Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Putin’s war against Ukraine is far from Tehran. But if the Biden administration hopes to deter Russia in Ukraine, and its growing alliance with China and Iran, it needs to move decisively against Iran’s nuclear assets now. The war in Europe and coming threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is confronting the U.S. with a stark reality: an emerging alliance of nuclear-armed states, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, whose atomic umbrella will stretch from NATO’s borders in Eastern Europe to the Asian Far East. The Biden Administration does...
Dear Volodymyr Zelenskyy, You are a master of public relations, a Churchill for your country, a true patriot. I am a Jewess, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Indeed, your country, Ukraine, has been invaded and the reality is grim. Technology has allowed you to appear in front of countries’ parliaments and on every TV channel and the plight is clear, the Ukrainians will fight for their freedom and sovereignty provided they can get the support and help from the outside world. Before I start, I need to remind you that if Israel’s prime min...
(JNS) — The year so far finds the Western alliance at a crossroads. Unable to comprehend the Axis assembled against the American-led world order, the Biden administration is actively empowering our adversaries and rendering a new world war vastly more likely. It is just as Winston Churchill said long ago — an appeaser is someone who feeds his friends to the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. For a moment after the shocking Russian assault on Ukraine, we almost forgot the Biden administration’s reckless abandonment of the 20-year commi...
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine under Obama in February 2014 and Biden in February 2022. The invasions eight years apart to the month are not a coincidence. Both times Putin was facing a lame duck Democrat who had just flinched away from a military engagement. Each time Putin smelled weakness and he struck. Obama, after declaring a red line in Syria, had panicked and backed away in 2013. He then cheered on Ukrainian protests against a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv, and Moscow responded by calling his bluff and seizing Crimea. Afterward, Obama...
(JNS) — After the recent revelations of war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, the world is looking for ways to make life harder for President Vladimir Putin’s regime and to express its outrage. So when America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced that the United States was going to ask the U.N. General Assembly to boot Russia off of the world body’s Human Rights Council, the initiative was widely applauded. Given the atrocities committed by the Russians in their illegal war of aggression, removing Moscow...
(JNS) — The suppression of pro-Israel views on campus has been a troubling development in the ongoing cognitive war against Israel. Now, the silencing of pro-Israel voices even appears in college newspapers. This week, the University of Chicago’s student newspaper, The Chicago Maroon, followed that ignoble path by violating journalistic and free speech ideals in retracting an op-ed written by two students, “We must condemn the SJP’s online antisemitism,” who questioned the tactics and ideology of members of the university’s chapter of Students...
(JNS) — I know many Jews from the older (than me) generation whose response to political issues was: “Is it good for the Jews?” The younger generations viewed this as myopic and anachronistic. Elderly Jews were particularistic; the younger “enlightened” Jews were universalistic. Many conservative Jews of all ages have become increasingly like their grandparents. Throughout the Trump administration, they could set aside his transgressions because he was in their view the most pro-Israel president in history. Dayenu. Now we have the controversy o...
I had not even left the parking lot of Ben Gurion airport Thursday when I learned there had just been another terrorist attack that morning. The fourth in a week. This one took place near my home, on a bus that my kids use often. A Palestinian Arab terrorist boarded, carrying a screwdriver, and stabbed a 28-year-old man before being “neutralized” by another passenger with a gun. It’s understandable that you might not be aware of this specific attack, or what’s being called the recent “wave” of terror attacks in Israel. It’s not Ukraine, and...
Are we perpetually enslaved to our inner doubts, despair and anger? It is hard to sing the song of freedom when we do not feel free. So often it feels as though the sea will never split. Because inside every one of us there is a Pharaoh and he will not let us go. He holds us down and mocks our hopes. He laughs and tells us that we are slaves and we will always be slaves. That there is no other life for us than the one we have. He points to the wasted, ruined efforts of our past and tells us that we must continue to waste our lives building...
(JNS) — I understand that Hillary Clinton is mourning the passing of her friend and predecessor, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. But that doesn’t give her the right to revise the historical record concerning Albright and Israel. Writing in The New York Times on March 27, Clinton described Albright as “a woman of action, especially when facing injustice.” According to Clinton, Albright “understood that American power is the only thing standing between the rules-based global order and the rule of the sword.” And she “never stop...
(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) — As the evidence of war crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine mounts, and President Joe Biden has already labeled Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal,” the United States should lay the groundwork for a war-crimes trial patterned after the Nuremberg trials following World War II. A tribunal should be formed with the most esteemed jurists from the United States, Britain, France, and perhaps one or more other countries, to ensure a fair and credible trial of Putin and the officers who carried out his orders. The Inter...
(JNS) — The United States and Iran are reportedly on the cusp of a new nuclear agreement. One of the last remaining issues is said to be whether or not the Biden administration removes the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The administration is purportedly offering to do so on the condition that Iran makes some amorphous commitment to rein in its regional aggression and refrain from targeting Americans. In other words, as far as the Biden administration is concerned, it’s OK if the Iranians att...
