“Our iron-clad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history.” — President Barack Obama

This 19 word sentence contained within the 6992 word State of the Union address, President Barack Obama practically singled out Israel as if to highlight to his Jewish supporters and detractors alike, that he is the best friend the Jews have had. Other nations, or nation’s capitals were mentioned as allies, but only Israel was assured such an “Iron-clad commitment”.

For all the accolades and loud cheers in the House Chamber, however, the words that the President chose were quite careful and maybe even telling. Unlike Europe and Asia, which he called America’s “oldest alliances,” and the “Americas”, with which he said our ties “are deeper,” America, he said, is committed to Israel’s security. We accept that and know it, and have seen the “closest military cooperation between” Israel and the United States in history take shape in the iron-clad Iron Dome mobile missile defense system that the U.S. has helped build in Israel.

The President’s security and military assurances might imply a harsh acceptance of the present and future. Is it easier to arm a nation and prepare it for a battle than it is to resolve the root cause of the threat in the first place? Not to make a perfect comparison, , but when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani saw some of New York City’s more dangerous neighborhoods, he did not put guns in the hands of the decent people living there, but eliminated the dangers, locked up the criminals and took the streets back. The same strategies are being deployed in cities like Newark, Compton and others across the country, where law enforcement and public leaders seek to eradicate crime and eliminate the root causes of the danger.

Of course crime is not the same as ideology, and the issues that affect dangerous cities and those that drive the forces in the Middle East are not the same, but the essence of the argument is no different. Sure Israel needs better weaponry for the time being, as she needs to have a strong deterrent for her enemies, but wouldn’t the prudent course be to help clean up the neighborhood rather than, or in the case, along with, arming the decent people who are stuck in the middle. Israel is indeed in the middle of a world of nations seeking to destroy it.

The right thing to do is for the President to call the issues as they are and boldly condemn those who would seek to harm Israel. He should pound the point of the unyielding cries within the “governments” of Hamas and Hezbollah to destroy Israel. He should decry the hypocritical comments by people like Maen Areikat, the PLO “Ambassador” to the United States who said Jews would not be allowed in the Palestinian State, while Palestinians demand access to all of Israel. He should acknowledge that the divide separating Jews and Moslems in the Middle East is not about land, but about a true and deep seeded belief among many in positions of influence that the G-d of Islam wants his adherents to stamp out the Jews and erase all traces of Israel. Only then can we begin to discuss the terms of any “peace,” and try to find land agreements that would keep the distance sufficiently

Instead, this President and his administration have chosen to ignore the true cause of the problems in the region; the ideological hatred that will not be negotiated away. In his third State of the Union the President declared that “a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunis to Cairo; from Sana’a to Tripoli,” but left out the inconvenient truth that the fundamental Islamists are winning the hearts and minds of the people and miring those lands deeper into trends of intolerance, violence and hatred. Liberty is not coming; tyranny is rising, and that will not bode well for Israel or the United States.

On May 19th, 2011, President Obama said that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines.” This sentiment is nothing new; those words have been spoken by many before – Jews and Israelis alike.. However, it seemed to have belied what many thought the President had learned to appreciate – the need for defensible borders. Four month later, when he stood before the U.N. General Assembly on September 21, he said,

Then in November, the administration was so harsh with Israel over building in Jerusalem and the West Bank, it was as if the President’s words to the U.N. – only two months prior- were delivered to placate Jews after the May 19th debacle.

As soon as the pressure was off, he went back to the old routine of chastising the Jews and making moral equivalences to the plights of the two peoples living alongside each other. One people are the startup nation who built a burgeoning society that has contributed so much knowledge and value to the world, and the other is a people hell-bent seeing the former destroyed.

The President, in his speech, devoted most of his attention to the economy, jobs, taxes and government reform and he spent very little time on foreign affairs. That’s actually a good thing. Yet, in that small allotment of time, he gave Israel a shout-out and emphasized how the U.S. cares for her security. For his supporters, they will say that proves what a friend he is, but a real friend cares enough to help make sure that the use of the war machines are the very last resort.

