US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was endorsed at a recent rally on Saturday by an imam who has previously claimed that ISIS atrocities benefit “Zionists,” and claimed falsely that Israel was never targeted by ISIS.
According to reports by London-based news outlet Middle East Eye, Sayed Hassan al-Qazwini, a local imam, addressed a Dearborn rally in Arabic on Saturday, encouraging support for Sanders.
Video of the rally has been posted online of the speech being delivered in Arabic in front of an audience holding Bernie Sanders signs. No translation of the speech was provided in the videos.
However, previous speeches by the imam have been controversial. In archival footage from 2015 posted online by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) in May 2019, the imam can be seen giving a speech about ISIS.
Detroit-Based Shiite Imam Hassan Qazwini: ISIS Run by Israel, Zionists In Order to Kill Muslims, Defame Islam; Israel Benefits from ISIS More than Anyone (Archival) pic.twitter.com/3Y2d0sIJk4
“The only place that has been completely safe and never threatened by ISIS is Israel,” he said, adding: “What does this tell you? This speaks out. This speaks volumes. ISIS somehow is connected to Israel and ISIS is playing the role of the arm of the Zionists in the Muslim world, to kill more Muslims and non-Muslims so it can define the name of Islam, so people can blame Islam for its atrocities so that people will be alienated from this religion.”
He claims that ISIS has harmed the image of the “peaceful religion,” and that “Zionists” are benefiting.
“Who is benefiting from these atrocities? The number one beneficiary of all these atrocities is the Zionist regime.”
Newsweek quoted Sanders as saying, “I am excited to welcome Phillip to our team. He is a gifted organizer and one of his generation’s most critical voices on issues of race and inequity. He has and will continue to push me and this movement to deliver on what is owed to black people, who have yet to experience reciprocity in this country.”
Agnew is also a fierce anti-Zionist, who called Israel an apartheid state and said that on a visit there in January 2015, he saw “cold, calculating racism and ethnic privilege masquerading as a Jewish state.”
Last month, Sanders said that he would not attend AIPAC’s annual policy conference on the grounds that it gives a “platform for bigots.”
In an article in the African-American magazine Ebony that appeared online on June 1, 2015, Agnew bashed then president Barack Obama for saying in an Atlantic interview, “There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law. These things are indivisible in my mind.”
Agnew disagreed.
“On its face, it may seem like the above statement shouldn’t warrant even the slightest iota of imagination: President Obama is merely relaying the oft-used trope of Zionist-African-American solidarity! Anyone can understand that, right? Especially the much maligned, ever-resilient African Americans. President Obama is just reminding us of the strong historical similarities that we share with the apartheid state of Israel. No imagination needed here.”
Israel will require anyone arriving from overseas to self-quarantine for 14 days as a precaution against the spread of coronavirus, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.
With 42 confirmed cases of the virus, Israel has already taken some tough counter-measures, forcing visitors from many countries in Asia and Europe into home isolation. The virus has hit travel and trade, with tourism in particular expected to suffer.
“Anyone who arrives in Israel from abroad will enter a 14-day isolation,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. He said the new measures would be in effect for two weeks initially.
“This is a difficult decision. But it is essential for safeguarding public health, and public health comes first.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chaired a series of discussions today on the #Coronavirus. Among the topics discussed were the policy regarding people entering Israel from overseas, economic preparations and scientific-technological issues, with the participation of experts. pic.twitter.com/w1ddnEMvVz
Government officials said the order would come into force immediately for Israelis returning to the country. From Thursday, any non-Israelis seeking to enter the country will have to prove they have the means to self-quarantine, the officials said.
Israeli media said the latest measure would mean quarantine for some 300,000 citizens in a country of around 9 million.
Palestinians in the West Bank have also been hit by the virus, reporting 25 confirmed cases. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has turned foreigners away at checkpoints and ordered schools and national parks closed.
Passengers being notified on a flight leaving from Tel Aviv to Berlin that they will have to spend 14 days in quarantine upon their return. Some decide to abandon their trip on the spot. pic.twitter.com/XJp0NAiOqV
The decision to quarantine all arrivals is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly or have a hint of political considerations. Reports that the prime minister was holding back from enforcing the ban on US travelers in order to not damage ties with President Donald Trump were vigorously denied Sunday. Siman Tov told Channel 12 News that “no political element was part of our decision-making process… all the decisions go to the National Security Council and the prime minister in the end. It’s a professional discussion on protecting the public. No foreign interests are involved in the decision.”
Although it’s difficult, in this acrimonious post-election period, to remove politics from any issue on the domestic agenda, there’s an imperative that the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis should rise above partisan considerations. Netanyahu seems to be meeting that criteria – so far.
Unlike in the US, where the handling of the virus has turned into a political football pitting the “downplaying” Republicans against the “take it seriously” Democrats, Israelis seem to be reacting to the crisis with one voice.
Netanyahu has, of course, made every effort to appear “presidential” and in charge of the situation. He spoke with US Vice President Mike Pence and on Sunday and then with European leaders on Monday about setting up airports to enable goods to be transported between countries so vital supplies don’t run out.
And whether that’s his intention or not, these moves could help Netanyahu as he fights for his political life.
As Jeremy Sharon wrote, “the more he looks like he’s taking care of business, the more urgent the problem, the more acute and dangerous it is, the more we won’t want to change the leadership and instead keep the status quo.”
What song leads the coronavirus quarantine playlist?
“My Sharona,” obviously, the 1979 hit by The Knacks, which is so easily replaced with the words “My Corona.”
Two sisters from Hod Hasharon, Inbar and Gilor Levi, who love nothing more than a good spoof, donned nurse and doctor scrubs and a pair of masks for their YouTube spoof of “My Corona.”
In fact, said Inbar Levi, the video has gone, well, viral.
“It just caught on, it was exactly at the right time,” said Levi, who had already published the song before Israel’s March 2 elections, but found that once the elections were over and coronavirus fears took over, the song took off.
The words came to them fairly easily, said Levi, although it took a little longer to get the filming done properly.
“It’s very fast, and there’s a lot of words,” she explained.
Like many veteran attendees of the annual AIPAC conference, usually held at the sprawling Walter E. Washington Center in northwest D.C., I have learned to expect packs of anti-Israel demonstrators to gather every year during the event. They usually wave Palestinian flags, chant familiar slogans through bullhorns, and brandish signs and banners inscribed with various accusations about the supposed sins of the Jewish State.
The 2020 AIPAC conference was the sixth I’ve attended, but the first I attended as a member of the press. So on the first day of this year’s conference—Sunday, March 1—I decided that instead of ignoring the usual anti-Israel demonstrations, I would visit and observe the protests, talk with the protesters, and ask them to explain their ideas in their own words.
At their rally, I met and spoke with several of the group: young and old, male and female, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular, and several who identified as Palestinian. My conversations with each of them were enlightening, but perhaps none more so than my exchange with two keffiyeh-clad American women, one of whom claimed Palestinian ancestry. They were both vehement and emotional in their replies to my questions, and insisted that Israel was to blame for the sorry state of Palestinian affairs. Neither seemed to notice when the other accused “Jews” of barbarism, but both seemed utterly convinced of their own moral superiority.
During our conversation, I mostly listened quietly, but eventually did ask them both what they believed must be done to bring about peace.
At that, one of them let it slip. Calling Israel an “illegal country in the first place“, she subsequently declared, “the Jews should get on their knees and beg for forgiveness for what they’ve done to the Palestinians since 1948.”
She continued: “They’ve ethnically cleansed villages. They massacred 700,000 people.“
Her compatriot (who had claimed Palestinian Arab ancestry) added, “I think they feel bad. I think that’s why they’re so aggressive a lot of the time.“
It did not seem to occur to either of these women that they had both condemned “the Jews” rather than “the Zionists” or “the Israelis”. At no time did either of them amend the sentiment, though one of them later pointedly referred to “the Zionists” because “not all Jews are Zionists”. You can see a short excerpt of this exchange below.
The German Left Party, which opposed last year’s anti-BDS Bundestag resolution, held a conference last week in the city of Kassel in which calls to shoot wealthy Germans and impose forced labor on them were discussed.
