If politics makes strange bedfellows, wars make even stranger ones. That has always been true for all nations and is no less the case for the state of Israel in our own day. Beset by a world of Arab and Islamic foes, it has taken its allies wherever it can find them. Read More »

Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, said today the “decision has to be made” for the U.S. to arm the opposition in Syria, but cautioned that the weapons should be ones that wouldn’t be used against Israel if they fall into the wrong hands. “That’s not us fighting. Read More »

On Tuesday, Peter Beinart chastised American Jews for not listening more closely to Israeli soldiers. “There’s nothing American Jews love more than Israeli soldiers, except perhaps, Israeli spies,” he wrote in a piece in the Daily Beast titled “U.S. Jews Should Heed Top Israeli Soldiers Who Oppose Bombing Iran. Read More »

A story in today’s International Herald Tribune (read here on the New York Times website) provides an interesting insight into exactly what happens when a secular state is taken over by Islamists. Read More »

There are two common reporting challenges that inevitably become more pronounced when a topic of great interest and importance becomes part of the day-to-day news: the tendency of stories to offer no new information whatsoever, and the habit of reporters to allow themselves to be spun into writing self-contradicting pieces. Read More »

I wanted to add a personal word to Jonathan’s post regarding the Presbyterian Church USA’s anti-Israel bias. Years ago my wife, children, and I attended a PCUSA church, where we enjoyed a very good relationship with the senior pastor, who baptized two of our children. Read More »

When I did a post-doc in Israel back in academic year 2001-2002, the Palestinian terror and bombing campaign was at its height. Hordes of Western journalists circulated through Israel on their way to the West Bank and Gaza. Read More »

The disconnect between the views of the leadership of mainline Protestant churches on the Middle East and those of the rank-and-file members of their congregations has been growing in recent decades. Read More »

Some staffers and diplomats at the State Department with time on their hands are, no doubt, working hard right now to come up with a legal rationale for continuing U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority. Read More »

In May 2010, a Turkish Islamist charity with close ties to Turkey’s ruling party sponsored a flotilla which it claimed was to relieve suffering in the Gaza Strip, never mind that the standard of living in Gaza surpasses that in Turkey, according to several different measures . Read More »

Dislike of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been a constant theme of the Obama administration. While President Obama has cuddled up to an Islamist troublemaker and human rights violator like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, he has made no secret of his abhorrence of Netanyahu. Read More »

Yesterday’s executive order signed by President Obama enforcing a total ban on transactions with any entity doing business with Iran’s Central Bank is the lever by which an international oil embargo of the Islamic state can be put in place. Read More »

There was something interesting about the reaction to the consummation of the Fatah-Hamas unity pact yesterday. Read More »

Of all the Arab countries which have overthrown dictators, Tunisia probably provides the most cause for optimism, despite the election of an Islamist government. Read More »

Cameras don’t lie, but they also do not give the full perspective. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has often received disproportionate attention in the world media because Israel allows freer access to the press than any Arab state. Read More »

Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal has a column today asking whether Israel can bomb Iran. He writes: Put simply, an Israeli strike on Iran would not just be a larger-scale reprise of the attacks that took out Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s in 2007. Read More »

I wrote earlier today about the human rights violations that have become routine under the regime of President Obama’s buddy Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Read More »

President Obama is getting heaps of praise for the tough Iranian bank sanctions he ordered today . But lost in the pro-Obama media coverage are the names of the two lawmakers who made these sanctions happen: Sens. Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez. Read More »

President Obama may have bragged to Fareed Zakaria in TIME last month about his close relations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but a better understanding of the sort of leader that the president values via an op-ed in today’s Washington Post . Read More »

In retrospect, the operation to kill Osama bin Laden–Operation Neptune Spear on May 2, 2011–may be viewed as a turning point in the Obama presidency. Read More »