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Friday, June 03, 2022

06/03 Links Pt2: Morningstar's ESG unit admits anti-Israel bias; Beinart, in New York Times, Aims at Maker of Iron Dome, Javelin While Misleading on Military Budget

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: From Washington to Jerusalem, the conspiracies are unravelling
Like every politician on the face of the planet, Netanyahu sought positive coverage from news organizations. The prosecution decided that this effort amounted to a solicitation of a bribe. Netanyahu signed regulatory decisions that affected a telecommunications firm owned by his friend. The prosecution decided this was a favor – a payment for positive coverage from his friend's news website. Unfortunately for the prosecution, Netanyahu received terrible coverage from the website. But no matter, the prosecutors simply updated the definition of bribery. They said Netanyahu received "undo responsiveness" from the website's management to his requests for better coverage, and that was now the definition of a bribe.

Over the first several months of the trial, prosecution witness after prosecution witness shred the claim. The website's management was not responsive to requests from Netanyahu or his spokesmen, not in absolute terms and not in comparison to requests from other politicians.

Over the past three months, the focus of the trial moved to the alleged regulatory favors Netanyahu provided his friend, who owned the telecommunications giant Bezeq along with his website. Here too, the prosecution's case has fallen apart. Netanyahu was a mere rubber stamp in the regulatory process. He gave no instructions to his underlings. There was no give, and no take. There was no bribe.

There are many different ways to view the prosecution's behavior. Some commentators argue that they never thought Netanyahu would risk going to trial and would simply cop a plea to avoid prison and slink off into the shadows, handing leadership of the country to someone else. Others claim that the prosecutors are simply stupid, or incompetent.

But judging from their behavior, Israel's legal fraternity was – and remains – rabidly political. They used every power they could conjure up to bring about Netanyahu's downfall. They invented laws just for him. They defined politics and journalism as criminal enterprises, to criminalize Netanyahu's non-criminal actions – which, it works out, he didn't even undertake. They trampled the very notion of the rule of law in their "ends justify the mean" campaign to force Netanyahu from power.

And just as in the case of Russiagate, the prosecutors and the police could never have conducted their legal coup d'etat without the media's full cooperation. Just as was the case with Trump and the US media, so in Netanyahu's case, the Israeli media was a full partner in the plot to overthrow Netanyahu. Throughout the two-year investigation, the media received a constant stream of illegal, and grossly distorted information from police interrogations which carefully selected reporters breathlessly reported daily on the evening news.

Israel's prosecutors tied their actions to the elections calendar to tilt the results against Netanyahu. And they succeeded. For four years, then-attorney general Mendelblit was the most powerful "politician" in Israel. And he won. Netanyahu was first paralyzed and weakened by the investigations, then critically wounded by the indictment, and finally forced from office.

Whether or not Netanyahu is exonerated, whether or not Sussman's acquittal was justified, the fact is that no verdict will bring justice or bridge the divides in American and Israeli societies. So long as the legal systems that created Russiagate and ousted Netanyahu from power remain corrupted by politicized bureaucrats, our societies will only grow more divided and unstable.
Beinart, in New York Times, Aims at Maker of Iron Dome, Javelin While Misleading on Military Budget
Unlike Beinart, I’m not going to cast aspersions on people’s motives. Yet it’s intriguing that the single defense contractor he names, Raytheon, is Israeli defense firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.’s partner in the development of the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and SkyHunter interceptor systems and Tamir missiles that defend against incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars. Beinart is on record calling for elimination of the Jewish state and its replacement with a different country Beinart calls “Israel-Palestine,” “a Jewish home that is also, equally, a Palestinian home,” “a Jewish home that is not a Jewish state.”

Personally, I’m grateful Israelis are protected by defense systems of the sort built by Raytheon and Rafael. I’d think ties to Raytheon would be a plus in a potential Pentagon official, not a disqualifier.

Even Beinart concedes, “The Biden administration deserves credit for speedily arming Ukraine.” Who does Beinart think manufactured those arms that went to Ukraine? Without the defense contractors Beinart is casting aspersions on, the Ukrainians would be crushed under the tracks of Russian tanks. Raytheon, it turns out, also helps make the Javelin antitank missile that has been so useful to Ukraine in disabling Russian armor.

Modern weaponry requires extended research, development, manufacturing, testing, and training lead time. Without adequate military spending even in peacetime, speedily arming any country — Ukraine, Israel, the United States itself — that needs protection from an advancing tyrant becomes impossible. This was a point made memorably in 1938 by Winston Churchill in While England Slept and in 1940 by John F. Kennedy in Why England Slept. By the years those books were published, the realizations were, alas, too late to save much of European Jewry.


