October 31, 2020

The Choice Between Trump and Obama Foreign Policies

A new book by Dr. Walid Phares, titled The Choice: Trump vs Obama Biden in US Foreign Policy is getting attention in Washington, D.C. and around the world. Released in late September, it stands alone as a definitive discussion and analysis of fo...

January 6, 2020

What it takes to be a global moral leader

Today, the United States, Israel, the Sunni Arab nations, and the free Western world should sleep a little easier, knowing that one of the world's most notorious terrorists, Qassem Soleimani, has been eliminated from the face of the Earth. ...

February 2, 2018

Remembering Who Our Friends Are

In what has ironically been designated “Operation Olive Branch,” Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been trying to put the northwestern Syrian region of Afrin into a stranglehold. Turkey is now in its second week ...

April 22, 2017

The Iranian Nuclear Agreement Should Not Be Extended

As I write these words, the Iranian nuclear agreement that was brokered by the Obama administration is sitting on President Trump’s desk. It requires presidential certification of compliance every 90 days, and the president is deliberating on w...

March 4, 2017

Shattering the State Department’s Echo Chamber

Most Americans would like to believe that certain ethical qualities are in the mix when shaping American foreign policy, such as intellectual honesty and moral integrity. These qualities, whether part of an individual’s nature or those of natio...

November 19, 2016

The Great American-Jewish Cultural Divide

If anything could be said about America in the week following the election, it is that we are a deeply divided nation. Many streets in our cities have been filled with demonstrators holding signs such as “He’s Not My President”...

August 24, 2016

The Anatomy of a Deception

The media and much of the Republican establishment have caught on to only part of a story about a shady deal that the Obama administration made with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a deal that took a rather labyrinthine and bizarre form. What they are ...

July 23, 2016

Four Lessons about the Nice Attack

Secretary of State John Kerry once again, this past Sunday, demonstrated his profound lack of understanding of the Islamist mindset by saying on CNN that ISIS “is on the run” in Iraq and Syria, and that the attacks in Nice “show tha...

February 18, 2016

The Syrian Descent into Hell

In what can only be considered a war crime, Russian warplanes on Monday bombed two Syrian schools and five hospitals in the Aleppo region, killing up to 50 civilians. It was not without a bit of irony that I read the headlines in last Friday...

January 27, 2016

Blood Money

Last Thursday, at the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Secretary of State John Kerry said, "I think that some of it (the money from the Iranian nuclear deal), will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which a...

December 29, 2015

Refusing to Give Up the Ghost of Oslo

There is a complete industry that has grown up around the Oslo Accords that has kept many people employed for two decades now, inside the Beltway, far removed from the daily reality of the knifings and vehicular deaths that the people in Israel have ...

December 13, 2015

Sleeping Through the Shiite Wakeup Call

This week, while all of us were still reeling over the events of San Bernardino, word got out on Tuesday that Iran had launched yet another missile test. The missile, a Gahdr-110, a medium-range ballistic missile that has a range of 1800 to 2000...

November 10, 2015

The Syrian Chessboard

Exactly 21 years ago, in November, 1994, during the heady days of the Oslo Accords, I cut my political teeth working against the stationing of U.S. troops on the Golan Heights. This seemingly innocuous move on the part of the American government unde...

September 23, 2015

The Iran Deal -- a Corrupt and Dirty Game

The Obama administration, in its effort to forge a lasting foreign policy legacy, has not only forged what will most likely come to be regarded in the history books as the most perilous and feckless deal in the history of international treaties, but ...

November 23, 2014

Terror in Jerusalem

Last week in Israel we awoke to the horrific news that four Jews were mercilessly hacked to death while at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue. They were killed by terrorists wielding meat cleavers, knives, guns, and axes. A fifth Israeli Jew, a policema...

September 18, 2014

The Junior Varsity Team in the White House

In November of 2011, I was on Capitol Hill with some Syrian dissident friends of mine, hoping to gain enough congressional sponsors for a letter to President Obama to  offer some real and substantive help to the moderate forces within the Free S...

August 5, 2014

Call It for What it Is: Anti-Semitism

The late Congressman Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in the United States Congress, frequently would comment that “The veneer of civilization is paper thin.” During the war in Gaza, we have witnessed this flimsy veneer...

July 4, 2014

The End of Our Illusions

The entire nation and people of Israel this week has been united in profound anguish. It is an agony so great it is wells up in the cavity of your chest that can only be heaved up in vast oceans of tears, and then one realizes the tears do nothing to...

May 22, 2014

Misplaced Outrage

This month the entire world was transfixed by the heinous kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian, Christian school girls by the radical Islamic group Boko Haram, who were then forced to convert to Islam; And then this week we watched as a Sudanese Cour...

April 10, 2014

Who is Governor Chris Christie Really Pandering To?

Pundits have written about Governor Chris Christie’s recent faux pas at the Republican Jewish Coalition conclave in Las Vegas. The Governor mistakenly called the territories that Israel was forced to conquer in its defensive wars of 1967 and 19...

March 16, 2014

It is Time to Remove the Persian Mask

On Wednesday, March 5th, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) intercepted an Iranian Ship, the Clos-C, which had within it a cache of deadly weapons, including 40 M-302 rockets, 181 mortar shells, and about 400,000 bullets. The ship was bound for Hamas-co...

January 15, 2014

A Disturbing Double Standard

Afghan President Hamid Karzi has recently authorized the release of 72 prisoners, regarded as a threat to the security of the United States. The State Department has vociferously objected to that decision. On Thursday, Jen Psaki, a State Department s...

September 24, 2013

Beware Persians Bearing Gifts

Americans are an honest and a trusting people. Our word is our word, and we place a high premium on integrity. We are psychologically removed from the byzantine ways of the Persian bazaar. A friend of mine once purchased a rug there, and the mer...

June 2, 2013

Kissing My Daughter Goodbye

I just kissed my daughter goodbye, leaving her in Israel. This has always been one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do, as a mother. I know that living in Israel is an independent choice that she has made as an intelligent, thinking ad...

January 5, 2013

Egypt's Stillborn Democracy

While all eyes in Washington have been directed as to whether or not we will be going off the "fiscal cliff", there is a civilizational cliff that much of the Muslim and Arab world are rapidly plunging across. Much of the West had thought we had been...

November 16, 2012

Targeted Killings: Good for the U.S.; Good for Israel

On November 14th, Israeli President Shimon Peres visited a school the town of Sderot in southern Israel. Sderot is the closest border town to Hamas-controlled Gaza and has sustained over 120 rocket attacks in just the prior four days. "We were born a...