But Turkey and Israel take the prize for countries playing on both sides. Turkey planned and staged its shootdown of a Russian warplane to disrupt development of a genuine coalition against ISIS, preferring instead to press ahead with its war against the Kurds and Assad. The Turks have been allowing militants to cross their border from Syria with relatively little impediment, a point raised by Obama in recent discussions. More to the point, they have been exchanging weapons and cash for oil, which ISIS is pumping out of the fields that it has occupied in Syria and Iraq. Turkish President Erdogan’s son Bilal is behind the syndicate that exports and sells the oil, transactions that might well amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. An attempt to investigate Bilal in 2013 was derailed when his father intervened to fire all the prosecutors and policemen involved. Turkey will not be joining the fray against ISIS at any time soon.
And then there is Israel, which has made clear that it prefers terrorists to Assad.
Jonathan Pollard, American Who Spied for Israel, Released After 30 Years
Others said he deserved to be punished, but believe the fervor in the American intelligence community was exacerbated by bias. Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer, said he would have kept Mr. Pollard behind bars for life. But he added: “With some folks, the emotional intensity of the Pollard issue unquestionably springs from a fairly serious anti-Israeli sentiment. Some of those are anchored in anti-Semitism.”
In 1998, President Bill Clinton considered releasing him to seal an Israeli-Palestinian, peace agreement, only to back off after George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director,threatened to resign. President Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, last yearproposed more or less the same thing, but it went nowhere.
Taboola: Recommended Content
Seven years before Taboola started, we were just a bunch of geeks in the Israeli army, passionate about the unique problems that can be solved with advanced mathematics. In the early days, Adam Singolda, our Founder & CEO, became passionate about the discovery problem as he realized that people don’t really wake up in the morning thinking about new videos or articles they would like to consume that day. Search could never solve that problem: how can someone search for something they don’t even know exists?
In July 2007, Taboola was founded and we began thinking about content consumption patterns, and ways to predict the videos people may like before ever expressing an interest in watching them. It took us 3.5 years to innovate around what became the foundation for Taboola’s mathematical predictive engine, Taboola EngageRank™, that later became part of publishers’ workflows given its various optimization capabilities. This algorithmic innovation around video then helped Taboola broaden its solution to recommend articles and slideshows, providing world-leading publishers with a single, ultimate discovery and monetization solution.
.. Taboola is the world’s leading content discovery platform, serving 300B recommendations to over 550M unique visitors each month on the web’s most innovative publisher sites, including NBC, USA Today, The Weather Channel, The Atlantic and Fox Sports.
The ‘Shidduch Crisis’ Has Led to an Orthodox Obsession with Female Beauty
The boy turns back to the driver: “But don’t you agree, sir, that if you have the most precious diamond in the world, you keep it wrapped up? You don’t take it to the streets to show the entire world?”
The girl gasps silently — she is taken backwards in time, back to the apologetics they taught in 7th grade, again and again, bas melech, kol kvoda pnima, a princess’s honor is all inside, a divine jewel to be kept hidden…
But before she can respond, the driver presses the brakes. He turns around and faces the yeshiva boy, and says slowly, his voice shaking with rage: “Listen to me, boy. This is not an object you’re talking about. This is a living, breathing human being.”
.. “I need a gorgeous girl,” one older businessman tells me over the phone, his intonations straight out of the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva. I say that I may have a young woman for him, it might be worth a date. Then I think it over again and say, actually, I’m so sorry, I just realized that she’s not for you, sorry, never mind, I will think of someone else.
He is offended. He’s already seen her picture — he is struck by her beauty. “But why? Why isn’t she for me?”
I sigh and finally admit: “She’s looking for an erudite, a Harvard boy, someone really intellectual, worldly…”
“That’s not fair,” he objects. I am not allowed to judge, he says.
“So, let me get this straight,” I fire back. “Your demands for a gorgeous girl must be met, yet her demands for an intellectual mean nothing? Why is that any more harsh?”
.. I am told — here, it’s not uncommon for a young man to refuse to go out with a girl because he heard that she was once overweight in high school.
.. So when I am told constantly, that the religious world protects women from being objectified, by omitting their images — that this reflects some “essential community value” of appreciating women’s inner beauty over externals, I can’t help but laugh at how out of touch this is from reality.
.. Today’s religious woman is caught between two extreme worlds — a religious world which offers only contradictions, which tells us that our beauty is key to happiness in life yet we should also hide ourselves lest we attract attention, and a secular world which seems to equate liberty with exhibitionism.
.. I am reminded of Daisy Buchanan’s haunting words about her own small daughter: ”I hope she’ll be a fool — that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
.. And it is evident on social media today, on Instagram feeds and private Facebook and WhatsApp groups — where religious women are creating their own alternative media, a place where their faces can exist.
I recommend that the leadership remain ahead of the game.