Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s trip to New York next week will be a welcome relief for the Iranian leader. Finally, he’ll be somewhere where he’s appreciated, even loved.   Ahead of his trip to America, the US media continued its practice of presenting Rouhani as a moderate, and a natural ally for the US. NBC News’ Anne Curry interviewed Rouhani…

    The United States has a problem with Islamic State. Its problem is that it refuses to acknowledge why Islamic State is a problem.   The problem with Islamic State is not that it is brutal. Plenty of regimes are brutal.   Islamic State poses two challenges for the US. First, unlike the Saudis and even the Iranians, IS…

    Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.   You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.   If…

  Something extraordinary has happened.   On August 31, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told an audience of Fatah members that Egypt had offered to give the PA some 1,600 kilometers of land in Sinai adjacent to Gaza, thus quintupling the size of the Gaza Strip. Egypt even offered to allow all the so-called “Palestinian refugees” to…

  During his yearlong captivity at the hands of the barbarians from Islamic State, Steven Sotloff’s colleagues in Israeli media organs purged all of his articles from their websites to erase his connections to Israel and hide the fact that he was an Israeli citizen.   So, too, every effort was made to hide the fact that he was Jewish.…

    It isn’t hard to understand the truth about Israel and Hamas.   Four-year-old Daniel Tragerman was murdered on Friday afternoon in his home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz by Hamas terrorists.   They shot him with a mortar launched from a school in Gaza’s Zeitoun neighborhood. At the time of the launch, the school was filled with civilians who…

  Hamas’s war with Israel is not a stand-alone event. It is happening in the context of the vast changes that are casting asunder old patterns of behavior and strategic understandings as actors in the region begin to reassess the threats they face.   Hamas was once funded by Saudi Arabia and enabled by Egypt. Now the regimes of these…

    For most Israelis, the international discourse on Gaza is unintelligible.   Here we were going along, minding our own business.   Then on a clear night in June, apropos of nothing, Palestinian terrorists stole, murdered and hid the bodies of three of our children as they made their way home from school.   Before we could catch our…

  Outside the US, throughout the Western world, anti-Semitism is becoming a powerful social and political force. And its power is beginning to have a significant impact on Israel’s relations with other democracies.   Consider South Africa. Following a lopsided vote by the University of Cape Town’s Student Union to boycott Israel, Jewish students fear that their own student union…