MESSAGE FROM PROFESSOR FREDERICK KRANTZ
Dear CIJR Friends and Supporters:
Each time I have sat down to write this Appeal, I have been interrupted by dramatic news.
There was the July 13 assassination attempt against President Donald J. Trump. The initial video showed the President’s head bleeding as he slumped to the ground. For a long moment, it seemed he might have been mortally wounded—then, surrounded by Secret Service agents, he jumped to his feet, raising a fist and shouting “Fight! Fight!”. Moments later, with a U.S. flag in the background (in an image remindful of the famous picture of the Marines raising the flag on Mt. Suribachi, on Okinawa), he raised his fist again before being swept up into his armoured SUV and rushed away to a hospital.
Then, after a tense and event-filled week, culminating in Donald Trump’s triumphal return to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, as I resumed writing this note, more, if different, dramatic news suddenly broke: after stonewalling about never giving up the Presidency, a weak and mentally-impaired Joe Biden, with prominent Democratic figures calling on him not to run, suddenly announced his resignation, throwing his support behind his Vice-President, Kamala Harris.
Call it Providence or chance, the sniper’s bullet missed killing the President by a millimeter or two, piercing his ear and not his brain, and this, with Joe Biden’s sudden resignation, has transformed American politics and, potentially, world history. We still do not know whether the assassination attempt was a crazed one-of or part of something larger (and perhaps ongoing); whatever it is, its context was, clearly, the Democratic Party’s vicious, years-long delegitimation campaign against Trump, depicted as a ”threat to our democracy,” a ‘white racist nationalist,” “the new Hitler,” etc. Now the fountain-head of that campaign, Joe Biden, is to all intents and purposes gone; with little more than 100 days before the Nov. 5 election, his Presidency is shattered, and the succession—whatever the lip service paid to Kamala Harris as a candidate (she is less popular even than Biden in the polls)—is an open, and divisive, question.
The unfolding American trauma and instability means almost five months remain of a dangerous national leadership interregnum, one which Putin in Russia and Xi in China are following closely. These events come as Israel, already largely abandoned by the Biden Administration, is at a decisive turning point. As the long, grinding war against the Hamas murderers in Gaza is winding down, the simmering conflict with Hezbollah terrorists in the north is heating up, and now a Houthi missile from Yemen, 2,000 miles away, evading Israeli defenses, has exploded in downtown Tel Aviv. As residents of the southern kibbutzim begin trickling back, 80,000 evacuated Israelis remain displaced from their homes on the northern Lebanese border in an area now under increasing Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks.
Outright war with Hezbollah in Lebanon looms. No state can allow its population to live under permanent threat, let alone be displaced, along its borders, and certainly not one which, like the Jewish state, is at points less than 10 miles wide. Israel, finally facing the brute fact of undying Iran-backed Islamist hatred, will never return to its precarious pre-Oct: 7th borders, north or south. And amid this domestic chaos and global uncertainty, Israel’s Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu, will address the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, July 24.
We here in Diaspora, as part of the Jewish People, must redouble our efforts to support our brothers and sisters in their righteous existential struggle, just as we must confront and defeat the ugly wave of thuggish pro-Palestinian antisemitism unleashed by Oct.7 on our campuses and in our streets.
Please help the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and its recognized pro-bono scholars and dedicated staff do its proven, effective work supporting Israel, our students, and our community. Your tax-deductible contribution enables us to maintain
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NB: Please view the recent Jul. 4 “Nov. 5: A Fateful Day” Zoom Seminar by Prof. Harold Waller and myself, linked above It outlines what Israel and we face: America wobbling under the failing Biden presidency, the hostility of the “international community” (UN, EU, WEF, ICC, ICJ, etc.), and the dangerous new nuclear-armed “Axis” of China-Russia-Iran-North Korea. Challenging the American-led post-World World War II global balance, this authoritarian Axis threatens—in Ukraine, Taiwan, the Red Sea-Suez Canal, and the Korean peninsula, as well as the Middle East—to plunge us into World War III.
Again, please enable CIJR—an independent educational endowment wholly dependent on individual donations—to play its role in supporting Israel and the Jewish People. Democratic Jewish Israel, in fighting for its own survival, fights for us and for the survival of what is best in Western civilization and culture. Make as generous a tax-deductible contribution as possible—and as I always ask, If not now, when?