Free Republic

The Six Day War Remembered A reflection on the "what-might-have-beens. " June 7, 2016 Joseph Puder    This May, Israel celebrated its 68th year of independent statehood. On June 5th, Israel commemorated the 49th anniversary of the Six Day War, in which it liberated the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old city, including the Western Wall.  The Etzion Bloc, Jewish property seized by Jordan’s Arab Legion and held for 19 years was also liberated.  The proverbial Israeli “David” of the pre-1967 years has been transformed by the international press and western academia into the post-1967 “Goliath.”  In the process, Israel...

Descendants of Israel Dov Frumkin, who purchased land near Old City of Jerusalem, celebrates campaign to redeem property. While the Jewish community in the neighborhood of Silwan (Shiloach) in eastern Jerusalem has elicited fierce criticism from the Israeli left and even the American government, descendants of the original owner of the “Kfar HaTeimanim” (Yemenite Village) area in Silwan celebrated the planned construction of an additional apartment building for the growing Jewish population. Yair Frumkin and his sister are direct descendants of Israel Dov Frumkin, who purchased the land the predominantly-Arab neighborhood of Silwan now sits back in 1882. The land...

In the past few weeks, there have been a series of stories by Jewish writers about ‎what happened to them when they seemingly unleashed the fury of right-wing anti-‎Semites online by writing something deemed unfriendly toward or critical of ‎Donald Trump, or in one case, his wife, Melania. The toxic response from the angry ‎internet/social media mob, now commonly described as part of the alt-right ‎‎(alternative right) movement, has seemed to confirm what writers on the Left have ‎believed for a long time: that while the Left may be critical of Israel, or its settlement ‎policy, or of Prime Minister...

It is up to centrist Democrats, who still represent a majority of the party, to resist this attempt, and to ensure that support for Israel remains a point of bipartisan consensus. For many years now support for Israel has been a rare point of bipartisan consensus in an increasingly polarized political climate. Bernie Sanders apparently seems determined to undermine that consensus. Sanders has demonstrated a consistent bias against the nation-state of the Jewish people and surrounded himself with foreign-policy “experts” who often describe Israel as an apartheid state, and have repeatedly accused the IDF of committing war crimes. Sanders has...

If you want to understand Sen. Bernie Sanders, this is what you need to know: He is the quintessential modern identity-free man. He is a non-Jewish Jew and a non-American American. In Sanders' speeches and interviews, there is virtually no mention of his being a Jew (unless he's asked about it), and -- what's truly amazing for an American presidential candidate -- there are few mentions of America, except to lament American inequality, Wall Street corruption and other American evils. The term "non-Jewish Jew" is not mine. It is generally attributed to a Jewish historian, Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an...

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders criticized the Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from foreign governments in an interview aired Sunday, calling it a conflict of interest. "Do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of State and a foundation run by her husband collects many, many dollars from foreign governments — governments which are dictatorships? "Yeah, I do have a problem with that. Yeah, I do," Sanders said on CNN's "State of the Union." When host Jake Tapper asked if he thought it was a conflict of interest, Sanders said, "I do." Sanders and Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton,...

I understand you may not love (or even like) Mrs. Clinton right now. Perhaps you can’t imagine knocking on doors for her in the cold or donating your hard-earned money to finance her campaign. I’m doing both of those things, but I realize that you may not want to. I felt the same way about Mr. Obama in 2008. In the end I didn’t work hard to get him elected (I really regret that now, by the way), but neither did I do or say anything that would harm his chances. I came to accept that he was, in fact,...

Shortly after The Associated Press updated its delegate count and declared Hillary Clinton the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a spokesman for Sen. Bernie Sanders slammed the media’s “rush to judgement.” “It is unfortunate that the media, in a rush to judgement, are ignoring the Democratic National Committee’s clear statement that it is wrong to count the votes of superdelegates before they actually vote at the convention this summer,” spokesman Michael Briggs said Monday night. “Secretary Clinton does not have and will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to secure the nomination. She will be dependent on superdelegates who...

Four central figures in the FBI’s criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices are all using the same lawyer, a move described as a “red flag” by a former U.S. attorney who now runs a government watchdog group. Lawyer Beth Wilkinson is representing: Clinton former chief of staff Cheryl Mills; policy adviser Jake Sullivan; media gatekeeper Philippe Reines; and former aide Heather Samuelson, who helped decide which Clinton emails were destroyed before turning over the remaining 30,000 records to the State Department. "I think it would be a real red flag," Matthew Whitaker, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability...

Sen. Bernie Sanders plans to take stock of his presidential campaign at his home in Burlington, Vt., following Tuesday’s primary here and in five other states. “Let’s assess where we are after tomorrow before we make statements based on speculation,” the Vermont senator said Monday at a news conference here, when asked whether he is willing to endorse rival Hillary Clinton in the coming weeks. “We’ll be in L.A. tomorrow night and we’ll be taking a plane back to Burlington,” he added, when asked for further specifics on his schedule.

