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This week a German doctor in Bavaria filed a criminal complaint against Rabbi David Goldberg. Rabbi Goldberg’s “crime”? He performs ritual circumcisions on Jewish male infants in accordance with Jewish law. The doctor’s complaint came shortly after a ruling by a court in Cologne outlawing the practice of male circumcision. The Austrians and the Swiss also took the ruling to heart and have banned infant male circumcision in several hospitals in Switzerland as well as in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg. Denmark and Scandinavian governments are also considering limiting the practice of circumcision which has constituted one of the foundational...

So it works out that Iran's vice president really hates Jews. In fact, he hates Jews so much that even The New York Times reported it. On Tuesday, the Times published an account of Iranian Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi's speech before a UN forum on fighting drug addiction in Tehran. Rahimi claimed that Jews control the illegal drug trade. We sell drugs, he said, in order to fulfill what he said is a Talmudic writ to "destroy everyone who opposes the Jews." He said that our conspiracy is obvious since, he claimed, there are no Jewish drug addicts. He went...

I went to the US Consulate this week to take care of certain family business. It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I think it is ironic that two days after my extremely unpleasant experience at the consulate, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland refused to say what the capital of Israel is. It was ironic because anyone who visits the consulate knows that the US's position on Jerusalem is in perfect alignment with that of Israel's worst enemies. Last time I went to the consulate was in 2007. At that time the building was located in the middle of an Arab...

This morning I received an e-mail alert from CAMERA that my alma mater, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government is hosting a two-day conference which essentially begins with the proposition that Israel has no right to exist. This isn't surprising. After all, the Kennedy School is home to my old professor Steve Walt. No one there batted a lash when he co-published his updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with University of Chicago's John Mearshimer. Not only did Walt suffer no recrimination from his colleagues at Harvard when he first emerged a professional Jew basher. He suffered...

Anti-Semitism may not yet be a litmus test for social acceptability in the US, but it has certainly become acceptable. Proof of this dismal state of affairs came this week with the publication of a supportive profile of University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer in The Atlantic monthly written by the magazine’s in-house foreign policy guru Robert Kaplan. Mearsheimer is the author, together with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government’s Prof. Stephen Walt, of the infamous 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Since the book’s publication, Mearsheimer has become one of the most high-profile anti-Semites in America.

For decades New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman balanced his substantively anti-Israel positions with repeated protestations of love for Israel. His balancing act ended last week when he employed traditional anti-Semitic slurs to dismiss the authenticity of substantive American support for Israel. Channeling the longstanding anti-Semitic charge that Jewish money buys support for power-hungry Jews best expressed in the forged 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in John Mearshimer's and Stephen Walt's 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, Friedman denied the significance of the US Congress's overwhelming support for Israel. As he put it,...

Last Friday, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, did something revolutionary. He told the truth about the Palestinians. In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich said that the Palestinians are an “invented” people, “who are in fact Arabs.” His statement about the Palestinians was entirely accurate. At the end of 1920, the “Palestinian people” was artificially carved out of the Arab population of “Greater Syria.” “Greater Syria” included present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. That is, the Palestinian people were invented 91 years ago. Moreover, as Gingrich noted,...

GIVEN EGYPT’S singular importance to US strategic interests in the Arab world, the Obama administration’s response to the calamitous election results has been shocking. Rather than sound the alarm bells, US President Barack Obama has celebrated the results as a victory for “democracy.” Rather than warn Egypt that it will face severe consequences if it completes its Islamist transformation, the Obama administration has turned its guns on the first country that will pay a price for Egypt’s Islamic revolution: Israel. Speaking at the annual policy conclave in Washington sponsored by the leftist Brookings Institute’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy,...

Something is happening in Iran. Forces are in motion. But what is happening? And who are the forces that are on the move? Since this week's bombing in Isfahan, the world media is rife with speculation that the war with Iran over its nuclear weapons program has begun. But if the war has begun, who is fighting it? What are their aims? And what are their methods and means of attack? Wednesday the Times of London published a much cited article about this week's blast in Isfahan. The article referred to the bombed installation as a "uranium enrichment facility." But...

“A la tarde de la vida te examinarán en el amor. At the end of your life, you will be judged on love.” St. John of the Cross “Love is the fundamental relation of God to the world. … In a chain of acts of love, man strives for the highest end.” St. Thomas Aquinas Both St. John of the Cross and St. Thomas Aquinas teach that each human being is created to love; that the perfection of man’s intellect, will, and emotions is in direct proportion to the deliberate direction of these powers by the human soul to the...

