Last week Iran began enriching uranium in a second network of centrifuges. Just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dropped nearly all pretenses about his intention to achieve nuclear weapons, so too he makes it clear daily that he intends to use such weapons to annihilate Israel. The world's reaction to Iran's behavior is depressingly instructive. Russia tells us…
Apropos of nothing, Wednesday night Channel 2 news broadcast a jihadi snuff film. The video, produced by an Iraqi group called the Islamic Army of Allah, shows a jihadi sniper knocking off American soldiers one by one. Being a propaganda flick whose goal is to demoralize Americans and their allies and recruit new soldiers to the army of jihad,…
Last Thursday a French court found Philippe Karsenty guilty of libeling France 2 television network and its Jerusalem bureau chief Charles Enderlin. Karsenty, who runs a media watchdog Web site called Media Matters, called for Enderlin and his boss Arlette Chabot to be sacked for their September 30, 2000 televised report alleging that IDF forces had killed 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura…
Last week Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told his countrymen they needn't worry about Iran's escalating confrontation with the US because he has a direct line to Allah. Allah, he said, has assured him that everything will be just fine. Ahmadinejad also promised that Iran would not cease its enrichment of uranium "even for one day." Iran's nuclear triumph is imminent,…
In Acre this past weekend, what was supposed to be a joyous celebration of Simchat Torah degenerated into a near pogrom when for two nights an Arab mob physically attacked Jewish worshipers with crowbars, rocks and firecrackers, and verbally assaulted them with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs. The worshipers were students from the hesder yeshiva Ruah Tzfonit (Northern Wind) located in…
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's speech at the American Task Force for Palestine's inaugural dinner in Washington on Wednesday evening was but the latest sign that America's alliance with Israel is weakening. Rice's statement that "there could be no greater legacy for America than to help to bring into being a Palestinian state," just about says it all.…
It would seem that Karl Marx got things backwards. History does not repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Rather, it repeats itself first as farce and second as tragedy. This, perhaps more than anything else is the conclusion one should reach from North Korea's nuclear test on Columbus Day. It was the Clinton administration, which back…
The clouds of the coming war are converging upon Israel. But our political and military leaders refuse to look up at the darkening sky. The Russian bear has awakened after 15 years of hibernation. Under the leadership of former KGB commander President Vladimir Putin, Russia is reasserting its traditional hostility towards Israel. On Tuesday, Russian military engineers landed…
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is an interesting case study in how a public image can trump professional competence in Israeli politics. Livni was brought into politics by then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1999. The back-bencher became prominent in 2003 after undergoing two major transformations. First, she exchanged her frizzy light brown curls and dowdy dresses for straight blond…