As the school year finally began this year in Israel, following the teacher’s strike, Meretz MK Yossi Sarid made an appeal on the “Voice of Israel” radio newsreel.

Sarid advised principals, teachers and parents to be on the lookout for Rabbis or Yeshiva students who may lurk anywhere near schoolyards, kindergarten teachers or nursery school promoters who may want to seduce children to enter their preschool programs, and/or “anyone with a religious look” who may be “encroaching in your neighborhood”.

Sarid then followed with an “assurance”.

This year, Sarid said reassuredly, “we have set up commando units, yes, commando units, in every secular neighborhood. We have set up hotlines throughout the country. The job of the commando units and the hotline is to warn of encroaching religious people before they grab our children”.

And in one of the leaflets distributed at secular schools and neighborhoods, pictures of little children with yarmulkes being herded into a nursery school were captioned “Let’s stamp this out while they’re young”.

Sarid’s “hotlines” worked.

Staffers now operate such hotlines, with ample budget provided by one of Israel’s “pluralism” lobbies, with ample funds provided by contributors from North American non-Orthodox religious Jews who think that they have contributed to promote dialogue and pluralistic religious thought amongst Israeli Jews.

The results are real.

Many Israeli Secular schools and neighborhoods have now effectively eliminated any religious or Jewish content to their lives, reinforcing the continuing Israeli phenomenon of Jewish communities that develop almost an anti-Semitic modus operandi. Instead of welcoming, say, Reform or other forms of Jewish observance into secular schools and neighborhoods, the plethora of antireligious organizations have initiated a system that mitigates against any religious or Jewish influence whatsoever, while the various religious groups have simply abandoned their interest in making the effort to influence these communities that are now devoid of Judaism.

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David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.