Former Israeli Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren is a native of West Orange, New Jersey best exemplifies the special relations between the two allies, Israel and the US. With the publication of his memoir, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (2015), he has another best seller. Previous ones were Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2003) and Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (2007). Having read Ally, I concur with praise from two pundits: Bret Stephens, the Tuesday Wall Street Journal columnist of note, and Vic Rosenthal , a former resident of Fresno , California, now a Jerusalem resident whose Abu Yehuda blog posts are a must read about an American living in Israel.
Some Arab Knesset (parliament) members have devoted much of their time and efforts to helping the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — who have their own leaders, spokesmen, representatives — at the expense of their own constituents in Israel.
How does joining a flotilla to the Gaza Strip solve any problems facing Arab Israelis, such as unemployment and poverty? It is also a betrayal of the Arab voters who sent them to the Knesset to fight for more public funds and services for the Arabs in Israel.
Would the two Knesset members be willing to risk their lives for the people who voted for them? It was hard to find Arab Israelis who saw anything positive in Ghattas’s decision to sail aboard a ship to the Gaza Strip. In fact, many did not hesitate privately to criticize the decision.
It is time for Arab Israelis to endorse a new approach toward their state, and distance themselves from representatives who act against their interests and damage relations between Jews and Arabs.
If some Knesset members wish to devote their time and energy to helping the Palestinians, they should consider moving to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Otherwise, they need to start addressing the problems facing their constituents and refrain from causing further damage to Arab-Jewish relations.
Once again, it is time to remind the representatives of the Arab citizens of Israel in the Knesset (parliament) who their real constituents are.
The politically convenient illusion that a coherent United States of Europe might be nudged into being paved the way for the financially convenient delusion that a single currency would see the Euro Zone stable, secure and surging ahead. The turmoil in Greece puts pay to that notion
Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Commission, may be widely referred to as “the master of lies”, but when he spoke to a group of students in Belgium in early May he was not at his best. The Eurozone, he claimed, was an “area of solidarity and prosperity”. There are no reports of laughter but in Hades Tacitus could be heard repeating that old jibe of his, “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”: They make a desert and call it peace.
A desert it is, at least in the currency union’s south. About the only abundance is in miserable statistics. To take just a few, Greece’s GDP fell by roughly a quarter between 2008 and 2014. In Spain, youth unemployment stood at slightly under 50 per cent this March, some 10 per cent worse than in Italy, a country with an economy that has barely grown since the turn of the century. There has been a wave of emigration from Europe’s south in which the best and the brightest are over-represented. Talk of a lost generation is not hyperbole.
Without a sense of exceptionalism, a country of chosen people cannot prosper
Biblical Israel was America’s inspiration. Its successor, the State of Israel, yet may be America’s salvation, though usually the issue is put the other way around. America’s founders, to be sure, saw in their “new nation, conceived in liberty” a new Israel, and Lincoln dubbed Americans an “almost chosen people.” We long since put the notion of national election on the back shelf along with other memorabilia of the Revolution and Civil War. But Israel’s founding and fight for survival strike a chord in our national character that reminds of us what we were and still should be.
The notion of “national election,” to be sure, has scant purchase in a world where every identity group claims the right to the equality of its own narrative. It evokes Europe’s wars of national aggrandizement, foreign wars to make the world safe for democracy, and the marginalization of minorities. The notion that one nation’s narrative might trump another’s offends the leveling Zeitgeist: Identity politics excludes the distinction between good and evil, for every narrative is valid in its own terms. That was the nub of President Barack Obama’s oft-quoted 2009 remark, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”
Former Green Party and independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader told the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) to start using the word “anti-Semitism,” arguing that Jews “do not own” the phrase.
“You never avoid using the word anti-Semitism when Arabs and Arab-Americans are discriminated against, are arrested without charges, are exposed to all kinds of swears and bars against employment and all kinds of discrimination that goes on, and that is anti-Semitism. The Semitic race is Arabs and Jews and the Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism,” he said at a citizen empowerment session at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s national convention.
While the Iran nuclear talks drag on in Vienna past the third missed deadline, spare a thought for the luxurious surroundings in which these talks are taking place.
The venue, where Iran’s chief negotiator Javad Zarif and sundry other negotiators have been bunking down during these talks, is the Palais Coburg, formerly a palace, now an ornate hotel, rich in beautifully restored old stonework, polished wood, plush furnishings, crystal chandeliers, golden bathroom fixtures, gourmet restaurants, and three tiers of magnificent front terraces. Here’s a view of the Palais [1], and here’s a rundown on the rooms and suites [2], which go for anywhere from about $660 to almost $3,000 per night. The Coburg Suite, at the high end of this scale, is a 1,299 square foot duplex, decorated in the Empire style, with kitchenette, terrace, jacuzzi, sauna, plump pillows and fresh flowers.
This week the Colorado Supreme Court dusted off a relic from the state’s anti-Catholic past to strike down a school voucher program. The charming result of this less-than-charitable secularism will be to deny poor children their right to a good education.
Taxpayers for Public Education v. Douglas County challenged the Choice Scholarship Program in the state’s third largest county. Since 2011 the program has offered voucher grants to help students defray the cost of tuition at some 23 private schools that they otherwise could not afford.
The Colorado Supreme Court held 4-3 that because 16 of these schools are “religious in character,” the program violates a section of the state constitution that states no taxpayer funds can be used to “support or sustain” any institution controlled by a “sectarian denomination.” Amid the nativist wave of the 1870s and 1880s, 39 states came to adopt these so-called Blaine Amendments that were meant to target immigrants, religious minorities and Catholic parochial schools.
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By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”John 13:35
As Christians continue to be displaced, tormented, tortured, and killed throughout the Middle East, especially in regions controlled by radical Islamists under the influence of ISIS, Al Qaeda franchisees, and fundamentalists bent on religious purification and/or global Caliphate, it is tempting (and right) to summarily denounce the lack of concern by the West in general, and the current Administration specifically for inaction, and ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Christians from their legitimate homes throughout the Gulf region, as well as Africa, and parts of Asia. Our anger, frustration, sorrow and concern can be magnified recognizing the destruction of historically important churches, and disruption of Christian communities is based upon the crime of prayer and faith, and is largely unprovoked, unless one considers worshipping by conscience in a tradition different from the majority as provocative.
Puerto Rico is a failed welfare state that needs a Detroit-like overhaul.
The Obama Administration is delighted to tell everyone that Greece isn’t America’s problem, but hold the schadenfreude. The U.S. has its own version of Greece in Puerto Rico, and the meltdown could be nearly as ugly when it arrives.
Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla this week admitted the open secret that the territory’s $72 billion debt “is not payable.” Europeans will notice the Greek-like reasons: excessive borrowing, anti-growth policies, human and capital flight, and the refusal of local politicians to address the failure of entitlement state politics. Oh, and don’t forget the policy damage from Washington.
CIA Director John Brennan says America’s top spies are not diverse enough, and he’s doing something about it.
The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.”
What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.”
Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness.
The CIA director commissioned the study last year, convening a panel of experts to perform a comprehensive assessment of diversity in the agency’s workforce. The study is partly based on the results of an “Agency-wide instrument”—in non-spy-speak, “instrument” means questionnaire—developed in conjunction with research psychologists attached to the CIA’s Office of Medical Services. It also draws on hundreds of formal and informal interviews and 28 focus groups, including not only spies based at headquarters in Langley, Va., but also agents working incognito in a dozen undisclosed locations out in the cold.
