Monday, April 15, 2024

04/15 Links Pt2: Israel’s Splendid Isolation; Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism; Exposed: UNRWA’s Rigged “Independent” Review

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Israel’s Splendid Isolation
So maybe there is a certain type of rueful wisdom to be taken from these undeniable statistics. Maybe the thing is, Israel doesn’t need the support of the international community and the Council on Foreign Relations and the panel on Washington Week in Review and the jawboners at the Aspen Institute and the billionaires who drink ambrosia from the boots of tyrants at Davos. Maybe the thing is, Israel is a nation that has had this miraculous rise because it has a purpose, which is something most other countries do not have or need, and something that Thomas Friedman and his ilk are (again) too unnerved by to understand.

Israel is engaged in a purpose that is both world-historical and outside history. It exists as a refuge and haven and homeland for the world’s most stateless people, and its claim to statehood is not just due to its need for protection but based in part on a literally transcendent claim. That’s why I say it exists outside history as well.

To ensure the continuity of its existence, Israel must act. First, it must beat back those who would destroy it and who have been coming at it relentlessly since the day it was founded—genocidal evildoers whose Amalekite faces are now showing themselves even in America, really for the first time in our history.

Second, it must not only survive but thrive, because the fulfillment of its purpose depends upon it slowly making Jewish power a simple and undeniable and enduring reality in a world that has not known such a thing before—and is, as I said before, unnerved by it.

That was, in fact, happening during the 2010s with the Abraham Accords—until that progress was halted in part by a bizarrely feckless Biden administration that decided to hinge our national policy toward the world’s most important oil-exporting nation on the murder of a single person in a consulate in Turkey several years earlier. The fact that Israel had grown the way it had grown and shown how to be an innovative nation in a region mired in backwardness was its calling card.

But perhaps it was too focused on hurrying time along. For over the course of the past decade, Israel somehow found itself, like the sightless Samson in John Milton’s imagining, “eyeless in Gaza”—and made itself vulnerable to the worst single event in its history. At least Samson had been blinded by enemy Philistines; Israel’s leaders blinded themselves. They didn’t see the gathering danger because they wanted to look elsewhere and do other things.

Its response has, yet again, isolated Israel. That isolation is wearing away at the determination of some Israelis to see this war through to victory or is causing them to despair that there can be victory. It is a hateful thing, the isolation. It is unjust, it is foul, it is hypocritical, and it is, of course, anti-Semitic at its root.

But as the past six decades have shown us, when it comes to Israel’s purpose as both a change agent in history and a representative of a force outside of history, the isolation doesn’t matter at all. They—we—are not isolated. They—we—are chosen.
Christine Rosen: Why the Media Ignore Anti-Semitism
In fact, the decision to downplay the anti-Semitic threat from the left is deliberate. Left-leaning media do not like to cover the behavior of their own, as the inconsistent coverage of the Jew-baiting members of the Democratic Party’s “Squad” during the past several years attests. Mainstream reporters at outlets like the New York Times take great pains to provide context and explanations for Representative Ilhan Omar’s blatant anti-Semitism, for example. A 2019 piece gave Omar and her defenders ample space to claim she was being unfairly targeted for criticism because she was a progressive Muslim woman while glossing over the fact that she had repeatedly accused Jews of having dual loyalties.

Amid the current conflict, it’s evident there is tacit agreement among most in the mainstream media that because Israel is defending itself by trying to root out Hamas in Gaza, the behavior of protesters is somehow justifiable and acceptable—but only because it involves Israel and the Jews.

This goes well beyond the deliberately misleading stories and factual errors about the war that have appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post. As Zach Kessel and Ari Blaff outlined in National Review, in a deep dive of the Post’s coverage of the Israel–Hamas war, the newspaper “has been a case study in moral confusion and anti-Israel bias” and has “violated traditional journalistic principles that have shaped coverage of foreign conflicts by American newsrooms for decades.”

Similarly, a recent story in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, a long-time editor and reporter at National Public Radio, described how NPR “approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms,” which meant “highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.”

By contrast, imagine if an elderly African-American civil-rights activist were being heckled and bullied with racist taunts while trying to speak before a red-state city-council meeting about the need to properly recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Every major newspaper, magazine, and television and cable network would air nonstop coverage of the event.

The double standard at work in mainstream media has become impossible to ignore and is a sign of a deep moral failing in the profession of journalism: When it comes to threats and attacks against Jews, integrity is sacrificed on the altar of ideological conformity. Thus the self-proclaimed seekers of truth became handmaidens to barbarity and the world’s oldest and most destructive hatred.
Seth Mandel: The Evil Campaign to Remove Jews from the Public Square
In her book People Love Dead Jews, Dara Horn recounts the furious response she received once when she mentioned, in a lecture, that the common story of immigration officials changing Jewish family names at Ellis Island is a myth. Immigrants’ names were taken from ship manifests, which were compiled using the immigrants’ own passports. Inspectors were there to confirm, not record, each passenger’s name.

Name-changers in the early-20th century were often Jews, but they were much more likely to be already-settled middle-aged parents of children who were pursuing a trade or a degree in higher education. In 1932, according to the historian Kirsten Fermaglich, 65 percent of those petitioning to change their name had Jewish-sounding last names. Most of the name changes—for Jews and non-Jews alike—at this time were motivated by the desire “to abandon ‘foreign’ names that were ‘difficult to pronounce and spell’ and to adopt instead more ‘American’ names,” Fermaglich writes. “These individuals were hoping to shed the ethnic markers that disadvantaged them in American society by taking on unmarked, ordinary names that would go unnoticed.”

This came at a time when public opinion in the United States had been turning against immigrants for a decade. Especially Jewish immigrants. A restrictive immigration bill would become law (over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto) in 1917. Momentum would soon get rolling toward another, even more restrictive one in 1924. Because immigration law was country-of-origin focused, there could be no official “Jewish quota.” But there were quotas for the parts of Europe that Jews were seeking to leave, and those quotas could be reduced in favor of more “desirable” countries of origin.

“The Hebrew race… in spite of long residence in Europe, is still as it has always been an Asiatic race,” thundered prominent immigration restrictionist Prescott Hall. Bolshevism, he said, was a “movement of oriental Tatar tribes led by Asiatic Semites against the Nordic bourgeoisie.” The historian Howard Sachar quotes a U.S. foreign-service officer inveighing against the Polish Jews seeking to come to America: “They are filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits.” Most of them “lack any conception of patriotic or national spirit, and the majority of this percentage is mentally incapable of acquiring it.”

That last line was intended to convey the point that assimilation into American ways was impossible for Jews. Therefore, one was right to be suspicious of them—whether or not they were born in America. Thus no one with a Jewish-sounding last name was spared the suspicion that he might not ever be truly American. Clubs and hotels and even residential neighborhoods tightened their policies excluding Jews. In 1922, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell repeatedly encountered potential donors who demanded to know how the president planned to “leave our university free of this plague.” Official quotas were still controversial, but the Ivies ultimately figured out the same thing the congressional crafters of immigration quotas did: You could limit your intake of Jews by adjusting geographic quotas. By the 1930s, Harvard had dropped its share of Jewish enrollment from over 25 percent to 10 percent, and Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Swarthmore had gotten their Jewish share into the single digits.


US, Israel call on UNSC to condemn Iran’s attack, but no action taken
The United Nations Security Council debated, but did not condemn, Iran’s missile and drone attack against the Jewish state early Sunday morning, as the United States and Israel called on it to do so.

“The Security Council must unequivocally condemn Iran’s aggressive actions and call for Iran and its partners and proxies to cease their attacks,” US Ambassador Robert Wood told the 15-member body, which held a special session on the attack late Sunday afternoon in New York.

But neither he nor any other country put forward a resolution to condemn Iran. No vote was taken on the matter and no statement was issued.

The UNSC president, Maltese Ambassador Venessa Frazier, told reporters after the meeting that the most important priority of the UNSC was on Gaza, where it wants to see a ceasefire, the unconditional release of hostages, and the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid to the enclave.

In terms of Iran, the message was clear, that this situation “should not escalate any further,” she said.

Wood speaks of the threat Israel faced during the Iranian attack
During the debate, Wood spoke of the danger Israel faced when it was under attack early Sunday morning.

“Iran’s intent was to cause significant damage and death in Israel,” Wood said as he described how Iran had launched over 300 munitions, including more than 100 ballistic missiles and land attack cruise missiles at Israel, as well as explosive unmanned aerial vehicles.

A coalition of armed forces from Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan shot down most of the missiles.

Wood charged that Iran violated multiple Security Council resolutions, by arming its proxy groups the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as by transferring the “Shahed one-way attack drones to Russia – the same drones it used in last night’s attacks against Israel.”

“Iran’s reckless actions not only posed a threat to populations in Israel but also to other UN member states in the region, including Jordan and Iraq,” Wood sai
UN Watch: Exposed: UNRWA’s Rigged “Independent” Review
On February 5, 2024, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the appointment of an “Independent Review Group” with the stated purpose of assessing whether the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) “is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to allegations of serious breaches when they are made.”[1]

The announcement came shortly after 18 top donor states to UNRWA suspended funding to the agency,[2] due to revelations that at least 12 UNRWA staffers participated[3] in the October 7th massacre and that hundreds of the agency’s employees are operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.[4]

Catherine Colonna, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs, was selected to lead the Review Group, which also consisted of the following three Scandinavian research institutions: The Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) in Norway; The Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Sweden, and The Danish Institute for Human Rights.

The Review Group began its work on February 14th and submitted an interim report to the Secretary-General on March 20th. Though the interim report was not made public, the UN announced that the report “found that UNRWA has in place a significant number of mechanisms and procedures to ensure compliance with the Humanitarian Principle of neutrality.”[5] The final report is scheduled to be released to the public on April 20th.

The EU, Canada, Sweden, Finland, France, Australia and Japan have already each announced that they are resuming funding to UNRWA.

