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Sunday, October 13, 2024

10/13 Links: How the Israel-Iran rope-a-dope ends; The sanctity of international law has been compromised to demonise Israel; Over 60 wounded in Hezbollah drone strikes

From Ian:

Caroline Glick: Netanyahu’s ‘day after’ plan
Despite the comprehensiveness of its echo-chamber strategy of flooding the media with anti-Netanyahu innuendo, demoralizing messages of Israeli weakness and claims that Israel is trying to pull the U.S. into an unnecessary war, the administration’s messaging is hitting a wall.

Israel’s astounding success in devastating Hezbollah’s leadership and a large percentage of its massive arsenal of projectiles increased American support for Israeli victory. Whereas a few months ago, “experts” scoffed at Netanyahu’s pledge to bring Israel “Absolute Victory” in the war, now experts like Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s MI6 spy agency, are saying that Israel is on the road to achieving just that.

And so we come to Netanyahu’s day-after plan. Rebuffed by Biden-Harris, Netanyahu waited until after Israel turned the tide in the war to present his actual strategic vision for a post-war Middle East to the administration. He outlined it in two English-language video messages, first to the Iranian people and then to the Lebanese people.

In both videos, he described how Iran and Hezbollah, respectively, have destroyed Iran and Lebanon. Israel, he explained to the Lebanese, has weakened Hezbollah sufficiently for the Lebanese people to rise up against it.

In his words, “We have degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities; we took out thousands of terrorists, including Nasrallah himself, and Nasrallah’s replacement, and the replacement of his replacement. Today, Hezbollah is weaker than it has been for many, many years.

“Now you, the Lebanese people, you stand at a significant crossroads. It is your choice. You can now take back your country.”

He told the Iranians, “You know one simple thing, Iran’s tyrants don’t care about your future. But you do.”

He told the Iranian people that Iran will be freed from the regime “a lot sooner than people think,” and presented them with a vision of peace after its fall.

“Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace. When that day comes, the terror network that the regime built in five continents will be bankrupt, dismantled. Iran will thrive as never before.”

Netanyahu’s vision is the opposite of the Obama-Biden-Harris vision. And the American public supports it. This state of affairs limits the administration’s capacity to block Israel’s plans in relation to its much-vaunted retaliatory strike following Iran’s missile assault on Oct. 1.

The Biden-Harris team’s efforts to bar Israel from attacking either Iran’s nuclear installations or its oil installations involve the familiar mix of contradictory messaging and political and strategic subversion that we have experienced from Democratic administrations since 2009. On the one hand, the U.S. supports Israel. On the other hand, the administration has flooded the media with its claims that Israel is too weak to take effective action, that its efforts are geared towards dragging the U.S. into a war, and that Iran poses no threat to anyone.

All the same, Israel’s unexpected and demoralizing delays in carrying out its retaliatory attack on Iran raise fears that the administration is successfully blocking Israel from taking any strategically meaningful action against the regime. If that is in fact the case, the momentum Israel gained from its stunning intelligence operations and airstrikes against Hezbollah will be squandered. The conviction will resurface that Israel doesn’t have what it takes to win the war.

While a source of anxiety, the prospect that Netanyahu will stand down now is minuscule. Israel’s momentum is too strong. Iranians and Lebanese, empowered by Israel’s achievement, are already echoing his messaging. The administration’s continued demands for immediate ceasefires and Israeli strategic reticence strike the average American and U.S. ally as irrational and out of step with events.

While the shape of things to come is still unknowable, it is clear that Iran wasn’t the only party whose strategic goals were undermined by Israel’s seizure of the upper hand in this war. The Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy establishment’s Iran-centric vision of the Middle East was also scuttled.
Michael Oren: How the Israel-Iran rope-a-dope ends
Iran’s haymaker is coming, and the only question is whether Israel is prepared to deliver ours first. Can Israel, in classic boxing fashion, use Iran’s strategy against it? Will Israel emulate Muhammad Ali, the greatest pugilist of all time, in adopting the tactic of “rope-a-dope?”

Though not taught to me by my father, “rope-a-dope” was known to all sports fans of my generation. Ali would simply put his gloves up, covering his face, and let his opponent pound them repeatedly to no effect. Finally, with the challenger utterly fatigued, Ali would inflict his lethal right. An eight-count would follow, concluding with a bell.

Israel, too, could play rope-a-dope with Iran, parlaying its proxies’ attacks while wearing down the Ayatollahs’ resources. We could also lead them to believe that we’re concentrating solely on their left jabs and ignoring their impending right. We could lull them into a worn-out sense of security and then, unexpectedly, deliver the knock-out.

My father’s lessons worked. When next accosted by the Jew-hating bully, I suggested that we fight like gentlemen and challenged him to a match. We each got a pair of the Everlasts and started to box. Hackneyed as it sounds, he never laid a glove on me. Rather, I let him tire and fluster himself blocking my lefts until I could exploit his unguarded face. The bell – had there been one – pealed my victory.

I recalled that experience while reviewing our many rounds of conflict with Iran. They cannot conclude with a tie. My father, of blessed memory, would tell us, as he once assured me, now is our chance to strike. We may not get another.
Victor Davis Hanson: Biden and Harris, own up: your Iran policies ignited Israel’s war
It was the terrorists of Hamas who surprise-attacked and murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians during peace and on a Jewish holiday.

Their slaughtering, torturing, raping and hostage-taking revealed a level of pre-civilization barbarism rarely seen in the modern era.

Israel was simultaneously targeted by rockets from Hamas and Hezbollah that would eventually number over 20,000.

It did not respond to the bloodbath with a full-scale invasion of Gaza until Oct. 27, some three weeks after the slaughtering.

During that interim, for most of the Muslim world and both US Muslim communities and on American campuses, there was rejoicing at the news of slaughtered Jews.

