I wasn’t even specifically looking for this, but it came up while I was searching for news of the Supreme Court case on whether “Israel” should be written on passports for American babies born in Jerusalem. Then I found this article, which does not mention Moshe Feiglin by name in the body, but then I noticed a video on the bottom captioned “Far Right Israeli MP visits Jerusalem Al Aqsa Compound.” Obvious who that has to be.
The video is pretty schvach and annoying that they refer to it as the “Al Aqsa Compound”. But he’s in it, and he speaks, too. So that’s good. There’s some yippety Arab yenta at the end going on and on about how Feiglin “Raided the Al Aqsa Mosque” and “prevented her from praying there” somehow singlehandedly, unarmed, and without even approaching the stupid Mosque.
I have made clear before how the Arabs themselves are the ones blowing up Al Aqsa. We want nothing to do with it. We are interested in the Dome of the Rock, not the Mosque. The Arabs face their butts to the Dome of the Rock when they daven (see below), so clearly they aren’t interested in it either. So I really don’t know what we’re fighting about really. We don’t want what they want, they don’t want what we want.
Notice where their butts are facing.
So I suggest we all stop shooting each other over it. We’ll take the Dome, you take the Mosque, בסדר?
Just saw the news. Turned on Ynet live and who other than Moshe Feiglin was being interviewed.
First of all, he’s going to Har Habayit tomorrow morning. He calls on the police to open Har Habayit to all Jews immediately in response to this murder attempt. Hopefully attempt. Rav Glick is still fighting for his life.
According to Moshe, who was standing nearby at the time (correction: he had left half an hour earlier, but his assistant Shai Malka, was there and saw the attempted murder), an Arab goes up to Glick, unmistakable with signature red hair and beard, and asks him in Arab-accented Hebrew, if he is Glick. Glick says yes, and the Arab shoots him several times at point blank range. Rav Glick stumbles around bleeding and falls on the floor near Malka. The Arab flees the scene on a motorcycle.
Refuah Shleimah to Yehuda Yehoshua ben Brenda. One of the very few Rabbis I have full respect for. God please have mercy and save him.
UPDATE 5AM – Rav Glick’s life is still in danger but his condition has stabilized and improved since entering the hospital. Surgery is complete. Wounds to the chest and stomach.
This is a continuation as to why Feiglin is wrong when he says that zero VAT on newly built homes will benefit the rich more than the poor, thereby widening the gap between rich and poor. (For people new to this blog, I still support Feiglin for Prime Minister enthusiastically. He’s just wrong on this issue.)
This is a very important point that few people understand, precisely because it is so counterintuitive. Consumption taxes like value added taxes, in Hebrew מע״מ for מס ערך מוסף, do not have a direct impact on the prices of goods that are taxed. If you search this blog, you’ll find that earlier posts from several years ago have made the same mistake in assuming that VAT is simply passed on to the consumer. It never is. It is impossible to pass on a consumption tax to a consumer. It is always passed backward onto the retailer, never forward on to the end consumer.
Murray Rothbard wrote about this in Man Economy and State, Chapter 12, section D, paragraph 4. Here it is: (I finished the 1,369 page book two months ago. Yay for me.)
In considering the general sales tax, many people are misled by the fact that the price paid by the consumer necessarily includes the tax. If someone goes to a movie and pays $1.00 admission, and if he sees prominently posted the information that this covers a “price” of 85¢ and a tax of 15¢, he tends to conclude that the tax has simply been added on to the “price.” But $1.00 is the price, not 85¢, the latter sum simply being the revenue accruing to the firm after taxes. The revenue to the firm has, in effect, been reduced to allow for payment of taxes.
The general sales tax Rothbard refers to is the VAT, or the מע״מ. So if we translate that to houses and use Feiglin’s flawed analogy, a house that costs 1.6M NIS, does NOT actually cost 288K less than that on the free market because of the VAT which is supposedly tacked on to the end. The house costs 1.6M, period, regardless of whether there is a VAT or not. Why must this be so?
