Free Republic

Turns out there are real questions about the accuracy of that recent Quinnipiac poll showing President Obama’s approval rating at just 52 percent among Jewish voters. As the JTA’s Eric Fingerhut pointed out, the Jewish sampling “was derived from a sample of just 71 respondents, for a margin of error of plus or minus 11.6 percent — a sample size that pollsters generally say makes such surveys unreliable.” Actually, common sense and some knowledge of Jewish voting habits should be enough to render any such poll findings suspect at best. Obama enjoys two important advantages that make him almost a...

With the history of twentieth-century science and technology largely a saga of Jewish accomplishment, in retrospect it might seem foreordained that after World War II the rising Jewish nation in the Middle East would emerge not only as a financial power but also as a scientific and technological leader. Yet surprisingly, for all the talk of deserts in bloom, the predictable miracle did not occur. Forty-some years on, Israel by 1990 was still mostly barren of technology and finance. Apart from military breakthroughs, the scores of thousands of brilliant Jews assembled in Israel generated few significant companies or technologies, no...

When I marked the recent anniversary of Peter Jennings's passing with a column about an embarrassing incident in the ABC newsman's career, a couple of readers chastised your gentle correspondent for speaking ill of the dead. So when Edward Kennedy died not long after, I decided to err on the side of decency and keep mum for an appropriate interval. OK, interval's up. The whitewashing and lionizing of Ted Kennedy was nauseating - though hardly unexpected from a media establishment that for decades has been in such embarrassing thrall to the Kennedys. Back in 2003, Kennedy - whose behavior during...

Submitted for your amusement, a tale of two columnists, as different as it is humanly possible to be in their view of the Middle East. First, four quotes from the columnist who is second to none in his support for Israel: 1) “Yes, I love the state of Israel. It is everything a Western democracy should be at this point in history: brave, resourceful, tough, realistic, in search of peace but ready for war. It is a King Arthur of nations which is showing the rest of us how a brave and free people ought to live.…” 2) “I have...

Recent congressional hearings about the destruction, by Israel’s air force, of a Syrian-North Korean nuclear facility has shed light on the mutually beneficial nature of U.S.-Israel relations. The September 2007 Israeli military operation in Syria dealt a setback to the Syria/North Korea/Iran/Hizbullah axis while advancing American and Israeli interests. It bolstered U.S. deterrence, extended America’s strategic arm and provided Washington with vital information concerning Russian air defense systems, which are also employed by Iran. And it served to refute the claim that U.S.-Israel relations have been shaped by political expediency. Former secretary of state and NATO supreme commander Gen. (ret.)...

Ze’ev Raz was the leader of the IDF attack force that bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in June 1981. Today he works at Elta Systems LTD, one of Israel’s leading defense electronics companies and a subdivision of Israel Aerospace Industries. The Jewish Press met recently with the former IAF pilot to get his thoughts on the Israeli bombing in September of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria; on Israel’s options in dealing with what Israeli leaders still consider a very real Iranian nuclear threat; and on what went through his mind as he carried out one of the most daring...

The respected left-wing journalist Aluf Benn recently reported in Haaretz that “When Condoleezza Rice talks about the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, she sees in her mind’s eye the struggle of African Americans for equal rights, which culminated in the period of her Alabama childhood.” Though Benn never cited any source for his description of Rice’s deep personal identification with the Palestinian national cause, he has interviewed Secretary Rice before and obviously felt his source was good enough for print. He went on to “guess” that Rice’s feelings were based on the similarity between the separation fence...

* Michael Beschloss, the historian whose new book, "Presidential Courage," played such a prominent role in the Monitor’s last offering, apparently has become a victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome, so dubbed by columnist Charles Krauthammer in 2003 as he sought to give a name to “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency – nay, the very existence – of George W. Bush.” In the Aug. 5 New York Times Book Review, Beschloss was asked by the Review’s editors “how George W. Bush fits his idea of presidential courage.” Here was the...

Phyllis Chesler, a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn who in the 1960’s and 70’s gained fame both as a prominent voice of the feminist movement and an internationally renowned left-wing ideologue, broke ranks with the Left several years ago. The unwillingness of leftists to make unequivocal distinctions between Western democracy and jihadist imperialism; the refusal of feminists to condemn the hideous treatment of women in Third World and Muslim nations; and the appalling hatred of Israel that had come to infect vast precincts of the academic and activist Left – all these played a role in Dr. Chesler’s ideological shift....

By Rabbi Ari Sytner I had never seen so many fire trucks in one place. It was Erev Shabbos the eve of the Sabbath, but this Friday was unlike like any other. Instead of running around town in preparation for Shabbos, I stopped my normal routine and found myself standing solemnly with the crowd of onlookers lining the sidewalks of Charleston, South Carolina. We watched silently as several hundred fire trucks from cities and counties across the country passed before us. This somber procession would escort the nine heroic fallen Charleston firefighters who earlier that week had died in the...

