By Yaakov Menken, on October 29th, 2009 The discussion which led to this post began, of all places, on Twitter. Shai Gluskin, a Reconstructionist Rabbi whom I’d met on a train four years ago, was monitoring the J-Street Conference this week, as I was. I posted several comments about J Street and it’s formula for peace, he noticed and followed me (that’s a Twitter term), and we got into a discussion about what it means to be pro-Israel, what it means to be Pro-Peace, and, in Shai’s words, the “terms of engagement for Jews who disagree.”
Someone wrote to the Twitter account of the Republican Jewish Coalition that “Making pro-Israel advocacy a partisan issue weakens the pro-Israel lobby and weakens Israel.” I believe this individual felt that the Republican Jewish Coalition should not have commented on the fact that someone was at the J Street conference recruiting for a “freedom march” in Gaza. I responded, opining that it “Can’t be worse for ‘Pro-Israel’ than defining expansion of a Hamas terrorist base as ‘Pro-Israel’.”
Shai Gluskin: “Where did you get the idea that J Street wants ‘expansion of a Hamas terrorist base?’”
YM, in a six part series: There’s this place called Gaza, which Israel … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on January 9th, 2009 When one lacks any semblance of moral justification for one’s belligerence and lust to murder innocents, there is only benefit in having as many dead civilians as possible of one’s own to display in lieu of logic. … Read More >>
By Avi Shafran, on January 1st, 2009 No, I’m neither a prophet nor a covert Israeli operative. Yes, it was only a day after I distributed a column taking the New York Times to task for refusing to call Hamas a terrorist organization that Israel launched its offensive against Hamas in Gaza. But, really, I had no foreknowledge of the fact that Israel’s leaders would do anything more in response to the shelling of its towns by Hamas and its friends than offer the sort of statements that have been issued for years after such terrorist onslaughts.
But they did do more, in the hope – may we merit its fulfillment – of crippling the infrastructure of the murderous entity to its south. And, true to form, The Times avoided the “T” word, going only so far as to identify Hamas on first mention as a group “which Israel and the United States brand as a terrorist organization.” According to informed sources, Israel and the United States have also branded the sun hot and the Pope Catholic.
Similarly true to form was Hamas itself, whose spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, according to the very aforementioned newspaper, “called for revenge in the form of strikes reaching ‘deep … Read More >>
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