Letters to the Editor from our 07/20/07 issue.

Hillel Fencing Update

I would like to update you on Ari Givner, one of the fencers that could not fence in the National Championships because of Shabbat. The experience to be at a national competition was too important to pass…

In the end, despite pleas to spare Judaism’s holiest city the shame of a spectacle celebrating the rejection of Judaism’s moral code, the “Gay Pride” parade took place as planned in Jerusalem.

Had hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem and across the country flowed into the…

When Dwight D. Eisenhower dedicated the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., in June 1957, his 500-word talk effused good will ("Civilization owes to the Islamic world some of its most important tools and achievements") even as the American president embarrassingly bumbled (Muslims in the United States, he declared, have…

Much in our world desecrates the name of G-d – in Hebrew, that is called "chilul Hashem." Whether murder and mayhem in the name of religion or misbehavior on the part of religious individuals, actions that push holiness away from a world that so direly needs it are considered…

Is the knighting of Salman Rushdie, 60, by the queen of England "a sign of the changing mood" toward British Muslims, as Observer columnist Nick Cohen wrote? Is it "a welcome example of … British backbone," as Islamism specialist Sadanand Dhume described it in the Wall Street Journal?

The Hamas victory over Fatah in Gaza on June 14 has great importance for Palestinians, for the Islamist movement, and for the United States. It has rather less significance for Israel.

Tensions between Fatah and Hamas are likely to endure and with them, the split between the West…

[I was recently privileged to address the commencement ceremony of Bais Yaakov of Baltimore, an Orthodox girls school founded in 1942. The following is an edited version of my remarks to the more than 100 high school graduates, their families and friends.]

Back in the day – the…

Barring a "catastrophic development," Middle East Newsline reports, George Bush has decided not to attack Iran. An administration source explains that Washington deems Iran’s cooperation "needed for a withdrawal [of U.S. forces] from Iraq."

If correct, this implies the Jewish state stands alone against a regime that threatens…

Beware legislative behemoths. Beware "comprehensive immigration reform." Any bill that is 380 pages long is bound to have nooks and crannies reflecting private deals, quiet paybacks and ad hoc arrangements that you often don’t learn about until it’s too late.

The main provisions of the immigration reform monster…

The decision last week by the Islamic Society of Boston to drop its lawsuit against 17 defendants, including counterterrorism specialist Steven Emerson, gives reason to step back to consider radical Islam’s legal ambitions.

The envisioned $22 million Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.

The lawsuit came about because,…

One of the great enigmas of the modern Middle East is why, forty years ago next week, the Six-Day War took place. Neither Israel nor its Arab neighbors wanted or expected a fight in June 1967; the consensus view among historians holds that the unwanted combat resulted from a…

A question mark hangs over the opening of New York City’s planned Arabic-language school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy.

That the topic remains open is surprising. Other than objections from a few of us – the New York Sun’s editorialists, its columnist Alicia Colon, the investigative team of…

"Oh, come on!" the e-mail read, "What’s a few dead children on the altar of my liberal slippery-slope paranoia?"

Gruesome as the imagery was, I had to smile. The message was intended as a humorous "touché!" from an academic who had originally contacted me in anger. He was…

My visit to Istanbul this week comes in the midst of the greatest challenge to the Turkish secular republic since its creation in 1923.

Founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire, the republic came into existence at about the…

The Supreme Court has made it clear that ideology trumps women’s health in the nation’s highest court. On April 18, the Supreme Court made it clear that respect for legal precedent is dead. Clear that Roe v. Wade’s protections are no longer immutable. Clear that it doesn’t mind…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s upholding of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act has elicited the usual cries of protest from abortion rights advocates and, also as usual, they include an assortment of Jewish groups and The New York Times.

That latter institution…

"If today’s Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason." So writes Joel Fishman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in "The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel," an insightful piece of historical research.
…

Country must give substance to a national security strategy

Celebrations of Israel’s 59th year of independence may be overshadowed by the Winograd Commissions’ interim report on the political and military leadership’s conduct during the Second Lebanon War last summer. Personal conclusions notwithstanding, the report will…

Come September, an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated to open its doors in Brooklyn. The New York City Department of Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12, will boast a "multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction."

Did Rep. Nancy Pelosi drop the ball in the Middle East? Was she fouled? Was there a ball at all?

Pelosi, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, earned White House vituperation unusual for its intensity in even these partisan times…