No one was about to shoot him, sadistically torture his wife or bash the baby’s head

When it suits them, Israel’s left-wingers tug manipulatively at Jewish heartstrings. They know how to play us – or so they think.

And thus Labor leader Isaac Herzog would have us believe that just because we are descendants of persecuted refugees (literally running for their very lives), it now behooves us to open the gates of our still-beleaguered mini-state to the still-inimical descendants of those who denied asylum to distraught Jewish refugees (and thereby sentenced them to death).

Out to garner warm accolades from the indefatigable do-gooder set, Herzog urges that Israel admit Syrian refugees – the very ones who imbibe Nazi-like Judeophobic propaganda with their mothers’ milk. There’s no doubt that they hate us. The only question is whether they ran away from IS and accordingly hate us in the Assad-Hezbollah-Iranian idiom or whether they escaped Assad and despise us in the rabid Jihadist vein.

Conceivably, by Herzog’s reckoning, ushering into our midst outright intractable enemies is a sure-fire vote-getter. Besides, it appears that no pretext to embarrass the government is taboo.  And so, to underscore his ploy, Herzog has posted on his Facebook page nothing less than the contention that those who disagree with him: “have forgotten what it means to be Jews”. Continue reading →

Abbas is just about as crucial to Israel as scarecrows are to contemporary agriculture.

Intelligence analysis is an iffy proposition in the best of times. It’s inevitably tinged with political agendas, wishful thinking, conformity to groupthink, reluctance to upset the boss, keenness to upset the boss, jockeying for position, fear of being proven wrong – and much more from the self-serving to the genuinely clueless.

It’s with this in mind that we ought to approach the periodic perplexity of whether this time Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas is finally honest about his oft-sounded declarations of intent to resign.

To be sure, he’s not quite legally in office as president of the Palestinian Authority. He was questionably elected to a four-year term in 2005 and is now completing his eleventh year in that position. With noteworthy frequency, sometimes every few months or so, Abbas has been putting the whole watching world on notice that he has had it, is about to throw in the towel and walk away from the leadership. Continue reading →

Naomi Shemer- “I didn’t go where the thought-police ordained that I should.”

When Jews commit ideological murder it’s man bites dog. The rarity and shock then serve as just about the most expedient excuse for settling internal political scores.

It was only to be expected that two unrelated homicidal attacks would instigate the current blame-fest against the majority of the nation lumped collectively (and contemptuously) into the so-called right-wing. It always was so. History buffs can point to the Arlozoroff assassination but no need to delve that far. Suffice it to say, that local prejudices don’t evaporate. They just conveniently transmute.

Nonetheless, one premise remains unalterable – the Left is presumed righteous and the Right can do no right.

I got these basic political insights at a very young age from two friends of my parents’. They used to drop by on occasion and I could never tell them apart. They were identical twins – incredibly identical. They looked the same, spoke the same and behaved the same. The only difference between them was in their politics – about which each was as intense as the other. Continue reading →

Jewish storefronts in prewar Krakow: the mandatory name-sign decree was hardly innocuous.

Poland made history on Monday morning, April 19, 1937. It taught the world how to implement a boycott without actually admitting that it’s doing anything of the sort.

Headliners of today’s European Union have learned the lesson well, even if few of the EU’s sanctimonious sermonizers can likely cite the source and inspiration for their very unoriginal charade.

The Polish non-boycott was no mean feat on the eve of WWII, when dark clouds of impending doom already gathered over the heads of European Jewry. Given the bestial goings-on and the brutish anti-Jewish boycotts next-door in the Third Reich, Poland appeared positively refined by comparison – the soul of sophistication.

The Poles never sank as low as the crude and vulgar Germans. They didn’t adopt the practice of daubing storefronts with giant Jude inscriptions, smashing windows or sending out storm troopers to form scary picket lines, carry offensive signs in the formidable Teutonic tradition and warn off the super-race away from subhuman Jewish shopkeepers.

Instead, Poland’s Minister of Industry and Commence Antoni Roman issued an edict that looked impeccably non-discriminatory. It ordered that all business signs boldly display the proprietor’s name, directly above any other incidental scrap information such as what was sold at the premises. Precise rules were stipulated regarding the size of the letters required.

What could possibly be wrong with that? Continue reading →

Edvard Benes: “his known addiction to compromise became serious weakness”

Is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally culpable for the atrocious deal which US President Barack Obama and his multinational cohort contracted with Iran? Exuding extraordinary opportunism, MK Ya’ir Lapid screams just that into every available microphone.

Opportunism according to the dictionary definition is “the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances – with little regard for principles or consequences. Opportunist actions are expedient actions guided primarily by self-interested motives.”

Lapid’s fortunes had flopped spectacularly in the March elections. His political bankruptcy would have been all the more crushing had Labor posed a more credible alternative. As was, Lapid avoided utter ruin only because his list afforded a midway shelter for those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either large party.

This leaves Lapid with the pressing need to keep his name in the headlines and make political hay of whatever transpires – like the signing of the Vienna deal on the ayatollahs’ nukes. Continue reading →

THE SHIRELLES in 1962 when they sang “you say hop and I’ll hop.”

