Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 29
In an interview on CBS-TV’s “This Morning” last week, President Obama outlined his theory of the causes of terrorism: climate change is straining natural resources around the world, and “when people are not able to make a living or take care of their families,” they become “desperate,” and “as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen.” The next day, a middle-class Muslim couple who were not under any evident financial strain and were perfectly capable of taking care of their six-month old daughter, decided to massacre fourt...
Secretary of State John Kerry’s assertion that the Palestinian Arabs are in a “very dire situation” is not only absurd but also very revealing--about the fantasies that guide the Obama administration’s Middle East policy. Emerging from a meeting with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Nov. 24, Kerry declared: “I know that the situation for Palestinians in the West Bank, in Jerusalem, in Gaza is, at this moment, very dire, that there are extraordinary concerns, obviously, about the violence,” he added. “Dire”? Is he kidding or just...
A form of amnesia must be affecting the Obama administration’s former chief Mideast negotiator, Martin Indyk. It is, however, a very selective kind of amnesia—he forgets only concessions that Israel has made. Speaking recently at a conference in Tel Aviv, Indyk declared that the only reason there are no peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians is because of Israeli construction in Judea-Samaria. Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas would “become a partner tomorrow for the deal you’d like to make if there was a settlement freeze,...
The death of any Jew at the hands of Palestinian terrorists should make American Jewish organizations sit up and take notice. But the death of U.S. Jewish peace activist Richard Lakin poses a special challenge to left-of-center advocacy groups such as J Street. Lakin, 76, a retired Connecticut school principal, was a passenger on a bus in Jerusalem’s Armon HaNatziv neighborhood when two Palestinian Arab terrorists attacked with guns and knives on October 13. He passed away on October 26, from the injuries suffered in the attack. Lakin family fr...
Secretary of State John Kerry met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism. Since the Obama administration has been saying that “all sides” need to take steps to end the violence, we can presume that Kerry demanded that Israel make some new concessions. Here are a few ideas as to what Kerry might have asked for: • Reduce Checkpoints: For years, the administration has been saying that Israeli security checkpoints in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank) are “humiliating” to the Palestini...
Twenty years ago this week, Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians came to an end. So why do Israel’s critics keep claiming that Israel is still occupying the Palestinians? On Sept. 28, 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo II accord, also known as the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement. It provided for Israel’s withdrawal from the cities in Judea-Samaria where 98 percent of Palestinian Arabs reside. And in the weeks that followed, Israel did just that. Israel’s forces...
On Aug. 16, the Israeli Army revealed that Iran has been directing terrorist attacks from Syria against Israelis in the Golan Heights region. Nobody paid attention. Four days later, Iranian-sponsored rockets from Syria struck Israel’s Upper Galilee. Is anybody listening now? For weeks, supporters of Israel have been warning that the emerging Iran agreement would give Tehran funds that it could use to wage war against Israel through its proxies. But now it turns out that Iran is already waging that war. The question is, who is paying a...
The tenth anniversary of Israel’s retreat from Gaza has occasioned a number of interesting commentaries. Perhaps the most innovative comes from Shmuel Rosner, of Haaretz and the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, who views the withdrawal as a kind of triumph for Zionism, surprisingly enough. We should “rejoice” over the fact that Israel “chose” on its own to leave Gaza, Rosner contends. “We took our fate in our own hands...The Jews were not evicted... We were not driven out.” He is alluding to the classic Zionist concept of Jews taking their fate into...
“Rockets will fall on Tel Aviv,” President Obama warned on Aug. 4, claiming that if his Iran deal is rejected, military conflict will inevitably ensue. Mr. Obama seems to be betting that the rest of us have forgotten that Iranian rockets already fell on Tel Aviv last year. If rockets fell when there was no agreement in 2014, why should Israelis be frightened by warnings that rockets will fall if there is no agreement in 2015? There was a time, not so long ago, when Tel Aviv seemed immune from the dangers brewing in Gaza. Sure, border towns suc...
The Obama administration’s weak response to Iran’s latest belligerent rhetoric is reminiscent of how the U.S. responded to one of Yasser Arafat’s most infamous speeches—and illustrates one of the main dangers of the Iran nuclear agreement. Just four days after the nuclear deal was signed in Vienna, with the ink on the agreement barely dry, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, denounced America’s “arrogance” and vowed that despite the agreement, Iran will continue “supporting our friends in Palestine, Lebanon” and elsewhere. In oth...
Hillary Clinton is hoping for a “new tone” in the U.S.-Israel relationship, one Jewish leader recently claimed. But in the meantime, Israel is stuck dealing with the deadly consequences of her policies as secretary of state. Russia this week announced its intention to provide Iran with the S-300 advanced missile system. Russian president Vladimir Putin reportedly justified his action on the grounds that the missile system is for defensive purposes. In this case, however, “defensive” means that it could be used to “defend” Iran’s nuclear weapo...
(The authors are president and chairman, respectively, of the Religious Zionists of Philadelphia, and candidates on the Religious Zionist slate (www.VoteTorah.org) in the World Zionist Congress elections.) A sea change began within hours of the Israeli election returns. Thomas L. Friedman, who has devoted much of his life to promoting Palestinian statehood, declared in his New York Times column that the idea of a Palestinian state is “not possible anymore.” That was followed by his Times colleague David K. Shipler, another longtime adv...
