We need not be sitting ducks to terrorists and crazies

Shabbat is over and we’ve all turned on our TVs and mobiles to be faced with this horrifying news.

Yet another reminder that Jews are an endangered species and there’s nowhere we are truly safe – even in the ‘Golden Medina’ of America.

Our hearts go out to the families of the slain and we pray that those who were injured will recover soon and fully – especially those valiant police officers among the wounded.

President Trump has taken some flak for his comment that this might not have happened if there had been an armed guard on the premises. But we all know he’s right. The same argument holds true for all the shooting sprees from Sandy Hook to Bataclan and so many other auditoria where hundreds of innocent people were sitting ducks at the mercy of a mad shooter for the 15 or 30 minutes before help arrived.

We learned this lesson in the 70’s when Arafat’s PLO turned airplanes into easy terror pickings. Two or three hundred people helplessly sealed in an aluminium tube.   But, for the last 50 years - and starting long before the security screening devices of today - most airlines have carried an armed air marshal and the problem has been almost eradicated.

We need to understand that this has long gone beyond airplanes, and the same precautions have to be taken in all places where people are gathered in large numbers. We make such a big fuss about fire doors and sprinklers, and yet there is no armed guard in 99% of crowded venues, whether they be places of entertainment or worship.

Just like the safety limits on crowd capacity and fire exits at any indoor event, there should be a law requiring, say 1 armed officer for every 100 people at the venue.

When I go to shul in Israel, there is not always a security guard at the door. But I always know for sure that among the congregants there are at least one or two army reservists packing a firearm. And we have seen in the many street attacks how Israelis have been quick to neutralise terrorists within seconds of them revealing deadly intent. The Jerusalem bulldozer attack 10 years ago comes to mind.

We cannot and need not be sitting ducks to terrorists and crazies.

So, Trump's not presidential

I’m tired of hearing people say: “Trump's not being presidential”.

Today it was about his comments on the pipe bombs sent to Soros and other Democrat activists who openly incited supporters to mob and harass Trump staff and supporters in restaurants, stores and gas stations.  

Trump is not presidential, right.

He’s crude, unpolished and has an ego the size of Brazil.

But here’s the thing ….

He was elected precisely because people were fed up with presidential types.

Like the slick and highly polished Obama, who started off his presidency going on an apology tour for America, decimated its military, never achieved growth of more than 3% in all his 8 years, racked up more debt than all his 43 ‘presidential’ predecessors combined, weaponised the IRS, DOJ and FBI to silence his enemies, forced 300 million Americans into a doomed healthcare scheme, allowed Putin to steal Crimea with impunity, and gave Iran’s ayatollahs $150 billion plus hostage money in pallets of used banknotes.

But he did it all with oh! - such polished speech and presidential aplomb !

Now we have Trump, the oh so unpresidential POTUS.

His enemies may call him the antichrist – but he’s more the anti-politician.

Unlike most other elected leaders, he's been keeping his election promises … all of them.

In fact the only ones not delivered fully, are those obstructed by Democrats in Congress. Like the wall.

Meanwhile, he has reduced Black, Hispanic and Asian unemployment to the lowest levels in American history and women’s unemployment down to the lowest for 65 years. He’s weaned 4 million Americans off food stamps, brought back half a million manufacturing jobs to America’s heartland, faced down China on fiendish trade abuses, got US hostages released for no ransom and stopped North Korea’s missiles flying over Japan. He’s renegotiated NAFTA and forced NATO countries to pay their own way, saving America billions. He’s cancelled the Iran sell-out and is refitting the military with $700 billion a year.

Thank goodness he’s not presidential.

We’ve had a bellyful of those !

American Jewish Voters

So, while 51 percent of American Jewish respondents approve of Trump's efforts for Israel, only 6% would vote for him.
How sick is this?

Can these Americans really be true Jews, or has the 70% assimilation rate totally wiped out their Jewish values.

One of those is "Hakarat Hatov". That means, gratitude.

Israel is today the 'Jew among Nations' . To single out Israel for criticism with double standards and delegitimization amounts to pure antisemitism.

When Trump and Haley called time on this, and blocked it at the United Nations, they were fighting for our people, the Jews. When Trump cut funds to the PA and UNRWA for abetting Jew hatred, he was fighting for our people, the Jews. When he sanctioned UNESCO he was rescuing Jewish heritage from political erasure. And when he faced down our enemies to finally move the US embassy to Jerusalem, Trump paid the greatest honour to our eternal Jewish capital before all the world to see.

President Eisenhower treated Israel coolly, explaining to his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, “We conduct our policy as if there were not one Jew in the country. They don’t vote for us anyway.”