A brief examination of all of the parties involved in the review group confirms that they are not unbiased, objective observers. Rather, Ms. Colonna, the three organizations, and many of their staff have previously issued statements, published content, and liked social media posts demonstrating their positive feelings towards UNRWA and its work, often even after the newfound allegations of UNRWA’s links to Hamas post-October 7th, and their animosity towards the State of Israel.
UN rapporteur accuses Jewish state of genocide on day after Iran attacks Israel
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinians who has a long history of denouncing Israel, glossed over Iran’s attack against the Jewish state on Saturday in a social media post the next day.

“I truly hope Iran’s military response to Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Syria doesn’t escalate into a full blown-war,” Albanese wrote on Sunday. “At the same time, I urge everyone to remain committed to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its brutal violence in the West Bank. This is the only path to peace in the region and beyond.”

Albanese pinned the post, in which she referred to an April 1 strike on an Iranian compound in Syria, to the top of her account on X. Tehran and others have accused Israel of carrying out the attack, which killed seven members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps terror group, including a high-ranking general. The Jewish state has not publicly taken responsibility.

Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Authority citizens were also in danger on Saturday when Iran fired hundreds of missiles and drones, and a seven-year-old Bedouin Arab girl, who lives in the southern Negev desert, was seriously injured.

“Calling it an Iranian reaction to Israeli provocation is absurd and ignorant. Reframing it around false claims of Israeli genocide is malicious blood libeling,” wrote David May, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in response to the U.N. officials post. “Iran’s attack should remind people the Gaza war is one front in Iran’s broader attempt to destroy Israel.”

About an hour prior to Albanese’s post, Hillel Neuer, executive director of United Nations Watch, asked if the cat had got her tongue, nearly 24 hours after the attack began.

“The U.N.’s Hamas proxy Francesca Albanese, who usually tweets every five minutes about violations of international law, has suddenly gone radio silent,” he wrote. “I wonder why.”
TravelingIsrael.com: The PALESTINIANS are the most PRIVILEGED refugees in the World.

California is the homeland of progressive anti-Semitism
Two California stalwart industries, tech and film production, have buckled under the pressure of fashionable activist anti-Zionism. Organisations like the Writers Guild, long a bastion of progressivism, suddenly decided to display neutrality when it comes to attacks on the Jewish state. Two thousand actors signed a statement outlining Israel’s “war crimes”, with no mention of Hamas’ atrocities.

Silicon Valley, which once embraced anti-Israel groups like Black Lives Matter with open arms, has kept remarkably quiet about the Hamas pogrom. “A lot of [tech oligarchs] are more concerned with their social justice profile than their Judaism,” longtime Jewish activist and Palo Alto native Nickolas Targ tells me, in an area where “secular progressivism is part of the air.”

Given these developments, will California Jews, long fixtures in the Democratic Party and progressive circles, shift to the Right? Not anytime soon. California’s Jewish democrats are instead engaged in an intra-party struggle against the increasingly anti-Jewish Left.

Well-organised pro-Hamas demonstrators were able to all but shut down the state party convention this year. The nine California Congresspeople backing a ceasefire before Hamas is destroyed are all Democratic progressives. Gavin Newsom’s temporary Senate appointee and former union organiser Laphonza Butler has also joined the crowd seeking to remove support for Israel’s war effort.

The truth is that anti-Israel advocacy has found its base within the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, while the strongest support for Israel in the state now comes from Republicans. Still, some Democratic moderates have launched a counter-coup, with the well-connected Bay Area publicist insisting his group ‘Democratic Majority for Israel’ will succeed in halting the pro-Hamas trend. Rep. Adam Schiff, the next Senator of the state, won a campaign against two far more anti-Israel candidates.

Jews in California, as elsewhere, will need to prioritise not ideology but community survival. They will need to work with whatever politician, in either party, who embraces the security of our communities, as well as Israel. Now is not the time for party loyalty, or making excuses for a Democratic party that has long since stopped caring about the safety of Jews. If not, this fabled outpost of the diaspora will weaken and whither, leaving Jews with only one homeland, the perpetually threatened Jewish state.
Schools are teaching kids to ‘feel’ antisemitic
The mechanisms of this were perfectly encapsulated in a recent forum, led predominately by New York City Department of Education middle-school teachers, on how to teach students to properly despise Zionism — without being sanctioned by school administrators or parents for doing it. The “Curriculum Share for Palestine” opened with commitments by all to a shared emotional setting. A kickoff “land acknowledgment” ensured all feel bad about the dispossessed Native American tribes, and feel loathing toward American settlers and the nation they created. These feelings then get officially extended toward Palestinians: “As educators committed to doing our part in the fight for Palestinian liberation…let’s remember struggles are interconnected.” Then, participants received a list of acceptable emotions for engaging in the discussion. You can only ask questions that “come from” the right place and you must “understand that anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism.” As it unfolded, the meeting’s brainstorming was not actually about curricula in the traditional sense; rather, participating teachers strategized on how to connect children’s feelings to ordained feelings about Zionism. For instance, in Eva Ackerman’s social studies class at MS 594 in the South Bronx: “we’ve been talking a lot about settler-colonialism in what is now the United States and that is what [Zionism’s] connected to.” She pondered how to use “Zionist text” with her predominantly Dominican, Puerto Rican and West African students, “to connect it to their lived realities in some way.” Session leader and longtime New York City social-studies teacher Arax Tramblian LeFevre shared a curriculum she developed with the Progressive Classroom Project titled “What Is Zionism?” With no embarrassment, she described her goal as aligning students around the proper feelings about Israel. She views this two-part “job” as, first: “to help the 12-year-old boy who’s an amazing kid, whose parents identify as strongly Zionist, to understand why the ideology is both harmful and offensive to others.” Second, she wants, “my students who were raised in households that value and teach Palestinian liberation… to understand why some of their classmates…have love for what they believe the state of Israel stands for.” And yes, LeFevre noted, she teaches this curriculum after her unit on “Holocaust studies.”
Tehran Calling The Iranian Threat to the UK
A new report by Policy Exchange ‘Tehran calling: The Iranian threat to the UK’ exposes the extent to which the Islamic Republic of Iran poses a unique challenge to both the security and social cohesion of the United Kingdom.

Iran is a hostile state in the style of Russia or China: it seeks to interfere with our online systems and takes British citizens hostage. Yet Iran also seeks to wield social and cultural influence in this country, declaring and imposing blasphemy codes, and creating institutions that project power and influence.

This report also asks a major question of both the Home Secretary and the Security Services. It is clear whose job it is to protect the UK from Iranian state terrorism: the police and the security services. But whose job is it to counter Iranian state-led subversion – the process whereby Iran tries to influence political, religious, educational or cultural organisations in this country?

Subversion, once a core task of MI5, appears to have been removed from the contemporary focus of the Security Service. Until recently, MI5 stated on its website “We no longer undertake counter-subversion work, and would only resume doing so if our monitoring of emerging threats suggested an increase in the subversive threat.” The idea that Iran may be seeking to influence British Muslims, and that it may be someone’s job to stop this, has not been openly articulated by the Security Service.

Download Publication (PDF)
‘Something has gone truly, terribly wrong’: the latest outbreak of anti-Semitism in Britain
Particularly troublesome is the situation in universities. Agitation among young people against Israel has disrupted universities in dangerous ways. It is directed against Jews even though the label used is generally (but not always) “Zionists”. University Jewish societies attract demonstrations. The Jewish chaplain at Leeds has received death threats. Jewish students at Exeter University report being hounded. Graffiti at the University of East Anglia and at Manchester University have caused distress and alarm. Jewish academics at Queen Mary University in London report a hostile atmosphere. Lecturers mark down essays that are not suitably anti-Zionist.

An alarming example of this aggressive behaviour is the recent outrage at Trinity College, Cambridge, where a woman from “Palestine Action” tore to shreds a painting of Arthur Balfour by the prominent society artist Philip de László (himself a Hungarian Jew). It was painted three years before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain indicated that it looked with favour on the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Resurgent anti-Semitism is not just about Israel. Most Jews in the UK, I suspect, have warm feelings towards Israel but feel very differently about its government. Yet the terms “Jew” and “Zionist” have become entangled. Along with this, unashamed talk in the open about rich Jews, Jews controlling the media, the “over-representation” of Jews in high positions – all this has spread. The reason for that is what we often call “wokery”. Jews are no longer regarded as the victims of 2,000 years of persecution, who have at last managed to find a place in mainstream society.

In line with the fashionable nonsense of “critical race theory”, which has infected universities first in America and now in Britain, they are white oppressors, indeed the archetypal white oppressors, and Israel has become the last but perhaps the worst “settler colonialist” society. It is a simplistic distortion (many Jews are not even white), but on social media, it is easier to explain the world’s problems through simple arguments with a stench of conspiracy theories than through dispassionate discussion based on evidence.

The sense of insecurity among British Jews is compounded by the weak response of the police to the behaviour of marchers – which might almost be described as complicity. When the prime minister finds it necessary to make a speech outside 10 Downing Street condemning hatred for Jews and insisting that the police adopt a more active role, something has gone badly wrong at Scotland Yard.

When the police wrestle to the ground a demonstrator carrying a placard denouncing Hamas as terrorists (which is official government policy) and ignore the marchers who have roughed him up, something has gone very badly wrong. When “From the river to the sea” is projected onto Big Ben, something has gone truly, terribly wrong. Above all, when a country that over the last few centuries has not practised the anti-Semitic excesses seen across most of Europe becomes caught up in a wave of Jew-hate, the wider community must not remain silent.
Britain’s Jewish community put on high alert after Iran attack on Israel
The Jewish community in Britain has been put on high alert following Iran’s attack on Israel.

On Saturday night, the Community Security Trust (CST) – a charity that exists to protect Jews from anti-Semitism – said it had issued a notice to Jewish organisations to upgrade security measures in light of the attack.

