Tag: United States

Don't Blame Bush I've received a number of e-mails recently blaming President Bush for Israel's problems. This line of thinking is dangerous as well...

Special Note: I would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt appreciation to the many people who have written to express their good wishes for hatzlacha upon the publication of my new book, "The Committed Marriage." These letters are very meaningful to me and have given me much chizuk. Please forgive me if I cannot respond to each letter individually, but during the coming months I am scheduled to speak throughout the United States and I look forward to greeting you and personally signing your copy of my book.

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's point about a pending Supreme Court case challenging state anti-sodomy laws seems hardly remarkable. The senator said: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual [homosexual] sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery, you have the right to anything."

Exposing The TimesThe expose by Tom Gross that you carried on your front page last week ("Distortions andDouble Standards: How the New York Times...

Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a genuine intellectual, but also a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who revelled in partisan politics. He was a true iconoclast, but delighted...

The support for Nazi war criminals repeatedly voiced by Patrick J. Buchanan (examples of which were offered in this space last week) is but one harsh note in the syndicated columnist's ongoing primal scream against Jews and Israel.

The Monitor will return to the subject of Joe Lieberman (or Senator Twister, as we've renamed him) next week; after all - and here we're paraphrasing the Sage of Saddle River, the late and lamented Dick Nixon - we will have Joe to kick around for the foreseeable future.

While there is of course more than one way to look at the last two centuries of Jewish life on the planet, one instructive way to summarize them might be as a two-hundred year search for an alternative to traditional Orthodoxy.

After September 11, many expressed amazement at the relative ease with which illegal aliens from Arab countries were apparently able to lose themselves in American society. This in no small measure contributed to the horrific events of that day. But a startling story in this past Monday's New York Times documents that there was doubtless another related dimension as well. According to a The Times piece entitled, "After A Long, Slow Climb to Respectability, a Muslim Charity Experiences a Rapid Fall," the US was not only duped into providing a home for terrorists, it also served as a cash cow for terrorists.

It is altogether fitting and proper that New York State's Governor George Pataki, New York City's Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Mayor-Elect Michael Bloomberg chose Chanuka for their solidarity visit to Israel. Chanuka symbolizes Divine deliverance and the triumph of good over evil, themes that have particular resonance now that both the United States and Israel are waging war against terrorism. Indeed, the presence of these three politicians in Israel at this time sharply underscores the parallel challenges presented by the events of September 11 and the more than year-long Intifada. Coming as well, in the context of President Bush's no-nonsense support for Israel's anti-terrorist efforts, it is an indication that American appreciation of Israel's plight is not only broad, but deep as well.

When President Bush, in the company of Treasury Secretary O'Neill and Attorney General Ashcroft, announced publicly on December 4 that the United States would be seizing the assets of the Holy Land Foundation of Richardson, Texas, because its money was being used to support the Hamas terror organization, the President was endorsing the lawsuit brought in May 2000 against the Holy Land Foundation by the parents of David Boim, a 17-year-old yeshiva student who was killed in a drive-by shooting by Hamas terrorists in May 1996.

As we said here last week, the Bush Administration seems to be making its case for a Phase II military effort against Iraq. Indeed, at a Rose Garden ceremony this past Monday for two recently released aid workers in Afghanistan who had been held captive by the Taliban, President Bush was asked what message he had for Iraq. He said as follows:

Well, my message is that if you harbor a terrorist, you're a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist, you are a terrorist. If you develop weapons of mass destruction that you want to [use to] terrorize the world, you'll be held accountable.

Represented by noted Washington lawyer Nathan Lewin, the parents of David Boim ? a 17 year-old New Yorker who was murdered by Hamas terrorists at a bus stop in Beit El, Israel on May 13, 1996 ? filed suit against several U.S.-based organizations that provided significant support and contributions to Hamas.

As we and others have opined, the inclusion of Arab states that continue to harbor terrorist cells in the anti-terrorism coalition is seriously undermining the effort by signalling a political business as usual modus operandi. We have been equally critical of signs that the Bush Administration is agreeing to certain demands of Arab states in general in order to keep them in the coalition. Primary among the concessions was the recent public support expressed by President Bush for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Plainly, the Arab states think they are finally onto something in their effort to have the United States cut Israel loose. But the snickering that this has doubtless engendered seems about to turn into outright mockery if it hasn't already done so.

