Kenneth Abramowitz's case for resolve on Iran, set against this year's diplomacy — and a holiday season that asks Israel to remember 1973 as much as to atone.
The National 9/11 Memorial on the 25th commemoration of the attacks.
This year, the sun sets on the 25th anniversary of al-Qaeda's attack on America. It rises on Rosh Hashanah 5787 — the Jewish new year beginning at the exact moment the country pauses to remember its deadliest day.
The calendar carries other anniversaries too. It's been eleven years since the Obama administration and a Democratic Senate minority pushed through the JCPOA, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, over the objections of every Senate Republican. Three years after that, Israeli intelligence produced an archive of roughly 100,000 Iranian nuclear documents, seized in a 2018 raid. The IAEA and Western intelligence agencies reviewed the material. President Trump cited it that same year when withdrawing the U.S. from the deal. Those are questions raised in 2001 — who is the enemy, how far does the war against it extend — that media and civic leaders have downplayed ever since. This year they returned in a very literal form: an actual war between Israel, the U.S., and Iran that began in late February.
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| Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz |
That tension ran through a recent interview with Kenneth Abramowitz, founder and president of SaveTheWest.com and a leader with the Florida-based Citizens for National Security, recorded at the Republican Jewish Coalition's Leadership Summit in Las Vegas — hours before the same coalition gave Vice President JD Vance a standing ovation.
Full interview above. Click any "watch this moment" link below to jump the player to that point.
In His Own Words
Mr. Abramowitz, who spent time in Israel this year, opened with a blunt diagnosis of what he believes the White House misunderstands about the region.
Israel's population, he said, has learned that it is "surrounded by death cults."
"No more Mr. Nice Guy," he said, arguing the same posture should apply to American bases and to the U.S. itself.
He extended the label well beyond foreign militant groups.
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Democratic Socialists of America, he said, both qualify as "death cults" in his framework — grouped together, in his telling, by a shared hostility to the Constitution, the rule of law, and policing.
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| The late Mickey Bienenfeld (heard in "The Ten Commandments") sounded the shofar |
On Iran, Mr. Abramowitz framed the confrontation as three overlapping wars — a recent six-month conflict, a 47-year state of hostility dating to 1979, and what he called a 1,400-year war with a strain of Islam. Asked whether America's involvement against Iran amounted to anything short of an "America First" action — the critique he said JD Vance tends to gesture toward — he didn't back away from it.
He argued the U.S. has both a right and a constitutional obligation to act against foreign and domestic threats alike.
He cast advocates of a more restrained "America First" posture as unwitting heirs to Charles Lindbergh's isolationist movement before Pearl Harbor.
Asked whether higher gas prices were worth pressuring Iran, he didn't hedge.
"I'd rather have gas at $4.50 and be living than having it at $3 and be dead," he said, arguing a nuclear-armed Iran was the true cost of cheaper fuel.
The Diplomacy Around It
This context sits outside the interview itself — a separate thread in this year's actual diplomacy, worth setting alongside it. What Mr. Abramowitz described as America's posture toward Iran — "no more Mr. Nice Guy" — matched the early part of this year but not the rest of it. Israel and the United States went to war with Iran in February; the war ended in ceasefires brokered largely by Qatar and Pakistan, not Washington or Jerusalem. Gaza has followed a similar shape: Hamas's disarmament is being run through a Board of Peace that President Trump created and chairs, with Netanyahu's government sitting outside much of that process rather than directing it.
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| Quadrilateral Iran talks |
A different kind of year
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| Vice Pres. JD Vance at RJC via JTA |
None of that record dampened the reception the Pres. and the V.P. got in Las Vegas. The V.P. received a standing ovation taking the stage and another leaving it, and RJC board members said afterward they'd back him in 2028.
A new year opens on an old question
This week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is traditionally a time of accounting — a moment, in Jewish tradition, to ask honestly what changed and what didn't. Mr. Abramowitz closed his own interview with a version of that same question, cast across a much longer arc than one election cycle or one administration.
He invoked the biblical command to fight Amalek "every generation," arguing that communists, Islamists, and globalists are this generation's incarnation of that same enemy, returning, in his telling, precisely because each generation forgets the one before it.
Yom Kippur carries its own memory of forgetting. It was on this holiday in 1973 that Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Israel, catching the country at its most unguarded moment of the year — a reminder, still marked each fall, that vigilance and devotion are meant to sit together, not in tension.
This year the holiday falls as Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares to travel to New York, expected to address the UN General Assembly within days. Whatever he says there, the coincidence of the calendar is its own kind of question: whether the discipline Yom Kippur asks for — an honest accounting of what's changed and what hasn't — extends as readily to guarding against complacency - as it does to observance itself.
Watch the full interview above, or at youtu.be/puF7R18vu9o. Timestamp links jump directly to the moment quoted.
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