In the last US presidential debate, incumbent Barack Obama sort of promised to save us. His exact words were: “If Israel is attacked, America will stand with Israel.” This assurance in itself – be it sincere or otherwise – should send shivers down Israeli spines.

There is, of course the question of what “stand with Israel” actually means. The phrase is too vague for comfort. But the cynical spin-potential isn’t our greatest cause for worry.

Our primary concern should be engendered by another phrase, “if Israel is attacked.” Maybe we’re ungrateful, but heck, we wouldn’t like to find ourselves in that deep existential hole where we’re bleeding, can’t help ourselves and must depend on the dubious goodwill of foreign benefactors like Obama to come – be it gallantly or reluctantly – to our rescue. Continue reading →

If it did anything, the landmark visit to Gaza by the Emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani on Tuesday exposed a slew of widespread regional fallacies.

First looms the contention of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh that the visit ended the political and economic blockade of Gaza. This is vitally important, coming as it does days after another ship hired by radical leftists, the Estelle, attempted to sail from Europe to Gaza to break the blockade that, as Haniyeh himself attests, does not exist.

Hamas and its global coterie of cheerleaders cannot have it both ways. There either is a blockade or there is not. Truth cannot be adjusted to whatever they find convenient at any particular juncture. Continue reading →

Israel’s agenda-driven pundits are strict mono-measurers with no other political yardstick but how any hullabaloo impacts on the Likud – or, more specifically, on its headliner Binyamin Netanyahu. They cheer whatever damages the Likud or diminishes Netanyahu.

Look at how the second coming of Shas’s Arye Deri’s was greeted. Regardless of obligatory hand-wringing about Deri’s criminal record, his comeback offered the Left an opportunity for undisguised gloating, owing to the loudly trumpeted assumption that Deri is sure to bite into the Bibi’s vote-getting potential.

The curious case of Communications, Welfare and Social Services Minister Moshe Kahlon was altogether a godsend allowing propagandists to crow that the Likud no longer represents regular folks. When Kahlon announced his time-out, for whatever reason, it became the leading news item both on air and on page one of the print media. It was as if a shining star had fallen.

This demands a serious reality check. Is Kahlon truly so central a figure, or was this deliberately skewed reporting designed to ingrain the impression that an actual watershed event had just crucially injured Netanyahu? Continue reading →

The European Union was never popular in Israel and with good reason. Its officious meddling has already well exceeded the bounds of commonplace harassment and has edged ever closer to an infringement on our sovereignty, a suborning of our democracy and the undermining of our vital self-preservation interests.

So despite our government’s fawning felicitations to Brussels, many Israelis frowned on the decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the overbearing EU.

By that decision, the Nobel Peace award has finally been equated in stature and gravitas with the Napoleon Prize satirically contrived by the matchless sitcom writers who gave us the BBC’s Yes, Minister back in the 1980s.

The fictional honor, we were informed in the series’ fifth episode, is earmarked “for the statesman who’s made the biggest contribution to European unity.” That prompts the supercilious Sir Humphrey to interject: “since Napoleon, that is, if you don’t count Hitler.” (The fuehrer, by the way, was nominated in earnest for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1938, but blew his chances by launching WWII).

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, apparently out to prove that real life can rival the most side-splitting spoof, had already bestowed its peace accolades on frustrated genocide-promoter Yasser Arafat, as it did on Al Gore for scorning the ecological sins of other folks and on Barack Obama for… Well, we haven’t figured that one out yet. Continue reading →

When it’s properly motivated, the UN can react with lightning speed. It just has to want to, as in the case of the errant mortar shells from the Syrian civil war that inadvertently overfly the border and come down with an occasional thud on the Turkish side.

No lucid pundit can envisage any stratagem that would remotely tempt embattled Damascus despot Bashar Assad to arouse Turkish ire. Assad presumably has his hands more than full at home. He is the least likely to launch deliberate aggression against his big neighbor and thereby ostracize and endanger himself even further in an already hostile world environment.

