Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 25
(JNS) — “There’s no such thing as a winnable war It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore … “We share the same biology, regardless of ideology But what might save us, me and you Is if the Russians love their children, too.” So sang Sting. He was, and I think he still is, a marvelous singer. But the naïve notions expressed in that 1985 song are long past their sell-by date. Start with the Russians. President Vladimir Putin firmly believes his war of conquest against Ukraine is winnable. Russians who love their children have no say in the matter. A...
(JNS) — Young Israeli soldiers on patrol in Gaza two weeks ago encountered and eliminated Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas commander who plotted and implemented the invasion of Israel on Oct. 7 and the brutal massacre that followed. This long-anticipated milestone was a significant battle won in a war that will not soon end. To understand why, you need to understand who Sinwar was and the cause for which he fought. His goal was not to force Israel to end the “occupation” of Gaza because, as a matter of incontestable fact, all Israelis departed Gaza...
(The Washington Times via JNS) — The Nova Music Festival was billed as a celebration of “Friends, Love, and Infinite Freedom.” On Oct. 6, 2023, attendees from more than two dozen countries gathered in Israel’s Negev Desert just three miles from Hamas-ruled Gaza to sing, dance and celebrate peace through the night. At dawn the next day, Hamas terrorists used bulldozers and bombs to break through Israel’s high-tech fence that was thought to secure the border. Arriving at the festival grounds, they began slaughtering, raping, mutilating and kidna...
(JNS) — I’m sure you’ve heard commentators describe the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel as “rivals” engaged in a “tit-for-tat” conflict. That misinterprets reality. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader” since 1989, seeks to establish a new Middle Eastern empire. Israelis, by contrast, only want to survive as an independent nation within a slice of their ancient Jewish homeland. They would like nothing better than to enjoy amicable relations with Iranians, as they did prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. I should add: Substanti...
(JNS) — Back in December, the eminent historian Niall Ferguson wrote an essay in The Free Press that, it’s now apparent, presaged the tidal wave of demonstrations now inundating college campuses around the country. It was called “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” which also was the title of a 1927 publication by French philosopher Julien Benda. Ferguson noted that while that piece was written six years before Hitler came to power, German universities—then the world’s best—already were transitioning from scholarship to “the intellectual or...
(JNS) — One of the many ways last weekend’s drone and missile attacks on Israel could have been worse: If Iran’s rulers had instructed their U.S.-based operatives to simultaneously carry out a terrorist attack, and our intelligence agencies had failed to learn about it. Preventing such a catastrophe requires that those intelligence agencies have the ability and authority to surveil—think wiretap—terrorists abroad and their communications with operatives in the United States. Which gets me to a little good news: Last week, the House, on a bipa...
(JNS) — Starting in the 1920s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union pioneered the art of dezinformatsiya. A hundred years later, the Communist Party of China has developed disinformation into a high-tech science. You probably know how the Kremlin did propaganda: Thousands of KGB operatives would feed false information to journalists in dozens of countries to advance Moscow’s goals. Increasing anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism were high on the list. Some of those journalists were fellow travelers. Others were what the Soviets called “us...
(JNS) — Seven years ago this month, then-Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that the $150 billion in sanctions relief the Obama administration was providing to Iran’s rulers would—to a greater or lesser extent—fund terrorism. “I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists,” he said in an interview with CNBC. He added: “We are confident that this will not result in an increase somehow in the threat to any partner or any...
(JNS) — Forty-five years ago this month, a revolution was underway in Iran. It was called an Iranian revolution but its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had a more ambitious project in mind: the founding of a new Islamic empire that would project power throughout the Middle East and far beyond. In 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei succeeded Khomeini as “supreme leader” of the misleadingly named Islamic Republic of Iran. Like his predecessor, he has repeatedly and relentlessly vowed “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” And he’s elaborat...
(JNS) — The coming of a New Year is an appropriate time for retrospection. I’ve been thinking about December 2001. Like many Americans, I was traumatized by the horrific images of the Sept. 11 attacks. And like many Americans, I wanted to do something useful in response. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make the cut for Delta Force. But, with help from former U.N. Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick and former Rep. Jack Kemp, I began setting up a research institute to study the regimes, organizations and ideologies driving and justifying terrorism, to formu...
(JNS) — “A fool is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Oscar Wilde famously quipped. In Milwaukee last week, the Republican candidates for president—minus one Donald J. Trump—quarreled over both the price and value of American support for Ukraine. Only Nikki Haley crunched the numbers correctly. From the February 2022 Russian invasion to August of this year, the United States has committed roughly $43 billion to Ukraine. As Haley suggested, that’s just 3.5 percent of U.S. spending on the Defense Department over...
(JNS) — “Death solves all problems — no man, no problem” Josef Stalin is quoted as having said. A significant number of influential people are now applying the Soviet dictator’s logic to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Their formulation is as simple as it is homicidal: “No Israel, no problem.” Iran’s rulers express their genocidal intentions forthrightly. “We will not back off from the annihilation of Israel, even one millimeter,” Brig.-Gen. Abolfazl Shekarchi, spokesman for the regime’s armed forces has vowed. Hezbollah and Palesti...
