Kenneth Abramowitz's warning about Iran, measured against the diplomacy that actually followed it.
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.
 |
| 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.
Mr. Abramowitz: "No more Mr. Nice Guy"
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.
 |
| The late Mickey Bienenfeld sounding the New Year shofar (heard in "The Ten Commandments") |
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.
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 restraint Mr. Abramowitz didn't mention
What Mr. Abramowitz described as America's posture toward Iran — "no more Mr. Nice Guy" — matched the earlier part of this year but not the latter. Israel and the United States went to war with Iran starting in late February, a campaign that included direct U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. But the war didn't end in regime change or a decisive resolution — it ended in a string of ceasefires, several of which collapsed and had to be renegotiated, brokered increasingly by Qatar and Pakistan rather than by Washington or Jerusalem. Islamabad brokered the initial ceasefire and hosted the highest-level U.S.-Iran talks in 47 years; Doha stepped in later to help stabilize the Strait of Hormuz and keep negotiations alive after they repeatedly broke down. Whatever appetite existed in February for a fight through to regime change in Tehran gave way, over the following months, to a mediated, negotiated off-ramp — steered substantially by two governments with their own relationships to political Islam and, in Qatar's case, to Hamas itself.
 |
| Quadrilateral Iran talks |
The pattern repeated closer to Israel's other fronts. President Donald Trump has told Netanyahu directly to keep Lebanon strikes "surgical," with U.S. officials publicly asking Israel to "exercise restraint" while a diplomatic track with Beirut plays out. The Pres. has warned Israel not to "interfere" in Syria's post-Assad transition. And Israel's own Gaza plan for the territory's future has run into resistance from Washington's preferred framework, brokered in large part through the same Gulf channels.
A different kind of year
 |
| 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. Whether the summit's other sessions addressed the year's Qatar- and Pakistan-mediated diplomacy isn't something this interview or the available reporting on the event covers — but the warmth of the reception itself is a matter of record, regardless of what else was or wasn't said from the podium that week.
A new year opens on an old question
Rosh Hashanah 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.
It's a framework built for permanence, not news cycles: a call to vigilance regardless of who is in the room applauding, who is brokering which ceasefire, or how any single summit chooses to spend its evening. Whether that vigilance gets applied as evenly to allies as Mr. Abramowitz applies it to enemies is the question his own framing leaves open — and, fittingly, the kind of question the new year is supposed to prompt.
Watch the full interview above, or at youtu.be/puF7R18vu9o. Timestamp links jump directly to the moment quoted.
- Teshuvah - repentance and return
- Tefillah - prayer
- Tzedakah - charity and righteous giving
The stories illustrate the breadth of our mission: documenting Jewish communal life, preserving firsthand testimony, questioning public officials and institutions, examining threats to Israel and Jewish safety, and celebrating Jewish faith, culture and resilience.
Our initiative produces and publishes original video journalism, including:
- Interviews with political, religious and community leaders
- Coverage of conferences, rallies, public forums and Jewish communal events
- Reports concerning Israel, antisemitism and the challenges facing Jewish communities
- Speeches and firsthand accounts that viewers might otherwise never see
- Video stories produced for audiences seeking substance beyond brief headlines and conventional news narratives
During the past 12 months, our original reporting has included:
- Are Public Chanukah Menorah Lightings Days After the Bondi Massacre Prudent?, examining the balance between security, Jewish visibility and the determination to answer darkness with greater light.
- Israel Achieves 78 Years of Liberty, reporting from a Los Angeles Independence Day celebration and asking how more than 30 months of war have affected diaspora Jews.
- Israel’s Lifeline When Missiles Strike - Magen David Adom Explained, featuring our interview with MDA Chief of Staff Uri Shacham about Israel’s emergency medical and blood-services network.
- Israel as America’s Will-to-Act, presenting security analyst Ken Abramowitz’s assessment of Israel, Hamas, Iran and the resolve required to confront Islamist threats.
- Jewish and Israeli Gaming-Industry Conventioneers Gather for an October 7 Survivor’s Perspective, preserving photographer Inor Kagno’s firsthand testimony about surviving the Nova Music Festival massacre and confronting the information war that followed.
- An Historic, Rabbinic Transition at American Jewish University - New Horizons for the Ziegler School, examining the succession of Rabbi Bradley Artson by Rabbi Cheryl Peretz and the future of rabbinic education.
- Loay Alnaji, Who Killed Paul Kessler, Will Likely Serve Just Six Months, continuing our coverage of the killing of a Jewish Californian who stood publicly in support of Israel.
Get the mitzvah by donating here or utilize the Donate window at the top of the column in the margin on the right.
No comments:
Post a Comment