Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 2205 - 2213 of 2213
MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank (JTA)—For proponents of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, SodaStream would appear to be a straightforward target. The Israeli company, which sells a popular kitchen gadget that turns tap water into carbonated drinks, has a large factory in a West Bank settlement. When SodaStream announced that it would run an ad during the Super Bowl, the pro-Palestinian boycott campaign against the company reached a fever pitch. But for hundreds of Palestinians, SodaStream i...
NEW YORK (JTA)—Espacio Anna Frank says its goal is to promote tolerance by teaching the life story of the teenage diarist murdered by the Nazis. But is there something sinister lurking behind the Venezuelan organization’s benevolent facade? SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, seems to believe so. According to a dossier attributed to SEBIN, the Caracas-based group is actually part of an Israeli cloak-and-dagger operation aimed at undermining the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez...
Idlib, Syria—Nine-year-old Salima Hamid jerked her hips to the musical chants as the older male youths clapped their hands. Behind them in the crowd, Amal Nuran and her head-scarf-covered friends exchanged cell phone pictures snapped at the day’s anti-regime rally. “We all have a role to play in this revolution,” the 19-year-old law student tells The Media Line. “Even we girls can help by coming to the protests.” Later, however, outside of earshot of suspicious men, Nuran expressed her real feelings. “There is little for us to do beyond making...
The American businessmen and women appeared transfixed as they listened to the man behind the first Palestinian planned city depict his journey from vision to reality. Bashar Al-Masri was describing the day in 2008 when in Qatar on the first stop on a planned investment tour of the Gulf States to raise money for the project, he had asked for “between one and ten million dollars,” but “came away with a commitment for hundreds of millions of dollars”—enough to cover both the equity and financing. Rawabi—“hills” in Arabic—would soon be more than...
(JTA)—Wide-eyed and smiley, Elay-Gabriel seems utterly unaffected by the French media’s sudden interest in him. A dozen French journalists have visited the 18-month-old in recent months because he is trapped in a sort of legal limbo: He cannot obtain citizenship because the state does not recognize children born to surrogates abroad as French, even if one of their biological parents is a French national. Complicating matters is the fact that Elay-Gabriel is being raised by two gay Parisians—Isra...
AMMAN, Jordan—Street noises mix with a call to prayer coming from the King Hussein Mosque in downtown Amman, the city’s commercial center, while on a nearby street corner, Issam, a Syrian businessman, calmly answers a steady flow of phone calls and customers’ questions. The 44-year-old has successfully transferred his shoe business from Syria’s war-ravaged city of Aleppo to the Jordanian capital, starting his enterprise anew in Amman like hundreds—if not thousands—of other Syrian refugee businessmen that Jordanian officials say have settle...
(JTA)—In his many years of service for France’s spy agency, Claude Moniquet has seen much evidence linking Hezbollah to terrorist-related activities in Europe and beyond. The attacks, says Moniquet, a 20-year veteran of the DGSE intelligence service, go back as far as 1983, to the bombing of military barracks in Beirut that killed nearly 300 people, including 58 French soldiers. But the evidence, he says, was ignored. So Moniquet believes that Bulgaria’s announcement last week that it concl...
TEL AVIV—Israel’s first large gas field, Tamar, is due to begin producing natural gas next April. It is an economic bonanza for the state, and a security nightmare for the navy, tasked with protecting the huge area, much of which is outside Israel’s territorial waters. “These fields have strategic significance and could be easily a target for our neighbors,” a senior naval official in charge of planning, told The Media Line in an exclusive briefing in his office in Tel Aviv. “Usually to protect an area, we just make a sterile zone around it....
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon dedicated this year’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day to rescuers of Nazi victims who were not famous heroes but little-known people living “ordinary” lives. Yet some of those little-known rescuers—like Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn— lived anything but ordinary lives. When Berta celebrated her 90th birthday in New York this summer, one guest—Meir Brand, a white-haired grandfather of eight—made the trip from Israel. Berta calls Meir her son. He is, but not in any ordinary sense. In 1941, when B...
