http://samsonblinded.org/blog A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict Mon, 08 Feb 2010 07:54:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Maimonides rejected Jewish theocracy on the grounds that it would corrupt rabbis, and insisted on an independent Exilarch. His messiah and king is also not a rabbi. But he presumed that an Exilarch acts within Jewish law. If a country is governed by religious law, then rabbis effectively dictate policy ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/new-jewish-fundamentalism.htm Israel has no choice but to end the aliyah and repeal the Law of Return. The move is a decade overdue. Around 1993 the Soviet Jewish aliyah ended, and there remained no pockets of potential Jewish immigrants anywhere in the world. The large Jewish Diaspora in America, Canada, Australia, and France ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/babylon-21.htm One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt. American troops started withdrawing from Iraq despite resurgent violence. American surge in Afghanistan is insufficient, and Taliban posed to retake power. It ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/obamas-state-of-the-union-address-a-review.htm Obama is extremely indecisive and open to influence. He has been influenced by forces as disparate as an anti-Semitic black preacher and Jew Rahm Emanuel, ultra-leftist Samantha Power and cynical Hillary Clinton. Despite his rhetoric of change, Obama brought the old guys and gals to the White House, and so ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/how-to-deal-with-obamas-administration.htm Rabbis detail the law of the Torah, apparently to make it clear. Such an approach, however, is wrong. By analogy with secular law,that which is unspecified in the law is left to personal choice. If one is commanded to bring a sacrifice, it is irrelevant whether he starts walking toward ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/an-ode-to-the-cheeseburger.htm Long before Goldstone, rabbis struggled with moral paradoxes created by extreme circumstances. Just as lawyers and legislators do today, rabbis sought to apply their formal rules to extremely rare situations. Rabbinical rules, like any others, tend to become inoperable on the fringes. Instead of recognizing that some situations are inherently ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/live-shields-in-judaism.htm Obama has lost many confrontations: with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia—just about everyone. But his failure with Syria stands out as a monument to ineptitude. It was almost impossible to fail with Syria. The country is led by a strong dictator who would have ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/look-at-syria.htm The calls to set up an Israeli version of CNN or Al Jazeera are futile. The first problem is that the Israeli government wouldn’t have the good sense of Qatari sheikh to finance the TV station and let it loose. Instead, the station would be subjected to all kinds of ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/israel-lost-the-media-war.htm The recent debate over disobedience in the army is surprising. To recap, in several incidents IDF soldiers displayed banners vowing to refuse their orders to evict Jews from the settlements. All of them were severely punished with jail terms and demoted from combat units. Far removed from its glorious days of ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/disobey.htm How would you react, if a people had a history of killing your own people, who only wanted to live safely among them? Arabs murdered religious Jews by the scores in Tzfat in 1834, and again in 1860, long before they ever heard of Zionism. Arabs continued murdering apolitical religious ... http://samsonblinded.org/blog/and-you-goldstone.htm