A Left Party attendee named Sandra L. explained what needed to be done post-revolution after “we have shot the one percent of the richest.”
Party leader Bernd Riexinger responded that, “We don’t shoot them, we use them for useful work.” Forced labor was one of the extermination methods used by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder Jews during the Holocaust.
Columnist Harald Martenstein wrote in the Berlin daily Tagesspiegel on Saturday that “Almost at the same time as the shooting debate, eight left-wing politicians filed a criminal complaint against [Chancellor] Angela Merkel for “aiding and abetting the murder” of the Iranian terrorist general [Qassem] Soleimani and that Germany had supported the murder. At least Israel haters don’t have to be afraid of the Left.”
Riexinger chalked up his comment about forced labor to “irony.”
Alan Dershowitz | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep 85
Alan Dershowitz — was the youngest full professor in Harvard Law history where he is now the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, writer of numerous best-selling books including, "The Case Against Impeaching Trump," and his latest, "Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo" — joins Ben to discuss being a civil libertarian, Trump, Obama, Israel, #MeToo, O.J. Simpson, impeachment, going from loved to hated by the Left, and much more. (Israel at 39Min)
American nuclear negotiations with Iran began in secret, behind Israel's back. None of the countries that Iran threatened most was told that talks were taking place. We were aghast to learn from intelligence that our greatest ally was secretly bargaining with our greatest enemy about the gravest threat facing the Jewish state. When asked directly about the meetings, our American colleagues did not reply truthfully.
Five years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint meeting of Congress about the nuclear deal then taking shape with Iran (the JCPOA), and warned of three dangers:
- First, he argued that "Israel's neighbors, Iran's neighbors, know that Iran will become even more aggressive and sponsor even more terrorism when its economy is unshackled."
- Second, leaving Iran with an expansive and expanding nuclear infrastructure unnecessary for a peaceful energy program, as its advanced centrifuge research and development went untouched, would put Tehran "weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons" when the deal's restrictions were lifted after 10 to 15 years.
- Third, the deal would be "a farewell to arms control" because Iran's neighbors would insist on having the same capabilities for themselves, potentially leading to a regional nuclear arms race.
Deal advocates bet that an engaged, enriched Iran would moderate before the deal's restrictions would expire. Today, we know that an increase in Iran's aggression throughout the region accompanied the implementation of the deal. A financially flush Qasem Soleimani led Iran's stepped-up efforts to sow discord, terror and bloodshed in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and in the region's waterways.
After the deal went into effect, Iran's defense budget increased by 30-40%. The funds Iran gave to Hizbullah, Hamas and other terrorist groups climbed to nearly $1 billion annually. The Revolutionary Guards began trying to establish a permanent military presence in Syria, from which they launched drone and missile attacks on Israel. Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, using Iranian missiles, accelerated.
By the time the U.S. withdrew from the deal in May 2018, it was abundantly clear that rather than buying Iran's moderation, the JCPOA had funded Iran's aggression.
Earlier, the Israeli authorities announced that they had facilitated 105,495 humanitarian crossings for Palestinians to receive medical treatment in Israel during the last week of February.
Yet, rather than showing gratitude toward the Israeli authorities for their assistance, the Palestinian Authority and its media outlets and officials are continuing their campaign of incitement against Israel.
If, as the Palestinians claim, the Jews have been using wild boars for the past two decades, why has no one snapped even one photo of an Israeli truck carrying the animals into Palestinian villages?
What about the hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the West Bank? How come they too have not been attacked by wild boars? And how are these wild boars able to distinguish between Arabs and Jews?
While this sort of perverse Palestinian payback is nothing new, it nonetheless ought to interest anyone in the international community who is considering contributing to the Palestinian cause.
This exclusive account demonstrates that SOAS has been the venue for a hate-infested political group set up explicitly to attack mainstream British Jewry. The official minutes from this group’s meetings demonstrate-
- That it was set up by academic(s) at SOAS. The university hosts the group’s strategy meetings
- Calls itself Jewish even though it is driven by non-Jewish antisemites
- The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) – the radical Islamist group behind the pro-Hezbollah Al Quds demonstrations -gives them directives to act against the Jewish community
- A volunteer from Interpal and the Campaign Manager for the PSC have also been part of the ‘Jewish’ steering group
- At its first public outing -two of the three official attendees were non-Jews who share antisemitic conspiracy theories
- They do not have a connection to a single Rabbi and struggled to find somebody who could fill the role
- They prepared a ‘lecture series’ to tour on UK campuses which will create hostility towards Jewish people in the UK and destabilise the Jewish community
There is no justification for SOAS continually being permitted to get away with so much flagrant antisemitic activity. It isn’t just about the poor Jewish students who study there – SOAS is incubating groups that align with Hezbollah, Iran, Islamist movements – and that are created with the purpose of helping to tear the world of British Jewry apart. And if you complain – they will shield antisemitic political activity as being under the umbrella of ‘academic freedom’. How toxic is that!
Though they claim to stand for inclusion and universality, progressives these days are managing to denounce more groups than they include. Anyone who does not share their politics is, at best, persona non grata; at worst, they are downright demonized. Progressives condemn hate, unless it’s toward an individual or group they’ve deemed worthy of hating. The most glaring and pernicious example today is the obsessive delegitimization of Israel, the very embodiment of Jewish people hood.
The first prong of attack is the Left’s gross mischaracterization of Jews as predominantly “white,” and therefore powerful, in contrast to Muslims, who are perceived as “brown,” and therefore oppressed. In fact, global Jewry is dominantly brown-skinned, and millions of Muslims are actually white. But it is a small lie to tell for the sake of one’s sacred political theory.
Such a fallacious mode of thinking about group oppression begs the question: Who gets to determine the “universal” hierarchy of victimhood? Muslims may be an oppressed group in China, but in the Arab world, Muslims are doing the oppressing. Palestinians may be a persecuted minority in Lebanon, but in Gaza and the West Bank, their leadership is persecuting Christians and practicing gender apartheid against women.
The anti-Israel activist group IfNotNow has gone so far as to blame an Israeli victim of a terrorist attack for his own murder, decrying the teenager’s participation in a government they deem a colonialist regime. At the same time, they never disclose that the very term “Palestine” was an imperialist invention of the Roman Empire.
What we know so far:
1. Ken Roth solicited gift from Saudi billionaire promising NOT to defend #LGBT rights
2. HRW had reported on this donor's enslavement of workers
3. Roth's HRW had $223 million net assets & didn't need the money
Years passed, and, responding to Trump’s plan at a January 28, 2020 press conference in Ramallah, Abbas exposed the deeper layer of the PLO’s beliefs, saying: “Dear brothers, I consider this deal as the culmination of the Balfour declaration… The ‘Deal of the Century’ is based on the Balfour Declaration, which was created by America and Britain. Some may find this strange. America? Yes, America! And Britain. It was America that formulated [the Balfour Declaration], in agreement with Britain, and it was America that incorporated it into the Covenant of the League of Nations… America founded the Balfour Declaration, and it has now begun to implement it.”
Indeed, according to Article 20 of the 1964 Palestinian Covenant, “The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void.” And so, even 22 years after the ceremony in which the covenant was “abolished,” the PLO continues to consider the Balfour Declaration a source of continuous injustice that has been done to the Palestinians. It is in this spirit that in his article marking the centenary of the declaration titled “The Burden of Lord Balfour” (The Cairo Reviews of Global Affairs, November 17, 2017) Abbas wrote: “Lord Arthur Balfour was a British foreign secretary who decided to change the identity and fate of Palestine, a land that he did not own, by promising it to the Zionist movement, and dramatically altering the history of the Palestinian people... The Balfour Declaration of 1917 symbolizes the international role in the Palestinian catastrophe and exodus, the Nakba of 1948.”
In that article Abbas also proposed a solution to the refugee issue: “We also reiterate that, in order to end claims with Israel, there must be a just solution for the seven million Palestinian refugees based on the choice of every refugee,” i.e., his choice between returning to his family’s original home in Israel and accepting financial compensation.