Because a price is not just a number that a seller sets in order to make a certain profit he feels like making. If that were true nobody would ever sell at a loss. A price is what the seller can get on the market regardless of the profit he makes or doesn’t make. In other words, it’s not like the seller of a house or the builder of a house who is selling it feels like he has to make X profit on the house and therefore sells it for 1.6M assuming a VAT, but would sell it for 288K less if he sells it without a VAT and get the same profit. It doesn’t work that way.
A price is a finely tuned level where buyers and sellers equal out. It is the point where supply and demand meet, not the point at which the seller feels he has made enough money. If by divine intervention the VAT were abolished tomorrow, the price of housing would NOT suddenly shrink by 20% or whatever the VAT is. If it did you’d have a rush of demand that would immediately bid the price back up to the current levels.
A clear illustration of this is what happens at a supermarket sale designed to get you interested in a product. The supermarket often sets something at below a market price and then limits you to a certain amount of it. Say tomatoes are on sale for a shekel a kilo when the real free market price is 3 shekels a kilo. The store will inevitably limit you to, say, 3 kilos. Why the limit? Because by going below the free market price, it has voluntarily introduced a shortage, necessitating the limiting. If it were at the free market price, there would be no limit on any customer, because the free market price IS ITSELF the limit.
The current price of housing is the equilibrium point between supply and demand. If VAT were gone tomorrow on everything, the prices of everything would stay the same because the equilibrium point between buyers and sellers of anything has not changed overnight. If suddenly the price of housing dropped by the VAT amount, then you’d have more buyers willing to buy than sellers willing to sell, and the price would quickly jump back up to the current market price. Perhaps a few sales would be made at current prices minus the VAT, but they would be made so fast that the competitive bidding would very quickly push the price back up within days or hours to reach equilibrium again.
Therefore, there IS no benefit to rich people of 288K on a 1.6M house, because the price WOULD NOT CHANGE. Neither is there any direct benefit on any other buyer of any house no matter how rich or poor he may be.
Where there IS direct benefit is on the SELLER of the house, or the builder of the house who is the seller, in that he gets to keep the amount of money previously stolen from him by the government. The SELLER of a 400K house and a 1.6M house could be the same person. In fact, the seller of a 400K house could be rich while the seller of a 1.6M house could be poor. The benefit to them of getting rid of the VAT is that they no longer have to pay 20% (or whatever the VAT is) to the government, so they can keep that and reinvest it in say building more houses instead of buying more $60K Iron Dome missiles to swat flies out of the air from Gaza.
That eventually ups supply, gradually bringing the price down on everything. So yes, getting rid of VAT does lower prices INDIRECTLY, only by increasing supply through reinvestment of profits that would have otherwise been taken by government and spent on some inner city school prison. But in Israel, since the government owns 93% of the land, there is no way to up supply even if the VAT is obliterated. So housing prices would continue to rise, as Feiglin says in his post. However, even so getting rid of the VAT would lower prices on whatever the bigger profits were reinvested in, so we’d be better off on net anyway even if housing prices are not affected because of the government land monopoly restricting supply.
Conclusion: It’s not that buyers of more expensive houses will get a greater benefit. They won’t. It’s that sellers of more expensive houses will have less stolen from them. Those sellers could be anyone. Stop with the class warfare, I don’t want to hear anything about Rich vs Poor and the supposed battle between them. The battle is between taxpayers and tax receivers. The battle is between rich and poor taxpayers vs rich and poor tax receivers.
We need to fight the tax receivers until they no longer receive anything. (Yes, this includes Feiglin himself as a Knesset Member, and the only reason I give him an exception is that he is leading the fight from within the government, and there is no other way I see of taking them down legally and nonviolently.)
I sat down tonight with a group of about 40 people, Feiglinite activists. As usual Moshe was able to cut through all the circus crap with one sharp line. That is one ability of his that is unmatched.
Ready for the line? Here’s the line.
“Of the 120 Knesset members, 119 of them are incapable of saying the simple phrase ‘This is our land, including Gaza’. The hardest of the right wing will only go so far as saying ‘Let’s conquer Gaza and give it to Abu Mazen.'”