Whatever else we have to say about Assad, and there’s plenty to rightfully badmouth him for, he certainly didn’t seek confrontation with Turkey. This isn’t his doing. Continue reading →

Dearborn, Michigan, may have started off as a no-account aggregate of farms and modest homesteads but it would evolve into a singular omen. This once-quintessential emblem of old-time Americana would stand out as a powerful indication of important things to come. Dearborn encapsulates within itself something akin to an ever-unfolding prophesy of America’s future.

It’s perhaps no quirk of fate that the latest episode in Dearborn’s annals is about protecting the honor of a prophet via anti-blasphemy laws – the draconian sort which proliferate in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other centers of Islamic enlightenment. It’s all along the lines of the international ban on anti-Islam speech proposed at the UN General Assembly by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and darling of America’s own elected leader, Barack Obama.

This is hardly insignificant because the impetus for the outcry about the supposed insult to Muhammad’s repute was given by no other than Obama himself.

It was he and his administration’s mouthpieces who assiduously disseminated the insult-narrative as the pretext for Muslim violence worldwide. They repeatedly underscored, harshly condemned and profusely apologized for said insult – even if in the same breath they also sanctimoniously preached that rioting isn’t a proper response to what they nevertheless did portray as a genuine grievance. Continue reading →

The entire country mourned the passing of iconic songwriter Haim Hefer on this new year’s second day. We were awash in a deluge of nostalgia, which was only fitting, bearing in mind that Hefer was a master of nostalgia. His ability to home in and seize on the singular sentiment of the era proved the hallmark of his prolific output.

And so in 1948, as the Palmach achieved its greatest feats but was already threatened with dismantlement by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Hefer wrote a somewhat premature self-lamenting eulogy for the Hagana’s elite strike force. I translated its opening stanza:

Gentlemen, history cyclically reappears.
Nothing is forgotten, nothing disappears.
We’ll yet remember how under a lead barrage,
The Palmach in Syria did march  Continue reading →

It is written in the Koran that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet are sinners, whom it is the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every Muslim who is slain in this warfare is sure to go to Paradise.

       Tripoli’s envoy, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja

Difficult as it may be for some New York Times devotees to believe, the above wasn’t enunciated in response to an esoteric 14-minute YouTube clip, which was uploaded months ago by a California-resident Egyptian Copt, which few actually viewed but which invisible Islamic puppet-masters belatedly decried as too offensive to overlook.

The above quote dates back to 1785 but it undeniably bloviates in precisely the same spirit as latter-day Muslim rabble-rousers. Nothing has changed since these supremacist sentiments were sounded to American emissaries Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who were dispatched to London in an attempt to reason with the proto-al-Qaida leaders of their day.

Suffice it to say that the negotiations led nowhere. What the two future American presidents – both Founding Fathers with the impeccable credentials of enlightened political philosophers – would hear was that Muslims are above accommodating themselves to lowly infidels and that the infidels had better admit their inferiority and pay the obligatory penalty for being inferior. Continue reading →

To those among us with some historical memory, these tense days might be reminiscent of days no less tense on the eve of the Six Day War. Then too Israel was beset by existential threat.

Egypt had blockaded the Tiran Straits, kicked out UN forces from Sinai and filled our airwaves with bellicose bluster about annihilating the Jewish state, a.k.a. the loathsome “Zionist entity.” Four and a half decades later, we are threatened by Iranian nukes and all around us is regurgitated the bellicose bluster about annihilating Israel, a.k.a. the loathsome “Zionist entity.” To those of us who still remember, the vehement vows to obliterate us sound eerily similar. Continue reading →

No matter how much denial is smugly stuffed down our throats by homegrown swaggering braggarts, any and every territory which Israel has ever ceded to its still-vital and still-implacable enemies became a breeding ground for festering terror and aggression against the still-vulnerable Jewish state.

It takes stupefying cerebral contortions to deny that this was unequivocally demonstrated in Lebanon (where Hezbollah mushroomed to monstrous proportions after Ehud Barak’s unilateral midnight flight of 2000), in Judea and Samaria (whose cities Israel relinquished post-Oslo), in the Gaza Strip (which in 2005 we ditched via Ariel Sharon’s disastrous disengagement) and in Sinai, whose border with Israel now looms as the most potentially explosive.

No degree of denial-neurosis can belittle this. Each Israeli retreat, without a single solitary exception, comes back to haunt us with vicious vengeance. Continue reading →