The charity said: “CST has tonight sent a notice to all communal organisations, requesting that security measures are fully implemented.

“This is a necessary precaution because of the situation between Iran and Israel. It is not due to any specific information or warning here in the UK.”

It added: “CST has worked tirelessly with our community, police and Government since the war began on Oct 7, doing everything we can together to support and enable UK Jewish life. This will continue for as long as it is needed.”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said on Saturday night: “We are praying for the safety of Israel and its citizens, as well as the entire region, as the Iranian regime launches a direct attack.”

Huge surge in anti-Semitism
Since the Oct 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, the British Jewish community has experienced a huge surge in anti-Semitic incidents in the UK.

According to the CST’s annual report released in February, there were 4,103 anti-Semitic incidents in the UK last year, nearly double the previous record in 2021.

Two-thirds of the anti-Semitism reports received were on or after Oct 7.

Attacks increased by 147 per cent compared to the 1,662 recorded in 2022 and were 81 per cent higher than the previous annual record of 2,261 in 2021.
A Very Unhappy Anniversary
April 7 was the sixth month anniversary of the October 7 Hamas pogrom and the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas. For those who have been watching this war closely it was particularly disconcerting. It was on that day that the Netanyahu government announced that it was pulling most of its troops out of southern Gaza, a move that left a number of questions unanswered. Was this a harbinger of Bibi’s coalition succumbing to pressure from the Biden administration to end the war giving Hamas a victory? Was it a response to the recent violent demonstrations by the Israeli left in the guise of a demand to bring the hostages home but, like the prewar demonstrations against judicial reform, was actually meant to bring down the government?

In any case the troop drawdown was a shock to commentators such as myself who have been advocating for the commencement of the operation in Rafah to finish off the remaining four Hamas battalions. But on April 7 a number of demonstrations were held in the Jewish diaspora organized for the sole purpose of emphasizing the plight of the 130 hostages still being held by Hamas. The particular rally I attended in Toronto was called “Six Months in Hell.” (READ MORE from Max Dublin: Biden Pulls a Bait and Switch on Israel)

One of the speakers was Goldie Ghamari, an Iranian human rights lawyer who is a Conservative Party member of the Ontario Legislature. She noted that Iran is the only country in the Middle East that has not held any pro-Hamas rallies, which is remarkable since Hamas is a proxy of the Iranian regime. She stated emphatically that the huge Iranian diaspora community stands squarely behind Israel, that Persians and Jews have a three-thousand-year history going all the way back to Cyrus the Great. And it is true that before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran and Israel enjoyed excellent, mutually beneficial relations.

A number of speakers excoriated Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party for giving aid and comfort to Hamas. This impetus for this criticism is the unprecedented reversal of Canadian Foreign Policy which has seen the Trudeau regime give support for Hamas in the United Nations General Assembly, for which Hamas leaders have publicly thanked him. Trudeau has also restored funding to UNRWA and stopped selling military equipment to Israel, a bit of laughable virtue-signaling considering Canada sells only non-essential accessories, not military hardware, to Israel (though most of the Canadian electorate is probably unaware of this.)

Like the Biden administration’s election-year pandering to Muslims in Michigan, Trudeau’s government has long pandered to the Canadian Muslim population, which is much larger than the country’s Jewish population. Whenever Trudeau was mentioned, the Toronto audience booed loudly.

As I have previously written in these pages, Canada does have its share of Jewish leftist radicals who support Hamas, but all and all the Canadian Jewish population is more conservative than its American counterpart. This is due in part to the fact that a good number of Holocaust survivors immigrated to Canada and landed in Toronto after World War II.
'Free hostages' ad denied at spot once hosting pro-Palestinian ad in New Jersey
A New Jersey rabbi was denied the ability to place an advertisement calling for the release of Hamas hostages in certain locations of South Brunswick in early February, despite there being Pro-Palestinian advertisements at the same locations.

Rutgers Chabad Rabbi Mendy Carlebach told The Jerusalem Post that Lamar Advertising of New York City and New Jersey had told him that they were not accepting “anything related to the hostages or the kidnappings” on two billboards at Monmouth Junction.

Lamer clarified to the rabbi that the township did not accept “sensitive or religious” messaging in the location because it was on South Brunswick’s property.

“This makes no sense to not allow the victims of the worst terror attack on Israel to bring attention to hostages but to allow Pro-Palestine propaganda,” Carlebach told Lamar in an email.

The rabbi said he contacted the township, which told him there was no such restriction. The township did not respond to the Post’s queries.

The site had previously hosted an advertisement that called to “save Gaza’s children, call your congress member.” Lamar told the rabbi that the advertisement ended on December 14. However, the rabbi said the site continued to have advertisements with religious messaging related to Ramadan.

Lamar did not respond to Post’s requests for comment.


Iranian influence network members scored 10 Biden White House visits
At least three reported members of a covert Iranian government-controlled influence network visited the Biden White House on numerous occasions for meetings with senior U.S. officials, records show.

The trio, Dina Esfandiary and Ali Vaez of the global International Crisis Group think tank, plus now-Pentagon official Ariane Tabatabai, was outed through the release of leaked Iranian government emails last year as being linked to a network called the Iran Experts Initiative, a project of Iran’s foreign ministry that helped push Tehran talking points in the United States and Europe.

According to a Washington Examiner review of White House visitor logs, Esfandiary, Vaez, and Tabatabai headed to the White House a combined 10 times between April 2022 and December 2023 — a fact that foreign policy experts, watchdog groups, and congressional sources say shows the Biden administration has granted those with concerning Iran ties apparent access to the halls of power.

Esfandiary, Vaez, and Tabatabai share connections to Robert Malley, President Joe Biden‘s special envoy to Iran who was placed on unpaid leave in June of last year amid a federal investigation into his handling of classified information, Semafor reported. Malley, who saw his security clearance revoked, was the Obama administration’s lead negotiator in 2015 for the heavily scrutinized Iran nuclear deal that waived sanctions for Iran — the leading state sponsor of terrorism.

Malley, until 2021, led the International Crisis Group, the think tank that counts Vaez and Esfandiary as senior advisers. Tabatabai was a diplomat for a period on the Malley-led Iran nuclear negotiations team upon Biden taking office that year.

“There’s two things that are problematic here,” said Richard Goldberg, an ex-White House National Security Council member who worked on the Iran portfolio.

“One, it’s troubling that people with a track record of being very close to the regime and potentially sympathetic to the regime in Tehran have open-door access to the administration,” Goldberg, now a senior adviser to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, told the Washington Examiner. “Two, it’s even more troubling that, to this day, we have no answers on the Malley investigation and where it’s leading.”
Biden Admin Grants Iranian Foreign Minister Visa To Enter US Days After Israel Strike
The Biden administration has granted Iran’s foreign minister a U.S. visa so that he can attend upcoming United Nations proceedings in New York City, generating outrage in the wake of Tehran’s weekend strike on Israel.

Lawmakers are already calling on the Biden administration to revoke Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian’s entry visa into America, which will enable him to attend U.N. meetings later this week, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. While the State Department would not confirm whether it had granted the Iranian diplomat an entry visa, regional outlets are reporting that a U.S. entry visa has already been issued.

Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), in a letter sent Monday to the State Department and obtained by the Free Beacon, demanded "immediate action to revoke the visa of Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian," appearing to confirm the regional reports.

"In the wake of Saturday’s direct attack by Iran on our ally, Israel, we urge you to prevent Iran from using American soil as a platform to amplify its anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric," Lankford wrote, referring to a weekend missile attack by Iran on Israel that threatens to spark a regional war.

Amir-Abdollahian is scheduled to attend U.N. sessions this week surrounding the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel.

A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the matter when approached by the Free Beacon, referring a reporter to a press briefing late last week by spokesman Matthew Miller.

"We never speak to visa records. They’re confidential by law, and so I can’t speak to visa records from here," Miller told reporters in response to questions about the status of Amir-Abdollahian’s visa. "But as has long been the case, we take our obligations as the host of the United Nations very seriously."
In her new book, Batya Ungar-Sargon speaks on why Jews need to rethink their alliances
And that’s where her book applies to the Jews and Israel, especially post-October 7, when American Jews were stunned by the reaction of the country, especially among people they felt were their allies: the progressives.

“Too much of the institutional American Jewish community backed the wrong pony. It’s infuriating!” she told The Jerusalem Post. “These institutions backed the progressives, who are the people behind all this elitist antisemitism and the anti-working class sentiment,” she said. The main reason the majority of American Jews are progressive is that they attend universities, or “woke factories,” as she calls them.

“I think the whole woke ideology was inherently bad for Jews; it’s inherently racist,” she said, noting that it holds that black people have no agency, that whoever has less power is more virtuous – and that includes Hamas.

American Jews and our institutions supported the very people opposed to Israel, she said. “They hate America, they hate white people,” she said, noting that many American Jews were okay with this, were fine being in bed with the progressives, being part of this “intersectional coalition,” until after October 7, “when we were excluded.”

Ungar-Sargon said the intersectional Left is not antisemitic in its core, it’s just that “they hate Israel because they hate America and they hate white people.” (She said the Right is trying to get rid of the far-right antisemites in its midst).

What are American Jewish liberals to do?
She’s seeing a lot of what she calls “Pick Me” Jews, Jews like Oscar-winner Jonathan Glazer claiming “we’re the good Jews, Israel’s bad,” hoping that the progressives will still like them, “begging the antisemites to pick them.”

Progressive American Jews, super invested in the progressive worldview, are demanding that DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) cater to the Jews, insisting that Jews, too, are an oppressed group and should be included in DEI definitions, Ungar-Sargon said.

“It’s embarrassing. It’s undignified,” she said.

