The past two days have witnessed some Israeli reaction to settler fundamentalism. On Sunday (December 13 2009) evening, Defense Minister Ehud Barak finally stood up to a mutiny-inciting IDF-affiliated rabbi. This morning (December 15 2009) Haaretz published a scathing exposé of how Israeli and US taxes fund Yitzhar’s Od Yosef Hai yeshiva, publisher of Baruch Hagever, an ode to Cave of Patriarchs murderer Baruch Goldstein, and, more recently, the “Handbook for the Killing of Gentiles.”

Most startling, however, is an op-ed by Ben Dror Yemini, a senior editor at Maariv, known as a leading crusader against anti-Israeli propaganda and ‘Islamofascism.’ Enraged at the damage done to his efforts by Friday’s (December 11 2009) torching of a mosque in the West Bank village of Yasuf, he penned a full frontal assault on the attackers, the rabbis sanctioning them and the government’s of Israel lack of action on the issue (full text after the jump.)

Israel-haters worldwide were quick to celebrate the pictures of the burned mosque in the village of Yasuf…The hooligans who desecrated a mosque are the enemy because they contributed the most to the delegitimization campaign of the international radical left, led by Ahmadinezhad and Hugo Chavez.  In their acts, they actually helped bolstering those who want to turn Israel into an illegitimate, leper state.  Healthy states know how to curb such phenomena, but here, it seems, we refuse to get the point.  We exercise forgiveness instead.  Sure, the prime minister and the defense minister condemned the act, but where are their acts?  What happened to the basic understanding that the arsonists who torched the mosque are terrorists, and that the harm they inflict on Israel is as grave as terror attacks by Hamas members?  Why do we fail to realize that this is a Jewish mutation of Neo-Nazism?  Why do we not see that they are the enemy, dangerous warriors in the battle against the legitimacy of the State of Israel?…We must not refer to them as a small and marginal minority.  These people are supported by the highest echelons.  Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, the spiritual leader of the religious-Zionists, issued an edict that practically allows Jews to pick olives in plantations that belong to Arabs.

Note that Yemini neglects to address the fact that the some of the Rabbis inciting these actions are recipients of generous government funding. This is not surprising, however, because a frequent source of his, Israel’s premier expert on NGO funding, Prof. Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor, contends that the practice is just a fact of life in Israel, as normal as the funding of youth movements, and does not warrant any extraordinary action. Responding to a direct question on Od Yosef Hai, he tells the Jerusalem Post’s Shmuel Rosner that

the state is used to funnel large sums of money to various sectors and institutions related to political parties  – from kibbuzim to youth movements and yeshivot —  with numerous stops in between.

Here is the Rabbi Eliyahu ruling referenced in the op-ed (quoted by Haaretz on October 25 2002)

Since the land is the inheritance of the People of Israel, planting on this land  by gentiles is planting on land that does not belong to them. If someone plants a tree on my land, both the tree and the fruit it yields belong to me.

Neo-Nazis among us

The mosque desecraters are dangerous enemies who defeat Israel in its struggle for legitimacy.  They are not alone.  Their ideology comes from the top.  Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu allowed Jews to pick the Olives of Arabs.  Those who authorize olive thefts may be comfortable when mosques are desecrated

Op-ed, Ben-Dror Yemini, Maariv, December 15 2009

They are “our boys.”  They are pioneers, salt of the earth, our own flesh and blood.  They sacrificed a life of convenience just to be out there, first in the field.  Yes, they are sometimes naughty and step out line here and there, but this no reason to make a fuss.  After all, they are on our side.

Too many among us maintain this view.  We may find it hard to conceive of the threat they post, but we are looking at a cancer.  People who act like Skinheads, Neo-Nazis, or Jihadists are just that, regardless of their faith.  There are such Christians, there are such Muslims and, in case we have not yet realized – and we should – there are such Jews too.

People like that exist in every nation.  In Hungary, France, and Ukraine we witnessed sickening phenomena where swastikas were painted on walls, synagogues were torched, and cemeteries desecrated.  These acts were perpetrated by racists, and there are such racists among us too.  Are they a small and marginal minority?  Possibly, but it does not take more than a small minority to start a fire.  They are not “ours” and they are no pioneers.  They are our enemies.  Israel-haters worldwide were quick to celebrate the pictures of the burned mosque in the village of Yasuf.  We have no idea how these pictures are viewed worldwide.  Anti-Semites, left and right, had a field day.  In case we did not yet realize that, the war for the State of Israel is not waged just against Qassam and Katyusha rockets.  The most important ring is where we fight for our legitimacy.

The hooligans who desecrated a mosque are the enemy because they contributed the most to the delegitimization campaign of the international radical left, led by Ahmadinezhad and Hugo Chavez.  In their acts, they actually helped bolstering those who want to turn Israel into an illegitimate, leper state.  Healthy states know how to curb such phenomena, but here, it seems, we refuse to get the point.  We exercise forgiveness instead.  Sure, the prime minister and the defense minister condemned the act, but where are their acts?  What happened to the basic understanding that the arsonists who torched the mosque are terrorists, and that the harm they inflict on Israel is as grave as terror attacks by Hamas members?  Why do we fail to realize that this is a Jewish mutation of Neo-Nazism?  Why do we not see that they are the enemy, dangerous warriors in the battle against the legitimacy of the State of Israel?

We must not refer to them as a small and marginal minority.  These people are supported by the highest echelons.  Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, the spiritual leader of the religious-Zionists, issued an edict that practically allows Jews to pick olives in plantations that belong to Arabs.  Though many among us deny that Jews cause damage to Palestinian plantations, claiming that this is leftist provocation, the religious ruling sets the tone.  Rabbi Eliahu did not say a word about mosques, but those who authorize olive thefts may be comfortable when mosques are desecrated.

