Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, this week sounded an unusually strong—and therefore welcome—warning about the continuing bias against Israel in the corridors of the world body. On a visit to Israel, Power spoke publicly about the experience of ZAKA, an Israeli humanitarian aid organization, in its efforts to gain accreditation at the U.N. After describing Zaka’s venerable record of assistance not just in Israel, but in New York City after the 9/11 atrocities and in Haiti after the devastating earthquake there...
9 may well be remembered as the year that Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel finally died its death—in a clinical sense, at least. Across the U.S., state legislatures are passing bills that will outlaw state authorities from investing public funds in, and entering into contracts with, companies and other entities that engage in a boycott of Israel. This doesn’t mean that engaging in a boycott of Israel is illegal, but for anyone who cares about their bottom line, the legislation should provide a powerful inc...
“When in Rome, do as the Iranians do.” That was the core message emerging from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visit to Europe this week, in a bid to boost trade relations now that the sanctions related to Tehran’s nuclear program have been lifted. Arriving at Rome’s venerable Capitoline Museum for a meeting with his Italian counterpart, Mateo Renzi, Rouhani was swiftly escorted past the museum’s priceless collection of Roman statues, including many nudes that had been covered up—yes, really—to avoid offending the sensibilities o...
Another week, another litany of ugly incidents targeting Jews, along with expressions of concern about rising anti-Semitism around the globe, and even the odd solution offered up. But as we’ve been slowly learning since the turn of this century, not much really changes. Let’s start with France, where in the last four years Islamist terrorists have executed two massacres at Jewish sites—first at a school in Toulouse in 2012, which resulted in the murders of a teacher and three children, and then at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris in Janua...
The rulers of the Arab Gulf states are, it seems, increasingly attentive to what Israel has to say about the balance of power in the region. As a rising Shi’a Iran faces off against a Sunni coalition led by Saudi Arabia, the core shared interest between Israel’s democracy and these conservative theocracies—countering Iran’s bid to become the dominant power and influence in the Islamic world—has rarely been as apparent. Hence the interview given by a senior IDF officer to a Saudi weekly, Elaph, which laid out how Israel analyzes the present w...
So numerous were the omissions, distortions, and flights of extraordinary fancy in President Barack Obama’s Jan. 12 State of the Union address that you’d be hard-pressed to pick the most egregious passage. For what it’s worth, then, I offer my personal selection. “On issues of global concern, we will mobilize the world to work with us, and make sure other countries pull their own weight,” Obama said. “That’s our approach to conflicts like Syria, where we’re partnering with local forces and leading international efforts to help that broken soc...
Next month marks the first anniversary of the death of Alberto Nisman, the Argentine federal prosecutor who spent a decade investigating the 1994 Iranian-backed bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. In that massacre, 85 people were murdered and hundreds more injured. Nisman’s lifeless body, readers will remember, was discovered in the bathroom of his Buenos Aires apartment on Jan. 18, 2015—the night before he was due to elaborate on his formal complaint against the government of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in fron...
The most recent Republican presidential debate was a breath of fresh air on the terrorism challenge that is front and center in American politics right now. To begin with, it was heartening to see Jeb Bush, whose quest to secure the nomination is all but over, remind Americans that he can be a clear and insightful thinker and leader. As he lambasted Donald Trump for the latter’s stupid and bigoted proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States, Bush pointed out a few indubitable truths, most importantly concerning the Kurds. “We nee...
The massacre in San Bernardino by an Islamist husband-and-wife terror team forces us to recognize, once again, that the United States has to choose between isolationism and internationalism in its foreign policy. Put another way, it’s a choice between disengaging from the world’s most febrile regions, in the hope that doing so will put us out of harm’s way and rein in our “imperial” instincts, or actively engaging on our own terms, in the expectation that we can effectively counter rogue regimes and terrorist groups. This is where we get to a...
I was telling a friend this week that of all the topics I write about, the global campaign against Israel’s very existence is the one that just won’t go away, no matter how much I might wish otherwise. After all, it’s an issue that’s consumed a good deal of my attention for more than a decade now. Anyone who writes about a particular subject for that length of time faces the prospect of becoming inured to it, not to mention bored. (Take it from me; anti-Zionists are, on top of everything else, deeply boring folks who repeat the same discredited...
One of the most memorable scenes in the 2010 film “Four Lions,” a dark British comedy about a group of the most incompetent jihadis imaginable, takes place as the aspiring martyrs climb into a van for the long nighttime drive down to London, where their plan is to bomb the annual marathon. As they set off in the dark, the four jihadis are silent and pensive, listening to a somber recording of chanted verses from the Qu’ran. But as dawn breaks on the outskirts of London, they swap out the Qu’ran for the irrepressibly joyful song “Dancin...
Last week marked the 40th anniversary of one of the worst instances of anti-Semitism since the end of the Second World War. On Nov. 10, 1975, the United Nations—a body created out of the ashes of the Holocaust—passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, with racism and racial discrimination. That resolution was the culmination of a lengthy campaign by the Soviet Union to turn Israel into the only state within the U.N. system to have its legitimacy questioned. Soviet Jews had been per...