If American Jews insist on belonging to the elite, insist on sending their children to those universities that wouldn’t unequivocally condemn calling for the genocide of the Jews, there will be pro-Hamas demonstrations, they won’t be popular with their peers (“It’s a good thing to be unpopular with sociopaths,”) they will have to learn to stand up for themselves.

“They’re not in danger. There’s no rising antisemitism in America,” she said, pointing out that it’s mostly happening on college campuses. “Raise children who can stand up for the Jewish people and stand up for the Jewish state,” she said.Or better yet, course correct. “The intersectional Left is a dead end.”
Reform rabbi to Democrat politicians: ‘Do not take American Jews for granted’
Ammi Hirsch, senior rabbi at New York City’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, shared a video, posted on Sunday, during a service noting some fraught conversations with Jewish Democrats of late.

“Neither I nor our synagogue engage in partisan politics. So allow me to express a nonpartisan word to all of our friends in elected office from the Democratic Party,” he said. “From one who is finely attuned to American Jewish sentiment, do not take American Jews for granted.”

Hirsch reported that he had spoken with “so many American Jews in the past few months who have surprised me with their anxiety about developments in the Democratic Party and their perception that it is becoming increasingly hostile to Israel, and increasingly tolerant of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in its own ranks.”

At the end of the brief video, the rabbi cautioned: “Be careful. The results of the upcoming election do not only depend on Michigan.”

The Real Clear Politics average of polls from March 8-24 gives former President Donald Trump a 2.8% lead in the state over U.S. President Joe Biden.

Following Iran’s launching of a combination of more than 300 drones, rockets and missiles towards Israel over the weekend (some 99% of which were shot down), Hirsch wrote on X that “Israeli society is just simply remarkable—the level of resilience and inspiration that emanates from the Jewish state—as it faces such hostility—is just a remarkable thing to behold.”


JPost Editorial: Israel must not write off the Democratic party, but rather show it the truth
The Democratic Party “hates Israel,” President Donald Trump thundered last month in an interview with his former aide, Sebastian Gorka. On Tuesday, he said President Joe Biden has “abandoned Israel” and “any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined.”

Trump is wrong. The Democratic Party does not hate Israel, and Biden has not abandoned the Jewish state.

Stalwart Democratic Israeli supporters such as senators John Fetterman from Pennsylvania and Jacky Rosen from Nevada, as well as congressmen like New York’s Ritchie Torres, New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer and Illinois’ Brad Schneider, prove that Trump’s first assertion is incorrect.

And Biden’s statement on Thursday that his commitment to Israel’s security against threats “from Iran and its proxies is ironclad” disproves Trump’s assertion about the incumbent president’s “abandonment” of Israel.

Trump supporters may argue these are “just words,” but the president’s dispatch of air force carrier strike forces to the eastern Mediterranean shortly after October 7 to deter Iran from attacking Israel shows he has a track record backing up those words.

Yet, we must admit, there are worrying signs within the party that its long-time commitment to Israel is waning.

A sign of this is a letter signed by 56 Democratic representatives, almost a quarter of the 213 House Democrats, calling on Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to reconsider arms transfers to Israel – at the very time that the country is fighting a terrorist organization bent on its destruction.


Ex-PLO Spokesman Rashid Khalidi Explains Away Oct 7 Hamas Massacre in Guardian Feature
Rashid Khalidi didn’t need a 5,000-word feature in The Guardian to justify what could be succinctly summarized in a sentence: he believes Israel is a colonialist settler state that has no right to exist in “Palestine.”

In “‘A new abyss’: Gaza and the hundred years’ war on Palestine” the Colombia University historian and former PLO press officer argues that the war Hamas sparked with its October 7 massacre is merely a new phase in a bigger conflict that has been waged continuously for several generations:
This is the thesis of my book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: that events in Palestine since 1917 resulted from a multi-stage war waged on the indigenous Palestinian population by great power patrons of the Zionist movement – a movement that was both settler colonialist and nationalist, and which aimed to replace the Palestinian people in their ancestral homeland. These powers later allied with the Israeli nation-state that grew out of that movement. Throughout this long war, the Palestinians have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country. This framework is indispensable in explaining not only the history of the past century and more, but also the brutality that we have witnessed since 7 October.”

This paragraph of blatant historical revisionism is a template for the rest of the drawn-out piece: an exercise in distortion, omission and spin.

Whether Khalidi is prepared to acknowledge it or not, Jews are indigenous to the land that is the modern State of Israel. The Jewish people have lived in the Holy Land for millennia, and their presence has been continuous since the return from Egypt 3336 years ago marked by next week’s Passover holiday.

The dismissal of Zionism as a colonialist movement that is shaped by its intention to subjugate and displace native Palestinians is risible. Indeed, comparing the push by early Zionist leaders for Jews to return to their historical homeland is the antithesis of European settler colonial projects of that time.

However, Khalidi’s historical revisionism is not simply a way to deny that Jews have any right to Israel; it is also how he tacitly defends “Palestinians [who] have fiercely resisted the usurpation of their country”—in other words, terrorism.

While he acknowledges some of the “gruesome” events of October 7, we are left to assume that “resistance” is how he views the Hamas attack and indeed all Palestinian terrorism — both the result of and defense against a colonialist project.

Israel’s war against Hamas is not, for the likes of Khalidi, a war against a genocidal terrorist organization that is sworn to Israel’s destruction. Rather, it is the “product of the violent European settler-colonial methods employed by Zionism to ‘transform Palestine into the land of Israel…’”

Naturally, Khalidi pays little regard to salient details, such as Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip nearly two decades ago. If such facts were mentioned, his ludicrous assertion that Hamas’ “philosophy of armed resistance is unlikely to disappear as long as there is no prospect of an end to military occupation, colonisation and oppression of the Palestinian people…”

The fact is that Hamas’s so-called “armed resistance” policy has never been about “military occupation” or anything else—according to their own charter, it is about killing Jews. This aim is not limited to Jews in Israel but extends to Jews everywhere.

Much of Khalidi’s feature is dedicated to his subversion of Zionism and his excusing of “Palestinian resistance.”
Columbia put ‘most extreme’ people on Jew-hatred task force, professor appears to say
Columbia University staffed its antisemitism task force with the “most extreme political people” that they could find, and the body countering Jew-hatred only exists because “the other side” howls whenever someone looks at them the wrong way, an Arab studies professor at the university appears to say during an apparently-surreptitious interview.

“We have an antisemitism talk task force because everybody on the other side has howled their head off if somebody so much has looked sideways at them,” Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia, appears to say on a video recorded by the pro-Israel social media platform Visegrád 24.

“People who are being treated much worse have been hesitant to go to these people because they know they’re biased,” the man in the video adds, referring to the university’s antisemitism task force.

The man in the video added that the university created a lower-level Islamophobia task force than the antisemitism one, uses “human spies” and reads faculty members’ emails.

“Antisemitism is a sacred topic, and if you cover your partisanship for Israel under the cloak of antisemitism, you can get away with a lot,” the man added.

He thinks that there is a shift underway in views about Israel.

“People who go to Jewish day schools. People who are religiously observant and go regularly to synagogue and have, you know, they have classes on Saturdays, or whatever, they’re indoctrinated,” he said.
HIDDEN CAM: Zionists "instituted a Police State" : Prof.Rashid Khalidi | V24 Investigations
This is the first of multiple Visegrad24 Investigations exposing the radical bias that has infiltrated elite American universities.

V24 undercover journalists spoke with Rashid Khalidi, a PLO press agency director under Yasser Arafat in the 80's and now the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, notorious for his hardline pro-Palestinian extremism.

The indoctrination, politicization, and pressure to engage in activism by the professors is shocking!


Daniel Greenfield: 126 Killed in Chicago Since Mayor Called for Ceasefire in Gaza
At the end of January, Mayor Brandon Johnson, the corrupt pro-crime leftist in charge of the city, whipped votes and broke a tie to demand that Israel stop attacking his Hamas pals under the guise of calling for a “ceasefire”.

Gaza hasn’t been doing so well since, but neither has Chicago.

Since Mayor Johnson and the cowards and leftists on the City Council called for a ceasefire, 126 people have been killed in Chicago.

That’s right. 126 just in the last several months. (Those are the Trib numbers, Hey Jackass shows 140 for the whole year but it may be listing only murders that occurred as a result of shootings. HJ also shows 539 shot and wounded so far this year.)
Elected Jewish Chicago Leaders Scorch Brandon Johnson in Letter Declining ‘Roundtable’ Meeting Invite
Like many woke Democrats, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has been no friend to the Jewish community in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks, something that was confirmed when Johnson cast the deciding vote in favor of a meaningless ceasefire resolution from the Chicago City Council in February.

There have been many other issues with his lack of leadership as well, something that was explained in a scathing letter written by three elected Jewish leaders Friday explaining why they were declining a meeting invite for a Monday roundtable discussion on antisemitism in the Windy City:
In a letter sent Friday declining the invitation, Chicago Ald. Debra Silverstein, 50th Ward, state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz, and Rep. Bob Morgan pointed to Johnson’s tie-breaking vote in support of a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the ongoing war in Gaza as one example of Johnson’s “stunning failure in leadership.” The letter went on to cite Johnson’s support for Chicago Public School students walking out in support of a cease-fire, among other reasons, as more evidence of their dissatisfaction with Johnson’s support of the Jewish community.

“True change can only start at the top. Before calling for a roundtable on antisemitism, a true leader should begin by demonstrating a modicum of empathy for the Jewish community — we have seen none of that,” the letter read.
‘Squad’ members comment on Iran attack days later, condemn Israel
After more than a day of silence, some members of the so-called “Squad” in Congress commented on Iran’s attack on Israel. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) criticized both the Islamic Republic’s attack and the Jewish state.

“I condemn the attacks by the Iranian military on Israel, as well as Israel’s military attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria that further escalates tension in the region,” Omar stated, about an attack in Syria that Tehran blamed on Israel.