The meaning of this permanent demand is that the PLO is not authorized to represent the will of each individual refugee, and hence the PLO is unable to agree with the Israeli government on any quota of refugees that would be allowed to settle in Israel. Hence, the PLO is unable to include in any agreement the vital component of “mutual end of claims.” This barrier is in addition to the PLO’s ongoing claim to the entire territory of Israel, a demand on which organization still educate its youth.
The new American “Peace to Prosperity” plan implicitly anticipates that, within the next four years, the PLO leadership will return to the negotiation table. In order to avoid future mistakes, we must abandon the erroneous theory that “the PLO is the solution.” We must not close our eyes to the simple fact that, for the PLO, the core issue is the hundred-year-old “injustice” embedded in the very existence of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. This gap cannot be bridged, and no plan that any Israeli government can accept can also satisfy the PLO. Therefore, a peace treaty with the PLO cannot and will not be signed.
Ze’ev B. Begin is a researcher in MEMRI, The Middle East Media Research Institute.
Pew Research nodded toward this issue last year, while studying European attitudes 30 years after the Berlin Wall’s fall. Jews were not the poll’s focus, but it’s striking that Jews were rated favorably by their fellow countrymen in “the Netherlands (92%), Sweden (92%), the UK (90%) and France (89%).”
Seventy-four years after the Holocaust’s end, Pew also learned that only 12 percent of Germans in former East Germany and 5 percent in former West Germany viewed Jews unfavorably. Eighty-six percent of Germans told Pew they had favorable opinions of Jews in 2019, compared to 53 percent in 1991.
Unfortunately, other surveys don’t echo these upbeat numbers. Asked about this, a Pew Research spokesman, who pointed to some questions posed by Pew’s “international religion survey team” in 2017, emailed, “Neither survey set out to measure antisemitism. In fact, we are very careful NOT to make any claims that our questions are actually measuring antisemitism.”
So, stipulating that Pew’s surveys do not expressly study antisemitism, lack the qualitative data Pew’s spokesman considers necessary, and include few questions, let’s look at the 2017 data, because Pew remains a reputable source. That year, surveyors asked Europeans in 15 countries whether they would accept a Jew as family or a neighbor, whether Jews “pursue their own interests” rather than their home country’s, and whether Jews “overstate how much they have suffered.”
I’d submit that the number of Europeans opposed to Jewish relatives is irrelevant here. While it reflects a form of prejudice and is upsetting to any people involved, it doesn’t threaten Jews’ ability to live freely or safely.
By contrast, not wanting Jewish neighbors is housing discrimination and affects every Jewish citizen. So when 12 percent of Italians, along with 10 percent of Irish and Portuguese respondents say they wouldn’t “be willing to accept Jews as” neighbors, that matters.
When 36 percent of Portuguese respondents, along with 32 percent of Spaniards, 31 percent of Italians, and 28 percent of Belgians agree that “Jews always pursue their own interests and not the interest of the country they live in,” that’s concerning.
And when 36 percent of Italians, 33 percent of Portuguese, 30 percent of Spanish, and 28 percent of Belgian respondents tell Pew pollsters they agree that “Jews always overstate how much they have suffered,” that’s a red flag. Neighbors who believe you’re exaggerating about historical suffering are unlikely to empathize over your contemporary concerns.
Anti-Jewish incidents in Italy climbed sharply in 2019, the latest report from the country’s main antisemitism monitor revealed on Friday.
Data gathered by the Milan-based “Osservatorio Antisemitismo” (Antisemitism Observatory) showed that there were 251 incidents of hatred targeting Jews last year, compared with 197 such incidents in 2018.
About 30,000 Jews live in Italy, concentrated in a handful of major cities.
The majority of the 2019 incidents — 173 — involved antisemitic posts online that were reported to the Observatory. In other categories, there were 31 incidents of verbal abuse, 23 instances of antisemitic graffiti and two violent assaults, one involving a woman in Rome who was slapped and spat upon by her assailant, and the other a man in the northern town of Prunetto who was punched and insulted with anti-Jewish epithets.
Stefano Gatti — the editor of the Observatory’s report — told the Italian Jewish news outlet Bet Magazine Mosaico that part of the reason for the increase was a greater willingness among victims to report attacks.
Equally, Gatti emphasized that the available data was likely an “underestimate” of the scale of the problem, “because they only include explicit complaints and not cases that are unknown or unreported.”
Asked to explain the broader context around the rise of antisemitism in Italy, Gatti pointed to the visibility of anti-Zionist propaganda demonizing the State of Israel and the related popularity of conspiracy theories centered upon Jews.
Two of the incidents recorded by the Observatory in 2019 — the cancellation of a concert in Sardinia by the Israeli musician Eyal Lerner and a public campaign for the boycott of Israeli goods — were characterized as antisemitism promoted by Italian supporters of the effort to subject the Jewish state to boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
“In the pro-Palestinian rhetoric, the themes, myths and symbols of anti-Judaism re-emerge,” Gatti commented. “Deicide, the blood libel, exclusivism, hatred for the rest of humanity: Anti-Zionist propaganda is hybridized with anti-Jewish myths.”
A top surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders's (I., Vt.) presidential campaign claimed Zionism is a "racist" ideology and even criticized Barack Obama for saying otherwise.
Phillip Agnew, a self-proclaimed militant, was published by Ebony magazine in 2015 arguing that Zionism "is a racist, exploitative, and exclusionary ideology."
"There is no direct line from Zionism to the Black Freedom struggle," Agnew wrote. "No rhetorical imagination-acrobatics can conjure one, and no amount of intimidation can chart one. It is a racist, exploitative, and exclusionary ideology."
Agnew, who also goes by Umi Selah, criticized then-president Obama for comparing the right of Jews to "have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination" to African Americans having equal protection under the law. He called it a "lie" and a "figment of our well-manicured imagination."
The Sanders campaign and Agnew did not respond to requests for comment.
Agnew's viewpoint is out of line with even the United Nations, which has a history of heaping scorn on the Jewish state. The international body voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to revoke a statement it previously passed, saying, "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination."
"The official count found 111 nations in favor of repealing the statement and 25 nations, mostly Islamic and hard-line Communists, voting against," the New York Times reported at the time. "Thirteen nations abstained. Seventeen other countries, including Egypt, which recognizes Israel, and Kuwait and China, did not take part in the voting."
Agnew is the cofounder of Dream Defenders, a group that promotes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which advocates an economic boycott of Israel and its people.
There are a lot of people who are relieved that Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the Democratic primary race, and not all of them are named Biden.
The withdrawal of the former mayor of New York City gives a boost to former Vice President Joe Biden. Bloomberg's jumping on the Biden bandwagon removes the last competition for more moderate Democratic primary voters and lessens the chances that Sen. Bernie Sanders will become the Democratic nominee. That's a relief for both centrists who fear the Vermont Socialist can't beat President Donald Trump, as well as supporters of Israel who have been rightly outraged by Sanders's slanderous attacks on AIPAC and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But Bloomberg's exit from the presidential contest also brings a sigh of relief to those who feared that his wild spending was providing ammunition to anti-Semites.
The idea that Jews buy political influence to pursue secret agendas has been a trope of anti-Semites dating back to the publication of the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion at the start of the 20th century. It's been revived in various forms, including by some anti-Semitic supporters of Sanders, such as Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who claimed that supporters of Israel were purchasing Congress in her now-famous quip: "It's all about the Benjamins."
Indeed, the fact that Bloomberg and two other billionaires with Jewish ties, George Soros and Tom Steyer (who has a Jewish father and who also recently ended a futile presidential bid) have been the largest donors to Democratic candidates and liberal political causes in recent years has created an unhealthy dialogue about campaign finance and anti-Semitism. The slightest hint of criticism of the trio – who have invested large sums promoting liberal politicians and policies – has been seized upon as evidence of Jew-baiting.
From Iran, to Syria to the Palestinians, if a Democrat wins the US presidency, especially Bernie Sanders, Israel will need to make major policy adjustments, former deputy National Security Council head Chuck Freilich told The Jerusalem Post.
Under Sanders, “I would advise for everyone to pray,” he said, adding that confronting a nuclear Iran with Sanders in the White House “is a horror.”
