Free Republic

In the biblical saga of the exodus from Egypt, there is a great military mystery. We are told that when the Israelites left Goshen in Egypt, they had 600,000 men of fighting age in their ranks, and – at least according to one reading of the text – they were well armed (hamushim). That being the case, why did they behave in such a cowardly manner, shuddering as Pharaoh's army approached? True, comments the great sage Ibn Ezra, the Egyptians had 600 chariots, but what are those when up against 600,000 fighting men? The medieval French rabbi Chezkuni makes the...

The Israeli First Amendment holds that Jewish traitors and Arab terrorists may call for the destruction of Israel, may cheer terrorists and suicide bombers, and may endorse anti-Semitism - all as protected speech. But making any statement about the Oslo process with which Yossi Beilin would not agree will get you arrested as an inciter; and going to a protest against Olmert's war against settlers will get you beaten to a pulp by the police and hospitalized. This week, the Israeli First Amendment reached unprecedented heights of Orwellianism. First, Azmi Bishara was cleared. Bishara runs one of those pro-terror, Arab...

Perhaps the best indication of the extent to which the world has been Orwellized is the toady news coverage of the Palestinian "election", including in the Israeli media, itself largely the occupied territory of the far-left. For months, the media were all in suspense over whether the victors in the "election" would be the Hamas terrorists or the PLO terrorists. As it turned out, Hamas evidently won the "election" by a huge majority. The first part of the absurdity in the message daily inculcated by the Israeli political elite is that there is any significant difference between the PLO and...

Sharon Renews the RRH Doctrine by Steven Plaut Oct 02, '05 / 28 Elul 5765 I've long suspected that it is the Israeli grand strategy to defeat the Palestinians by forcing them to laugh themselves to death. That seems to be the only possible way to understand the latest resuscitation of the RRH Doctrine, which has dominated Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and the Arab states since the early 1990s. The RRH Doctrine was invented in the early days of Oslo and stands for Really, Really Hard. Israeli governments would make deals to hand over most of the West Bank...

Middle East ceasefires are always unilateral ceasefires, whereby the Jews stop shooting back. They usually morph into one of those "controlled carnage" agreements that Israeli politicians so love, whereby the Arabs continue to murder Jews, and as long as the rate of murder is "reasonable", the Jews do not retaliate. Such deals obtained in the past in Lebanon and with the PLO. And now, Ariel Sharon's ceasefire has been revealed to be just another in this series, as the massacre Friday night outside a Tel Aviv nightclub showed. The one-sided violence is no surprise. And it is being accompanied by...

This week is Memorial Day in Israel and right after it is Independence Day. I have believed for years that the best way to commemorate these days is by turning them into a battle against the loss of perspective. Memorial Day is the more troubling of the two days. The problem is that Israelis have lost their sense of Jewish perspective to such an extreme extent, and this becomes glaringly evident on Memorial Day. Israelis are incapable of viewing their problems and that of the state within the perspective of Jewish history. In large part , this is because of...

Almost everything that most people "know" about Tu B'Shvat is totally wrong and completely false. Tu B'Shvat, the 15th day of the month of Shvat in the Jewish calendar, has been deconstructed in recent years and converted into a holiday of ecology and environmentalist political agitprop. It is waved about by the Tikkun Olam Pagans as a political banner to demand that all Jews support the Green political agenda. The wacko pagan "Eco-Judaism" movement, including its Tikkun dervishes, has made it their holiest of all holidays, a day to hug bushes and worship tree spirits and nature. And Jewish assimilationist...

As you know, I recently published an article entitled "I Am Ashamed to Be an Israeli". The article seems to have had a very wide exposure and I have received many responses. Among those I received were a series of email letters from someone associated with the wacko Neturei Karta movement, and - if I am not mistaken - he is actually the guy who runs their anti-Israel websites. He and I have carried on a correspondence of sorts all week. Below I have collected the essence of the notes I sent him and compiled them into this "Open Letter"....

Ah, the Israeli Left! Every day brings us new wonders from it, new manifestations of anti-Semitism and treason. Among the Israeli or ex-Israeli leftist anti-Semites trekking the globe is one Mapplethropian "artist" named Dror Feiler. Feiler hates Israel with a passion and supports Jihad and Palestinian terrorism. He lives in Stockholm with his Swedish wife, whence he spreads his views, including through the Internet. He also claims to be a musician who makes "music and noise" - and my guess is more of the latter than the former. Among Feiler's recent "artistic" creations is a work celebrating the terrorist woman...

Who us? Us? But we are the beautiful people. We love peace. We pet cats. We sing Joan Baez songs. We believe in the brotherhood of peoples. So how dare you fire bullets at us? Sure we were there to show our solidarity with the mass murderers and the suicide bombers. We understand that the security fence Israel is building is designed to make it harder for the terrorists we support to enter Israel and murder Jewish children and other civilians. And that is precisely why we believe it must come down. So, yes, we marched on Saturday, the day...

In the now world-famous libel suit between Holocaust Denier David Irving and Dr. Deoborah Lipstadt, Irving sued Lipstadt and her publisher. Lipstadt had written that Irving was a Nazi apologist and admirer of Hitler. She had asserted that Irving was a Holocaust Denier who had distorted facts and manipulated documents to prove that there had been no genocide of Jews during World War II. Irving sued for libel. He claimed that Lipstadt damaged his reputation and credentials as a serious historian and writer. Lipstadt's claims against Irving were in part based on Irving's own efforts as apologist for and promoter...

There are now in fact not one, but two, treasonous private "peace initiatives" being promoted by the Israeli fundamentalist Left, somewhat comically competing against one another. There is the Beilin Geneva Misunderstandings, which is being bulk mailed to Israeli households this week in defiance of a proposal last week by the Consumers Union to prohibit junk mail. And then there is the "initiative" by ex-spook Ami Ayalon, who once headed Israeli intelligence services (never mind the oxymoron in that term) and before that was Navy Commandant, together with a PLO terrorist. This past weekend, Yediot Acharonot, the largest Israeli daily,...

Yet another nail was banged this week into the coffin of Israeli democracy. On Monday, the McCarthyist Left succeeded, at long last, in shutting down Arutz-7, the main voice of non-leftist dissidence in Israel. This under a government headed by Ariel Sharon. Israel's Hebrew media are the occupied territories of Israel's Far Left. Haaretz is considerably less pluralistic than was Pravda in the days of Brezhnev and is increasingly advocating the "One-State Solution", meaning the Rwanda Solution, to Israel's existence, where Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish state. Yediot Aharonot is just slightly less extremist than Haaretz and...

Say what? Anti-Semites? Who, us anti-Zionists? Us? We have nothing against Jews as such. We just hate Zionism and Zionists. We think Israel does not have a right to exist. But that does not mean we have anything against Jews as such. Heavens to Mergatroyd. Marx Forbid. We are humanists. Progressives. Peace lovers. Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews. Anti-Zionism is opposition to Zionism and Israeli policies. The two have nothing to do with one another. Venus and Mars. Night and day. Trust us. Sure, we think the only country on the earth that must be annihilated is Israel. But...

9/11 Outrage In Colorado By Steven Plaut FrontPageMagazine.com | September 5, 2002 Osama Bin Laden was apparently not available to address the students at Colorado College on the first anniversary of the September 11 Islamist atrocities. I say this because I doubt there could be any other plausible explanation for why Colorado College saw fit to ask Hanan Ashrawi, the most prominent spokesman for Palestine's war of terror in the west, to address its student body for the First Anniversary of America's second Pearl Harbor. Colorado College president Richard F. Celeste, a former Ohio governor and ambassador to India during...