“I am grateful no deaths were reported from the attack and am praying for Amina al-Hassouni, the 7-year-old Bedouin civilian who was severely injured in the attack, to make a complete recovery,” Omar said of Iran’s attack on Saturday.

“As leaders in Washington jump to call for war with Iran and rush additional offensive weapons to the Israeli military, we need to exercise restraint and use every diplomatic tool to de-escalate tensions,” Omar said. “Civilians in not only Gaza, Israel, the West Bank and Iran but also Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen are bearing the brunt of this escalation, and there must be a ceasefire on all sides.”

“I will continue to call for de-escalation, restraint and lasting peace,” she added.

Bowman stated that “in this critical moment, we need to engage with peace, not weapons.”


Spain’s PM Sanchez is attacking Israel for his political survival
When analyzing Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in the international arena, it is important to recognize that his words and actions do not represent the sentiments of the Spanish people, especially regarding the Israel-Hamas war.

Sánchez did not win the last elections in Spain. He formed a government thanks to what the Spanish press dubbed the “Frankenstein coalition,” a parliamentary alliance that includes communists (financed by the Islamic Republic of Iran), members of terrorist organizations, and Basque and Catalan separatist parties working to break the Spanish constitutional order.

His recent statement on the recognition of a “Palestinian state” by the summer of 2024 has nothing to do with Spain’s interests, nor does it respond to popular Spanish demand. If he goes through with it, Sanchez’s decision will reward Hamas and the Palestinians for the October 7th Massacre, the largest slaughter of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust.

Why would Pedro Sanchez reward terrorism? I think for two reasons: the need to distract the local public opinion from his government’s corruption scandals, while mobilizing his most activist supporters, and the ideological shift of Sanchez’s Socialist Party towards extremism and communism, in line with his antisemitic political partners.

Pedro Sánchez is known in Spain as an immoral character and a compulsive liar: there is no promise he hasn’t broken, as he does the opposite of what he says. He embodies the model of the unscrupulous leader - a politician who doesn’t care about the legality of the means to achieve his ends.

While Hamas was massacring Israelis on October 7th, Sánchez’s ministers supported the terrorist offensive with calls for a “Free Palestine.” Shortly after, former minister Ione Belarra urged Spain to break diplomatic relations with Israel and called for Prime Minister Netanyahu to be tried by the International Criminal Court as a “war criminal.” Communist vice-president Yolanda Díaz referred to the actions of the Israeli Defense Forces in response to Hamas’ carnage as war crimes, with no lament for the pogrom. Sánchez suggested that Israel’s actions were illegal and demanded a “two-state solution” during a visit with the relatives of the Israeli hostages.
Belgium pushes to expel controversial Palestinian activist ‘hate preacher’
Belgium’s government on Monday said it wanted to revoke the refugee status of the head of a network supporting Palestinian prisoners, whom it accused of being an “extremist hate preacher.”

Mohammed Khatib is the coordinator in Europe for Samidoun, a controversial organization close to Palestinian Islamist groups that was banned in neighboring Germany after allegedly celebrating the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel.

Belgium’s Secretary of State for Asylum and Migration, Nicole de Moor, announced that she had asked the immigration services to withdraw the refugee status of Khatib, whom she said was “known as an extremist hate preacher.”

“The asylum procedure is intended for people fleeing war or unjust persecution. There is no place for people who represent a danger to society,” she said.

“Even if someone has already been recognized as a refugee, if that person turns out to be an extremist, recognition can be withdrawn.”

De Moor said the request was based on “information provided by the security services,” without giving any further details.


'Iran Wasn't Attacking Israel': Berkeley Student Group Rallies Behind Iran After Missile Attack
A student group at the University of California, Berkeley, rallied behind Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel over the weekend, arguing that the Jewish state bears responsibility for the Iranian attack.

As Iran launched an attack involving hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles on Sunday, Berkeley’s Bears for Palestine declined to condemn the unprecedented attack and opted instead to place the blame on Israel. The student group shared a graphic on Instagram with the caption, "Iran wasn’t attacking Israel. It was responding." That post was accompanied by a second claiming that Iran attacked Israel because it refused a Gaza ceasefire, according to social media posts reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

"Iran’s condition for refraining from retaliation was for a Gaza ceasefire. Israel refused, preferring to destabilize the lives of millions in order to continue the genocide in Gaza," said the post.

Berkeley’s vice chancellor of communications Dan Mogulof told the Free Beacon on Monday that while students have the right to express their views, even if they are "without factual basis," they do not speak for the university.

"University students have the same rights and responsibilities as any other member of the public, including freedom of speech, as guaranteed by the Constitution, even if the viewpoints expressed are deeply offensive or without factual basis," said Mogulof. "At the same time, students most certainly do not speak for or represent the values, perspectives, or positions of the University, its colleges, or departments."

The social media posts come as numerous anti-Israel student groups across the country signaled their support for Iran’s drone attack on the Jewish state. Bears for Palestine did not respond to requests for comment.

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at Columbia University and George Washington University shared similar graphics backing Iran. The latter also shared posts to its Instagram story claiming Iran was simply retaliating against "Israel’s provocative actions" as well as a video that claimed "Iran’s attack on Israel wasn’t unprovoked. It’s Israel that wants a wider war."

"Iran is retaliating, not instigating a conflict," said a post.
Pro-Palestinian, left-wing campus groups cheer Iranian attack on Israel
Soon after news broke on Saturday night of Iran’s missile attack on Israel, hard-line anti-Israel activists celebrated Iran’s barrage, with some declaring it a necessary consequence of Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.

The message spread quickly on social media and appeared on the feeds of several Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. An Instagram post by the account @PalestinianYouthMovement praised the attack and said “Iran, Yemen and Lebanon dared to take action to bring an end to this genocide.” The account has 587,000 followers, and its post was shared by the SJP chapter at UCLA.

“We saw it after Hamas’ 10/7 massacre and we’re seeing it now after Iran’s unprecedented attack on the Jewish state: anti-Zionists rejoice, glorifying and justifying violence against Israeli civilians,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told Jewish Insider. “The cruelty knows no bounds; the hatred has no limits.”

Hunter College’s Palestine Solidarity Alliance, an affiliate of SJP, reposted a report of an Iranian drone attack from the Arabs of Canada Instagram account and added: “true solidarity.”

Columbia University’s SJP chapter reshared a post by Omar Baddar, the former deputy executive director of the Arab American Institute, mocking Israel for seeking U.N. condemnation of the attack. “You violate a mountain of UN resolutions, condemn the UN at every turn, bomb UN schools & shelters, murder UN employees & then you demand a UN meeting over another country responding to your bombing of their consulate,” the post read.

In Chicago on Saturday, 300 anti-war activists were meeting to discuss plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in August when an activist took to the stage to announce that Iran had attacked Israel. The crowd burst into cheers at the news, The Free Press reported. The event was co-hosted by several groups, including the Chicago chapter of SJP.
Pomona College Faculty Condemn Arrest of Anti-Zionist Protesters, Continuing Attacks on Black Officials Who Resist Anti-Israel Pressure
The faculty at Pomona College in Claremont, California have censured their school for calling the police to arrest nearly two dozen anti-Zionist students who illegally occupied an administrative building to protest Israel’s military offensive against Hamas, the campus’ official newspaper reported over the weekend.

“The faculty condemns the present and future militarization and use of police on the campus,” said a resolution passed with the approval of 92 professors, while 39 voted no and four abstained. “It insists that the college immediately drop criminal charges and reverse the suspensions and all related consequences against student protesters for their actions of civil disobedience.”

The faculty’s volley of criticism came after dozens of students, many of whom were members of the anti-Zionist campus group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), began occupying Alexander Hall on campus earlier this month. At least 18 of the students commandeered the office of Pomona College president Gabrielle Starr.

According to Starr — the first African American in the history of the school to hold the position — the students spoke impertinently to their superiors and, along with refusing to provide identification, uttered an “anti-Black racial slur in addressing an administrator.”

In total, 20 students, including one who allegedly attempted to stand in the way of a police officer escorting a student in custody, were arrested and later released.

The demonstration was reportedly prompted by the administration’s dismantling of an “apartheid wall” that activists mounted earlier that week — SJP partisans have cited that as the reason the group unlawfully occupied Alexander Hall and disparaged Black administrators.

Since the incident, numerous campus groups have criticized Starr’s method of restoring order on campus, which included levying suspensions against any student who participated in the demonstration. SJP has demanded that Starr resign from her position, and the school’s student government, Associated Students of Pomona College (ASPC), has accused her of violating the students’ right to due process by “circumventing” a disciplinary process in which students render the final judgement. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA), which supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, has maintained that the students acted peaceably but did not mention Starr’s accusation of anti-Black racism, which progressives in higher education have previously described as tantamount to violence.
Harvard attempts to dismiss lawsuit filed by Jewish students
A 38-page filing from Harvard University’s legal team argues that the school has worked to combat campus antisemitism, thus a lawsuit alleging the failure to do so should be dismissed.

Harvard filed its answer on April 12 to a suit brought by Shabbos (“Alexander”) Kestenbaum and five other Jewish student plaintiffs charging that the school had “become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.”

Its lawyers countered that “without minimizing at all the importance of the need to address energetically antisemitism at the university, plaintiffs’ dissatisfaction with the strategy and speed of Harvard’s essential work does not state a legally cognizable claim.”

The motion presented a range of “tangible steps” the school had taken to counter Jew-hatred.

Kestenbaum responded to the filing on Saturday, saying “Harvard’s meritless motion to dismiss our lawsuit only proves our point: It has never taken the concerns of us Jewish students seriously and has no plans to start now.”
Jewish writers say the post-Oct. 7 English literary world has blacklisted them
Erika Dreifus has spent the better part of two decades sharing resources for fellow Jewish writers on her website, but little did she imagine prior to the October 7 massacre that she’d be curating a list of publications that she calls “Writers, Beware.”

