Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 176 - 200 of 203
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... Full story
Israel ended 2013 in much the same way as previous years: facing a surge of terrorist activity from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. On Dec. 24, Salah Shukri Abu Latyef, a 22-year-old Israeli Defense Ministry worker who was repairing the border fence with Gaza, was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper. Abu Latyef’s murder was followed by a series of rocket attacks that provoked response strikes from the Israeli military—which deemed that the assault directly threatened the 13,500 Israelis living in the immediate vicinity—on weapons manufacturing facil... Full story
On a virtual stroll through the website of the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel”—a deeply unpleasant experience, I should add—I came across an article that drew an analogy I hadn’t encountered before. Intellectually ludicrous and morally ugly, the writer compared the situation of Aida, a Palestinian refugee camp near Bethlehem, with the bombing by the German Luftwaffe of the Basque city of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. The Aida camp is not the most luxurious place on earth, yet it is far from... Full story
As Jews across the world celebrated Chanukah, they also remembered the victory of the Maccabees against the brutal rule of Antiochus IV, designated “Harasha” (“the wicked”) by rabbinical tradition. Antiochus’s main aim was to Hellenize the Jews in the ancient land of Israel by forcing them to adopt Greek customs in place of Jewish ones. Among the Jewish customs that Antiochus banned was circumcision. Because it was the symbol of the covenant between God and the Jewish patriarch Abraham, Antiochus understood that if Judaism were to be comprehen... Full story
In the coming days, there will be much reflection on the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela, following the former South African president’s passing on Dec. 5. And in the coming weeks, we can anticipate a febrile exchange over his true views on Israel and the Middle East. We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of such a debate. Mandela has entered the pantheon of 20th-century figures that exercised the most extraordinary influence over global events, touching the lives of ordinary mortals in the process. In the 1940s, many Britons could tel... Full story
Imagine the following scenario. A storied American university holds a conference on the future of democracy in Europe. Among the invited speakers are representatives of two of the continent’s neo-Nazi parties, Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece. Better yet, imagine that same university holding a conference on current trends in Israeli politics, featuring a speaker who is an open admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish extremist who murdered 29 worshippers and wounded more than 100 when he opened fire in a Palestinian mosque in H... Full story
Here, in a nutshell, are the principles driving the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy. Screw the Syrians. Don’t upset the Iranians. And stop those damn Israelis from wrecking Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations. We are coming to the end of year marked by shameful climb-downs in the face of our enemies and utterly unreasonable demands made of our allies. In Syria, Obama temporarily toyed with the idea of launching air strikes against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, before being seduced by a Russian proposal to have that same reg... Full story
One of the most irritating aspects of the international efforts to deal with Iran’s nuclear program lies in the unrealistic expectations that negotiations create, even among those—like the American Jewish advocacy groups who met with the White House Oct. 29 to discuss the nuclear issue—who have every reason to be cynical. From Nov. 7-8, members of the so-called P5+1, which comprises the five members of the U.N. Security Council along with Germany, will meet with representatives of the Iranian regime in Geneva. These talks follow from preliminar... Full story
Ah, Saudi Arabia! The country that spawned 15 of the 19 terrorists that executed the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. The country we in America are told is an ally, even though, when it comes to values, we have virtually nothing in common with the reactionary oil billionaires running the place. The country whose oil supplies us, for the moment, with about 13 percent of our annual energy needs. The country with one of the most abysmal human rights records in the world, which bans any religion other than Islam, which imports slave labor from the... Full story
I’ll confess that when I first read about Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s disagreement with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, I felt a degree of sympathy. Not for the substance of the argument, but for the manner in which Lapid expressed it. “My father didn’t come to Haifa from the Budapest ghetto in order to get recognition from Abu Mazen (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas),” Lapid said Oct. 7 at New York’s 92nd Street Y. “Darn right,” I grunted at my Mac... Full story
A few weeks ago, I ventured the theory that rather than the so-called “Israel Lobby” controlling the administration, it’s the administration that controls the Israel Lobby. As evidence, I cited two recent episodes. Firstly, Secretary of State John Kerry’s much-vaunted effort to revive Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations, which, to this date, have gone nowhere for much the same reason that past efforts have failed: the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel’s historic legitimacy by abandoning the so-called “right of return.” Nonetheless,... Full story
By Ben Cohen JNS.org From the brink of war, the Middle East has moved at dizzying speed to the cusp of peace. Or so we are led to believe. The issues at hand are Iran and Syria—and incidentally, there is good reason to feel some relief from that fact, since it’s a timely reminder that Palestinian opposition to Israel’s legitimacy is not the core dispute in the region, but a sideshow in the larger civil war with Islam that has engulfed much of this neighborhood. In Syria, the regime of Bashar al-Assad claims, under the watchful eye of the Russi... Full story
Barely minutes after the news broke that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was planning a major effort on Capitol Hill to garner support for the Obama Administration’s plan for a limited military operation against the Syrian regime, the conspiracy theorists were having a field day. As always, it’s instructive to note how the notion that American foreign policy is a prisoner of organizations like AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group in America, is an idée fixe on both the far left and the extreme right. Juan Cole, a left-... Full story
“Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon/The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave/They buried us without shroud or coffin/And in August the barley grew up out of our grave.” These lines are from the poem “Requiem for the Croppies,” by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who died last week. They were pointed out to me by a dear friend of mine, also an Irishman, who instructively observed how Heaney’s verse—which commemorated the merciless British crushing of an Irish uprising in 1798—eerily conjures up the terrible real... Full story
Back in 1976, when the burgeoning punk movement began transforming the rock ’n’ roll landscapes of London and New York, a young man named John Lydon scrawled the words “I Hate...” on his Pink Floyd t-shirt. With this one stroke, Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, the lead singer of The Sex Pistols, demarcated the past from the future: eschewing the lengthy and ponderous compositions of Floyd’s front man, Roger Waters, Rotten and his mates set about delivering sharp, angry tunes in a compact three-minute format. Almost 40 years later, popular music has... Full story
One of the oft-repeated criticisms of the movement to boycott Israel is that it portrays the Middle East’s only healthy democracy as the ultimate rogue state, ignoring at the same time those authoritarian regimes that violate the most basic human rights on a daily basis. Frankly, that’s why I’m pleased to announce that the boycott I’m writing about here, one that is picking up pace, has nothing to do with Israel, the Palestinians, or the Middle East in general. This time, the target is Russia. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia has reverte... Full story
Among the handful of post-war leaders who could always be relied upon to support the United States unstintingly, the name of Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, stands out. Blair wasn’t content to merely support U.S. foreign policy. He energetically advocated for American engagement and warned of the negative global consequences of an America in retreat. In April 1999, at the height of the NATO operation against the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo carried out by Serbian forces, Blair delivered an historic speech to the Chicago Council o... Full story
The victory of Hassan Rouhani in June’s Iranian presidential election has once again thrust the word “moderate” into the center of the agonized debate over western policy toward Tehran’s nuclear program—a debate whose latest iteration centers on the implications of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s planned visit to Iran next month. But what “moderate” actually means in this context remains unclear. If the various western pundits and politicians who have embraced Rouhani are to be believed, this wise successor to the hyperbolic Mahmoud Ahmadin... Full story
Which aspect of Secretary of State John Kerry’s repetition of the Arab position last week, that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies at the root of Middle Eastern instability, is more remarkable? The fact that Kerry could actually say such a thing, or the fact that, with the exception of the Weekly Standard, such an extraordinary claim could pass almost unnoticed in a media landscape that is rarely short of opinions about the region? Let’s first revisit what Kerry said. After talks in Amman with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh and his... Full story
With the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, one is almost forced to question whether the global Islamist movement has been dealt a mortal blow. The notion that the era of Islamism has come to an end is not as outlandish as it seems. While the faith of Islam crystallized in Arabia 15 centuries ago, the ideology of Islamism—which aims to place the imperatives of sharia law at the heart of a coercive and all-powerful state—is a product of the last century. Like its totalitarian cousins—fascism, communism and nat... Full story
Following the ugly battle between the Egyptian military and Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi, resulting in Morsi’s ouster on July 3, as well as the ongoing bloodbath in Syria, the arguments for the preservation of the Jordanian model—politically moderate, more democratic than its neighbors, and proudly Islamic yet amenable to good relations with western nations and with Israel—are self-evident. When King Hussein of Jordan died in early 1999, Israel mourned him, as the veteran journalist Eric Silver pointed out at the time, “as o... Full story
Over the last few weeks, there has been much reflection on the legacy of the former South African president, Nelson Mandela, as his health has deteriorated. And in the coming weeks, we can anticipate a febrile exchange over his true views on Israel and the Middle East. We shouldn’t underestimate the significance of such a debate. Mandela has entered the pantheon of 20th-century figures that exercised the most extraordinary influence over global events, touching the lives of ordinary mortals in the process. In the 1940s, many Britons could t... Full story
An unexpected obstacle to efforts within the European Union (EU) to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization emerged last week when the new Bulgarian foreign minister, Kristian Vigenin, stated in a radio interview that evidence connecting the Lebanese Shi’a organization with last year’s murderous assault on a busload of Israeli tourists in the resort town of Burgas was “not conclusive.” Vigenin produced no new evidence to counter the conclusion, shared by American, Israeli and British intelligence agencies, that Hezbollah was behind... Full story
In a recent, exhaustive study of anti-Semitism, the German scholar Clemens Heni explains the significance for Christian theology of the story of Ahasver, a Jewish shoemaker in Jerusalem who, legend has it, refused Jesus a resting place as he made his way to Golgotha bearing the cross on his back. Ahasver’s punishment, says Heni, was to wander the world for eternity, an image that formed the basis for what the Nazis famously called “der ewige Jude”—“the eternal Jew.” “The attribute ‘eternal’ cries out for redemption,” writes Heni. “For Christia... Full story
Here’s a term that rarely crops up in discussions of American policy towards northeast Asia: the Korea Lobby. And as for the pejorative term “Korea Firsters,” that isn’t one I’ve come across. It’s not as if a cluster of organizations working to enhance our relationship with South Korea, or highlight the danger posed by the communist North, doesn’t exist. There’s a group called Korean American Civic Empowerment, whose website boasts a photo of its supporters with the refreshingly combative U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL). The group works... Full story