(JNS) — March 27, 2022, was the twentieth anniversary of the Passover Seder Massacre. As families sat down to Passover dinner at the Park Hotel in Netanya in northern Israel in 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his explosive device in the dining hall, murdering 30 and wounding another 160. Every month, the Palestinian Authority spends tens of thousands of dollars to reward the bomber’s family and pay salaries to the terrorists arrested by Israel for their part in the massacre. Among the terrorists arrested for the attack are: Abb...
For us old-timers, it is beginning to feel like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis all over again, in terms of worries about a nuclear conflagration. Vladimir Putin is waving around his tactical nuclear weapons, i.e., low yield nuclear bombs that would have a devastating impact on a battlefield, but limit the damage to a specific area. Few would suggest based on what we have seen from him since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that his moral scruples would prevent him from employing them should his armies face a humiliating defeat or...
(JNS) — The United Nations has a long history of inventing or redefining terminology to single out, demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. Over the years, for example, the U.N. has invented a separate meaning for the term “refugee” when it comes to Palestinians, and declared that “Zionism” actually meant “racism.” More recently, some U.N. officials have attempted to redefine the Jewish right to self-determination as “apartheid.” In the coming days, the U.N. is set to continue the trend at the Human Rights Council by declaring that Israel’s...
(JNS) — Biden’s ambassador to Israel recently told participants in a pro-BDS group’s webinar that the real problem with the Palestinian Authority funding terrorism is that “it gives the ‘haters’ an excuse not to support the P.A. based on the argument that it is ‘paying for people who killed Jews.’” He also told the anti-Israel group, whose CEO has described Israel as an “oppressive regime” and which cheered the Ben & Jerry’s boycott, that “your agenda is where my heart is.” At this rate, Thomas Nides will be hugging and kissing Hamas leaders b...
Perhaps it’s a coincidence that I just finished reading Richard Heideman’s new book, “The Bloody Price of Freedom” last week, the same week in which U.S. Ambassador Thomas Nides said that he was “infuriated” by settlement growth. Ambassador Nides would do well to read the book too. I’ll lend him my copy. “I’m a bit of a nag on this, including the idea of settlement growth, which infuriates me when they do things that just infuriate the situation in east Jerusalem and the West Bank.” Nides was clearly playing to his audience, and likel...
Dear Editor: I read Daniel Greenfield’s article on ADL leaders Greenblatt and Eileen Hershenov (Feb. 18, 2022, “Meet the Obama mentor and Soros lawyer heading up the ADL’s civil rights”). ADL is part of the problem because the white supremacists believe the Jews are progressives, socialist, or communist. ADL fits the perception on all three because of where they get their money. Greed is their middle name. I started to write to them because I think I have a good idea on how to stem antisemitism. But I need help because I do not know anyone...
(JNS) — Like politics, wars can make for strange bedfellows. In the Second World War, even a staunch anti-Communist like Winston Churchill saw no problem with an alliance with the Soviet Union. Making common cause with a totalitarian state led by a mass murderer like Josef Stalin was difficult to swallow, and would lead to future tragedies. But with the future of civilization at stake in 1941, Churchill had to embrace the Soviets so as to defeat a more immediate threat: Nazi Germany. As he put it at the time, “If Hitler invaded hell, I would ma...
(JNS) — The title immediately engaged my interest. “To Whom Was the Promised Land Promised?” by Abraham A. Sion focuses on the legal right of Jews under international law to the territory of “Palestine” and the British betrayal that thwarted it for three decades. The story began with the Balfour Declaration (1917). It called for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people” in “Palestine,” geographically defined by the League of Nations after World War I as the land east and west of the Jordan River. The postwar Mandate f...
As many of you know, almost two years ago Rachel and I moved to New Orleans. As you also probably know, we lost her a little over a year ago to dementia. And, the “Let the Good Times Roll” city shut down shortly after we arrived due to Covid. Well, times change. For the first time in two years the town opened up for Mardi Gras and the Good Times are rolling once again. The question for me again was, okay — what now? I had that same question when we came to Orlando from Cleveland. My first project was to build and create a radio station, which...
(JTA) — Seventy-nine years ago this month, crowds twice filled Madison Square Garden for a pageant, “We Will Never Die,” meant to draw attention to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis. Screenwriter Ben Hecht organized the spectacle and wrote the script; German refugee composer Kurt Weill wrote the score. A young Marlon Brando had a leading role. Two million Jews had already been killed. The performance included the lines, “No voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end. But...
(JTA) — After decades of fearing that we would forget the horrors of our recent past, I am starting to fear the opposite possibility: that we Jews remember our history all too well but feel powerless to act on its lessons. The Russian invasion of Ukraine invites analogies to our traumatic past. History begs us to learn from what came before. These analogies to the past are never perfect. Seeing analogies between past and present does not mean we think that anything that happened in the past would be identical to anything happening in the p...
(JNS) — The news coming out of Russia these days sounds taken from a particularly gloomy dystopian novel, or perhaps from the Soviet era. The state — far from a model of democracy to begin with — has deteriorated in a matter of weeks into a genuine dictatorship, punishing citizens not just for their actions, but for their thoughts. Employees who refuse to support the invasion of Ukraine are fired. Students who do not support Putin’s “special operation” are expelled. Border control agents check the phones of Russians heading overseas fo...