The list, which includes magazines, websites and all things book-related, “are sites that are vilifying the Jewish state, or Jewish writers” since the Hamas-led terror onslaught that saw 1,200 people butchered in southern Israel and 253 abducted to the Gaza Strip, said Dreifus.

“Even before Israel went into Gaza, literary sites and magazines began putting out statements that were so egregious, so bigoted, so antisemitic,” Dreifus said.

As the war enters its seventh month, the situation appears to have worsened.

On April 5, Jina Moore, the editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary magazine Guernica, announced her resignation in a blog post one month after being forced to retract a personal essay she’d greenlit by British-Israeli Joanna Chen, saying she disagreed with her copublisher’s decision to retract it.

A self-described liberal writer and translator who used to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to Israeli hospitals for medical care, Chen used her essay to address her inner struggle with the idea of coexistence during wartime.

But the publication of Chen’s essay sparked a mass resignation from the magazine’s staff, while copublisher Madhuri Sastry called it “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” A member of the anti-Israel group Writers Against the War on Gaza, Sastry called for a cultural boycott of all Israeli institutions.

“The incident showed that the literary community is not a safe space for Jewish or Israeli writers,” Dreifus said.
Israeli academics slammed for signing letter accusing Israel of ‘plausible genocide’
A lecturer at an Israeli university is going on unpaid leave after students demanded he be fired for signing a petition that claims Israel “appears to” be guilty of genocide.

Regev Nathansohn, who teaches communications at Sapir College, is one of two dozen Israeli academics who have signed a petition calling for the United States to stop arming Israel in its war with Hamas. The petition, which more than 1,000 academics from around the world have signed, characterizes Israel’s conduct as a “plausible genocide.”

“President Biden, do not let the United States go down in history as the enabler of genocide,” said the petition, which has more than 1,000 signatories, from a group called Academics4Peace. “Respect the US’s obligation under international law and basic morality. The only way to stop the starvation of two million people, including 100+ Israeli hostages, is to end this war.”

Sapir is located on the Gaza border near the town of Sderot, which was one of the sites attacked in Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel that saw 1,200 people butchered and 253 abducted to the Gaza Strip, roughly 130 of whom are still in Hamas hands.

Many of the school’s students and staff hail from the area, and hundreds of its students signed a letter asking the college administration to fire Nathansohn for signing the petition. Israel rejects accusations of genocide and says it takes measures to avoid civilian casualties.

“We will not tolerate educators who incite and call for a boycott against our country, as well as those who slander our soldiers,” said the students’ letter.


Vox minimises Arab persecution of Mizrahi Jews
This is a poorly-argued article by Sigal Samuel in the far-leftist publication Vox that manages to completely avoid any mention of the rise of Islamism and the 7 October Hamas massacre. Ms Samuel downplays the violence and persecution experienced by Jews in Arab countries, but cannot convincingly explain their exodus. Examples of solidarity between Mizrahi Jews and Arabs are confined to the extreme left in Israel. I have ‘fisked’ the piece: you can read my comments in italics.

“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech last October, days into the Israel-Hamas war.

Netanyahu has voiced that idea repeatedly, both before and after the Hamas attack on October 7 — the idea that Israel is a bastion of Western civilization in an uncivilized, backward, and barbarous region.

His mention of “the jungle” recalls a popular Israeli expression, attributed to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak three decades ago, that Israel is “a villa in the jungle.” The jungle, in this case, is the Arab world, and the Palestinians in it are the “beasts” par excellence.

But the idea goes back even further, to the early Zionist thinkers. Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian father of modern Zionism, wanted to establish a state where Jews could be safe from the violent antisemitism they’d long faced in Europe. He painted a vision of a Jewish state in Palestine that would grant civil rights to the Arabs who remained there (in his diary, he toyed with the idea of transferring some outside the borders). He argued that by bringing Western civilization to the region, Jews would be benefiting the local Arabs economically and culturally — and that the Jewish state would “constitute part of the wall of defense against Asia; we would serve as an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

Arabs like King Faisal also thought that the Jews would be benefiting the local Arabs.

This “outpost of civilization” ideology is key to understanding how Israel justified Palestinian dispossession to Israelis and to the world as Jews seeking refuge from persecution settled in Palestine in the 19th and 20th centuries. When Israel was founded in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes in what is now the Jewish state.

Ms Samuel conveniently forgets that no Palestinian would have been dispossessed had the Arab League and the Palestinian Arabs not rejected the Partition Plan and declared a war of annihilation against Israel. A greater number of Jews were made refugees but Ms Samuel does not mention the 850,000 Jews forced out and dispossessed from the Arab world at the same time.

But from the early days of the state, there was a group that didn’t buy the justification: Jews with roots in the Arab and Muslim world.
Guardian toes the Iranian line
First, their assertion that the attack in Damascus struck “an Iranian embassy annex”, thus representing an attack on “sovereign Iranian territory”, is only a Iranian claim – one that not only has been disputed by Israel. A US State Department spokesperson stated, when asked about Tehran’s characterisation of the target hit by Israel, that “It is our position that we are still attempting to answer that question, whether it was a consular facility or not.”

Further, at least six of those killed were from the IRGC, Hezbollah and Syrian militias, or were known terrorists.

While Syria reportedly has refused to disclose the identity of seven others who died in the strike, there’s no evidence that they were diplomats or ordinary civilians. In fact, one of those killed in the strike on IRGC officials, Mohammad Reza Zahedi, was the commander of the IRGC-QF in Lebanon, plays a key role in in providing Iranian-made missiles to Hezbollah, was a member of Hezbpllah’s Shura Council and, according to Iranian sources, was personally involved in the planning and execution of the October 7th massacre.

Iran’s assertion, wrote Haaretz journalist Amos Harel, regarding “the building’s diplomatic status” is “aimed at laying the groundwork in the international arena for the Iranian case that the facility was under Iranian sovereignty, and tantamount to an attack on Iranian soil”. So, the Guardian, it seems. has allowed itself to be played by the Islamic Republic.

Moreover, though the editorial dances around this important fact in the second paragraph highlighted, Iran, through its proxies – such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis, groups which are part of Tehran’s so-called ‘Axis of Resistance’ – has been directly striking Israel nearly every day for the past six months.

Hamas carried out the deadliest attack on Israeli civilians in the country’s history, representing the worst antisemitic massacre since the Holocaust, while Hezbollah forces, and assorted other Iranian-backed militias, have bombarded Israeli cities with thousands of projectiles over the past six months – forcing the displacement of roughly 70,000 Israelis in the north, and killing nine civilians and 11 soldiers. If the mullahs wanted to, they could have of course prevented Hezbollah and its other proxies in the region from from entering the war.

As the writer Eli Lake responded to other Iran apologists who’ve peddled the Guardian/Iranian line about Israel knowingly provoking the regime: “Why is this argument never made in reverse? Hamas knew when it raped, mutilated and murdered 1200 Jews, it would provoke a retaliatory response. Iran knew when it armed, funded and trained genocidal proxies, it would provoke a retaliatory response.”

Even by Guardian standards, the editorial’s legitimisation of the Iranian narrative on their attack on Israel is astonishing.
CNN Platforms Biased Journalists in Coverage of Iran, Gaza
CNN recently published articles by two journalists who are better described as anti-Israel mouthpieces.

Tamara Qiblawi, a Senior Investigations Writer, and Khader Al Za’anoun, a Gaza-based journalist are both platformed despite CNN being aware of the former’s anti-Israel social media posts and the latter’s position as a staffer for Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.

Qiblawi’s anti-Israel comments on social media were previously exposed by HonestReporting last year, when she was Senior Digital Middle East Producer at CNN.

Some of her now-removed posts labeled Israel as an “ethno-religious exclusive state” and supported a “resistance axis,” the term used to refer to Iranian-backed terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction.

Yet none of this seemed to bother CNN this week as Qiblawi published a genius-in-hindsight analysis describing Iran’s unprecedented attack on the Jewish state as a mere “fireworks display.”
UK Media Platform Extremist Mouthpiece for Iranian Regime
In the aftermath of Iran’s drone and missile attack on Israel, some media asked Iranians their opinions. As is often the case in authoritarian societies, those interviewees who expressed anything that could be interpreted as critical of the Iranian regime’s actions did so without providing their full names, due to fear of reprisals.

Conversely, it’s crystal clear that commentators or interviewees representing official bodies of the Islamic Republic will toe the party line, even if that means spreading blatant propaganda on Western media. If such figures are given a platform, the media are obligated to ensure their audience understands that the person being interviewed is a representative of that government. This, of course, is also the case when Israeli government or military spokespeople appear on our screens.

Both the UK’s Sky News and Channel 4 News conducted interviews with Seyed Mohammad Marandi, who was presented as a University of Tehran professor. But there’s an enormous difference between a Western university — where freedom of speech and thought is supposed to be encouraged — and a university in a closed society, where the regime maintains control over every facet of life, including education.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise on Sky News when Seyed Mohammad Marandi described Iran’s attack as a “major humiliation for the Israeli regime,” smirking as he did so. He went on to claim, despite any evidence, that Iran had caused severe damage to two Israeli military bases.

When asked about Iranian nuclear capabilities, Mohammad Marandi laughably claimed:
Iran is not like the United States, which has and uses, and has already used, nuclear weapons. Iran’s peaceful program, as we’ve seen over the years, has been peaceful and there’s never been any evidence to show otherwise.

Accusing Israel of genocide, the professor said:
You and I and your colleagues know, and everyone knows, that the Israeli regime is an apartheid regime. It is an ethno-supremacist regime. It carries out ethnic cleansing, and it kills Palestinians on a regular basis, not just in Gaza, in the West Bank.

