Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Attacks on Israel's legitimacy were in full flow at the UN General Assembly session in New York City on Wednesday, as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the 1917 Balfour Declaration-in which Britain announced its support for "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people"-as a "crime against our people," while Iranian President Hassan Rouhani described the Jewish state as "the rogue Zionist regime," in language harking back to the...
This week, I became an American citizen. As I intently studied my naturalization certificate after the oath-taking ceremony, it struck me how fortunate I am to be accepted into this nation on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, of all occasions. I should stress that my own story is rather routine and uninteresting. I came to the U.S. from the United Kingdom with my family, I had a job and a home in New York, and as the years went by, I progressed from a work visa to a ‘Green Card’ to full citizenship. Along the way, I did nothing more dramatic than fil...
Should American Jewish leaders speak to the rulers of a petrostate that finances Hamas terrorists to blow up their fellow Jews in Israel? That, in essence, is the fraught question emerging from the rumors and reports of recent days that prominent representatives of the U.S. Jewish community will meet with senior Qatari officials, supposedly including Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, on the fringes of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York this week. Having canvassed Jewish opinion on this question, I’ve concluded t...
Billy Joel’s decision to sport a yellow star on the front and back of his jacket during a concert this week was a nod to history that the singer may not have been aware of. The venue for the concert, New York City’s Madison Square Garden, was the site of pro- and anti-Nazi rallies during the World War II. In February 1939, as Europe teetered on the edge of war, 22,000 Nazi sympathizers gathered at the Garden for a rally organized by the German American Bund, during which swastika flags flew alongside a portrait of George Washington. “St...
A leading Palestinian newspaper published an account on Monday of a tense encounter between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and US President Donald Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner in Ramallah last week. Al-Quds, a Jerusalem-based newspaper that is close to the PA, reported that Kushner had raised the issue of the so-called "martyr payments" made to convicted terrorists and their families-a policy dubbed "pay to slay" that costs the PA more than $300 million annu...
The scene is Paris in the late 19th century. At a glittering ball, a handful of eligible gentilhommes eagerly circled the charming Comtesse de La Rochefoucauld—something of an Ivanka Trump in her day—in the hope of being granted a dance. But when the comtesse finally took to the dance floor, the man on her arm was Arthur Meyer, the scion of a rabbinical family who had risen from modest origins to become a newspaper magnate. The spectacle of the comtesse dancing with Meyer the Jew was shocking to the anti-Semites in France—and, this being the t...
As much as President Donald Trump enjoys taking a metaphorical sledgehammer to even the merest of slights against him, there is no reason to repeat the commander-in-chief’s behavior in judging his administration. That there is so much darkness around Trump, his character and his intentions should not obscure the occasional rays of light emanating from his administration. In foreign policy, one can list a few achievements on this score. There was the appointment of Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a few short months, s...
The monthly salary of approximately $3,000 that the Palestinian Authority will pay to terrorist Omar al-Abed could be a powerful spur to a pending U.S. legislative bill that would slash aid to the PA over its “martyr payments” policy, a leading Middle East expert told The Algemeiner on Tuesday. “This is definitely going to put wind in the sails of the Taylor Force Act,” said Jonathan Schanzer, an expert on Palestinian politics at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank. Named in memory of former...
An award-winning journalist who broke the story of the group of Jewish women ejected from an LGBTQ march in Chicago last month has been reassigned to non-journalistic duties at the paper which ran the original report, the Windy City Times. Gretchen Rachel Hammond-whose June 24 story caused a national storm after she detailed how three women flying Jewish Pride flags embossed with the Star of David were instructed to leave the gathering by organizers from the Dyke March Collective-confirmed to...
If you haven’t encountered the term “Shi’a corridor” yet, chances are that you will in the coming weeks, particularly if the ongoing confrontation between the U.S. and Iran in Syria intensifies. What was initially a sideshow to the main battle against Islamic State in Syria is fast becoming the main focus of attention. In recent weeks, the U.S. has shot down at least two Iranian armed drones over Syria. A Syrian regime bomber jet supposedly attacking Islamic State positions near Raqqa was also downed, after it ventured too close to positions he...
For me, the main takeaway from the British election June 8 was that Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the opposition Labour party, didn’t win it. Most of the ridicule in the wake of the election has been aimed at Conservative party Prime Minister Theresa May, for her political error worthy of an Elizabethan farce—calling an election with the aim of increasing her majority, only to end up needing the votes of a right-wing Unionist party in Northern Ireland in order to form a government. The scorn heaped on May by most of the British med...
By any standards, it was an extraordinary week for U.S.-Israel relations—and that was before President Donald Trump even arrived in Israel for his official visit. It began with what sounded like a brawl between American and Israeli officials laying the groundwork for Trump’s May 22-23 visit. Irritated by an Israeli request that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompany Trump on his visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem—an image that would send the unmistakable signal that the new U.S. administration regards a united Jerusalem as Israel’s ete...
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has welcomed a clarification from President Donald Trump's Administration that it does not regard the Western Wall in Jerusalem as a "part of the West Bank," contrary to earlier media reports. "We were dismayed by press accounts earlier today reporting that, in response to a request that Prime Minister Netanyahu accompany President Trump when he visits the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, unidentified U.S. officials...
