Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
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(JNS) — Were you aware that the Dreyfusards, those seeking to exonerate the Jewish captain of France’s army who was accused of spying for Germany, were not only working for France and for Jews, but that their campaign “was also a fight for Black people, for LGBT people, for indigenous people, for Palestinians”? That is the opinion of Noah Berlatsky. In a 2019 op-ed piece on JNS, I employed the term “Diasporic supremacy” to relate to the new form of anti-Zionism that has developed, as well as the smug “we-do-not-agree-with-Is...
(The Washington Times via JNS) — The Nova Music Festival was billed as a celebration of “Friends, Love, and Infinite Freedom.” On Oct. 6, 2023, attendees from more than two dozen countries gathered in Israel’s Negev Desert just three miles from Hamas-ruled Gaza to sing, dance and celebrate peace through the night. At dawn the next day, Hamas terrorists used bulldozers and bombs to break through Israel’s high-tech fence that was thought to secure the border. Arriving at the festival grounds, they began slaughtering, raping, mutilating and kidna...
(JNS) — Act 1. The stage is set. The key players are Barack Obama, who wants to manufacture a break with Israel; Benjamin Netanyahu, looking to navigate a hostile administration; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden. During Biden’s visit to Israel, the Obama administration stages a scandal, claiming that it was deliberately insulted because the local Jerusalem municipality routed some housing that the administration belatedly opposed through an approvals process. Hillary Clinton spends an hour (and later brags abo...
(JNS) — The unbearable images of the war in Gaza have shaken the world, prompting urgent calls for an end to the suffering. However, neither calls for an immediate unilateral ceasefire, nor incantations, nor grand speeches, nor votes at the United Nations will be enough to bring about peace or stop the violence. Yet somehow, this approach seems to prevail in much of the international community. To think that a solution can magically emerge—where hostilities cease overnight without the release of hostages or a significant weakening of Hamas’s mi...
In a poll from last year, the Muslim occupiers in West Bank and Gaza gave Hamas a 76 percent rating. Islamic Jihad was at 84 percent. The UN was at only 9 percent. And America was at 0 percent. Maybe the latest $400 million check will turn things around. U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken announced an additional $404 million in new aid to Palestinians, while attending the “Call for Action: Urgent Humanitarian Response for Gaza” Conference in Jordan on Tuesday. This is in addition to “the more than $1.8 billion in development, econo...
Since when did terrorism enter the lexicon of valid political or diplomatic debate? Since when did intellectual up become intellectual down and the real targets of intended genocide, Israel and the Jewish people, become the accused perpetrators of genocide? In a recent interview with the foreign media, a Hamas terrorist was asked, “How is it that most of your missiles fall in open areas to such an extent that they are predominately inaccurate?” In response he allegedly replied simply that “our missiles are accurate, but the God of the Jews move...
(JNS) — The blatant antisemitic act regarding the 2024 edition of the East Brunswick High School yearbook recently made headlines. The action resulted in a picture of Muslim students replacing the original photograph of the Jewish students who are part of the Jewish Student Union club. In addition, there is a complete absence of the names of the Jewish students. JSU, a division of NCSY, stands in unwavering support of our students, advisers and parent community at East Brunswick High School in New Jersey. For more than a decade, our club at t...
(JNS) — There is much room to improve international law in order to deal with terrorism and the use of force by non-state actors. But that is not essential to fighting terrorism. The law matters but is not always either the problem or the solution. It was not the lack of applicable law that resulted in the Oct. 7 massacre and the international criticism of Israel’s response has nothing whatsoever to do with the law. International law already prohibits the terrorism and genocide being waged by the Palestinian Authority and Iran (directly and...
(JNS) — The creator of the universe has given humankind the ability to forget. This is both a gift and a curse. Without the ability to forget, how can we forgive? Our ability to forget gives us room to heal. But the necessity of remembering is also of great importance. By remembering, we can help ensure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. When we remember too long and too hard, we don’t allow room for forgiveness, rebirth and growth. When we forget, we allow others to fill the void with half-truths and outright lies. When we forge...
(Gatestone Institute via JNS) — The answers to the question of who is funding the groups behind the pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli protests on U.S. campuses continue to grow in complexity. It appears that a multitude of donors are falling over each other to help promote the cause of the officially designated terrorist group, whose openly stated aim is the destruction of Israel and the Jews, to impressionable young students and the public at large. Politico revealed—to those who still had doubts—that many of the people bankrolling the campus prote...
(JNS) — For Jews the world over, the past eight months have been little more than a series of catastrophes. Contrary to their expectations, American Jews have proved to be no exception. They have discovered that no Jewish community is ever immune to history. American Jews are reeling from this terrible realization. To an extent, so are all Americans, and with good reason. After all, what has emerged since the Oct. 7 massacre has been rather remarkable: A self-declared “antiracist” movement that embraces antisemitism. An unholy alliance betwe...
(JNS) — If people think the war in Gaza is intolerable, they should buckle up for what may now be coming. This week, the north of Israel burned as fires caused by barrages of Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon consumed 3,460 acres of land. In addition, Hezbollah, which has been subjecting northern Israel to rocket and missile attacks for eight months, expanded its range as far south as Acre and Nahariya. This escalation may mean that Israel, which has been carefully limiting its responses to Hezbollah’s aggression, now takes the gloves off and mou...
There I stood, in Jerusalem’s Beit Ha’am theater, delivering remarks to hundreds of people gathered from some two dozen countries at the opening session of “March of the Nations.” I stood 10 meters from where Adolph Eichmann stood trial in 1961, behind bullet proof glass, and where he was sentenced. 62 years ago this week, Eichmann was executed for actual genocide and crimes against humanity, unlike the conflated obscene charges brought against Israel today. The “March of the Nations” was a redemptive respite we all needed. In the middle of a...
