‘Jewish Indiana Jones’ admits NY Torah fraud

NEW YORK (AP) — A Jewish charity co-founder who claimed he traveled the world as a “Jewish Indiana Jones” to rescue Torahs pleaded guilty to fraud charges Thursday, saying he lied when he claimed he had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls in Europe and Israel for six years.
Menachem Youlus entered the plea to mail and wire fraud charges in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Youlus is the owner of the Jewish Bookstore in Wheaton, Md., where he lives. A plea deal with prosecutors called for him to serve up to five years and three months in prison.
“I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct,” Youlus, 50, said as he described the lies he told between 2004 and 2010 to obtain funds from his Save a Torah charity and some of its contributors.
Prosecutors said he defrauded the charity he founded and its donors out of $862,000.
The government said he fabricated detailed accounts of exploits to recover Torahs lost or hidden during the Holocaust, including at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
During his plea, he said his lies included telling prospective buyers that he had personally retrieved parts of one scroll from a metal box at Auschwitz.
A criminal complaint said Youlus had distributed Torahs he bought from U.S. dealers to synagogues and congregations nationwide, sometimes at inflated rates. It said he put nearly a third of $1.2 million collected by the charity into his personal accounts, spending some of it on private school tuition for his children and on personal expenses, including meals and health care.
The publicly stated mission of the charity was to locate and acquire Torahs that survived the Holocaust or had been taken from Jewish communities worldwide and repair them so they could be used in communities that need them. But authorities said Youlus rarely traveled abroad during the years he had claimed to go Torah hunting.
At a 2004 Torah dedication, Youlus wrote: “I guess you could call me the Jewish Indiana Jones,” the complaint said, referencing the action-adventure hero played by Harrison Ford in the 1981 Stephen Spielberg classic “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
In a statement, attorney Benjamin Brafman said he will seek leniency at a June 21 sentencing for Youlus, “a good man with the best of intentions who ultimately strayed into fraudulent conduct that he now accepts full responsibility for.”

http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/D%C3%A9claration_du_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ral_Bonaparte_au_peuple_%C3%A9gyptien

“Cheikhs, cadis, imams, chorbadjis et notable de la nation, dites au peuple que les Français sont aussi de vrais musulmans. La preuve en est qu’ils sont allés à Rome et ont renversé le gouvernement du pape, qui poussait toujours les chrétiens à faire la guerre aux musulmans.

Ils ont ensuite été à Malte et ont détruit les chevaliers qui prétendaient que Dieu leur ordonnait de faire la guerre aux musulmans.

De tout temps, les Français sont les vrais amis du sultan ottoman (que Dieu éternise son empire!) et les ennemis de ses ennemis.”

Vom Kriege wider die Türken, 1528

“Even in our own times, what was Muenzer seeking, except to become a new Turkish emperor? He was possessed of the spirit of lies and therefore there was no holding him back; he had to go at the other work of the devil, take the sword and murder and rob, as the spirit of murder drove him, and he created such a rebellion and such misery.”

Calvinist leader Theodore Beza also, in his 1574 political treatise that advocated the right of armed resistance against tyrants, considered the Ottoman system to be an entity whose notions of “justice” totally differed even from very deficient Christian states:

http://www.constitution.org/cmt/beza/magistrates.htm#ques6

“d) But perhaps there will not be wanting those who will furnish the (example of) the authority of the Turkish emperor over his subjects. I should wish these to have their answer in a single word: an empire of that description does not deserve to be called either kingly or human, but wholly barbarous, tyrannical, uncivilized and detestable, especially because whereas the other monarchies and empires, to however many faults they may have been subject, were still instruments suitable for the preservation of human society, it is obvious that on the contrary this Turkish tyranny is an awful scourge of God by means of which God in accordance with his just judgment threatens this world with its final ruin and overthrow.

Therefore, if there are men to be found today who are counselors to kings so that these may fashion an example and an image of their rule from that source, I proclaim with a clear and loud voice that those Turks should be deemed the public enemies of humankind and should be cast out in banishment.”

And as if to fulfill Beza’s prophecy; when Napoleon (widely seen as antichrist-figure by conservative Christians) entered Egypt in 1798, he tried to win the locals over to his side by telling them how well French revolutionaries could get along with Islam:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Campaign_in_Egypt_and_Syria#Disembarkation_at_Alexandria

“Cadis, cheiks, imans, tchorbadjis, [I ask you to] tell the people that we are true Muslims too. Wasn’t it us who destroyed the Knights of Malta? Wasn’t it us who destroyed the Pope who used to say that he had a duty to make war on Muslims? Wasn’t it us who have at all times been friends to the Great Lord (the sultan) and enemies to his enemies?”