By any standards, it was an extraordinary week for U.S.-Israel relations—and that was before President Donald Trump even arrived in Israel for his official visit. It began with what sounded like a brawl between American and Israeli officials laying the groundwork for Trump’s May 22-23 visit. Irritated by an Israeli request that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accompany Trump on his visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem—an image that would send the unmistakable signal that the new U.S. administration regards a united Jerusalem as Israel’s ete...
An Israeli veterans organization has released a hard-hitting new video attacking Breaking the Silence—an Israeli NGO that publishes what it says are the anonymous testimonies of Israeli soldiers who participated in abuses against Palestinians—for “lying” about an incident in which a Palestinian prisoner was allegedly beaten unconscious. The group, Reservists on Duty, said that the original Hebrew version of the video had garnered one million views, triggering their decision to release it in English as well. “Organizations promoting BDS such as...
Leading American Jewish groups were quick to praise President Donald Trump’s forthright condemnation of anti-Semitism during a Holocaust commemoration speech. Speaking on behalf of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Stephen Greenberg, its chairman and Malcolm Hoenlein, its executive vice chairman/CEO, noted appreciatively that Trump “clearly and forcefully condemned all forms of anti-Semitism, calling out Holocaust denial, threats to Israel’s existence, anti-Semitic discourse and rhetoric and attacks on Jewis...
As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed near-dictatorial powers following his dubious victory in a constitutional referendum April 16, Andrew Brunson, a Christian pastor from North Carolina, was marking his sixth month of incarceration inside a Turkish prison. Brunson, who has lived in Turkey with his family for the last 23 years, was the head of the Resurrection Church in the coastal city of Izmir—that is, until he was detained last October on the vague and unsubstantiated charge of “membership in an armed terrorist org...
I’ve written many times about the anti-Semitism that continues to plague the British Labour Party—once a noble party of both opposition and government that has now, under its current far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, become a laughably ineffective opposition with little hope of attaining government leadership. One key reason for that involves the scandals around open expressions of anti-Semitism from party activists and leaders alike, discrediting the party among voters in general and forcing Jewish members to leave what was once their nat...
There was an illuminating report from Paris in The Wall Street Journal this week that related how Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, has been consulting a group of French bankers and captains of industry in a bid to continue the mainstreaming of her party as the country’s presidential election approaches. Named “Les Horaces,” in honor of imperial Rome’s most illustrious and politically astute poet, this collection of dignitaries is preparing Le Pen, who represents what has up until now been a perennial party of opposit...
As reports of the savage terrorist attack in central London March 22 emerged, it was clear pretty quickly that British authorities were dealing with an incident straight from the Islamist terror manual. The weapons of choice in London were ordinary consumer goods that are easily refashioned for the purposes of murder. The car in which the kids are driven to school is also a makeshift tank that can be used for ramming pedestrians. The knife that chops a salad can also be a machete of sorts, used to hack down police officers and others who get...
The prospect of all-out conflict between the U.S. and the North Korean regime has loomed large over the last fortnight, as a consequence of the latest round of provocations from Pyongyang. It’s always a competition between the world’s rogue states as to which one of them can pose the greatest threat to global peace and order at any given moment. Since 2011, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, backed by Russian and Iranian military power in the air and on the ground, has wreaked havoc in the Middle East, annihilating around 500,000 people and...
For those of us who spent much of 2016, based upon then-candidate Donald Trump’s own bombastic declarations, worrying about the thrust of the foreign policy of a future Trump administration, President Trump’s address to Congress Feb. 28 provided welcome relief. As ever, precise details were scarce and important shifts of direction went unacknowledged, but the underlying message was clear—and notably more centrist in orientation. Trump correctly identified “radical Islamic terror” as America’s prime enemy, but he also spoke of the importance...
I will admit that this sounds perverse, but Iran’s recent ballistic missile test was welcome in one important sense. Let me explain. Just more than a fortnight into President Donald Trump’s administration, America and the world have been bombarded with all sorts of crises, to the extent that it feels as if two years of history has been packed into two weeks. Relations with Mexico are at their lowest ebb in more than a century. The administration continues to exasperate, most likely intentionally, European heads of state with its on again, off...
He came to Canada as a 16-year-old refugee from Somalia. He’s highly regarded across the Canadian political spectrum. He was just appointed as immigration minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Now 40 years old, Ahmed Hussen has a promising career in front of him. And in these polarized, fragmented times, he is exactly the kind of public figure we need when it comes to clarifying the wider debate about immigration and Islamism, human rights and national security. Trudeau, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, has often bee...
It’s been clear for a long time that there is little difference between the character of terrorist attacks in Israel and those in the West more broadly. Trucks ram into crowds—as they did in Nice, Berlin and Jerusalem. Terrorists blow up or shoot up nightclubs—as they did in Orlando, Tel Aviv and Bali. Knife-wielding Islamists dash into venues from shopping malls to police stations stabbing anyone in reach—as they did in Minnesota, Brussels and, yes, Tel Aviv. Compared to 15 years ago, there is a much greater empathy with Israel’s existenti...
