Why Is a Major Jewish Organization Hosting Al Sharpton?

At an upcoming conference, the Religious Action Center—the advocacy and activism arm of American Reform Judaism—has on its roster of speakers the “civil-rights leader” Al Sharpton. An anti-Semitic demagogue, Sharpton has twice incited his followers to violence against Jews—in the 1991 Crown Heights riots and the 1995 attack on Freddie’s Fashion Mart—leading to a combined figure of nine deaths. Yet he was a frequent guest at the Obama White House and now has his own political talk show. Chris Robbins comments:

In August 1991 [Sharpton] helped incite a three-day race riot in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. . . . In response to a tragic [traffic] accident, Sharpton organized angry protests. . . . He railed against Jewish “diamond merchants” and later told a crowd that “if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” Roused by Sharpton’s rhetoric, the mob rampaged. It pursued and cornered an innocent Jewish victim. Yankel Rosenbaum, then twenty-nine years old, was an Orthodox student visiting Crown Heights from Australia. Sharpton’s mob stabbed him to death.

[S]ome say Sharpton has outgrown his past. We could perhaps entertain that conclusion if Sharpton had addressed his misdeeds and asked his victims for forgiveness during his Obama-era makeover. But [he] is not repentant. The best we can say is that after cable-television executives insisted upon—and bought and paid for—Sharpton’s good manners, he has had the good sense to stay bought.

[The Religious Action Center] sees Sharpton as a key bedfellow in the anti-Trump alliance as well as a bridge to the African-American community. [It] thus chooses to see Sharpton version 2.0, the recently minted civil-rights leader and power broker. Sharpton’s sordid past is off limits. It would be better to remember Yankel Rosenbaum.

Read more at Israel Hayom

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Brooklyn, Politics & Current Affairs, Reform Judaism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF