Some of the luckier folks are born into renowned families. If sufficiently mercenary, they can cash in on their lineage and do quite well from a departed forefather’s fame. Arun and Rajmohan Gandhi, for instance, are the Mahatma’s grandsons and their genealogical good fortune presumably entitles them to profess unique moral authority.

Quite like them is Martin Luther King’s eldest son and namesake.

Ordinarily we couldn’t care less about them. But they came to our region, participated in propaganda forums and dispensed advice on how to overcome villainous Israel “nonviolently.” Arun was the trailblazer. He appeared here in 2004. Rajmohan and MLK III followed in his footsteps this month. Continue reading →

In herself Anat Kamm could not be more unimportant. As a symptom of the psycho-political ills that plague Western democracies Anat Kamm could not be more important.

The malaise her pseudo-intellectual narcissism mirrors can obviously be least afforded in beleaguered Israel, but it’s not only endemic here.

Moreover, it’s lauded as the epitome of politically correct bon ton not only by this country’s homegrown left-leaning media. Continue reading →

It was a short time before Israel’s 30th birthday. Again I found myself in the small, modest living room of Mr. and Mrs. Pulerevitch on Tel Aviv’s Ben-Yehuda Street. It was an old building and the rented apartment seemed suitably suffused with old-world ambiance. The metropolitan hustle, bustle and brashness were all left outside. Inside everything was genteel and unhurried. Another time, another dimension.

I had become a frequent family guest, was affectionately called Sarah’le and pampered more like a favorite daughter than a news-reporter. Originally I met Yechezkel at his workplace, the Tel Aviv municipality’s paymaster department. He had founded the Prisoners of Zion Association and among my beats was the then-climaxing aliya struggle in the then-extant USSR. Continue reading →

The latest Egyptian blockbuster movie, Cousins (Welad Ela’am), ostensibly set in Tel Aviv (actually filmed in far-off Cape Town), unabashedly demonizes Israelis as Nazis. In one scene, as drivers halt their vehicles for Holocaust Remembrance Day’s memorial siren, the Arab hero provocatively asks an old man standing at solemn attention:

“And what about the Holocaust you perpetrated against the Palestinians?”

Dwarfing and distorting the Holocaust serves our enemies – from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (who earned a PhD in Moscow for a dissertation which denied the Holocaust and simultaneously blamed it on Zionists). Continue reading →

Lonely, vulnerable, affection-craving Israel always yearned for friends. It always also liked to kid itself that it has friends. Hence, at a ceremony half-a-century ago, standing alongside Charles de Gaulle, David Ben-Gurion extolled French friendship for little, renascent, plucky Israel. With no compunctions, haughty de Gaulle doused BG’s warm sentiments. “In international affairs,” he intoned superciliously, “there are no friends, only interests.” Continue reading →