For over three years, Biden-Harris had signaled Israel’s enemies that the United States no longer acted like a close ally of the past.

The administration lifted sanctions on a hostile Iran, giving it $100 billion in oil windfalls.

It begged Iran to reenter the disastrous Iran deal.

It abandoned the Abraham Accords.

It lifted the terrorist designation from the terrorist Houthis.

It restored fungible aid to the Hamas tunnel builders.

It gave new aid to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon.

Israel’s enemies got the Biden message: Attack the Jewish state and perhaps Americans for the first time in a half-century may not really mind that much.

And so they did, in unison.

Rather than admitting their own role in igniting the Middle East, Biden and Harris now blame the victims of their own incendiary foreign policy.

The final irony?

Israel has concluded that Biden-Harris foolhardiness can be toxic — and endanger its very survival — and so will not agree to its own suicide.

What do you think? Post a comment.

Instead, Israel seeks to finish a multifaceted war it did not seek.

And one of the beneficiaries of Israeli blood and treasure will be the United States itself, given Israel is now systematically weakening America’s own existential enemies.


The sanctity of international law has been compromised to demonise Israel
The truth is that the ICJ made clear that, at the interim hearing, it was assuming that the Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide (ie focussing on the question of legal rights), but not that there was a plausible genocide (ie not focussing on the disputed facts).

This subtle but critical distinction unsurprisingly eluded almost all of the international media. Rather more surprisingly, it escaped some leading lawyers, too. Four retired members of the UK Supreme Court signed a letter supporting UK sanctions on Israel, founded on the proposition that the ICJ had determined “there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza”. Although the then President of the ICJ, Judge Donoghue, later confirmed that the court “did not decide … that the claim of genocide was plausible”, the open letters had already been printed, the placards ordered and the internet memes circulated.

International law has not been having a good war. And that is a real concern to those of us who support the international legal order and want to see it thrive. Part of the problem might be one familiar to us from other areas: international treaties and rules set up to deal with the conduct of states, are ill-equipped to deal with non-state actors with the capabilities of states, and of terrorist organisations funded and controlled by states.

But there is also a suspicion that the answer to the question “Are Israel’s acts lawful?” is too often a knee-jerk “no”, even before those acts are identified.

Over the past year, I have heard international lawyers decry the use by Israel of missiles and of ground forces, of targeted assassinations and cyber-warfare, of attacking supply lines and building a security wall. Some have contended that attacking Hezbollah fighters with exploding pagers – and it’s hard to conceive of a more targeted response – is also unlawful. But I have heard little from lawyers about how Israel can prevent another 7 October while acting within international law.

One such conversation ended with the suggestion that Israel and its sworn enemies should negotiate and “compromise somewhere in the middle”. I pointed out that the starting bid of Hamas (and Hezbollah, and the Houthis) was that all Israeli Jews should be killed, while Israel’s position was that none should be, and asked where “in the middle” a compromise might lie.

I’m still waiting for an answer. Perhaps some lawyers are better at identifying problems than finding solutions.
“Well, it Depends”_ The Explosive Pagers Attack Revisited
Still, critics of the operation raise another point, which is relevant to the proportionality analysis (as well as to distinction if one does not accept our position that the pagers were, formally speaking, the object of the attack). Even if one accepts that the pagers were distributed mostly to Hezbollah military operatives, Israel could not know who actually held the pagers at the time of their explosion, and therefore it could not have directed its attack only at militants and/or could not have anticipated that the harm to civilians would not be excessive. As already indicated, there are reports that suggest some of those harmed were civilians not participating in hostilities. Therefore, Israel’s actions arguably violate IHL’s presumption of civilian status, according to which a person is considered a civilian unless it can be proven otherwise. This rule is relevant for the application of both principles of distinction and proportionality.

Discussing these points requires addressing several controversial doctrinal issues. First, with regard to the presumption of civilian status, despite some disagreements in the past about its scope and contents (especially regarding NIACs), it now seems settled law that in case of doubt as to whether the attacked person or object is civilian, a presumption of civilian status must hold. The level of proof that the attacking military must attain before reversing the presumption, however, is far from clear. Deciding extreme cases appears to be straightforward. The attacking State is not required to show one-hundred percent proof that the person targeted is taking a direct part in hostilities, nor can it base its identification of the target as military on general speculations, such as age or gender. Disagreements remain regarding the cases found in the middle between these two extreme scenarios.

The 2023 version of the U.S. DoD Law of War Manual suggests the following criteria: the decision of the commander should be based on his genuine and good faith professional opinion as to the identity of the target; on context; and on available information. It should consider the importance of the target, as well as expected civilian casualties. The level of proof need not be one which will convince a criminal court.

The Manual further states,
Commanders and other decision-makers must determine whether a potential target is a military objective based on the available information that is relevant to whether the potential target meets the applicable legal standard for a military objective. Such relevant information includes the characteristics of the potential target (e.g., the conduct or status of the person or the nature, location, purpose, or use of the object), as well as other information that indicates whether the potential target is a military objective (e.g., the military advantages or disadvantages offered by where the target is situated, intelligence estimates of enemy forces’ presence or anticipated action, enemy tactics, or assessments of civilian presence and behavior). In addition, it may be feasible to gather more information about the potential target (§ 5.4.3.2).

This standard of “genuine and good faith professional opinion” seems to us to be a correct articulation of the evidentiary standard required for identifying military targets under IHL.

From that point of view, it seems to us that if Israel made a professional assessment as to the identity of the persons holding the pagers, in which it assumed that there is a very high chance that the person holding the pager would be a legitimate military target, this could, in the specific context of the conflict against Hezbollah, substantiate a decision to target pagers (and those holding them) in a manner that would not produce excessive collateral harm. In particular, the contextual analysis should, in our mind, consider the fact that alternative operations to target Hezbollah’s mid-and high-level command structure, which is embedded in civilian settings (such as the Dahia quarter in Beirut) would most likely result in far greater collateral harm to civilians.

