Author: Jonathan S. Tobin /JNS.org
OPINION: Jonathan S. Tobin. Americans don’t like war in general. But if it has to be done, it had better be quick. The joint U.S.-Israeli effort against Iran may only be two months old, but that is already too long for many people, most of whom never wanted armed conflict with Tehran in the first place. And that is proving to be politically problematic for President Donald Trump and the Republicans. The Iran war is just one reason for the polls predicting defeat for the GOP in the midterm elections in a year when the incumbent party typically loses. There’s…
By Jonathan Tobin/ JNS.org The latest attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump demonstrates anew that, like the toleration of antisemitism, the demonization of opponents leads to the unthinkable. We’ve been through this so many times that perhaps it’s futile even to raise the possibility that the temperature of political discourse should be lowered. But after the third attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump in less than two years, combined with other acts of political violence such as the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the subject is unavoidable. American politics is now being conducted in a manner in which it…
Opinion: Jonathan S. Tobin Critics assert that the price America is paying to force the Islamic Republic to give up its nuclear ambitions and zeal for terrorism is too high. But the alternatives are far worse. Two weeks after the start of the U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran, naysayers about the wisdom of the operation remain pervasive and loud. The arguments against the war are based on a variety of concerns. The motivations of many of those denouncing the decisions of President Donald Trump are clearly partisan, ideological, and, in the case of a considerable percentage of those on the far…
Ten days after the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli air offensive against Iran’s terrorist regime, the ultimate outcome of the joint campaign remains uncertain. Iran’s government and military have largely been decapitated, with the country’s ability to inflict terror on the region drastically reduced. Further damage has been done to its ballistic-missile and nuclear programs. Yet it’s still unclear if the theocratic tyranny in Tehran will fall, as both America and Israel want and expect. What is clear is the focus of the opposition. Its campaign primarily revolves around one issue—and it isn’t the Jewish state. That comes despite attempts by right-wing and…
Being an aide to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as one of his companions in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968—the day the leader of the civil-rights movement was shot and killed—conferred a certain status on Rev. Jesse Jackson that amounted to secular sainthood. Parlaying that clout into being the first serious African-American candidate to run for president—with his two ultimately unsuccessful, but impactful, campaigns for the Democratic Party nomination in 1984 and 1988—gave him a place in history that nothing else he did or said could take away. Those résumé items are the main reasons why Jackson,…
OPINION: Jonathan S. Tobin What does it say about a country where some rudimentary knowledge about the Holocaust is commonplace, but where misleading analogies about it are a routine occurrence in public discourse? You can ask the same question about the use of the most important term to come out of the Shoah. The word “genocide” was coined in its aftermath to describe the systematic mass slaughter aimed at the extermination of a single people. But in a country where it is estimated that about three-quarters of American K-12 students get lessons on the murder of 6 million Jews by the German…