While overt sectarian violence is increasingly rare, tensions are still high enough that officials built a new separation wall just weeks ago — adding to the dozens of walls and fences, some of them brick, corrugated-metal and steel-mesh structures more than 25 feet high, that already separate Protestant and Catholic communities

March 9, 2008 Northern Ireland No Comments

Despite Landmark Changes in N. Ireland, Trust in Police Still Lags - washingtonpost.com, March 9, 2008

BELFAST — The two young men, in their teens or early 20s, one of them with fresh bruises on his face, walked up the Shankill Road on a busy Friday afternoon in January, carrying placards that read, “I’m a thief and a burglar.”

For an hour, people poured out of shops and pubs to watch the young men, who had been caught breaking into an elderly woman’s house. It had been a while since they had seen what is known here as a “walk of shame,” the kind of rough justice doled out by illegal paramilitary groups during Northern Ireland’s three decades of sectarian violence.

“I would love the paramilitaries to come back,” said Julie Lester, 42, who described watching with delight as the housebreakers were publicly humiliated. “There’s a rise in crime and drugs and we have nobody to turn to. I have really no faith in the police.”

Nearly 10 years after the landmark April 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, Northern Ireland is still struggling to create a police force fully trusted by the province’s divided Catholic and Protestant communities.

Rabbi Hershel Schachter: “If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I’d tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister],” which prompted laughter from his audience

March 9, 2008 National Religious (Religious Zionists), Israeli Religious Right No Comments

The Jewish Week News, March 5, 2008

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, issued an apology today for a statement he made that appeared to advocate shooting the Prime Minister of Israel should the government “give away Jerusalem.”

The statement, part of a 39-second clip posted on YouTube this week, is from a discussion the rabbi had in Israel with American students learning at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem. It is not known when the statement was made.

In what appears to be a response to a question about serving in the Israeli army, the rabbi, a leading decisor in the Orthodox community, says: “First you have to know what the army is going to do. If the army is going to destroy Gush Katif, there’s no mitzvah to destroy Eretz Yisrael.

“If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I’d tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister],” which prompted laughter from his audience.

The national-religious camp’s flagship yeshiva

March 9, 2008 National Religious (Religious Zionists), Israeli Religious Right No Comments

The national-religious camp’s flagship yeshiva - Haaretz, March 8, 2008

The Mercaz Harav rabbinic college is the most prominent yeshiva in the religious Zionist world. It trained the movement’s leading rabbis as well as many yeshiva heads, city rabbis, and teachers in religious colleges and high schools.

The school was central in shaping the evolution of religious Zionism. As the flagship of national-religious yeshivas, the religious right is bound to attribute greater symbolic meaning to a terrorist attack here than anywhere else.
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Founded in 1924 by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, then chief Ashkenazi rabbi during the British Mandate, it is seen as the first yeshiva to be Zionist in spirit.

Rabbi Kook called it “the central world yeshiva,” wishing to set it as a model for a new yeshiva concept, integrating traditional Talmud studies with Jewish philosophy, Bible and even Jewish history, geography and literature. The last three subjects were never actually taught there.

After its founder’s death in 1935 it was named Merkaz Harav after him, and became synonymous with Rabbi Kook’s teachings.

In its first decades the college had few students and at times it was not clear whether it would survive. The turning point came in the ’50s, when graduates of Bnei Akiva religious schools and high-school yeshivas seeking higher religious education flocked to Merkaz Harav, the only Zionist yeshiva.

The prominent Bnei Akiva rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, a student of Rabbi Kook’s, encouraged students to go to Merkaz Harav, which was headed from 1952 by Rabbi Abraham Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, until his death in 1982.

The foundations for the religious settlements in the West Bank were forged in Merkaz Harav, whose student Hanan Porat set out to restore the Jewish settlement in Gush Etzion immediately after the Six-Day War.

The founders of Gush Emunim, a religious political movement that encouraged Jewish settlement of land they believe God promised the Jews, came from Merkaz Harav after the Yom Kippur War.