Caroline Glick, Editor of the Jerusalem Post and Fellow at the Center For Security Policy, published “Sarah Palin’s Friendship“asking American Jewish voters to take a second look at both Obama and Palin and their relative positions on Israel. Written on February 12, of 2010, Glick’s words have become even more powerful in light of the President’s attitude towards Israel. Glick also wrote a defense of Palin following the Shooting in Arizona On Saturday, former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin gave the keynote address at the Tea Party Movement convention in Nashville, Tennessee. As she did in...

There is something surreal about the coverage of developments this week at the UN. The general tenor is akin to the showdown at the O.K. Corral. Either the Palestinians win recognition of statehood, or they don't. If they do, they win. If they don't, Israel wins. The problem with this message is that even if the Palestinians don't receive UN membership they still win. There is no scenario in which Israel wins at the UN. The reason is simple. The UN is profoundly hostile to Israel. It has a large, permanent, automatic majority of members that always supports harming Israel....

The Saudis effectively ended their strategic alliance with the US in the aftermath of the US-supported overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Since then the Saudis have strengthened their ties to China and Russia and from what I understand have refused to sign any new oil contracts with the Americans. Now in this op-ed in the New York Times, the Saudis are hitching a ride on the Palestinian UN bid to justify their previous abandonment of America. Saudi Prince Turki Al-FaisalAs my readers are well aware, I think that the US's abandonment of Mubarak was one of the greatest strategic errors the...

Ten years ago, in the shadow of the crater at Ground Zero, the smoldering Pentagon and a field of honor in Pennsylvania, America found itself at war. Today, a decade on, America is still at war. Ten years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, the time has come to assess the progress of America's war. But in order to assess its progress, we must first understand the war. What war has the US been fighting since Sept. 11?

The Palestinians' decision to place the issue of the establishment of a Palestinian state before the United Nations for a vote next month repudiates the principles of the 1993 Oslo peace framework, through which the Palestinian Authority was formed out of the PLO. The Oslo framework dictated that the final status of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem would be determined through direct negotiations between the PLO and Israel. While brazen, the Palestinians' UN gambit is not the first time that Israel has been confronted with unequivocal proof that the Palestinians have been operating in bad faith. ........ Recently, several leading...

In the wake of Anders Breivik's massacre of his fellow Norwegians, I was amazed at the speed with which the leftist media throughout the US and Europe used his crime as a means of criminalizing their ideological opponents on the Right. Just hours after Breivik's identity was reported, leftist media outlets and blogs were filled with attempts to blame Breivik's crime on conservative public intellectuals whose ideas he cited in a 1,500 page online manifesto. My revulsion at this bald attempt to use Breivik's crime to attack freedom of speech propelled me to write my July 29 column, "Breivik and...

Saying that Israel faces daunting challenges today and that those challenges will multiply and grow in the near future should not be construed as a partisan or ideological statement. Rather, it is a statement of fact. It is also a fact that the greatest dangers facing Israel stem from US President Barack Obama's rapid withdrawal of the US from its position as the predominant power in the Middle East on the one hand, and from Iran's rise as a nuclear power and regional power on the other. These power shifts along with the Muslim Brotherhood's rising power in Egypt; Turkey's...

Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is in Europe this week seeking to convince the Spanish and Norwegian governments to support the Palestinian bid to sidestep negotiations with Israel and have the UN General Assembly recognize Palestinian sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in addition to Gaza. The Palestinians know that without US support, their initiative will fail to gain Security Council support and therefore have no legal weight. But they believe that if they push hard enough, Israel's control over these areas will eventually unravel and they will gain control over them without ever accepting Israel's right to exist. Fatah's UN...

Posted by Caroline Glick Jun 18th 2011 at 11:00 am in Iran, Israel, Middle East | Comments (46) Every day, major stories come out of the Middle East. And behind each of these stories are major developments that deserve of our attention and, more often than not, our intense concern. Just this week, major stories have come out of Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen and Pakistan that are all deeply disconcerting. In Syria, dictator Bashar Assad’s violent repression of the popular revolt against his tyrannical, minority regime has exposed the Syrian leader as a vicious murderer. While...

As the Washington Post pointed out on Friday, US President Barack Obama purposely provoked the current fight with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He knew full well that Netanyahu does not back the Palestinian formulation that negotiations with Israel must be based on the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, or what are wrongly referred to as the 1967 lines. In the days leading up to Obama's speech last Thursday, Israel registered explicit, repeated requests that he not adopt the Palestinian position that negotiations should be based on those lines. And so it was a stinging rebuke when Obama declared Thursday: "The...