Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS)—The exposé on anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party, broadcast in the United Kingdom last week by the BBC’s flagship Panorama program, gave viewers an opportunity to see the extraordinary confrontation in April 2016 between John Mann, a Labour parliamentarian and leading fighter against anti-Jewish bigotry, and Ken Livingstone, the former Labour Mayor of London and leading promoter of conspiracy theories about Zionist “collaboration” with Nazi Germany. Livingstone had given a radio interview in which he repeated the slander he’d utt...
(JNS)—In a puff piece on Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, published on the occasion of his 80th birthday last year, the broadcaster France 24 headlined its profile, “The Great Survivor of Lebanese Politics.” This wording suggested that Berri is a successful politician in the sense that this image is understood in the Western democracies; someone who negotiates, navigates, cajoles and compromises his way through his country’s legislature and invariably comes out on top. But if Berri has been the “great survivor,” this is due...
(JNS)—By the time America woke up on Friday, Mar. 15, Google’s search engine was jammed with news of a mass shooting at another place of worship in the world. Counts of 49 dead and dozens wounded were being reported at the Al Noor Mosque in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Doubtless, many people were looking for the manifesto penned in advance of this atrocity, titled “The Great Replacement,” which the gunman had apparently issued. The text was easy to find and nauseating to read. To summarize its ideas and arguments at any length...
(JNS)—This July, Argentina’s Jewish community will mark the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were murdered and hundreds more were seriously wounded. It is promising to be a wretched and depressing commemoration, frankly, because there is no reason to expect anything else. On July 18, 1994, a Renault utility truck packed with explosives smashed into the AMIA building in the busy downtown area of the Argentine capital, leaving a scene of absolute carnage in its wake. The bombing, whi...
(JNS)—Imagine that you are a Jewish doctor in a Nazi concentration camp. About 100 of your fellow inmates suffer from diabetes, and you only have a limited supply of insulin, with no guarantee of more on the way. Do you give each patient the same amount regardless of individual need, knowing that all of them will likely die within a month? Or do you reserve your supply for those with a greater chance of survival, meaning that those with severe diabetes will die much sooner as a result? Or imagine that you are the Greek Jewish teenager from Salo...
(JNS)—Back in January, the unlikely figure of Paddington Bear—the cuddly, bright-eyed cub much adored by young children through the years—ran afoul of the Russian government. As part of its policy of limiting the influence of foreign culture on Russia’s citizens, Vladimir Putin’s regime delayed the release of the movie “Paddington Bear 2” by two weeks to prevent it from competing with locally produced films that hit the screens at the same time. That decision was enabled by legislation from 2015 that also permits Russia’s rulers to, in t...
(JNS)—In the summer of 1993, I found myself at one of the most unsettling dinner engagements that I have yet experienced. I was a young journalist writing about the war in Bosnia, and a friend of mine in London who was working as an aide to Haris Silajdzic, the Bosnian foreign minister at the time, called one day with an invitation to sneak into a private dinner Silajdzic was attending in the British capital that same evening. “Sure,” I enthused. “Where?” “South Kensington,” my friend laughed. “The Iranian Embassy.” I went along. Under a hu...
(JNS)—There was one corner of New York City last Thursday where the Senate Judicial Committee hearings into the accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh went largely unnoticed: the United Nations building perched on the East River, where the 73rd General Assembly has been in full swing this week. But while the proceedings in Washington were electrifying, the spectacle at the United Nations had all the feel of an annual routine. Most of all, there were the usual lengthy speeches, laden with protocol and platitudes, and d...
(JNS)—In all the furor around the anti-Semitism plaguing the British Labour Party, I’ve noticed two distinct forms of defense of both the party and its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The first defense, favored by those for whom Corbyn is a Socialist equivalent of L. Ron Hubbard, is to dismiss any and all accusations of anti-Semitism as a “hoax” or “smear” aimed solely at destroying their leader’s prospects of becoming Britain’s next prime minister. The second, which may be wrong-headed but is at least grounded in intellectual sincerity, is t...
(JNS)—Imam Mundhir Abdallah is a good example of the dilemmas that have confronted politicians in Denmark in their response to Islamist extremism among the country’s 300,000 Muslims, the large majority of whom are first- or second-generation immigrants. In May 2017, the Danish Jewish community filed a complaint against Imam Abdallah for a sermon he delivered two months previously, in which he implored faithful Muslims to kill the Jews on “Judgement Day” and urged the “liberation” of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem from “the filth of the Zionis...
(JNS)—When it comes to the Palestinian “original sin” theory of Israel’s creation, there are two key milestones: the flight of approximately 750,000 Arab refugees during the 1948 War of Independence and the 1967 conquest of eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the Six-Day War. The events of 1948 are known in Arabic as the nakba (“catastrophe”) and the events of 1967 are called the naksa (“setback”). This week, with the 51st anniversary of the Six-Day War upon us, Palestinians will mark “Naksa Day” on June 5 with protest...
(JNS)—In a welcome statement issued this week, the U.S. State Department drew attention to the continuing persecution of the small Baha’i religious minority in Yemen by Iran-backed Shi’a rebels. The rebel Houthis “have targeted the Baha’i community in inflammatory speech along with a wave of detentions, ‘court summons,’ and punishment without a fair or transparent legal process,” the statement observed. These and similar actions over the past 12 months “appear to be an effort to pressure Yemeni Baha’is to recant their faith.” Like the Yezidi an...