(JNS) — After months in which it was falsely claimed that the only way to rescue hostages was to cut a deal with Islamic terrorists, Israel launched a daring daylight rescue operation, simultaneously hitting two houses where four hostages were being held. The operation brought together the Israel Defense Forces, the Israel Security Agency (its version of the FBI), and the Israel Police National Counter-Terror Unit “Yamam,” penetrating deep into enemy territory in a risky rescue mission that required precise timing and holding off hordes of te...
(JNS) — Recent decisions against Israel by the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, which are clearly intended to rescue Hamas and aid and abet its genocidal war on the Jewish state, can only reinforce a truism often expressed by Israelis: Kol ha’olam negdeinu. “The whole world is against us.” Israelis have reason enough to feel this way, but it is worth asking whether it’s actually true. What, after all, is the “whole world”? If the term refers to world popular opinion, then it is almost certainly wrong. It is...
(JNS) — During World War II, a series of documentary films were made, directed by Frank Capra, that set out in explicit and graphic detail the precipitating causes and reasons why the U.S. entered the war to defeat the Axis powers, including Nazi Germany. Before Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, many Americans were beset by doubts about the war. Even after Nazi Germany declared war on the U.S. on Dec. 11, 1941, there were still those who did not know or understand why it was so important for the U.S. to be involved. Nazi p...
(JNS) — U.S. President Joe Biden’s bait-and-switch speech last Friday evening, timed to prevent religiously observant Israelis from watching and Jerusalem officialdom from issuing a proper response, was as worrisome as it was oxymoronic. Though talking out of both sides of his mouth is typical of the confused incumbent who’s seeking re-election in November, his Shabbat performance was a doozy. Taking credit for his and his team’s “intensive diplomacy” to end the war in Gaza, he announced that Israel had “offered a comprehensive new proposal:...
(Jewish Journal via JNS) — Middle East heat indices aside, the truest hot spot on the planet is, always, wherever the Israel Defense Forces happens to be killing Muslims, no matter the reason. Jews taking the lives of Arabs always commands the world’s attention. Muslims killing Muslims—such as the savage sectarian violence between Shi’ites and Sunnis, with a body count in the millions — is never newsworthy. A cause of death brought about by Jews, however, is of special interest to the “human rights” community. Jews fighting for their surviva...
If you’re keeping score, to date 138 states have recognized the ‘State of Palestine,” most recently Ireland, Norway, and Spain. This begs the question, what are they recognizing? They have recognized a state that never existed, with a name never used before 1964, but whose national identity is that Israel “occupied” them in 1948. The first time the term Palestine was used was in the Second Century, over 100 years after Jesus was crucified, to subjugate and embarrass its indigenous people, the Jewish people, after a Jewish revolt to expel Rom...
(JNS) — On Oct. 7, Hamas had a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. Plan B was to pull back, stage ambushes and cry genocide while making up fake casualties and staging atrocities until its Islamist and leftist allies managed to save it, while using hostages and their bodies as negotiating leverage. Biden, who announced back in December that he had bailed out on supporting Israel, has now announced a deal that consists of three (actually 4) phases. Let me break it down. Phase 1. Hamas frees some surviving f...
(JNS) — The demonization of Israel and antisemitism on campus may be more intense than in the past, but it’s not new. This is why it is even more damning that the Jewish community was ineffective in acting before the smoke turned into a blaze. As early as 1983, I wrote about the propaganda war on campus in the Jewish newspaper in Berkeley, Calif. “We should not let ourselves be intimidated by individuals or crowds,” I wrote. One problem was that “there are very few students on this campus with the knowledge, articulateness and inclinati...
(JNS) — If you’re keeping track, Biden announced that America was going to spend two months building a floating pier to deliver aid to Gaza at a cost of $300 million that would be operated by the U.S. military. Then the pier came under attack by terrorists, was withdrawn to the Israeli port of Ashdod for repairs while the Biden administration conducted backchannel talks with Hamas urging it not to attack the pier, then redeployed for aid deliveries. And it’s been a smashing success. For Hamas. The good news was the Pentagon press secre...
(JNS) — An ex-U.S. State Department official believes that he has come up with a brand-new, innovative, never-before-tried way to reach peace in the Middle East: Give more territory to the Palestinian Authority. How many times will these guys try to sell us this bridge to nowhere? These same dangerous ideas? The “new” scheme is to give the Gaza Strip to the P.A. This proposal comes from David Makovsky, who used to be the right-hand man to Martin Indyk, the most pro-Palestinian U.S. ambassador to Israel in history. For more than 20 years, Makovs...
(JNS) — The open split been between the Biden administration and the Israeli government as to how Israel should conduct war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip has become a gut-wrenching policy dispute while the goal to expunge the terror organization is still ongoing. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s recent public statement, “Israel is not a vassal state of the United States,” is evidence of how both pungent and exasperating policy and personal divergence has become. U.S. President Joe Biden has taken the bold step of dispatc...
(JNS) — The International Committee of the Red Cross explains the purpose of the rules of war by stating, “The rules of war or international humanitarian law are a set of international rules that set out what can and cannot be done during an armed conflict. The main purpose of international humanitarian law is to maintain some humanity in armed conflicts, saving lives and reducing suffering. To do that, international humanitarian law regulates how wars are fought.” “The rules of war are universal,” it claims. “The Geneva Conventions (which are...
