Columns

It is easy to feel sorry for the Palestinians in Gaza. Televised and print images of their apparently unrelieved misery would appear to suggest Israeli cruelty in the use of armed force. Exactly the opposite is true. By deliberately placing elderly women and young children in areas from which lethal rockets are launched into Israeli homes and schools, it is only the Palestinian leaders who openly violate the law of war.

The cemetery in Lodz is said to be one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe, with about 230,000 graves.

Concluded in mid-September, the sixth annual International Conference on Global Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, underscored the growing threat of mega-terror. To a large extent, this existential threat to Israel is made worse by the always-deliberate insertion of terrorist personnel and assets in the midst of civilian populations.

I am often amazed by the reaction of world governments to the bullying tactics of the Muslim world.

The name Radegast Station might not be familiar to most people.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has reportedly asked Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to free imprisoned terrorist Marwan Barghouti. Her argument, it would appear, is that the Tanzim leader remains very popular among the Palestinians, and that he is the only Fatah representative who could successfully supplant the Hamas-led government.

We Jews have experienced so much pain in our long and arduous history that the pain of Islamic terrorism seems to be just another episode of indescribable suffering. To an extent, this is certainly true. For the moment, we must endure, and - in the end - we shall prevail. So it has been before; so it will be again.

An exhibit commemorating the Jewish community of Czestochowa, which has been traveling the world for the past two years, culminated in the gathering of more than 200 people who went there for a special reunion during Sukkot. These remnants and descendants of a community of more than 30,000 came from the U.S., Israel, South America, Australia and Europe.

There is no easy answer to the question of ongoing Iranian nuclearization. All options are unappealing, and all will have very substantial costs. For the moment, diplomacy still seems to be the preferred path to crisis remediation, but only because polite conversation and empty threats protect all parties from taking easily identifiable risks.

During Chol Hamoed Sukkot the sound of singing in a sukkah was heard in Czestochowa for the first time since the Shoah.

Three-State Solution   In his fine column of Sept. 15, Louis Rene Beres noted that Israel was not the aggressor in 1967 and as such...

Now we have passed the five-year anniversary of September 11, 2006 - with all of the horrifying memories, with all of the recurrent pain. We know today, that all pertinent government agencies are working 24/7 to keep us safe in the future. We know, as well, that even greater preparedness can never make us truly safe. We know, above all, that we must continue with our daily lives, personal and collective, and that we must not submit to the unprecedented blackmail of Islamic terrorism ("Convert or die!").

On Yom Kippur, I was in Kiev after having participated in the commemorations at Babi Yar.

The roots of 9/11 lie deeply embedded in civilizational hostility - in its distinctly partial - but nonetheless - primal Islamic hatred for western modernity. This fixed and growing hatred extends to other major religions, especially Judaism, but also to certain elements of Christianity. And although it is true that the greatest portion of Muslims rejects terror violence as a means of fulfilling presumed Islamic expectations, the remaining portion is not statistically insignificant. This group numbers (at least) in the tens-of-millions.

There are other PA/PLO/Hamas violations of Oslo, any one of which could comprise an entire magazine article.

As of Tzom Gedalia, Sept. 25, I will be on a trip to Ukraine and Poland.

The rights of both Jews and Christians were openly trampled on by the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem. Churches were made into mosques. Slaughterhouses were deliberately established near Jewish places of worship. Mosques were built next to churches and synagogues so that their minarets could literally "over-tower" them.

Last week, President Lech Kaczynski of Poland visited Israel, where he participated in many events in support of Israel and the Jewish community in Poland.

The unchanging struggle to evict the Jews from "all of Palestine" (that is, from Israel as well as Judea/Samaria/Gaza) is driven by the homicidal idea of jihad or holy war. According to Islamic orthodoxy, their "prophet" is said to have predicted a final war to annihilate the Jews.

For the last two weeks I have written about cemetery restoration in Poland. This week I present a report from the Foundation for the Preservation of the Jewish Heritage in Poland, which has done tremendous work in the field. The first half of 2006 has been a busy time for the Foundation for the Preservation of the Jewish Heritage in Poland. The Foundation has cleared up ten Jewish cemeteries and fenced four of them, erected monuments or memorial plaques commemorating pre-war Jewish communities in five towns and is currently restoring four synagogues.

The poet Auden understood many things. He understood truly important things as only the poets can. He understood that humankind can always be found in pretty much the same imperiled condition.

I recently interviewed a Holocaust survivor who was present as the Russian army entered the town of Czetachowa.

New Leadership Needed     If one were previously inclined to believe that Israel's leadership would finally muster the will to fight the Islamofascists chomping at...

Technically, the Lebanon war against Hizbullah is over. In fact, however, Israel remains starkly vulnerable to further rocket attacks, and - even more ominously - to a still-nuclearizing Iran. Making matters worse, Prime Minister Olmert has yet to openly change course from his indisputably catastrophic plan for "realignment" and "convergence."

In an ancient myth, the Greek gods condemn Sisyphus to roll a great rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone will inevitably fall back of its own weight. By imposing this terrible judgment the gods had prescribed the dreadful punishment of interminable labor. But they also revealed something vastly more difficult to understand, namely, that even such useless labor need not be altogether futile. Such labor, they knew, could also be heroic.

Last week's conference on Jewish genealogy in New York featured many sessions dealing with the issues of tracing Jewish lineage.

Six days after the "Three Weeks War," our goal is to carry on, with all the more determination, the mission to bring about a great awakening among the Jewish people.

With mounting evidence that Hizbullah-fired rockets can cause Israel considerable damage, one point should stand out glaringly above all others: Under no circumstances should Iran be allowed to reach the stage at which it could launch nuclear weapons.

While most of Europe is critical of Israel's war against Hizbullah, the country that most Jews think of being the most anti-Semitic is hosting a group of Israeli youth from northern Israel to ease their trauma.

Humanitarian international law continues to correctly require that every use of force by an army or insurgent force meet the test of "proportionality." Going back to the basic legal principle that "the means that can be used to injure an enemy are not unlimited," proportionality stipulates (among other things) that every exercise of armed force be limited to the minimum application needed for operational success. More specifically, this ancient principle of customary international law applies to all judgments of military advantage and to all planned reprisals.