But Freilich, who advocates many moderate national security ideas, said Sanders in some ways is a symptom of issues that have festered much longer.
If in November a Democrat wins the presidency, “whether [Joe] Biden or Sanders, there is a critical role of repairing to be done,” he said.
“I don’t think the people of Israel are fully aware of the collapse of support – the absolute free fall in support for Israel especially among younger people in the Democratic party – and in the Jewish community, which votes in the high 70% range for Democrats,” Freilich said.
“There is pent up fury with decades of frustration over the policy regarding Palestinians in the West Bank,” which was exacerbated by the direct confrontation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration over Iran and by Netanyahu’s cozying up to the Trump administration, he said.
“There are also tectonic changes in American demographics, which have nothing to do with Israel,”Freilich said. “The fastest-growing groups are Latinos and the religiously unidentified. Latinos are not interested in Israel,” and if people who are more religious tend to support Israel, people who are less tend not to.
In Israel, the checks and balances move in only one direction. The Knesset and the government – that is, the elected branches of government – are fully checked by the legal fraternity. The justices, attorney general and state prosecutors, for their part, have no checks on their power at all. The reason they keep seizing the powers of the Knesset and the government is because they can.
Whereas Likud and its coalition partners are committed to pursuing significant reform to check the power of the prosecutors and justices, Blue and White's platform dismisses outright all possibility of reform. The Left knows what its source of power is. And it isn't the people.
On Wednesday, Blue and White announced it will seek the passage of a law barring indicted officials from serving as prime minister. In so doing, Blue and White formalized its rejection of democracy. If passed into law, Blue and White's bill will do two things which are both antithetical to democracy.
First, it will give the unelected attorney general the power to decide who can run for office. If all that is needed to block a politician from running is a criminal indictment, then the only person who matters in Israeli politics will be the attorney general.
Second, the bill seeks to cancel Monday's election. More than two million Israelis voted for Netanyahu, either directly by voting for Likud, or indirectly, by voting for its coalition partners. And the Blue and White bill intends to throw their ballots into the trash.
If the law passes, Israel's parliamentary system will have more in common with Iran's parliamentary system than with Britain's. In Iran, the Guardian Council of the Islamic Revolution decides who can run for office. In Israel, the Guardian Council of the legal revolution will perform the same function, and to the same end.
It's not at all clear how we can proceed from this point. But what is clear enough is that we have reached an inflection point. Either three members of the Blue and White coalition break ranks and join Netanyahu to form a government and save Israeli democracy, or Israel will cease to be a democracy.
Israel is a country that has known more than its share of national emergencies. Over time its citizens have weathered Arab invasions, ballistic missiles and terror bombing campaigns. The sudden attack of coronavirus is something new. For once, we and the rest of the world are on the same side.
In the first stages of the virus, Israel's aggressive instincts have kicked in as it has adopted emergency measures. Tourists from countries affected by the virus have been sent home. Foreigners from "contagious" nations were banned. Avoiding panic is central to the government's strategy. Officials want to contain the virus as much as possible. It appears to be working. No Israelis have yet died from corona and less than two dozen are hospitalized.
"We are in control of the situation, thanks to the great caution we have adopted," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the country on Wednesday. "We have been forced to take very severe steps to slow the spread of the virus in Israel and that is what has happened. We have ordered quarantines and mass checkups that many other countries haven't done."
Critics say that the hardline virus defense policy is exaggerated. But that is unknowable in advance. Risking lives to placate treasury officials, tourist agencies, business travelers or disappointed children on Purim is a step responsible officials can't contemplate.
El Al on Friday cut back flights to San Francisco and a number of European cities amid a global drop in travel over fears about the new coronavirus, with a senior company official calling it “an unprecedented crisis.”
Flights that left for San Francisco Friday morning were combined, according to El Al, due to the low number of passengers on each plane.
In Europe, the Israeli airline was cancelling some flights to Berlin, Barcelona and Zurich. All three cities are located in countries which Israel began restricting the entry of non-nationals to on Friday as part of efforts to slow the spread of the virus.
“This is an unprecedented crisis,” a senior El Al official told the Ynet news site.
“The consequences of this crisis are huge and we are trying to do everything we can [to handle it],” he said.
El Al was also expected to cancel flights on Sunday to Munich, Budapest, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bucharest, Vienna and Marseille.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday encouraged his countrymen to adopt ‘Namaste’ - the Indian way of greeting - instead of the normal handshake as one of the measures to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
At a press conference following a review meeting to fight the spread of coronavirus, Netanyahu said that several measures will be announced to prevent the spread of coronavirus but some simple measures like avoiding the normal handshake while greeting people may possibly be replaced with other forms of greetings like the Indian ‘Namaste’.
He also demonstrated at the press conference as to how the Indians do ‘Namaste’ while greeting people.
Netanyahu said that “we are in the middle of a global epidemic”, but Israel has done well as it was quick in taking action to prevent the spread of the virus in the country.
A Jewish woman filed a lawsuit against her former New Jersey school district Wednesday after she said officials failed to protect her from “endemic anti-Semitism."
Students at the Marine Academy of Science and Technology drew swastikas in notebooks and read “Mein Kampf” in public, according to the lawsuit. One posed for a photograph next to the words, “I h8 Jews.” After her parents complained, the woman became “a pariah,” the complaint said, while school leaders were “deliberately indifferent” to her plight.
The state attorney general’s office previously found “reasonable suspicion” that the district overseeing the Sandy Hook school broke New Jersey’s anti-discrimination law.
The complaint named the Monmouth County Vocational School District, its board of education and school leaders in the U.S. District Court of New Jersey.
“I’m forever saddened that this happened to me, but I have grown to accept that my family and I did the right thing by reporting it," the 18-year-old said in a message sent by her lawyer, Eric Hecker. He asked that the former student’s full name not be used to protect her privacy. She is no longer at the academy.
"I am trying to move forward but this will always be something I carry,” she said.
In a statement, District Superintendent Timothy McCorkell said the school had “appropriately disciplined” the students involved with the “I h8 Jews” photo.
Soon after that photo was taken, the school consulted with the Jewish Federation in the Heart of New Jersey. The South River-based nonprofit recommended curriculum about Jewish history and hate speech.
“Ongoing education” is crucial in situations like these, said Lisa Karasic, a spokesperson for the federation. “Both for students and educators.”
Many students at the academy were later enrolled in programs about the Holocaust and “cultural competency,” McCorkell said, in line with recommendations made by the state attorney general.
House Democrats on Wednesday blocked the consideration of a bill that would have prohibited domestic support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) sponsored the bill, which would have modified existing law to take aim at the anti-Israel BDS movement by forbidding domestic support for foreign boycotts from organizations like the United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Union.
Lawmakers voted along party lines to defeat the consideration of the bill by a margin of 219 to 194.
"We cannot be quiet when it comes to combating anti-Semitism and anti-Israel mentalities," Rep. Debbie Lesko (R., Ariz.) said on the House floor. "We need to work together in Congress and pass common-sense legislation on this issue. H.R. 5595 does just that."
Zeldin added that the bill established Congress's opposition to the BDS movement and condemned the United Nations "blacklist" of companies that do business in the West Bank. He called on Congress to also condemn the United Nations' actions against Israel.
"BDS tries to delegitimize Israel by turning it into a pariah state, cut off from all trade, tourism, military, diplomatic, and cultural ties with the rest of the world," Zeldin said.
If true, this shows exactly what BDS are about, they are willing to put millions of people at risk because of their obsessional hatred of the only Jewish state - Israel
Their compulsion for hatred isn’t rational & comparisons can be drawn to the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses https://t.co/hKmILflWXx
An Arabic-language Canadian newspaper has published an article praising Palestinian terrorists and accusing Israel of burying prisoners alive and stealing their organs.
Al-Meshwar, which circulates in the Greater Toronto area, dedicated half a page in its February 28 edition to an article titled "The Abuse of the Martyrs and the Manipulation of Their Bodies Are Jewish Commandments and Israeli Directives,” according to B'nai Brith Canada.