The question we must answer before we even try to win a war is who does Israel belong to? The left wing and the right wing both agree. It belongs to the Arabs.
Well that was interesting. I’m the guy in the blue jeans and brown shirt who kind of looks like me.
I woke up this morning at 4:45 to go to the Mikveh and then to Har Habayit with Moshe Feiglin. He stayed in Jerusalem apparently so I drove there myself for the first time though I’ve gone with Moshe several times before, and parked on Derech Hevron because looking for a parking spot in or around the Old City scares me. When I got there at 7:30 it took about half an hour for the police to let us in. Then we had the “No praying no bowing no kneeling no singing, no religious activity” thing and the customary full body search for any religious articles including a complete emptying of the contents of my wallet just like my two year old Daffy does when I leave it within her reach. In case there is religious contraband tucked away in one of the pockets or folds of my wallet.
We get up there, me in my Vibram 5-fingers, others in flip-flops, Feiglin in socks because he intends to go right up to Kipat HaSelah, Dome of the Rock so he can’t have any shoes on at all. I was intending to go one step closer than I usually go, but I’m not ready to go up to the Dome yet, and Moshe asked us politely not to anyway, and to leave the דין כיבוש stuff to him, no problem with that.
We get to the gate and immediately we hear in the background some Alla-hu Akbars. They are faint and I don’t mind them. I know they mean to insult me and intimidate me, but I can’t but wholeheartedly agree with them. God is great. Thank you Arabs for noticing, and for timing your chants with the entrance of God’s representatives here, us. So I can’t but feel flattered.
As we continue on, the chants get louder and more Arabs begin to congregate around us, fine, no problem. Nobody has violated the non aggression principle yet. Everyone has a right to chant God is Great at me as much as they want. I keep smiling and walking slowly. Heavily armed police surround us.
Non Jewish tourists, mostly Jesus-worshipers, stare at us and wonder why we are the focus of all the Akbars. Two old ladies from the Jesus group join us, apparently from Australia. They want to be part of the excitement, apparently.
And then the trigger. The Waqf guy sent each time to oversee that we don’t do anything religious is standing in front of us. Then Moshe goes up to one of the police guys and tells him that it was agreed with the higherups in the police department that at least for part of the time, the Waqf guy would not be our escort. So, to the police guy’s credit, he starts to escort the Waqf guy away from us. A scuffle ensues, and the Waqf guy is removed.
And then the chants get really loud and the number of screaming Arabs multiplies to hundreds, possibly over a 1000, but I’d have to see an aerial picture.
The news says that “a couple of young Arabs began screaming” but that is quite far from what was happening. Arabs of all ages began converging on us, men, women, a few kids, young and old alike, כל העם מקצה as they say in Sodom. מנער ועד זקן טף ונשים.
They start getting closer, and I start feeling a bit smushed. My heart rate only now begins to jump up a bit. Just a bit. Police are on all sides of us pushing away Arabs jumping in our direction.
The old Jesus ladies try to calm us down and say, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Lord!” One Lord for every two Jesuses. The Jesus-thanking is not helping me slow my heart rate, and I really feel caught between Esav and Yishmael now, though Yishmael wants to kill me and Esav just wants me to thank Jesus. I just want to daven, but the Jewish policemen for sure are not going to be happy about that, and they’re busy at the moment pushing away rioters so I’d rather not give them a hard time.
The police turn us around about 1/5th into our circuit. We’re headed back. Michael Puah has the camera, telling everyone to calmly smile, and Moshe is in the middle walking calmly as he always does. As we head back, I see one rock the size of a grapefruit fly above me and land about 10 feet behind me. So I stop looking at Feiglin in favor of keeping my eyes out for any rocks headed toward my skull.
I didn’t see any others.
One of the Jesus ladies asks me what group this is. I say it’s Feiglin’s group. She says who? I say Moshe Feiglin. Sudden recognition and excitement on her face. “Oh, Moshe Feiglin?! Where is he? Can I shake his hand?!”
“Sure,” I say. “He’s over there, in the suit.” She rushes up to him and shakes his hand.
