From Ian:
Isi Leibler: Balancing dangers and opportunities
Isi Leibler: Balancing dangers and opportunities
The speed of recent changes is breathtaking.JPost Editorial: The hypocrisy of the Socialist International
On the negative side, an escalation in anti-Semitism has reduced the quality of life for most Jews. Most European governments do not conceal their contempt for Israel, and their foreign policies and U.N. voting records display an absence of moral compass.
Nothing illustrates this better than their reaction to Israeli self-defense against incursions by Hamas terrorists and rocket attacks. To depict Israel's efforts to defend itself from violent mobs as a disproportionate response to "peaceful demonstrators" is obscene. No country would have shown as much restraint.
The behavior of the ailing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his acolytes has descended to levels of anti-Semitism that would have made the Nazis proud.
A rabid hatred for U.S. President Donald Trump has led many American Jews to distance themselves from Israel. Forty-two percent of them even opposed moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
On the broader Jewish political level, the Anti-Defamation League, the once respected apolitical body whose mandate was to combat anti-Semitism, today aggressively seeks to slander Trump and often criticizes Israel.
The Democratic Party has become radicalized with the emergence of anti-Israeli agitators. The primary election defeat of Rep. Joe Crowley, the Democratic caucus chairman and a firm supporter of Israel, was a significant blow. Jewish voters were not dissuaded from supporting his opponent, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has made no secret of her hostility to Israel. She is affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, which supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
The situation for Jews on college campuses has worsened. Many pro-BDS agitators are fringe Jews working with radical Arabs and far-left extremists.
But outside this gloom, there is also light.
How did we get here? For the better part of a century, Labor Zionism was a major ideology in the pre-state Zionist movement and in Israeli political life, and a major player in the Socialist International, where the Poalei Zion movement became a member in 1923. Shimon Peres was vice president and honorary president of the Socialist International, and Collette Avital, a former Labor MK, is currently a vice president.Ignoring Extradition Request, Russian President Putin Meets With Senior Iranian Envoy Wanted by Argentina for 1994 AMIA Bombing
But the progressive world has been hijacked by the idea of intersectionality, which creates a hierarchy of grievances in which Israel’s success is considered a demerit, and the Palestinians somehow are championed by all. The Socialist International reflects a trend seen in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the UK – with whom Israeli Labor has already cut ties – and a slow but steady rise in ultra-leftist candidates running with the Democrats in the US midterm elections this year.
Never mind that Labor and Meretz members advocate for progressive causes – whether for women, LGBT people or the Arab minority in Israel – while Fatah, the Palestinian party in the Socialist International, led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, is far from progressive on social issues, reeks with corruption and openly rewards terrorists who murder and maim Israeli civilians to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
It’s no wonder that Labor left an organization where it had no say and was doomed to lose, despite the party’s storied history in the Socialist International. This only begs the question of why Meretz chose to remain in this den of hypocrites.
Argentina’s government voiced its frustration with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration on Thursday, after Moscow ignored a formal request from an Argentine judge to arrest a senior visiting Iranian official implicated in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires.
Putin met on Thursday with Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to the regime’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, greeting him warmly in front of reporters. Velayati was Iran’s foreign minister at the time of the AMIA atrocity on July 18, 1994, when 85 people died and hundreds more were wounded after a truck packed with explosives drove into the Jewish organization’s main building in the Argentine capital.
Velayati was also present at a meeting of top Iranian security officials in the city of Mashhad on August 14, 1993, where the decision to bomb the AMIA building is understood to have been made.
Velayati’s face-to-face with Putin on Thursday came just 36 hours after Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral requested his arrest by the Russian authorities. It was Judge Corral who issued international arrest warrants for Velayati and seven other Iranian and Lebanese operatives in 2006. Corral also tried unsuccessfully to secure Velayati’s arrest under the same warrant in 2016, when the Iranian visited Singapore and Malaysia.
Argentine news outlet Infobae.com reported that both Argentina’s foreign minister, Jorge Faurie, and its ambassador to Moscow, Ricardo Lagorio, had reached out personally to their Russian counterparts to enforce Corral’s arrest warrant.






