The article was penned by former Hamas official Dr. Mustafa Yusuf al-Lidawi, who has a track record of accusing Jews of blood libel and other antisemitic charges. In it, he praised the "martyrdom" of Muhammed al-Na'im, a commander in the al-Quds Brigade of Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was killed on the Gaza/Israeli border last month trying to plant a bomb. An IDF bulldozer prevented other Palestinians from retrieving his body, in a tit-for-tat action over the holding of fallen IDF soldiers in Gaza.
Of Palestinian terrorists, Lidawi wrote: “Blessed is their martyrdom, and congratulations to them on their dwelling [in heaven], and hail to them in the highest Paradise.” He also accused Israel of burying prisoners alive and stealing their organs, ascribing such a practice to Israel's “ancient malice, and Talmudic and Torah commandments.”
B'nai Brith Canada has filed a complaint with Toronto Police.
“It is unacceptable that Canadian publications, in any language, continue to demonize Jews and glorify terrorism,” said Michael Mostyn, Chief Executive Officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “These relentless and baseless attacks on our community undermine inter-communal relations and increase the risk to our safety.”
Instead, everyone looks the other way — condemning Israel, which is actually Gaza’s greatest, though still-hated, benefactor.
In reality, Egypt could open its border with Gaza tomorrow. It could declare a free trade zone to aid the shattered Gazan economy. It would have masses of trucks and civilian transportation crisscrossing the border, as they do at Israel’s Kerem Shalom crossing, giving Gazans freedom of travel and employment in a place their leadership hasn’t insistently deemed worthy of total destruction. After all, Gazans and Egyptians are Arab brethren, with a shared language, culture, and religion.
So why doesn’t Egypt open their arms to their Gazan brethren? Simple: thanks to Hamas and PIJ, Gazans are thoroughly indoctrinated in militancy and terrorism. Islamist elements that have made it into Sinai from Gaza have murdered Egyptian citizens and soldiers on a large scale. What’s more, Egypt has enough trouble containing the Muslim Brotherhood on its own territory — remember the Morsi regime? The last thing Egypt wants is to allow the free movement of Hamas operatives into Egypt; Hamas is, after all, the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So why then does the media ignore Egypt’s critical role in keeping Gaza boxed in and isolated? The answer is simple: When in doubt, blame Israel. Gazans inevitably get shot trying to invade Israel, making for good TV and photos. Plus, it fits neatly into the mainstream media’s preferred narrative — Israel is Goliath. Likewise, the Hamas leadership fully appreciates that attacking the Egyptian border and launching hundreds of missiles into Egypt would cause a reaction that would make Israel’s responses look positively pacifistic in comparison.
Egypt is responsible for the perpetual pressure cooker that is Gaza. While Israel’s blockade of Gaza completes its encirclement, that encirclement would not be possible if the world demanded that Egypt throw open its border with Gaza. The focus on Israel as the culprit in Gaza’s misery is misplaced and hypocritical.
Since the administration of President Jimmy Carter, nearly every American president has sought to attain the holy grail of diplomacy: a solution to the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors. In some ways, the Trump Administration’s new peace initiative, “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People,” is merely another proposal for an American-brokered arrangement, the next plan in a line of many.
But its vision is based on political premises that reveal a fundamentally different understanding of American interests in the region. From its approach to Israeli settlements and the “land for peace” paradigm to the nature of its ambitions and its conception of America’s role, this new plan, whether it proves successful or not, could come to be seen as the beginning of new era in Israeli security and regional order.
In this podcast, Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who participated in the crafting of the Trump Administration’s plan, joins Jonathan Silver to explain the details of the “Peace to Prosperity” vision and why it represents a step forward for U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.
Senior White House advisor Jared Kushner on Thursday briefed a bipartisan group from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the U.S. Middle East peace plan.
Kushner argued that the status quo is broken and something else has to be tried. He added that the lingering Israeli-Palestinian conflict is used as a pretext for more radicalization in the Middle East.
He said the White House wanted to use the plan to bring Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds closer together. He also presented a list of reforms he said the Palestinians must undertake to achieve statehood and reduce the risk of creating a failed state.
A White House official slammed the Palestinian response to the plan, saying, "It has exposed the Palestinian leadership who is defending the status quo. We are moving the debate to discussing the technical challenges and the details as opposed to romanticizing about things that people know will never happen."
Kushner's PowerPoint presentation notes that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
The Executive Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), Ken Roth, accepted a major donation from a Saudi real estate tycoon by promising not to support advocacy of the LGBT community in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Intercept first reported Monday on the quid pro quo between Roth, who has gained a reputation for strident attacks against Israel, and Saudi billionaire Mohamed Bin Issa al-Jaber.
“Human Rights Watch [HRW] accepted a sizable donation from a Saudi billionaire shortly after its researchers documented labor abuses at one of the man’s companies, a potential violation of the rights group’s own fund-raising guidance,” wrote The Intercept’s Alex Emmons.
“In 2012, Roth signed a memorandum of understanding with al-Jaber containing language that said the gift could not be used for LGBT rights work in the region. He was later pictured next to Jaber at a 2013 ceremony to memorialize the funding,” the self-described online “adversarial journalism” site wrote.
“The controversial donation is at the center of a contentious internal debate about the judgment and leadership of Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth,” wrote The Intercept.
“The 2012 grant from al-Jaber’s UK-based charitable foundation amounted to $470,000,” the news site said.
The Jerusalem Post can report that last year Roth praised Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a tweet, after he defended his regime’s execution of gays.
2/ HRW now admits that its chief @KenRoth himself solicited the donation from Sheikh Mohamed Bin Issa Al Jaber. Roth himself signed the agreement with the accused Saudi human rights abuser promising that HRW would not use the funds to promote LGBT rights. https://t.co/nX6Uwso7Q9pic.twitter.com/7WfalnPy5J
As regular readers are no doubt aware, the BBC is usually very quick off the mark when it comes to providing amplification for reports, campaigns or talking points promoted by the political NGO ‘Human Rights Watch’ (HRW).
Nevertheless, we have yet to find any BBC coverage (including on its website’s ‘human rights’ page) of a recent story concerning that organisation.
On February 27th HRW put out a “Statement on Return of Donation” which opens:
“In 2012, Human Rights Watch made a deeply regrettable decision to accept a donation that included conditions that the funds not be used to support HRW’s work on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the Middle East and North Africa. We also regret that the grant was made by the owner of a company that Human Rights Watch had previously identified as complicit in labor rights abuse. This decision stood in stark contrast to our core values and our longstanding commitment to LGBT rights as an integral part of human rights. Accepting a grant with such a condition was anathema to HRW’s commitment to protecting the human rights of all people.”
Which brings us to the importance of the election results, and the reason that Netanyahu and his supporters were celebrating on Monday night with confetti and all.
This election constituted a defeat of the “anybody but Bibi” hysteria. It represented a win for the sane center-right that believes in Netanyahu’s handling of domestic and foreign affairs, and strongly opposes the tyranny of the courts. It also illustrated that Israelis care about ideas and actions, and that they are not as swayed by empty slogans and outrageous assertions as certain politicians seem to imagine.
Take Gantz, for example, who has spent his campaign trying to out-Bibi on the one hand and accuse him — appallingly — of behaving like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on the other. You know, the same Erdoğan who jails anyone who disagrees with him, including judges, lawyers, academics, and more journalists than any other autocrat or dictator in the world.
As all Israelis know, the only person in danger of getting locked up for his political views is Netanyahu himself. But never mind; the fact that he dares to criticize the police and Supreme Court is enough to stick him with the egregious label.
The good news is that Netanyahu is still Israel’s prime minister and likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. The bad news is that the makeup of the next government, if one is established without the need for a fourth election, could take weeks and be less than satisfactory to an electorate eager to move on.
It took Israeli politics nearly a year to get back to square one.
That’s the basic fact to understand about the third round of general voting held within a year. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right to claim the vote as a personal victory, it is only by comparison to his near defeat last September that it can be viewed as a great triumph. Israel’s crazy political system may have exhausted and infuriated its citizens, but the three contests held in this period changed very little about the way the country is governed.
