Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 3402
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — The biggest winner of Europe’s recent elections was the Islamist-leftist alliance. For those who still find an alliance between the left and homophobic, misogynistic Islamists incomprehensible, please keep in mind that the global left is no longer liberal. Leftism has become a big tent for all varieties of illiberalism, including Islamism. Post-election videos showed Islamists celebrating leftist wins, praising Sharia Law, and bashing Western democracy. They carried signs like “Sharia will dominate the world...
(JNS) — At what point does angry political discourse cross the line between legitimate impassioned advocacy and direct incitement to violence? It’s a question that’s been all too common in both the United States and Israel for the past generation. That is why acts of political violence—such as the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump this past weekend—can just as easily exacerbate the tensions within societies rather than help heal them. In seeking to understand how Americans can transcend their political divisions...
(JNS) — “The week that was” started with an assassin’s bullet missing former President Donald Trump. As Trump said: “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” In his speech at the Republican National Convention, he asserted: “I’m not supposed to be here, I’m supposed to be dead.” Trump has not only internalized the profound and unmistakable providential intervention that saved him but has been brave and courageous enough to bring God back into the world. Unlike most politicians, who rarely if ever speak about God, Tr...
(JNS) — In the wake of the Hamas hostage crisis, a central and often-heard rallying cry has emerged from the Israeli and Diaspora Jewish communities: “Bring them home.” While this phrase is rooted in the profound desire to see our Jewish brothers and sisters safely returned, it inadvertently misplaces the onus of responsibility. Instead, the call should be: “Let them go.” This nuanced difference is critical, as it rightly places the burden on Hamas, the terrorist organization that took the hostages, rather than on the Israeli governmen...
It makes no sense. Why would Donald Trump pick as a running mate a white man from Middle America who’s just like him? Wasn’t Trump supposed to broaden his base to increase his chances of winning in November, and pick someone like a woman or a person of color or a more classic conservative? Instead of expanding his reach, Trump has doubled down on his ideology, choosing J.D. Vance, someone who once called him “cultural heroin” for Middle America while musing that he may be “America’s Hitler.” Evidently, Trump must have been so eager to buil...
(JNS) — One of the ways to tell apart moderates and extremists is checking the brakes. The other is the constant infighting. And the two are connected. Extremists have no brakes so their movement is always going to new extremes. In my book “Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left,” I quote a telling line about the French Revolution. “‘As the revolution becomes radical, the Right disappears, and the Left of one assembly becomes the Right of the succeeding assembly,’ Mignet explained, describing how each new political inc...
I visited Israel for the second time recently. The first time was approximately six weeks after the Oct. 7th massacre by Hamas. The country is still working to eliminate Hamas and the country will be forever changed by the evil attack. On this trip I tried to focus mostly on the children of Israel and what their future will look like. The future of any culture is dependent on their ability to remember the past without the bias of the media and for the culture to remember what their core beliefs are. In Israel, the children seem to have a very...
(JNS) — On July 11, actor, director and producer George Clooney was featured in The New York Times calling for a new Democratic nominee for president. His credentials for an opinion piece in the newspaper that still claims to publish only “All the News That’s Fit to Print” are that “I have led some of the biggest fundraisers in my party’s history” and “last month I co-hosted the single largest fundraiser supporting any Democratic candidate ever, for President Biden’s reelection.” George Clooney does himself in when he writes, “We don’t a...
(JNS) — Franz Kafka would feel right at home in northern Israel. Life here has a surreal, absurdist character with the indivisible mix of the mundane and the potentially catastrophic. A quiet day has only a handful of rocket or drone attacks and we have become used to incessant plane noise and to looking up and around after a boom or two. Israelis are resilient, but resilience is often the product of being able to maintain one’s routine and “normalcy” within one’s familiar surroundings. Anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000 people have been stripped o...
(JNS) — The Biden administration, as well as almost every nation in the world, is pressuring Israel to create an immediate pathway for a Palestinian state. In theory, separating from the Palestinian Arab population—if it could be done with all security safeguards in place—accepting Israel as a Jewish state and signing an end-of-conflict agreement would be a reasonable alternative to the present situation, if it were possible. But does anyone look at what a Palestinian state would be and how faithful its leadership would be to any signed agree...
Sunday, July 7, is not just another day. It is 275 days since the inhuman Hamas invasion and massacre in Israel, slaughtering 1200 and taking more than 250 hostages to Gaza. 120 are still in captivity in Gaza’s network of terror tunnels. Some may still be being held captive in the private homes of Hamas terrorist operatives, as were the four rescued in a bold IDF operation on June 8. Through forensic and other evidence, Israel has declared that a few dozen of the 120 hostages are already dead. But the actual number of hostages still alive is u...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — The reaction of many Jews to the horrific times in which we find ourselves calls to mind the “Christopher Columbus problem”—conflating what’s new to us with what’s actually new. Has the world really changed since Oct. 7, or have a number of enduring truths suddenly become all too evident? I propose that it is the latter. Here are a dozen examples: 1. Many hold Israel to a very different standard than any other nation. Countries that kill gays, subjugate women, slaughter minority populations and murder dissidents...
