The Religious Zionist sector is in mourning over the death of the principal of a well known school, Yosef Hershkowitz HY"D, who fell in the battles of northern Gaza.
At the beginning of the war, several days after he was drafted, he sent a small video clip to his students in which he said:
"I am making a personal request — not to speak loshon hora against the Jewish people. Do not utter a single negative word. There are no Rightists, no Leftists, no chareidim, nothing! There are only Jews. The Nazi Hamasniks are not interested in whom you voted for and what you think. This is our own personal issue, that is, not to say a malicious word against one another, but simply to overcome such an urge."
A strong message which applies to each and every one of us; we must bear in mind that we are all Jews, including those who seem distant. But a Jewish spark burns in each one of us.
Ask the Kiruv organizations to tell about the streaming of so many who, only a few weeks ago, were distant from anything smacking of Judaism and are now coming en mass to seek the word of Hashem and be strengthened. There is no contradiction between this message and the following one because in the end, whoever assists the Hamas men and their ilk and is yet proud of it, is not included here!
Bad Speech...
In a Tel Aviv court there sits a judge who looks askance at the national symbols of the country which pays his salary.
At this time, the government is sitting upon the extension of the imprisonment of suspected terrorists by visual evidence. The Prison Authority has ordered that during the hearings, the Israeli national symbols and the watchword of "Am Yisrael Chai" be present in the background.
Judge Itai Harmelin vehemently objected and asked the police representative why this had to be. That representative replied that when the judge sat in a regular courtroom, the same symbol was displayed on the wall behind him. Dissatisfied with the answer, the judge added that he felt that the motto "Am Yisrael Chai" sounded fascistic to him. Why couldn't the site of the hearings suffice with "Tel Aviv Office of Detention"?
The police spokesman said that the mottoes were designed to bolster the spirits of his compatriots regarding those who were killed in the war and those who are actively fighting at the present. The judge refused to continue the hearing unless those hallmarks were removed.
Energetic reporters, burrowing into the records of said judge, discovered that his reaction was not unusual in the least. Amit Segal exposed an 'academic' essay of his in which he tells of a speech he delivered in an American university where he told his audience that in his previous occupation as a lawyer, he chose to represent a Hizbullah terrorist who was trained as a NT fighter. He boasted that he had encouraged the terrorist to use Hizbullah rhetoric and declare in the courtroom that his opposition to Israel does not only find expression on the battlefield but even in the very courtroom.
On another occasion, he tried to convince a terrorist to claim in the courtroom that he had been protecting his village against the Israeli army. And further, as judge, he had ordered the release of a Palestinian who had come out stating to the pro-Palestinian media "Death to the Jews," with the backdrop of a burned tank, arguing that this constituted 'freedom of speech.'
Today, when the police arrest, justifiably, agitators of such channels inciting against the State and against Jews in general, they have a distinguished spokesman in the judicial system. In all probability, if these were to be brought before him in court, he would exonerate them under the cover of freedom of inciteful speech.
