Of Life And Liberty

Dear Editor,

America became great in 1776 when our Founders sacrificed their lives and livelihoods to establish a nation founded on liberty. Every American can now help make America great again by respectfully and persistently prevailing on Congress (202-224-3121) to pass the Education Freedom Accounts Act (S.2455/H.R.4426). This will empower parents in the District of Columbia to provide their children with a quality education that matches their needs, talents, and faith, which is their Divine, human, and civil right.

This will also serve as a model and trailblazer for all 50 states on how to render our educational system consistent with our Constitution and our free-enterprise system, vastly improving the quality of education and saving taxpayers countless billions of dollars.

Just as liberty served to transform thirteen small colonies into the greatest, most innovative “united nation” in the history of civilization, liberty restored in 2017 will surely accomplish no less.

Israel Teitelbaum

Alliance for Free Choice in Education

Morristown, New Jersey

U.S. Hypocrisy
Toward Israel

Dear Editor,

With all the think tanks in and around Washington, it is interesting and even funny that the United States cannot figure out how to bring about correct results in the Middle East that are consistent with true democratic ideology as has been implemented by previous U.S. presidents over the decades. A big part of this problem may actually lie with the ideological change in foreign policy brought to the White House by Barack Obama, which sought to change the U.S. role in the world. Another aspect may be this administration’s resentment for Israel.

By pursuing this change in ideology, President Obama has created the climate for the release of tremendous destructive forces which theoretically have brought us closer to a world war than we have ever been since the last one. The main reason for this was his attempt to realign U.S. foreign policy with his own ideological ambitions while breaking off from the consistency of policy endeavors of the Bush administration that were established in reaction to 9/11. When Obama came into office, he immediately sought to end the U.S. engagement in Iraq and ultimately set a date for withdrawal. He later did the same thing with Afghanistan.

The stark contrast between the goals of the Obama administration in Afghanistan and the results that we are witnessing in Iraq and Syria may be reflective of the antipathy that this outgoing administration has had for Israel. While President Obama has admittedly brought an added measure of safety to U.S. shores by taking out virtually the entire al-Qaeda command structure with drone strikes, he has at the same time caused a major conflagration in the Middle East by pursuing policies that accelerated the formation of ISIS.

All President Obama had to do in order to keep ISIS marginalized as perhaps just another terrorist group with its original name al-Qaeda in Iraq was to fund and support the anti-Assad forces when they had a chance of success at the time of its nascence, but instead he balked. The real question is why.

While it could very well be that Obama’s reluctance to originally fund the Syrian rebels was based upon wrong advice given to him by those so-called think tanks who perhaps saw Assad as a source for stability in the Middle East after Hussein, Mubarak, and Khadafy were all gone, or because those so-called think tanks feared the release of al-Qaeda prisoners from Assad’s jails (which was happening anyway), it could also perhaps have been due to the age-old adage which says that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The fact that President Assad is a well-known ally and supporter of both Hezbollah and Iran–two of Israel’s most intractable enemies, and is continuously pressuring the Jewish State about the Golan, may well have fed into Obama’s deep-seated resentment of the Jewish State and prevented him from acting quickly.

President Obama has certainly proven that antipathy now by his current administration’s recent abandonment of Israel to the contagious forces of hatred which pervade the United Nations. The first President Bush who launched operation Desert Storm was at least somewhat consistent in his opposition to Israeli settlement building by also opposing Saddam Hussein’s attempted land grab in Kuwait. Has Obama’s administration in contrast been acting purely hypocritical by sitting back and permitting ISIS to kill, annihilate, and persecute tens of thousands of people while engaged in an unfettered land grab, while at the same time stridently opposing the reasonable expansion of Israeli society forged from huge amounts of Jewish blood spilled from unprovoked terror attacks on its citizens and in the wake of an entire history of Arab intransigence?

One is left to wonder, if disengagement has been the major theme of the Obama administration vis-à-vis its foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, why did it suddenly choose to reengage with Israel so late in the presidential term and actually construct the resolution of condemnation as many believe that it did? And if as President Obama recently confided in an interview that ISIS’s ability to initiate major land grabs was not on his administration’s “radar” then why could he not also conveniently keep Israel’s settlement expansions off that radar as well? In the end, it will be none other than Obama’s own pathetic legacy which will likely answer that question.

Lawrence Kulak

Brooklyn, N.Y.

Russia Underground

Dear Editor,

“The Double Tragedy of Soviet Jewry” by Nison Gordon, z’l (December 30)–the English translation of a 1964 Yiddish article–is a fascinating time-capsule piece. It apparently was written just before the grassroots Soviet Jewry movement burst onto the scene on May 1, 1964 with nearly 1,000 students–many Orthodox–demonstrating at the Soviet UN Mission. While Chabad continued its underground mission in the USSR, and many other charedi groups declined to join public protests, perhaps due to their rabbis’ experiences under the Nazis and Soviets, Modern Orthodox rabbis became the inspirational leaders of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. In the end, after many years of hardship, G-d revealed His miracle and a quarter of our brethren who were trapped in Russia were redeemed.

Glenn Richter

Manhattan

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