By Gary Gerofsky

The Jewish Daily Forward published an article on April 17, 2013, soon after the Boston terrorist bombings entitled “Jews Warn Against Rush to Judgment on Boston Marathon Terror Bombings: Security Experts Say History of Mistakes Teaches Caution.” It contained the usual cautionary tripe and left-wing warnings not to presume anything about the bombings and not to jump to conclusions. The article did not, however, avoid musing about connections to Hitler’s birthday, the Oklahoma bombings, and the low-tech nature of the attacks — all conjecture used by the author to obscure the true nature of the terror act and to pin blame on the unobvious. The carnage was actually carried out by obvious culprits and the usual suspects: Muslim terrorists.

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by Gary Gerofsky

This is the speech that Obama ought to make to Israelis during his visit to their country:

Prime Minister Netanyahu, Knesset members, the people of Israel and the Jewish people worldwide: It is an honor and privilege to be here today in Jerusalem, Israel, the undivided capital of Israel and the land of the Jewish people from the time before the establishment of the first temple of Solomon, destroyed by the Babylonians, followed by the second temple which Antiochus desecrated, Pompey looted and the Romans destroyed during the Siege of Jerusalem. Throughout history invaders and superpowers have attempted to extinguish the Jewish people and their symbols. Today is no different as we have an empire of Islamists using whatever means they can to wipe out all traces of Israel and Judaism. They too will not succeed.

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By Barry Rubin

The Book of Esther, which is read on Purim and to which that holiday is dedicated, has been interpreted many ways. Yet there is much to be understood by analyzing the story in terms of political ideology and strategy.

Ahasuerus is the powerful king over Persia and much more. He holds a banquet and invites the leaders of all of the provinces to come in order to wield together his diverse empire by showing his wealth, strength, generosity, and bringing together his political elite in terms of fellowship and equality with each other.

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by Gary Gerofsky

I sometimes think about the problem of anti-Semitism and why this irrational prejudice preoccupies so many people these days — from elites in Europe, to bureaucrats and Islamists in the UN, to churches, unions and Left-leaning academics and politicians.

I believe that in the minds of people like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom are children of Holocaust victims, they blame the ravages of the Holocaust on the group affiliation of the victims rather than on the perpetrators. They use the Holocaust nightmare to apply retroactive retribution to Jews for the existence of the State of Israel via the murderous hands of the Nazis. They apply a similar retribution to Jews in the present using Islamic terrorism as the battering ram of choice. During speaking engagements by these individuals, they reveal a loathing and disdain for Jews/Israel and perhaps they believe that the brutality of the Nazis was somehow a justifiable component and end result of the anger towards Jews by Europeans against the Jewish religion or against other characteristics of their Jewish victims. Do the “intellectuals” of today think that Jews did something wrong or that their beliefs got them into the mess known as the Holocaust and the wars carried out against Israel by its neighbors since the Holocaust? Do they think that Israel is receiving its just deserts today in terms of terror heaped on the country for being a Jewish state?

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by Steven Shamrak

Not long ago over 1000 people came to Jerusalem and participated in the 3rd Conference on Israeli Sovereignty.

During his speech at the conference, Moshe Feiglin, head of the Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction of the Likud party, informed delegates that the amount of money Israel has spent on security since the Oslo Accords could pay every Arab family $500,000 to relocate from Jewish land (most of them would have happily moved out for much less). The need for such expenditure is clear evidence that, in spite of all efforts and concessions Israel has made, the walls it has built and advanced weapons it has developed, Arabs will never agree to peaceful co-existence with Jews – and not just Jews, but all “infidels” (non-Muslims).

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by Nidra Poller*

What is Europe going to do about Islam? Submit? Resist? Or just wait it out, dimwittedly? The recent French presidential election offers insight into the way Islam, or more exactly the Islamist factor, may eventually play out in European politics.

Despite attempts by the Left to focus the debate on the economic crisis, Islam played a decisive role in the contest. The Socialist candidate, whose platform was tilted to favor the party’s Muslim clientele, could not have won without total support in the second round of voting from far Left parties marked by zealous anti-Zionism and a full range of anti-Western ideologies. The question of Islam-in-France was raised with unprecedented candor by incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the Movement for a Popular Majority (UMP). For the first time in France, a major party clearly advocated a push back against Islam (qualified of course with the adjective “radical”). This strategy fired up the enthusiasm of the base, mobilized voters, brought tens of thousands to party rallies, and led to a daily increase in Sarkozy’s polling figures. It would be fair to estimate that if he had had one more week to campaign he might have defeated Hollande during the second-round vote on May 6, 2012.

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by Phyllis Chesler

I disagree with my colleague Jonathan Kay’s recent article “American super-hawks demand to know: ‘Are you Jew enough?’”

First, let me thank him for referring to me as “a feminist-turned anti-Islamist” and not as “anti-Muslim” or as an “Islamophobe.” However, in becoming an “anti-Islamist” I did not check my feminist credentials at the door; my work on honour-based violence, including honour killing among Muslims and Hindus (mainly in India) is pure feminist work. The victims are primarily women of colour, and yes, in the West, they are primarily Muslims. I am championing their cause just as I have championed the cause of non-Muslim Western women. I work with Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents who share my Enlightenment values, a single universal standard of human rights, and who, like me, have taken a stand against the persecution of girls, women, homosexuals, free thinkers and pro-Israel advocates in the Muslim world.