Another relevant doctrinal question involves the use of probabilities in targeting decisions. Let us assume that Israel knew in advance that five to ten percent of the persons holding the pagers would be civilians without being able to identify which of the pagers was actually used by civilians and without having the technological ability to target only those directly participating in hostilities. Would it then be prohibited from detonating the pagers (under principles of distinction or proportionality)? This state of affairs appears to us to be analogous to the problem of error rate in the use of weapon systems. Assuming that even sophisticated missiles have a five to ten percent error rate, which could result in them missing their target, would one say that sending a barrage of missiles directed at military objectives during an active armed conflict is prohibited, just because there is almost statistical certainty that civilians would be harmed because of the malfunctioning of some of these missiles? If indeed our factual assumption is correct, and Israel anticipated according to its “genuine and good faith professional opinion” that almost but not everyone who would carry or hold a pager is a Hezbollah military operative, the fact that it could have been expected that a small number of civilians might be also harmed, does not render, in our view, the entire operation disproportionate in nature.
United Nations' Material Support for Terrorism: Allegedly Gave $1.3 Billion to Hamas in Cash, Presumably for Weapons
Gavriel Mairone, the attorney who is representing the plaintiffs, argues that these shocking allegations demonstrate that, for more than a decade, UNRWA's aid distribution network was involved in widespread fraud and corruption. The lawsuit claims this scheme not only enriched Hamas but also funded terrorism, playing a pivotal role in the October 7 attacks.

The first damning evidence of the UN's complicity in the worst terrorist atrocity committed in Israel's history emerged after Israel's military reported that 450 workers employed by UNRWA were "military operatives from Hamas and other armed groups" and has shared this intelligence with the United Nations.

The dossier of "a UN crime against humanity" and its demonization of Israel is too long to list, but one can get a glimpse of it...

A better idea, given the body's recent woeful record on its handling of the Middle East, would be to demolish the entire infrastructure of this corrupt and institutionally biased body.


Windermere Holocaust archivist says antisemitism has 'reached another level' amid hate crimes rise
Windermere Holocaust archivist says antisemitic hate has "gone onto a different level" as Home Office, released this week, shows a 25% national increase in religious hate crimes.

Trevor Avery, Director of the Lake District Holocaust Project, says the recent antisemitic graffiti marked on the building of the exhibition has become "insidious".

He said: "Often it happens and you deal with each incident as it comes along. But then you look back, suddenly there are personal attacks, personal threats face to face and you realise it's gone onto a different level. I could probably name all the jewish folks in this area, it's a small community.

"The fear from jewish people visiting, imagine turning up to a Holocaust project in Windermere which tells this beautiful story of these children who arrived and were cared for by the locals and there's a swastika on the building."

The charity says antisemitic graffiti has also appeared at a playground in Windermere, the place where Holocaust victims came to recover after the Second World War.

Windermere provided sanctuary to hundreds of Nazi death camp survivors 79 years ago, in 1945.

Boys and girls who survived the concentration and labour camps in eastern Europe, known as the 'Windermere Boys', moved to the Lake District leaving their home countries behind.

The children settled in Cumbria as part of a recuperating scheme in which they were provided education, training and language skills. They were also given psychological help to aid their integration into British society.
Simon Sebag Montefiore warns we are witnessing ‘the end of the taboo on antisemitism’
Acclaimed author Simon Sebag Montefiore has warned we are witnessing “the end of the taboo on antisemitism” that emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and which now needs to be “fought for again.”

In a compelling interview on the Sky News Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips show, the author of a newly updated biography of Jerusalem, said “part” of the problem could be found amongst some Palestinian rights protesters who were “exploiting medieval tropes of antisemitism” including those around the murder of children by Jews.

Montefiore also said the current Labour government must be “confident about the interests of the West” in its approach to the on-going conflict in the Middle East, but he added:”This doesn’t mean that they should forswear humanitarian standards, which should be applied to Israel as much as to anybody.”

Asked for his view about the threat to society from rising antisemtism, the writer said:”I do think we really feel in the Jewish community here that we’re in a new era now.

“And there has been a huge change. I think in historical terms, what we’re seeing is the end of the taboo on antisemitism, that was really one of the results of the 1945 war and the Holocaust and, you know, 80 years later, it’s kind of run out.

“And we are just seeing many of the huge gains, gained in society, not just the taboo on antisemitism, but many of the gains of the great liberal reformation.

“All of those things are now being challenged, and many of the things we took for granted in our democracies, of which the taboo on antisemtism is, is a key one, are now being challenged and will have to be fought for again. ”

Phillips asked for more detail on the “tropes of antisemitism”.

“You know, of course, part of it is a protest against Israel,” said Montefiore. “Part of it is a protest for Palestinian rights, which many of us agree with in their principles. But they are also using and exploiting tropes of antisemitism. Some of them are medieval, some of them are 19th century, that we haven’t seen for a long time.

‘Well, for example, the blood libel, for example, you know, the medieval blood libel that Jewish people used the blood of Christian children to make their Matzah cakes for Passover, which started in Medieval Britain and which you’re now seeing regularly in the posters, on the rallies, you know, the anti-Israel, Pro-Palestine.”

Montefiore agreed that in terms of the conduct of the campaign in Gaza, Israel “in some ways, could have made better choices.”

He said it seemed essential that both Hamas and Hezbollah were defeated “but not at the cost of too many civilian casualties.”

The historian also cast doubt on the accuracy of figures made public by Hamas, which obscured the number of terrorist fighters from the overall casualties.


Norway begins border checks amid threats to Jewish, Israeli targets
Norway is introducing temporary border checks after raising its terror threat level, police said on Saturday. According to the statement, the inspections will be in effect until Oct. 22.

Norway is not part of the European Union but is a member of the Schengen Zone, with no border controls between countries. The Nordic country shares land borders with E.U. and Schengen members Sweden and Finland.

