Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — The Oct. 7 Hamas massacres hit hard at communities where many of the residents were left of center. As a result, even some of the usual anti-Israel types temporarily came around to the idea of fighting Hamas. That included the anti-Israel lobby group J Street. On Oct. 9, J Street issued a statement denouncing the attacks and stating that “we stand in solidarity with the Israeli people and with the Israeli armed forces that have been battling desperately to protect them. We support Israel’s right to defend its citizens from this barbaric...
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. 7 attack. As I started explaining, she asked, “Who is Hamas? Where was this?” Now my daughter is a smart, mature person, but she chooses not to watch any news. “It’s t...
(JTA) — One hundred years ago, in November 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the greatest leaders of the Zionist movement and definitely the one with the greatest foresight, wrote in Berlin a seminal article in the Razsviet (Dawn, in Russian) newspaper, titled “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs).” His main argument was that in order for the Zionists to succeed in settling the Land of Israel and persist in living there, they must create an “Iron Wall” that will thwart Arab ambitions to eradicate the Zionist enterprise. It is worth quoting him...
(JNS) — Palestinian leadership must have a better inducement for Israel to come to the negotiating table than rape, mutilation, kidnapping, stabbings and missile attacks. The Palestinian people must be willing to accept two fundamental facts: 1) it is not possible to turn the clock back to June 4, 1967; and 2) it is a futile crusade to try and destroy Israel. For a state of war to be replaced by a state of peace, a state of acceptance must replace a state of rejection. Before Israel can feel secure enough to cede more control over any of the l...
I always find it incredible that with the Jewish custom of an annual cycle of reading the entire Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy) in the course of a year brings us back to the same verses, stories, and narratives that we read a year earlier, but in a different place in our lives that we relate to it differently each year. It underscores that the Torah, God’s word, is relevant to each and every one of us, no matter where we are in our lives, how old we are, or our circumstances. I see that often in my life, but never more than this w...
(JNS) — Former Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.” Never has this been truer than in Israel’s current war to destroy Hamas. For many years, a figurative diplomatic clock was set for Israel every time it launched a defensive military operation. This clock is not brought out for any other conflict in the world. It simply does not exist except in the imagination of Israel’s foreign interlocutors, who try to burn it into the psyches of the Jewish state’s decision-makers. As a result, the clock h...
(JNS) — When I heard the news that Henry Kissinger had died, the only thing I could think was “There goes the smartest man in the world.” This is hyperbolic, of course, but one cannot read any of Kissinger’s books without feeling that one has encountered an extraordinary intelligence. In a world that despises anything resembling intelligence, this is not easily dismissed. Many, however, do dismiss it. Even the more positive eulogists have hedged their bets, attempting to head off the inevitable fusillade of invective from the progres...
(JNS) — It is common to think that despite the extensive political, religious and cultural differences between different identity groups in Israel, on really important matters—such as survival in the face of enemy attack—they can all come together. Indeed, it seemed that this was illustrated by the total mobilization of Israeli society after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. Yet recent days have shown that this is not entirely true. There is one very important matter that has not enjoyed total consensus: The hostages being held in Gaza by Hamas...
(JNS) — Polish educator Janusz Korczak once wrote: “If I were a boy again, I’d want to remember and know everything that I know now. Only I wouldn’t want anyone to find out that I was already a grownup once. I would pretend as if nothing were the matter; that I’m the same kind of little boy as all the others.” Over the past two months, understanding the world as an adult has not been a great privilege. One could be forgiven if, for the past two months, one had been envious of the naivete of children, even if just for a fleeting moment. Of...
By Clifford D. May (JNS) — “Swaps of captives resume after brief protest by Hamas,” read the top headline in The Washington Post on Sunday. But the “captives” set free by Israel had all been arrested or already convicted of such crimes as stabbing, shooting and attempted suicide bombing, while the “captives” released by Hamas are all innocent women and children dragged from their homes in flagrant violation of international law. In what legal or moral universe is there any equivalence between the two? The Israelis are releasing three terrori...
In the Academy Awards, no one has ever heard of an award recipient standing before a jubilant and envious audience, and say, “No, thank you, I really didn’t make this film and I do not deserve your recognition. I am rescinding this honor you have bestowed upon me.” Of course not. People who don’t win an Oscar, the most prestigious award in the Hollywood film industry, repeatedly claim that it’s just an honoree to be nominated. They’d never return the coveted award. It sounds absurd even to think it. Unlike Miss Universe and other such beauty...
(Gatestone Institute via JNS) — The Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group and its supporters are disappointed that the Arab countries did not come to the rescue of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the war which erupted after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. At least 1,200 Israelis were murdered and more than 4,500 wounded in the attack. Another 240 Israelis, including toddlers, children, women and the elderly, were kidnapped to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. This is not the first time that the Palestinians have voiced disappointment with their A...
(JNS) — Much of the Hamas enthusiasm we’ve seen has been at a distance—shaky camera shots of mobs of rioters, some quick clips of a poster-ripper or a few tweets or videos gleaned from the madness of social media influencers, but here they are given a full forum to speak at the Oakland City Council. The issue on the table is whether the Oakland City Council will just demand that Israel stop attacking Hamas, misleadingly described as a “ceasefire,” or whether the resolution will also at least condemn Hamas’s mass murder of Israelis. That brough...
