Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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President Joe Biden’s decision to “pause” the delivery of smart bombs, artillery shells and other kinds of ammunition to Israel as a form of punishment for Israel’s sin of ignoring the president’s admonition not to invade Rafa fails to take into consideration a number of factors all of which are critical to U.S. national interests. The president based his decision on humanitarian concerns for the displaced citizens of Gaza who have relocated to Rafa, the only remaining city in Gaza not under Israel’s military control; and that there have alread...
(JNS) — I’m sure you’ve heard commentators describe the Islamic Republic of Iran and Israel as “rivals” engaged in a “tit-for-tat” conflict. That misinterprets reality. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s “supreme leader” since 1989, seeks to establish a new Middle Eastern empire. Israelis, by contrast, only want to survive as an independent nation within a slice of their ancient Jewish homeland. They would like nothing better than to enjoy amicable relations with Iranians, as they did prior to Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. I should add: Substanti...
(JNS) — Some years ago, I heard Rabbi Manis Friedman tell a story about a man who overheard his friend telling his wife on the phone, “Drop dead!” “How can you speak that way to your wife?!” he demanded. The friend smiled and said, “She just asked me if her new dress was gorgeous, and I answered, ‘Yes, drop-dead.’” Hearing only half a conversation and drawing conclusions can be dangerous. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard stories about others that I didn’t want to believe; and indeed, upon investigation, they turned out to be either...
(JNS) — U.S. President Biden’s suspension of weapons deliveries to Israel places Deborah Lipstadt, the most prominent Jewish member of his administration, in quite a bind. How will she respond? Let us recall the example set by Mark Siegel in 1978. He was the Carter administration’s liaison to the Jewish community when President Jimmy Carter decided to provide deadly fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The president expected Siegel to convince American Jews to accept the weapons deal. In early March 1978, Siegel addressed 900 young leaders o...
Antisemitism is on the rise across America and all over the world. What are Orlando Jews feeling and what can we do about it in these tumultuous times? I’ve realized since Oct. 7, with the massacre in Israel and the terrible war raging in the Middle East, I’ve been living with terrible feelings of disbelief, anger, frustration, depression and angst. These emotions are all related in a vicious cycle. First disbelief. It’s difficult to conceive of the level of evil perpetrated by Hamas on Oct 7 and painful to witness the death of civilians in Ga...
(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden’s approach to Israel since the start of the Oct. 7 war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip has my head spinning. His approach has been marked by a delicate balancing act that attempts to support a key ally on one hand while addressing humanitarian concerns faced by Gazan civilians on the other. However, this balancing act—some might call it “nuanced”—has led to contradictions that impact the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. Remember that it began after a horde of Hamas terrorists invaded Israeli communities along the G...
As I sat down to write this opinion, I realized that there are four things really bugging me. Number one. I have not read one single article that puts the blame on Hamas for the inhumane conditions in Gaza — food and water shortages, destroyed homes with refugees everywhere, etc. Hamas was elected by the people in Gaza to be their governing body. All the money sent to Gaza since 2007 has not been used to build a prosperous area that, I’m told, could have been like Dubai or Singapore. Hamas used the money to build tunnels and stockpile wea...
(JNS) — Back in December, the eminent historian Niall Ferguson wrote an essay in The Free Press that, it’s now apparent, presaged the tidal wave of demonstrations now inundating college campuses around the country. It was called “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” which also was the title of a 1927 publication by French philosopher Julien Benda. Ferguson noted that while that piece was written six years before Hitler came to power, German universities—then the world’s best—already were transitioning from scholarship to “the intellectual or...
Dear Editor: I am appalled that someone has not taken up an organized move to get George Soros out of this country. I am aware he has been thrown out of six countries already for doing exactly what he is doing now, destroying the economy, destroying civil rights, and attempting to destroy religion. He needs to go. Also, Blinken works for him and the Blinken family has worked for Soros for years and this is a conflict of interest. I can only assume people are afraid of what will happen to them. — Anonymous...
(JNS) — Faculty and students are proudly protesting Israel’s existence and praising Hamas for the slaughter of Jews. Not satisfied, they call for an intifada, and the erasure of Israel and its population from the Middle East. Some of the protesters cannot identify the river or sea they want to be “free” but chime in with other virtue signalers. Individually, they may not all be antisemites, but their views are antisemitic. Note to antisemites: Stop complaining that even as you block roads, occupy buildings, hold rallies, propagandize in clas...
The great universities are now paying the price for allowing woke professors to indoctrinate their students with idealogical and political dogma instead of offering them a critical thinking and intellectually honest education. The result is a vulnerable and naive student body on many of America’s prestigious colleges and universities, egged on by radical outsiders supported by questionably legal funding sources, violently protesting the war against the Arabs in Gaza, and endorsing the delegitimization of the Jewish State. The attempted t...
(JNS) — Hamas is a sanctioned Islamic terrorist organization. It’s illegal to provide aid to it. And for non-citizens, especially foreign students on visas, supporting terrorists is a deportable offense. And yet after six months of pro-Hamas rallies on college campuses and in major cities, not a single foreign student appears to have been deported. The latest Hamas occupations at Yale and Columbia have stopped even pretending to be anything other than outright support for an illegal terrorist group and its ongoing murder of Jews. Jewish stu...
