Interesting Posts and Articles #33

1. Did Chevron exist at the time of Yehoshua?
2. Lazer Beams:
   

   The Melitzer Rebbe stresses that indiscriminate calls for people to move immediately to Israel are irresponsible, and that it's no mitzva to bring a person here and make him or her suffer. On the other hand, a person is required to forever strive to move here, and should make longterm plans to do so.

   On the short term, the Melitzer says that each case has its own merits, and each person should carefully consider his or her individual situation with their local rov.

3. Obama as apostate Muslim? From an Op-Ed in the New York Times:
   

   As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.
   ...
   It is true that the criminal codes in most Muslim countries do not mandate execution for apostasy (although a law doing exactly that is pending before Iran’s Parliament and in two Malaysian states). But as a practical matter, in very few Islamic countries do the governments have sufficient authority to resist demands for the punishment of apostates at the hands of religious authorities.
   ...
   

   Because no government is likely to allow the prosecution of a President Obama — not even those of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the only two countries where Islamic religious courts dominate over secular law — another provision of Muslim law is perhaps more relevant: it prohibits punishment for any Muslim who kills any apostate, and effectively prohibits interference with such a killing.

   At the very least, that would complicate the security planning of state visits by President Obama to Muslim countries, because the very act of protecting him would be sinful for Islamic security guards. More broadly, most citizens of the Islamic world would be horrified by the fact of Senator Obama’s conversion to Christianity once it became widely known — as it would, no doubt, should he win the White House.

4. Hillary turns fire on media
   

   Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is increasingly aiming its punches not at her front-running opponent Barack Obama, but at the media.
   

5. My post on Rabbi Meir Baal HaNes and the segulah for finding a lost object.
6. Life In Israel has a post about halachic revisionism, heter mechira, and Rav Shlomo Zalman Aurbach.
7. Using a magnet to turn off the speech center of the brain.