American Jewish leaders who supported the Oslo Accords or have criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now strongly challenging the Obama administration’s policy toward Israel. It’s the latest sign of a growing consensus in the Jewish community that the president’s vindictive approach toward Israel is unfair and overreaching. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, head of the Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue and the Ramaz Day School in Manhattan, was an early supporter of the left-leaning Israeli party Meimad, and its American equivalent, Shvil Hazah...
Who misled President Obama into his losing showdown over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s blockbuster speech to Congress? And how much of this week’s setback to the president should be blamed on the “progressive” Israel lobbying group J Street? When J Street was established, its leaders chose a football metaphor to describe their purpose: they said they would serve as “President Obama’s blocking back.” In other words, they would charge into the defensive line, pushing aside critics so that Obama would be able to dictate terms to Israel. But a...
It didn’t take even a week to be refuted. On Jan. 15, noted Israel critic Peter Beinart declared that Palestinians who hate Israel never claim that they were inspired by anti-Israel incitement. Just six days later, on Jan. 21, a Palestinian who stabbed twelve Israelis on a Tel Aviv bus said he was inspired by “radical Islamic broadcasts.” Beinart is a CNN commentator, a columnist for Ha’aretz, and a fellow at a liberal think think, the New America Foundation. He made a splash in 2012 in the Jewish world with his book The Crisis of Zionism...
Lest anyone think, even for a moment, that there is even the slightest link between Islamic terror against Jews in Paris and Islamic terror against Jews in Jerusalem, the New York Times has rushed in to disabuse us of that notion. The Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren, authored a half-page article on Jan. 10 mocking the idea of such linkage. The editors helpfully added a huge color photograph of a scowling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The image of the mean, angry Netanyahu is important to trying to discredit any sympathy for h...
Remember that “arson attack” last month by “Jewish extremists” against a West Bank mosque? Remember how that outrageous assault made headline news around the world? Remember how it showed that “both sides”—not just the Arabs—are guilty of violence, and “both sides”—not only Israelis—are suffering? Well, guess what: it was a lie. The period from late October through late November was a time of escalating Palestinian terrorism against Israelis. On Oct. 22, a terrorist (or, according to the Palestinian Authority, a “hero”) drove his car into a Jer...
For years, Palestinian leaders and their media allies have claimed that the “Second Intifada”—the mass violence of 2000-2001—was a “spontaneous” uprising against Israeli “oppression.” But occasionally they tell the truth: it wasn’t spontaneous at all. It was organized by the Palestinian Authority leadership itself. Last week Mahmoud al-Zahar, co-founder of Hamas and its former foreign minister, let the cat out of the bag in an interview with the Hamas television station, Al Aqsa TV, on Dec. 12. He revealed that PA chairman Yasir Arafat hims...
They don’t have plush offices or secretaries or gala dinners, but a group of 15-year-olds on Long Island are providing an inspiring model of leadership for the rest of the American Jewish community. Tenth graders at the Rambam Mesivta High School in Lawrence, New York, recently initiated an on-line crowd sourcing campaign, which has raised an astonishing $2.4-million for the families of the four American-Israeli rabbis, and the Druze police officer, who were murdered in a Jerusalem synagogue last month. We were all horrified and saddened by the...
By Another young American man has given his life while fighting in the ranks of Islamist terrorists abroad. But this time, instead of being met with universal condemnations and scorn, the young terrorist is being greeted with sympathetic news accounts and “even-handed” statements from the State Department – all because he joined a politically correct terror group affiliated with the Palestinians. Just think. When Eric Harroun of Arizona joined an Al Qaeda group fighting in Syria last year, he was arrested as soon as he tried to re-enter the U...
As Yom Kippur sermons go, Martin Indyk’s was a doozy. Speaking at the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington, D.C. on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the former U.S. envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations accused Israel of showing “total disrespect” for the Obama administration. Indyk said many things in his Yom Kippur address with which one might take issue, but one analogy in particular stands out as especially disturbing. He said that he “discovered” in the most recent round of failed negotiations “that we would crack the whip, b...
A major American university is currently hosting a visiting novelist who says that Israel is a deeply racist country and that its creation was a “catastrophe.” And the Chicago Jewish Federation is helping to foot the bill. The Israel Studies Project at the University of Illinois, which was created by, and is funded in part by, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan of Chicago, invites Israeli writers and academics to spend time at American universities. This year’s choice, Sayed Kashua, certainly has some interesting things to say. Kashua is an...
Prominent supporters of both Israel and the Palestinian cause are now saying that the solution to the current Gaza conflict is for the Palestinian Authority to be handed control there in place of Hamas. Such thinking fails to account for the PA’s long history of sheltering, assisting, and even collaborating with Hamas and other terrorist groups. Writing on the op-ed page of the Washington Post on Aug. 21, former national security advisers Samuel (“Sandy”) Berger (who served under Bill Clinton) and Stephen Hadley (under George W. Bush) argue...
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is refusing to meet with Palestinian leaders during his visit to Israel this week. Maybe that’s a mistake. The Palestinian Authority has invited him to visit the areas under its control, and the New York Times and others are quick to accuse the governor of bias for refusing. In our view, the governor would actually be performing a great public service if he did visit certain PA-controlled areas—some of the ones they don’t want him to see. That would help clarify many of the issues that need to be considered befor...
A simple cease-fire in Gaza would give Hamas time to re-arm and renew its terrorist activities. The demilitarization of Gaza would put an end to Hamas’s terrorist activities. Which goal makes more sense? President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have been working hard to achieve a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This effort is shortsighted and worse. A simple cease-fire would be a de-facto victory for Hamas. It would give Hamas the time and breathing space it needs to smuggle in more weapons, repair its terror tunnels, a...