As was the case before the first vote, Netanyahu is still the country’s most popular politician, though arguments can be made that no one under indictment should stay in power, even if the charges against him are questionable. And yet, a critical mass of Israeli voters doesn’t agree, let alone buy the claim that Netanyahu is a threat to democracy or the rule of law. Though it shouldn’t have taken three elections to clarify that point, when Netanyahu goes, it will be either of his own volition (something that he doesn’t seem to contemplate in the foreseeable future) or because the judicial system takes him down. As long as his fate is in the hands of the voters, he will remain prime minister.
The other main conclusion concerns policy, and it is one that many commentators are ignoring. Though the rest of the world, including some of those running for president of the United States, still advocates for Israel to make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians for peace, the vast majority of Israelis have more or less stopped discussing the issue. Even if many Americans refuse to accept reality, a broad consensus on the lack of a peace partner encompasses not only Netanyahu’s right-wing/religious bloc, but also the Blue and White Party, which campaigned on stands virtually identical to those of the prime minister.
These are two basic facts about the country that its foreign friends, and especially its critics, should take to heart.
As votes cast in so-called double envelopes in the Knesset elections were being tallied, the Central Election Committee updated the count Wednesday morning, giving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the centrist rival Blue and White led by Benny Gantz an extra seat apiece, leaving the premier’s bloc of right-wing supporters at 58 seats.
After 99% of the votes were tallied, Likud gained a seat for a total of 36, with the rival Blue and White party also increasing its power from 32 to 33.
The Joint List of predominantly Arab parties dropped from 16 seats to 15, while the ultra-Orthodox Shas party dropped from 10 seats to 9.
The rest of the parties’ seat totals remained the same: seven for United Torah Judaism (UTJ), seven for Yisrael Beytenu, seven for Labor-Gesher-Meretz and six for Yamina.
Based on those seat totals, Likud and its allies would have 58 seats combined. The right-wing religious bloc supporting Netanyahu — consisting of Likud, Shas, UTJ and Yamina — though, falls short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.
The counting of the “double envelope” ballots of soldiers, police staff, diplomats, handicapped citizens, hospital patients and staff, and prisoners began overnight and was expected to conclude later in the day.
Today, enemies of the Jewish state use language to indicate Israel should cease to exist. A logical question ensues when calling to “Free Palestine” – what will be of the Jews once “Palestine” is freed? Three options emerge: 1) Israel becomes an Arab country and Jews once again take their historic place in Arab lands as dhimmis (second-class citizens), 2) all Jews will be exiled from Israel or 3) a war will be waged against Israel by her enemies with the goal to eliminate all Jews from the land.
There are real-world consequences to this type of deceptive language. A war is not fantasy. The Palestinian Authority regularly incites violence against the Jewish state. Its arch rival, the terror group Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel, is responsible for launching thousands of rockets into Israel from Gaza. More than 1,350 innocent Israeli lives have been taken by Palestinian terrorists since 2000. Iran repeatedly calls for the destruction of Israel, and the leader of the terrorist group Hezbollah stated that it would be easier if all of the Jews moved to “occupied Palestine” in order to be chased down for the “final and decisive battle.”
For anyone truly preoccupied with human rights, all three options, with varying intensity, leave Jews in a dangerous predicament all too familiar.
As this year’s high school seniors prepare to enter college, it’s vital they learn about slogans used to vilify Israel – such as “Free Palestine” – and how to counter them. In Club Z, we expose students to the language antisemitic activists use to demonize Israel. Our teens gain the tools they need to combat antisemitic activism and stand up for the Jewish state before they arrive on college campuses. It is critical that the next generation of proud and proactive Zionist leaders are adequately prepared to fight – and ultimately defeat – the PR battle waged against the Jewish state.
Today, the grotesque myth of Islamic tolerance of Jews, in particular, persists, even as we are in the midst of a global pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism and Anti-Jewish violence. This violent hatred is driven by the same unreformed and unrepentant canonical Islamic themes Perlmann described in the 1940s—which date to the advent of Islam—as promulgated, now, by Islam’s most authoritative religious teaching institutions, Sunni and Shiite alike.
Analyses from the ADL published between 2014 to Nov. 21, 2019, which determined the prevalence (occurrence) of “extreme antisemitism”—i.e., agreement with at least 6/11 antisemitic stereotypes, have demonstrated:
- The 16 most Antisemitic countries in the world are all in the Muslim Middle East, where extreme Antisemitism has a 74 to 93% prevalence.
- Extreme Antisemitism is 50-55% prevalent among Western European Muslims, i.e., ~3-fold the rate of Western European Christians, or non-Muslims overall.
- Extreme Antisemitism in the U.S., a much more philosemitic country, has a 34% prevalence among Muslims, 2.4-fold the 14% rate in non-Muslims
This excess of Muslim Jew-hatred is accompanied not only by endless jihad violence against Israeli Jews (450-500 thwarted attacks per year in 2018, and 2019; additionally, thousands of rocket barrages), but 3- to 10-fold increased rates of anti-Jewish violence, or violent threats, against Western European Jews, by Muslims, relative to violence from the Left, or Right, and 23 Muslim jihadist attacks against American Jews since 9/11, 16 of which were thwarted, thankfully, but 7 that were completed, resulting in 8 deaths and 8 serious injuries—the most recent being Muslim convert Grafton Thomas’s attack on a Monsey, New York synagogue, December 28, 2019, during a Chanukah candle lighting ceremony.
Current Al-Azhar University Grand Imam, and Sunni Muslim Papal equivalent, Ahmad al-Tayeb, during an October, 2013 interview, re-affirmed, authoritatively, the canonical Islamic animus which fuels this global orgy of Muslim Jew-hatred, and violence. Riveting on Koran 5:82, al-Tayeb stated brazenly:
A verse in the Koran explains the Muslims’ relations with the Jews…See how we suffer today from global Zionism and Judaism…Since the inception of Islam 1,400 years ago, we have been suffering from Jewish and Zionist interference in Muslim affairs. The Koran (5:82) said it and history has proven it: ‘You shall find the strongest among men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews…’
Perhaps the guiltiest of perpetrators, in Lowry’s estimation, is the “simple passage of time.” The Millennial and post-Millennial generations were “never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union,” she writes. They have no first-hand knowledge of how state-run industry affects prices and quality of service. They’ve only heard about the refugee crises that punctuated the Communist epoch second-hand, if they heard about them at all. They never experienced an air-raid drill, never read dissidents or met a Refusenik, and never participated in a black economy that wasn’t built up around the trade in illicit narcotics. For these voters, the Cold War is an academic concept.
What younger voters do know more intimately, Lowry observes, are conditions like “yawning inequality, heavy debt burdens, obscene costs of living, and stagnant wages.” And as these voters have become more favorable toward redistributionist politics, they’ve gravitated toward the “worker-centered” policies of Bernie Sanders, which are tempered by his “consistent” “opposition to totalitarianism and autocracy and street violence.” After all, “the guy has always been clear that he wants the United States to become more like Denmark, not Cuba.” That’s the kind of clarity afforded only to those committed to pretending Sanders’s career in the public eye began in 2015.
It’s difficult to think of a similar example of ignorance that would be waved off with such insouciance. Would American voters with no first-hand memory of the Holocaust be forgiven for drifting into the arms of neo-Nazi movements? Are younger Americans no longer expected to maintain some understanding of America’s experience with slavery and Jim Crow laws? Should we withhold judgment on Americans who “did not live through” the Apartheid era and have never heard the name P.W. Botha? Or is it incumbent on those of us who do have a passing familiarity with these abuses and those responsible for them to educate our benighted fellow citizens? Given the level of commitment popular liberal intellectual culture dedicates to cultivating awareness around these repugnant episodes in recent human history, it is conspicuous that many can only muster a shrug when confronted with post-Soviet amnesia.
Lowry appears to see the Great Forgetting as a source of exculpation for Americans who know nothing of the suffering endured by those who lived under collectivism. In fact, what she’s written is more of an indictment—not just of those voters but the institutions and enterprises devoted to socialism’s rehabilitation. If the right is guilty of seeing a Communist conspiracy down every blind alley, center-left media rarely misses a chance to highlight the virtues of life under the red star.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on track to win 59 seats for his bloc of right-wing and religious parties in Monday’s election, down by one from the 60 predicted by the initial exit polls. The new prediction leaves him two short of a majority in the Knesset.
