Beautiful Bimah & cover dedicated by Tali & Yechiel Hertz, in memory of Hindy Cohen (a"h). Bimah & cover - located in Yeshivah Toras Chaim @ 7 Harikma Romema Jerusalem, the Kollel that Yechiel Hertz learns in.

BCC & Jeff Ballabon of Iron Dome Alliance.

Jeff is the CEO of B2 Strategic where he advises and represents corporate and political clients on interacting with the government and media and guides foreign companies entering U.S. markets. He previously headed the communications and public policy departments of major media corporations including CBS News, Primedia and Court TV.

Young Professionals Shabbat Retreat @ FLH Edmonton, Alberta Canada, January 29 - January 31, 2016, featuring prominent trial attorney Baruch C. Cohen Esq.

Young Professionals Shabbat Retreat @ FLH Edmonton, Alberta Canada
January 29 - January 31, 2016
Fantasyland Hotel, 17700-87 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta T5T 4V4
RSVP: Rabbi Moshe Segal; 780-680-3818, shabbatretreat@gmail.com

Young Professionals Shabbat Retreat

featuring prominent trial attorney Baruch C. Cohen Esq.,  (SuperLawyer 2013, 2015, & 2016), who’s admitted to practice before all state and federal courts in California and before SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States). Join us for a weekend of connection and inspiration as Baruch takes us on a compelling journey you wont want to miss.

•”The Challenges of an Orthodox Jewish trial attorney."

•"How David Slew Goliath, an Orthodox Jewish trial attorney's analysis."

•"From Trials to Triumph, a Bereaved Parent's Spiritual Journey Beyond Grief."

Mesivta of Greater Los Angeles (Calabasas) Ezras Nashim dedicated by Rabbi & Mrs. Uri Mandelbaum in memory of Hindy....

Young Professionals Shabbat Retreat featuring prominent trial attorney Baruch C. Cohen Esq., January 29 - January 31, 2016 Fantasyland Hotel, 17700-87 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta T5T 4V4

Young Professionals Shabbat Retreat @ FLH Edmonton, Alberta Canada
January 29 - January 31, 2016
Fantasyland Hotel, 17700-87 Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta T5T 4V4
RSVP: Rabbi Moshe Segal; 780-680-3818, shabbatretreat@gmail.com

Young Professionals Shabbat Retreat featuring prominent trial attorney Baruch C. Cohen Esq., y (SuperLawyer 2013, 2015, & 2016), who’s admitted to practice before all state and federal courts in California and before SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States). Join us for a weekend of connection and inspiration as Baruch takes us on a compelling journey you wont want to miss.

•”The Challenges of an Orthodox Jewish trial attorney."

•"How David Slew Goliath, an Orthodox Jewish trial attorney's analysis."

•"From Trials to Triumph, a Bereaved Parent's Spiritual Journey Beyond Grief."

For Whom They Come First By: Bruce Abramson and Jeff Ballabon

Photo Credit: Asher Schwartz

Martin Niemöller’s haunting poem, “First They Came,” has been making the rounds in social media lately.  The numerous variants of the poem recount Europe’s stoicism as “they” came for Communists, Socialists, Trade Unionists, Gypsies, Homosexuals, and of course Jews—in varying orders and combinations—before coming for “normal” Europeans.  Widely cited for its stinging rebuke of Europe’s intelligentsia as the Nazis attacked, enslaved, and exterminated one vulnerable minority after another, and for its terse reminder that self-preservation requires vigilance in protecting minority rights, the poem’s popularity spikes whenever a new atrocity works its way onto the front pages.

Today’s atrocity involves the refugees from Syria’s civil war, and in particular the plight of Sunni Muslim refugees fleeing the newly ascendant Sunni Caliphate.  The accused are those who question the wisdom of granting mass asylum in the U.S. or in Europe.  The charge against them is an irrational hatred of Muslims, also known as Islamophobia.  But the accusers, who see themselves as champions of the oppressed, have inverted both the facts and the moral sentiment.  The masses currently huddling at the gates of the West are hardly the “first” targets of Islamist terror.  That dubious honor belongs to the same group for whose plight Neimöller’s silent intelligentsia bears the greatest culpability: the Jews.

