June 12: Shavuot
The Palestine Chronicle and Iran; Gain-of-function for monkeypox; IDF kills Hezbollah commander
Today’s edition of The Scroll is shortened for Shavuot.
→On Monday, we mentioned the story of The Palestine Chronicle, the little-known online magazine and nonprofit, headquartered in Washington state, that employed Abdullah Al-Jamal, a Hamas member who was killed on Saturday when Israeli forces raided his home in Gaza, where three hostages were being held. As we noted at the time, the driving force behind The Palestine Chronicle and its parent nonprofit, People Media Project, appears to be Ramzy Baroud, a former Al Jazeera editor and journalist who also holds a fellowship at a Turkish think tank founded by convicted terror financier Sami Al-Arian.
In a pair of stories on Monday and Tuesday, The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo revealed more about Baroud and The Palestine Chronicle and their connection to international terror networks, including:
Baroud has published his work in an Iranian state-controlled media outlet, Kayhan International, and on two websites—the American Herald Tribune and Critical Studies—seized by the Justice Department in 2020 for being part of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps covert influence network.
At least six other Palestine Chronicle contributors published on the shuttered Iranian propaganda sites. Some have also had their work aggregated on the Iranian state-owned Press TV.
Baroud’s Facebook page includes several dozen photos of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the U.S.-designated terror group that appears to have an active influence network inside the United States, including through nonprofits such as Samidoun (a fiscal sponsorship of the Alliance for Global Justice).
Baroud’s daughter Zarefah works as a digital media associate for American Muslims for Palestine, the parent organization of Students for Justice in Palestine. AMP and related nonprofits are currently the subject of multiple lawsuits in the United States, including one alleging that it is a “disguised continuance” of a charity shuttered for Hamas fundraising during the Holy Land Foundation prosecutions and one accusing the group of providing material support to Hamas since Oct. 7.
→Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) spent nearly nine years concealing plans to engineer a pandemic-capable monkeypox virus using gain-of-function research, according to a Tuesday report from GOP House Energy and Commerce Committee staff. As reported by Emily Kopp of U.S. Right to Know, in 2015, an NIAID virologist, Bernard Moss, received formal approval from the National Institutes of Health’s Institutional Review Board for experiments designed to splice together genes from two different clades of the monkeypox virus—one more deadly, the other more transmissible. The purpose of the experiment was to engineer a “chimeric” virus with pandemic-capable transmissibility and a case fatality rate of up to 15% (COVID-19’s CFR is between 0.05% and 0.5%)—you know, for public health. NIAID maintains the experiment was never carried out, but that’s after spending a year and a half denying to congressional investigators that the experiment was ever approved, only to admit, in March 2024, that it was.
→We reported yesterday that Hamas had “rejected” the Israeli cease-fire offer; a spokesman for the terror group claimed it merely suggested “amendments.” Hamas submitted its response yesterday to Egyptian and Qatari mediators. The proposed changes reportedly include an accelerated timeline for a permanent cease-fire and a withdrawal of all Israeli troops from Gaza. In an anonymous statement, an Israeli official said that Hamas had “changed all of the main and most meaningful parameters” of the proposed deal, amounting to a de facto rejection of the Israeli offer.
→The IDF killed a senior Hezbollah commander, Taleb Abdullah, in an airstrike in Jouaiyya, in southern Lebanon, on Tuesday night. Abdullah is the most senior Hezbollah commander killed since Oct. 7, according to the IDF, and was responsible for several attacks against northern Israel. According to X user a2023gazawar, a conflict tracker, Abdullah was commander of the Nasr Unit, responsible for the area of Lebanon between Israel’s border and the Litani River, and the “first line of defense for Hezbollah against Israel in the case of an invasion.” Hezbollah responded to the strike with a barrage of more than 170 rockets into northern Israel on Wednesday morning.
→Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested eight illegal immigrants with ties to ISIS in a “coordinated sting operation spanning Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia,” according to a Tuesday report in The New York Post. The suspects, ethnic Tajiks with Russian citizenship, all entered the country via the southern border (including one via the CBP One app), where they passed an initial vetting by federal authorities and were released into the interior. At some point, they came onto the “radar” of the multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force, which notified ICE of their presence. According to the report in the Post, at least some of the suspects were placed under FBI surveillance, where one of them was recorded “talking about bombs.” ICE previously arrested an Uzbek national with ISIS ties in Baltimore this April. He had also illegally crossed the southern border and had been living in the United States for two years.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Stuart Halpern on the stiff-necked Jew in the Book of Ruth
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The Virtues of Stubbornness
The important lessons we can learn from a minor figure in the Book of Ruth
By Stuart Halpern
Who was the real heroine of the Book of Ruth? The answer might not be what you think.
For those in need of a quick recap, the biblical tale—which we read on the holiday of Shavuot—begins by recounting how a small Israelite family fled the Jewish homeland for the fields of Moab in a time of famine. Following the death of the matriarch Naomi’s husband and two sons, God eventually ends the hunger, bringing bread back to Bethlehem. Ruth and Orpah, Naomi’s young, widowed daughters-in-law, both initially offer to accompany Naomi back to her home. In response, Naomi argues that her daughters-in-law will be better off financially and socially if they stay behind in Moab.
Ruth decides that Naomi’s people shall be her people, Naomi’s God her God. She accompanies her mother-in-law back to Bethlehem. Eventually, readers of the Book of Ruth are informed, King David descends from Ruth, the beloved monarch-poet admired by billions over millennia serving as a reward for Ruth’s loving loyalty.
Naomi’s other daughter-in-law, on the other hand, heeds Naomi’s advice and stays back.
Orpah merits only a cursory mention in the tale’s opening verses. Pale in comparison to Ruth, that ravishing and remarkable subject of Leonard Cohen songs and Hollywood blockbusters, Orpah’s brief appearance in the beloved story barely merits a blip.
Yet to Rabbi Shmuel Bornsztain (1855-1926), the Hasidic sage known by the title of his magnum opus the Shem MiShmuel, it is Orpah’s character that constitutes the very reason we recite this story on Shavuot, the holiday that commemorates the giving of the Torah. Though Orpah was not herself an Israelite, Bornsztain argues that her behavior bespeaks a rigidity of character that Jews can—and should—review annually, and imitate.
Bornsztain’s shockingly revisionist reading begins with a callback to the Jewish calendar’s previous holiday, Passover. Orpah’s greatness, he writes, lies in her being similar to Pharaoh, that dastardly despot of Egypt: Their sharing an essential nature is reflected in the fact that in Hebrew, their names share the same letters.
Citing the midrash, Bornsztain notes that the etymology of the name Orpah alludes to the neck—oreph in Hebrew. Orpah, in embodying the essence of her name, turned her neck to walk away from Naomi. This act, in the mainstream Jewish tradition, is usually understood to be a betrayal, an act of defiant stubbornness. Similarly, Pharaoh demonstrated unyielding obstinance in his refusal to let the Israelites leave Egypt, despite his being subjected to those blood-frog-and-hail-filled plagues.
In contrast, Ruth’s name, the Hasidic rebbe notes, is an anagram for a tor, a dove, known for, quite literally, sticking its neck out and demonstrating flexible tranquility.
Though, as Bornsztain notes, the dove is undoubtedly biblically associated with peaceful tranquility, as in the lover in the Song of Songs’ praise that “my dove, my perfect one, is the only one” (and, one would add, the dove in the story of Noah having returned after the flood with an olive branch in its mouth), it is Ruth’s stiff-necked foil in whose merit the Jewish people have survived.
“Israel possesses the trait of stiff-neckedness,” Bornsztain writes, noting that the Children of Israel are called “keshei oreph,” meaning “stiff-necked,” by God in in describing their defiance amid their desert wanderings.
As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks put it, this Jewish stubbornness is “not a tragic failing but a noble and defiant loyalty” to their faith. “Mightier religions will urge them to convert,” Sacks continued, “but they will resist. They will suffer humiliation, persecution, even torture and death because of the name they bear and the faith they profess, but they will stay true to the covenant their ancestors made.”