Podcast: Spielberg-produced documentary dissects 2016 Tel Aviv terror attack
Welcome to this week’s Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel.

This week, host Jessica Steinberg speaks to documentary filmmaker Tal Inbar and producer Nancy Spielberg, sister of Steven Spielberg, who premiered their new film “Closed Circuit” at DocAviv, Tel Aviv’s annual documentary film festival.

“Closed Circuit” uses security camera footage — much of it taken on the night of the 2016 terror attack in Tel Aviv’s upscale Sarona Market — when two men in suits shot at a crowd eating out, killing four people.

Inbar uses the footage to deconstruct the event, augmented by interviews with those who survived the attack, and who speak openly and honestly about their insights into that event as well as how it has affected them to this day.

The nearly-hour-long documentary is made up primarily of security camera footage, while the one-on-one interviews with the survivors were filmed at Sarona Market, just meters from the site of the attack.

Spielberg discusses her immediate fascination with the film upon receiving a ‘cold’ email from Inbar, as well as her own relationship to Israel.

She reflects on how the film resonates, particularly in the US, currently reeling from its own spate of tragic attacks.




Event with PFLP terrorism ties held at Ottawa city-owned property
Activists with alleged connections to terrorist organizations are keynote speakers at an event on Friday that is being held on Ottawa city property, against the municipality's policies on providing public spaces to individuals and groups that support violence. Speakers with terrorism ties

Khaled Barakat — allegedly a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization — and his wife Charlotte Kates — a leader in the allegedly PFLP-affiliated Samidoun Palestinian Prisoners Network — are featured speakers at the International League of Peoples' Struggle (ILPS) in Canada's 5th assembly at the Ottawa city-owned Foster Farm Community Centre on Friday.

According to the rental policy of the city of Ottawa, the municipality "will not provide public space, facilities and/or properties within its jurisdiction to an individual or group that supports or promotes views, ideas or presentations which promote or are likely to promote" violence or disctimination, contempt or hatred to a person based on national origin.

“We are extremely concerned that PFLP-terror tied individuals and organizations have been able to rent space that falls under the jurisdiction of the City of Ottawa, a clear violation of the city's policies meant to protect religious, national, and ethnic groups from hate and incitement," President and CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) Shimon Koffler Fogel said in a statment.

A promotional image for the ILPS assembly shows a previous ILPS event in which Barakat and Kates sit next to a PFLP poster featuring the terrorist group's imprisoned secretary-general Ahmad Sa'adat.

Another advertisment on Instagram says the ILPS supports Palestinian "resistance" against Israel "by any means necessary" — A phrase that has recently become more popular with anti-Israel groups and has been widely criticized as condoning violence and terrorism.


Is the BDS movement still relevant? Watch Brooke Goldstein on ILTV
Brooke Goldstein talks about the BDS movement, and about the need to band together and unify, and demand that there be consequences for Jew-hatred.

"We have to refocus where Jewish advocacy is and start talking about the Jewish community as a minority community which is deserved of equal protection under the law and which is subjected to systemic racism."


Morningstar's ESG unit admits anti-Israel bias in one of its products
A unit of Morningstar Inc that rates companies on environmental, social and governance criteria will no longer sell a human rights research product to investors after an independent review found it "focuses disproportionately on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict" relative to other high-risk regions, executives said on Thursday.

In addition to eliminating the Human Rights Radar product, Morningstar's Sustainalytics unit will take other steps recommended by law firm White & Case LLP, such as making its research more transparent and adding an ombudsperson. In a note on Chicago-based Morningstar's website, CEO Kunal Kapoor said that the company previously was "overly dismissive" when Jewish groups and others raised concerns about bias in its research.

"Any notion that we’re not objective, not transparent and not consistent is important to us," Sustainalytics President Bob Mann said in an interview.

Human Rights Radar had only three employees, Mann said.

The reforms mark the latest rethink for the ESG movement, under fire over the ways that firms apply social concerns to financial decisions. Sustainalytics is one of the main firms assigning ESG ratings to companies as investors pour billions of dollars in sustainable funds.

Jewish groups have complained that Sustainalytics' work supported international efforts to isolate Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in occupied territories.

White & Case's report states that companies' ties to Israel were noted much more frequently in Human Rights Radar compared with other places where companies could be exposed to human rights concerns such as Saudi Arabia or Tibet.
‘Adults Weren’t Taking Me Seriously’: Student Details Antisemitic Bullying in Suit Against Melbourne School
Harrowing details of antisemitic bullying and violence were revealed in an Australian federal court this week, as a civil trial to determine whether Melbourne’s Brighton Secondary College violated the Racial Discrimination Act continued.

