Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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While I’ve never been a big fan of celebrity interventions in politics, I will concede that, on occasion, a big-screen actor or a rock star will achieve the kind of impact that mere mortals can only dream about. Case in point: Maureen Lipman, a much-loved British Jewish actress whom American audiences will recognize from her role in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film about the Holocaust, “The Pianist,” in which she played the mother of the film’s main protagonist, Wladyslaw Szpilman. Last week, Lipman wrote an article for Standpoint, a British p...
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s economy minister, got it 100 percent right in a Facebook posting just a few hours after the latest blow to American-Israeli relations—aka “chickenshitgate”— surfaced in the media. Responding to the anonymous “senior Obama administration” official who told The Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a “chickenshit,” Bennett said, “Cursing the prime minister and calling him names is an insult not just to him but to the millions of Israeli citizens and Jews across the...
For several decades now, Israel’s enemies have actively and willfully defamed the Jewish state by comparing its actions to the atrocities committed by the worst villains in recent history. We all know about the ludicrous and insulting parallel drawn between Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa. It was precisely that parallel that underpinned the notorious U.N. General Assembly resolution of 1975, which has since been rescinded, equating Zionism with racism. And we know, too, of the obscene comparison between Israel and Nazi G...
Who are we at war with in the Middle East? At first glance, this seems like a straightforward question with an obvious answer. We are at war with the Islamic State terrorist organization in Iraq and Syria. Moreover, “war” is the exact descriptor to use, now that the Obama administration has gotten over its initial reluctance to portray the clash in this part of the Middle East with such a stark and unmistakable word. War, however, is rarely simple. As a rule of thumb, one should appreciate that the identified enemy is not the only enemy. Hence,...
I will confess that I felt more anxious than I’d anticipated about the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum. In case it’s not clear why, I’m a British citizen who has lived in the United States for the past decade. Over that period, as with many arrivals to these shores, my attention has been consumed far more by domestic issues here, just as my concern with the finer details of politics in my native land has faded. Yet the spectacle of Scots voting on whether to leave the United Kingdom stirred something in me. I couldn’t observe it...
By Ben Cohen JNS.org Here’s the good news: the Obama administration has finally grasped that the onslaught of the Islamic State terror group through Iraq and Syria needs to be defeated and destroyed. Sixty-one percent of Americans, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, agree with the president. At a time when much of the world believes, not unreasonably, that America is in retreat, the administration’s willingness to pursue military options and its almost George W. Bush-esque rhetoric regarding the “evil” of Islamic State, as Secr...
Ask a foreigner to name a British parliamentarian. Assuming they are able to provide an answer, there’s a high chance, especially if that person is a Jew or a Muslim, that the name on their lips will be that of George Galloway. The 60-year-old Galloway has been a fixture of the British House of Commons since 1987. In that time, he has represented a variety of constituencies, beginning in the Scottish city of Glasgow and currently representing a section of Bradford, a heavily Muslim city in the north of England. He has also represented two diffe...
Strolling through Jerusalem’s historic Yemin Moshe quarter on a pleasant August morning, my ears caught a ringing, melodic sound emanating from within the walls of the Old City, perhaps half a mile from where I stood. This being a Sunday, the sound I heard was the chiming of church bells, welcoming Christian worshippers to morning services. Normally, there is something joyous about the sound of those bells, particularly in a city that contains the key holy sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But on this day, I felt a profound sadness u...
I recently journeyed to Columbus Circle in Manhattan to savor the atmosphere at two rival demonstrations over Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. On one side, by the entrance to Central Park, and adjacent to the hot dog stands and “I Love NYC” souvenir outlets, I found about 60 or so pro-Israel demonstrators. The sky was gray and leaden, the humidity threatened a thunderstorm, and the news coming out of Israel was pretty bleak, but their mood veered in the joyous direction. They danced and sang, they recited prayers for the IDF’s fallen soldier...
The debate about whether Jews have a future in Europe has once again surfaced, as Israel’s Operation Protective Edge gained momentum in response to Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza. The two issues are connected for a simple reason: on July 13, a large number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Paris decided to attack a synagogue in the French capital, thereby demonstrating that these days, aspiring pogromists are more likely to wear a Palestinian keffiyeh than a swastika armband. I had originally intended to write about whether Europe’s Jews sho...
It was often remarked that the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader, Yasser Arafat, would sound moderate when speaking in English and utterly intransigent when speaking in Arabic. Much of the same could be said about his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority. In an exclusive op-ed for Haaretz—published to coincide with the Israeli newspaper’s one-day conference on peace in Tel Aviv that was rudely interrupted by a barrage of rockets from Gaza—Abbas sounded rather statesmanlike. “As the president of the...
If you want the measure of how American policy has clumsily tailed the shifting system of alliances in the Middle East, look no further than the op-ed titled “Iraq Must Not Come Apart,” published in the New York Times by Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations. Once an advocate of a federal Iraq, Gelb has now changed his mind. Nothing wrong with that, except that in doing so, Gelb, one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers in America today, has arrived at a most troubling position. America’s priority, Gelb says, is to defea...