Juda Engelmayer is an executive with the NY PR firm, 5W Public Relations.

This article was written for the Jewish Star

In coordination with UN Remembrance Day, director Daniel Finkelman recently filmed one of the first scripted and reenacted music videos, set during the Holocaust entitled, “Rainbow in the Night”.  The video offers viewers an emotional and visual outlook into life in Poland, 1939.

“Rainbow in the Night” was filmed in multiple locations including Crakow, Poland, New York and the crew was even given special permission to tape in the Majdanek concentration camp.  By filming the scenes in Poland, Mr. Finkelman envisioned that viewers would better understand the conditions and treatment the prisoners experienced. Mr. Finkelman designated the slogan, “The Last Survivor,” as the main concept for the music video. Once the final Holocaust survivor passes away, younger generations will have to refer to books and documentaries to learn about the tragic events.

Adam Kaufman, of Adam B. Kaufman & Associates, PLLC and longtime Woodmere resident said, “What’s been happening between the religious and secular communities is disheartening.  Israel and Jews have enough people wishing harm without us wanting to harm one another.  Sadly, at times we can be our own worst enemies.” To Mr. Kaufman’s point, the internal conflict would be enough to keep such a small society busy.  Yet, that could be viewed as a minor bump in the road when looking at it in the context of the world it exists in.

Read the whole article at The Jewish Star

Juda Engelmayer is an executive with the NY PR agency, 5W Public Relations and a contributor to the Jewish Star

Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome

by Juda Engelmayer, SVP, 5WPR

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school It’s a wonder I can think at all, and though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none, I can read the writing on the wall.”

These words, iconic and now ironic, were made famous by the great duo Simon and Garfunkel at a time when the orange-boxed Kodakchrome was as common as the iPod is today.  The Eastman Kodak Company, however, failed to read the writing on the wall.  The iPod, for its part, made Sony’s reigning portable music box (the “Walkman”) obsolete, but unlike Sony, which maintained its edge with other devices, Kodak failed to adapt.

The company — whose name was until only a short time ago as synonymous of the camera industry as Band Aid still is to the adhesive bandage business— was so comfortable being on top, its corporate culture could not see beyond it own greatness to plan for leaner times.

As digital imagery crept onto the market and the megapixel count rose to such a point that the silver-coated cellulose acetate strips went the way of the muscle car’s carburetors, leaving it for enthusiasts and pedants, Kodak, which based its growth on the sale of cheap throwaway cameras and mass quantities of consumables such as its film, developing chemicals and photo paper, lost its market share.

Remarkably, although the technology may be different, the ingredients are similar and Kodak was poised for evolution.  Anyone who ever tore apart an old floppy disk knows that the memory mechanism was little more than a thin sheet of plastic.  Kodak presumably had access to the raw materials, but lacked the foresight to simply add an additional assembly line, if not change some out completely.

The question is why.

That answer is that Kodak became complacent, resting on its laurels and unwilling to change even as the world changed around it.  Its leadership failed to comprehend the extent of the digital revolution.  Other companies that were never before in the photography business saw an opportunity to not only create cameras that rivaled the best Kodak could develop, but to create a whole new industry.  There are the high capacity memory cards that can hold more images on a thumbnail-sized device than 1,000 rolls of Kodak’s top consumable films, and there are massive networks of photo-sharing and editing options available in Cyberspace.

Instead of realizing that people would now be sharing their children’s portraits on Smartphones rather than wallet-sized paper photos, Kodak was still pushing wallet-sized paper photos.  While the family portraits on office desks across the world were being viewed on multi-picture digital photo screens, Kodak was still hawking paper fitted to cheap wooden frames.

By the time it bought its way onto the Internet with its Kodak Gallery, it was a high-priced new kid on the block, and without the communal interactivity that allowed others to thrive.