He also issued a thinly veiled threat against Israel, which he followed up on Channel 4 News with what sounded like an Iranian threat towards both the UK and US:
There’s huge danger for the people of Britain and the United States because if this war spreads, have no doubt that all American bases in the Persian Gulf region will be destroyed and those countries that host American bases will be guilty by association, and all those oil and gas installations will be destroyed by drones and missiles. So the smart thing to do is for the UK government, the US government and others to rein in their mad dog and to stop murdering children.
Voice of America’s Gaza War Recap Omits Vital Context
To mark six months of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Voice of America (VOA) released a three-minute video chronicling the effect that the war has had in both Israel and Gaza.

However, rather than provide its audience with a comprehensive overview of the war in Gaza, VOA produced a report that omitted a fair amount of context, ultimately leaving it heavily one-sided and uninformative.

The video report begins with the recent Israeli protests calling for new elections, a hostage deal, and the ouster of the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In its coverage of these protests, VOA claims that the Israeli government has been unable “so far to secure the release of hostages captured on October 7.”

This statement omits the fact that, in November 2023, more than 100 hostages were released during a temporary ceasefire in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

As well, this claim makes it appear as if the onus lies with Israel when, in fact, Israel has agreed to several deals that would see the release of more hostages from Hamas captivity, all of which have been rejected by the leadership of the Gaza-based terror group.


BBC accused of ‘outrageous bias’ after Nick Robinson said Israel ‘murders tens of thousands of innocents’
Politicians have attacked the BBC and accused it of “shocking bias” after presenter Nick Robinson said on Monday that Israel had “murdered tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians”.

Senior Tory Theresa Villiers said there should be “an immediate investigation” into Robinson’s comments.

In an interview with the Foreign Secretary, Lord David Cameron, the BBC Radio 4 Today presenter said he would ask “a question of morality”.

“Western governments appear to back Israel the moment that Israel is under attack, but when Israel attacks and murders tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians, we say the words, but we do almost nothing,” Robinson said.

The former PM said he did not agree “at all” with Robinson’s comment and that people can see that “the truly malign actor in the region is Iran”.

The comments on the BBC flagship news programme sparked outrage.

Former Cabinet Minister Theresa Villiers told The Sun: “Even by the BBC’s standards this is shocking bias.

“I can’t believe that this kind of question is asked on one of the nation’s most influential and highly regarded news programmes. Israel does not target civilians. The country is defending itself from a brutal terror attack and making strenuous efforts not to harm civilians.

"The BBC should launch an immediate investigation into this latest example of an anti-Israel statement by one of its presenters,” said Villiers.


Ros Atkins and BBC Verify jump the shark
Again, Atkins has nothing to tell BBC audiences in his own words about the steps taken by Israel in order to protect the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, including prior warnings and provision of evacuation routes, which some experts say are unprecedented. In fact, all he has to say is:
Atkins: “Israel denies this.”

Significantly, Atkins also fails to inform BBC audiences about a different letter sent on April 5th – which to date has been signed by well over 1,300 British lawyers and former judges – explaining that there is no legal obligation for the UK government to take actions against Israel as demanded in the earlier letter and explaining some of its inaccuracies.

The fact that Atkins and his team chose to totally ignore that second letter and to erase it from audience view is ample indication that his report was not intended to meet the public purposes set out in its charter.
“The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.”

Indeed, the essence of this report is made very clear by Atkins’ editorialising in his closing sentences:
Atkins: “…this isn’t only about the law. Israel’s actions in Gaza are led by a military the UK is helping to arm. Whether legal or not, that’s a political choice as well.”

In other words, contrary to the claim in this report’s synopsis, Ros Atkins had no intention of ‘explaining’ the issue in order to enable viewers to become “informed citizens”. The fact that over half of the item was given over to promotion of views that contradict the legal advice provided to the UK government, and that a letter signed by other members of the British legal community (together with subsequent debate) was completely erased from audience view, indicates that the aim of Atkins’ report is purely to influence public opinion.

The BBC’s funding public may well be wondering how such content aligns with BBC Verify’s declared purpose: “to address the growing threat of disinformation and build trust with audiences”.
Le Devoir Commentator Claims Israeli Soldiers “Machine-Gun The Population Of The Gaza Strip”

Columnist Gwynne Dyer Claims Israel Struck Iranian Terror Targets “For No Apparent Reason”

University Of Manitoba Student Newspaper Accuses Israel Of Genocide

‘Lively spirit’: Hundreds attend funeral of Israeli teen killed in West Bank attack
Hundreds of people attended the funeral of slain Israeli teenager Benjamin Achimeir on Sunday in the Givat Shaul neighborhood of Jerusalem, a day after his body was discovered in the West Bank.

The 14-year-old from Jerusalem was killed on Friday, in what the IDF and Shin Bet security agency designated as a terror attack, which resulted in violent clashes between extremist Israeli settlers and Palestinians.

Among those in attendance at the funeral were Chief Rabbis David Lau and Yitzhak Yosef and Religious Zionism MK Zvi Sukkot.

Speaking during the funeral service, Achimeir’s mother, Miriam, said tearfully that her son was simple-hearted and sacrificed his life for his beliefs: “You were so kind, you always thought of others and took everyone into account. You made sure not to hurt anyone, not even joking at others’ expense,” she said.

Benjamin’s brother Avinoam eulogized him as well, saying: “Bini, my beloved and sweet brother. You were always the lively spirit in the house, the one who helped everyone and brought us together. You always wanted us to travel with you, and I, like a fool, didn’t have time for that, I’m sorry Bini. You always helped me.”

Achimeir went missing after setting out in the early morning hours of Friday from a farm near the unauthorized West Bank outpost of Malachei Shalom to go shepherding, according to the IDF. Hours later, the sheep returned to “Gal Farm” without him.
Palestinian Authority Denies ‘Politico’ Report That It Will Change Pay-for-Slay Program
The Palestinian official in charge of ensuring that salaries are paid to the families of terrorists in the notorious “Pay-for-Slay” program has categorically dismissed reports that the Palestinian Authority (PA) would end the payments.

A March 2024 report in Politico cited two Biden administration officials saying that, “the U.S. is near a deal with the Palestinian Authority to end its contentious ‘martyr payments’ for people who commit acts of violence against Israel.”

In response, Qadura Fares, the Director of the PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs and Chairman of the PA-funded Prisoners’ Club, declared that the reports are false because paying salaries to prisoners is “anchored in Palestinian law and is non-negotiable”:
Senior sources in the American administration said that a draft of the American plan that was submitted to the PA presents an alternative solution to the question of the salaries paid to the Palestinian families, and it will start by implementing a comprehensive plan by the PA on the topic of welfare …

Director of Palestinian [PLO] Commission of Prisoners’ [Affairs] Qadura Fares emphasized that the reports given on this matter are baseless, but they are being disseminated now and then. He directed attention to how this is part of the Israeli media’s attempt to distort and tarnish the image of the PA.

In an interview with Erem News, Fares said that the payment of salaries to the families of the prisoners and the Martyrs is anchored in Palestinian law and is non-negotiable, and he even strongly emphasized that the payment of salaries to the families of the prisoners and the Martyrs by the PA is “a red line.” [emphasis added]

[Erem News, UAE-based news website, April 1, 2024]

For years, the US and European countries have demanded that the PA reframe its rewards-for-terrorists program so that it becomes a social welfare program for the families of terrorists, but the PA has refused. Now, Politico has reported that “drafts of the PA payments reform plans seen by U.S. officials indicate that Palestinian leaders will replace the current scheme with a general welfare program.”

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) reported on a similar initiative in 2013, just two years after PMW exposed the PA’s Pay-for-Slay program.

After PMW presented the evidence to European countries, both Britain and Norway asked the PA to make a superficial change to their law by calling the payments social “assistance” instead of salaries to prisoners. Even this cosmetic change, however, was met with outrage among the Palestinian public and the prisoners’ organizations.


It’s time for a new approach to antisemitism
Perhaps nothing encourages antisemitism more than the impunity enjoyed by today’s antisemites. This is the result of a pervasive and systemic failure to enforce laws, prosecute violations and punish the Jew-haters for their crimes. For example, out of 118 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City brought to trial between 2018 and 2022, the perpetrator was convicted and sentenced to significant prison time only once. In this context, is it any wonder that during the same period, there was a huge jump in antisemitic hate crimes in the city?

This is unacceptable. Consequences matter. We need to change the calculus for the antisemites. We must impose painful social consequences on those who engage in hate crimes and violence. We must identify and restrain those who promote an ideology of Jew-hatred—including in universities and the media. Many might not want to hear it, but punishment is far more effective at curbing bad behavior than education.

We propose a new approach to fighting antisemitism that draws on strategies that have effectively curbed hatred of other minority groups, such as the black and LGBT communities.

Almost anyone who explicitly speaks or acts in a racist or anti-LGBT manner quickly faces punishment in the form of social and cultural ostracization as well as legal sanctions. Society has come to recognize that unless these haters are punished, they rarely stop. Similarly, society must enforce existing laws—especially civil rights laws—and arrest, prosecute and severely punish antisemitism and antisemites. Antisemites must also face social and cultural ostracization.

In the educational system, the U.S. government must adopt the same approach it uses to protect blacks and sexual minorities. Jewish students must receive equal protection. Institutions and especially their leaders that fail to give them equal protection must face severe consequences.

An initial step would be requiring the educational system—including K-12—to cleanse itself of hateful ideologies. Additionally, high school and college curricula must include an honest examination of our tribal nature, recognizing that we are not exempt from evolution and identifying how we can restrain its negative impulses.

As a society, we cannot afford to wait any longer. Today’s epidemic of Jew-hatred requires immediate action based on fresh thinking. Continuing to pursue failed policies is no longer acceptable.
France Bolsters Security at Jewish Schools, Synagogues Amid Mideast Conflict as Passover Approaches
France will bolster security at Jewish schools and synagogues ahead of Passover, in part due to the ongoing war in Gaza and the escalating conflict between Iran and Israel, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin.