During the war in Iraq, when I was still living in London and coordinating news coverage of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein for various international media organizations, I was in regular contact with a brave Iraqi Kurdish journalist named Ayub Nuri. When Ayub and I finally met in person, several years later in New York, we spent a couple of hours talking about the region generally, and specifically about whether Israel had a natural ally in the Kurds. So it was with some pleasure, in the midst of a horrible news week for the Middle East, that...
I’ve long argued that any proper understanding of the Palestinian conflict with Israel’s legitimacy is compromised by not taking wider regional factors into account. The school of thought that describes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “the Middle East conflict” is dangerously misguided, because it ignores other factors that are far more important, such as the historically violent schism between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, Iran’s renewed assertiveness in Syria and Lebanon, the shared strategic interests binding Israel and the conservativ...
When I last wrote about the archive of Jewish treasures from Iraq rescued by U.S. forces in Baghdad in 2003, I noted that the prevalent opinion among Iraqi Jews—a community from which I hail on my father’s side—was that the books, photographs, scrolls, writings, and communal documents in this extraordinary collection should remain in America, rather than being returned to Iraq. I then argued that while this view couldn’t be faulted on legal or moral grounds, I nonetheless wished that the situation were different, and that Iraq could celebra...
When Hassan Rouhani was elected as Iran’s president in June 2013, you could hear the sighs of relief in Washington, in Brussels, at U.N. Headquarters, and across key European capitals. Finally, we were told, the terrorism-supporting, human rights-abusing, Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had left the political stage. Finally, a moderate, rational leader with whom we could conduct business was in power. Finally, there was a real chance of securing an enduring deal to thwart Iran’s dangerous nuclear ambitions. Almost a year later, we...
As its next ambassador to the United Nations Headquarters in New York, Iran has appointed a man who participated in the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. The decision has been met with outrage—and rightly so. “Unconscionable,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has introduced legislation that would prevent a U.N. ambassador from entering the United States if that ambassador is a known terrorist. “A slap in the face,” said U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “A disdain for the diplomatic process,” said U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)....
Ah, the devious Benjamin Netanyahu! Just when we are on the cusp of a breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations, Israel’s slippery prime minister introduces a potential deal-breaker, in the form of insisting that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. That, in essence, is the narrative that has emerged over the past fortnight, as shaped by the tiresome pundits who spend their days forensically examining Netanyahu’s statements and actions. Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Hussein Ibish, a faux moderate wor...
It’s getting harder these days to survey the latest developments in the Middle East without feeling anxiety about the negative impact they will have on our own policy debate. I see a pattern—some may call it “Obama’s Law,” though I hesitate to do so—whereby the worse things get for Israel in a strategic sense, the more pressure there is on Jerusalem to make concessions. And because Israel cannot make concessions when Palestinian terrorists in Gaza shower the south of the country with missiles, or when Iran tries to smuggle in rockets to...
Back in 2004, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused his regional rival Viktor Yushchenko, who was then the pro-western president of Ukraine, of having campaigned on the basis of “anti-Russian, Zionist” slogans. Putin’s invocation of the Z word led some observers to briefly fear that Russia was reviving the spirit of Soviet anti-Semitism dressed up as “anti-Zionism.” But a few hours later, Putin’s office clarified that what he’d meant to say was “anti-Semitic,” not “Zionist.” Was Putin’s office lying with this clarification? Was the...
#Rethink2014 is one of the more creative Twitter hashtags I’ve recently encountered. Launched by students opposing the hatefest otherwise known as “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW), the hashtag is designed for incorporation into tweets that explain why this ghastly annual event is a series of calumnies and lies from beginning to end. Some examples: “I oppose Israel Apartheid Week because I know what apartheid actually means.” “I oppose Israel Apartheid Week because I’m sitting next to an Arab-Israeli Muslim IDF soldier on the bus in Jerusalem.” ...
That there is widespread anxiety over the Obama administration’s Middle East policies is hardly a secret. If we have learned anything over the past six years it is that, contrary to the conspiratorial theory that the so-called “Israel Lobby” is the ultimate authority when it comes to Washington’s stance in the region, the opposite is true. It is presidents and their appointees who make policies, based on their assessment of the strategic interests of the United States at a given moment. In that framework, the “Lobby” only enjoys success whe...
Ever since its founding in 2008, J Street, the liberal Jewish advocacy group, has expended a great deal of time and energy trying to convince American Jews that it is a credible and more ethical alternative to traditional pro-Israel organizations like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). J Street believes, not unreasonably, that there is a constituency for its work among those American Jews who are generally supportive of Israel but queasy over certain of its policies, most obviously creating and sustaining Jewish communities i...
When it comes to the most asinine response to the purported deal between the world’s main powers and Iran over the latter’s nuclear program, top honors to go Harvard University’s Stephen Walt. Walt was the co-author, with his academic colleague John Mearsheimer, of “The Israel Lobby,” a badly researched, poorly argued screed about how a cluster of pro-Israel organizations have cajoled successive U.S. administrations into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t have done. Paranoically obsessed with what he regards as the malign influence o...
Here are three disturbing memes about Jews and Israel that I’ve noticed in three separate-but-related news stories recently. Meme No.1: “You’re ungrateful.” Here’s State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf responding to reported remarks by the Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon attacking Secretary of State John Kerry. “We find the remarks of the defense minister to be offensive and inappropriate, especially given all that the United States has done to support Israel’s security needs and will continue to do,” said Harf. Now, one can certainly...
