Two steps forward, three steps back.\n\nThat is the definition of any Middle East peace process, and the most important question now is whether President Bush, who very publicly committed himself to a \”road map to peace\” last month, will tough it out.
\”We will not allow anyone to drag us into a civil war,\” declared Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas on June 8.
His disloyal opposition — Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Yasser Arafat\’s Al Aqsa suicide brigades — sent a different message to Abbas and other Arab leaders who had just met with President Bush in Aqaba.
The latest book to charge into the battle of the media, \”What Liberal Media?: The Truth About \’Bias\’ and the News,\” by Nation columnist Eric Alterman, attempts to give ammunition to the liberal side.
All this week there\’s been some strange goings-on at the intersection of Us and Them.
What better place to visit as civilization teetered at the brink than the repository of much of civilization\’s bounty?
The crowd in front of the Jewish Republicans\’ booth didn\’t approach the size of those at some of the better food stands at the Israel\’s Independence Day celebration at Woodley Park in the San Fernando Valley. Still, it was big enough to interest me after having watched the GOP\’s long courtship of Jews; for years, it\’s been a romance that sometimes reached the engagement party but usually fell short of the chuppah.
On Sat., May 31, President Bush visited Auschwitz, and spoke about the horrors of that place where some 1.5-million Jews were gassed to death by the Nazis.
A Reform Jew and an Orthodox Jew talking seriously about Torah. That was the apparent novelty of \”One People, Two Worlds,\” the recent book by Rabbis Ammiel Hirsch and Yosef Reinman, in which they present a probing 18-month e-mail exchange dealing with a host of Jewish issues and texts.
Persecution is something that religious groups have known elsewhere. Religious freedom has allowed them to flourish in the United States — religious freedom and tolerance.