(JNS) — There he was, the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, lying on the floor kicking his feet in anger over the U.S. veto of a resolution for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. Security Council. Of course, I am exaggerating about the 88-year-old on the floor, but his reaction to the American veto was not too far from a 2-year-old’s tantrum. Notwithstanding that the Biden administration pressed Abbas not to go ahead with the bid for statehood, the administration’s veto must have come as somewhat of a shock to the Plestinians because...
(JNS) — I recently had the freedom to rush to my bomb shelter as Iranian drones and missiles targeted Israel. As Israel’s defense systems and help from its allies protected me and millions of others, I was especially thankful for the past two years of refuge I have found in the Jewish state. After refusing to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I fled Moscow. The awareness that I am free while others are not grows more intense around Passover, the holiday of freedom. But this year, it is especially heavy. More than 100 hostages are still...
(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden began his Earth Day speech at Prince William Forest Park in Virginia on Monday by singling out a few prominent climate-change figures in attendance. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who introduced him, was one of them. “You know, I learned a long time ago: Listen to that lady; listen to that lady,” he said. “We’re going to talk more about another part of the world, too, real quickly.” It doesn’t take a genius to guess what region he had in mind. AOC—as the member of his party’s radical...
(JNS) — Few Jews still believe that the Jewish establishment has done a good job defending and protecting the community from the rhetorical onslaught against Israel that has morphed into a full-on assault against American Jewry. From the start, the “establishment” — the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Federation system, the Jewish Community Relations Councils and many rabbis—failed to understand that the obsessive, intense, continuous “criticism of Israeli policies” that appeared almost daily in the media was...
Visiting Israel for the first time a year ago was not only a spiritual pilgrimage and fulfillment of a dream, but an experience that allowed me to look at my own experiences as a persecuted Christian in Iran — arrested, and sentenced to death because of my faith, through a different prism. I went to Israel to impart a message to the Israeli and Jewish people that Iran is not your enemy, that Iranians support Israel and the Jewish people, and that the Iranian and Israeli (and Jewish) people have a common enemy in the terrorist Islamic regime. On...
(JNS) — The words you are looking for are, “Thank you, Mr. President.” I have not hesitated to criticize many of U.S. President Joe Biden’s policies before and after Oct. 7, but I have also consistently maintained that he has been the most pro-Israel president ever during any of Israel’s wars. That should have been obvious this past weekend when the United States coordinated a regional air defense that helped Israel avoid suffering any serious harm from a barrage of more than 300 Iranian drones and missiles. It was the first time U.S. forc...
(JNS) — One of the many ways last weekend’s drone and missile attacks on Israel could have been worse: If Iran’s rulers had instructed their U.S.-based operatives to simultaneously carry out a terrorist attack, and our intelligence agencies had failed to learn about it. Preventing such a catastrophe requires that those intelligence agencies have the ability and authority to surveil—think wiretap—terrorists abroad and their communications with operatives in the United States. Which gets me to a little good news: Last week, the House, on a bipa...
(JNS) — After the death of Moses, Joshua was called upon by God to lead our people into the Promised Land. He knew he faced potential resistance ahead. Yet having come from slavery in Egypt, he had the determination and confidence to lead his people and win the battles. Joshua saw the war through to its conclusion when the enemies were defeated, and the land of Canaan was under Israel’s control. For thousands of years, the Jewish people have faced real and potential catastrophes, as well as monstrous enemies. Each time, we pushed forward on...
(JNS) — Can you see the hypocrisy? I see it all day, every day. It’s hard to live in Israel, no matter how you feel about the war, and not see it. When you live in this region, it’s like the rest of the world is upside down. It’s like you’re looking at a bizarro universe that exists on a different plane—a universe so devoid of logic and morality that it no longer feels like your own. The Israel Defense Forces made a monumental mistake. It was an error almost no one wanted. The accidental drone strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen hum...
(JNS) — Given the current rancor between the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the unbreakable, unshakeable bonds between Israel and the U.S. seem to be loosening a bit. While bad under any circumstances, the timing of the mistaken attack on the World Central Kitchen crew in Gaza could not have been worse. Not even Israel’s admission of error and apology curbed the world media’s appetite for defaming the Jewish state. President Joe Biden’s finger-wagging response opened the door for foreign leaders to do the same. I...
(JNS) — In January 1943, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued the Casablanca Declaration. It stated that the Allies’ goal was the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers. This was a statement of moral clarity and resolve for the ages. In sharp contrast, President Joe Biden has now effectively demanded Israel’s “unconditional surrender.” After the tragic accidental killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers by the IDF, Biden spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and...
(JNS) — Marking on Sunday six months since the Oct. 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened his weekly Cabinet meeting by listing what he called the “considerable achievements” of the war in Gaza. “We have eliminated 19 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, including senior commanders,” he said. “We have killed, wounded or captured a large number of Hamas terrorists. We have cleared out Shifa [Hospital in Gaza City] and other terrorist command centers.” He went on, “We have destroyed rocket factories, command centers and weapons caches. A...
(JNS) — Too many people in positions of power have all too conveniently forgotten what Israel is up against. And what we in the United States are up against, for that matter. Israel has been fighting a war of no choice. It is an existential war. It was forced upon Israel on Oct. 7, when the most brutal atrocities imaginable—the worst since the days of the Holocaust—were inflicted on Israelis. Now that six months have passed since Oct. 7, it’s time to ask a few pointed questions: Has the world forgotten the babies who were decapitated and bur...
