Posted on: October 25th, 2012

The New Israel Fund recently announced that it “is undertaking a comprehensive survey to identify those most involved in inciting racism and violence.” Incitement to violence and intolerance is a particularly troubling problem plaguing Israeli society today. This problem is all the more severe when the incitement comes from respected public figures and political leaders. But will the New Israel Fund will also include anti-Jewish incitement coming from the Israeli Left?

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Posted on: October 25th, 2012

To My Fellow Rabbis: I write to you at this time of dire trouble for our country and for Israel. Last week America was under attack. Our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were slaughtered by Muslim extremists. This was not a spontaneous "protest" against an admittedly stupid video. This was an organized military assault, coordinated expressly for execution on September 11.

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Posted on: October 24th, 2012

An Islamist radical convicted of stabbing two German police officers during a protest against "offensive" cartoons has been sentenced to six years in prison. Murat K, a 26-year-old German-born Salafist of Turkish heritage from the western state of Hessen, openly admitted that he had attacked and wounded the two police officers with a kitchen knife during the cartoon riots in May. He showed no remorse, however, during his trial at the district court in the city of Bonn; he said he had been morally obligated to follow Islamic Sharia law.

Posted on: October 24th, 2012

What can a yeshiva do to institute practices that will help prevent any form of abuse? Our community has become a focal point of scrutiny for not responding with greater fervor to the allegations and occurrence of sexual abuse. Not only does this create pain and suffering for victims and their families, it greatly undermines the very institutions built to help protect them. Yeshivas are bedrocks of our community, not only for education but also as a safe harbor for our children.

Posted on: October 24th, 2012

The American presidency came to an end on October 15, 1992 during a Town Hall debate between President George H.W, Bush, Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. The stage seemed more like a place for Phil Donahue to strut around, biting his lips and dragging out tawdry tales for audience applause than for three presidential candidates to discuss the future of the country.

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Posted on: October 24th, 2012

George McGovern is widely remembered for advocating immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam and sharp reductions in defense spending. Yet despite his reputation as a pacifist, the former U.S. senator and 1972 presidential candidate, who died Sunday at 90, did believe there were times when America should use military force abroad.

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Posted on: October 24th, 2012

If any single business lobby—yes, business lobby—stands as an obstacle to entitlement reform, it is the American Association of Retired People [AARP]. There is nothing wrong with being a successful business, and the AARP should be credited for being just that. But there is something unsavory, at least, about being in the business of duping the elderly. Dissimulating—even to the elderly—is not illegal, nor should it be.

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Posted on: October 24th, 2012

The Obama Campaign, that strange 4 year marriage of Generation X hipsters, inner city bosses, suburban college educated boomers longing for racial healing, Big Green businessmen and shady Saudis, appears to be finally sinking beneath the waves. It isn't going out in a blaze of glory, but with mumbles of trending topics.

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Posted on: October 23rd, 2012

How does a mild mannered CPA from Far Rockaway, Queens grow a set of vocal cords of such power and presence that a once meek and put-upon bean counter is now a vital part of the burgeoning Jerusalem acapella scene? And what causes an environmental lawyer from Marin County to discard all her eco-friendly (or at least carbon neutral) possessions to hop a fume-belching El Al Boeing 747 flight with the goal of thoroughly amending her life’s trajectory? Perhaps it’s the pale-pink light bouncing off the Old City’s ancient walls on a typical Jerusalem summer’s evening that somehow catalyzes a reaction, diffusing all reason and refracting all rational thought.

Posted on: October 23rd, 2012

The Palestinian Authority says it is worried because of the rise in the number of Palestinians from Jerusalem who are seeking Israeli citizenship. Hatem Abdel Kader, who is in charge of the "Jerusalem Portfolio" in the ruling Fatah faction in the West Bank, revealed that more than 10,000 Palestinians from Jerusalem have been granted Israeli citizenship.

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Posted on: October 23rd, 2012

Many of us can, I am sure, remember where we were when we realized that the resplendence of the Nobel Prize had diminished. For some this realization can be traced to the news that Yasser Arafat had become joint recipient of the Peace Prize (an award of which he was never stripped). For others it will have been the announcement earlier this month that the award had been given to the E.U.

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Posted on: October 23rd, 2012

Obama's greatest Foreign Policy error was the same one that had been made by Bush and by numerous past administrations. The error was that the problem was not Islam, but Islamic violence. It was Obama however who took that error to its logical conclusion by pursuing a foreign policy meant to part Islamists from their violent tendencies by allowing them to win without the need for terrorism.

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Posted on: October 22nd, 2012

A wave of anti-Jewish violence has taken place in France and Sweden over the past few weeks. The difference in government response is notable, and yet there is something similarly disquieting about their actions. The Swedish government alternately denies the problem, blames the Jews and blames Israel -- it recently funded a book on Israeli "apartheid." The French are more complicated. French counter-terror police have been good at tracking domestic radical Islamists, but the government has made overtly anti-Israel gestures that appear to be nothing so much as "compensation" to its increasingly angry and radical Muslim community and to the Arab world.

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Posted on: October 22nd, 2012

Democrats do not have a great track record in the White House. The number of Democratic presidents who have won second terms is small and becomes much smaller with the second half of the 20th Century. Unlike Congressional shifts which reflect regional politics more than a national referendum, the Presidency is a referendum on the usages of the nearly unlimited power of its holder.

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Posted on: October 22nd, 2012

The major argument against taking preemptive military action against Iran is the fear that Tehran’s retaliatory capability will engulf the Middle East and other regions in serious violence and turmoil, throwing the world’s already fragile economy into a deep recession or even an economic depression. This mindset is coupled with a peculiar assumption that absent […]

Posted on: October 21st, 2012

The Iranian Green Revolution had brave Neda Agha-Soltan, and the Pakistanis have the stubbornly courageous Malala Yousufzai. At fourteen, when the Taliban tried to assassinate Malala for promoting education for girls, she had been defying the Taliban for years. Whether these girls are catalysts for sustained revolutions may well depend on how many in the West […]

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Posted on: October 21st, 2012

In recent years, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe has been the focus of an intense lobbying campaign by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 Muslim countries that are aggressively pressuring Western countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam. In August 1990, the Muslim member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation officially adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, an alternative document to the 1948 United Nations' document, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Cairo Declaration states that people have "freedom and right to a dignified life in accordance with Islamic Sharia law."

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Posted on: October 21st, 2012

America can be a Democracy or a Mediacracy. It cannot and will not be both. And the only way to preserve democracy is to challenge the Mediacrats and force them out of the public space that they have usurped and back into the private sphere of their financial interests where they belong.

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Posted on: October 19th, 2012

Modern government is fixated on depth of control over people. It plots to control every aspect of their lives with the goal of creating a completely harmonious whole. Technology has fed the illusion that such control has become more feasible than ever allowing for the rise of truly scientific government. This illusion is destroying the nation-states of modern civilization by overburdening them with massive governments flailing for control and destroying their economies in order to achieve that control.

Posted on: October 18th, 2012

The American presidency came to an end on October 15, 1992 during a Town Hall debate between Bush I, Ross Perot and Bill Clinton. The stage of the Town Hall seemed more like a place for Phil Donahue or Sally Jesse Raphael to strut around, biting their lips, and dragging out tawdry tales for audience applause, than for three presidential candidates to discuss the future of the country.

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