Alluding to this persecution of the Jews by their enemies throughout history, Bornsztain, whose own hometown would be overrun by the Germans in 1915, sees their possessing the pharaonic/Orpah trait of obstinance as a positive. It is, he argues, a part of the “rechush gadol,” “great wealth,” the freed Israelites take with them on their way out of Egypt—implying that the Jews, by osmosis, absorbed the characteristic from their monarchical oppressor, but directed it toward the positive. This “great wealth,” usually understood to refer to clothing borrowed from the Egyptians, was actually metaphorical clothing, “worn for spiritual matters.” Ensconced within their national character by way of the revelation at Sinai which followed the Exodus, this now-Israelite propensity for “strength and fortitude in acceptance of God” became an immovable force that “all the winds in the world” would not be able to budge.
Bornsztain then brings us back to the festival of Shavuot and its commemoration of the revelation at Sinai. The very first commandment given from atop the mountain, “I am the Lord your God who took you out of Egypt,” engraved this obstinacy of loyalty “into the heart of Israel,” he writes. Just as God created the world, forging nature by His word, so, too, the Israelites’ collective personality became, by dint of that commandment, “fitting vessels for God’s utterances.” Vessels, that is, that would not crack under the pressures of history.
It was then, as a result of Sinai’s revelation, says Bornsztain, “the character of Orpah in holiness joined the character of Ruth. Therefore, we read this scroll on the holiday of the giving of the Torah.”
***
Almost a century later, the Catholic professor Maria Poggi Johnson made a strikingly similar argument as Bornsztain, in her book about what she learned about faith from her Jewish neighbors:
I imagine that when God calls his people “stiff-necked,” he feels rather the way I do when I yell at my daughter to get her nose out of that book right now and come down to dinner or else: secretly proud and delighted that she is a hopeless bookworm like her old ma. Stubbornness can be inconvenient and exasperating but it can also be a very useful quality—and it is a quality God knows his people will need. It’s not easy being different, and the stiff necks of the Israelites will, in the long run, be the key to their holiness and their very survival as a people.
So it was, she continues:
Against all logic and reason, and in defiance of all the horrors of history, Jews have survived and remembered who they are, where they came from, and to whom they owed their allegiance. They have remembered and obeyed not just when things went well—when they had cisterns and vineyards and olive groves—but also when they had nothing, when the Temple was destroyed again, when they were driven into exile, when their villages were burnt by laughing Cossacks, when they were locked in ghettos and starved, when they were hoarded into cattle trucks and gas chambers.
And, one might add, when Israel was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7.
“To be unbendingly evil is worse than idolatry,” said the 20th-century theologian Rabbi Norman Lamm. “To be unbendingly Godly is the greatest virtue. What is dogged obstinacy in the service of a bad cause, is valorous constancy in the service of a good one.”
As we reread the Book of Ruth once more then, Bornsztain’s untraditional take on the tale couldn’t be timelier. The main narrative through line of the Book of Ruth is not what is actually most important. Ruth’s selfless dedication to Naomi and the birth of the eventual King David at the end, are, one presumes even Bornsztain would admit, plot points worthy of applause. But the narrative’s real power lies elsewhere, from Orpah to Pharaoh to Sinai. It begins with one who stayed and stood, unyielding.
“ The suspects, ethnic Tajiks with Russian citizenship, all entered the country via the southern border (including one via the CBP One app), where they passed an initial vetting by federal authorities and were released into the interior. At some point, they came onto the “radar” of the multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force, which notified ICE of their presence. According to the report in the Post, at least some of the suspects were placed under FBI surveillance, where one of them was recorded “talking about bombs.”
Great. And how many are here, roaming about free to do whatever it is they want who have NOT been picked up on the “radar” of those in the JTTF, or are just being “monitored’ by the utterly feckless FBI?
How many times have we heard, well after a devastating shooting or act, that the perpetrators “were known to the FBI”?
We are like sitting ducks for God knows what acts of horror now being plotted to be committed here by thousands of illegals now in this country. It is a ticking time bomb. Mind boggling that this wide open border just continues apace.