Op-Eds

With Hamas now fully in control of Gaza, freely running guns and missiles through the Egyptian border (negating the need for tunnels), the missile barrages on southern Israel can be expected to increase.

In short, to every act of war against the United States during the 1990’s, the Clinton-Gore response was limp-wristed and supine. And worse. By refusing to concede a lost presidential election, thereby breaking a hundred-year tradition, Gore delayed the transition to the new administration that would have to deal with the terrorist threat. As a result of the two-month delay, the comprehensive anti-terror plan that Bush ordered on taking office (the Clinton-Gore team had none) did not arrive on his desk until the day before the 9/11 attack.

In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, Israelis were convinced that peace with the Arabs was finally at hand. That thinking was based on the notion that the war had proven Israel’s invincible presence in the region. If Israel was unbeatable, they reasoned, what choice would the Arabs have other than to make peace?

We, Israeli professors for justice and peace, do hereby appeal to researchers, academics, scholars and teachers, in Israel and throughout the world, to take a firm and clear stand against the continuing occupation and denial of rights.

In 1981, when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor and was condemned for it by nearly the entire world, Pastor John Hagee decided he had to stand up for Israel. And he did. “A Night to Honor Israel” was born with the purpose of giving the Christian community an opportunity to demonstrate its love and support of Israel and the Jewish people.

The cultural war between Islamic barbarism and Judeo-Christian civilization is raging even as Gaza and Sderot are under siege. The manipulation of propaganda is a key factor here. Britain – the country that turned Nazi-era European Jews back from Palestine’s shores – is now trying to boycott and isolate Israeli doctors, journalists, and university professors. The British Anglican Church, well-financed British-based NGOS (Christian Aid, World Vision, Amnesty International, etc.) and British academics have joined their voices to the Islamist-led jackal-chorus against Israel.

Until 1967, Gaza was part of Egypt. The Arabs who lived in Gaza considered themselves – get this – Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood was active and quite popular in Gaza – and outlawed by the Egyptian government.

What happens when the far Right collides with the hard Left? Will the universe explode? Will the laws of physics be distorted by some anti-Newtonian implosion of logic? No, they won’t. Not as long as the two ends of the spectrum are uniting to slam the Jews, that is.

My father, Dr. Isaac Lewin, z”l, was 37 years old in January 1943 when B’nai B’rith held a conference in Pittsburgh to which it invited 34 national Jewish organizations. It announced that the purpose of the meeting was “to consider what steps should be taken to bring about some agreement on the part of the American Jewish community with respect to the post-war status of Jews and the upbuilding of a Jewish Palestine.”

This July 4th will be different for me, and all it took was a “sieg heil” and dozens of cautionary injunctions to walk only where it is safe.

A recent Jewish Press editorial commented on an article I wrote for the Jerusalem Post calling for a reevaluation of the role of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. The editorial provided an excerpt of my article, including my critique of the Chief Rabbinate’s extreme position on conversion to Judaism. It then raised an important question: why didn’t I entertain the need for a uniform standard? “We need to hear his [Rabbi Angel’s] views regarding the consequences of an absence of universal acceptance of halachic legitimacy…”

As the Jews were about to leave the desert to enter the Promised Land, Moses told them (Deut. 29. 1-8), “You have seen everything that God did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and all the slaves and to all his land…. But God did not give you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day. I lead you forty years in the wilderness ... and you arrived at this place…”

The New York Times is special to me. Always has been, always will be. Over the years there were times I was critical of Times editorials, and on a few occasions of its news stories. Yet my day would not be complete if I had not read the Times.

Lately, I’ve been reading some very strange things in various Jewish media outlets about the history of kiruv (outreach) in America. I’ve had to read some of these articles several times over just to be certain my eyes weren’t deceiving me.

It comes across as a classic Right-Left dispute. Liberals, led by Al Gore, claim global warming is due mainly to human activity and something must be done before it is too late. Conservatives question that and are quick to accuse the Left of scare tactics fueled by a desire to expand the powers of government. Yet if we put our emotions aside, reasonable discourse can take place and rational conclusions can be drawn.

The summer wedding season is here, and even comic book characters are getting into the act.

A recent headline in the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot reported that certain military advisers are putting pressure on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to initiate talks with Syria for fear of a Syrian attack on Israel this summer. Those who advocate this policy are controlled by their fear and dread of another summer of the horrors of war.

In the last lap of his second term, George W. Bush has all but fallen off the major media scope. It’s not that he’s suddenly become beloved by The New York Times or that media pundits have now begun to see the light and embrace him. On the contrary, criticism of the president and his policies has become almost second nature to most of them.

It was shocking to see the writer Hillel Halkin marking the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem by calling for its division. In a May 15op-ed in the New York Sun (“Mounting Figures”), Halkin wrote about the concern of Israeli political leaders with demographics. As a solution, he extended their call for territorial concessions even beyond Judea and Samaria, applying it to the capital city of Israel.

One of the many new “minhagim” in the shidduch world concerns two or more siblings who are in the proverbial parsha simultaneously. This is an increasingly frequent phenomenon due to the ever-increasing length of the average dating career.

Devious ideologues hate light because light exposes their loathsome tricks. So it is not surprising that Letty Cottin Pogrebin and her cohort, incisively critiqued by Dr. Kenneth Levin in a recent Jewish Press front-page essay (“The Empty Rage of Jewish ‘Progressives,’” April 20), hate seeing the word “progressives” in quotation marks.

Great wars in history eventually become great wars about history. Only a few years after the last soldier leaves the battlefield, accepted truths about the nature of a military conflict and the motivations for it invariably come under assault by revisionists and counter-revisionists whose vehemence can rival that of the original combatants.

Covered with sand and dust, his face the color of chalk, my husband resembled a nomad, shirt ripped, clothes and shoes much the same as one who just crossed a desert. Choked with emotion, he could barely speak when he returned late Thursday afternoon, the fourth day of the Six-Day War, from his first experience at the newly liberated Western Wall.

The Twentieth of Sivan, designated by sages in two different eras to be a day of fasting and commemoration, marks tragedies that befell the Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages up to the Holocaust and was, until the Second World War, communally observed by European Jewry.

Why did Bahar’s remarks go largely unreported in the Western media? Why does the U.S. continue to deal with, support, fund and urge concessions to the PA when its elected officials call for genocide of Jews and Americans? Why are foreign governments not protesting or demanding a retraction from PA president Mahmoud Abbas?

Sadly, the war in Iraq appears to be lost. The Democrats – like terriers shaking a rat (Iraq), using a plan of funding war for three months (salami tactics), causing the Army command to recognize that Congress, not the president, is effectively in charge – have achieved their goal: implementing withdrawal.

In an unprecedented effort to rally popular support, al Qaeda is apparently trying to refashion its image from an ultra-conservative, radical Islamist group with clear and precise goals – the ultimate being to implement sharia law around the globe – to what the liberal West has long had a soft spot for: a romanticized revolutionary movement of the “Ché” variety, fighting to overthrow oppression and exploitation (which, as the usual story goes, are products of U.S. greed and aggression).

In 1984, the United States rectified a diplomatic anomaly when it formally recognized the Vatican and agreed to exchange ambassadors with the papal mini-state in Rome.

It is in the silent whispers of our daily Hebrew prayers. “May it be thy will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Temple be speedily rebuilt in our days and grant us a share in thy Torah. There we will serve thee with reverence, as in days of old and as in former years.”

Is it just me, or have you also noticed how our children are introduced to an unusually high degree of competition in school? Every time I turn around it seems they are involved in one or another extracurricular program.