The Jewish Press This Week

 The Jewish Press This Week

This week’s issue of The Jewish Press has published my account of Sinai Temple’s solidarity mission to Israel earlier this month:  Visiting Israel at War.”

Also of note in this week’s issue:  Phyllis Chesler’sThe Time is Now:  Israel and the West on the Brink:”

In the space of five weeks, trees that took one hundred years to grow were burned to the ground by Hizbullah rockets. The Israeli north became one vast ghost town, Kiryat Shmonah was devastated, more than a million Israeli refugees were forced to flee . . . But little of this has been shown by the world media, which has focused obsessively on the Lebanese civilian dead.

Steven Plaut, professor at the University of Haifa, has a bitter reflection on “The War Israel Chose to Lose:”

The Olmert government, which had gone to war to win the release of the kidnapped soldiers being held hostage by the terrorists, signed a cease-fire agreement in which it gave up the demand for the soldiers’ immediate and unconditional release.

The cease-fire was a complete capitulation by Israel, which got a promise of a few more UN troops to sunbathe in Lebanon. But UN troops have been “patrolling” the south of Lebanon since 1978 and have yet to stop a single Katyusha or mortar attack, or even a single stone from being thrown over the border fence.

As Haaretz’s Avi Shavit asked sarcastically, “Did we go to war so that French soldiers will protect us from Hizbullah?”

Robert Tanenbaum in “Civilization’s Lament” notes how broad terrorism has already spread:

Today, Hizbullah has risen up against Israel. Tomorrow, radical Islam will rise up against the rest of the non-believers, the kafir. Civilization — democratic values, economic progress, rational inquiry, coexistence — has already tasted terrorism. In Bali, Breslav, Buenos Aires, Baghdad and Brazil; in Darfur, Calcutta, Turkey, Morocco and London; in Sharm el-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia, New York City, Amman, and Madrid.

15 cities — not counting Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Netanya, Ashkelon, Kiryat Shmonah and Sederot — in Europe, Russia, South America, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, England and America. And counting.

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