Legal action against the school was announced in November, continuing a saga that began in 2020, when five of its former Jewish students came forward accusing administrators of ignoring antisemitic discrimination and fostering a “prison culture” that violated their human rights.

According to The Age, an Australian daily, on Thursday, former Brighton student Liam Arnold-Levy testified that no action was taken after someone punched him in the stomach and threatened to slit his throat, nor when others called him “Jewboy,” “f***ing Jew,” and told him to “die in an oven.” In another incident, a school official allegedly accused him of “being dramatic” when a group of female students “violently” pushed him.

“I was made to feel I shouldn’t be proud of who I am,” Arnold-Levy said, noting that his tormentors became more aggressive after he began wearing a kippah and tzitzit. “Those people who made me feel this way got no punishment for the way they treated me.”

Arnold-Levy also said that pledges to apprise the principal of the incidents weren’t fulfilled, telling the court, “It felt so much worse that adults weren’t taking me seriously … and that the students were able to get away with such violence and hatred.”

“No reaction to the fact that a knife had been held up to a student’s throat,” he continued. “There was no urgency, no concern, nothing. It made me feel possibly a million times worse. The extent of the attacks [had] gotten so bad and that didn’t even provoke a response from the school. Nothing.”
NYC City Council to Investigate Antisemitism Allegations at CUNY
The New York City Council announced on May 31 that they will be investigating allegations of antisemitism at the City University of New York (CUNY) schools.

The New York Post reported that the city council’s Higher Education Committee will holding a hearing on June 8 about antisemitism at college campuses; the Post claimed to have sources telling them that the decision from CUNY Law faculty to back a resolution endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement was what prompted the city council to hold the hearing.

“The embracement and normalization of BDS by both CUNY students and faculty has fostered an extremely hostile campus environment that has resulted in the more blatant forms of antisemitism that are becoming all too common in our city,” City Councilman Eric Dinowitz, a Democrat who heads the committee and the Jewish Caucus in the city council, told the Post. “It is crucial for the Council to ensure that our CUNY system, a national model for higher education, does not descend into the singling out of the only Jewish state in the world, and in turn, ostracize our Jewish students and residents.”

City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a Republican who serves as the city council’s Minority Whip, tweeted: “Antisemitism will no longer go unchecked at @CUNY. Not on my watch. Defund antisemitism. Expose the antisemites. I am just getting started here. And now, I hope this probe/hearing leads to real action and not just headlines.” Vernikov had recently announced that she is revoking $50,000 from CUNY over the BDS resolution vote.


What They Didn't Burn, Mel Laytner's Search for His Father's Holocaust Secrets, Book Review
What They Didn't Burn: Uncovering My Father's Holocaust Secrets by Mel Laytner is an amazing, riveting story. Laytner, an extremely talented writer, reveals a lot as he tracks down his father's secrets. Laytner, the elder of two brothers, discovered that his quiet father was not only a Holocaust survivor, but he had been a canny and successful black market wheeler dealer

I must admit that the author and I first met in the mid-1960s when I joined Betar. We've seen each other very infrequently over the years, but when I heard that he had finally published his father's Holocaust story I wanted to read it. Laytner gave me and my husband a copy.

Among our Betar friends, there are two distinct types, those like me and my husband whose parents were American born and raised, and there were those whose parents were survivors, or had left just in time. We whose parents were American raised can never really imagine what our friends had lived with, which frequently meant that their parents kept many secrets from them.

Laytner's quest to discover the truth about his father took him many years. By the time he had the time to devote to it, few sources were still alive. He had to travel a lot to talk to people and see old government records in Europe. A few times his brother accompanied him, but mostly he did it alone. Laytner used his journalist skills to interview and research. His success and the subsequent book couldn't have been accomplished by someone without those skills.

Laytner's parents were both Holocaust survivors who worked hard day and night at all sorts of jobs, trying all sorts of businesses, too, when they got to New York. At one point they owned a candy store open seven days a week. That was the same drive that got them through the Holocaust, but during the Holocaust Laytner's father even traded diamonds on the black market, among other things. I'd say that Laytner inherited that drive, since he needed similar smarts to discover his father's true story.

Think of What They Didn't Burn as an exciting treasure hunt, and Mel Laytner takes us along for the ride. I highly recommend the book for readers of all ages.
The boy who escaped Auschwitz to reveal its HORRORS (and was ignored)! Faced with Rudolf Vrba's shocking report on the exterminations, Churchill and Roosevelt dithered - and the killing continued
THE ESCAPE ARTIST by Jonathan Freedland (John Murray £20, 400pp)
Jonathan Freedland was a 19-year-old student when he went to see Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s epic nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. It left a deep mark on him, but one interviewee stood out.