If Trump were to say such a thing after the upcoming midterm elections could you possibly blame him?

Maybe if all these 'enlightened' American Jews assimilated more quickly, we might sooner be left with a truer representation of our people and their values - not least gratitude.

Khan al-Ahmar

With the fallout of her disastrous conduct of Brexit swirling around her, it's surprising that Theresa May finds the time (and chutzpah) to meddle in the town planning issues of another sovereign state.

Khan al-Ahmar is nothing more than a nomadic Bedouin shanty encampment which was set up alongside Highway 1 outside Jerusalem. 
It was set up illegally, without zoning or highways permission and in any other country would have been bulldozed years ago. 

However, because this is is the Jewish state, whose every action must be subject to a double-standard in this world, the issue of its removal has been tied up in court hearings for no less than NINE years. 

And there's been no limit to the financial support of foreign funds and NGOs who have been paying the human rights lawyers to keep this in play for all that time. Their backers' sole aim is to fight the Jewish state using its very own democratic institutions and bastions of social justice. Such things which incidentally do not exist anywhere else in the region. 

These people seem to have zero interest in the human rights of Syrians, Yemenis, Kurds, Yazidis, Tibetans or indeed the tens of thousands of Christians who have been ethnically cleansed by the PLO just around the corner in Bethlehem. 

Imagine a group of migrants setting up a shanty town alongside the M6 motorway outside Birmingham.
Would Mrs May's police or government let it stand longer than a week - a month?
Nine years? Gimme a break!

And it's not as if the Bedouin have not been offered alternative accommodation. The state offered them permanent housing not far away - but this didn't suit the leftists who needed to keep this pot boiling for propaganda purposes.

What Mrs May and other leaders standing in judgement need to understand is that these Bedouin Arabs could by now have enjoyed 10 years of good living in a proper community, with sanitation, schooling and all the community services. But, just like the Palestinian Arabs languishing for decades in so-called refugee camps, they are just more pawns of the Muslim Brotherhood which cynically uses them to undermine and delegitimize the Jewish state which they failed to kill at birth 70 years ago.

On Khashoggi ....

The disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the gruesome means of his suspected torture and disposal have shocked the world and occupied the headlines and lead slots of TV media and opinion pieces for many days.

As lurid tales of his demise filter out into the media, so do more details of Khashoggi’s extreme views – both against the Saudi rulers and in support of the Muslim Brotherhood of which he was a member and advocate of political Islam.

In every sense this was a journalist looking for trouble, and he found it at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.

This event brings to mind the gruesome killing of another journalist 16 years ago, by the name of Daniel Pearl. He was kidnapped by Al Qaeda and beheaded by its 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Daniel worked for the Wall Street Journal. In contrast to Khashoggi, he wasn’t out looking for trouble. His crime was simply being a Jew.

His executioners made sure the world would know of this “crime”, making him read out aloud these last words on video before his beheading:

“My name is Daniel Pearl. I'm a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father's side the family is Zionist. My father's Jewish, my mother's Jewish, I'm Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We've made numerous family visits to Israel.”

May his dear soul rest in peace.

Gaza: A soldier's letter

Whilst in Israel over Sukkot, I went down to the Gaza border to see the extent of fire damage caused by Hamas’s flying petrol bombs. It’s distressing to see large swathes of blackened landscape. Our people were so proud to make the desert bloom – whilst our so-called peace partners are into scorched earth and wanton destruction.

Whilst in the border area I visited Black Arrow, a memorial to the many IDF units which operated in the south, including Unit 101 which was commanded by Ariel Sharon. A young girl in a baseball cap was standing at the lookout and asked where I was from. She told me that she had immigrated to Israel from Los Angeles a couple of years earlier. I was scanning the Gaza horizon for incoming fire balloons when she said; “My boyfriend served in Gaza, was injured and lost his sight. We’re getting married next year.” She said this so matter-of-factly, it left me stunned and I was still dwelling on the thought many days afterward.

I recall this again here after reading a letter recently published on an Israeli website from an anonymous soldier, telling the true story of what they face at the Gaza border on a daily basis.

Whilst I empathise with the frustration of this soldier, his letter reminds me of the speech made by Colonel Richard Kemp to the UN in Geneva when he said the IDF had done more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Here is the letter: 

“I monitor the news media and am dismayed how it ignores what’s really going on at the Gaza border fence. These aren’t “riots” but war in every sense of the word. When I go home and tell people what’s really going on here, they’re shocked.

For a long time now, on a nightly basis, we’ve been facing Hamas groups that throw hundreds of grenades and petrol bombs at us. They fire at us from within crowds of women and children so that we are prevented from responding. Not that we would otherwise shoot them because the rules of engagement for opening fire are confused and frustrating. All of this goes on against a backdrop of powerful exploding balloons and fires that fill the air with black smoke.

