Throughout the Arab-Israeli peace process over the years two key elements have been constant and remain critical today as Israelis and Palestinians gather again around the same table. First, recognition that direct talks between Israel and credible Arab partners can achieve durable peace accords. Second, the critical role of the United States in facilitating the direct talks and sealing the peace deal.
From my latest column on Fox News.
Regular readers will need no introduction to Luis D’Elía. The renowned social activist and prominent supporter of the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner shares his thoughts with the world on Twitter and a few minutes ago he posted this:
Continue reading ‘Argentine Jews: Someone’s Keeping An Eye On You’
On September 4, Shiva Nazar Ahari, a young female human rights activist incarcerated in Evin since last December, will enter a Revolutionary Court to face fabricated charges that carry the death penalty. Ahari, a leading activist with the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), stands accused of “anti-regime propaganda” and “acts contrary to national security.” She faces an additional charge in a category of criminality plausible only in societies run along totalitarian lines; what the ayatollahs deem mohareb, or “rebellion against God.” It would require the most blinkered apologist for the Iranian regime to suggest that someone charged in this way can expect a fair trial.
From my latest article on The Huffington Post.
Imagine that you are a distinguished academic, a sociologist say, or a historian. You have a nice job in an American university, your family background is Catholic Polish and though you are well known to experts in your own area of study the broader public has never heard of you.
Via Honest Reporting:
That young man was, in fact, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago, who was beaten within inches of his life before being rescued by the Israeli border policeman in the photo.
The resulting outrage generated by the gross distortion of the photo “launched” Honest Reporting.
Now, ten years later, we caught up with Tuvia in an exclusive interview.
Regular readers of this blog will know that we have repeatedly argued against the usefulness of the Northern Ireland analogy applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Nevertheless, like the corpse of a drowned dog, it keeps bobbing to the surface again and again. The latest example is by Ali Abunimah in the New York Times. With a deep sigh and a heavy step I’ll now proceed to take it apart.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) representatives visited Sudan this week to discuss the African nation’s plans to build at least one nuclear reactor by 2020. The ambitious scheme, which oil-producing Sudan claims would be purely for civil use to produce electricity, is the latest in Arab nuclear initiatives, paralleling Iran’s highly controversial program.
The view is widely held that Turkey is ruled by a moderate Islamist party, the AKP, that is committed to democracy and integration with Europe and that it is the old secular elite that stands in the way of modernization and human rights. Many also believe that the decline in Israel’s previously good relations with Turkey can be explained entirely by Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara.
Continue reading ‘Foreign Illusions About Turkey And The AKP’
Now, with active prodding by President Obama, including individual White House meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu in July, the Palestinian leader found that he could no longer remain unresponsive to the West’s entreaties to accept Israel’s continual overtures to return to direct talks, lest the Palestinians be perceived, correctly, as the obstacle to peace.Mahmoud Abbas, however, may be able to salvage his strategy. The one-year timeline the U.S. set to conclude direct talks creates an aura of expectation, but also conveys to Abbas that he has more time to be indecisive, with all the perils that entails.
From my latest op-ed on Fox News, here.
In the 1930s, the exiled Trotsky began to take an interest in both the Arab-Jewish conflict and Zionist colonization in Palestine. Unlike the orthodox Stalinists, he was distrustful of the “reactionary Muslim” and “anti-Semitic pogromist” elements in the Palestinian Arab national movement. Unlike the Trotskyists of today, he did not uncritically whitewash the Palestinian riots of 1929 as a revolutionary “liberation” struggle. Indeed, by 1937, though he never became a Zionist, Trotsky had come to radically revise his earlier standpoint on the “Jewish question.” He recognized, for example, that his earlier belief in the inevitability of assimilation was unfounded; that there was a Jewish nation, which required a territorial base; and that the Soviet regime was shamelessly encouraging anti-Semitism to deflect attention from its own failures.
The always insightful Robert Wistrich describes the evolution of Leon Trotsky’s thinking on that topic of discussion known as “The Jewish Question.” Read it all here.
Wistrich adds:
In the West, his legacy is kept alive by the amorphous Fourth International - a motley crew of Trotskyite groups whose sectarianism, internal dissension, sterile scholastic disputes and personal rivalries are legendary.
You know what’s coming now, don’t you…
And if you just can’t sit through that scene again, remember this jaunty little number?
Michael Collins isn’t a name that will mean much to many readers of this blog. For present purposes it will suffice to say that he was a key figure in the War of Independence that led to Ireland winning its freedom from Great Britain. He was shot dead in an ambush during the Irish Civil War 88 years ago today.
Continue reading ‘Michael Collins, 88 Years and Burying the Past’
One of the most vicious anti-Zionist propagandists subsidized by the late, unlamented Soviet Union was a man named Trofim Kichko. The author of an antisemitic tract called “Judaism Without Embellishments,” Kichko would doubtless have approved of this photograph which the irredeemably blockheaded Max Blumenthal has posted on his Facebook page:
Continue reading ‘Max Blumenthal Revives Soviet Antisemitism’
Writing in the New York Times Charles M. Blow says that,
While Jews are only 2 percent of the United States population, their influence outweighs their proportion.
Well said, Charles. Perhaps you might like to devote your next column to saying what measures you think ought to be taken to reduce Jewish influence. Limit Jewish participation in higher education? Make Jews who run for Congress pass a loyalty test? Make one non-Jewish vote count for two Jewish ones in swing states? The possibilities are endless. (Via Phoebe)
They’re calling it the yarmulkeh goal - because when Hapoel Tel Aviv striker Itay Schechter scored his team’s third in a 3-2 victory over Salzburg in this week’s Champion’s League qualifier, he celebrated not by crossing himself or tearing off his shirt, but by donning a Hapoel TA skullcap. Schechter received a yellow card as a result. Hapoel manager Eli Guttman said: “I don’t have a problem with Christian players who cross themselves after they score so why shouldn’t Shechter pray the way he wants to.”
Here’s the goal itself: note the precision in avoiding the offside position and the truly exquisite finish.
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