“As Passover approaches and given the current international situation, I have told local officials to significantly step up security at places visited by our Jewish compatriots, especially with regards to synagogues and Jewish schools,” he wrote on the X/Twitter social media platform.

The Jewish holiday of Passover, which celebrates the Biblical story of the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt, will begin next Monday evening and end the following Tuesday.

Darmanin’s tweet came amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza and one day after Iran launched an unprecedented direct attack against the Israeli homeland.

The move to step up security at Jewish institutions also came amid an explosion of antisemitism in France in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Antisemitic outrages rose by over 1,000 percent in the final three months of 2023 compared with the previous year, with over 1,200 incidents reported — greater than the total number of incidents in France for the previous three years combined.

Amid a historic surge in hate crimes against Jews, Darmanin has announced several steps to combat pro-Hamas forces in the country.

Following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, the interior minister attempted to impose an outright ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations, citing fears over public disorder. That order was subsequently modified by the Council of State, which ruled that demonstrations could be banned by the police on a case-by-case basis.
Ramapo police arrest 23-year-old for attempted murder of Jewish man in his own driveway
The Ramapo Police Department announced on Saturday that it arrested Elijah Dean, 23, and charged the New York City resident with various degrees of attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon. Dean is accused of stabbing a man, who was in his own driveway, multiple times, including in the head and neck.

The victim is reportedly an Orthodox Jew. Police did not state a motive for the crime.

The arrest came after “nearly 48 hours of tireless investigative efforts,” and police officers worked with the FBI and with the detective bureau of the Spring Valley Police Department, the Ramapo police said.

Dean was arraigned Saturday evening in Ramapo Town Court, with bail set as $1 million in cash, per the police, which stated that the victim remains hospitalized in serious condition but is expected to survive.
Scottish police investigate ‘Zionism = Nazism’ post as potential hate crime
A new hate-crime law in Scotland empowers victims of online antisemitism or other bigoted content against protected groups to submit a report to police. That has led to an unnamed woman filing a complaint against an anti-Israel graphic uploaded by Tom Arthur Sr., the father of community wealth minister Tom Arthur, who condemned the image’s sharing.

The Internet meme features the phrase “Nazism = Zionism” above a blue Star of David with a swastika twisted into the center.

Initial articles on the potential infraction noted that the person who filed the report was not Jewish and that they were inundated with reports. Eventually, police clarified that they were investigating.

“We’re snowed under with all these complaints. How are we supposed to get through all these?” the woman who received the image said an officer told her.

“Police Scotland have made it clear that this complaint is being investigated as a crime. And so, commenting on an inaccurate anonymous report in the media would be inappropriate at this time,” a spokesperson for the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities told JNS. “Nevertheless, we welcome the fact that the image itself has been universally recognized and condemned as antisemitic by both the SNP and the Minister concerned.”
British neo-Nazi teen on trial for plot to bomb East Sussex synagogue
For the next three weeks, jurors at the Winchester Crown Court in England will listen to proceedings on whether a white supremacist’s notes constituted a fantasy to impress friends or an authentic terror plot to kill Jews and himself in a suicide bombing.

A trial began last week involving Mason Reynolds, a self-described neo-Nazi who faces charges for allegedly planning to blow up a synagogue in East Sussex. The 19-year-old, a student who lived with his parents, was arrested in June 2023.

On the encrypted messaging platform Telegram, Reynolds allegedly told fellow posters of neo-Nazi memes that he “had a plan” to further the movement’s goals of waging war on Jews, blamed for masterminding a conspiracy against white people.

Barrister Naomi Parsons, acting as prosecutor, said that Reynolds was in the courtroom not for his hateful ideology but “because he has been charged with a terrorism-related offense, and what that means, in practice, is that he’s not just held those political, racial and ideological views” but has acted on them.

Parsons pointed to a document in a notes application on Reynolds’s phone that included a plan to attack a synagogue, complete with video, images and text. It identified an entrance he intended to use and named which Jewish holidays draw the largest crowds to prayer.


Tucker Carlson is officially an antisemite
What do Tucker Carlson, the isolationist conservative pundit, and Elizabeth Warren, the woke progressive senator from Massachusetts, have in common? Not much other than slandering Israel.

Last week, at an event at the Islamic Center of Boston, Warren told her audience, “What Israel is doing is wrong. … It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend it to your will. … I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide.” She claimed the International Court of Justice has “ample evidence to do so.”

Yesterday, in an interview posted on X that already has over seven million views, Carlson gave a platform to Pastor Munther Isaac. Isaac is the conference director of Christ at the Checkpoint, a well-known anti-Israel propagandist forum in Bethlehem that seeks to undermine Evangelical Christian support for Israel. Christ at the Checkpoint supports the BDS movement, denies the Jewish people’s historical connection to Israel by manipulating Christian theology and history, and vilifies Israel as solely responsible for all conflict in the region.

Christ at the Checkpoint promotes a particularly twisted form of antisemitic supersessionist theology. At one of its conferences, Anglican priest Naim Ateek explained the name of the group by falsely claiming, “Jesus was a Palestinian who lived in Palestine … born under occupation. Jesus lived under occupation. Everything he taught, everything he said was done under occupation, exactly the way we live today.”

Isaac celebrated the Oct. 7 massacre, declaring in his sermon the next day that he was “shocked by the strength of the Palestinian man who defied his siege.”

Carlson’s team carefully vets his guests. Munther Isaac’s antisemitic views and support for Hamas are well known, but Carlson hosted him all the same. When Isaac said that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza and “starving” the Gazan civilian population, Carlson made clear that he agreed with these lies. “Father, thank you for your thoroughly decent and sensible analysis,” he said. “I hope it’s heard by Christians throughout the West.”

As for Warren, her hatred of Israel isn’t news. In this, she is like millions of other woke progressives. But Carlson is a hero of the right. Can he really be an antisemite? The answer, sadly, is yes.

For a long time, many have tried to give Carlson the benefit of the doubt. Carlson isn’t antisemitic, he’s just an isolationist, they claim. But his antisemitism is now undeniable.


Argentina's president reveals his Jewish heritage
Argentinian President Javier Milei is known as a fervent supporter of Israel. In February, he visited Israel, and during the trip he prayed at the Western Wall, where he was seen shedding tears. He also traveled to the south and was shocked by the scenes of the Hamas atrocities. Milei has now revealed that he has Jewish roots.

In a speech at the Chabad synagogue in Bal Harbor, Florida, Milei recounted that his grandfather was Jewish. "My grandfather was truly a great influence. I used to learn values from him and learned a lot," Milei said, speaking in Spanish with a simultaneous translation. "The most interesting thing is that, shortly before he died he discovered that he was Jewish. He didn’t know but someone told him, ‘Your mother was Jewish, so you are Jewish.'"

"So all the values that I received from him came from Judaism," Milei added. The Jewish community in the area recognized the president of Argentina as the "international ambassador of light," partly due to his unwavering support for Israel.

Also present at the synagogue was Louis Har, an Israeli-Argentinian citizen who was freed from Hamas captivity in a daring operation in Rafah. He presented Miliei with a yellow ribbon to symbolize the remaining hostages. The president of Argentina posted on Instagram a picture of the gift he received, a colorful plaque in the shape of the Torah with a verse from the Book of Isaiah in Hebrew and Spanish. The verse includes a variation of the expression "a light to the nations."

Rabbi Tzvi Grunblatt, who has headed Chabad in Argentina since 1978, traveled with Milei and his entourage to Miami. "I’m proud as an Argentinean about this recognition to our president and the secretary general of the presidency, for his faith, his spiritual values, for his belief in the spiritual mission of life,” Grunblatt told JTA. “There are a lot of people with that attitude but he not only is a man of faith but also speaks publicly about this.”
Inside the real Israel
Beyond Tel Aviv, it’s a different world. Up in the northern, rural part of Israel where my family lives, people care even less about what the world has to say. Outside the cities, life in Israel is still hard. Most jobs are manual, and there’s even less interest in what the rest of the world thinks. They don’t speak English; they don’t know or care what the campuses of Columbia or Harvard think they are. Over dinner one night, a relative asked me if London was still an “antisemitic shithole.” They send their children to fight in Gaza and pray for their return, they don’t trust Bibi anymore, but they don’t know who else to turn to.

In the kibbutz where my family is from, there’s a small limestone quarry. Jewish Israelis and Arabs from inside Israel and the West Bank work side by side from the early hours, blowing holes in the mountain. It’s dirty, sweaty, dangerous work and there’s no room to treat those around you as anything but equal. There’s nothing special about the scene — it’s one of hundreds of thousands all over Israel happening all the time. In restaurants, in shops, in factories, there are a million different types of quiet coexistence, most of which have survived October 7.

The nastiness and insanity of online discourse flattens Israel to a caricature. In reality it is no different from any other country, but it’s portrayed as unique in either its evil or its future. When the public image of a country is shaped by people that have never been there, you end up with lies on top of lies.

Israel is neither a racist crusader state nor a flawless paragon of moral virtue that never makes a mistake. It is a country like any other. There are ugly elements of its society, and there is political incompetence in danger of leading the country to ruin. But where doesn’t that exist? There is not a nation on the face of the earth immune to demagogues, or whose people wouldn’t react with fear and rage when hundreds of them are massacred.

In all my conversations with Israelis, everyone I spoke to was unsettled, they were tired, they wanted to feel secure.

Over drinks in Tel Aviv one night, I spoke to a friend who’d just been released from reserve duty after three months in Gaza and the destroyed kibbutzim around it. I asked him what he thought of the world’s response — the surges in antisemitism, the marches that veer into hate mobs, the endless mindless discourse of the online left. He said he didn’t care. He’d spent three months in Gaza and now he’d come out of it, back to his wife and children. “I just care about what’s happening here,” he said. In a country with real conflict, no one has time for culture wars.




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This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For 20 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

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