Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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The newly released details about a recent terrorist attack in Jerusalem show how easily Palestinian terrorists can enter Israel—thus contradicting the phony claims that Palestinians’ movements are severely restricted by Israel. The attack in question took place June 16. Three Palestinian terrorists killed a teenage Israeli policewoman named Hadas Malka, in Jerusalem. They also stabbed and shot several other Israelis, before they were killed. The BBC rubbed salt in the victims’ wounds by headlining its reports of the attack: “Three Palesti...
The headlines of the Jewish press this week were filled with stories about angry American Jews arriving in Israel and denouncing the Israeli government’s decision regarding egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall. Jerry Silverman, head of the Jewish Federations of North America, called the government’s decision “a direct insult” to diaspora Jewry and vowed to launch a “campaign” to “fight back.” Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said the battle to reverse the decision is “worth fighting for.” A statement issued by the...
The Israeli authorities last week confiscated two tractors, a hydraulic excavator and other equipment used by Palestinians to carry out illegal quarrying that has been damaging a rare nature reserve in the Judean Desert. If major American newspapers reported the story, the headline would probably read: “Israel Confiscates Palestinians’ Tractors.” I say “if,” because there’s really not much chance The New York Times or Washington Post would ever cover a story that reflects badly on the Palestinian cause. That would undermine their drive to pr...
Anybody who thought the new Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times would be any less pro-Palestinian than his predecessor was sadly mistaken. Ian Fisher replaced Peter Baker as head of The Times’s Jerusalem bureau in January. Many of Fisher’s articles in recent months have been slanted against Israel, but his coverage of the lynching attempt in the Palestinian Arab village of Hawara May 18 was the worst so far. The facts of the Hawara episode are well-documented in a graphic video that can be seen on YouTube. Arabs waving PLO flags and...
The Palestinian Arabs, who are constantly being described by the Jewish left as disenfranchised and subjugated, went to the polls last weekend. That’s right—the same Palestinians whom Israel supposedly deprives of the right to vote freely cast ballots in a democratic election. Henry Siegman, former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in a recent issue of the London Review of Books that Israel is “Palestine’s occupier” and the Palestinians live under “permanent subjugation.” Likewise, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), at t...
The Washington Post’s chief correspondent in Israel has discarded all pretense of objectivity and is now openly lobbying for a political cause—and it’s one of the most distasteful causes imaginable: justifying the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) policy of paying imprisoned terrorists and their families. William Booth, the Post’s longtime Jerusalem bureau chief, has never been very careful about keeping his personal opinions out of his news articles. But his May 3 report on PA payments to terrorists crossed the line from journalism to outright advo...
J Street, the left-wing group that claims to be staunchly opposed to Israeli settlements, has embraced an Israeli settlement. What? How can that be? This strange but true story began when the Israeli Knesset overwhelmingly adopted a law to prohibit the entry of foreign citizens who actively promote the BDS movement against Israel. The law does not prevent Israeli citizens from boycotting Israel. Their right to seek the destruction of their own country remains protected. The law does not block the entry of foreigners who happen to agree with...
Those cruel Israelis! Palestinian residents of Gaza just want some soccer balls and perhaps a few Frisbees, to help break the monotony of life under siege. Yet the insensitive Israeli authorities, enforcing their ruthless blockade, recently intercepted a shipment of innocent, humanitarian sporting goods that would have brought a little light to the dark of lives of Gaza’s children. That’s what you can expect pro-Palestinian human rights groups and their media supporters to report. The truth, however, is different. Very different. In an attempt...
A group of Palestinians tried to burn some Israeli Jews to death March 23. Just another day in the Middle East. The four attackers drove up to the perimeter of the Jewish community of Beit El, north of Jerusalem, and began hurling firebombs toward homes there. A firebomb, also known as a Molotov cocktail, is of course a deadly weapon. It explodes on impact and unleashes a torrent of flames. We can all easily imagine what would happen if those firebombs had struck people or homes. Fortunately, Israeli soldiers immediately fired at the would-be m...
Israel critic Peter Beinart has announced that when his children “near adulthood, I’ll encourage them to visit the West Bank.” Why? “So they can see for themselves what it means to hold millions of people... without free movement or due process,” he wrote in his column for The Forward. The Beinart children are in for quite a surprise. In his various articles and media appearances, Papa Beinart regularly accuses Israel of occupying and oppressing the Palestinians. I imagine that’s what the Beinart kids hear at the dinner table, too. But when th...
Diplomats never pretend to be experts on acting, yet for some reason actors constantly present themselves as experts on international affairs. Hollywood award ceremonies are now dominated by awardees delivering pretentious political diatribes. The latest presumed fount of wisdom is Richard Gere, who visited Israel last week to promote a film in which he plays a character modeled on the American Jewish businessman from whom Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert accepted large bribes. In an interview with Haaretz, Gere rattled off all the shallow...
For the past 15 years, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has been promoting the so-called “Saudi Initiative,” a plan he says proves that Saudi Arabia sincerely wants peace with Israel. But this week, a senior Palestinian leader revealed that at the very moment the Saudis were launching that plan, they were financing a major wave of terrorism against Israel. It’s time for Friedman to publicly admit he was wrong and apologize for the harm he caused to Israel. It all started Feb. 6, 2002, when Friedman devoted his New York Times colum...
