Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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The cemetery in Jerusalem’s Givat Shaul neighborhood was bathed in the fading sunlight of a late May afternoon. Silently and steadily, the column of mourners wound their way toward an open grave, surrounded by glinting white headstones, inhaling the heady scent of the cypress trees that flourish on the adjacent hillsides. As the mourners came to a halt, a rabbi recited the Jewish memorial prayer, El Male Rachamim, his sorrowful tones punctuated by the crunch of the gravel underfoot and the gentle sobs of the family of the deceased. The m...
A potentially ugly row is brewing in the United Kingdom over an academic conference, due to be held at the University of Southampton in April, which carries the title, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.” Given that a sentence construction like that one will leave most people with their eyes glazed over, let’s just cut to the chase here. The real title of this conference is, “Does the State of Israel Have a Legal Right to Exist? No, Of Course it Doesn’t.” Hence the growing volley of c...
I will be interesting to see if Saudi Arabia’s King Salman gets the “Bibi treatment” from the news media this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you’ll remember, was accused of snubbing President Barack Obama when he addressed Congress on the Iranian nuclear threat back in March. Contrastingly, King Salman can be said to have snubbed the president by not coming to Washington for his May 14 summit with Gulf Arab leaders. In any case, supporters of Israel should feel some relief at the political heat being directed, if only tempora...
For two weeks in June, Washington, DC will play host to a group of pro-Palestinian activists who have assembled an exhibit about the dispersion of the Palestinians during Israel’s War of Independence. The exhibit takes place under the auspices of the “Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope”—“nakba” is the Arabic word for “catastrophe,” which is how Palestinians and their supporters typically refer to the 1948 upheaval that accompanied the war launched against the nascent state of Israel by five Arab armies. It’s a clever idea that require...
A potentially ugly row is brewing in the United Kingdom over an academic conference, due to be held at the University of Southampton in April, which carries the title, “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism.” Given that a sentence construction like that one will leave most people with their eyes glazed over, let’s just cut to the chase here. The real title of this conference is, “Does the State of Israel Have a Legal Right to Exist? No, Of Course it Doesn’t.” Hence the growing volley of c...
For just more than a month now, the Virginia State Bar (VSB)-which, it should be noted, is a state body working with the legal profession in Virginia-has been embroiled in a nasty political row over its apparent boycott of Israel. I say "apparent" because this hasn't been the kind of run-of-the-mill boycott row one encounters on college campuses. Leading officials of the VSB are insisting that they are not boycotting Israel and that, moreover, they were not even aware of the Boycott, Divestment...
Back in Roman times, Yemen went by the name “Arabia Felix”—Latin for “Happy Arabia.” It’s hard to think of a greater misnomer for this Arab state on the southern tip of the Persian Gulf, a few miles across the water from the Horn of Africa. The Romans actually had a pretty miserable time there. Aelius Gallus, who was the Prefect of Egypt in 26 BCE, tried to conquer the territory and was roundly defeated. Through the ages, Yemen maintained its warlike image, with its various tribes doing battle with the Ottoman Turks and the British Empire. The...
When Barack Obama began his first term as president, foreign policy chatter was prone to including terms like “regime change” and “axis of evil” in discussions about Iran. But as Obama sought to break decisively with the legacy of his predecessor, George W. Bush, he moved rapidly in the opposite direction, offering an olive branch to the Iranian regime within a few weeks of assuming office. In March 2009, Obama delivered a message to mark the Persian New Year in which he said, “The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its...
As expected, the Obama administration is having a hard time selling the American public on the feeble understanding—it’s not a “deal,” since nothing was signed—that was recently reached with Iran over its nuclear program. Let’s start with President Barack Obama himself. Interviewed by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times after the understanding was announced, Obama was confident and buoyant, declaring that there was no formula “more effective than the diplomatic initiative and framework that we put forward” when it comes to preventing Tehr...
President Barack Obama is correct. There is, as he said on Tuesday, no realistic prospect of a Palestinian state being created through a diplomatic process for the foreseeable future. “What we can’t do is pretend that there’s a possibility for something that’s not there,” Obama said. “And we can’t continue to premise our public diplomacy based on something that everybody knows is not going to happen at least in the next several years.” So that, it would seem, is that. In 2012, Obama confidently told the U.N. General Assembly, “The road is ha...
There is no world leader more hated by bien-pensant liberals in America and Europe than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Whereas once the bile was directed at former U.S. President George W. Bush—for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, for identifying radical Islam in both its Shi’a and Sunni variations as an existential threat, and for backing Israel—it’s now largely focused on Netanyahu, an alleged “racist” and “war criminal” who just happens to have won a resounding vote of confidence from the Israeli electorate on March 17. Two N...
I probably shouldn’t admit this, given that my political views are fairly well-known, but one of my favorite songs is “I’m So Bored With the USA,” by British punk legends The Clash. “Yankee dollar talk to the dictators of the world,” spits vocalist Joe Strummer in the song’s opening verse. “In fact it’s giving orders, an’ they can’t afford to miss a word!” Oh how times have changed since “I’m So Bored” was released in 1977! The images of steely jawed, stone-hearted CIA officers conjured up by the song seem hopelessly dated. In today’s...