Rabbi Eliyahu is not yet another rabbi.  He is the spiritual leader and guide of the religious-Zionist movement.  In the 1950’s, Eliahu was a member of the Pact of the Zealots, an underground movement that wanted to violently impose the rules of the Bible on the State of Israel.  I fail to see how such a person could ever be appointed a chief rabbi, but it happened.  His ruling, which approves of theft, shows that this spiritual leader did not really change much.

When will the State of Israel wake up and realize that it is facing a real threat from an enemy within?  When will the national Zionist camp rise from its slumber and see that lethal cancer nests in our midst?  When will we all see that these Jihadist- and Neo-Nazi-compatible hooligans must be stopped while they are still small?  Let us pray this happens before it is too late.

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The comparison to neo-Nazis and skinheads is not hyperbole. Internal terrorists pose as great a danger as external ones, and that applies to all countries.

Loneliness is defined as perceived social isolation, and it’s not based on the number of people around you.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Study: Loneliness spreads more quickly among friends than family
• Like happiness, loneliness can spread out three degrees of separation
• Loneliness spreads much more easily among women than among men

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• Psychology
• Facebook Inc.
• University of Chicago

(CNN) — Have you ever felt cut off from other people, even if there are plenty around you? Maybe you felt all alone in the world, but you were making other people feel lonely without even realizing it.

New research suggests loneliness can actually travel from person to person, spreading up to three degrees of separation. That means if your neighbor’s cousin’s friend is lonely, you may have a good chance of being lonely, too.

The results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, were also mentioned in the recent book “Connected” by Dr. Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University and James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego. The book explores how happiness, obesity, smoking and a slew of other behaviors and habits are contagious among groups of people who know one another.

Read more about the book

John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago who has written a book called “Loneliness,” teamed up with Christakis and Fowler to study the effect of this phenomenon in social networks.

The authors focused on data from the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948. The loneliness research looked at the second generation in the study, which includes 5,124 people.

In the heart study, researchers kept in touch with participants every two to four years, asking them about depression, loneliness and other issues. They also kept a record of their friends. This allowed Christakis, Fowler and Cacioppo to look at the subjects’ social networks over time.

If a direct connection in your social network is lonely, you are 52 percent more likely to be lonely, the researchers found. At two degrees of separation — a friend of a friend — it’s 25 percent. At three degrees, someone who knows your friend’s friend, it’s 15 percent.

By helping lonely people on the periphery of a social network, “We can create a protective barrier against loneliness that will keep the whole network from unraveling,” Christakis and Fowler wrote in “Connected.”

The results are surprising because “we think of loneliness as something that affects a person who is by himself or herself,” Ed Diener, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an e-mail. He was not involved in the study.

But it makes sense that the way a lonely person behaves could influence others, and those people could respond in kind to more friends, social scientists say.

“If lonely people act out behaviors that alienate others, some others will learn to enact those same behaviors, sometimes in reaction against the lonely person,” Diener said.

Loneliness is defined as perceived social isolation, and it’s not based on the number of people around you, Cacioppo said. Evolutionarily, it was important for early humans to know how many peers they could count on, work with and survive with, as well as who would betray them, he said.

“That’s why the quality, not the quantity, of relationships is what’s related to whether someone feels isolated or feels satisfied with their relationships,” he said.

Cacioppo’s earlier research says people have different baseline levels of loneliness, meaning some people have a greater need than others for social connection. From that perspective, it follows that someone who is highly sensitive to disconnection would more strongly promote lonely feelings in the network, he said.

Both lonely and nonlonely people prefer nonlonely people, and sometimes the lonely are even harsher to others who feel disconnected than the nonlonely people. This helps leave the lonely people with fewer friends, Cacioppo said.

In the social network study, mood did not affect how loneliness was transmitted, he said. Participants were asked how depressed they were, and this did not seem to affect whether they passed loneliness along the network.

The study also found that loneliness spreads much more easily among women than among men, citing the idea that women may be more likely to express and share emotions, as well as the observation that there may be greater stigma associated with loneliness among men. Happiness, by contrast, does not seem to have gender distinctions in the way it spreads, according to Christakis and Fowler’s research.

People who are lonely may be motivated to seek social connection, increasing the likelihood that others around that person will be exposed to loneliness, the authors said.

Loneliness spreads more quickly among friends than family, but this finding may be limited to older people, as the average age in the sample was 64 years old, the authors said. Cacioppo, though, said the pattern generally makes sense because the cost of leaving a friendship is less than cutting off a family member, so people are more likely to isolate themselves from friends than close relatives or spouses.

Although these effects are stronger in person, they also have implications for online social interactions, he said.

“If you have an important friend and they are really grumpy and say nasty things on email, you may walk into the next room and be grumpy to someone else,” he said.

The findings have implications for communities, Cacioppo said. City planners and policymakers should consider interventions such as sidewalks that allow neighborhood residents to interact more in public spaces, so that if someone is feeling down, others can help bring that person out of it.

In terms of therapy, it’s important for lonely people to understand the condition and what it does to the brain, he said. Those who are lonely tend to view things as more threatening, and if they understand that, they can help themselves temper such strong reactions.

“We can correct our tendency to want to act grumpy to others,” he said.

Diener said the research is important, building off of the “Connected” authors’ earlier work on social networks.

“This series of studies shows us that we don’t just live in individual worlds, but are influenced often in unconscious ways of which we are not aware,” he said.

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