His name was Rudolf Vrba, hugely charismatic, with the leather-jacketed swagger of Al Pacino. At the age of 19, Vrba had escaped from Auschwitz — one of only four Jews who did — to tell the world what was happening in the death camp.

Equally extraordinary was the fact that so few people had heard of him.

Thirty years later, Freedland, by now a highly respected writer, began to look more closely into his life, seeking out those who had known him. It turned out that Gerta, Vrba’s teenage sweetheart in war-torn Slovakia who later became his first wife, was now living alone in London, aged 93. She talked to Freedland at length and gave him a suitcase of Vrba’s letters.

Within a few days she had passed away. Vrba’s second wife and widow, Robin, was in New York and talked extensively to Freedland, too.

Slowly the pieces fell into place, and the result is this portrait of a brilliant but troubled man whose life was scarcely believable. It is compulsively readable, as you would expect from Freedland who, writing as Sam Bourne, is the author of several best-selling thrillers.

But it is much more: in an age like ours, when the value of truth is sometimes called into question, this powerful book is about truth itself, and why some people are unwilling to confront it. You won’t believe what you can’t imagine.

Vrba, then Walter Rosenberg (Vrba was his nom de guerre when he went into hiding after his escape), was born in 1924 in what is now rural Slovakia and was precociously brilliant as well as fiercely independent of thought.

He had an extraordinary memory, a skill he would need when he later memorised every detail of the slaughter he was to witness.

In the summer of 1942, Walter ended up at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in German-occupied Poland. Slowly, the full scale of what was going on became apparent. It was a factory of death, specially prepared on Himmler’s orders.

When the ‘resettlement’ trains arrived after long journeys with no water, food or toilets for the passengers, most of the women, plus all children and the elderly, would be marched off to the gas chambers.
Church founded by antisemite hosts an event on Jewish-Catholic relations
Nancy Gietzen needed to see if the plaque was still there.

She made her way to the foyer of the National Shrine of the Little Flower, the historic Catholic church and day school where the Jewish educator had been a substitute teacher for three years until she left after discovering how the parish had memorialized its founder, Father Charles Coughlin.

Sure enough, there it was, next to a glass case displaying the priest’s old chalice and vestments: “While Coughlin’s pastoral skills produced the splendid Shrine, his political involvement and passionate rhetoric opened him up to accusations of anti-Semitism.” The wording she remembered was intact.

The plaque was, to say the least, a mild way to describe the man who had been America’s most vocal wellspring of antisemitism during the Great Depression. On Father Coughlin’s nationwide radio show, which ran from 1926-1940, he was a fearsome demagogue: parroting Nazi propaganda, telling his listeners that “international bankers” and “Jewish Communists” were plotting their demise, stating that the Jews deserved what happened to them at Kristallnacht, and encouraging the growth of the Christian Front, a pro-Nazi Christian militia that plotted to overthrow the U.S. government by attacking prominent Jews.

The proceeds from Coughlin’s media exploits (which included a political party and a fascist magazine called Social Justice) paid for the Shrine’s splendor, while ensuring that generations of Detroit Jews would stay far away from it.

Until now, that is. On Tuesday evening, the Shrine held an event titled “The Jewish-Catholic Relationship: Past, Present, and Future,” a series of historical lectures co-sponsored by the Archdiocese of Detroit and the local Jewish Community Relations Council, known as the JCRC/AJC. Jews and Catholics alike filed into the pews to hear two academics, one Jewish and one Catholic, discuss the history of relations between the two faiths, most of it revolving around Catholic antisemitism.
New York Cops Apprehend Assailants in Two Separate Antisemitic Outrages
Two men have been apprehended by the New York City Police Department in connection with two separate antisemitic assaults in different parts of the city during the last two months.

In Staten Island, an 18-year-old man was indicted on hate crimes charges in connection with an attack on a Jewish couple in April, while in Brooklyn, a 35-year-old was arrested over a violent assault on a Jewish man last month.

Logan Jones — the alleged offender in Staten Island — is accused of having approached the victim, a 21-year-old Jewish man who was walking with his wife, accompanied by five friends in the evening of April 1. Jones is said to have punched his victim in the face before joining with two of his companions in repeatedly kicking the Jewish man, who tried to escape by sliding under a truck parked nearby.