(JNS)—There is a tragic account of the last moments of Grigori Zinoviev, the veteran Russian Bolshevik leader of Jewish descent who was executed by Stalin in 1936. According to the historian Donald Rayfield, on the journey from his prison cell to the execution cellar, the broken Zinoviev “clung to the boots of his guards and was taken down by stretcher.” “This scene,” Rayfield continues in his book on Stalin’s crimes, “was re-enacted several times at supper at Stalin’s dacha, the bodyguard Karl Pauker playing the part of Zinoviev—begging for St...
Amid uncertainty over the future direction of US policy in Syria, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley issued a stinging rebuke on Wednesday to President Bashar al-Assad’s regime over its continued use of chemical weapons. “We must not forget that while we sit here debating chemical weapons, there are people on the front lines in Syria who are facing the terrifying reality of those heinous weapons,” Haley declared at a meeting of the UN Security Council marking the first anniversary of the massacre at Khan Sheikhoun in northwestern Syria...
(JNS)-Queen Elizabeth II is marking her 66th year of reign in 2018, which by any standards is an extraordinarily long time for a single individual to be a head of state. (By comparison, King David is said to have reigned for 40 years, and Queen Victoria-comfortably overtaken now by Elizabeth-managed 64.) Off the top of my head, I can't think of any current ruler who has remained in place throughout the Cold War and beyond. In that sense, historians will have a grand second Elizabethan era to...
(JNS)—I interviewed Mateusz Morawiecki, the prime minister of Poland, during his September visit to New York. The public-relations maven who arranged the meeting pitched Morawiecki—then still deputy prime minister—as a rising star anxious to allay concerns in the Jewish community about controversial legislation (which was signed into law on Feb. 6) regarding terminology and the Holocaust. Indeed, when we sat down for our conversation, Morawiecki advanced the case that Jews and Poles have a common interest in commemorating the brutalities of th...
For the first time in nearly a decade, one dares to believe that the Islamist clerics who have ruled Iran since 1979 will not be in power by the time the 40th anniversary of their revolution rolls around in 2019. The nationwide protests are a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, as evidenced in the slogans chanted by the demonstrators. They are also a rude antidote to the thinking of much of the Western establishment, which still clings to the notion that the “reformers” with whom they negotiated the 2015 nuclear dea...
U.S. National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster underlined an important point this week that deserves a wider audience. Speaking at a conference in Washington, D.C., McMaster highlighted two countries that he said were playing a key role in advancing radical Islamist ideology through the Muslim community’s “charities, madrassas and other social organizations.” Not Pakistan. Not Libya. Not Shi’a Iran. The two countries named by McMaster have been regarded for most of the past century as stalwart allies of the West. One is a member of the NAT...
Foreign ministers from India, Russia and China notably refrained from recognizing 'East Jerusalem' as the capital of Palestine at their annual meeting in New Delhi this week-seven days after the US recognized the holy city as the capital of Israel. The decision not to restate the position on Jerusalem long-held by all three countries was in marked contrast to their joint call at last year's meeting in Moscow for a "sovereign, independent, viable and united State of Palestine, with East...
It has been a long time since I’ve heard anyone say anything positive about the French Socialist Party (PS), once the giant of that country’s post-war politics, but trounced into fifth place in this year’s presidential election, with just 6 percent of the vote going to its candidate. But I’m nonetheless going to throw caution to the wind, and offer my modest congratulations to the PS for its Nov. 21 decision to expel Gérard Filoche, the party grandee at the center of a row over a dismally transparent anti-Semitic tweet from his account,...
The US expressed horror on Friday, Nov. 24, over the release by Pakistan last week of Hafiz Saeed, the mastermind of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai whose targets included Nariman House, the local Chabad center. “The United States is deeply concerned that Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) leader Hafiz Saeed has been released from house arrest in Pakistan,” a statement from the State Department declared. “LeT is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent civilians in terro...
Another week, another centennial. Following the Balfour Declaration’s milestone, it’s now time to look back on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, where a communist insurrection in St. Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, gave birth to a state that caused untold misery to millions for almost the remainder of the 20th century. Led by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks—the “majority” faction of the Russian communists—were a tight-knit, fiercely revolutionary group. Its core members had shared the experience of exile in grand cities like London...
For the Palestinians, the year zero is not 1948, when the state of Israel came into being, but 1917, when Great Britain issued, in the November of that year, the Balfour Declaration—expressing support for the establishment of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. So central is the Balfour Declaration to Palestinian political identity that the “Zionist invasion” is officially deemed to have begun in 1917—not in 1882, when the first trickle of Jewish pioneers from Russia began arriving, nor in 1897, when the Zionist movement held its first congr...
Walking through central London last week, and with a spare half hour on my hands, I decided to pay a quick visit to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Inside, I spent most of my time intently studying a painting that I could not recall having seen before: “The Philosopher,” a 1645 canvas by the Italian painter Salvator Rosa. Rosa depicts a stern young man with flowing black locks and undistinguished clothing holding a stone tablet that bears the Latin inscription, “Aut tace aut loquere meliora silentio.” In English, it means, “Either...
It is difficult to look at the scandalous international response to the Kurdish independence referendum and not think, at the same time, of the betrayals endured by the Zionist movement in the decades after World War I. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, promising a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. What people forget is that in 1939, Britain then issued a White Paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine—on the eve of the Holocaust—to a paltry 75,000 souls over five years. They forget, too, that as late as 1947, Bri...