Police said that not all travelers will be checked as part of the new border controls and that delays are not expected at border crossings.

The move comes after the domestic security service raised the terror threat level from moderate to high on Oct. 8 (level 4 on a scale of 1 to 5).

“It is primarily the threat to Jewish and Israeli targets that has been further intensified,” according to the Politiets sikkerhetstjeneste (PST).

“There are several negative conditions that have increased the terrorist threat, among other things linked to the ongoing escalation of the conflict in the Middle East,” the statement continued.

“Furthermore, there are several Jewish holidays in October. Several actors may see such markings as a symbol of terrorist acts.”

According to the PST’s definition, level 4 means that the security services have assessed that “one or more people have concrete and realistic plans and are taking concrete steps to carry out terrorist attacks and/or that several conditions increase the terrorist threat.”

The Norwegian security measures come after gunfire and explosions occurred near the Israeli embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm earlier this month.


IDF Displays Complete Battlefield Supremacy in Southern Lebanon Operation
On Thursday I saw the IDF in a Lebanese town taking apart the military infrastructure, including advanced Kornet missiles, rockets, and anti-aircraft guns, which Hizbullah embedded into nearly every civilian house. While Hizbullah has started to fire rockets at larger Israeli cities farther from the border, these attacks have paled in comparison to what was expected and the casualty count has been relatively low.

Once it began a ground invasion of Lebanon, Israel expected to have thousands of dead civilians and a ravaged home front, including in Tel Aviv. During the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Israeli forces suffered from Hizbullah ambushes and there were concerns about the IDF's ability to take the fight to enemy territory on the ground.

Yet, what I saw in southern Lebanon was complete IDF supremacy on the ground - and in record time. Reported IDF deaths in battle are in the low dozens - an astoundingly low number compared to the several hundred Hizbullah operatives killed and the myriad of weapons captured. The IDF has exorcised the Hizbullah demons that had plagued it.
Netanyahu tells UN to get forces out of harm’s way in Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to remove UNIFIL peacekeepers from areas of IDF activity in Southern Lebanon.

“I want to directly address the U.N. Secretary-General from here: It is time for you to remove UNIFIL from Hezbollah’s strongholds and from the combat areas,” the premier said in a statement.

“The IDF has repeatedly requested this, only to be met with refusal, a refusal aimed solely at providing Hezbollah terrorists with a human shield. Your refusal to evacuate UNIFIL soldiers turns them into hostages of Hezbollah. This endangers both them and the lives of our soldiers,” he continued.

“We regret the harm caused to UNIFIL soldiers, and we are doing everything we can to prevent it. But the simplest and most obvious way to ensure their safety is to simply remove them from the danger zone.

Mr. Secretary-General, get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way. It should be done right now, immediately,” Netanyahu said.

“Unfortunately, some European leaders are applying pressure in the wrong place. Instead of criticizing Israel, they should direct their criticism at Hezbollah, which uses UNIFIL as a human shield, just as Hamas in Gaza uses UNRWA as a human shield. Unfortunately, in Gaza, UNRWA even collaborates with Hamas.”


US to send advanced aerial defense system to Israel
The United States will deploy in Israel the THAAD advanced aerial defense system, the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed on Sunday, amid anticipation of an Israeli retaliation for Iran’s rocket strikes on it earlier this month.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved the deployment of a THAAD battery and “associated crew of U.S. military personnel to Israel to help bolster Israel’s air defenses following Iran’s unprecedented attacks against Israel on April 13 and again on October 1,” the Pentagon announced in a statement.

THAAD, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, is a mobile anti-ballistic missile. U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the deployment, which is the third since 2019.

“The THAAD Battery will augment Israel’s integrated air defense system. This action underscores the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel, and to defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks by Iran,” Sunday’s announcement added.

The U.S. military deployed a THAAD battery, along with Patriot battalions, to bolster protections for American troops in the region late last year after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in southern Israel.

The United States also sent a THAAD unit to Israel in March 2019 for “training and an integrated air defense exercise,” according to the Pentagon. It also deployed the THAAD in Israel in 2021.

The manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, claims THAAD is the only U.S. system designed to intercept targets both inside and outside the atmosphere. THAAD was developed following the 1991 Gulf War as a countermeasure for long and medium-range missiles.


Hezbollah’s finances dry up as cash sources cut
Hezbollah is running out of money, as three of its main sources of cash dry up, the Voice of America (VOA) reported on Friday.

The Iranian terrorist proxy relies on three key funding channels: Al-Qard al Hasan, or AQAH, a Hezbollah-owned quasi-bank operating without a government banking license; Licensed Lebanese commercial banks: and cash from Iran, Researchers told the broadcaster.

Israel targeted AQAH in its initial airstrikes during the current campaign in Lebanon. They hit Hezbollah’s “cash storage centers, including a large part of the AQAH vaults,” leaving the group in a “financial crisis,” VOA reported, quoting a Sept. 30 report by Murr Television, aka MTV Lebanon.

Hilal Khashan, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut, also told the VOA that Israel “destroyed” most of AQAH’s branches.

“Hezbollah is facing a very serious financial problem. They are unable to pay rank and file members who have fled their homes and need to feed their families,” Khashan said.

The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), a group of Israeli intelligence veterans, describes Al-Qard al-Hasan (“The Benevolent Loan”), as an institution that mainly provides interest-free loans to the Shi’ite community in Lebanon.

The main idea is to support Shi’ite society so that it in turn will support Hezbollah, becoming a “resistance society,” ITIC explained.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned AQAH in 2007 and individuals associated with it in proceeding years. The sanctions did not, however, affect the number of loans provided by the organization, which continued to grow, ITIC said.

David Asher, a former U.S. Defense and State Department official who focused on Hezbollah’s drug trafficking and money laundering operations, told VOA that the group is in “deep trouble” as it is also losing access to Lebanese banking.

