Guests and Blogs

What is not fit to print is printed. What is fit to print is not printed. These are two glaring examples of what passes for coverage of Israel in two major daily newspapers. One publishes a distorted article, the other ignores significant news. A Jewish weekly even discards news that is important to its ethnic readership.

"Their plans, I have come to believe, are more severe than conquering one country. Arab Muslims intend to impose Islam upon the entire world."

Mostafa Rajael, Sylvia Santana, and Najla el-Mangoush are certainly deserving of our praise and our prayers.

It seems Summer Lee is enthralled by the “woke” dictum that Israel and Israelis are irredeemably evil and to be ostracized by all “good” people. Thus, she refused to attend the talk given by Israel’s President Herzog.

After seven months on the job, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee set herself up for the winter of Summer, to borrow from “The summer of George” title of a Seinfeld segment. Earlier this month, she traded barbs with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which criticized her decision to boycott Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address before Congress.

Recently Princeton Assistant Professor Satyel Larson's included as required reading Jasbir Puar's book "The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability." MAIM is the operative word. Puar's premise is that every shot fired by every IDF soldier since May 1948 is solely aimed to maim Arabs and Palestinians notwithstanding that 28,400 Jews have have been murdered by the Arabs -- murdered being the terminology of Arab leader the Grand Mufti Amin al Husseini -- since May 1948.

It’s obvious that both Israelis and Palestinians need to be concerned about the condition of water that flows across the boundaries people have established. Yet reports from Israel and from Palestinian-administered areas have differed considerably.

“This is an affront to American democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system,” says America’s Mayor. Rudy Giuliani was not referring to charges that he conspired to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results.

The sentencing of Tree of Life synagogue killer Robert Bowers raises disturbing questions about antisemitism’s link to mental illness, the deterrence value of the death penalty and the value of hate-crime laws.

I share Bruce Ticker’s concern about the future of Israel as the home of the Jewish people – the place where no Jew who needed to go there would ever be turned away.

When the perpetrator of this act of racist and antisemitic violence was found guilty on all counts this past June, I felt a palpable sense of relief. Justice had been done and this evil human would be punished for his horrific crime. Upon hearing the news that he would be given the death penalty, however, I felt a sense of unease and trauma – similar to what I felt when I learned about his murderous act in the first place.

It is cruel irony that Israelis are preparing to move to Germany or Poland where their parents or grandparents survived Hitler.

I’m writing to provide some background for the situation in which Rep. Jamila Jayapal characterized Israel as a “racist state.” And to comment on media misrepresentation of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

We all know what brought this on. The resolution targeted Jayapal for labeling Israel a “racist state” when she addressed the liberal Netroots Nation in Chicago on the previous Saturday night. On Sunday, her fellow Democrats protested, prompting Jayapal to revise her original remarks.

In The Philadelphia Inquirer’s food section, a Palestinian chef opened up a whole new front…quite an unappetizing one…in the propaganda wars over Israel.

I thought BJN readers might be interested in the history surrounding the “refugee” situation that Richard Sherman discussed in his letter ("Letter: The Antisemitic Perversion of “Palestinian Refugee”", BJN 7/14/23).

Of 12 Palestinians killed in Israel’s in Jenin the other week, at least four were under 18, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, according to The New York Times. Terrorist groups claimed that at least five of those killed were fighters, including a 16-year-old boy. Israel said that all Palestinian fatalities were combatants.

For nearly two decades the mainstream media has written about "Palestinian refugees" to describe the millions of Arabs living in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The gunman’s six words, as alleged during his trial, were both dreadful and predictable: “All these Jews need to die.”

Almost immediately I shuddered when I switched on the television Wednesday night last week and learned that U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff was censured by the House of Representatives. I felt as if I was watching a replay of the trials of Alfred Dreyfus and Leo Frank.

Perhaps the saddest point about a CUNY law student using her invitation to address her fellow graduates (Column: New York Times Compounds Harm Of ‘Fiery Speech’ That Bashes Israel Boulder Jewish News June 22, 2023) was that many in the audience probably didn’t know enough about the history of the modern State of Israel to challenge the speaker, even if there had been an opportunity for them to do so.

If a reader can find the Times article, they must wade through one-third of the piece before getting a blurry idea of what the “fiery speech” is about and what “embers” are being fanned by whom.

Guess what an organization should do if a supervisor repeatedly humiliates and bullies a Jewish subordinate in the course of joking about Jews who were exterminated in Nazi death camps. Not in the Canadian army.

Notwithstanding the praise that some Jewish organizations have heaped on the Biden White House's recent plan to fight antisemitism ("U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism"), the facts -- for at least two reasons -- demonstrate that this plan is toothless. 

Pittsburgh’s Jewish community is currently forced to relive the murders of 11 members of three congregations who gathered to worship at Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, and  the experience is obviously most traumatic for surviving victims who testified at the alleged gunman’s trial.