FJN News & Features
Middle East
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Preempt Terrorists, Or Not?
"Everything" did not change on 9/11, as some expected, but one thing certainly did: the U.S. government’s willingness to preempt enemies before they act. This new policy has outraged so many, it may be discontinued.
In foreign affairs, preemption replaced the long-established policy of deterrence. A series…
Posted on 10/03 at 03:56 PM • Hits: 103 |
|
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Islamic Economics:What Does It Mean?
While the outside world hardly noticed, a significant and rapidly growing amount of money is now being managed in accord with Islamic law, the Shari‘a. According to one study, "by the end of 2005, more than 300 institutions in over 65 jurisdictions were managing assets worth around US$700 billion…
Posted on 09/26 at 04:23 PM • Hits: 82 |
|
Friday, September 21, 2007
Five Years of Campus Watch
What has Campus Watch, a project to critique and improve Middle East studies in the United States and Canada, achieved since it opened its doors this week in 2002?
Along with like-minded organizations – the National Association of Scholars, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, National Review, and the…
Posted on 09/21 at 04:01 PM • Hits: 69 |
|
Friday, September 07, 2007
Teaching Arabic or Recruiting Extremists?
New York City’s Arabic-language public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy, opens its doors this week, with special security, for 11- and 12-year-old students. One hopes that the prolonged public debate over the school’s Islamist proclivities will prompt it not to promote any political or religious agendas.
Count…
Posted on 09/07 at 02:39 PM • Hits: 88 |
|
Friday, August 31, 2007
Ban Islam?
Non-Muslims occasionally raise the idea of banning the Koran, Islam, and Muslims. Examples this month include calls by a political leader in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, to ban the Koran — which he compares to Hitler’s Mein Kampf — and two Australian politicians, Pauline Hanson and Paul Green, demanding…
Posted on 08/31 at 04:13 PM • Hits: 82 |
|
Friday, August 10, 2007
Rabbi Feinstein Speaks
A recent attack on Israel’s Chief Rabbinate invoked the late and revered American Orthodox decisor of Jewish law, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.
The attacker was Professor Benjamin Ish-Shalom, the director of Israel’s Institute for Jewish Studies, an agency charged with offering a course of Jewish study to non-Jewish immigrants…
Posted on 08/10 at 05:24 PM • Hits: 111 |
|
Ban the Burqa - and the Niqab Too
Once-exotic forms of Muslim women’s head and body garments have now become both familiar in the West and the source of fractious political and legal disputes.
The hijab (a hair-covering) is ever-more popular in Detroit but has been banned from French public schools, discouraged by the International Football…
Posted on 08/10 at 05:24 PM • Hits: 112 |
|
Friday, August 03, 2007
Invitation to Intermarriage
One can’t help but feel sad for Noah Feldman. In spite of his considerable professional accomplishments – a law professorship at Harvard, three books, a slew of well-received essays and a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, to name a few – the young Jew is clearly stewing.…
Posted on 08/03 at 05:24 PM • Hits: 109 |
|
Summer fun column spoiled
Real columnists at mass circulation papers get to do a "summer break" column. That’s what I planned. Honestly I did. It started, "Italian fortnight. One child on a kibbutz, the other on a Jewish bus tour of America’s East Coast. So the wife and I sprint to Italy to…
Posted on 08/03 at 05:24 PM • Hits: 101 |
|
Friday, July 27, 2007
Returns Welcome
Married mere days, David found himself seated at the head of a table with his new wife, in-laws and a host of strangers, including some rabbis with long beards.
He wasn’t nervous around rabbis; his personal journey from California teen-age martial-arts aficionado to 20-something Orthodox yeshiva student had…
Posted on 07/27 at 01:02 PM • Hits: 110 |
|
Salvaging the Iraq War
Two positions dominate and polarize the American body politic today. Some say the war is lost, so leave Iraq. Others say the war can be won, so keep the troops in place.
I split the difference and offer a third route. The occupation is lost but the war…
Posted on 07/27 at 12:58 PM • Hits: 108 |
|
Friday, July 20, 2007
Kibbutz Conversation
Tisha B’Av – which falls this year on July 24 – always brings back the personal memory of a conversation between two teen-aged cousins more than thirty years ago. It took place on the outskirts of a non-religious kibbutz in the Galilee, on a hill overlooking a lush valley.…
Posted on 07/20 at 03:03 PM • Hits: 94 |
|
Kibbutz Conversation
Tisha B’Av – which falls this year on July 24 – always brings back the personal memory of a conversation between two teen-aged cousins more than thirty years ago. It took place on the outskirts of a non-religious kibbutz in the Galilee, on a hill overlooking a lush valley.…
Posted on 07/20 at 03:02 PM • Hits: 99 |
|
Red Mosque in Rebellion
Imagine that an Islamist central command exists — and that you are its chief strategist, with a mandate to spread full application of Shariah, or Islamic law, through all means available, with the ultimate goal of a worldwide caliphate. What advice would you offer your comrades in the aftermath…
Posted on 07/20 at 02:57 PM • Hits: 101 |
|
Friday, July 13, 2007
Peace Index: June 2007
Conducted by Prof. Ephraim Yaar and Prof. Tamar Hermann- Tel Aviv University
Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip has not eroded the Israeli Jewish public’s consistent support for the two-states-for-two-peoples formula as a basis for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This public does not, however, see that solution as…
Posted on 07/13 at 01:39 PM • Hits: 116 |
|
Conversion Confusion
Israel’s Orthodox Rabbinate has been under siege of late, over the issue – once again – of conversion. And once again as well, the media abound with misinformation. This time, though, some of it is being supplied by Orthodox rabbis.
Writing in the Jerusalem Post, the retiring rabbi…
Posted on 07/13 at 01:28 PM • Hits: 111 |
|
Unleashing the Iranian Opposition
Navigating the fractious currents of émigré politics is never easy, and especially for the Iranian opposition group known as the Mujahedeen-e Khalq or the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran. Simply put, the rogue oil state regime it opposes terrifies one half the West and tempts the other, and the MEK…
Posted on 07/13 at 01:24 PM • Hits: 99 |
|
Friday, March 02, 2007
A Call to Arms
The thesis that is the Jewish Nation has an antithesis: Amalek. And just as the Jewish People is defined by its Torah, so is its polar opposite associated with a particular system of thought and attitude.
Amalek the nation is unknown to…
Posted on 03/02 at 01:00 AM • Hits: 416 |
|
Friday, February 02, 2007
Heroic Measures
A recent report from Jenin got me thinking.
Residents of the West Bank city have hung a large picture of Saddam Hussein in the refugee-quarter’s central square. A local commander of the Fatah-aligned Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades explained that the display was intended to show…
Posted on 02/02 at 01:00 AM • Hits: 328 |
|
Friday, January 05, 2007
President Ford’s Legacy for Israel:
As President Ford was laid to rest, veteran diplomats, pundits and politicians in Israel recall the letter of assurance that President Ford provided the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on September 1st, 1975, following six months of American pressure for Israel to sign an interim agreement with Egypt,…
Posted on 01/05 at 01:00 AM • Hits: 459 |
|