The first polls indicated that Netanyahu’s Likud won 36-37 seats. Its allies in Shas, UTJ and Yamina won 9, 7-8 and 6-7 respectively. The polls showed Blue and White with 33 seats, its ally Labor-Gesher-Meretz with 6-7, the Joint List 14-15 and Yisrael Beytenu 6-8.
When Channel 13 updated its numbers at around 1 a.m. Israel time, however, Gantz gained one seat to 34 and the blocs shifted slightly, leaving the right-wing with only 59 seats.
Channel 12 also updated its numbers, giving Likud 37 seats, Blue and White 32, Arab Joint List 15, Shas 9, Yisrael Beytenu 7, UTJ 7, Labor-Gesher-Meretz 7 and Yamina 6.
However, by 4 a.m., Kan News gave Likud 36 seats and Blue and White 33, with the right bloc also holding a total of 59.
The numbers are expected to continue to change. The votes of soldiers, who tend to lean to the right, have not yet been counted and the Joint List tends to lose a seat when the soldiers’ votes are added. But, if the Right does not obtain its 61st seat, it could end up being because the far-right Otzma Yehudit Party refused Netanyahu’s repeated requests to quit the race.
As Israel awaits the final results from the elections for the 23rd Knesset, the most recent results from the Central Elections Committee (CEC) show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc as having 59 seats in the new Knesset, meaning it will need two more members of Knesset in order to become a majority if the seat distribution remains the same after final results are received.
Here are the new members of Knesset according to the most recent results from the CEC:
The coalition may not yet be in the bag, but after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's impressive showing in Monday's election, it can now be said with complete certainty: the man is a political magician.
After already serving as prime minister for 14 years, 11 of them consecutively; just two weeks before the start of a trial on charges of bribery, breach of trust and fraud; with a good part – but by no means all – of the media against him; with a bevy of former security chiefs and diplomats declaring his continued rule would endanger democracy -- Netanyahu again defeated the odds and pulled out what, according to the exit polls, looks like a victory.
His path to building a coalition will not be easy, but with all the parties – and the public – sick of elections, this time Netanyahu is definitely in the driver's seat and should be able to pick up the seat or two he needs to finally give Israel a government.
And the key to his political magic is the fact that Netanyahu is simply a consummate campaigner.
No one campaigns better than Netanyahu. No one. He has energy, charisma, and a once-in-a-generation ability to talk to his voters at eye level. He knows what buttons to press – Jewish and Zionist pride, fear of the Left – and he presses them better than anyone else.
The president, Netanyahu and Gantz should use these elections as an opportunity to try to bridge the tribes. If Israel is to recover and rally now, after three harmful and costly elections, our leaders – especially the president – should see us as one people with one destiny.
Furthermore, the people need to know that we did not waste three elections for no benefit, and that a new government and Knesset will seek to operate on behalf of all the country’s citizens – to make Israel safe and secure, boost the economy and trade, maintain the rule of law, promote equal opportunity and recognize the legitimacy of all streams of Judaism.
There are critical budgets to be passed – from health to military. Key legislation awaits Knesset approval in a range of areas, from haredi conscription to civil marriage, and important appointments need to be made, such as a new police commissioner and state attorney. The country must come together to resolve such pressing issues as halting the ongoing terrorist attacks from Gaza, returning the two Israelis and the remains of two soldiers being held by Hamas, confronting Iran’s efforts to expand its regional tentacles and become a nuclear power, making progress on implementing the Trump peace plan, and countering the coronavirus threat.
The last thing Israel needs now is another stalemate that could force a fourth election. The country – led by the president and the politicians – must find a way to heal itself from the damage caused by the last three elections and move us all forward toward a brighter future.
Alan Dershowitz says, "Israel's Democracy is alive and well!"
Likud, chaired by Israel's caretaker Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, edged ahead of Blue and White alliance with 37-34 seats respectively, an exit poll by Channel 12 shows.
The initial results hint that the alliance led by Benny Gantz could see Likud take its status as Israel's largest party, boosting Netanyahu's position in the coalition talks that will follow. The PM was brief in his initial reaction, saying: "Thank you!"
From Ian: Israelophobia and the West: The Hijacking of Civil Discourse on Israel and How to Rescue It
The new Jerusalem Center publication Israelophobia and the West exposes and evaluates the parallel phenomena of unprecedented anti-Semitic assaults against Jews in the West while simultaneously demonizing the Jewish State. It further exposes the deceptive representation of anti-Semitic rhetoric as legitimate political criticism of Israel. A special dialogue: Prof. Alan Dershowitz - Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School; Ben-Dror Yemini - Israeli journalist at Yediot Ahronot; Moderated by Dan Diker.
A 2014 survey of antisemitism by the US Anti-Defamation League (ADL) covered 100 countries. It found that all the countries in the top 10 most antisemitic locations were in the Middle East or north Africa region, with an overall figure of 73%. The West Bank and Gaza came at the top, with 93% of Palestinians expressing antisemitic views.
A smaller survey of 19 countries published by the ADL in the following year found that Muslim populations in general had the highest levels of antisemitism in Europe: For the first time, the ADL poll measured Muslim attitudes in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. An average of 55 percent of Western European Muslims harbored anti-Semitic attitudes. Acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes by Muslims in these countries was substantially higher than among the national population in each country, though lower than corresponding figures of 75 percent in 2014 for Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
In the United States, a 2017 report on antisemitism in general, identified much of the hatred as coming from the Muslim community, notably on college campuses: It is particularly disturbing that anti-Semitism appears to be relatively common in the American Muslim community, including among its leaders.
Muslim expression of anti-Semitic views has become especially common on American college campuses.
Several Muslim attacks on Jews, synagogues and more are listed in the report. Here, anti-Jewish prejudice is, as often as not, conflated with anti-zionist ideology and activism. Again, that distortion, in turn, leads many people, most often on the left, to indulge Muslim antisemitism, to join Islamic protests, and even, as Britain's Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn did for many years, to call Muslim terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah "friends".
Some anti-zionism is bolstered by the widespread rationalization that Palestinian resistance to Israel is in harmony with one's own secular political convictions. Palestinians and their supporters across the Islamic world are thought to be protesting and fighting for nationalistic, anti-colonial, and economic motives combined with an anti-apartheid pro-refugee set of priorities. Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization's leading party, for example, is proclaimed as a "secular, nationalist" entity. The first article in the PLO's 1964 Covenant reads: "Palestine is an Arab homeland bound by strong Arab national ties to the rest of the Arab Countries and which together form the great Arab homeland."
According to all elements of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, information received from the Israelis was unique in its detail and the subjects it shed light on, areas that for years were obscured from the West. Based on the intelligence provided, Washington was able to draw a detailed and fairly accurate picture of the structure and deployment of a substantial part of the Soviet Union's strategic missile divisions.[26]
How did the Israelis pull it off? Retracing the exact steps of clandestine activities is difficult, but one can reconstruct what likely transpired based on information made public after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Israeli agents who understood the Soviet bureaucracy in Eastern Europe became keenly aware of a major flaw in the system. The tendency to hoard information—itself a symptom of an obsession with secrecy—created an information glut in which untold numbers of paper-form military records were filed and stored. The more this information multiplied, the harder it became to keep track of. At the same time, Israeli spies managed to obtain the identities of several former members of the Soviet military and security establishments who had intimate knowledge of their government's missile capabilities. When these people were no longer in their positions—which undoubtedly meant the authorities paid less attention to them—it was easier for Israeli agents to convince them to share their technical knowledge. This was where Israeli intelligence reached its Cold War peak and aligned most closely with the intelligence goals of the West.
Conclusion
For many years, the Soviet ballistic missile threat was relatively low on the list of Israel's immediate security priorities. After all, Moscow's weapons were not aimed at Jerusalem or Tel Aviv but at New York and Washington. Israel had always been more interested in the MiG fighter's maneuverability and the T-class tank's endurance. So the effort to collect data on Soviet missile capabilities marked an important shift. Israeli intelligence moved from tactical concerns to a broader strategic narrative as Jerusalem understood that its long-term security interests were achieved not by narrow intelligence collection but by undermining the country that acted as the patron and arms supplier of its enemies.
