Defending the Indefensible

The editor in chief of the new joke "Ami magazine" does a horrendous interview with Zev Brenner in which he defends the Skvere Rebbe, attacks bloggers, and basically insults our intelligence and that of his host for a half hour. In this story that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, wherein it is revealed that New Square residents were harassed for years and violence was going on for the longest time in which police, residents, and most importantly, the Skvere Rebbe, were complicit in condoning and encouraging bullying, terrorizing, and harassment against fine, ehrliche yidden who simply wanted to daven in a different shul. There can be no excuse for any of these crimes, and for this sick, horrible excuse for a magazine publisher to try and (quite pathetically, I might add) exonerate the Skvere rabbi for his part in these atrocities is criminal. For him to then attack bloggers and say that these message bearers are any worse than the horrendous criminals and their defenders (himself being one of their staunchest supporters) is to sink to a whole new low.

One of the only rabbis to condemn the attacks says, "The system needs to be scrapped... the machine is the problem. It isn’t the cogs" and "the Torah is designed to create a positive social environment for growth and spiritual development. It can’t be that poverty, oppression, terror and anti-social behavior are the darchei noam, pleasant ways of the Torah. It just can't."