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In this issue
Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Sept. 15, 2008 / 15 Elul 5768

A day of remembrance, in spite of it all

By Kathryn Lopez


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks came abruptly. Most of the political world had just returned from the conventions in Denver and the Twin Cities. In the immediate hours leading up to that day, we had all succumbed to talk of lipstick and pigs.


In case you live in a cave in Afghanistan (in which case, maybe you don't want to know or I shouldn't be telling you), Barack Obama, during a campaign event on Sept. 9, said, "You can put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig." The crowd pretty clearly took the words as a swipe at the Republican ticket, harkening back to Sarah Palin's comment in her vice-presidential acceptance speech that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull is lipstick.


Although I had hoped Palin's official response would consist of simply hitting the podium in the midst of applying makeup at her next campaign rally, the McCain campaign instead reacted with a juvenile ad, using footage of anchorwoman Katie Couric complaining about sexism, insinuating that Obama's use of the cliche stemmed from sexist roots.


Obama's comment was silly. The response was silly. Thank goodness we have the luxury of being silly.


Or do we?


As the lipstick was put back in its purse for a day, or at least for the morning hours of Sept. 11 — when MSNBC took time off from showing Keith Olbermann rants to air footage from that day in 2001 — we remembered. We remembered those who were murdered. We remembered our fellow citizens fighting at home and abroad. We remembered that three of the four candidates vying for the White House have children serving; Palin's son left for Iraq that very day.


During that week seven years ago, fellow JWR columnist Kathleen Parker wrote: "Our behavior toward one another in recent years — our splintering into groups and bickering over blame — now should be a source of embarrassment as well as an inspiration never to go back."


We should be embarrassed and inspired.


On one hand, it's a great thing that we can take the time to care about silly matters. As one reader e-mailed me: "I woke up this morning with a prayer of gratitude in my heart that the top story of the day was the silly 'lipstick on a pig' saga. What a blessing that we're not waking up worrying about anthrax attacks and bombs and wondering if it's safe to send our kids to school. God bless George W. Bush and our men and women in arms that have kept us safe these seven years."


True and fair enough. But we have an important decision before us. And as we get distracted by lipstick and pigs, let's remember, too, that there will be bombings and battle plans.


What worries me about Obama is not his use of hoary old sayings, but his judgment. He's running for the position of commander in chief, after all.


In his acclaimed best seller, "Dreams from My Father," he wrote: "I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder — alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware-is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all."


That worries me, not because I am without compassion for hardship. There is humiliation and fury on Chicago's South Side. And there is humiliation and fury among Muslims and Catholics alike in Pakistan. But Hamas' hatred for the Jews in Israel is a specific and evil thing that does not need to be understood as much as it must be condemned and stopped.


And the men who murdered 3,000 of us on Sept. 11, 2001, hate those who live on Chicago's South Side as much as they hate the wealthy folks who work on Wall Street.


Seven years after the attacks on my city and our country, no lipstick can gloss over the truth: There is a war on. And I'm not sure Obama and his Democratic colleagues — the bunch that ostracized Joe Lieberman for daring to support our troops, who have done successful work in Iraq thanks to leaders like him — get it.

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