And while the Cold War is over, and Israel no longer finds itself trapped between two rival superpower blocs, it continues to provide first hand and invaluable lessons on waging war and preserving national defense.
Hollywood mustered its creative forces in the 1940s when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany sought to conquer the world, with Humphrey Bogart standing up to the fascist regime in “Casablanca” and director Ernst Lubitsch mocking it and its dictator in “To Be or Not to Be.”
More than 70 years later, an increase in hate crimes, emboldened white supremacists and political upheaval have prompted TV and film makers to revisit Nazism. The works are varied and their receptions mixed, but they share a goal: to use fiction to learn from 20th-century totalitarianism and its horrors, including the Holocaust that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.
In Amazon’s “Hunters,” an unlikely group of 1970s New Yorkers target German Nazis who have brought their genocidal quest to America. HBO’s “The Plot Against America” is based on Philip Roth’s novel that posits a repressive early 1940s US government led by Charles Lindbergh, the real-life aviation hero and anti-Semitic isolationist. The Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit” is in Lubitsch’s satirical mode, deepened by tragedy.
Preceding them was “The Man in the High Castle,” the 2015-19 Amazon series based on Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi novel of the same name about a fallen America ruled by WWII victors Germany and Japan.
The war has had other screen comebacks. During the political and social turmoil of the mid- to late-1960s, cynical and irreverent films including “King Rat” and “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” were released alongside traditional battle epics such as the star-laden “Battle of the Bulge.”
“We seem to have waves of interest in both the Holocaust and World War II, not always at the same time,” said Sharon Willis, a film scholar and professor at the University of Rochester in New York. “I feel that, collectively, we return to these terrains when we have some kind of problem to work out that we think is related to them.”
Sometimes people believe something so much that even once the belief is no longer viable, they can’t quite let go of it, because it is now indistinguishable from their own sense of self. Case in point: I once asked a leader in the American Jewish community, a liberal Zionist, what he would think if the two-state solution were no longer possible. After a long pause, he responded, “That would be the end of my Zionism.” And so, he continued, he could not give up on the two-state solution.
This may be where liberal Zionists are today. As a University of Pennsylvania political scientist and longtime scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Ian Lustick writes in his excellent and provocative new book, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality: “Two states for two peoples was a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it is not a solution today.” For many liberal Zionists, this is a hard pill to swallow. But it also might be true.
In many Jewish circles, when talk of two states commences, it often very quickly devolves into: “If only we had a partner for peace!” It is imagined that Israelis are generally willing, but the other side is not. Lustick wants us to shelve that reflexive, and convenient, abdication of responsibility, and look at the situation from a different direction. Whatever the foibles of the Palestinian side, he wants to explore this notion of two states solely from within the structures of Israeli governments and society from the 1970s until today. What he concludes is that the possibility of two states was never really viable on the Israeli side, not because Israelis weren’t willing to try it—many were—but because the very structures of government and societal reactions to changes on the ground made sure it would not happen. In short, once the two-state solution emerged as a possibility in the early 1970s, it very quickly became obsolete.
Lustick begins his argument by suggesting that “two-state solution” or “one-state solution” are mistaken and obfuscating terms. Instead of “two-state solution,” he wants us to understand the “two-state paradigm.” And instead of “one-state solution,” he suggests the “one-state reality.” There is no one-state solution; but there is, from the river to the sea, one state. And that state is called Israel.
The United Kingdom has just passed emergency legislation that will stop the early release of convicted terrorists from prison. This decisive action comes on the heels of two recent terror attacks in London by jihadists who were released from prison earlier than the end of their sentences for terror-related crimes.
In November, Usman Khan, who had served eight years in prison before being granted an early release, killed two people and wounded three others in an attack near London Bridge. Khan was wearing a fake suicide vest when he committed the attack. Khan participated in a de-radicalization program. Clearly, the program did not guarantee that Khan was genuinely rehabilitated or would not re-offend.
The second attack came in February, when Sudesh Amman, 20, stabbed two people in the Streatham section of South London. Amman had been released from prison just a week earlier, after he had served about half of his 40-month prison sentence for a 2018 terror conviction.
Undercover police were watching Amman, but they were not able to stop his stabbing spree. He was shot and killed by police within a minute.
The legislation enacted Wednesday blocks early release for about 50 imprisoned extremists, a statement from the UK Ministry of Justice said. It requires that any inmate convicted of a terror-related crime, such as training for terrorism, membership in a terror organization, or disseminating terrorist literature, must complete at least two-thirds of his or her sentence before being considered for release. Even then, the release is not guaranteed.
“No terrorist should be released early only to kill and maim on our streets,” said Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Robert Buckland. “Protecting the public is Government’s first duty and our message is clear — enough is enough.”
Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer has been named the ninth best hospital in the world by leading US magazine Newsweek, climbing one place since last year's rankings.
The hospital, located east of Tel Aviv, is Israel's largest medical facility and cares for approximately 1.6 million people annually. The hospital is also home to more than one-quarter of all Israeli clinical research.
The weekly magazine cited the hospital's collaborations with biotech and pharmaceutical companies worldwide to develop new drugs and treatments, in addition to research specialities including cardiology, cancer, brain diseases and genetics.
The Rochester-based Mayo Clinic led the global rankings for a second year, followed by Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital. Tel Aviv's Sourasky Medical Center, also known as Ichilov Hospital, was named the world's 34th leading hospital.
Tens of thousands of medical professionals were invited to participate in the survey ranking the world's best hospitals, which also took into account results from patient surveys and other medical performance indicators.
Other leading hospitals included Toronto General Hospital, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Johns Hopkins Hospital, University Hospital Zurich and Singapore General Hospital.
Israeli company BATM of Hod Hasharon announced that its biomedical division has developed a diagnostics kit to detect coronavirus from saliva samples in less than half an hour.
CEO Dr. Zvi Marom tells ISRAEL21c that the test is compatible with the current hospital-based method for diagnosing COVID-19, reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) – a type of gene sequencing that takes about eight hours.
“This kit has undergone testing by several central laboratories and hospitals that have now verified its ability to diagnose COVID-19,” says Marom, referring to the disease caused by coronavirus infection.
Marom, who has degrees in medicine and in industrial electronics, said BATM already has an advanced diagnostics kit that detects SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). The COVID-19 aspect will be added to that kit.
“BATM is working with academic and research institutions, mainly in Europe, to progress the kit to make it at a price point suitable for large-scale production,” says Marom. “The kit, which supports all the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendations, has already received interest from customers in several countries.”
By next year, BATM expects that the test will be commercialized as part of its NATLab doctor’s office solution using artificial intelligence and individual disease cartridges to diagnose bacterial, viral or fungal infections within 90 minutes. For now, only meningitis can be diagnosed with NATLab, produced by BATM subsidiary Ador Diagnostics in Rome.
Thanks to a new social-action project, Chinese coronavirus patients were able to ask Israeli primary care physician Dr. Rachel Libenson Vansh how to maintain proper health and hygiene while confined at home.
Using a Zoom video link over China’s Weibo social network, Libenson Vansh answered their questions in English with immediate translation into Chinese.
This remarkable setup, which took place over a week ago, was the first in a series of interactive video broadcasts spearheaded by Israeli organization Innonation, which links talents, companies and organizations across borders through its hubs in Israel and China.
One hundred Israeli physicians have volunteered to speak remotely with quarantined COVID-19 patients on topics of concern — such as family and children; dermatology (including sensitivity to protective masks); diet; psychology (as well as dealing with anxieties); pregnancy; and signs of serious illness that require immediate attention.
Figures today show the COVID-19 virus has infected 86,584 people in more than 60 countries and caused 2,976 deaths. Many people who have been put into quarantine, or are self-isolated at home, are worried and fearful and have many questions about their situation and how to look after themselves.
“The health systems in countries affected by the coronavirus are under tremendous pressure. They find it difficult to deal with the medical needs of people living under quarantine and with the general population that fears going to clinics and hospitals,” says Amit Gal-Or, who cofounded Innonation in 2016 with his father, Amir, and brother, Raz.
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