(Gatestone Institute via JNS) — “Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!” — “A Tale of Two Cities,” Charles Dickens Every leftist cause is founded on empathy. The quintessential leftist, no matter how much blood eventually spatters his hands, starts off by caring a great deal about other people. His heart bleeds for the oppressed, the workers and the peasants, for racial and sexual minorities and for all the oppressed peoples of the world. The ideological fashion may change, but the story...
(JNS) — The revelation of President Joe Biden’s precipitous cognitive decline at last week’s debate has come has a shock to many, including myself. In retrospect, of course, we were all foolish to dismiss the plethora of evidence that the decline was underway. But beset by the machinations of a collaborationist news media and what was clearly a carefully managed cover-up by the White House, we can’t be entirely blamed for holding on to our illusions. There was, moreover, a great deal of wishful thinking involved. Many of us were dissati...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — There is a certain kind of person for whom “The West Wing” was dramatic television at its finest. It featured sharp, brainy, political dialogue with a cast walking around the White House outwitting one another—not outdoing the other’s wits, but simply being wittier. The president was a former professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist. Naturally, he was a Democrat. “The West Wing” catered to coastal elites in the same way that “Roseanne” and “My Name Is Earl” were beloved by the working class in red states—or, at...
(JNS) — The debate on Thursday evening between U.S. President Joe Biden and predecessor Donald Trump is a gift that keeps on giving. Every syllable spoken by the two presumptive nominees continues to be the focus of both serious and comedic discourse. Only a handful of desperate straw-graspers are rejecting the consensus opinion that the incumbent’s performance revealed an unacceptable level of age-related brain fog. Even those of his ardent supporters in the media who’ve been telling us not to believe our lying eyes realized that the jig w...
(JNS) — Apart from its own 780,000-strong armed forces, Iran has assembled a score of armed groups in countries neighboring Israel; all of which, like Iran, are committed to the eradication of the Jewish state. The United States, the European Union and others in the West who are fixated on a two-state solution continually exhort Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a peace agreement. This exhortation confuses a sideshow with the main act, because Iran and its proxies, not Israel and the Palestinians, call the shots. Iran, which directs m...
(JNS) — Most of the organized Jewish world is as outraged as the Anti-Defamation League. The decision of Wikipedia to label the ADL as an “unreliable source” on its site with respect to anything related to Israel generated a letter of protest from 43 of the largest and most influential American Jewish organizations, including a sampling of groups on the center, left and right. The notion that the ADL, still considered the authoritative source on the subject of antisemitism by the liberal media, being shut down by the ubiquitous online encyc...
(JNS) — An EMP is essentially a large nuclear bomb that explodes in the outer atmosphere. In a cone-shaped area below, all electricity infrastructures and electronic devices fail. The area can be predetermined by arranging the size of the cone beforehand. So, for example, an attack could be focused on greater Chicago or the entire Midwest. The explosion causes no immediate deaths. But after roughly 10 days, many people will die due to lack of food (because refrigeration is impossible), water (most water is delivered by electric pumps), w...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — On the surface, it makes little sense. How can the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust lead to the biggest rise in antisemitism in modern times? Wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around? The more Jews die, the more they like us? Like that famous book said, “People Love Dead Jews.” How does one explain that on Oct. 8, right after 1,200 Jews were massacred, mutilated, butchered and raped by Hamas terrorists, 33 Harvard student organizations co-signed a statement holding Israel “entirely responsib...
(JNS) — A malodorous wind has been blowing through our institutions of international jurisdiction. Take, for example, the United Nations. Although erected after World War II upon the loftiest of foundations, an unscrupulous crew of autocracies, tyrannies and unaligned third-world nations—who have long resented the leading role that the United States has taken on the world’s stage—united into a force to be reckoned with, eroding that institution’s eminence. Among these nations is the 56-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the largest w...
(JNS) — As the war in Gaza appears to be winding down and another appears to be winding up on Israel’s northern border, Israeli politics is returning to something like its usual state: angry contention. For many months, the political divisions that threatened to rip the country to pieces in the year before the Oct. 7 massacre were buried by war. The interregnum appears to be over. The street protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have heated up again, with the issue of a hostage deal added to the usual griev...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Growing up in the home of a staunch Republican and an equally staunch Democrat, I became an Independent; it seemed like the sensible choice. The more I began to understand our political system—how partisan it can become, how parties change through the years—the more I remained steadfast in my choice. When I worked at The New Republic in the early ’90s, most of my friends were Democrats because the party still represented classical liberalism: Liberty, justice, equality, pluralism, civil society. With Republi...
(JNS) — The Biden-Harris administration released its “Fact Sheet” on the “Administration’s Actions to Address Conflict-Related Sexual Violence” on June 17, 2024. It is available on the White House website. Curiously missing is any mention of the Oct. 7 massacre and the mass rapes committed by Hamas. Nor is there mention of the kidnappings, sadistic murders and other atrocities Hamas committed against women on that day and since. In her remarks later that day at a White House event intended to raise awareness about “Conflict-Related Sexual Viole...
(JNS) — The Biden administration is negotiating directly with Hamas for the release of the five American/Israeli citizens kidnapped and held hostage by the terror group since Oct. 7. The talks with Hamas, an American-designated international terrorist organization, are being brokered by Qatar. Qatar is an ally of both Hamas and Iran. Shockingly, those talks are happening with no input or involvement from Israel—America’s closest and most reliable ally in the world. This is like America negotiating with Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden after 9/11. I...
