Our mainstream media could hardly contain their glee last week when the state attorney flatly rejected pleas to accord Margalit Har-Shefi a retrial. Opinion-molders bristled indignantly at the very suggestion that she might be exonerated. This, they righteously pontificated, would constitute a first step to releasing Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin Yigal Amir.

Just 19-years-old at the time, Har-Shefi was arrested post-assassination in 1995 because she was Amir’s classmate and friend. The prosecution alleged she knew of his intentions yet failed to phone the police. Eventually she was tried, convicted and imprisoned for the rarely prosecuted offense of not preventing a crime. Continue reading →

Although we gave the world monotheism, we are a nation obsessively searching for idols. We sculpt some, raise them on pedestals, confer sanctity upon them and declare their worship mandatory. In other idols we seek imperfections, poke at them, dig at the surface and deepen the blemishes so we may be justified in smiting the ghastliness.

We make our obsessions personal, even long after the idols’ mortal models are deceased, long after they are really relevant.

Even Bar Kochba isn’t invulnerable, presumably because his fight for liberty and rebellion against ancient Rome was revered by Zionism’s founding fathers. That renders him permissible prey for zealous post-Zionists. Continue reading →

Perhaps the greatest danger to Western civilization is moral relativism. Its basic premise is that there are no truths, just opinions. Our values are invariably belittled as vested interests. What our enemies promote is invariably elevated to the stature of the authentic yearnings of downtrodden masses.

History is downgraded to mere narratives, their factual base notwithstanding. Narratives of Third World authorship (including oil-rich potentates and Muslim clerics) are accorded credence, no matter how unfounded. Opposing narratives are disdainfully trashed, no matter how solidly founded on fact.

To ignore underlying postmodern distortion when grappling with the issues of the hour is to misread the hype. Continue reading →

Israelis have come to take the delegitimization of their national rights and hard-won sovereignty in stride. Partly it’s the overwhelming global tide of vilification. There is just so much one can rebut. After a while, apathy takes over.

We grow inured to smears – be they from glory-craving statesmen, populist politicians, British or Norwegian trade unions, supermarket shelf-stackers, sanctimonious church groups, human rights promoters, campus organizers, professors foisting intolerant agendas on impressionable students or artsy self-appointed thought-molders worldwide.

But it’s one thing not to pay heed anymore or care about what they say about us out there. It’s quite another to imbibe the slander and take it for granted as a given fact. It’s one thing to ignore the lie, but once we begin believing it, we accept that our very existence is sinful. Continue reading →

Rare is the American president with true strategic comprehension of the convoluted intricacies of the Mideast’s assorted disputes, especially the one arising from the implacable Arab refusal to accept a sovereign Jewish state in what they consider their lebensraum (one of Hitler’s favorite terms claiming entitlement to “living space” for his superior race)

The wisdom or imbecility of any given US president is inevitably as good as that of the aides who whisper in his ear. But some have unquestionably displayed greater capacity for preposterousness than others. It may be a mere accident of history or the result of left-wing proclivities, but the greatest inanities have of late emanated from Democrats – the present White House resident and his two living Democratic predecessors, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Barack Obama’s grasp of the Mideast is so skewed and so predisposed to support the Arab/Muslim narrative that he liberally subscribes to its copious falsehoods as part of his multicultural, moral-relativist, postmodern aggrandizement of the Third World. His fawning Cairo address in 2009 was just the preview of coming attractions. Continue reading →