While to his own troops, Bonaparte preached pure multicultural dogma:

“The peoples we will be living alongside are Muslims; their first article of faith is “There is no other god but God, and Mahomet is his prophet”. Do not contradict them; treat them as you treated the Jews, the Italians; respect their muftis and their imams, as you respected their rabbis and bishops. Have the same tolerance for the ceremonies prescribed by the Quran, for their mosques, as you had for the convents, for the synagogues, for the religion of Moses and that of Jesus Christ. The Roman legions used to protect all religions.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ron-paul-signed-off-on-racist-newsletters-sources-say/2012/01/20/gIQAvblFVQ_story.html

I wish that he were doing better in the primaries, because the press goes nuts over these newsletters, and they would be talked about constantly.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/021579.html

“Rawls arrives at his conception of “justice” by asking what sort of society people would choose to create if none of them had any knowledge of their particular personal characteristics. All they can know is that they will exist as a mere rational agent of some sort. He then concludes that the collective preferences of these abstract pseudo-agents are determinative of a just society. This is a truly stunning assertion, because in Rawls’s calculus all of the things which are relevant to justice have been dismissed as morally irrelevant: one’s history, family, sex, abilities, propensities for virtue, motivation, intelligence, not to mention one’s work and accomplishments. None of that can be morally relevant in determining what you are “due” in the Rawlsian system. And so what we get is something that is just the opposite of justice: a society where the only relevant consideration is egalitarian “fairness.” This notion of fairness implies that “justice” demands equality of outcome no matter how the inequalities come about.

Rawls’s political philosophy is perfect for liberal gnostics who refuse to dignify the particulars of human existence with any meaning.”

To Gnosticism-infected Christians, the significance of (say) Jesus Christ being a flesh-and-blood descendant of king David, “Son of David”, could well seem hard to comprehend. What possible importance could that have to them? Or the blood-atonement of Christ, for that matter?

The Docetic heresy was based on this anti-flesh prejudice, turning the Messiah into a bloodless, ghostly avatar or bodhisattva-figure.

But, along with Berry, many respected Reformed theologians reject the “tripartite” division of man and point out its Greek influence, preferring instead a “holistic” view.

Cornelius Van Til, Herman Bavinck, the great B.B. Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen, all reject the tripartite view, as does their disciple Dr. Greg Bahnsen, who has a great analytical article on the mind/body problem in philosophy:

http://www.cmfnow.com/articles/pa143.htm

“What is matter? Never mind! What is mind? Never matter!” ~ Warfield.

I remain unconvinced of your program, Henderson, though, as I’ve said before, I sympathize with the direction you’re moving and think we need much more of it.

(I share your frustration with White-Nationalists and their discussions of race.)

As a Van Tillian, I remain committed to the position that “race” is ultimately a spiritual category (a category that draws all the particular physical features, like genetics, culture, linguistics and family-line, into a relevant relationship with each other.)

But, I’m also committed to the idea that God could take one-hundred white-marbles and divide them into 10 equal groups — where all else is equal but the division — and we’d have legitimate, non-arbitrary distinctions among the 100 marbles.

“Race” is how God thinks about people-groups (and subsequently, we humans are endowed with an affinity for the group we’ve been placed in). He makes the “actors” on the stage of history. He develops the context of man.

This sort of work should be done by theologians-in-training at the anthropology department in the local seminary — too bad they’re busy working for Satan.

I disagree that one must insist upon this. One could just as easily view the mind as flesh, and therefore part of the body. At best, you could argue that the mind is at the point where body and soul converge, but I see no reason to insist that the mind is an entity separate from the body.

I also think Wendell Berry is very helpful on this score. He rejects the dualism of body and soul:

“They conclude that the formula for man-making is man = body + soul. But that conclusion cannot be derived, except by violence, from Genesis 2:7, which is not dualistic. The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man = body + soul; the formula there is soul = dust + breath…”

At the risk of spamming can I remind all British citizens to sign this e-petition: No to 70 million.

At 100,000 signatures the government is supposed to allow a debate on the matter in parliament, its well past that now but the bigger the numbers the louder the message. I realise its a very mild anti-immigration measure, not nearly enough and of course ‘they’ don’t want to do anything, but thats the beauty of the petition, its so mild that no one could object to signing it.