“We’re with you,” she says to Moshe, “the nations are with you. We’re from Australia. Thank you Jesus!” Moshe shakes her hand and smiles back at her.
We get off Har Habayit. Then a Mahane Yehuda-looking Jew sees Feiglin and immediately insists on a picture with him.
“אני לא תומך בך” he says. “I am not one of your supporters,” “אבל אתה בוודאי תהיה ראש הממשלה הבא”. “But you will definitely be the next prime minister.”
He takes a picture, still holding his cigarette, with Moshe. We disperse.
The police now have two choices for next month. Ban Moshe Feiglin from Har Habayit, or ban Arabs from Har Habayit while Moshe is there. Let’s see what they do.
The worst part about the whole experience was not the Arab rioters. Rioting is what they’re good at and it doesn’t disappoint me. It was not the rocks, as I can easily dodge them. And it was not the fact that the rioters were not expelled from Har Habayit instead of us, who were being peaceful. I expect nothing from the police, and the fact that they prevented Arabs from physically attacking us (rocks aside) is more than I expected. Good for them.
No, the worst part was as I was driving away I hear on the news that “Knesset Member and Vice Knesset Chairman Moshe Feiglin was removed from Har Habayit today along with a group of right wing activists after rioters began shouting at them and throwing rocks.”
They had the chutzpa to call ME a “RIGHT WING ACTIVIST?!”
GROSS!
Check in next month for more “Adventures with Yishmael on Har Habayit!”
Back to blogging. Things are heating up. You may have heard that the Knesset will be debating the issue of Jewish sovereignty on the Temple Mount this Tuesday. I’ll be going. I don’t really like the term “Jewish Sovereignty” because it’s an Orwellian term. It really means that the agents of the State of Israel will control what goes on at the Temple Mount, instead of what the situation is now, which is that the Jordanian state decides it.
If we are to stick to strict libertarian theory as to what should be done with Mount Moriah, the answer is give it to the nearest Kohen Meyuchas, or ancestor of a Kohen that can actually trace his lineage to someone who served in the temple 1944 years ago before it was destroyed. They are the last ones to have owned the place rightfully, so gather them all together (and there are a few of them around) and give private ownership of Har Habayit to them by shares of stock in it and let them decide what to do with it. The Arabs can take what’s on the surface and get off, or stay on, if that’s what the majority of Kohanim Meyuchasim decide.
But I digress. This won’t happen. So the next best thing is to give it to some State of Israel official who is something of a next of kin, since we’re at least related to the Kohanim. And this just came one step closer to happening 2 weeks ago. It was quite poetic actually.
How it happened
The status of Har Habayit has never come up in the Knesset. Ever. This is the first time since the destruction of the Temple that a Jewish authority will even discuss it. So how did it happen?
The Knesset has its own weird parliamentary rules. Moshe Feiglin brought up the motion to discuss the status of Har Habayit with the goal of having the Knesset pass a resolution to allow Jews to enter the compound from all gates and to pray there. The status quo currently is that Jews can only come through one gate, between 7am and 10pm only on certain days in very small groups, must be surrounded by police at all times, cannot carry any “contraband” including religious articles to the site, move their lips in prayer, bow, look at the Waqf the wrong way, or steal the Dome of the Rock.
The weird parliamentary rules are these: Once Feiglin brought up the motion, the Speaker can either deny a vote, at which point the motion goes to committee, or call a vote. If the vote passes, the discussion will happen. If the vote fails, the discussion will not happen. (A “discussion” is basically when Knesset Members are invited to the podium to bloviate. The only one who ever actually says anything of substance is Moshe.) So basically the speaker can either deny a vote and let the fate of the motion be decided in committee, or he can roll the dice with an immediate vote which will decide the fate of the motion immediately.
The Speaker at the time was the loveable Ahmed Tibi, the loud-mouthed Arab gynecologist and envy of all sewer rats. In the plenum at the time were Tibi, Feiglin, Amir “Unionize this Mustache” Peretz and Yisrael Eichler the Haredi guy. Tibi figured the numbers were on his side. He’d vote against a discussion of Jewish Sovereignty on Holy Al Aqsa, Peretz would too because he’s a lefty, Eichler would too because he’s Haredi and thinks Jews going up to Har Habayit is like Nadav and Avihu offering up Esh Zarah and holy fire will descend from heaven, so he thought it’d be 3 to 1 against and the whole issue would die right there.