An extremist Arab Knesset member who endorses violence and has been condemned by the Likud and Labor parties alike was cheered at the recent J Street national conference. For an organization that supposedly promotes peaceful coexistence, they sure have some strange bedfellows! The object of J Street’s enthusiastic applause was Member of Knesset Ayman Odeh, leader of the parliamentary bloc known as the Joint Arab List. Odeh is well-known in Israel for his extremist rhetoric. Last year, for example, he claimed that Israel murdered Yasser Arafat....
A Palestinian terrorist who murdered two Hebrew University of Jerusalem students has found a new ally, the far-left Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) group. How mainstream Jewish liberal groups respond will be telling. The killer, Rasmea Odeh, is locked in a battle, initiated by the Obama administration, to deport her for lying about her terrorist past. It all began in February 1969, when the 20-year-old Odeh, together with a fellow member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), set off a bomb in a Jerusalem supermarket. Two...
To hear the news media tell it, Israel’s Knesset has approved extreme right-wing legislation that will steal Palestinian land by legalizing illegal outposts and thereby demolish the last hopes for Middle East peace. The truth, of course, is very different. The Israeli government has not authorized the establishment of a new Jewish community in Judea and Samaria since 1992. That was the policy decreed by then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and followed by his successors, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the 1993 Oslo Accords d...
Like schoolchildren everywhere, Palestinian Arab children occasionally are assigned by their teachers to write poems. But the poetry they produce is not like that of children in the U.S. or elsewhere in the free world. Palestinian Media Watch reports that twice in the past month, a children’s program on official Palestinian Authority Television (PA TV) featured children reciting their poems. Among the most common terms they used: “blood,” “slaughter” and “revolution.” The PA TV program is called “The Best Home,” and the children who were...
Someday, perhaps, a team of sociologists and psychologists will examine the curious question of why Jewish ex-State Department officials are obsessed with Israel. Until that day comes, though, the rest of us will be stuck having to listen to those officials’ relentless harassment of Israel and promotion of the Palestinian cause. With the issue of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on the front burner, The New York Times trotted out two former State Department hands, both Jewish, to pour cold water on the embassy r...
By Stephen M. Flatow Remember John Howard Griffin's 1961 book "Black Like Me," about a white journalist who posed as an African-American in order to experience what life was like for blacks in the South? An American journalist recently undertook a Palestinian version of that experiment. Hearing complaints about Israeli checkpoints that supposedly restrict the movement of Arabs in Judea and Samaria, filmmaker Ami Horowitz of Fox News decided to see for himself. He hired a Palestinian driver and,...
In his recent speech about Israel and the Palestinians, Secretary of State John Kerry unfairly blamed Israel and minimized Palestinian violence. But he also did something else: he grievously dishonored the African-American civil rights movement, just weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In his Dec. 28 address at the State Department, Kerry recited a litany of accusations against Israel. The unkindest cut of all was his charge that Israeli policies are creating “segregated enclaves” for Palestinians and a “separate but unequal” system for Is...
Like many others, I sat at my computer with baited breath Wednesday waiting for Secretary of State John Kerry to explain the background to the U.S. abstention on the United Nations Security Council vote. And explain he did. But there were so many things wrong with what I will call Kerry’s farewell anti-Israel speech: • Spending 45 minutes on settlements, and 45 seconds on terrorism. • Claiming the Palestinians “live under Israeli military occupation” when 98 percent of them live under the Palestinian Authority (PA). • Condemning Israeli con...
John Kerry and J Street are worried. They see their cherished dream of a Palestinian state slipping away. Kerry’s criticism of Israel at the Saban Forum Dec. 4 attracted a lot of attention. But the transcript of the U.S. secretary of state’s remarks reveals an important moment that the media overlooked. Just as he was about to denounce Israel’s policies, Kerry suddenly turned to the audience and said: “By the way, just let me ask a question. Raise your hands. I mean, I know some of you may not want to acknowledge, but how many of you believe...
Important government action was taken to protect the environment in the Middle East this week. But don’t expect the government in question to get any credit—because it was the Israeli government that took the action, and the Palestinian Arabs who were the polluters. And the Palestinians, as we all know, are immune from international criticism. The Israeli authorities repeatedly alerted the Palestinian Authority (PA), over the course of several years, about a charcoal factory in the PA-ruled city of Ya’bad that was causing serious air pollu...
Professors at a number of American universities have found a new cause: demanding the release of a terrorist who murdered two college students. This disturbing story begins on Feb. 21, 1969. That was the day a powerful bomb exploded in a Jerusalem supermarket. Two Hebrew University students (and roommates), Edward Jaffe and Leon Kanner, were killed. “They had been buying canned food for a botanical field trip when they were blown to bits,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported. “Many housewives brought bouquets of flowers to the employees of [...
Archaeologists have uncovered yet more evidence of the ancient Jewish connection to Jerusalem—the very same week that UNESCO and the Palestinian Authority (PA) were declaring that Jews have no ties to Jerusalem. Talk about irony. The latest discovery of a site where the Roman army assaulted Jewish forces guarding the outer walls of Jerusalem, during the Second Temple period, explodes the lies of the U.N. and the PA. Consider this. The Romans were attacking Jewish forces. No evidence was found of any Palestinian forces in the area. The assault t...
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas suffered chest pains last week and was rushed to a hospital in Ramallah. The episode was an important reminder of the dangers and risks Israel will face if it heeds demands for the quick creation of a Palestinian state. In recent weeks, the S. Daniel Abraham Center has been sponsoring full-page ads in The New York Times calling for a Palestinian state. The Obama administration this week issued an overheated condemnation of Israel for approving the construction of a handful of houses for Jews, because that constr...
