Few of my past columns have elicited as much hate-mail as a recent Tack on perfidious Swiss neutrality. Several messages, oozing with particular vitriol, were signed by Arab names. The authors of others purported to be Swiss. Though in cyberspace nothing should be taken at face value, some of what supposedly originated on the Alpine moral high ground did have that ring of authenticity – like the one which affirmed the precedence of Swiss interests over “some goddamned foreigners,” i.e. Jews. “No wonder we Swiss don’t like your people,” the writer summed up. Continue reading →

At the very last moment, PA figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) got cold feet. Fearing flak, he canceled the awards ceremony in which the PLO’s highest medal of heroism was to be conferred on five women – all convicted terrorists behind Israeli bars. Continue reading →

Jimmy Carter’s peace-partner Khaled Mashaal wasn’t joking. Hamas’s Damascus-based kingpin may have been deliberately thumbing his nose at us – or try ing to rub our nose in it – but there was no hint of levity in his recent interview with Sky News. Reporter Tim Marshall asked Mashaal why Hamas fires rockets at Israeli kindergartens. To this Mashaal responded with deadpan ostensible earnestness: “We didn’t attack a kindergarten. We have primitive weapons. I ask the international community and the Americans to give us more advanced weapons so we can shoot more accurately.” Continue reading →

There are two types of inveterate peaceniks, like there are two types of incurable smokers. The first variety adamantly refuses to consider conclusive evidence about the detrimental effects of tar and nicotine. Exhaling vaporous clouds from their nostrils, type-one sorts attest to the virtues of their harmful habit. Not only do they continue to light up, but they preach to the rest of us to consume more packs. The more we smoke, the more we’ll deserve being counted among the beautiful people – by their own say-so – stronger and saner than all others. Continue reading →

Rare is the temptation to turn over any of one’s finite column space to another’s op-ed ruminations. But Gilad Sharon’s recent Yediot Aharonot piece – “It’s all about hatred” – is one such irresistible exception.

Every sentence by Ariel Sharon’s younger son deserves to be chiseled in stone. Gilad’s straightforward truths should be resonated at home and abroad – often, loud and unequivocally. His words ought to be uttered morning and night by our current premier – the elder Sharon’s one-time lackey deputy – and by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who got where she did by deftly sucking up to Gilad’s father and hitching an opportunistic ride on his coattails. Continue reading →

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and her urbane entourage are reportedly stunned by neutral Switzerland’s hardly neutral multi-billion-dollar gas deal with Iran. No sooner had new Swiss ambassador Walter Haffner presented his credentials here last week than he faced a dressing-down by the ministerial Western European Desk chief. Continue reading →

Last week ex-con Tali Fahima – found guilty in 2005 of aiding and abetting the enemy – made headlines yet again. Fahima – who by her own admission volunteered to serve as a human shield for Zakariya Zubeidi, chief of Jenin’s al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades – paid a condolence visit to the family of the jihadist who cold-bloodedly massacred eight young students at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva. She blamed Israel for his demise during the commission of indiscriminate slaughter. Continue reading →

You can safely bet your bottom shekel that Binyamin (“Fuad”) Ben-Eliezer’s command of Yiddish is just about as extensive as his command of Latin. You can further take for granted the probability that he has no inkling about how “cogito ergo sum” originated, what “kibitz” means, how they are connected and why he himself is the link which annoyingly binds all the above together. Continue reading →

What a tearjerker! What heartbreak! So much orchestrated media compassion for poor Omri on his entry into durance vile. Such orchestrated media angst about the new inmate’s quality of life behind bars. Such orchestrated media lamentations about the excessiveness of the sentence. Such orchestrated media downplay of the crime. Such orchestrated media insinuation about the blamelessness of this pitiable convict ex-Knesset member, former political master-manipulator and one-time “director-general of the state,” who accrued clout solely via the luck of lineage. Continue reading →

When Golda Meir sought to underscore the bogus nature of Palestinian claims, she’d bring up the resurgent Galilean nation. No, this isn’t an editing error.

Golda tried to make the point that to wrest territory from the minuscule Jewish presence contiguous to the Mideast’s vast Arab realm, Arabs contrive national entities and demand land on their behalf in the hallowed name of self-determination. It worked when their British Mandatory patrons usurped nearly 80 percent of original Palestine to hand over to London’s Arabian Peninsula lackey, Emir Abdullah. Thus was born the never-previously-heard-of Transjordanian nation (later renamed Jordanian, but still every bit as artificial). Continue reading →