“I’m hearing from Lebanese bankers, including Hezbollah financiers, that Lebanon’s wealthiest bankers who can afford to fly have fled to Europe and the Gulf, fearing they could be targeted next by Israel for helping Hezbollah,” Asher said, now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute.

“These Lebanese bankers, most of them billionaires, see the wind is blowing against Hezbollah, so they are not going to let it take millions of dollars out of their banks, which still have cash despite being bankrupt on paper,” Asher said. “They know that if they do, Israel probably will eliminate them, too.”


Over 60 wounded as Hezbollah drone strikes northern Israel
At least 60 people were wounded, including three critically, when a Hezbollah drone from Lebanon struck the Binyamina area on Israel’s Coastal Plain, halfway between Netanya and Haifa, on Sunday night, medics said.

According to the Magen David Adom emergency service, five of the casualties were seriously injured, and another 15 sustained moderate wounds. The remaining victims were lightly hurt.

“We asked for the army to help by providing helicopters, and some of the wounded will be evacuated to hospitals in the center of the country,” MDA director-general Eli Bin reporters, adding that medics were searching the area for additional victims of the attack.

United Hatzalah said its volunteer first responders “provided assistance to over 60 wounded people with varying degrees of injuries—critical, serious, moderate and light. Helicopters and ambulances evacuated all of the injured to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Sheba [Medical Center] at Tel Hashomer [in Ramat Gan], Hillel Yaffe [Medical Center in Hadera], HaEmek [Medical Center] in Afula and Laniado [Hospital] in Netanya.”

Lebanon’s Hezbollah terrorist army took responsibility for the assault, claiming in a statement it “launched a squadron of attack drones at an IDF training camp for the Golani Brigade in Binyamina, south of Haifa.”

According to Channel 12, two drones approached Israeli territory from the sea. While one was shot down, the second was not intercepted due to its apparent low altitude. No air-raid sirens were activated prior to the attack.


German journalist arrested in Beirut had feared he would be handed to Hezbollah
A German correspondent who was arrested in Beirut last month by Lebanese authorities after giving an interview to an Israeli broadcaster told a different Israeli outlet Saturday that he feared Lebanese authorities would hand him and a colleague over to Hezbollah.

Bild deputy editor-in-chief and correspondent Paul Ronzheimer was interviewed by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster on September 27, the day Israeli airstrikes killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

The following morning, he and his cameraman were arrested by Lebanese authorities and were only released after the German embassy intervened.

Ronzheimer, who has since left Lebanon, told Channel 12 that he had accepted an offer to be interviewed by Israeli television because he “didn’t know that this was forbidden, and I believe in free press.” The interview may have been the first live broadcast from Beirut on Israeli television since the IDF withdrew from the Lebanese capital in 1982.

Lebanon has strict laws that prohibit its citizens from any contact with Israel, an enemy state, and sanction anything that could be considered “normalization.” It’s unclear, however, how the law applied to Ronzheimer, a German national.

According to Ronzheimer, the morning after the interview “the nightmare began” when five people knocked on his door saying they had routine questions for him and demanded he hand over his equipment — including his phone and cameras.

He and his cameraman were then taken to an interrogation facility, where he was questioned for two hours on his activities and the live broadcast. He maintained that he was unaware that giving such an interview was forbidden and said he had given interviews to various outlets.

Ronzheimer told Channel 12 that he and his cameraman were then handcuffed, blindfolded and transferred to another location, without being informed of where he was being taken.

At this point, he feared they were being handed over to Hezbollah, he said.


The New York Times: Random errors or endemic malaise?
The way media organizations frame the wars they cover can significantly influence leaders, legislators, international organizations and public opinion. Media coverage of wars is crucial to the understanding of violent events and can determine the results of warfare almost as much as victories on the battlefield. It is therefore critical to be accurate.

Between Oct. 7, 2023, and June 7, 2024, The New York Times (hereinafter the “Times”) admitted to 72 errors in its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. More Times errors have been exposed through other media outlets. This article analyzes the boldest of these errors.

The Al-Ahli Hospital explosion
On Oct. 17, 2023, the lead headline on the Times website said: “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.” This massively distributed report caused major riots around the world and forced King Abdullah of Jordan to cancel a critical summit with U.S. President Joe Biden, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. But the headline was entirely false. It was a failed Palestinian rocket, not an Israeli airstrike. It was fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not the Israeli Air Force. It fell on the hospital parking lot, not the hospital itself. It killed 50-100 Palestinians, not 500. And the source was the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, not “Palestinians.”

Israel denied the report and produced a recording of a conversation between PIJ fighters who admitted that a failed launch had caused the explosion. But in its subsequent updates, the Times placed the denial in a smaller headline underneath the original one, implying to readers that the former was more reliable. Three days later, the Times published a vague correction in a ridiculous attempt to evade admitting that it had made a substantial error that caused a major setback to U.S. policy.

The Times was heavily criticized for “mindless amplification of terrorist propaganda” and for failing to disclose that the source of information on the Oct. 7 atrocities was “the same Hamas whose officials continue to claim that they didn’t kill any civilians despite livestreaming the slaughter themselves.” It was also criticized for giving Hamas “more credence than the claims of on-the-record Israeli military personnel offering tangible evidence.” Only after a rebuke from the White House did the paper finally admit its colossal error. The editor’s note said that “early versions of the coverage relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” and “left readers with an incorrect impression.” Times executive editor Joe Kahn promised to “reflect” and employ an “extra degree of scrutiny.”


Helen Andrews: Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel
The real reason Israel bothers Coates so much is something he waits until the very end of the book to confess:
Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our [Marcus] Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, ‘Up Ye Mighty Race’ was the creed. There, ‘Redemption Song’ is the national anthem. There, the red, black, and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream—the mythic Africa . . . What I saw in the City of David was so familiar to me—the search for self in an epic, mythic past filled with kings.