In a brief filed with the United States Court of Appeals in the crucial case involving an eruv in Tenafly, New Jersey, Nathan Lewin, Orthodox Jewry's foremost constitutional litigation lawyer, presented an important argument that will, if successful, insulate all eruvim in the United States against similar constitutional attack. The Tenafly Council ordered Cablevision to remove 183 plastic strips that the Eruv Association had attached to utility poles to be used as "lechis," which are necessary to complete an eruv. Many reportedly had reason to believe, from the debate that had preceded the order of removal, that Tenafly was simply trying to keep Orthodox Jews out of the town. But all the Council members swore that they had no anti-Orthodox bias ? which would have meant that their action against the eruv was a violation of the Constitution ? and the federal judge believed them.

A startling population report has just been published by the American Jewish Committee debunking the myth of potent Muslim voting power.

The other day, in a piece entitled, "For Some Jewish Leaders, Partnership With Muslims Is A Casualty of Sept. 11 Attacks," the New York Times reported on a rude awakening in the "interfaith dialogue" crowd in the aftermath of September 11:

Once again, Rudy Giuliani has demonstrated why his tenure as Mayor of New York these past years marked a transformation of our city. There are those who say that he should have accepted the $10 million for the World Trade Center victims fund from that Saudi prince who accompanied his check with the advice that the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause. Our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of the Israelis while the world turns the other cheek." They said the Mayor should just have issued a disclaimer.

When President Bush went to Congress for a resolution confirming his authority to mount this nation's worldwide war against terrorists and those who harbored them, he gave voice to the broad sentiment of Americans and significantly departed from the approach of some of his spokesmen who initially focused not on the systemic terrorist problem but on the particular acts of terror. Yet even after the President's inspiring words of resolve, it seemed that there was an unseemly period of negotiations with the Congress. Indeed, we could not understand why the resolution took even the four days it did to be forthcoming. In his inimitable fashion, Charles Krauthammer, writing in the Washington Post on the very day after the attacks, seemed to sum up the national feeling:

Given the fact that in Operation Desert Storm the United States literally rescued Saudi Arabia from a certain takeover by Iraq, it is particularly gnawing that they are hemming and hawing so much about helping us with going after Osama bin Laden. But, as reported by the New York Daily News, there is another troubling issue concerning Saudi Arabia that seems to be lurking just below the surface. That country seems inordinately interested in the progress of the investigation.

Once again, America is at war. Make no mistake. The coordinated sneak air attacks and car bombing that levelled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, killing untold numbers of Americans, is of a piece with the attack on Pearl Harbor. And just as our earlier enemies learned to their great dismay that we have the capacity to rise from any adversity and make any sacrifice required of us, so the perpetrators of this atrocity will also learn. Today's events are the culmination of a widespread but lunatic fringe who abide by a seething Muslim fundamentalism that has long viewed the United States as the evil incarnation of infidel secularism. It is most recently what drove the third world savaging of America at the Durban Conference and it is what has motivated attacks ? albeit of lesser magnitude, like the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Air Force base in Saudi Arabia and the assault on the USS Cole.

President Bush and his Secretary of State are certainly deserving of all the praise that will be heaped on them in the Anglo-Jewish media over the United States' withdrawal from the Durban Conference. The proposed anti-Israel resolution was an outrage and it was entirely correct for our government to say that this sort of thing would not be dignified by being the subject of debate or negotiations by us. It was also an important message to the Arab world that the United States has no intention of being part of any gang-up on Israel no matter how popular it is, and that we plan to act on principle.

The world as we knew it changed in a matter of moments early Tuesday when terrorists crashed two hijacked planes into Manhattan?s World Trade...

The world as we knew it changed in a matter of moments early Tuesday when terrorists crashed two hijacked planes into Manhattan?s World Trade...

Debate over Prime Minister Sharon's so-called policy of "restraint" continues to swirl. Among other things, our editorial last week expressing support for his measured responses to the escalating Palestinian terrorism drew more reaction than any Jewish Press editorial in recent memory. The letters from readers on the subject which appear this week are only a sampling of what we actually received, besides some really animated phone calls.

President Bush's heretofore steadfast message to Yasir Arafat - that the Palestinian leaders' abandonment of the peace table in favor of the battlefield will not be rewarded - is consistent with what we continue to believe is the only road to peace.