Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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A glimmer of hope in the fight against Iranian-backed terrorism shone forth from Argentina during the final days of 2016. A federal appeals court ruled that former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner will face a new investigation over allegations that she and her close colleagues made a secret pact with the Iranian regime over the probe into the July 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were murdered and hundreds were wounded on that fateful day, when a...
In July 2006, Israel fought a bitter defensive war against the Lebanese Islamist organization Hezbollah. The hostilities, which saw thousands of rockets fired at Israel by Hezbollah terrorists, as well as the displacement of nearly 500,000 Israelis from their homes, ended one month later with a United Nations-brokered cease-fire. Hezbollah had been temporarily chastened, but the disarmament demanded by the U.N. Security Council never happened, and the threat it poses has only grown during the intervening decade, most recently demonstrated by...
In late November, radical protesters in London attacked a Jewish communal building. As they wrestled with police at the gates, they screamed abuse about “baby killers!” and cried out, “It’s a Holocaust!” According to local media outlets, among them the Jewish Chronicle and the Jewish News, the protesters also daubed the building with graffiti that included a Star of David, a smear about a “kosher Holocaust,” and references to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. What was the reason for the protesters’ anger, the cause of their unashamedly ant...
On one of my first assignments abroad as a rookie journalist back in the early 1990s, I found myself in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, just as the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia was getting underway in earnest. One afternoon, sitting with a group of journalists and writers in a café in the city center, I was drawn into a long conversation with an Israeli professor who was temporarily teaching in Belgrade. We began comparing nationalism in the Balkans with nationalism in the Middle East, and an observation he made has stuck with me ever...
In considering the furor around President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Stephen Bannon, the CEO of the hard-right news website Breitbart, as his chief strategist, let’s start with the perspective of those who have defended him. On one important level, their anger over the Bannon spat is justified. It is galling to see the behemoths of the liberal left, from MoveOn.org to The New York Times, suddenly discover the threat of anti-Semitism after showing general indifference to its resurgence in public life during the last 16 years. Sim...
Donald Trump is now America’s master. As improbable as that outcome might seem to metropolitan Americans, it is actually quite consistent with the pattern of politics during the last decade. Many of Trump’s fundamental beliefs—his aversion to foreign engagements, his portrait of long-standing American allies as free-loaders, his deferential attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin—have been on prominent display during President Barack Obama’s two terms in office. Since politics is never smooth and is chock-full of unintended consequen...
You probably haven’t heard of Karlheinz Kopf. He’s one of three Austrian politicians currently sharing that country’s presidency following the departure of the previous incumbent in July. Kopf just returned to Vienna from Iran, where he distinguished himself by calling on the United States to ditch those sanctions against the Tehran regime that have remained in place since the Iran nuclear deal was signed last year. And that wasn’t the half of it. Frankly, Kopf’s statements during his visit might have been drafted by his Iranian hosts. As...
After months of dithering, the Obama administration has finally taken some action against the Lebanese Islamist terror organization Hezbollah. The U.S. Treasury Department has applied sanctions on four Hezbollah operatives reportedly planning terror attacks, as well as a company, Al-Inmaa Engineering and Contracting LLC, controlled by a senior Hezbollah financier. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has sanctioned Hezbollah commander Haytham ‘Ali Tabataba’i, also known as Abu ‘Ali Al-Tabataba’i, under U.S. counterterrorism rules. He has lea...
You have to wonder if the barbarians fighting under the flag of the Islamic State still believe that 72 virgins will be waiting for them in paradise once they become “martyrs.” I say this not because the leaders and foot soldiers of ISIS have suddenly woken up to the possibility that this belief is based, according to several scholars, on a mistranslation of the relevant verse of the Qu’ran; that would be expecting too much of them. I say this because they have already had a taste of that paradise here on earth, as a result of their campa...
Jew-baiting these days is a globally competitive field. The Middle East, Latin America and Asia could all put up credible candidates for the title of most notorious Jew-baiter. But if you ask me, it’s in Europe, the continent where modern anti-Semitism crystallized, where you’ll still find the most able and determined baiters. Now, if I had to pick someone from that particular field, I’d have to conclude that it’s a tie for first place. From Hungary: step forward Zsolt Bayer, journalist, fascist apologist, a founder of the ruling Fidesz...
Recently, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif embarked on a five-nation tour of Latin America to spread the message that Tehran’s global influence is on the up. Zarif is one of those Iranian leaders eagerly embraced as a “moderate” by the Obama Administration. Like other Iranian officials of his rank, Zarif’s room for maneuver is strictly regulated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. Still, the notion that he represents a genuinely reformist faction within the Islamic Republic has been a convenient and comforting tool for persu...
The far left U.S. Green Party marked a significant milestone in the current campaign cycle when CNN broadcast a town hall debate with its presidential candidate, Jill Stein, and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka. It was a chance for the largely obscure party to build upon the momentum generated by Sen. Bernie Sander’s bid for the Democratic Party nomination with a progressive platform untainted, as Stein and Baraka emphasized again and again, by the paw prints of corporate lobbyists, special interest groups and dubious foreign governments. L...
