One of the first concrete acts that the Bush administration took in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks was to outlaw the Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development and freeze its financial assets. The HLF was one of the principal funding arms of Hamas. Israel had tracked its financial activities for over a decade, and had repeatedly…
The war made it clear that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live. That goes straight to the bone. Other people have some choice of options – their attention is solicited by this issue or that, and being besieged by issues they make their choices according to their inclinations. But for "the chosen"…
So it looks like the EU's constitution might have run up against an iceberg. According to a report from Paris in The Weekly Standard, French President Jacques Chirac may have overplayed his EU card by allowing the French people to decide by referendum whether or not they wish to ratify the French-authored, 448-article EU constitution. Opinion polls taken in mid-April…
Last May, in the aftermath of the massacre of the Hatuel family; the rocket propelled grenade attacks on IDF forces and a steep increase in arms smuggling from Egypt through tunnels to Rafah, the IDF launched Operation Rainbow in Gaza. Its aim was to clean out Rafah of terrorists and stem the hemorrhage of arms being smuggled into Gaza from…
Jonathan Pollard is one of the most polarizing figures of our times. Pollard, a former intelligence analyst in US naval intelligence, has now served 20 years of a life imprisonment sentence following his conviction for transferring classified US intelligence materials relating to Arab ballistic missile and nonconventional weapons programs to Israel from May 1984 until his arrest in November 1985.…
As irony would have it, democracy is now the biggest threat facing the so-called peace process between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This we have learned from the press reports and media spins that preceded and followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's photogenic visit to US President George W. Bush's ranch in Texas this week. Both the Americans and the…
In late January Columbia University was forced to postpone a conference on the Palestinian conflict with Israel when Ambassador Danny Ayalon canceled his participation in the event. A source at the Israeli Embassy told The New York Sun at the time that Ayalon's decision to pull out of the conference came "in view of complaints by Jewish students of intimidation…
With the Knesset's defeat this week of the proposed referendum on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's planned withdrawal of Israeli forces and expulsion of Jewish communities from Gaza and northern Samaria, the last parliamentary obstacle to the establishment of a de facto Palestinian state with provisional borders was overcome. Although attention in Israel has been obsessively focused on our internal…
Last June, during a NATO summit in Istanbul, US President George W. Bush blamed the dictatorial rulers of the Arab world and their supporters for the culture of extremism that engenders terrorism and hatred of the West. Bush said, "In the last 60 years, many in the West have added to this [state of affairs] by excusing tyranny in…
During the course of his negotiations with Damascus-based Palestinian terror masters in Cairo this week, PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas made two revealing statements. First, on Tuesday, Abbas said that upon receiving security control of Jericho, he would release from custody all of the Palestinian terrorists who have been incarcerated there since May 2002. Those terrorists, who were transferred to…