Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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Israel’s 17-year coexistence policy with Hamas died on Oct. 7. Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip from 1948-1967 until they lost it to Israel in the 1967 6-Day War. Between June 5-10, 1967, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria attacked Israel on three fronts, outnumbering the Jewish people three to one, and failed to destroy the State of Israel. The Right of Conquest is a right of ownership to land after immediate possession via force of arms. Israel owns t...
(JNS) — The world feels like it’s on fire, with flames spreading in diverse directions. If the Jewish state was not at center stage, however, there would not have been any smoke. Ukrainians wonder why no fuss was made over Russia’s invasion of their country nearly two years ago. Twenty thousand Ukrainian children were kidnapped. No posters exist for them; no one is tearing down posters, insisting that it’s all propaganda. What a difference a change of scenery and age-old antisemitism makes. Ukrainians shouldn’t feel too neglected, though. T...
(JNS) — In the end, not even the support of former President Barack Obama and one of his former cabinet members was enough to save Claudine Gay from being forced out as president of Harvard University. Nor did the initial support of the Harvard Corporation itself, the endorsement of much of the Harvard faculty or the student newspaper allow Gay to remain in office at one of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions. After a month of controversy that began with her appalling testimony in front of Congress on Dec. 5, along with the pre...
(JNS) — Forty-five years ago this month, a revolution was underway in Iran. It was called an Iranian revolution but its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had a more ambitious project in mind: the founding of a new Islamic empire that would project power throughout the Middle East and far beyond. In 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei succeeded Khomeini as “supreme leader” of the misleadingly named Islamic Republic of Iran. Like his predecessor, he has repeatedly and relentlessly vowed “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” And he’s elaborat...
(JNS) — I have a secret that I’ve never told anyone before. For more than 20 years, it’s been too embarrassing and traumatic to revisit. But the time has come to share the story. Believe it or not, the whole situation arose because I was completing a college assignment. I studied at the University of Rhode Island and, for the most part, loved every minute of it. The education was classically liberal, although it seemed that the student body was not as politically motivated as, say, the Ivy League schools. In my senior year, I took a commu...
(JNS) — In his final book, “No Room for Small Dreams,” former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres wrote: “I have spent most of the better part of my life in pursuit of peace, and in doing so I have learned … making peace is not a simple endeavor. It is a constant struggle. But its complexity should not overshadow its purpose.” Today, Israel is at war with the terrorist group Hamas in the pursuit of long-term peace, and Shimon Peres’ words are more important than ever. Though the world expressed its horror at Hamas’s inhuman Oct. 7 massacre...
(JNS) — While antisemitic riots in support of Hamas are breaking out in cities across America, few if any such protests seem to be taking place in the Arab or Muslim world. One does not hear about outbreaks of violence in support of Hamas in the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Jordan. In that part of the world, one can find support for Hamas only among America’s enemies like Iran and its terrorist proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and gangs of jihadis in Syria and Iraq. There is a good reason for this: Our all...
(JNS) — Following Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, senior fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, detailed how Hezbollah manipulated the press. A similar report can be written when the war with Hamas is over. In the following excerpts, substitute Hamas for Hezbollah. Israel is automatically at a disadvantage in any conflict because it is an open society. “During the war,” Kalb noted, “no Hezbollah secrets were disclosed, but in Israel, secrets were leaked, rumors spre...
(JNS) — The coming of a New Year is an appropriate time for retrospection. I’ve been thinking about December 2001. Like many Americans, I was traumatized by the horrific images of the Sept. 11 attacks. And like many Americans, I wanted to do something useful in response. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t make the cut for Delta Force. But, with help from former U.N. Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick and former Rep. Jack Kemp, I began setting up a research institute to study the regimes, organizations and ideologies driving and justifying terrorism, to formu...
Yes, that’s right. I agree with AOC. No, these were not words I ever expected I’d put together in the same sentence much less in that order. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is hateful, reckless, dangerous, factually challenged, and a member of the extremist wing of the Democratic Party. Other than the sun rising in the day and setting at night, and the existence of gravity (I assume she agrees), there’s nothing I can think of that I ever would have agreed on with her. This highlights the saying that even a broken clock is right once...
(JNS) — Yemen’s Houthi terrorist movement recently made international headlines due to its attacks on shipping in the Red Sea. Initially a Zaydi Shi’ite response to perceived marginalization, the Houthis have become a powerful force in Yemen’s brutal civil war thanks to the Iranian regime’s sponsorship, as shown by the Houthis’ successful conquest of the capital Sana’a in 2014. The Zaydi Shi’ites are located in Yemen’s Saada province. Once dominant, Zaydism declined in the 20th century, and the Houthis first emerged in the 1980s as a Zaydi...
(JNS) — The repeatedly proposed remedy for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a “two-state solution,” with Arabs and Jews living side by side, happily ever after. But these magical words, as enticing as they may seem, are little more than fantasy. Its recent proponents, predictably in The New York Times (Dec. 21), are R. David Harden, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama’s special envoy for Middle East peace, and Larry Garber, a former U.S. Agency for International Government mission director to the West Bank and Gaza Strip....
There are reports circulating Israel of high-level talks involving negotiations to release more of the hostages brutally kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 and held captive in Gaza since. Reports of the hostages’ conditions from the 100+ who have been released are horrifying. They have suffered physical and psychological torture, starvation, held in underground cages in complete darkness, and suffered violent sexual assaults including gang raping women. Speculation is that many are dead, as some of the hostages’ bodies have been fou...