We don’t approach the border fence because it is rigged with land mines and explosives which are hidden in all sorts of things; even the inside of Hamas flagpoles. Hamas has studied our weaknesses and is taking full advantage of the situation.

They send children to break through the fence and they come towards us close enough to see the whites of our eyes. We then have to withdraw leaving Hamas to destroy our positions. We are not allowed to return fire and, instead of going on the attack, we have to take cover due to warnings of sniper fire.

We have been abandoned on the battlefield. We feel alone. This week there were warnings of the incendiary balloons being loaded with chemical substances!

And it’s not true that we haven’t suffered injuries. Perhaps not mortal injuries but many soldiers have been wounded in these clashes. The fact that there haven’t been losses on our side is a mystery which can only be explained as Divine protection from Above.

I write this so that Am Yisrael will know the truth of what is going on here.”

Kavanaugh & the Jewish Problem

Nothing has energised the campus Antifa warriors like the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

The images of mob rule and chanting over the voices of reason and due process are so reminiscent of the way Israel has been treated by these same shrieking groups.

Visiting speakers are intimidated, browbeaten and shouted down before they can ever posit an alternative viewpoint, much less the truth or facts of any issue.

The moment this Christine Ford woman levelled those wholly unsubstantiated allegations, senior Democrat congressmen insisted that they believed her 100 percent – not interested in any other possibility, or the presumption of innocence.

The same with Israel – whenever an Arab is killed or injured, in whatever circumstances it is classed as illegal, unwarranted and part of a bigger picture of ethnic cleansing or genocide.

And of course, in both cases the mainstream media takes the side of the mob against the side of reason – since it clearly sells more newspapers and airtime than the defence of an unfairly embattled judge or Jewish state.

Indeed the the Senate Judiciary committee chairman Sen Grassley excoroated the media for only wanting to interview the anti-Kavanagh people, not those who were supporting him. Sound familiar?

Interesting that when Googling for a Kavanaugh mob image to accompany this post, I came across this one, below. What a gem!

Here were signs supporting the defence of Planned Parenthood – the Amazon.Com of abortion in America - alongside a banner opposing circumcision as harmful to babies.

So, it’s OK with the pro-choicers to kill a fully developed foetus, but not OK to hurt its willy if it is ever fortunate enough to make it into this world.

The moral bankruptcy of progressives is simply staggering.

Trump @ War

I remember two years ago, we ended Sukkot with worried speculation that Obama would stick the knife into Israel at the UN General Assembly's opening session.

And he did so - as a parting gift to the Jews at the end of his presidency.
We could hardly have imagined the complete reversal that we saw just two months later with the surprise election of Donald Trump and the complete 180-degree turn toward Israel.
It is said: ישועת ה' כהרף עין G-d's deliverance comes in the wink of an eye. Consider Joseph waking up in his Egyptian dungeon and by sunset clothed in the robes of highest office in the land.

Whatever your American politics may be, left or right, there's no denying that no US president has done more to support Israel than any other - let alone in just 18 months of office.
Trump has put Iran back into sanctions - the most severe coming up in November - and is crippling the regime that vows to wipe Israel off the map as a 'one bomb nation'.
Through his ambassador Nikki Haley, Trump has put the boot into UN bias against Israel and withdrawn membership and funding of anti-Israel bodies like UNHCR and UNESCO.
Trump has cut funds to the so-called Palestinian Authority (still the PLO in all but name) which pays salaries to Jew killers - whom Abbas hails as heroes - and funds their families' needs with European aid money.
Trump has cut funds to UNRWA which inflated 'Palestinian refugee' numbers from 750,000 to 5 million and employs Hamas teachers to educate generations of Arabs in the narrative of Jihad and the destruction of Israel.
Trump has kept Israel plentifully supplied with the defense materiel it requires and guarantees its QME (qualitative military edge).
And, finally, President Trump has bravely moved the US embassy to Jerusalem - something that all his predecessors promised but never delivered.

Former House Speaker Tip O'Neil famously said: "all politics is local".
Well, we say that for Jews of any stripe local must always be Israel.
This is not an issue of dual loyalties, but the imperative of what is vital for Israel's security and the safety of our 6 millions brothers and sisters living there.

So, whatever you think of the star of this movie, or its director, it needs to be seen by all American Jews (except for the hopelessly pathetic self-haters) prior to the upcoming midterm elections. 

The Democrats have one simple agenda: take down Trump by impeachment and block his policies by whatever means, fair or foul.


President Trump has supported our people - it's time to return that support.