(JNS) — Every Jew, both inside and outside of Israel, has been held hostage for 40 days. In the Holy Land, Israelis—Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze—have been bombed, kidnapped, tortured, murdered, forced into bomb shelters and cast into internal exile. Because Israel has dared to fight back, Jews around the world are being “punished” for Israel’s alleged “crimes.” Jews everywhere are being verbally harassed, demonized, threatened, physically attacked and sometimes murdered. Visibly Jewish students no longer feel safe in their classroom...
This essay originally appeared in Kveller. (JTA) — It was a slow trickle, each long press of the finger and ensuing quick tap was days and sometimes weeks apart (it’s hard to comprehend that a whole month has passed since Oct. 7), but I am here to tell you that I — a former social media manager — have removed each and every social media app from my phone. In fact, as I was writing this very esssay, I realized I still had Threads downloaded, opened it for a minute, saw a Thread that said “Zionism is antisemitism,” and promptly deleted tha...
(JNS) — In the latest controversy surrounding media coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, the BBC was forced to apologize for reporting grossly false information. One of its presenters declared that IDF soldiers “were targeting people including medical teams and Arab speakers” at Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which would be a war crime. The presenter repeated this statement twice, citing a Reuters news report. As the BBC later admitted, this was an outright lie. It quickly emerged that the Reuters report in question had quoted an IDF statement that...
(JNS) — It is crystal clear now that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is exploiting the war against Israel to destroy the existing State of Israel by using pressure, threats, blackmail, leaks, the media, diplomatic backstabbing, the Arab states, the E.U. and the U.N. Read this paragraph from Blinken memo: As I said in private and in public, we believe Palestinian people’s voices and aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza. We believe in Palestinian-led governance of Gaza, with Gaza unified with the West Ban...
(JTA) — When I saw the photos and videos posted by Hamas murdering entire Israeli families, raping women and killing young people at a music festival on Oct. 7 — I was horrified and shocked. These images ignited the flames of a dormant trauma I suffered 82 years ago in Baghdad, Iraq, when I was just 10 years old. On June 1 and 2, 1941, two months after a pro-Nazi coup that plagued Baghdad, mobs — aided by the police and soldiers — broke into Jewish homes, raping women and girls and murdering Jews mercilessly in a rampage that came to be know...
(JNS) — In the Western mind, proportionality in war is simply a numbers game. The side that inflicts more casualties is acting disproportionately, is in the wrong and may even be committing crimes against humanity. This has no basis in international law, but it is useful as a rhetorical weapon. Israel’s enemies make prodigious use of this numbers game, which is no surprise. After all, when Israel is fighting a terrorist entity that uses civilians as human shields in order to increase body counts, which are then used to manipulate jou...
(JNS) — Paul Kessler went to a pro-Hamas demonstration in the Los Angeles area waving an Israeli flag to stand down the crowd gathered to support the genocide of Jews. A pro-Hamas demonstrator, who tracked the 69-year-old before he approached him, clubbed Kessler in the head with a megaphone. Kessler fell to the ground and died of cerebral bleeding. Forty-eight hours after Kessler was killed, his murderer was still free, even though the police know who he is. Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryoff hadn’t arrested him because he couldn’t decid...
(JNS) — There’s a theme that emerges when defending the atrocities of Hamas and its supporters: “You made us do it.” And the next step beyond that is the suggestion that the crimes committed by Hamas and its supporters were really a form of entrapment by Israel. You see this argument in the suggestion that Israel deliberately lowered its guard to allow Hamas to kill, rape and kidnap Israelis. And you see it in Linda Sarsour, a politically influential Islamist and the godmother of Islamist antisemitism in America, arguing that the kidnap...
By Remember Haman? The book of Esther tells the story of this horrible man in the king’s court who planned to kill all the Jews in the Persian/Medes kingdom — a kingdom that stretched from India to Ethiopia. Haman gave 10,000 talents of silver to the king and asked to be able to destroy all the Jews in the land. The king took the money and then gave it for the use of the genocide of the Jews. Of course, we know the rest of the story, Esther called for a fast and then went to the king and revealed Haman’s plan. Haman was hung and the Jewis...
The other day, I was reading my grandson the Dr. Seuss classic, “In a People House.” It was a needed respite for me, a break from incessantly following the news of the war in Israel, albeit that the Red Alert app on my phone sounded throughout, indicating continued rocket fire from Hamas terrorists in Gaza at Israeli towns and cities. Just another day and another war crime in case you’re keeping score. Try as I might to separate myself from the war, even with the unadulterated pleasure of reading to my grandson, I just couldn’t. Between...
(JNS) — After 75 years of a successful Israel, it’s hard to imagine that in its early years, Zionism garnered less than 10 percent of global Jewry’s support. Many Jews preferred to assimilate into the nations in which they resided. Others were afraid that advocating for their own state would inspire antisemitic attacks. It was only after the Holocaust that global Jewry, especially American Jewry, came around to supporting Zionism. As Germany transformed into an antisemitic killing machine, world Jewry witnessed the great powers refuse to admit...
(JNS) — The former Israel bureau chief of The New York Times has discovered who is really to blame for the Hamas pogrom on Oct. 7: Israel. This vile bit of slander comes from the pen of Ethan Bronner, who spent 26 years at the Times posing as an objective journalist. That included the years 2008 to 2012, when he served as its Israel bureau chief. Bronner’s pro-Palestinian bias over the years has been well documented. (For dozens of examples, see camera.org). Unfortunately, that troubling record didn’t stop Bloomberg News from making him head...