In all fairness, even politicians sometimes deserve a break. To whit it behooves us to admit that:

1. Barack Obama didn’t always lie about his Iranian fixation.
2. Binyamin Netanyahu couldn’t have ever stopped Obama.
3. Hillary Clinton is the only one who can stop Obama (despite her knee-jerk endorsement for his grand betrayal).

Let’s start at the top. Obama may have willfully led all and sundry astray as he pursued his courtship of the Iranian ayatollahs. He did fib prodigiously while allowing himself to be outmaneuvered by them at every turn. He couldn’t have been more disingenuous than when he denied his capitulation on every point and when extolled a deal that is far more laughable than the travesty which Bill Clinton concluded in 1994.

Like a dilettante neophyte at a Tehran bazaar, Obama haggled with the Iranians without ever threatening them, while openly evincing a rush to meet artificial deadlines of his own making and oozing eagerness to strike the bargain at any price. He blundered spectacularly. Continue reading →

A self-satisfied Dror Feiler on board the Marianne: he is a classic red-diaper baby.

Israeli expat Dror Feiler, domiciled in comfortable and smug Sweden, has helped organize many of the “humanitarian flotillas” to Gaza, including the 2010 Mavi Marmara provocation, the 2012 Estelle follow-up and the latest foiled Mariannemisadventure. He is a classic red-diaper baby.

In his pro-Hamas fervor, Feiler never mentions that Israel regularly (and quite dementedly) supplies Gaza with goods, electricity, fuel and water, whereas Gaza uses its resources to subjugate its masses and stockpile weapons of indiscriminate destruction.

Feiler either justifies or omits from discourse Gaza’s many and flagrant sins. He grotesquely exaggerates Israeli responses and willfully twists them out of all context. Feiler delights in painting Israel as intrinsically and irredeemably evil. Don’t look for Jewish empathy or a soft spot for the old homeland in Dror. That would contradict his red-diaper upbringing. That’s not where he comes from.

He’s a trusty unquestioning chip off the old block – his mother, Pnina, who spent a lifetime crusading for Palestinian causes and defaming Israel with relish. She hails from Yad Hanna, Israel’s sole Communist kibbutz. It was named in 1950 after heroic WWII paratrooper Hanna Szenes, whose memory and legacy have of late been targeted by artsy leftwing iconoclasts. Self-sacrifice for a Jewish cause and Zionist dedication have become unbearable in their enlightened milieu. Continue reading →

Expelled Jews are shoved out of Zion Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem after it was conquered by the Arab Legion in contravention of the 1947 UN Partition Resolution

The bottom-line truth is that the decision of the US Supreme Court to uphold official Washington’s pig-headed disconnect between Jerusalem and Israel doesn’t mean diddly-squat. It signifies zilch, zippo, nada, gurnisht, bubkes.

This is quite apart from of the fact that the court technically only dealt with American constitutional hairsplitting on who’s empowered to recognize what abroad. Such pedantry may perturb American jurists but for us Israelis it absolutely doesn’t change a thing.

We simply shouldn’t care if they say we aren’t who we know we are.

What any American higher-up in whatever bureaucracy in whichever branch of government finds it expedient to opine cannot factually alter our identity. It’s as straightforward as that and is in essence what 12-year-old Menachem Zivotofsky understood.

His battle against federal obduracy reached all the way to the highest US court but Menachem lost his appeal to have his American passport register his birth as having occurred in Israel rather than in an undefined Jerusalem.

The fussy legalistic quibbling that led to his defeat cannot obviate the fact that, irrespective of what shenanigans the justices subscribe to, Menachem did come into the world in sovereign Israel. The boy isn’t confused: “I am an Israeli and I want people to know that I am glad that I am an Israeli.” Continue reading →

Mahmoud Abbas (right) to King Abdullah- We are one nation in two states

Abraham Lincoln once famously said that “no man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.”

Honest Abe of course never encountered Palestinian Authority figurehead Mahmoud Abbas, who’s certainly a hugely successful liar. Nonetheless, Abbas, like most liars, does find it exceedingly hard to keep track of all the whoppers that incessantly escape his lips.

The more he fibs, the harder it becomes to bear in mind at each and every moment what version of which pretense he had used on each occasion and with whom. Eventually, even a consummate liar like Abbas is sure to slip up.

That’s what happened to him during his recent stopover in Amman, on the way back from Doha where he married off his grandson in sumptuous style. But Abbas, alas, found himself in a bit of hot water as soon as his visit began.

The Hashemite Kingdom’s loyalists didn’t take kindly to reports that Jibril Rajoub – Abbas’s fellow Fatah honcho and chairman of the Palestinian Football Association – had failed to vote for Prince Ali Ibn al-Hussein to head FIFA.  Ali is King Abdullah’s own brother who, owing to the monarchy’s non-too-regulated nepotistic inclinations, is also president of the Jordan Football Association. Rajoub’s attempts to kick Israel out of soccer’s international federation didn’t mitigate the royal umbrage.

Seeking to sooth the offended Hashemites, Abbas assured them that “the relationship between Jordan and Palestine is the relationship of one nation living in two states.” Continue reading →