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by Alexander H. Joffe*

The recent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) event at Brooklyn College featuring professional Palestinian Omar Barghouti and celebrity anti-Israel academic Judith Butler was true to form. A dual purpose was served. For one, students and staff were treated to calls for the destruction of Israel, conducted in a quasi-academic setting, with the implicit endorsement of the institution. Second, as always, trap was sprung on opponents of such campus abuses. Having successfully planned the event and represented it as an intellectual exploration of the one state solution, in which Israel is made extinct, the inevitable complaints regarding its one-sidedness and borderline antisemitism were met with the usual howls of censorship and demands for academic freedom. Politicians became involved on both sides. City Council members were opposed to the campus and tax dollars supporting an anti-Israel recruitment rally. Mayor Bloomberg then came out in favor, and with characteristic tact and insight, condemned the event’s content and scolded the presumably close-minded opponents, wittily telling them to apply to school in North Korea.

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by Steven Shamrak

Sometimes I am criticized for using the description “international anti-Semites” too often. I do substitute it with the words “bigots” or “idiots” from time to time. I shall continue to call things by their true names. Regardless of the terminology, there are many facts pertaining to unfair, genocidal and prejudicial treatment of Jews even during recent history that support my use of the term “international anti-Semites:”

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by Phyllis Chesler

The crowd at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on the upper west side is mainly Jewish and liberal — ultra-liberal. They behave as if they are superior to all “Ostjuden,” the illiterate, superstitious, unwashed Eastern European Jews — and therefore, in their sleek leather boots and fashionable coats they are, surely, finally, safe. At least, safer. After millennia of persecution, here are Jews who are not self-hating, not even opportunist, just Jews who feel secure as long as they feel superior to other Jews. The “Ostjuden” today are the Zionists, the “settlers,” the “right wing.”

Psychologically, this means that they deserve to survive. They are the “good” Jews. Assimilated, exquisitely moral, the first to find imperfections in their co-religionists.

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by David J. Rusin*

A detailed analysis of FBI statistics covering ten full calendar years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks reveals that, on a per capita basis, American Muslims, contrary to spin, have been subjected to hate crimes less often than other prominent minorities. From 2002 to 2011, Muslims are estimated to have suffered hate crimes at a frequency of 6.0 incidents per 100,000 per year — 10 percent lower than blacks (6.7), 48 percent lower than homosexuals and bisexuals (11.5), and 59 percent lower than Jews (14.8). Americans should keep these numbers in mind whenever Islamists attempt to silence critics by invoking Muslim victimhood.

The federal government defines a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” Though statutes mandating harsher punishments for hatred-inspired acts raise the specter of thought crimes, emphasize group identity over the individual, and seemingly favor certain victims over others, the FBI’s tracking of such deeds shines important light on the state of the nation. Annual reports assembled from local law enforcement data are accessible on the website of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Especially useful is Table 1 of each compilation, which summarizes the number of incidents, offenses, victims, and known offenders for hate crimes committed against members of different groups.

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by Efraim Karsh*

October 1, 2000, was a watershed in Arab-Jewish relations in the state of Israel. On that day, as most Israelis were celebrating the Jewish new year, their Arab compatriots unleashed a tidal wave of violence in support of the ‘al-Aqsa intifada’, an all out war of terror launched by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority a couple of days earlier.

For full ten days, Israeli Arabs blocked several main roads, cutting off Jewish localities and forcing some of them to defend against armed assaults by neighbours with whom they had maintained cordial relations for decades. Scores of Jewish families spending the holiday season in the Galilee found themselves attacked by frenzied Arab mobs wielding Molotov cocktails, ball bearings in slingshots, stones, even firearms. Stores, post offices, and other public places were ransacked as rioters clashed with police. Forests were set ablaze. In Nazareth, thousands of Arabs marched in the streets chanting, ‘With our souls and our blood we will redeem Palestine’. Jaffa and Haifa, the showcases of Arab-Jewish coexistence, were rocked by violence and vandalism.

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by Diana Muir Appelbaum*

Supersessionism refers to the belief that Christians have superseded Jews in a new covenant with God. Islam, too, sees itself as superseding all previous divine revelation but, unlike Christianity, which canonized the Old Testament embedding long centuries of pre-Christian history into the Christian narrative, Islam freely erases history itself. But Kemalist Turkey appeared to offer a revolutionary break with Islamic tradition when it established a secular republic on the ashes of the Ottoman caliphate. For decades it has been held up as a model of a modern, westernized, Middle Eastern democracy, that happened to have a Muslim majority. Closer examination, however, reveals substantial “continuity between the late Ottoman Empire” and the republic[1] as Turkish treatment of religious and ethnic minorities exposes an unacknowledged streak of Islamic supersessionism.

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by David Brog*

In early September 2012, many in the pro-Israel camp were disturbed by a series of events at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. First, the committee drafting the party platform eliminated traditional language recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Next, the party elders chose to restore the language and called for a pro forma voice vote from the delegates in support of this amendment. Instead, what looked and sounded like an angry majority of the delegates voted against recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

This hostility should not have come as a surprise. For many years, the liberal base of the Democratic Party has been steadily turning against the Jewish state. So much so that for the first time since 1948, one of America’s two major parties has begun to abandon its commitment to Israel. This trend has less to do with the behavior of President Obama or other national party leaders than with the far more troubling phenomenon of changing opinions at the grassroots. The Jerusalem flap at the Democratic convention was not a warning sign. It was the final bell.

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By Fern Sidman

In the heinous massacre that has rocked the nation to its core, it has been reported that among the 20 children that were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on Friday morning, December 14th, was six-year-old Noah Posner, a Jewish boy. His twin sister, also a student at the Sandy Hook school, escaped with her life. Upon receiving the news that her son had been one of the first graders killed, Noah’s mother, Veronique, a nurse at a local hospital, completely broke down according to Rabbi Shaul Praver of Temple Adath Israel in Newtown.

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