The field of public relations is no different.  It was not so long ago that the Big “three” networks ruled the television airwaves and the only serious news in town came from daily publications that ruled the news landscape and weekly ones that put the news into perspective. Firms founded in the glory days of Walter Cronkite’s “that’s the way it is,” which trivialized the impact that blogs, podcasts and the Huffington Post would have, and perhaps looked down their collective noses at the lowered standards of journalistic ethics, sneering at how the public would never accept media that failed at being “authoritative” because of those lowered standards are likely no longer around to complain about the fast pace of innovation.

This is the vowel sign age: Adaptability; evolution, innovation, opportunity and user-friendly simplicity are key characteristics of companies that want to meet the demands of a new era.  Technology has moved fast since the dawn of the personal computer in the early 1980s with the advent of beasts like the Osbourne and the Kaypro, and it has changed the way just about everything is done today.  From manufacturing, to marketing, to the speed that information flows, complacency kills companies. The big three U.S. Automakers learned the hard way that resting on laurels was a recipe for failure when they lost ground to the new, less expensive and better quality foreign manufacturers.

As Kodak is looking down the gullet of obsolescence and worthlessness, companies and corporate leaders can use it as a valuable learning tool.

In the late Seventies my uncle had a cartoon hanging on his bathroom wall that I always found poignant, but I never really contextualized it until the news hit that the giant Eastman Kodak was falling. It was a depiction of a roadside with tire tracks running through a broken outhouse and a caption that read, “Technology in of itself was not the juggernaut of our destruction. Our machines did not just lead us down the road to perdition. They merely rolled over us as we squatted by the roadside.”

The writing is on the wall. Don’t let it happen to you!

Read More at Ronntorossian.com

This was a special guest blog post to the blog of Ronn Torossian, CEO of 5WPR

Lew makes for an interesting choice for Mr. Obama, as he is one who has the respect of both sides. He comes with impressive credentials stemming from his days working for Democratic Congressman Joe Moakley and the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill. More recently, he was an executive at Citicorp where he ran a group that made alternative investments, such as hedge funds, credit swaps and other creative financial mechanisms that people such as the President say has hurt the economy.

Read More at Yahoo Contributor Network or the Jewish Star

Juda Engelmayer is an executive with the NY PR agency, 5W Public Relations and a contributor to the Cutting Edge News. This article was adapted from the Jewish Star

As the Jews worshiped the golden calf, they proclaimed that it was the G-d who brought them out of Egypt. How soon they forget!
It did not take too long for the experience of the Exodus to leave the people and for their faith to be challenged to the point of creating a G-d whom they thought spoke to them at that moment. They could have just abandoned religion and worship, but they still sought a higher power, and created it in the manner that they thought best. That seems to have happened again.
Too bad there isn’t a Moses today!
Not idolatry, but if we looked around at our Jewish communities today we could see clear signs of misdirected faith that causes people to act in ways that are not characteristic of a Jewish people who believe in “V’ahavta L’raiacha kamocha,” to love others as we wish to be loved ourselves – a rule that Jews sing about, quoting Rabbi Akiva, “This is a great principle of the Torah”. When we see what is happening in Bet Shemesh these days, it becomes all too clear that Jews have lost their way, and on their new paths, developed rules that have redefined the essence of modern Judaism.

Read more in the Jewish Star

Juda Engelmayer is public relations executive with the NY PR firm, 5W Public Relations where he runs a corporate, public affairs and crisis communications group.

For anyone who may have not been paying attention lately, President Barack Obama has been making greater attempts to demonstrate just how dedicated he is to Israel and therefore, for Jews in America.  The debate rages on as to whether Obama has been the best or the worst president for Jews as far as Israel is concerned, and in this election year we can be assured of one certainty; both sides will make the claim that benefits their own candidate for the White House, but what is the true and what is hyperbole?