There you have it. The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?

Earlier in the book, Coates talks about his 2014 Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” which cemented his status as America’s most prominent public intellectual. “In the months before the article was published, I felt that I had at last discovered the answer to the haunting question of why my people so reliably settled at the bottom of nearly every socioeconomic indicator,” he writes. “The answer was simple: The persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder. I was blessed with a gift, and the gift was not simply the knowledge that ‘they’ were lying (about us, about this country, and about themselves), but the proof.”

What he loved most about that article, in other words, was the feeling of finally being able to blame all the problems of black America on other people. Israel took that away from him. All the excuses for why his father’s black paradise remained a fantasy applied equally to the Jews, but they overcame the hostility of the world to succeed where Garvey & Co. failed. That, and not any resemblance to Jim Crow, is the reason Coates hates Israel so bitterly.

Coates’s embrace of the Palestinian cause has been condemned by his liberal friends with a vehemence that recalls the last time anti-Semitism caused a permanent rift in the left. In the 1970s, the alliance between college-educated Jewish liberals and black radicals fell apart over the latter’s embrace of the Arab cause as part of a growing Third World consciousness. In 1979, black civil-rights hero Andrew Young was forced to resign as ambassador to the United Nations after he was revealed to have met secretly with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which no US official was supposed to meet with until the PLO agreed to recognize Israel. That scandal, plus differences of opinion over racial quotas and similar issues, alienated Jewish liberals and launched many on the path to neoconservatism.

For a while, it looked as though a similar divorce might happen again in our day. Many liberals were genuinely shocked by the support for Palestine on college campuses in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack. It caused many to rethink their support for “wokeness” and its crude division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, evil whites and blameless people of color. Wealthy liberals like Bill Ackman defected. Suspicions of anti-Semitism among Black Lives Matter activists, which The New York Times had covered as far back as 2018, gained new credence as campus protesters chanted “From the River to the Sea” and some embraced paraglider iconography. The tensions threatened to bring about a split in the left as far-reaching as that of the 1970s.
Delete This Message
Coates is comically ill-equipped to talk about Israel and its conflicts with Palestinian terror groups and Arab states, and you quickly get the sense that he knows he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care. His authority to write on the subject derives from a 10-day visit to Israel in which, as an invited guest of the "Palestine Festival of Literature," he was plied with Palestinian propaganda. A more enthusiastic imbiber of agitprop the festival’s organizers, I imagine, could not have hoped for.

The Message contains many fictions. But cataloguing them all—he claims, for instance, that "Palestinians are barred from the Western Wall," when he must know this to be false—is beside the point. Coates boasts of his refusal to study the conflict’s complexities and learn. "I don’t really care much for hearing ‘both sides’ or ‘opposing points of view,’" he writes. And again: "I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation." He came to Israel with the intention of portraying it as the Jim Crow South, and he wasn’t going to let any countervailing facts get in his way.

Mainly, in both South Carolina and Israel, he finds memorials and other inanimate symbols. In South Carolina, having not seen any screaming Moms for Liberty at the school board meeting, he has to visit the statehouse in Columbia to find evidence of white supremacy: statues of onetime segregationist Strom Thurmond and avowed racist Ben Tillman, both politicians of some renown. Coates might have asked the state’s many black legislators why these statues remain and heard interesting answers, but maybe he had a plane to catch.

In Israel, he visits a park named for Meir Kahane, an American-born Israeli rabbi and Arab-hating terrorist. In the park lies the tomb of a Kahane acolyte, Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinian Muslims in a mosque. (The park name and tomb are widely regretted in Israel, as is the statue of Tillman in Columbia.) But statues, tombs, park names—it’s all pretty dull stuff for a guy hoping to see Mississippi Burning in the Middle East.

At last, walking through the Old City of Jerusalem with some of his fellow litterateurs, he finds what he’s been hoping for. Before they pass through the Lions Gate in the Muslim Quarter, Israeli soldiers stop them for "forty-five minutes or so." The soldiers offer no explanation. Then he notes that "no one visibly Muslim passed through the Lion’s Gate in all the time we were made to wait."

Aha—segregation!

"I could not quite put words to what I was seeing," he continues, "but watching those soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs, I could feel the lens of my mind curving to refract the blur of new and strange events." (The writing is almost as offensive as the sentiment: the lens of his mind refracting blur? And why would Georgia "sheriffs," the heads of different counties’ police forces, be standing together in the sun?)

The scandal of the book—and the reason Tony Dokoupil of CBS wasn’t simply justified in challenging Coates in a recent interview but had a duty to challenge him—is that Coates never mentions Palestinian terrorism. An unobservant or gullible person could read The Message and have no idea that the Israeli soldiers’ vigilance is a consequence of Palestinians’ notable tendency to lunge at Jews with knives, self-detonate in crowded areas, and otherwise maim and murder innocents. Coates doesn’t mention the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, or any other act of Palestinian terrorism. Nor does he wonder why, although more than two million Arabs are citizens of Israel, few if any Jews are citizens of Arab countries.

With The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become a clownish, postmodern Walter Duranty. Duranty, recall, was the prize-winning Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times who deliberately misled the American public about Soviet crimes. Only Coates isn’t misleading anybody. And Duranty, for all his sins, could write.
Lying by Omission
In these few lines, Coates channels rhetoric that he has employed throughout his career—a nebulous invocation of marginalized peoples (here, Palestinians) and a claim that their members are denied a platform in the American public sphere. Notably, he refers to those groups’ “perspectives,” regardless of the validity of those perspectives. It is as though the very presence of eliminationist groups blowing up Israeli buses and cafes—which prompted many of the security measures Coates decries—were a matter of opinion.

