Posted on 11/05/2011 2:05:52 PM PDT by Eleutheria5
Former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, known for his penchant for provocative statements, attacked Israel’s hareidi-religious Jews on Thursday, saying they are “a bigger existential threat to Israel than Iran and Ahmadinejad.”
It turned out that his main problem was that boys and girls do not dance together in hareida-religious circles.
Speaking a reunion of military academy graduates, Halevy said, “The existential danger to Israel, more than Iran’s nuclear program, is the radicalization of the hareidi Jews which is getting worse.”
He added, “The hareidi extremism is a greater danger than Ahmadinejad. I was educated in Bnei Akiva, and there we used to dance, girls and boys together. Were the rabbis back then so wanton? Extremist Orthodoxy has darkened our lives.”
He seems to have failed to realize that religious Zionists, for the most part, do not engage in mixed dancing either, as it is clearly forbidden halakhically, although in the early days of Bnei Akiva that did occur.
Halevy, who was born in the United Kingdom in 1934 to an Orthodox family, emigrated to Israel in 1948. He attended Ma'aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He joined the Mossad in 1961, and headed it between 1998 and 2002.
He took an active part in a special mission by former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin which helped forge the Israel-Jordan peace treaty in 1994.
Halevy, who is known as a hard-headed pragmatist on issues involving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, is always willing to ruffle feathers on both the right and the left.
He has said in the past that Israel should include the terror group Hamas in negotiations with PA
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(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
I’d guess that socialism is also a threat.
Iran, though? Nah.
OK that's funny right there!
Halevy is right to worry. Haredim have a high birthrate. One-third of Jewish births in Israel are to the 10% of the population that are haredi. Seculars are aborting, queering and intermarrying themselves into extinction. Halevy and his ilk are dying out and won’t be replaced. Somehow, I think the land and people of Israel will manage to survive without them.
Why doesn’t this moron work on a Hebrew remake of “Footloose”, and leave military strategy to grown ups?
Why doesn’t this moron work on a Hebrew remake of “Footloose”, and leave military strategy to grown ups?
Yea, you guys need to put these “Occupy Israel” (type) nutcases in their place. Your country is too small to absorb them the way we can get away with it.
You could probably start by explaining that Iranian nukes will kill OI people just as easily as conservative Israelis.
God be with you,
BobL
I have absolutely no idea what haredim is (are?). So I googled it and found on wikipedia that in Israel they are exempt from the draft and the vast majority of men do not serve in the military. It also said that over 50 percent of them receive welfare, compared to about 15 percent for the Israel population as a whole.
Is that accurate?
At first glance I thought the poster was saying Harry Reid was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.
“At first glance I thought the poster was saying Harry Reid was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.”
LOL - that is ACTUALLY true.
Just like a lot of 18 year olds would be better off serving in the military first, a lot of teenagers would be better off working than going to government indoctrination centers.
But fear not, in the coming collapse a lot of failed liberal ideas (like government schools) are going to be swept away in the financial tornado. The war of drugs too will disappear.
They’re not exempt from the draft, but a lot of them find ways around it. More are serving now than ever before. Don’t know how many of them are on welfare. Don’t even know how to apply for welfare or what it is. Everyone gets 169 shekels (enough to buy falafels and drinks for about four people) a month for each child under 18. Is this what the Wikipedia means by ‘welfare’? If they have a lot of kids, this might add up, but still won’t go very far.
My eldest son is what you might call a “hareidi,” being a Hasid of the Bialer Rebbe. But he works hard full-time in a fish store, and did a short stint in the IDF, admittedly before he became hareidi.
“The war of drugs too will disappear.”
This is getting way off topic. But if they legalized pot and hashish, they could tax the growers and marketers, and serve it in bars under supervision. That would raise new revenues, encourage entrepreneurs, and cut out a huge chunk of savings from the law enforcement budgets of the federal and state governments. Then there’d be money for important things like getting hareidi teenagers involved with mixed dancing and having babies out of wedlock just like normal people (there. back on topic).
At least there are still a few religious Jews around, someone should be studying Torah.
A little more Googling turned up a bunch of stories from English language Israeli newspapers about the Haredi. They say the men are exempt from the draft if they do nothing but study the Torah, and the IDf loses about 13 percent of its potential draft pool each year to this exemption.
They also say that the unemployment rate for Haredi men of working age is 65 percent.
Are those sources accurate?
That has the smell of bull-@#$#, if you ask me.
Was one of those English language papers Haaretz, by any chance? They’re pathological liars.
No, Ynetnews and the Jersualem Post.
I understand the military concern of a growing demographic group that refuses military service. The solution would be seeking religious approval for this growing group to aid in the defense of their nation.
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