A few years ago, the British anti-Semitism scholar David Hirsh remarked that while Israel was the ostensible target of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, first in the firing line were diaspora Jews. This shouldn’t be surprising if you consider it carefully—Jewish organizations are typically called on by the media to defend Israel, particularly during times of conflict, and many individual Jews have faced ostracism within their own professional communities for speaking in support of Israel and against the boycott. So, whe...
“There’s no stoppin’ the cretins from hoppin’,” sang the legendary Ramones, in one of their two-minute barnstormers that enters my head every time I see U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry getting on a plane. And never more than when his destination is Israel. If Kerry receives a frosty welcome in the Jewish state, it shouldn’t come as a shock, at least not to someone capable of empathizing with the ugly situation Israelis are currently facing. Part of the anger lies in the moral equivalence that Kerry’s State Department has molded to exp...
In November 1974, the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat addressed the entire world from the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly. Always a master of spectacle, Arafat cut an arresting figure as he strode toward the podium in a tieless black shirt and flowing cream jacket, with a perfectly-coiffed keffiyeh wrapped around his head. A holster without its gun—firearms are forbidden in the General Assembly Hall—was draped by his side pocket, completing the aesthetic effect of a Palestinian Che Guevara. Ara...
In the weeks since the Obama administration announced the perilous international nuclear deal with Iran, growing attention has been paid to the network of organizations and foundations that have been actively lobbying to normalize relations between the U.S. and the Islamist regime in Tehran. Rightly, that network is being referred to as the “Iran lobby.” The welcome and much-needed scrutiny of its workings and contacts provides a salutary lesson in how to identify enemies who present themselves as friends. At the head of the pack is the Washing...
On Sept. 17, the Regents of the 10-school University of California (UC) system discussed a statement of principles against intolerance. Alarmed by a rash of anti-Semitic incidents on UC campuses, a large number of Jewish scholars and activists have urged that the Regents adopt, in the context of their deliberations, the U.S. State Department’s working definition of anti-Semitism as an essential step in dealing with this grave problem. What the incident count at UC schools demonstrates is that the intellectually modish anti-Zionism that a...
The nuclear deal with Iran has, inevitably, been accompanied by a large amount of crystal ball gazing among its defenders and opponents as to how the legitimization of Tehran’s nuclear capacity will impact its behavior. Will the Iranian regime emerge from the deal as a responsible international actor—an outcome on which President Barack Obama himself is betting—or will it seek to rub salt into the wounds of its gullible Western interlocutors by fanning existing regional conflicts and launching new ones? Predicting politics is a notor...
In Europe, Jewish communities are still licking the wounds from a miserable 12 months that saw deadly jihadist violence erupt against them in Paris, Brussels, and Copenhagen. On the old continent, there has also been an unprecedented rise in hate crimes targeting Jews, along with a growing acceptance of anti-Semitic discourse masquerading as fevered, impassioned criticism of alleged Israeli crimes. These events are entirely consistent with Europe’s trajectory since the turn of the 21st Century. One can now confidently predict that any u...
When it comes to the deal agreed to a fortnight ago in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear program, there’s a pattern evolving that should be worrying the Obama administration: the more you know about it, the less you like it. A new opinion poll conducted by the organization I work for, The Israel Project, reveals that an increasing number of Americans are anxious about national security—after the economy, it’s the issue voters take most seriously—and that the Iran deal has exacerbated their concerns. More than 75 percent of Americans say they have...
This week, a bunch of journalists, foreign policy wonks, and assorted pundits received an email from the White House that began with the legendary words, “Hey, I’m Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama. For the past few years, I’ve been working closely with America’s negotiating team, which was tasked with finding a way to achieve a diplomatic resolution that prevents Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” Don’t you just love that “Hey,” greeting? So informal, so accessible, so confident, so quintessentiall...
Last week—and please forgive me for the graphic nature of this metaphor—Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled down his pants and urinated over the graves of the 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys exterminated by Serb forces in the enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995. Twenty years after Bosnia was torn apart by the genocide committed by both Serb and Croatian forces, the Russians—who were the main backers of the regime of the late tyrant of Belgrade, Slobodan Milosevic—are still playing the insidious role of denying the most monstrous crime t...
Back in 2003, as some readers will recall all too clearly, the noted historian Tony Judt penned a searing critique of Israel in the New York Review of Books. Titled “Israel: The Alternative,” Judt, whose impressive scholarship was largely focused on Europe, depicted the Jewish state as a reactionary outpost of 19th century nationalism that bucked the trend elsewhere—exemplified most of all by the European Union (EU)—toward “individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. Judt’s argument struck a wide-ranging, resonant chord. Inso...
With the June 30 deadline for a deal with Iran over its nuclear ambitions looming ominously, the Obama administration is having a hard time persuading a skeptical public that these negotiations are going to tame the Tehran regime. On the two critical issues—preventing Iran from weaponizing its nuclear program and rolling back the expansion of Iranian political and military influence throughout the region—all the evidence suggests that the White House is engaged in what Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former head of the U.S. Defense Int...
The French, to the casual observer, are a real enigma when it comes to foreign policy. Sometimes it seems like they can be truly helpful, whereas other times they are truly awful. Take Iran. On the question of the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions, France has retained a healthy skepticism regarding the current negotiating process being pushed by the Obama administration. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was crystal clear that any deal with Iran that didn’t grant international inspectors unfette...