(JNS) — In Mexico City last week, the president of the United States met with the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Canada for what was dubbed the “Three Amigos Summit.” The notion that Joe Biden, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Justin Trudeau resemble Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short—stars of the 1986 cult classic comic film ¡Three Amigos!—seems far fetched. Do these politicians make you laugh? On second thought…. But seriously folks, their Declaration of North America listed “six pillars.” Topping the list (of course):...
(JNS) — Imagine if Pope Francis were to say: “Only Christians are permitted in the Vatican! No Muslims and no Jews!” The “international community” would be outraged. But the pontiff would never say that. Muslims and Jews are welcome in the Vatican. Imagine if Israelis were to say: “Only Jews are permitted on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount! No Muslims and no Christians!” The “international community” would be outraged. But Israelis would never say that. Christians and Muslims are welcome on the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, the place where...
(JNS) — Vladimir Putin is slaughtering Ukrainian men, women and children. Xi Jinping is committing genocide against the Muslims of East Turkistan. Ali Khamenei is murdering Iranian girls for wearing their hijabs in what he considers a provocative manner. What is the United Nations doing in response to these crises? It’s going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” That quote, of course, is from a recent tweet by Kanye West. “DEFCON,” an acronym for “defense readiness condition,” is how the U.S. military indicates states of alert, ranging from on...
(JNS) — These are confusing times, and President Joe Biden is not helping to bring clarity. Last week, for example, he told Business Roundtable that “there’s going to be a new world order.” What could he possibly have meant? The old “new world order” was established by the United States following World War II. With the hopefully named United Nations at its core, the goal was to prevent or at least limit armed conflicts, promote human rights and establish a body of international laws and norms. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 199...
(JNS) — The plot was audacious: Agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran would kidnap an American citizen on American soil. Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist and human rights activist, was to be grabbed, spirited out of Brooklyn to Venezuela, and then on to Tehran where she would have been imprisoned, tortured, and, almost certainly, executed. Earlier this month, the FBI, to its enormous credit, foiled the plot. “Not on our watch,” FBI assistant director William Sweeney told reporters. Spokesmen for the Islamic Republic dismissed the cha...
(JNS) — International Holocaust Remembrance Day is meant to serve two purposes: to memorialize the victims of the Nazi genocide and help prevent future genocides. Last week, on Jan. 27, the day designated by the U.N. General Assembly for this annual commemoration, both purposes were insufficiently served. I’ll give credit where it’s due. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres made an appropriate statement: “Today, we honor the memory of the 6 million Jews and millions of others who were systematically murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis and...
(JNS) — In early 1979, I was sent to Iran to report on the rebellion then underway. I was woefully ignorant of Iranian history, politics and theology. But older, more experienced colleagues in the journalistic, diplomatic and intelligence communities also misunderstood what would become known as the Islamic Revolution. So, it was with both curiosity and pleasure that I’ve been reading “The Last Shah: America, Iran and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty,” an enlightening new history by Ray Takeyh, the Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East...
(JNS) — “Build Back Better” was Joe Biden’s campaign slogan. How different is that, really, from “Make America Great Again”? Both BBB and MAGA suggest the need for restoration, for reversing deterioration and decline, for fixing what’s broken. In foreign and national security policy, President Donald Trump —following eight years of President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to bolster the credibility of American power against America’s enemies — achieved some significant successes. He also suffered some significant failures. In other areas, he ma...
(JNS) — Not long before a virus born in China began spreading around the globe, destroying lives, devastating economies, and, oh yes, shutting down the Washington social scene, I attended an elegant, off-the-record dinner hosted by a well-funded think tank of the libertarian persuasion. The guest of honor, a senior figure in the Trump administration, excused himself before dessert, citing pressing matters of state. At that point, a distinguished professor from a prestigious university held forth, posing a question to those around the table: ...
(JNS)—Microbes are changing our lives, our economy, our culture. You should know—though it will provide no consolation—that it has ever been thus. Perhaps you assumed that the ability of pestilence to change the course of history was... well, history, in the sense that modern science, modern public health systems, and such modern bureaucracies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization would show those nasty little germs who’s boss. The Ebola outbreak of 2014-16... Full story
(Israel Hayom via JNS)—At the State Department, human rights have generally been a not-so-high priority. The big kahunas tend to focus on war and peace, allies and adversaries, national security and global economics. So it came as something of a surprise when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week launched a bipartisan Commission on Unalienable Rights. Its task, Pompeo wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “isn’t to discover new principles but to ground our discussion of human rights in America’s founding principles.” Commission members ... Full story
(JNS)—Socialism is cool again, thanks not least to septuagenarian Sen. Bernie Sanders and millennial Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC). Socialism has been cool before, of course, notably during the Great Depression, and what became known as the ’60s, the era of Vietnam, the civil rights movement, hippies and the (old) New Left. As a reporter for my high school newspaper in the later period, I interviewed Earl Browder, who had been general secretary of the Communist Party USA during the 1930s. He coined the slogan: “Communism is 20th... Full story
(JNS)—In this topsy-turvy world, if you’d like to see Palestinians living in peace, gainfully employed, with access to quality medical care and reason to believe tomorrow will be brighter than today, you’re denounced as anti-Palestinian. If, by contrast, you prefer that Palestinians remain impoverished and on the dole of America and other “donor nations,” hating their next-door neighbor and bequeathing that hatred to their children, viewing themselves as victims while aspiring to “martyrdom” in an endless war, you get to call yourself a ch... Full story