But Tibi tracht und God blacht. Tibi called the vote. Tibi votes no. Feiglin votes yes. So far it’s tied.
It goes to Mustache Peretz…and he isn’t even paying attention. No vote.
So it all comes down to Eichler. He looks at Moshe and Tibi, and decides, to hell with holy fire, let the Jews discuss it, and he’d rather be on Moshe’s side on this one than Tibi. He votes yes.
And suddenly, for the first time in one thousand nine hundred and forty-four years, the Jews will discuss their own sovereignty on Har Habayit this Tuesday.
If we take a step back, this is a structurally flawless mircocosm of what’s going on now in Jewish history. The Jewish ideologue proposes a vote to bring geulah one step closer. The Arab, thinking he will win, puts all his cards on the table and forces the other two Jews – the secular socialist and the haredi socialist, to make a decision. The secular socialist is asleep at the wheel. And the haredi tips the scales.
And God takes a small bow, making sure only the astute even notice the divine choreography at play here.
In an interview today on Galei Yisrael, Feiglin hinted that he has something planned for Obama’s trip regarding freeing Jonathan Pollard. At the very end of the interview, the journalist asked if he can share what he has up his sleeve.
Feiglin answered, “Do you want Pollard, or do you want a headline?”
“Are they mutually exclusive?” the interviewer asked.
“In this case they could be, so I’d rather keep it quiet.”
This is my own translation of an article in Ma’ariv (original here) written by some guy who’s pretty decent, but doesn’t quite understand the concept of liberty all that well. To him, it’s a government guy saying he’ll fight for someone’s right to marry someone of the same sex, as if it matters who the government says you can marry at all, as if marriage were some sort of government institution. Marriage is whatever private people want it to be.
Moshe Feiglin himself does not fully grasp what liberty is, though he’s pretty close. According to him, the “status of the classical heterosexual family” has to be “protected,” as if saying that if the government does not actively “protect the classical family,” all of society will disintegrate into dysfunctional and total homosexuality.
What Feiglin doesn’t like, and I agree with him, is the government stealing money from one group and giving it to gay people. But the author of this article sounds like he’d like his own government goon to spend someone else’s money to promote same sex marriage with government funded advertising campaigns or something. I just want people to do whatever the heck they want to do without stealing money from anybody through government programs.
If the government subsidizes a gay couple (like gives them a tax break for being married according to the government), the people who don’t like gay couples get angry. If the government subsidizes a straight couple, the gay people who also want the subsidy get angry for not having “the right to be married”. It’s got nothing to do with a right to be married. It has to do with the right not to be stolen from. If straight people can get stolen from less (get a tax break) for being married, why can’t gay people? It’s always about money. Not marriage or love or tolerance. Let’s not forget that.
All Feiglin really should say is that the gay community should do whatever it wants, raise its own money, and stop trying to legislate laws which cost money and force unwilling people to pay for something they don’t believe in. And that as an MK, he will make sure neither straights nor gays are being stolen from by government unequally.
Gay Jews, I call a truce! How about this: We the straight people promise to not get government to fund straight causes. You the gay people promise to not get government to fund gay causes. Then we can all go out for a drink at a mixed gay/straight bar. I’ll have the vanilla vodka with sprinkles and a cherry. You’ll have the whisky. Then we’ll go home and both do our familial thing, whatever that is.
This article was a Kiddush Hashem. Whoever doesn’t see that and is wrapped up in the “homosexual abomination” thing, really does not have his eye on the ball of how healing this is. Moshe, thank you for doing this. Keep it up.
Feiglin and the Gay Community; a Reconciliation
The historic visit of the religious right wing MK at a gay hangout in Tel Aviv at first looked like a recipe for disaster • But then came the moment when he told how the story of how the son of a good friend came out of the closet and had a conversation with him that “influenced [him] more than any discussion on the topic ever could.”