On June 2, a few days before the California primary, Hillary Clinton gave up trying to compete with Bernie Sanders on domestic policy. Instead, she zeroed in on the soft target of Donald Trump’s most “bizarre rants” in order to present herself as experienced and reasonable. Evidently taking her Democratic Party nomination for granted, she is positioning herself as the perfect candidate for hawkish Republicans. Choosing to speak in San Diego, home base of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, on a platform draped with 19 American flags and preceded by half an hour of military marching music, Hillary Clinton was certain...

Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters were recently caught on camera beating each other up, mistaking each as Donald Trump supporters. In the video, which was uploaded to YouTube Friday, rowdy protesters are seen getting more violent with each other, thinking the others were Trump supporters. Towards the end of the one-minute video, the crowd begins to chant “Bernie! Bernie!” The fight broke out during the protest of the Trump rally at San Jose Thursday. The protesters attacked Trump supporters in other instances, pelting them with eggs, burning “Make America Great Again” hats and American flags. San Jose police widely condemned the...

Hi everybody. I'm Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall. Bernie Sanders has bewitched a new generation of voting students by promising them free health care and free college. So I'd like to address this brief video to you young people who are Bernie supporters and are in it for the free college. Can we just think this through for a minute? Please? Let's say Bernie Sanders gets elected, the Democrats run the table and now we have a socialist President and Congress and sure enough Bernie Sanders passes a bill that says that every American now gets free college....

US Senator Elizabeth Warren has been a liberal favourite since her election in 2012. An outspoken critic of big business and a proponent of more regulation on the banking industry, the Massachusetts Democrat earlier this month led an effort to stop the $1.1tn government funding bill because it included changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank law that imposed strict rules on Wall Street. Now Warren’s liberal supporters are touting her as a viable alternative to former Secretary of State and presumed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton for president in 2016. The left-liberal website MoveOn.org recently launched a campaign to draft Warren...

Hillary Clinton is on the cusp of clinching the Democratic presidential nomination, and could move closer as Puerto Rico's primary results are announced Sunday night. The former secretary of state is competing with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to win a majority of Puerto Rico's 60 delegates. Clinton began the day 60 delegates shy of the 2,383 she needs to win the Democratic nomination -- with 1,776 pledged delegates and another 547 superdelegates. Sanders, meanwhile, started Sunday with 1,547 delegates total: 1,501 pledged delegates and another 46 superdelegates. Clinton is closing in on a historic nomination as the first female presidential...

Anti-Semitic incidents in New England are up more than 100% this year, according to numbers released this week by the Anti-Defamation League. In 2015, an average of five such incidents occurred each month, while so far this year, there have been over 10 each month. The increase is “fueled by vandalism, harassment, and other acts at schools and colleges,” reports the Boston Globe. “Clearly, people are acting out on some long-held stereotypes and hatred toward Jews,” said Robert Trestan, director of the New England Regional Office of the ADL, “and it’s designed to send a message of intimidation. We’re increasingly...

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday gave a speech in San Diego in which she reiterated her support for Israel. “Israel’s security is non-negotiable. They are our closest ally in the region and we have a moral obligation to defend them,” she said. In the speech, the former Secretary of State also blasted her Republican rival Donald Trump and especially his foreign policy platform, which she described as "dangerously incoherent". "Donald Trump's ideas are not just different, they are dangerously incoherent," she said, according to Reuters. "They're not even really ideas, just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds...

Delivering an unexpectedly robust address to America's most powerful pro-Israel lobby, the US secretary of state sent a strong signal that the Obama administration would not back down in its two-week stand-off with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, ordered Benjamin Netanyahu to reverse a decision to build 1,600 homes for Israeli settlers Speaking as Mr Netanyahu arrived in Washington for high-level talks, Mrs Clinton cautioned that Israel's refusal to halt construction in the territories it occupied after the 1967 Six-Day was emboldening its enemies. She also hinted for the first time that...

Government has a right to regulate the Second Amendment, Hillary Clinton said in an interview on the June 5 airing of This Week With George Stephanopoulos, Clinton contended that Americans have historically recognized the government’s “right” to regulate the bearing of arms, suggesting that it was not until District of Columbia v Heller (2008) that anyone thought otherwise. Stephanopoulos asked, “Do you believe an individual’s right to bear arms is a constitutional right? That it’s not linked to the service in the militia?”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) accused President Obama and Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton of giving Palestinians a pass on anti-Semitism, incitement, and terrorism in a new statement. Israel has suffered a wave of Palestinian terrorism over the past week, fueled by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ calls for violence and unrest. “Reminiscent of the days when Yasser Arafat talked peace in English and jihad in Arabic,” Rubio writes, “Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — a man President Obama regularly hails as a peacemaker — is inciting the bloodshed. ‘Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem is holy blood as long as...