In a few weeks I\’ll turn 33 and, sadly, I realize I\’m long past being anything \”for my age.\” I\’m no longer cute for my age, talented for my age, a good reader for my age. All qualifications and special considerations have long passed. There\’s nothing I can get away with now because, \”After all, your honor, he\’s only 33.\”
Gush is one of the sanest places in Israel I had ever visited. The people are healthy and happy. They love life and they love Israel.
Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld and I shook hands 20 minutes before we were to jump out of an airplane together at 12,500 feet. It would be my first solo jump. Dan has made some 23,000 — he\’s stopped counting except by the thousands.
When Israeli Arabs protest that talk of the \”demographic threat\” is racist, can Israeli Jews blame them? If non-Jewish professors and politicians anywhere on earth spoke of a Jewish demographic threat to their countries, what would Jews call it? What, for that matter, would decent non-Jews call it?
Raising the specter of the Arab demographic threat to Israel is, in fact, racist — if you believe that Zionism is racism, that a Jewish state is a racist state.
I don\’t believe that (even while I know there is no shortage of Jews whose Zionism doesn\’t amount to anything more than racism). Although the Jewish state by definition \”belongs\” to the Jews more than it does to its non-Jewish citizens, I don\’t consider it a force for racism, but the opposite: Whatever racism exists in Israel, the Jewish state came into being as an answer to racism of a rather larger magnitude — the habit of anti-Semitic oppression.
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in London, I can\’t help but despair at the ever-spiraling violence in our world today. And it pains me even more deeply that a significant portion of that violence occurs at the hands of Muslims in the name of Islam.
Of course, we have all condemned this latest attack in London. We have all stated that Islam is a religion of peace. We have all stated Islamic terror is neither sacred nor Islamic.
Yet, inevitably, I get a question from one — or more than one — reader which goes something like this: \”Yeah, but what about the suffering of Muslims in Iraq? Isn\’t that also wrong? Why don\’t you condemn that?\”