It gets worse as one drills down on the specifics. First, in what sense do Palestinians not “have a voice”? Unlike the Kurds, Copts, Uyghurs, and any number of other ethnic and religious minority groups, Palestinians have a chorus of vocal advocates in the United States, especially within elite media and academic circles. Figures like Representatives Rashida Tlaib (of Palestinian descent), Jamaal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar have made anti-Israel extremism central to their political platforms. Entire academic departments exist to demonize Israel and to justify Palestinian violence against the Jewish state. The United Nations condemns Israel while coddling dictators; its subsidiary, UNRWA, has special rules that treat Palestinians more favorably than any other group under the UN’s care (and openly collaborates with Hamas).

Coates’s claim that Palestinians’ “stories” are not “heard” is equally remarkable. Media outlets routinely publish coverage so sympathetic to the Palestinians that it borders on parody, from uncritically citing the Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health’s unverifiable casualty figures to rushing to report claims that Israel bombed Al-Ahli Hospital killing hundreds, when, in fact, a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had landed in the parking lot. A woman with alleged ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—a terrorist group—was nominated for an Emmy this year. The Palestinian cause might be the most over-represented foreign movement in American cultural history.

What of Coates’s assertion that too few Palestinians occupy powerful positions in Western media? It is almost too obvious to state, but one does not need to be a member of a group to advocate on that group’s behalf. Only die-hard adherents of “standpoint epistemology”—the idea that only members of oppressed groups can truly understand those groups’ oppression—would believe otherwise. Coates, who wrote a book about the Palestinians despite not being a Palestinian himself, certainly does not.

The deeper issue with Coates’s response, however, is not the inaccuracy of his claims but his implication that championing a supposedly marginalized group justifies presenting a one-sided narrative. His answer, which indicates that he has heard Israel’s perspective and now wants to provide an opposing one, does not deny that his account of what he saw in Israel and the Palestinian territories is biased. Instead of attempting to show that his assessment of the conflict is accurate, he argues that it is morally justified. But that merely amounts to suggesting that the ends justify the means: giving a voice to those whom he presupposes are oppressed excuses presenting misleading histories and half-baked analyses.

If Dokoupil erred at all, it was in not pressing Coates to answer two questions. First, what good is it to lend your voice to a group, when you use your voice to advance a dishonest account? And second, why do you think that advancing the interests of Palestinians requires you to lie by omission about the context of the situation?

Indeed, for his own sake, Coates should recognize that those who claim to champion the voiceless must do so responsibly. The role he has assumed for himself might best be analogized to that of a lawyer who zealously advocates for his client. But even the most dedicated counsel will be sanctioned for wantonly withholding key evidence. What Coates is doing is not advancing justice—it’s not even advancing the Palestinian cause. Instead, he’s just rehashing the same shopworn, misguided themes that he has peddled for years now.
CBS Coates saga isn’t a laughing matter, it’s our future
CBS News employees are making fools of themselves, weeping and gnashing their teeth over an incident in which comic book author Ta-Nehisi Coates was made to look foolish.

But don’t laugh. This is our future, one in which panicked news executives defer to the loudest, most emotionally unstable voices in the room, cowed entirely by mob rule designed to protect certain viewpoints while suppressing dissident voices.

On Sept. 30, during CBS Mornings host Tony Dokoupil’s interview with Coates, the anchor pressed the author specifically to defend his new book, The Message, which alleges, among other things, that Israel is an illegitimate state “built on ethnocracy” and “apartheid.” The book also questions the legitimacy of the founding of Israel following the Holocaust.

Coates writes that his impression of Israel cemented in 2023 during a 10-day trip to the West Bank.

“I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” writes Coates, who compares Israel to the Jim Crow-era American South.

By the author’s own admission, the closest he came to experiencing Israel’s supposed Jim Crow-style policies was when he and his touring party were made to wait for 45 minutes at a security checkpoint. This experience, Coates writes, called to mind the experiences of black Americans persecuted by racist, sunglass-wearing Jim Crow-era Georgia sheriffs. This is the best example Coates provides his readers.

The words “Hamas,” “Fatah,” “Palestinian Islamic Jihad,” “Hezbollah,” and “Iran” are not mentioned anywhere in Coates’s essay.

At CBS, Dokoupil took Coates to task over his simplistic presentation of Israel’s long-running conflict with Palestinians.

“I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away — the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” the anchor said.

He added: “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?”

Coates, who appears to have become too accustomed to intra-industry acclaim and admiration, responded pitifully, saying: “I wrote a 260-page book. It is not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”

At CBS’s offices, a full-blown revolt soon erupted, with frantic staffers demanding management punish Dokoupil for his impertinence.

Management obliged.
'Ghosts of a Holy War': How the Israel-Hamas War is rooted in the 1929 Hebron massacre
Yardena Schwartz, author of Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine That Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, is an award-winning American-born journalist who spent 10 years living and working in Israel. In 2019, she was handed the sort of literary treasure that most journalists can only dream of.

Ten years earlier, Suzie Lazarus (née Shainberg) and her husband, Paul, were still living in the old Shainberg family home in Memphis, Tennessee, but were about to move. Clearing the attic, they found a box filled with documents.

Suzie found, together with cables, telegrams, photographs, and a diary, more than 60 letters, each up to 10 pages long, written from what was then Palestine and dated in the late 1920s, all sent from her uncle David to his family.

The letters fascinated Suzie’s daughter, Jill. Over the next decade, Jill organized and digitized all of them, and finally archived them at her synagogue. Then, feeling that the archive deserved to be more widely known, she located Yardena Schwartz and entrusted her with the letters and diary.

What Schwartz discovered was truly enthralling.

An amazing discovery connecting the 1929 massacre to today
Aged 22, David Shainberg, intensely religious and possessed of a deep feeling for Judaism, decided that his purpose in life was to travel to the Holy Land and study Torah. Against the wishes of his parents and family, who called his mission crazy, he set sail from New York Harbor on September 12, 1928.

