One day last week this newspaper’s banner headline wasn’t about pressing news. Prompted by George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points, it informed us that the former US president “rejects claim that Israel was behind Iraq war.”

Cause for celebration? Are we vindicated at last?

It’s not that we didn’t know that Israel’s security was hardly uppermost on Bush’s scale of priorities. It’s not that we ever suspected him of going to war for us. Still, it’s nice, perhaps for the sake of keeping the formal record straight, to have Bush’s denial of yet another anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. Continue reading →

Even Barack Obama’s midterm electoral humiliation won’t redeem US foreign policy. The problem didn’t begin with the history-deficient mind-set of American students who’ll earn their bachelor’s degrees in 2014. But the intellectual rootlessness of the class of 2014 exacerbates the flaws. Today’s students/tomorrow’s leaders fertilize the soil into which bad seeds are sown by the current Washington elite.

On the simplistic level it was a hoot to read that to the class of 2014 Beethoven is a movie pooch, Michelangelo was a computer virus and Czechoslovakia never existed. For the past 13 years Beloit College’s Mind-Set List by Tom McBride and Ron Nief was a guaranteed source of hilarity, because each year the ignorance quotient it registers seems to climb to unprecedented, more grotesque and inconceivable heights. Continue reading →

Quite incredibly, representatives of Western democracies on UNESCO’s executive delivered a self-destructive blow to their own heritage when demanding that Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron be removed from the inventory of Jewish heritage sites. UNESCO’s resolution redefined them as mosques – as if Muslim from time immemorial. It sought to detach seminal biblical place-names from any Jewish connections.

It’s one thing to willfully subscribe to mind-blowing colossal deception; it’s quite another to shake the foundations beneath one’s own civilization. Continue reading →

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 →

More and more luminaries from out in left field don’t hate Binyamin Netanyahu fully as much as they did just a while back. By a near miraculous transformation he no longer appears quite as grotesque an ogre.

His dovish utterances on the launching of another peace gabfest seem to have earned Netanyahu grudging, if conditional, tolerance from confirmed political maligners.

It’s beginning to look familiar. It’s beginning to call to mind the abeyance of the Left’s unfathomable animus for Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu is probably incapable of Sharon’s outright overnight betrayal. But the Left detects potential in Netanyahu to repeat the irresolution he evinced erratically throughout his first term, most particularly during the Wye summit.

Diehard leftists indeed looked faintly more tolerant of Netanyahu post-Wye, only to ditch him despite enticing promises for a parliamentary “security net.” Continue reading →

By happenstance, just when Muammar Gaddafi staged his recent Muslim-supremacy spectacle (significantly) in Rome, Israeli actors refused to stage anything in well-within-national-consensus Ariel. On the face of it these events were unrelated.

Neither did the resounding refusal from Ramallah to even vaguely recognize Israel as a legitimate Jewish state seem linked to the in-house boycotts promulgated by those showbiz poseurs and their literati cheerleaders.

The Gaddafi extravaganza was all but overlooked by our media as a no-account eccentricity. The Ramallah reiteration of immutable nay-saying was mentioned in passing as an almost acceptable, incontestable fact of life. The out-of-left-field onslaught on Ariel, however, was ballyhooed by leftist scribblers and talking heads as heralding the moral imperative of further shrinking (anyhow precariously tiny) Israel.

Those who ignore or downplay the news from Rome and Ramallah, yet amplify the anti-Ariel offensive, obscure the fundamental connection. The aforementioned are all jigsaw pieces in the same puzzle. The removal of any piece leaves a gaping void which renders the picture meaningless. Separating and isolating constituent elements distorts the context. The upshot is that, systematically blinkered, we’re left defenseless. Continue reading →