To best answer the question, first we need to separate how good Obama is for the Jews versus how good he might be for Israel.  The two need to be divided, as without Israel Jews have little else to set themselves apart as Americans and voters as any religious group or any national group within our union. (read more in the Jewish Star)

Presidential Candidate Herman Cain was a solid option for Jewish voters for many reasons. The first being, he is a stated friend of the Jewish community and of Israel. Although coming late to the Israel game, once Cain entered politics he realized the importance of understanding the landscape of the Middle East and Israel’s predicament.

He found a deep spirited belief in Israel – likely emanating from good sense and his Southern Baptist religious beliefs. Prior to his joining the Republican debate series Cain might have in passing felt that Israel was being sold short by the Obama administration, but after his August visit to the Holy Land, he took it up as cause.

Read more in the Five Towns Jewish Star

Israel is not weak  – she is compassionate.  Don’t let this incident allow you see it any other way.

A horrific crime occurred in Cheshire, Conn., in 2007.  A family—Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, 11-year-old Michaela and 17-year-old Hayley—were butchered and burned, while Dr. William A. Petit, Jr, was beaten to within an inch of his life. The crime was committed in the comfort and safety of the Petits’ homes by two ruthless men who allegedly set out only to rob the house, not commit murder. There are few things more tragic than seeing families being massacred senselessly, and we rightfully cry out, voice shock and outrage, and demand a full measure of justice for the people who committed the crime.

Petit family

The report of this murder went viral. Just about every media outlet rightfully picked it up and offered insight and indignation. The two killers, even though they claimed not to have intended to commit murder, were demonized in the media as crazed killers. Protests were mounted calling for a return of capital punishment. The New York Times itself offered considerable space to this tragedy, which it called “a brutal invasion” and a “gruesome” crime. That is what it was and remains to this day. The second of the murderers will be tried soon. The other was already tried, convicted and sentenced to death. When the New York Times reported on the first sentence, it referred to “horrific attacks” and explained why the second killer deserved the same fate.

Perhaps, then, I misunderstood what happened last weekend in Itamar, Israel. The same New York Times that rightfully called the murders in Cheshire horrific seemed to take a more balanced approach to the death by bludgeoning of a family of five asleep in their homes Friday night.

The Arab terrorists involved in the Itamar tragedy conducted a brutal home invasion, including horrific attacks on an entire family and left behind a gruesome scene, perhaps equally if not far more brutal-looking than that in Cheshire. Yet the Times simply stated that the “assailants” “stabbed five members of the family to death in their beds.”

The Fogels – Udi, 36, and Ruth, 35, Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and Hadas, a baby girl of 3 months—were stabbed, had their throats slit and were left to die in pools of their own blood for their 12-year-old daughter to come home and find.

What would alarm the world from Connecticut received passing concern when from Israel. Life is not equal, and the treatment of the criminals is not, either. The message is that when you kill a Jew in Israel, especially a Jew living in a West Bank settlement, it is okay. The New York Times called the murderer a “Palestinian attacker,” as if he pushed someone and stole a wallet. The ruthless killers in Cheshire allegedly did not go to that home with intent to kill, yet they were portrayed as brutal murderers in the Times and everywhere else. Whoever carried out the attacks on the Fogels had murder in mind from the start—including the murder of a 3-month-old infant—yet he (or they) is portrayed by the beacon of journalistic balance as a “Palestinian attacker” making a political statement.

The weak coverage and the lack of outrage over such brutality underlie a deeper concern, yet to keep harping on the point of bias and politics is pointless; the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens said it well enough. The issue we must look at is the cheapening of blood when it comes to political or religious debate. Does frustration over land warrant brutal murder? If the same Palestinian attacker committed a home invasion murder in the United States feeling that the home belonged to him, would we just brush it off as ideological debate? This was a very personal crime committed by someone who either has killed before or will kill again; someone who is dangerous and ruthless, and who does not value life, and is likely known as such by those familiar with him. He killed a family as they slept, and slit the throat of an infant; slaughtered like animals and the New York Times chalks it up to a protest.

Where’s the humanity? Where is the justice? Where is the outrage? It certainly exists for the killers.