Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — There have been several moments of celebration for Zionists over the past 150 years. The first Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897 showed Zionists that their movement had fire in it. The Balfour Declaration signed in England in 1917 was one of the first public declarations of the right of the Jewish people to their own homeland. The United Nations’ Partition Plan vote in 1947 gave international validation to the establishment of a Jewish state. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. On June 10, 1967, the Six...
While it’s not always appropriate to criticize a politician for something they don’t say, during the past several months, given the vile antisemitic protests that have taken place across the U.S. under the veil of “anti-Zionism,” one might have assumed that as a self-declared Zionist, President Biden would have shut down threats against Jews by affirming that he is also a Zionist. “When you vilify Zionists, you vilify me,” he could have said. A modern JFK “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) moment. One can consider that an oversight, a la...
(JNS) — Forget her awkward off-putting personality and habit of speaking like a dim-witted kindergarten schoolteacher. Those are public-facing problems, and public-facing problems have to be pretty extreme for them to be disqualifying. Dems stuck with Biden until he had a total debate breakdown. Dems would like another Obama, and Kamala isn’t that, but they’d settle for a normal human being who isn’t some nightmarish hybrid of Chauncey Gardiner, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama with none of the positive aspects and all of the negative ones. B...
This article was previously published in the Dec. 22, 2023, issue. It garnered the Sally Latham Memorial Award for Serious Column in the FPA Weekly Newspaper Contest. (Portions of this article are very graphic.) I was talking with my daughter on the phone Friday evening. “What did you do this week?” she asked. I mentioned that I attended a private briefing and screening by the Consulate General of Israel in Miami to see the raw footage of what happened in Israel on Oct. 7. “What are you talking about?” she asked. She hadn’t heard of the Oct....
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — On Saturday, the Golan Heights came under global scrutiny when Hezbollah bombed a soccer field in the Druze village of Madjal Shams, killing 12 children. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It is also a reminder of the terrible and worsening condition of Israel’s north, which has been under attack since Oct. 8. In January, a mother and son were crushed to death when Hezbollah fired an anti-tank missile into their home. In early July, a married couple were killed by a direct hit, leaving their three children par...
(JNS) — Now that President Joe Biden has finally bent to the will of his party’s leaders and donors, the praise for his presidency is nearly universal on the left. The paeans to his personal greatness and acclaim for his time in the White House accelerated once his infirmity became clear in the June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump. Liberal corporate media spent years covering up the president’s cognitive decline, including accusing any journalists who brought up the subject of spreading “misinformation.” But once the lies were...
(JNS) — There has been a major shift among Jewish and Jewish-allied peoples. There has been a “great recalibration.” People have rethought many assumptions they believed were facts. There has been a recognition amongst individuals and organizations that doing things in the same way does not suffice. This extends to the secular and the religious as well as the conservative and the liberal. Before Oct. 7, the Jewish community was deeply fragmented along political lines. Conservatives struggled to understand why some Jewish people would support po...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — America reached a new low this past week simultaneous with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint session of Congress. Thousands of pro-Hamas activists rioted outside the Capitol Building and scuffled with the Capitol Police. The dress rehearsal for this anti-American hatefest took place in Dearborn, Michigan, where protesters shouted “Death to America!” on April 5. That’s the date when the United States finally joined Europeans in realizing that there is an Islamist belief system wholly incomp...
(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...
