route to curse the Jewish people camped in the desert. His faithful donkey keeps veering off the road, slamming into walls and eventually crouching on the ground. Balaam keeps whipping and cursing the donkey until miraculously the donkey talks to Balaam and tells him he’s strayed off the road because G-d’s angel has been blocking the path with a drawn sword in his hand and he’s tried to save his master from this. Only after this incredible experience does Balaam look up and see the angel. The donkey in contemporary times is a metaphor for the masses of the Jewish people who perceive G-d’s miracles and blessings vis-à-vis the State of Israel and the Haredim are Balaam, blind as they travel down the road to G-d’s redemption of the Jewish people.

Back in ancient times and semi-antiquity, the Torah records that the Kohanim (priests) (who were then our most religious class) went out to battle with the army along with the Ark of the Covenant and plenty of trumpets. The Kohanim would bless the soldiers on the eve of battle. The blessing can be found in the Torah. When the Persians allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem from Babylonian exile and rebuild the Temple, Ezra and Nechemia had no Messiah with them. They created the facts on the ground, Zionistically if you will, to rebuild the Jewish state. The Maccabees were fervently religious Kohanim who fought a 30 year military campaign to free Judaea from religious persecution at the hands of the Syrian-Greek empire.

There is no authentic Jewish tradition of not standing together with the entirety of the Jewish people, of not supporting the army, of not recognizing the legitimacy of the state. These are recent inventions as is much of Haredi life itself – separating themselves from the broader Jewish community in contravention of the words of the Rambam (Maimonides). In Hilchos Teshuva 4:2 he discuses how people who separate themselves from the broader public have the door to teshuva (redemption and repentance) shut before them.

Not praying for the welfare of the state (in this case Israel when in Israel) also contravenes the injunction of Rav Chanina in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 3:2 where we’re commanded to “pray for the welfare of the government.”

Having Haredi young men enter national service will accomplish two very important things: First, it will slowly start to make Haredim a part of Israeli society so that we’ll be one people again and everyone will share in the responsibilities of citizenship and second, it will expose more secular Israelis to the beauty of religiosity and can only help imbue a greater sense of Jewish traditions and values across all segments of the country.

There’s a long tradition in the U.S. of Quakers and conscientious objectors serving as medics in the armed forces so as to be a part of the great struggle for liberty and freedom even if they were disinclined to fight. There’s nothing wrong with Haredi men serving shoulder to shoulder with their brethren in defense of their homes, wives, children, parents, grandparents and religious institutions. The Iranians, Hamas, Hezbollah and all our other enemies won’t be thwarted by davening (prayer) alone, even though there is a great value to that. There’s an old adage that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” In this case a little foxhole exposure might see Haredi synagogues start praying for the state and the IDF like the rest of the Jewish people now that they’ll finally have some “skin in the game,” i.e., the defense of the country.