The Islamic State’s notion that the vast expanse between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Shatt-al-Arab belongs to the Sunni Arabs, and that the even greater realm stretching from Andalusia to Indonesia belongs to the Muslims, is hardly new.  Its clearest expression involves the false claim that the Jews, by establishing a safe-haven nation-state in part of the historic Jewish homeland, had “stolen” land from its rightful Sunni Arab possessors.  The use of anti-Jewish terror to secure “misappropriated” portions of “Arab” land date back at least to the 1920s.  It came into its own in the 1970s and 80s, when Yasir Arafat’s PLO launched spectacular attacks on the Olympics, jetliners, and cruise ships.  Far from fighting these tactics before they could spread, the international community forgave them as understandably targeted against the Jews, and elevated Arafat from revolutionary to statesman.  Other groups, from the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza chapter of Hamas to the Iranian-sponsored Shiite Lebanese shock troops of Hezbollah, took note.  The use of terror to promote Arab and Islamic causes would yield significant positive returns.  The targets expanded outward.  In September 2000, Arafat launched his intifada in Jerusalem, unleashing terror upon an innocent civilian population whose leaders had been willing to capitulate to every demand that the world then deemed reasonable.  Once again, Arafat taught his brethren an important lesson: the West will retreat in the face of escalating demands.  A year later, the terror hit New York and Washington—with London and Madrid soon to follow.

As long as the victims were Jewish, the Western intelligentsia was willing to take the matter in stride; the threat was distant, and focused on others. Even those who found the tactics distasteful preferred blaming the terror victims to the terrorists themselves.

Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates invented the term “Islamophobia,” which the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) then foisted upon the West.  In theory, Islamophobia describes the non-existent phenomenon whereby Westerners systematically attack and oppress Muslims.  In practice, it is a charge leveled at anyone opposed to Islamic supremacy, daring to suggest that Islam is due no greater respect than is any other faith, or that the world should judge Muslims by the same standards that it applies to anyone else.  In point of fact, though the number of bias attacks against Muslims and Islamic institutions is far from zero—where it belongs—there is no evidence of widespread violence against Muslims, and scant evidence of systematic discrimination, anywhere in the West.  Most impressively, Muslims enjoy their greatest measure of safety in the United States, where the broad citizenry has repeatedly gone out of its way to overlook provocations by Muslims committing anti-American atrocities in the name of Islam.

The legitimate refugees among the hordes now clamoring for admission to the West may indeed be every bit as miserable as those who attempted to flee Hitler’s Europe, but the situation is only parallel for the non-Sunni among them.  They, like the Jewish refugees for whom Neimöller and his friends refused to stand, for whom the British had foreclosed entrance to their homeland, and for whom no country in the world claimed kinship, have been driven from their homes and abandoned by the world.  The Sunni Arab majority now fleeing Syria, on the other hand, are part of a large and powerful family.  Nearly all of the Arab League’s twenty other state members, and nearly all of the OIC’s fifty-five other state members, are Sunni Muslim.  America should indeed assert its authority as a moral and military superpower, by pressing these places to open their borders to embrace their suffering kinsmen. Americans do not want to return refugee families to their torturers.  But many Americans want and expect these powerful Muslim nations to embrace the victims of radical Islam that they claim as family.  Their failure to do so threatens to shake the foundations of American forbearance.  A global Muslim leadership unwilling to welcome Muslim victims speaks volumes about the balance between violent, radical Muslims and peaceful, tolerant Muslims.  It is hardly irrational to wonder whether IS speaks for a silent majority when so few of the world’s powerful Sunni Muslim leaders seem prepared to aid even Sunni Muslim victims.

Meanwhile, if the West, or the broader international community, truly wished to heed Neimöller’s admonition, it would refocus its efforts to protect the Islamist’s first choice of victims.  Unlike mythical Islamophobia, anti-Semitism is rampant and growing.  From Chabad houses in Mumbai and Kosher markets in Paris to the streets of Israel, the Jews remain the Islamist’s target of choice.  Even in the United States, likely the most tolerant country in the world, the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks consistently dwarfs the number of violent attacks against any other faith, including Islam. According to the FBI’s most recent statistics, attacks against Jews represent 59% of all anti-religious hate crimes—one and a half times more than attacks against members of all other faith groups combined. Yet many of America’s leaders and much of its intelligentsia treat anti-Jewish terror as if it were a threat apart, unfortunate but excusable, and unrelated to the broader threat of Islamist terror.

For whom did they come first?  They came for the Jews.  They are still coming for the Jews.  And they will come for far more than the Jews until the West chooses to defend the Jews.  Those Westerners–including some leading American Jewish organizations—raucously charging Islamophobia and recklessly calling for unrestricted immigration should know better.  Humanitarianism, strategy, morality, and self-preservation all come together to a single point.  The fight against anti-Semitism is a critical front in the battle against radical Islam.  Complacency in the face of anti-Semitism fuels the radical Islamist cause.  And a Western willingness to let Islamic leaders off the hook for their own anti-Semitism, and from the responsibility for caring for even their own people, threatens to bring a strengthened Islamism to our very doorsteps.

About the Author: Bruce Abramson, a technology lawyer in private practice in NYC (www.bdabramson.com), is a Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research. Jeff Ballabon is CEO of B2 Strategic (www.b2strategic.com) and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Statesmanship and Diplomacy.