Rudy's The One By Daniel Greenfield Instead of beginning with hosannas for Rudy Giuliani, as is usually done when one writes favorably of a candidate for public office, I’m going to begin with his faults. Giuliani is authoritarian. He can be a bully. He has a low tolerance level for dissent and criticism. He doesn’t listen to people so much as tell them what to think. The upside to those qualities is that he makes up his mind on what the right course is and pursues it regardless of opposition. He is not a figure of democratic virtues – rather,...

I have lived in Israel for many years, and I would be delighted to take you on a little virtual tour of our country. Let me first give you a couple of minor points. Israel occupies 0.1% of the landmass of the Middle East and it is the only Jewish state, not only in this region, but in the world, and surrounded by 22 Arab states. Let us begin your virtual tour. You have already been through immigration at Tel Aviv Airport with your boyfriend, whom we shall call Ken. You will have filled out a visitors form. This form...

Jews and the Cold War By Jason Maoz The Jewish Press For obvious reasons, the disproportionate number of Jews who were either members of the old American Communist Party or otherwise active in left-wing politics during the Cold War has always been a sensitive issue for the Jewish community. Even now, with the Soviet Union dead and buried and Marxism thoroughly discredited just about everywhere outside of liberal-arts departments of elite (and not-so-elite) universities, the subject still tends to make people uneasy, if not defensive and hostile. It is, however, a subject that will not go away anytime soon; if...

Jimmy Carter’s Jewish Problem By Jason Maoz For those with eyes to see, there were hints as far back as the 1976 presidential campaign of the trouble to come. Early that year, Harper’s magazine published “Jimmy Carter’s Pathetic Lies,” a devastating exposé of Carter’s record in Georgia by a then little-known journalist named Steven Brill. Reg Murphy, who as editor of the Atlanta Constitution had kept a close eye on Carter’s rise in state politics, declared, “Jimmy Carter is one of the three or four phoniest men I ever met.” Speechwriter Bob Shrum quit the Carter campaign after just a...

Ann Coulter is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including the current Godless: The Church of Liberalism. Coulter, who writes a popular and controversial syndicated column, is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including Hannity and Colmes, Wolf Blitzer Reports, Scarborough Country, The O'Reilly Factor. Coulter consistently raises the ire of liberals, most recently when she castigated several 9/11 widows for using their status to score political points against the Bush administration. America knows Ann Coulter's views on liberals and liberalism in America, but little is known about her views on Israel. Ms. Coulter addressed that and...

Jewish Press Exclusive McCain: 'Proudly Pro-Israel' Says Haaretz Article Left 'Serious Misimpressions' By Jason Maoz Senior Editor In statements to The Jewish Press this week, Arizona Senator John McCain reacted sharply to an article earlier this month in the Israeli daily Haaretz that he said left "several serious misimpressions" regarding his views on Israel and the Middle East. As reported in the Media Monitor column in last week’s Jewish Press, the May 1 Haaretz article portrayed McCain, the early front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, as someone who, if elected president, would "micromanage" a more even-handed Mideast policy than...

The Times’s Strange Potshot By Jason Maoz It’s not exactly news that The New York Times editorial page detested Ronald Reagan. But who would have thought that seventeen years after the end of his presidency and nearly two years after his death the Times would still seek to denigrate Reagan’s legacy, on its news pages, in a manner that can only be described as petty and inappropriate? Of course, no one ever expected the Times’s liberal editorialists to endorse Reagan for president in 1980 and 1984. The last Republican presidential candidate endorsed by the Times had been Dwight Eisenhower in...

The Return Of Al Gore? By Jason Maoz It was a far-fetched scenario as recently as a year ago, but Al Gore is quietly making something of a political comeback. Moderate Democrats who despair that the early frontrunner for their party’s 2008 presidential nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is likely unelectable, can’t help remembering that Gore won half a million more votes than George W. Bush in 2000. Meanwhile, the party’s base voters, appreciably more to the left than the country at large and angry at what they perceive to be Clinton’s drift to the center, are looking for someone...

Obsessed With Jews By Jason Maoz He’s the columnist who complained that "Hitler died in 1945, but anti-Hitler hysteria is still going strong"; cautioned against "the excessive moral prestige Jews have in the media and the public square"; whined about "Jews deciding the standards, setting the criteria of humanity"; and observed, in chilling if artful prose, that because Jews "set themselves up as the arbiter, there is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a certain ‘kill the umpire’ impulse." He’s the writer who decried, in a column following the release of "Schindler’s List," what he called "all this Holocaust-harping" and characterized...

All The News That’s Fit For Pinch By Jason Maoz Yes, another piece on The New York Times – and those who don’t understand why the Times warrants constant scrutiny probably have no business reading a media column in the first place. Two years after the cartoonishly left-wing Howell Raines was removed from the executive editor’s office, the Times shows no signs of reverting to even a semblance of balance in its news coverage. In fact, the Times’s liberal bias has never been more pronounced, its editorial enthusiasms – particularly its obsessions with race and gender – blatant in virtually...