Bob Simon, veteran reporter for the prestigious CBS news program Sixty Minutes,  is upset with us. Apparently, our Ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, called Simon’s producer to complain about his unaired show on Christian Palestinians, calling it “outrageous [and] completely incomprehensible” especially “when Christians all over the Middle East’s Muslim world were being oppressed and massacred.”

It wasn’t the criticism, but the timing, Simon insisted. “I’ve never gotten a reaction before about a story that hasn’t been broadcast yet.”

“There’s a first time for everything, Bob,” Oren answered.

Now that the segment has been broadcast, let me offer Oren my congratulations: he was dead on. The piece would have done credit to the Minister of  Palestinian Propaganda.

To be fair, fairer than Simon at least, ...

...continue reading A Rusty Hatchet Job

The recent YouTube video showing Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner, deputy commander of the Beka’a Brigade, striking an aggressive ISM foreign national in the mouth with the clip of his rifle, has made waves all over the world. As usual, as in the Mohammed al-Dura incident, the pictures, taken out of context and played without explanation, are hard for those who love Israel to combat. After all, no one wants to attempt to justify the killing of a child (even though in the al-Dura case, it was staged and completely false) or the violent attack on a handsome blond ...

...continue reading Dupes, Dummies and Useful Idiots

I was in New York City for a wedding when I turned on the television news and saw pictures of the Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse.

I could not believe my eyes.

A little over twelve years ago our daughter Rachel had done her second year of National Service there, trying her best to infuse the children and the community with her own love of Israel and their Jewish heritage. Rav Monsenego, who had interviewed her for the position in Jerusalem, was the head of the struggling Jewish school and Jonathan Sandler had been one of the older students there.

It was a small Jewish community back then, a bit raw and ...

...continue reading Miryam and Marie

Can we talk Iran out of wanting to kill every man, woman and child in Israel? That seems to be the question these days.

If Iran were a mental patient, in our psychiatric notes we would have to record the following:

On August 28, 2001, at a rally for Quds (Arabic for Jerusalem) Day, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a Tehran crowd that “the Zionist regime is the axis of unity among all the thieves and criminals of the world.” In 2005, he said, quoting the Imam Khamenei, Israel should be “wiped off the map.”

While the world was busy nit-picking the translation of those words, particularly Israel’s “good friend” Jonathan Steele of The Guardian, arguing Iran’s leader was just referring ...

...continue reading Iran – Talking Cure for a Psychopath

More recently, a female employee of Israel’s lottery putting up posters in Beit Shemesh found herself stoned, her car windshield smashed, her tires slashed.

The ...

...continue reading The Ultra-Orthodox’s PR Problem

In part one of “A True Jewish Hero,” published in The Jerusalem Post Magazine on February 24, I followed the story of Avraham and Naomi Timor’s escape from the Holocaust, and their lives as religious, Jewish pioneers in pre-State Israel.

The travails of the War of Independence forced them to abandon their home in Neveh Ya’acov, Naomi giving birth in Jerusalem to her fifth child while Avraham, as Hagana commander of Neveh Ya’acov, courageously led his men to safety on a midnight life-or-death escape to Mount Scopus.

Despite the birth of his daughter, and everything he had already been though, Avraham accepted the appointment of Hagana commander of Mount Scopus.

Only with the first ...

...continue reading A True Jewish Hero – Part Two

“By January 1948, the settlement of Neve Yaakov was under siege. The thirty families were under attack by the Arabs of Shuafat, who blocked the road to Jerusalem and cut the water lines. Supplies could only be obtained by giving large bribes to the British police. That is how we got matzah for Pesach.”

So wrote Abraham (Wexler) Timor, Hagana commander of Neveh Ya’acov, many years later in a newsletter to his eight children and 120 grandchildren and great grandchildren.

I found it on the coffee table in his modest house in Moshav Nehalim, a place he’d helped to found, during a shiva call. A few days earlier, Abraham had passed away peacefully in his bed at the age of 96.

...continue reading A True Jewish Hero – Part One

With the Queen of England celebrating her Jubilee Year, and this week’s worshipful MP visit to hate-preacher Abu Hamza in a high-security prison, I think the time has come for a few words about what is going on in Britain.

To be quite honest, I started life as an Anglophile.

My bedtime story was David Copperfield. As I suffered and ultimately triumphed with that poor, handsome orphan lad, I was infused with a sense of longing for the streets of London, waiting for the magic moment when my feet would wander where my imagination had long roamed.

My opportunity came many years later in 1981, after I had finished a master’s thesis ...

...continue reading A Jubilee Year

“No woman should wait to hear the last kaddish for the obvious reason that women should make their exit before the men, lest they mingle with them… No woman aged less than forty should attend the synagogue for the afternoon and evening services…whether on a weekday or on the Sabbath, with the exception of the New Year and the Day of Atonement.” New regulations in Beit Shemesh? It wouldn’t be hard to believe. But actually, the above paragraph refers to regulations adopted by the Jerusalem Rabbinate in 1854 and is taken from the fascinating book by Prof. Margalit Shilo: Princess or Prisoner: Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840- 1914.

The book also ...

...continue reading The Tipping Point

Last week, after five long years of my being dragged through the courts, defamed, libeled and slandered, Israel’s Supreme Court issued a ruling in the Michal Tal case that stated: “There is not and never was any basis whatsoever for any claim of plagiarism or copyright infringement brought against Naomi Ragen in the Jerusalem District Court.”

Far from a mere technical victory, this ruling was an acknowledgement by Tal’s own children, one of whom is a lawyer, who had attended the court sessions and listened to testimony throughout, that this case was frivolous and baseless. For had they had the slightest hope of winning, they stood to gain NIS 2.5 million. Instead they withdrew at the first opportunity.

A short recap ...

...continue reading Bleak House – The Sordid Story of the Michal Tal Case