Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — In the wake of the devastating floods in Libya, the Palestinian Civil Defense Service, which operates under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority, announced that it was sending a 37-member team to assist with the humanitarian effort. The team, which includes search-and-rescue experts and two neurosurgeons, set off on Sept. 19, joining similar efforts that have been mobilized by other Arab countries and the international community more broadly. A cynic would be right to say that the Palestinian contribution is strongly motivated b...
(JNS) — “If necessary, just as we prevented the fall of Assad, we will prevent the fall of Putin.” This brazen claim was posted to a Telegram channel linked with the Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps last Saturday, as an amazed world watched a mutiny unfold in Russia that was quickly snuffed out before any significant violence unfolded. The IRGC has every reason to remain loyal to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has deepened his military alliance with Iran in tandem with his aggression against Ukraine. Russia has bee...
(JNS) — It’s impossible not be astonished and humbled by the bravery of the Iranian people. From bus drivers to university teachers, once again a cross-section of Iranian society has taken to the streets of Tehran and other cities in a fresh round of protests against the brutal Islamist regime that has ruled them since 1979. The immediate trigger for these latest demonstrations was the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, 22. Amini was arrested in Tehran by the regime’s so-called “Morality Police”—uniformed thugs whose job would correctly be...
(JNS) — A disparate group of Islamist clerics has been busily predicting that the State of Israel will disappear in 2022, citing the Koran for support. The prediction has been circulating in earnest since March, when Muslims around the world marked the holy month of Ramadan. According to an article on the pro-Hamas MEMO website by Mohammad Makram Balawi, a Palestinian writer living in Istanbul, the belief that Israel will be removed from the map at some point this year “is widely spread by some Muslim religious scholars, Palestinian and non...
The German airline Lufthansa has apologized for an incident last week in which more than 100 Orthodox Jews traveling in separate groups were collectively prevented from boarding a connecting flight in Frankfurt, following a dispute over masking regulations on the first leg of the journey from New York. However, Lufthansa could still face legal consequences after a prominent advocate for the Jewish community accused the airline of violating German laws on equal treatment. In a statement issued on Tuesday, Lufthansa offered an apology “to all t...
(JNS) — Looking back at 2021 in the hope of having something sensible to say about the past year, I found myself musing on a perennial question. Is history a story of progress, in which greater numbers of human beings become healthier, happier, more affluent, more tolerant and more educated with each year? Is it a story in which we learn from our past errors and those of our predecessors in order to not repeat them? Or is history a series of random cycles, in which health, happiness and wealth are at best fleeting experiences in a world w...
(JNS) Any notion that the worst days of Islamist terrorism are long behind us was brutally shattered at Kabul Airport on Thursday, as twin bombs ripped indiscriminately through Afghan civilians and U.S. and other foreign servicemen trying to complete the desperate evacuation of thousands of people for whom Taliban rule represents the most terrible fate. Gen. H.R. McMaster, a former U.S. national security advisor who served as deputy commander of the international force in Afghanistan, put it succinctly in the hours that followed the bloodshed...
Iran and Hamas on Monday effusively welcomed the final capitulation of the Afghan government to Taliban insurgents over the weekend, praising the hardline Islamist organization for its “brave leadership” in defeating the “American occupation.” As reports poured in from around the country of Taliban fighters seizing unmarried girls to serve as sex slaves and carrying out executions of members of the Afghan military, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi gushed over the “defeat” of the U.S., claiming that the Taliban’s violent seizure of power reflec...
(JNS) — As of this writing, South Africa’s Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng was on day seven of a 10-day deadline to publicly apologize for a speech he made last year in which he offered a full-throated defense of Israel, and still, he stood fast — no apology was forthcoming. Mogoeng’s uncompromising stance has enraged South Africa’s powerful pro-Palestinian lobby and reignited the charge that the modern-day State of Israel is a reincarnation of South Africa’s old apartheid regime when a white minority that constituted 10 percent of the population...
(JNS) — Many people who have never heard of the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) might reasonably ask why this body has the name that it does, upon learning that one of its members, China, is currently engaged in genocide against its Uyghur Muslim minority. Other nuggets of truth about the council — that the majority of its member states are illiberal autocracies, that the only country to have its record scrutinized as a fixed agenda item is Israel — would surely provoke similar questions among those blissfully unaware of the UNHRC’s existen...
(JNS) — American democracy may be immersed in crisis at the present time, but the various claims of its death are, as Mark Twain might have quipped, greatly exaggerated. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said on the other side of the world. “We can no longer tell the world that we still have ‘one country, two systems,’ ” Wu Chi-wai, chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party, told reporters last week. “This declares its official death.” (pri.org) “This” was the decision by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to force the removal of four p...
(JNS) — The most scathing book review I have read in a very long time appears in the Sept.18 edition of the London-based journal, the Times Literary Supplement. You might want to read it, too, if only for an illustration of what a comprehensive demolition looks like. The book under discussion is titled “An Army Like No Other,” a lengthy history of the Israeli Defense Forces authored by an Israeli anti-Zionist long resident in London, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, and published by the left-wing imprint Verso. The TLS reviewer, the grand strat...
(JNS)—The numbers are rolling in, and they make for grim reading. In four European countries with significant Jewish communities—France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy—statistics gathered during 2019 by communal organizations and law-enforcement agencies published in the last month noted in a steep rise in anti-Semitic offenses across all of them. Arguably, the most worrying pattern to emerge from this data is the growing tendency among Jew-haters to physically assault their victims. True, such outrages still account for only a small...