Civil trial attorney meets Rabbi Jeremy Gimpel, Deputy Director of the World Mizrachi Movement, host of Israel Inspired Radio on itunes, creator of Tuesday Night Live in Jerusalem

BREAKING ISRAEL NEWS: 800-Year-Old Jewish Prophecy: Current Tensions Between Iran, Saudi Arabia Harbinger to Messiah By Rivkah Lambert Adler January 6, 2016 , 12:30 pm

“Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

When Saudi Arabia severed diplomatic ties with Iran, this created a chain reaction that led Bahrain and other Middle Eastern countries to expel Iranian diplomats. Unwittingly, Saudi Arabia’s actions can be seen as the fulfillment of a messianic Jewish prophecy found in the ancient Jewish holy book known as the Yalkut Shimoni.

The Yalkut Shimoni, a compilation of rabbinic commentary on the Bible, is believed to have been composed in the 13th century. Despite being written over 800 years ago, the Yalkut Shimoni has something extremely relevant to say about today’s headlines.

Speaking about the relevant passage in the Yalkut Shimoni, Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam, better known as the Klausenberger Rebbe, said, “Remember these words. Now, perhaps, they are not understood, but in time, they will be, and they will be a source of chizuk (strength) to Am Yisroel (the Jewish people).” The Klausenberger Rebbe was an Orthodox rabbi with thousands of followers in the years prior to World War II. Most of his followers were murdered in the Holocaust. The Klausenberger Rebbe died in Israel in 1994.

What was the prophecy of the Yalkut Shimoni that the Klausenberger Rebbe knew would bring comfort and strength to the Jewish people at a future date? The Yalkut Shimoni predicted that the year the Messiah would appear, the “King of Persia [Iran] will provoke the King of Arabia [Saudi Arabia].”

The two main sects in Islam are Sunni and Shia. While they both have much in common, the differences between the two sects in Islam have led to a long history of violent and deadly conflict among Muslims . Many of today’s political and diplomatic conflicts between Iran and other Muslim countries are connected to this Sunni-Shia divide

Not surprisingly, Iran and Saudi Arabia do not share the same Muslim sect. Although the vast majority of the Islamic world today is Sunni, Iran, and, to a lesser degree Iraq, are home to the majority of the region’s Shiite Muslims. Saudi Arabia is more than 90 percent Sunni. Iran, by contrast, is 95 percent Shiite.

Thus, when angry Shiite Iranians recently overran the Saudi embassy in Tehran this past Sunday to protest the execution of a Shiite Muslim cleric named Nimr al-Nimr, the duel between the Sunnis and the Shiites was inflamed. As a consequence, Saudi Arabia gave Iranian diplomats 48 hours to pack up and leave.

The full text of the Yalkut Shimoni connects the political tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia with good news about the full redemption of the Jewish people.

“Rabbi Yizchok said: ‘The year that Melech HaMoshiach [Messiah the King] will be revealed, all the nations of the world will be provoking each other. The King of Persia (Iran) will provoke the King of Arabia, and the King of Arabia will go to Edom (the West) to take counsel, but the King of Persia will in turn, destroy the entire world. The nations of the world will be outraged and panicked. They will fall on their faces, and they will experience pains like birth pangs. Israel too will be outraged and in a state of panic and ask, where do we go? But say unto them, “My children, do not fear, ‘Higiyah zman geulatchem’  [the time of your redemption has come]. And in the last redemption will be different from the first which was followed by further bondage and pain. After this last redemption, you will not again experience any further pain or subjugation.”

[Rabbi] Baruch Cohen, a civil trial attorney in the US and pro-Israel blogger at American Trial Attorneys In Defense of Israel shared with Breaking Israel News the enthusiasm many feel when comparing the ancient prophecy to current events. “It is incredible to see Chazal’s [the Jewish sages’] prophecies come to life in real time in today’s headlines,” he said. “The Baal Haturim [early 14th century scholar of Jewish law] explains when Yishmael [Ishmael, meaning the Muslim Arabs] will fall and be finally defeated in the end of days, then the Moshiach [messiah] – the descendant of Yishai [father of King David], who is himself a descendant of Yitzchak [Issac], will come. Even in the most terrifying of times, we are comforted by the fact that eventually, with the ultimate downfall of the descendants of Yishmael, we will merit the final redemption by our righteous Moshiach.” Cohen concluded his comments to Breaking Israel News with with a spiritual challenge to those who are waiting for the Messiah to come and redeem humanity. “Yishmael typifies the power of prayer. He himself was born out of the power of the prayer of his mother Hagar. To this very day, the Arabs excel in prayer, which occupies a significant place in their daily ritual. In order to counteract the power of their prayer, we need to improve the concentration and intensity of our own prayers.”

http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/58217/800-year-old-prophecy-declares-when-king-persia-will-provoke-king-arabia-redemption-around-corner-middle-east/#WXlm0pB8AFFIHWB0.97