SAN DIEGO (Press Release)– The Jewish Federation of San Diego County has launched a relief fund to gather aid for the victims of the devastating tornado that tore through the Oklahoma City area this week, killing and injuring many people and leaving a wide path of destruction. One hundred percent of funds donated will go [...]
By Shoshana Bryen WASHINGTON, D.C. — History is back and so are the Russians. After an interregnum of twenty years, during which the communist Soviet Union was demolished and a crony capitalist, Russian kleptocracy turned inward to establish firm control of journalists (oh wait, that might have been the Obama Administration), civil society practitioners including [...]
By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California –When the news came recently from Memphis that Maxine Smith had died—just a few days after my own biological, if enigmatic mother had passed—I understood what the loss of maternal wisdom and joy really does to a son. This Mother’s Day is my bittersweet day of mourning for the [...]
By Isaac Yetiv, Ph.D. LA JOLLA, California — Like all crimes, acts of Islamist terrorism have their MOM (Motivation, Opportunity, Means). They differ in that they are not motivated by greed, profit, vengeance, or mental dysfunction, but by religious fanaticism inculcated in the minds of the perpetrators through years of intense indoctrination that succeeds in making [...]
By Ilene Lerner BOSTON — I remember going to New York years ago and seeing Six Degrees of Separation, a play based on the assumption that all of us are separated by just six degrees. If I ever doubted it, I don’t any longer! The Boston Marathon bombing has taught me how connected we all [...]
WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release)– The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent federal advisory body created by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) to monitor religious freedom abuses abroad, on Tuesday, April 30, released its 2013 Annual Report. The Report highlights the status of religious freedom globally and identifies those governments that are the most egregious [...]
NEW YORK (Press Release) – Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), strongly condemned an article by the special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Richard A. Falk, in which he blames the terrorist attacks at the Boston Marathon earlier this month on Israel and on American foreign policy. In an [...]
By Michael Hayutin SAN DIEGO — I have immense admiration for the first responders and bystanders who ignored personal safety to aid the victims of the Boston Marathon horror show. I pray I would have similar courage. Now the task before every American official is to fully understand who nurtured two young jihadists and how [...]
By Shoshana Bryen WASHINGTON, D.C — The discovery that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lived in the United States for a decade produced a spate of theorizing over “homegrown” terrorism and terrorists. Baseball, Google and iPhones are homegrown. There is nothing “homegrown” about Islamic terrorism, which is taught, bought and paid for by international sponsors, primarily [...]
By Ira Sharkansky JERUSALEM — There has been enough already written about the Chechen brothers of Boston to fill a library, and it’s still coming. We’ll never know for sure what produced the decisions of those two young men, and whoever else may have been involved. We’ve already heard from the White House that the [...]