(JNS) Two months after its shellacking in the United Kingdom’s general elections, the Labour Party continues to remind British voters of why they chose the “anyone-but-Jeremy-Corbyn” option. Last week, it was the turn of John McDonnell—Corbyn’s main lieutenant and a stalwart of the party’s far-left—to plumb the depths of illogical, offensive and plain ignorant political rhetoric. Speaking immediately after a visit to Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in the grim surroundings of south London’s Belmarsh prison, McDonnell produced an unfor...
(JNS)—In the halls of the United Nations, they’re calling it a “database,” but it’s more commonly and accurately known as a “blacklist.” It’s a list of more than 100 companies conducting business activities with Jewish communities and Israeli enterprises in the West Bank that was published, a good four years after it was first mooted, by the U.N. Human Rights Council last Wednesday. Given the litter of authoritarian states and theocracies that compose the UNHRC, as well as its notorious “Item 7”—an annual fixed agenda item that focuses the...
(JNS)—Predictably, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech to last week’s World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem raised hackles among the responsible guardians of Holocaust memory. The Russian dictator claimed that 40 percent of the 6 million Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter were citizens of the Soviet Union—a vastly overinflated figure that can be arrived at only if you include those Jews who resided in countries that were occupied by the USSR. Putin’s manipulation of Holocaust numbers—historians generally agree that about 1 million of the 6 mi...
(JNS)—Once again, talk of regime change is in the air inside Iran. Not since the crushing of the 2009 student-led protests has the Islamic Republic, as of this year entering the fifth decade of its existence, looked so vulnerable. The immediate cause of the latest spate of protests was, of course, the shooting down by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of a Ukrainian International Airlines flight from Tehran to Kiev on Jan. 8, killing all 176 passengers on board—more than 100 of whom were Canadian citizens intending to catch a con...
The head of the French Jewish community expressed fear that last week’s decision by prosecutors in Paris to excuse the murderer of a Jewish woman from a criminal trial symbolized a deeper reluctance to confront anti-Semitism among Muslims in France through legal means. In a forthright letter to Paris Attorney General Catherine Champrenault, Francis Kalifat—the president of CRIF, the representative organization of French Jews—intimated that the decision not to try Kobili Traore for the Apr. 4, 2017 torture and murder of Sarah Halimi, a 65-ye...
(JNS)—The following quotes are from Jewish citizens of various European countries, gathered during a survey earlier this year on Jewish perceptions of anti-Semitism that was carried out by the European Union. “Anti-Semitism and racism are like the Wiener Schnitzel. They are part of the Austrian cultural heritage, just as xenophobia and ‘we are different.’ There is nothing to fight against, just suppressing the consequences has to suffice.” “The way things are now, I experience, for example, that ‘Jew’ is a widespread cuss word in Copenhagen....
(JNS)—It is a story that strikes a chord with anyone familiar with the struggle for civil rights in the American South. Jwnaid Murad, a businessman in Iraqi Kurdistan, has decided that he will no longer sell Turkish products in his supermarket in the town of New Erbil in response to growing calls among Iraqi Kurds for a boycott of Turkey because of Ankara’s onslaught against fellow Kurds in Syria. Even though goods from Turkey make up 60 percent of the inventory in his supermarket, Murad gathered his employees to pack up the remaining Tur...
(JNS)—A few years ago, I was paying for some items at a large department store in the Netherlands when I was startled by the sight of a doll behind the cashier’s desk that appeared, at first glance, to be a grotesque racial caricature of a small black child wearing an elfin costume. I peered again, and with my first impression confirmed, gingerly asked the cashier what it was, exactly, that I was staring at. She turned around, looked at the doll and then looked back at me. Zwarte Piet, she said nonchalantly. Zwarte Piet (“Black Pete”), I subse...
(JNS)—As visitors to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem wind their way through the main exhibition, they are confronted by a series of unsettling photographs from the first decade of Nazi power: Jews forced onto their hands and knees to clean the sidewalks; a young Jewish woman fleeing from a crowd in a blind panic, her dress ripped open; Jewish schoolchildren compelled to wear a yellow Star of David as a badge of shame. What these images convey is a powerful sense of how anti-Semitism can progress from being a mere ideology to e...
(JNS)—In an interview with my colleague Benjamin Kerstein last week, Rabbi Eli Cohen, the executive director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council in Brooklyn, N.Y., said something about the state of anti-Semitism in America today that’s worth revisiting. Commenting on the continuing spate of brutal attacks against visibly Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, perpetrated mainly by African-American males, Rabbi Cohen remarked, “You know, white supremacists out somewhere in the United States, I don’t see any common denominator between that and som...
(JNS)—It’s more than 30 years since pro-democracy student demonstrators were brutally crushed by Chinese security forces in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—a graphic sign that while communism was in the process of collapsing elsewhere in the world, China was to be a bloody exception. The spirit of those 1989 protests has been revived in recent weeks on the streets of Hong Kong, where hundreds of thousands of protesters have been vigorously opposing Chinese attempts to impose the draconian laws that hold sway on the mainland. Because Hong Kong was a...
(JNS)—The furor in recent days over a viciously anti-Semitic article in a left-wing Belgian newspaper centered on the writer’s use of a mangled quote, attributed to the French-Jewish songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, about the impossibility of a God who could give his “chosen people,” so-called, such “ugly noses.” This boilerplate anti-Semitism, in keeping with the rest of the article by columnist Dimitri Verhulst, is the reason why the Flemish-language paper that published it, De Morgen, is now the subject of an investigation by the Belgian pol...
