Saturday, November 03, 2018
From Ian:
Bari Weiss: When a Terrorist Comes to Your Hometown
Bari Weiss: When a Terrorist Comes to Your Hometown
I want to tell you what it is like when your neighborhood becomes the scene of a mass murder.Ben Shapiro Interview: Israel is protecting Western civilization
The first thing you should know is that when your phone pings with a text from your youngest sister saying, “There is a shooter at tree of life,” your brain will insist that it is not true, that it is a hoax.
But your fingers will write back immediately, unthinking: “is dad there.”
Your mouth will turn to cotton while you wait for your mom to confirm that your father, who goes to one of Squirrel Hill’s synagogues every Shabbat morning, was not in the building.
Then another of your sisters will send a link to the police scanner and you will listen as the calls come in from the scene. You hear an officer report that the shooter declared he wants to “kill all the Jews.” He has hit officers. “Shots fired. Shots fired. Shots fired.”
You will cancel all your plans and book a flight home. Before you are even on the plane you will start to hear rumors — a couple has been killed, a doctor. You will wonder which families in your neighborhood will be shattered.
The numbness will break only when you find out that Cecil Rosenthal — the intellectually disabled, gentle giant of a man your mother has known since grade school — was murdered along with his brother, David. You will picture him as a proud usher standing in the entrance to services, and you will wonder if he greeted the killer, too. And you will weep.
When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again. But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers — the chevra kadisha — who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro‘s star has been rising in the US in recent years. He’s only 34 years old, but he began his career 17 years ago, writing a syndicated column, and now he has his own news site, The Daily Wire, “The Ben Shapiro Show,” a podcast with millions of listeners.Caroline Glick: Israeli Cabinet Minister Challenges Propaganda on Trump and Antisemitism
In between, he managed to become editor-at-large of the far-right – these days, some would say alt-right – website Breitbart, and resigned in 2016. Shapiro accused Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon, an eventual adviser to US President Donald Trump, of turning the site into “Trump’s personal Pravda.”
Later that year, the Anti-Defamation League identified Shapiro as the No. 1 target of online antisemitism among Jewish journalists in the US, and he received the most hate by far.
Shapiro continues to be targeted from all ends: from the Left, because he’s staunchly conservative, and from the Right, because he is not a Trump cheerleader, and doesn’t hesitate to criticize the president.
His no-nonsense attitude and caustic humor have attracted admirers and detractors; “facts don’t care about your feelings” is his most famous slogan, and he sells coffee mugs that are labeled “leftist tears.” He’s found allies in the self-described Intellectual Dark Web, a group of thinkers – their day jobs include academia, journalism and comedy – who don’t fit perfectly into mainstream media’s liberal or conservative labels, and have found wild success producing their own content online.
Although Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew and a vocal supporter of Israel, his content is aimed at a broader American audience, and therefore he doesn’t often focus on those areas.
In a conversation with The Jerusalem Post last month from his LA podcast studio, the father of two – married to a Moroccan-Israeli doctor about whom he often sweetly scheps naches (expresses great pride) – discussed American Jewish identity, support for Israel and more, in his typically no-holds-barred manner. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett kicked in the foundations of the left’s case against President Donald Trump on Tuesday. And they didn’t like it.
Since Saturday’s massacre of 11 mostly elderly Jews at prayer at the Tree of Life Synagogue, prominent left-wing American Jewish activists and Never Trump pundits have blamed Trump for the massacre by insisting that he has empowered antisemitic forces in the U.S.
The “proof” these commentators provide for their incendiary allegation is the Anti-Defamation League’s 2017 report on antisemitic incidents in the U.S. The ADL alleged that during Trump’s first year in office, there was a 57 percent rise in antisemitic incidents.
Bennett flew to Pittsburgh Sunday as the representative of the Israeli government to show solidarity with the Jewish community in the aftermath of the massacre. Before travelling back to Israel, he participated in a roundtable discussion of antisemitism in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.
When asked about the ADL data, Bennett said that he wasn’t certain that the report was accurate. “I’m not convinced those are the facts,” Bennett said adding, “I’m not sure there’s a surge in antisemitism in the United States.”
“We need to look at the facts. I understand that the ADL themselves have stated there is a drastic reduction in violent anti-Semitic events, but that has for some reason been hidden from the public discourse,” he maintained.
📆101 years ago today, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, endorsing the Jewish people’s right to a national home.
— Mark Regev (@MarkRegev) November 2, 2018
“The Balfour Declaration puts Britain on the right side of history.”
—@IsraeliPM
📷Inspecting the original Declaration with Mrs Netanyahu at @BritishLibrary pic.twitter.com/JwXN5xwu7e
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