It’s been a long time since I saw a gesture this desperate. At the recent Arab Summit in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, the Palestinian Authority (PA) foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, announced that his boss, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, had asked the Arab states to prepare a legal case against Britain in retaliation for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Balfour Declaration, which took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to the Zionist leader Lord Rothschild, confirmed Britain’s favorable view of a ...
We live in an era of resurgent, strongman leaders. Some of them, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, carry an aura of invincibility, a sense that they effortlessly control the levers of power at every level of state activity, from parliament to intelligence operations to the military. Some of them cling to power even as the states they created crumble under the weight of corruption, mismanagement, political repression, and economic degradation; Venezuela’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a prime example of this. Still others cling to power t...
A decade after fighting the Second Lebanon War against the Islamist terror militia Hezbollah, Israel is once again facing a build-up on its northern border, with the prospect of fresh hostilities looming The 2006 conflict, waged over a month during the hot summer, was the culmination of six years of rocket attacks by Hezbollah on cities and towns in northern Israel. By the time that war broke out, Hezbollah had taken advantage of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 to assemble 15,000 fighters and thousands of missiles aimed in t...
These are the days that Vladimir Putin has been aching for since the end of the Cold War. On Dec. 5, 1989, three weeks after the Berlin Wall was torn down, angry crowds stormed the Dresden Headquarters of the Stasi, the brutal secret police of the Soviet puppet regime in East Germany. At the time, KGB officer Putin was based in the office across the street reserved for the representatives of the Soviet security apparatus. When Russia’s future president picked up the phone to demand military protection from the surging masses, he was told that n...
In the days since the massacre of 49 people and the wounding of hundreds more by an Islamist gunman at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, America’s political leadership has sounded more discordant than ever. Never mind the absence of a bipartisan consensus about what we should do; our politicians are engaged in unsightly squabbling about the nature of the problem itself. In one corner, we have the Democratic Party, led by President Barack Obama, aggressively steering the national debate toward gun control. According to this camp’s account, the...
Every Iraqi Jew has a tale to tell about the Farhud, the two-day pogrom that befell the Jews of Baghdad 75 years ago in June 1941. In the case of my own family, it was a matter of heeding the advice of a Muslim business colleague of my grandfather, who told him that dark days were looming for the Jews, and that he would be wise to get his family out of the country as quickly as possible—which my grandfather did. But my grandfather was part of a fortunate minority. When the Farhud—which means, in Arabic, “violent dispossessio...
“He’s not Hitler. He wants to help America.” Melania Trump’s comment about her husband, GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, will go down as one of the more memorable quotes in an election cycle that has had its fair share of gaffes, outbursts, and the like. While her second sentence is debatable, the first one is undoubtedly true. If you are looking for this era’s aspiring Hitlers, you will not find them in America. In another country and in another political system, Donald Trump could quite conceivably become a dictator. Given his admir...
Despite leaving the world an unsafer place than when he found it, President Barack Obama isn’t shying away from busting those foreign policy taboos. The president who brought us a nuclear deal with the Iranian mullahs, and who gave Cuba’s fossilized communist regime a new lease on life, is about to fly to Japan. Once there, he will highlight the grave dangers of nuclear war in the city that has become a synonym for Armageddon: Hiroshima. Today, May 27, Obama will become the first president to visit Hiroshima since the U.S. dropped an ato...
The last time I wrote about Donald Trump in this column was back in December 2015, when the Republican presidential primary race was in full swing. Then, I voiced concern about what the Middle East policy of a Trump administration might look like, pointing out that his failure to address Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, along with his deference to Russian autocrat President Vladimir Putin, was perilously similar to the approach of President Barack Obama—whom the New York billionaire reviles. Six months later, and in the face of endless hig...
“It is generally admitted that anti-Semitism is on the increase, that it has been greatly exacerbated by the war, and that humane and enlightened people are not immune to it. It does not take violent forms (English people are almost invariably gentle and law-abiding), but it is ill-natured enough, and in favourable circumstances it could have political results.” So wrote George Orwell in a 1945 article for the Contemporary Jewish Record journal titled, “Anti-Semitism in Britain.” In that short essay, Orwell related a series of personal encount...
Here’s the latest episode of outreach to Iran from the lips of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. After condemning, during a press conference in Bahrain, the “destabilizing actions” of Iran in the Middle East, he then followed up with a plea. “Help us end the war in Yemen,” Kerry implored the Tehran regime. “Help us end the war in Syria, not intensify, and help us to be able to change the dynamics of this region.” What do you call this? Naiveté? Hard-nosed realism? The actualization of President Barack Obama’s deeply held belief that Amer...
Over the years, I’ve spoken at or attended a number of academic conferences on the subject of rising anti-Semitism. Parleys like these are essential for boosting our understanding of why, seven decades after the end of the World War II, the taboo around anti-Semitic invective—whether directed at Jews as Jews, or through code words like “Zionists”—has been broken. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists, along with scholars from similar disciplines, all play a decisive role in determining how the trajectory of anti-Semitism changes e...
The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic finally received a modicum of justice this week, when a United Nations court in The Hague sentenced him to 40 years in prison for his monstrous war crimes. The 10 charges Karadzic was convicted of included his role in the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. Those who remember that horrific event will recall that, along with the disgraceful buck-passing that stained the European response to that genocide, there was a more generalized disbelief that...
