Biden gets a thumbs-up from former Trump aide

Daily Point

Noted Trump aide from LI hails Biden’s Israel response

Nassau County native David Melech Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel and avid Donald Trump loyalist whose late father was a prominent North Woodmere rabbi, issued a statement praising the “exceptional” response of the Biden administration to the horrific massacre carried out by Hamas.

Friedman stated on ‘X’, formerly known as Twitter: “While I have been, and remain, deeply critical of the Biden Administration, the moral, tactical, diplomatic and military support that it has provided Israel over the past few days has been exceptional. As one living in Jerusalem with children who are Israeli citizens, I am deeply grateful. I pray that American support continues in the difficult days ahead.”

The comment was posted at 8:12 a.m. Thursday, hours after Trump, to promote his image, made a characteristic show of turning on a loyal ally — this time, right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"He was not prepared. He was not prepared, and Israel was not prepared. And under Trump, they wouldn't have had to be prepared," he strangely told Fox News. 

Speaking to supporters in Florida, Trump described as "very smart" the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah which, like Hamas in Gaza, is backed by Iran, Reuters reported.

"You know, Hezbollah is very smart,” Trump said. "They’re all very smart." (His praise of their intelligence was reminiscent of his praise last year for Vladimir Putin following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.)

Biden replied on ‘X’ that, with the U.S. committed to Israel, “the right time to praise the terrorists who seek to destroy them is never.”

Trump also expressed peevishness about Netanyahu, slamming him for backing out of an attack on an Iranian general in 2020. "Israel was going to do this with us, it was being planned and working on it for months and now we had everything all set to go," Trump said of the hit on Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani. "And the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack." Trump called this a “terrible thing.”

Morris S. Friedman, the ambassador’s late father, was a rabbi at Temple Hillel, a Conservative synagogue in North Woodmere, and served as the head of the New York Board of Rabbis, according to published accounts.

David Friedman played a key role in negotiating the so-called Abraham Accords. He penned a 2022 book “Sledgehammer: How Breaking with the Past Brought Peace to the Middle East.” 

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Welcome to the clown show

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Reference Point

Is it time to upgrade the LIRR system? 

It was a time of mixed results for the Long Island Rail Road. The state had taken over management of the previously privately owned railroad nine years earlier and had delivered “new cars, new schedules, and new management,” Newsday’s editorial board wrote in an Oct. 12, 1975 piece called “Bringing the LIRR’s Ideas Up to Date.”

“Each is a vast improvement over the past — yet ridership continues to fall under the impact of ever-rising fares. Something must be wrong. What’s wrong, we’d suggest, is that the railroad has failed to match its new hardware with new ideas.”

The board urged LIRR leaders to consider a proposal from Suffolk County Legis. Norton W. Daniels, of Sag Harbor, who said more people would ride the trains if the LIRR offered frequent “trolley-type service” on the North and South forks instead of one train each way per day.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that pitch was a precursor to the shuttle, or scoot, trains more recently proposed by another Sag Harbor politician, Assemb. Fred Thiele, and recently implemented to considerable applause on the South Fork.

Thiele had argued for those trains for some time, including a push in 2015 during which he cited $37.2 million for scoot train service that the State Legislature included in the LIRR’s 2010-14 capital funding budget, a successful pilot project during the reconstruction of County Road 39 a few years earlier, and a state-funded analysis called the Volpe Study that advocated for “small shuttle trains” that would run between Montauk and Speonk every half-hour or so during peak periods and every hour the rest of the time.

The editorial board of 1975 applauded Daniels’ proposal, writing snidely, “From the first reaction of politicians and planners, you’d have thought Daniels was proposing that the earth was round or machines could fly, or some equally starry-eyed theory.”

For proof that his idea could work, the board referred to the “hottest property in mass transit today” — the Lindenwold High Speed Line, a line that ran shorter trains (six cars during rush hours, two cars in daytime, one car at night) 12 times an hour along its 14.5-mile route from downtown Philadelphia to the New Jersey suburbs. The line, now called the PATCO Speedline, featured other innovations like magnetically coded commuter tickets and coin-operated machines, and automatic turnstiles that controlled entry and exit from trains. Plus, all trains were dispatched and switched by computers.

Newsday’s board saw the potential for the entire LIRR system.

“And given the inevitable trend of trainmen’s wages, the Long Island really should be gearing itself for automated collection of fares and tickets,” the board wrote. “It might be found unjust or impractical to replace the men and women now working on the railroad, but there’s no justification for hiring new people for a job better done by modern machinery.”

The railroad needed to “break with its past, as the Lindenwold line did,” the board concluded. Without that, the board wrote, “the LIRR hasn’t much of a future.”

Forty-eight years later, the LIRR is still running, of course, and it has slowly embraced modernity, but conductors still work train aisles checking and collecting tickets. The future, in at least one respect, is still in the future.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com

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