Jones and the five others allegedly fled the scene as the victim’s wife asked a bystander to call the police. The victim — who was dressed in traditional Hasidic attire when the attack occurred — suffered severe head and body pain, an abrasion to the cheek, as well as bruising to the face and mouth, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Jones’s bail was set at $30,000 and he is due to appear in court again on June 24.

“Without warning or provocation, this defendant allegedly assaulted an innocent man simply because of his Jewish faith,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement. “Crimes that target individuals because of their religion, race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation are a threat to everything we stand for here in Brooklyn. We will now seek to hold the defendant accountable.”

Meanwhile, Eric Redding, the 35-year-old arrested over an attack in early May upon an Orthodox Jewish man in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, is facing assault, aggravated harassment, menacing and hate crime charges, police said. Redding is accused of punching and kicking the 32-year-old man in broad daylight at the intersection of President Street and Utica Avenue while he hurled antisemitic insults at him, according to police.
French police find ‘alarming’ neo-Nazi weapons arsenal in Alsace region
French police discovered an arsenal of weapons including machine guns after arresting four men suspected of belonging to a neo-Nazi group in the eastern Alsace region, officials said Friday.

Some 200 officers detained the men, aged 45 to 53, at their homes on Tuesday near Mulhouse after intelligence services determined the group’s members took part in a “Jew hunt” during a football match in Strasbourg, prosecutor Edwige Roux-Morizot told a press conference.

They discovered an “alarming” number of guns — 18 legal and 23 illegal — 167 magazines, 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of gunpowder and materials for potentially making explosives, she said.

The bullet equivalent of “at least 120,000 cartridges” was also found, Lieutenant Colonel Yann Wanson of the local police unit said.

France has stepped up its surveillance of far-right extremists in line with an increase in antisemitic incidents in recent years, with President Emmanuel Macron visiting a vandalized Jewish cemetery in Alsace in December 2019.

So far investigators have not determined if the men were planning an attack, but antisemitic and Holocaust-denial works were found and computer equipment is being analyzed, Roux-Morizot said.

They also discovered equipment for making bullets and over 25,000 euros ($26,800) in cash.


To Date, Jewish Federations Deliver 1 Million Pounds of Aid to Ukraine
Since Russia went to war with Ukraine on Feb. 24—with more than 14 million people displaced from their homes and nearly 7 million of them seeking refuge in other countries—Jewish Federations of North America has reached a milestone of delivering 1 million pounds in aid-relief items.

The figures are part of a comprehensive analysis detailing the collective impact of the Federation emergency campaign.

Some notable statistics include:
- 538 tons of medical equipment, clothing, food and hygiene products have been distributed;
- 174,771 people have been fed;
- 80,556 people have been evacuated away from danger zones;
- 110,833 calls for assistance have been received via special hotlines;
- 18,080 new immigrants have arrived in Israel from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

“We were ready for action to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine because we have supported, year after year, the most comprehensive and effective system of relief and rescue in the world today, led by our partnership with the Jewish Agency for Israel, with the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and including other important partners,” said Jewish Federations of North America CEO and President Eric Fingerhut. “And that has worked non-stop to save lives.”

To date, Jewish Federations have raised $60 million for Ukraine, of which $48 million has already been distributed.
Belgian teacher who hid Jewish children during Holocaust dies at age 101
Andrée Geulen-Herscovici, a teacher from Belgium who helped save approximately 1,000 Jewish children during the Holocaust, died on Wednesday in Ixelles, Belgium, aged 101 years old.

As a young teacher, Geulen-Herscovici was disturbed by the Nazi occupation of her hometown of Brussels when Jewish students arrived at her school wearing yellow stars. She told her students — both Jewish and non-Jewish — to come to school wearing aprons to cover the symbol.

The discriminatory Nazi policies prompted Geulen-Herscovici to join the rescue organization Comité de Défence des Juifs (Jewish Defense Committee) in 1942. There, she met the Jewish activist Ida Sterno, who needed a non-Jewish person to assist her in rescue efforts.

Geulen-Herscovici was among several non-Jewish women who were tasked by the rescue organization with quietly approaching Jewish families to suggest they give up their children to hide them. She also transferred children between various hiding places.

“It was the hardest thing to do, not telling a mother where I was taking her son,” Geulen-Herscovici recalled in an interview.

Operating under the code name Claude Fournier, Geulen-Herscovici was instructed to live at the school where she taught, called Gaty de Gamont, where she helped to protect 12 Jewish students who had taken shelter there.

In May 1943, Nazis raided the school and arrested the students who were hiding there. Geulen-Herscovici and the other teachers were taken for questioning. The school’s headmistress, Odile Ovart, and her husband were sent to concentration camps, where they both died.




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