I have to confess that I was disappointed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference this year. I felt that it was bland, packed with tired talking points, lacking in strategic direction, and generally uninspiring. Not so with Netanyahu’s speech to Congress the following day, which was a barnstormer. In its immediate aftermath, there were the standard idiocies in response, but that was to be expected. One that caught my eye was the utterance of CNN’s Glori...
Love, as the song goes, is in the air. If the latest media reports are accurate, the United States and the Iranian regime are rapidly closing in on a deal over the mullahs’ nuclear ambitions. Admittedly, the source of this nugget of hope was Joseph Cirincione—a former Capitol Hill operative who now serves as the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a liberal foreign policy think tank, having gotten there via the Center for American Progress, another think tank that serves as a reliable echo chamber for the Obama administration’s edicts, both...
In his book on politics in the Arab world, “Cruelty and Silence,” the Iraqi intellectual Kanan Makiya made a telling point about the opposition to the first Gulf war of 1991, when a U.S.-led coalition ejected Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime from Kuwait. “A principled opposition to the Gulf war does not require,” Makiya wrote, “(a) denying that the Iraqi regime gassed its own citizens; (b) inventing dates to prove that the United States not only started the fighting on the ground (which it did) but that it sent Iraq into Kuwait (which it d...
A few months ago I asked William Schabas, the Canadian academic who this week resigned as head of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s probe into last summer’s war in Gaza because of a conflict of interest involving his work for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whether I could interview him for a magazine piece I was writing. He replied promptly and courteously, explaining that he couldn’t be interviewed because his commission hadn’t yet appointed a media relations officer. I remember being rather staggered by that admissi...
You have to hand it to the United Nations, I guess. It’s hard to think of another body that would organize a special meeting on the subject of rising anti-Semitism with anti-Semites not just in attendance, but making speeches as well. The Jan. 22 meeting on the subject at the U.N. General Assembly, organized in the run-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day, started well enough. The keynote speaker was French philosopher and author Bernard-Henri Levy, who used the occasion to mount a forthright denunciation of what he called “the del...
It was an electrifying moment: in a voice crackling with anger and pain, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced the rise of anti-Semitism in France before the country’s National Assembly on Jan. 13, pointedly observing, “We haven’t shown enough outrage.” Valls was speaking following the funerals of seven of the victims of the recent Islamist terrorist attacks in France, in which a total of 17 people, including four Jews trapped in a siege at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in eastern Paris, were murdered in cold blood. Though his spe...
As predictably as birds flying south for the winter, this week’s abominable terrorist attack on the headquarters of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, brought forth the usual burnt-out platitudes from those commentators who insist that Islamist violence is rooted in legitimate grievances with the West. One of the most heinous examples of this outwardly-nuanced, inwardly-confused discourse appeared in a piece for the Financial Times by Tony Barber. By the second paragraph, Barber was sagely counseling us not to jump to conclusions a...
It sometimes seems as if the see-saw debate about the true intentions of Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority has been with us for an eternity. One day, we’ll be saying that Abbas is genuinely a moderate, that he really is committed to a two-state solution, that perhaps he’s the guy upon whom the cautious, unsentimental Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should risk a bet. The next day, we’ll encounter yet another inciting, spiteful Abbas soundbite and it’s back to the drawing board. I don’t think that Abbas is the Machiavel...
Do we need Holocaust Remembrance Day? Since some of you may be incredulous that I even asked that question, let me first explain why I am doing so. Over the last week, a scandal has erupted in Ireland regarding whether or not Israel can be mentioned at the forthcoming official Holocaust commemoration on Sunday, Jan. 25. (The official international remembrance day follows two days later.) It was Yanky Fachler, the avuncular Irish-Jewish broadcaster who has been master of ceremonies of the event for several years now, who alerted the outside worl...
It’s an article that’s more than 10 years old now, but I still maintain that anyone who wants to get an insight into the dynamics of anti-Semitism in France would do well to consult “France’s Scarlet Letter,” published by the journalist Marie Brenner in the June 2003 edition of Vanity Fair. In that superlative piece, which had at its core a profile of Sammy Ghozlan, the Jewish ex-cop who started his own agency to monitor and expose anti-Semitic incidents, Brenner provided fascinating insight into the class divisions that streak the French Je...
A winter of discontent is brewing in America. Over the last fortnight, large parts of the country have seethed with anger, first at the decision of a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting of Michael Brown—18 years old, and black—and second, at the decision of a grand jury in New York not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island police officer who placed Eric Garner—43 years old, and black—in the chokehold that contributed to his death minutes later. The proximity, in terms of timing,...
To properly understand how the Holocaust has been seared onto Israel’s collective consciousness, one should visit the country on the 27th of Nisan, a date in the Hebrew calendar that falls in either April or May in the solar one. On that day, Yom HaShoah, the unsuspecting visitor is dumbstruck by the sight of an entire country coming to a halt. At 10 a.m. on the dot, a siren sounds across the country. Schools, hospitals, trading floors, garages, news rooms, tech start-ups—all these and more freeze exactly where they are as Israeli citizens obs...
As international negotiators departed Vienna with a final deal on Iran's nuclear program still elusive, the commander of the widely-feared Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) threatened to eliminate the State of Israel by "conquering Palestine." Fars news agency, an official mouthpiece of the Iranian regime, reported that Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the Commander of the IRGC, declared in Tehran that "Americans have very clearly surrendered to Iran's might and this is obvious in their...