Rabbi Ron Yosef is the only openly gay Orthodox Rabbi in Israel. “First of all, the fact that there is dialogue between the gay community and religious public figures – that’s a statement,” he tells me when I ask him about the significance of what is going to happen here tonight. “Once people see someone like Feiglin of Likud, considered a right winger, and as a religious person even known as a little extreme in some ways – it says to people: Wait a minute, something’s happening here. The very fact that this discourse will lead to questions for both sides as well as the public is great news.”
Afterwards I ask him why he thought Feiglin – who has in the past came out against gay pride parades, and even penned an article entitled “I am a proud homophobe” – suddenly decided to come here, to the Association for the Gay Community on Nahmani Street in Tel Aviv. Rabbi Ron Yosef replied to me that in his opinion, he realizes that there is a community in the country that has a right to have its voice heard and that as a public servant, he can no longer ignore it.” But just then, we heard a shout of “Please clear the way!” and the new (and a bit too tall, one might add) MK Moshe Feiglin entered the room followed by hordes of photographers trampling everything in their path, including Orthodox rabbis, homosexuals and journalists like me.
But it doesn’t matter, because the answer to my question I got an hour and fifteen minutes later, at the most intriguing moment of the evening in my opinion. One man threw bitter accusations at Feiglin that people like him, public figures, who speak against homosexuality in public, sow public homophobia that leads to murder. That moment was the first time that evening I saw Feiglin’s face change, and for a moment, this man – who throughout the evening had kept a cool that in my opinion very few are able to keep – looked as if something in him cracked, maybe even softened.
“In a way I have changed,” he said in the broken tone of an average man rather than that of a member of Knesset, and went on to tell how recently the son of one of his best friends came out of the closet in a conversation that “affected him more than any other discussion on the topic.”
I believed him. It was too human a moment not to believe him. Up until that point he had thrown all sorts of phrases in the air that had surprised me: “Within the framework of my own Jewish faith, a belief that integrates identity, inner meaning, and liberty, the freedom of all people is almost, I would say, the foundation… and so, in the most basic natural sense of my own understanding of Judaism, I fight for the freedom of every person and first and foremost the freedom of my people, which is also your freedom. I fight for you as much as anyone else. ” At one point he even stopped one of the speakers and told him that he came here to find where the two sides can identify rather than fight.
It was not easy. I must say the room felt like it was loaded with a sort of anger and there were several people in the audience from the gay community who I felt did not really come to listen, but to saturate Feiglin with the anger and frustration that had built up within them for years. But Feiglin was not really affected by it.
It seemed as if he knew that this was part of the game and that he honestly came here to be part of a genuine dialogue. The whole evening he sat with legs crossed and played with his fingers and just listened, commented at the appropriate times, and even laid out his philosophy concerning the classical nuclear family – a philosophy that he knew would not be welcomed very openly in the place he was sitting. “The classical family is the building block of society. If it falls apart – we would have no society,” he declared. And no one applauded.
Bridging the gap
I do not think that Moshe Feiglin will ever really be the spokesman for the gay community in Israel, and I do not believe we will ever hear him voicing support for a family that includes two fathers or two mothers, and despite his declarations, there is still a long way between him and the title of Freedom Fighter. But one must compliment him for the effort and courage to come here today and start the discussion. I think this is what “openness” is.
Towards the end of the evening Feiglin said: “The importance of the conversation is the very fact that it is taking place and dialogue is starting.” I wrote myself a note in my notepad: In the GLBT youth lounge at 9:20pm in Tel Aviv, I realized that the gap is still wide, but the sides are getting closer. Judging by the satisfied smile of Rabbi Ron Yosef on my right, it seems he understood that as well.
Next will be Feiglin the lunch box, Feiglin the breakfast cereal, and of course, Feiglin the flamethrower! (The kids love that one.)
I’ve seen the movie, it is extremely well done. We’re going after the whole pie now. We want the Likud chairmanship, and we’re going to take it. Time to step on the gas.
The Jewish Libertarian 