Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the breakout time for Iran to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon had now come down to “a matter of weeks.” This is clearly deeply alarming news. But why did Blinken choose to announce this to the world? After all, it invites the question, “So what are you going to do about it?” Blinken told the hearing that renewing the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which lifted sanctions in return for limitations on its nuclear program,...
Earlier this month I was watching a U.S. report about the war in Ukraine, which I have been following with a degree of obsessiveness. It’s hard to imagine that an unprovoked war is happening at all, much less destroying entire communities. The human tragedy is underscored with more than five million, over 10 percent of Ukrainians, having fled their country. Because I am Jewish and Israeli, I tend to look at this through a Jewish/Israeli prism. This relates to common experiences of war, which Ukrainians are suffering and which Israel has s...
(JNS) — The defeat of the Nazis in World War II ended the Holocaust, but the war against the Jews continued. Muslims and the British administration in Palestine sought to prevent Israel’s establishment, and in 1948, five Arab armies invaded the newly established Jewish state with the intention of wiping it out. Egypt, Syria and other countries planned to attack again in 1967, but were stopped when Israel launched a preemptive strike. The war against the Jews still went on, however, led by the PLO and, more recently, Hamas and other ter...
(JNS) — In February, the Anti-Defamation League announced that it had developed what it called an “online hate index” to monitor antisemitism on social-media platforms. The effort was conceived as a way to adequately measure the amount of hate speech being posted on sites like Twitter and Reddit, which the group thinks are not vigilant enough about detecting and removing such offensive material. ADL CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt conceded that Twitter had “made substantial strides” towards shutting down those posting vile cont...
(JNS) — One Tuesday night in February, a small group of Jewish students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where I serve as a shaliach (Israeli emissary) for the Jewish Agency for Israel, logged into the weekly Zoom meeting of the Student Union Assembly to support the adoption of a working definition of antisemitism. The resolution referenced the definition written by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which has been endorsed by countless governments and organizations. The IHRA definition maintains that, among other thi...
If there was ever proof that Israel is not an apartheid state actively discriminating against its Arab minority, all one needs to do is look at the recent statement of Israeli Arab Knesset member Ayman Odeh. Not only does this reflect the reality that Israeli Arabs are equal parts of Israel’s democracy, that he can make statements that go against the interest and security of the state shows what a hyper-democracy Israel in fact is. As all this has unfolded, the thought I cannot shake is how much Israel’s Arabs deserve better. Odeh used the occ...
(JNS) — Sadly, it is again time to mourn for more murdered innocent Jews and pray for the wounded in Israel. On April 7, a Palestinian Arab gunman from Samaria slipped through a hole in the security fence, traveled to Tel Aviv, murdered three Israeli Jews and injured another 11 people, several of whom are fighting for their lives. The three who diedwere were Barak Lufan, 35, a father of three, Olympic kayaker, Paralympics coach and head Olympic kayaking team coach; Tomer Morad, 27, a recently graduated mechanical engineer; and Tomer’s rec...
(JNS) — According to the February annual Gallup poll of country favorability, 71 percent of Americans accord Israel a “very favorable” and “mostly favorable” rating. This matches Israel’s average favorability since 2013, compared to 58 percent in 2002, 71 percent in 2012, 69 percent in 2019 and 75 percent in February 2021. Israel’s all-time high favorability was in February 1991 (79 percent) in the aftermath of the January-February Iraqi Scud missiles striking Tel Aviv. Israel is ranked seventh among countries rated by Gallup, trailing Cana...
(JNS) — It turns out that The Atlantic magazine did a better job explaining the problem of disinformation than even those planning its recent conference on the subject held at the University of Chicago could have hoped. The magazine modestly described the event, titled “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” as “groundbreaking,” and in one sense, it was. It was hosted by an institution that is one of the pillars of the liberal Washington establishment and had a list of speakers that was filled with well-known talking heads regularly...
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...
