Muslims can call for sharia law, condemn the United States as “The Great Satan,” call for the destruction of Israel, and shout down speakers at college forums — but heaven forbid that anyone should speak ill of the “Religion of Peace.”

Muslims raised a ruckus because Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, an intelligence officer who has been critical of Islam, was scheduled to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast. He has withdrawn from the event. Muslims have protested pro-Israel speakers on college campuses and other venues, and have sent their minions in to scream and shout until the speakers give up and leave.

Freedom of speech, it seems, is only permissible when it conforms to the Muslim way of thinking. Now they are able to control who speaks at our nation’s military academies. Sharia law is on the horizon.

Not revealed in last week’s editorial “Primary Concerns” is that Saul Alinsky authored the book “Rules for Radicals.” He taught that radicals do not flaunt their radicalism, but infiltrate the system from within. In 1985, Barack Obama began serving as a community organizer in Chicago working for the Developing Communities Project, which was an Alinskyite group. Alinsky believed that the ends justify the means. How can The Jewish Standard defend this person and his ideas?

In an article in the Jan. 27 issue about the closing of the Gittelman Day School, the word “mensches” appeared as part of a quote. There is no such word in German or in Yiddish.

In the Feb. 4, issue the error was repeated on page 3, but by the time we got to page 8, the error was corrected. Well almost, but not quite. While you printed the correct plural form, there is no “t” in Mensch or in Menschen. While some might consider this nitpicking, I feel strongly that a publication has an obligation to use proper spelling and grammar at all times.

WASHINGTON – Anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East is not merely characterized by sharp political differences. It mimics and is fueled by the most defamatory and dangerous of historical anti-Jewish themes. For confirmation, we need look no further than a widely published political cartoonist, a Jordan-based Palestinian named Emad Hajjaj. His cartoons regularly feature blatant incitement, equating Israel with the Third Reich, crudely caricaturing Jews as bloodthirsty monsters, portraying menorahs as weapons, and showing the “crucifixion” of Palestinians on a cross marked by a Star of David.

None of this is exceptional. What is surprising, or should be, is the international indifference to — indeed, complicity in — vile and incendiary Arab anti-Semitism without parallel, quantitatively or qualitatively, on the Israeli side of the regional divide. Yet B’nai B’rith has found that among those claimed as clients by Hajjaj’s public relations firm Abu Mahjoob Creative Productions Company are not only several local government bodies, but also foreign organizations such as the British Council and the major corporations Visa, Orange, the German industrial giant Siemens, and others. If this was not bad enough, the firm’s client list features multiple agencies of the United Nations — including the United Nations Development Fund for Women (now merged into U.N. Women), the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF.

Over the past weeks, protests have spread throughout Israel calling for a response to racism targeted at the country’s Ethiopian community. Sparked by a Channel 2 story on discrimination in Kityat Malachi, citizens have taken to the streets to show their outrage at the status quo. Although the despicable slurs and actions that triggered these protests are blatant examples of these grievances, they conceal a deeper issue.

Beyond more overt examples, Ethiopian Israelis are often considered less desirable neighbors, and frequently have a harder time finding a job. They are perceived as a poor, underprivileged community, and face the stigma of lacking the capability to contribute equally, even if this myth is belied by reality. Some of this is outright racism, but the rest is symptomatic of a deeper and far more widespread prejudice: indirect or concealed racism.

JERUSALEM — The recent violence in Beit Shemesh and in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood has led me to speak out against the so-called “sikrikim” in the harshest possible terms, equating their actions to terrorism. Sikrikim — Sicarii-ites — is the name given to a fringe anti-Zionist vigilante group, loosely linked to Neturei Karta and said to have been at the forefront of many of the recent violent attacks against innocent Israelis.

In my mind, there is a dangerous similarity in their actions and those of Islamist terrorists. I do not use this comparison lightly. As the founder of the ZAKA rescue and recovery organization, I know only too well the horror of terror.

Let me state this clearly. Despite some news reports, I am not a candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s Ninth Congreessional District. I am considering becoming a candidate, however, and I so informed the Bergen County Republican Organization (BCPO). People considering becoming candidated had until Jan. 31 to inform the BCPO of their interest; otherwise, they could not be considered for the party’s nomination (although they could run in a primary).

It was 9:58 p.m. Sunday evening. The day before, Syria launched its assault on Homs. It is said that anywhere between 217 and 260 people were killed by Bashar al-Assad’s forces on that first day. On Sunday, it is estimated that an additional 60 people were killed.

In southern Afghanistan, a bomb planted near a market killed a little girl and injured three boys. In northwestern Pakistan, another bomb killed a Pakistani soldier and wounded 11 others.

At 9:58 p.m., e-mail blasts — the modern equivalent of breaking news bulletins — arrived from both The New York Times and National Public Radio: The New York Giants defeated the New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl.

On Jan. 20, police in Wayne entered the home of an elderly man named Donald Domsky. They found him lying dead in a doorway. He had been dead in that doorway since sometime in December 2010. In the intervening 13 months, his mail kept piling up outside his home; his grass went unmowed; he defaulted on his property taxes and his utilities. Yet in all that time, no one bothered to knock on his door, or call the police, not even the people from Wayne’s public works department who responded to neighbor complaints and came to mow the lawn. The neighbors complained about the grass, but not about the fact that the old man whose grass it was had been missing for many months.

This is the nature of the society in which we live. We are more concerned with what happens on a football field than on a killing field. We are more concerned about the unsightliness of an overgrown lawn than the lack of any sighting of the person who should be mowing it.

We ravenously throw our arms around materialism, but keep our neighbors at arms’ length.

This is not a Jewish issue, in the sense that the “we” here encompasses everyone, Jews and non-Jews alike. Clearly, the issue is a general societal one.

Yet it is a specific Jewish issue, as well, because creating a better world — tikkun olam — is not merely a Jewish issue, it is the Jewish mission.

Perhaps our community can establish and coordinate a “year of Jewish values,” during which all levels of the education spectrum — from early childhood to adult — create and teach specific Jewish values, while pulpit rabbis devote a sermon a month to those same values. Perhaps, too, our educators, rabbis, and social workers can put their minds together to create a “Jewish values fair” or some similar event that will entertain, yet educate. Perhaps we can create a “conversations curriculum” that parents and children can use around the dinner table on Friday evenings during this “year of Jewish values.”

Jewish values are not for Jews alone and many are not even unique to us. If we remind ourselves of what those values are, however, perhaps we can inspire the greater community in which we live to do the same.