By 5 p.m. EST., on Tuesday, Dec. 19, the U.N. Security Council was supposed to vote on a resolution to stop the war in Gaza to deal with the humanitarian crisis in the enclave. By 3:45 p.m., word came out the vote was delayed for a day and is expected today, on Wednesday, if consensus is achieved. The reason for the delay is simple: the draft demanded a “cessation” of the war, effectively blocking Israel’s stated objective to decimate Hamas terrorist organization. And ignored Israel’s right to self-defense. The clearest indication that such a...
(JNS) — An Israeli mental-health professional shared with a small group of visiting Americans how the remains of those who were savagely murdered on Oct. 7 were lovingly handled. Breathing slowly, she described how ZAKA, the volunteer organization that handles victim identification after disasters and terrorist attacks, diligently goes about collecting body parts, and then arranges refrigerated transportation and ritual observances for the dead. She humbly said that when a deceased person was inappropriately handled, maybe bumped, the worker w...
I suddenly woke up this morning at 3:16 a.m., and knew I had to write this article. I recently went on a trip to Israel. The country is in the middle of a war and the people are grieving. I went with a Christian organization, CityServe, and also with the support of another Christian ministry. When I boarded the EL AL plane, a woman said “you know there is a war going on there, right?” The trip changed my life. I am a neurosurgeon in Orlando, and I have lived here since 1999. As I get older, I am constantly looking for a purpose to justify my...
(JNS) — Recently, I attended a dinner given by a major pro-Israel organization. It was the first since COVID and the turnout was great. There were old and new friends, Jews and non-Jews, Democrats and Republicans. It was wonderful and uplifting in a time of worry, sorrow and love for Israel and its supporters around the world. Until several speakers said that thing about supporting “Israel’s right to exist.” No. Stop. Please. Stand up straight. The fact that anti-Israel and antisemitic forces say Israel has no right to exist is not a reason...
Dear Editor: The United Nations was formed with the idea, after defeat of the Nazi savages, that the peoples of the world would get together to stop or preferably prevent organized acts for mass murder anywhere in the world. This has not happened. Instead, that organization has repeatedly issued condemnation of the one country, whose people include many victims and survivors of the Nazi murderers, for sins that Israel never committed. Now that Israel fights a defensive war that was forced upon it by the most inhuman group anywhere, the U.N....
(JNS) — I was poised to go on a live broadcast of WION, an English-language Indian television network, last week to discuss the war against Hamas. But before my turn to speak came, I was startled by the program host’s introduction to the segment. He spoke of images that were shocking the world and the world’s outrage about them, and gave what might be termed a trigger warning for those about to see them for the first time. As I soon learned, he wasn’t referring to the evidence of the indescribable atrocities committed against Israeli civilia...
(JNS) — The Oct. 7 Hamas massacres hit hard at communities where many of the residents were left of center. As a result, even some of the usual anti-Israel types temporarily came around to the idea of fighting Hamas. That included the anti-Israel lobby group J Street. On Oct. 9, J Street issued a statement denouncing the attacks and stating that “we stand in solidarity with the Israeli people and with the Israeli armed forces that have been battling desperately to protect them. We support Israel’s right to defend its citizens from this barbaric...
Portions of this article are very graphic. I was talking with my daughter on the phone Friday evening. “What did you do this week?” she asked. I mentioned that I attended a private briefing and screening by the Consulate General of Israel in Miami to see the raw footage of what happened in Israel on Oct. 7. “What are you talking about?” she asked. She hadn’t heard of the Oct. 7 attack. As I started explaining, she asked, “Who is Hamas? Where was this?” Now my daughter is a smart, mature person, but she chooses not to watch any news. “It’s t...
(JTA) — One hundred years ago, in November 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the greatest leaders of the Zionist movement and definitely the one with the greatest foresight, wrote in Berlin a seminal article in the Razsviet (Dawn, in Russian) newspaper, titled “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs).” His main argument was that in order for the Zionists to succeed in settling the Land of Israel and persist in living there, they must create an “Iron Wall” that will thwart Arab ambitions to eradicate the Zionist enterprise. It is worth quoting him...
(JNS) — Palestinian leadership must have a better inducement for Israel to come to the negotiating table than rape, mutilation, kidnapping, stabbings and missile attacks. The Palestinian people must be willing to accept two fundamental facts: 1) it is not possible to turn the clock back to June 4, 1967; and 2) it is a futile crusade to try and destroy Israel. For a state of war to be replaced by a state of peace, a state of acceptance must replace a state of rejection. Before Israel can feel secure enough to cede more control over any of the l...
I always find it incredible that with the Jewish custom of an annual cycle of reading the entire Torah (Genesis through Deuteronomy) in the course of a year brings us back to the same verses, stories, and narratives that we read a year earlier, but in a different place in our lives that we relate to it differently each year. It underscores that the Torah, God’s word, is relevant to each and every one of us, no matter where we are in our lives, how old we are, or our circumstances. I see that often in my life, but never more than this w...
(JNS) — Former Prime Minister Golda Meir once said, “I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.” Never has this been truer than in Israel’s current war to destroy Hamas. For many years, a figurative diplomatic clock was set for Israel every time it launched a defensive military operation. This clock is not brought out for any other conflict in the world. It simply does not exist except in the imagination of Israel’s foreign interlocutors, who try to burn it into the psyches of the Jewish state’s decision-makers. As a result, the clock h...
