11/09/2018
It has been unsettling these past two weeks watching American Jewish leftist activists and organizations accuse President Donald Trump of responsibility for the antisemitic massacre of 11 elderly Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27. The problem is not simply that the likes of J Street and the New Israel Fund fail to…
11/08/2018
Most of the analyses of Tuesday’s midterm elections in the US have focused on which party can rightly say it won. Democratic commentators insist the Democrats won the election, since they regained control of the House of Representatives. Republicans point to their expanded control over the Senate and their wins in several fraught gubernatorial races to argue that their…
11/02/2018
Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett kicked in the foundations of the left’s case against President Donald Trump on Tuesday. And they didn’t like it. Since Saturday’s massacre of 11 mostly elderly Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life Synagogue, prominent left-wing American Jewish activists and Never Trump pundits have blamed Trump for the massacre by insisting that…
11/02/2018
Breitbart News’s Caroline Glick said left-wing Jews blaming President Donald Trump for inciting Saturday’s mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue are “dishonoring the dead” and “dishonoring the cause of fighting anti-Semitism.” She offered her remarks in a Monday interview with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily. Glick said, “It would’ve been good if the Jewish community in the United…
11/01/2018
Just hours after the largest massacre of Jews in America in US history, the Atlantic Monthly posted a piece by Franklin Foer. In his “Prayer for Squirrel Hill, and for American Jewry,” Foer wrote, “Any strategy for enhancing the security of American Jewry should involve shunning [President Donald] Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be refused, their presence in synagogues…
10/29/2018
It is an open secret, seldom discussed, that the regime of King Abdullah II of Jordan is extraordinarily weak. He is viewed in the U.S. as a close ally, whose counsel is sought by senior officials and foreign policy practitioners. But more than an ally, Abdullah is a dependent. Without the U.S. — and to a similar degree, without Israel —…
10/26/2018
This week we received a few reminders that in certain significant ways, the discourse in Israel and hence the policymaking is very much stuck in the 1990s. The first reminder came on Sunday when Jordan’s King Abdullah abruptly announced that he is rescinding two annexes of the peace deal that then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed with his father the…
10/24/2018
The Jamal Khashoggi affair is no mere “whodunnit” murder mystery. It is an event that has the potential to endanger all of America’s core interests in the Middle East. To understand why that is the case, it is necessary to remember what those core interests are, to consider which regimes share American interests, which regimes threaten them, and how the…
10/19/2018
For the past two weeks, Israel-bashers have had a brand-new poster child. Her name is Lara Alqasem. Alqasem is an American citizen registered in a masters degree program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is also a key operative in the so-called BDS or “boycott, divestment and sanctions” campaign against Israel. Alqasem flew to Israel two weeks ago. Upon landing at Ben…
10/19/2018
Wednesday night, the security cabinet convened to discuss the Hamas regime in Gaza’s escalating war against Israel. The current round of war began seven months ago when Hamas terror bosses ordered Gaza residents to the border with Israel. The declared purpose of the mass gatherings was to destroy Israel in what Hamas referred to as “the march of return.” Hamas…