When he landed in Palestine two weeks later, he spent a few nights in Tel Aviv, visited Jerusalem and the Kotel, and then made for the Hebron Yeshiva, the largest in the Holy Land.

His letters home provide a detailed picture of Palestine at the time and portray Hebron as a peaceful city, with Jews and Arabs living and working side by side. He tells of Jewish holidays and weddings, says Schwartz, “attended by Hebron’s Arab leaders and sheikhs, who danced into the night alongside rabbis.”

On August 24, 1929 – a Shabbat – some 3,000 heavily armed Arabs marched into Hebron and attacked the Jewish Quarter. They went from house to house raping, stabbing, torturing, castrating, and burning alive their unarmed victims. Sixty-seven Jewish men, women, and children were slaughtered – among them David Shainberg.

Schwartz perceives a direct link between that Hebron massacre and the Hamas pogrom of October 7, 2023, also a Shabbat.


Anti-Israel NYC rabbi attended UN meeting with Iran prez– less than a week before Tehran launched hundreds of missiles at Jewish state
A radical, anti-Israel Brooklyn rabbi sat down for a meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian during the United Nations General Assembly, less than a week before Tehran launched nearly 200 missiles at Israel.

Abby Stein, a part-time rabbi at the progressive Park Slope synagogue Kolot Chayeinu who was thrown out of the White House in June for calling for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, can be seen in photos of the event shared by Iranian state-owned Press TV.

She was among roughly two dozen religious leaders, scholars and Iranian officials at the “meeting with leaders of divine religions,” the photos showed.

Others attendees included members of the Haredi Jewish group Neturei Karta, whose members oppose the existence of the Jewish state and have been a frequent presence at anti-Israel demonstrations.

Pezeshkian lashed out at Israel during the late September meeting for its “shameful” attacks on Lebanon targeting Hezbollah terrorists, which have also killed women and children, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

Just days later, on Oct. 1, Iran fired nearly 200 missiles at Israel following a series of IDF’s fatal airstrikes that killed Hezoballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah and other top officials.

Stein, who was hired by the progressive synagogue this year, has been a vocal activist opposing Israel’s war in Gaza, as well as the growing conflict in Lebanon.

She is a member of the anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for Peace’s Rabbinical Council and in June was booted from the White House Pride Month celebration after she and another attendee stood up during First Lady Jill Biden’s speech to demand a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and for the United States to stop supplying weapons to Israel.

US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a staunch supporter of Israel, ripped the far-left rabbi for participating in the Iran-led confab.


New York Congressional Candidate, Running on a Plan To Combat Campus Anti-Semitism, Took Max Donation From Nonprofit Leader Bankrolling Pro-Hamas Protests
New York Democratic congressional hopeful Laura Gillen has centered her campaign around fighting campus anti-Semitism as violent anti-Israel protests take colleges by storm. She also accepted thousands of dollars in donations from David Rockefeller, whose nonprofit has funneled millions to Hamas-friendly groups.

Gillen has repeatedly denounced the campus protests and in September announced her anti-Semitism action plan. She vowed, if elected, to work to leverage federal aid to colleges to force changes in codes of conduct and increase funding to the Office of Civil Rights, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and law enforcement to better respond to threats to synagogues. She also advocated for social media platforms to strengthen content moderation.

"The situation unfolding at Columbia University should be shocking, but sadly antisemitism has been unmasked on campuses across the country," Gillen wrote in an April 22 post. "College presidents need to condemn this hate mongering and ensure the safety of all students."

But in June, Gillen accepted a campaign contribution of $3,300—the maximum allowed—from David Rockefeller, a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and another $3,300 from his wife, Susan Rockefeller.

Since 2018, the fund has funneled more than $3.4 million to Hamas-friendly groups, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.

Defense for Children International-Palestine, which serves as a critical cog in Hamas’s propaganda machinery, has received $165,000, for example. The Israeli government designated it as a terror organization in October 2021, arguing that it effectively operates as an extension of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another terror group.
Campus protesters for Palestine no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt
Ignorance, about Islamism or antisemitism’s many guises, can no longer be a legitimate excuse for those who chose to demonstrate. The students that joined them this week have been given the benefit of the doubt for far too long. My classmates are not ignorant. They know what happened on October 7. They know, when they wear a keffiyeh, that it was popularized by figures such as Yasser Arafat and the terrorist plane hijacker Leila Khaled. They know that suicide bombers have enacted their beloved “intifada” chants in Israel and have blown up men, women and children. They know all this and they join the march anyway.

Why? Because they believe that the situation in Israel can only be understood through an “oppressor/oppressed” lens.They think Israelis are white and Palestinians are brown. They believe Israel to be a white imperialist project and that it is therefore justified for Hamas, as “freedom fighters,” to livestream the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians.

The professors and students at universities across the country no longer have the luxury of leaving our politics at the classroom door. As Monday demonstrated, the hatred against Jews is here, it is real and it shows no sign of abating. Students are not hesitant to openly endorse terrorists. So, if you are a student that does not hate Jews, that believes Israel has a right to exist and if you believe that it is morally wrong to celebrate terrorism, you must speak out now.

I recognize the desire to cling on to the days when you didn’t know your professor’s politics and you could debate with others in the classroom without fearing they held a desire to see Jews murdered just for being Jews. The time to pretend that everyone is coming from a place of “good faith” is over. Support of terrorism is no longer fringe but is, rather, an accepted position on campus. Those that came out to support terrorism this week know exactly what they are doing. We need to understand that they mean it when they say they celebrate “resistance.” They have no problem with the killing of innocent Jews in Israel and if we take their chants at face value, they want to “globalize” the killing.

It is vital for us students to counter these arguments whenever we hear them. Correct the lies. Point out the tropes. Argue, even if this sounds obvious, against suicide bombing. Support from faculty should be welcomed and encouraged; I have been fortunate in the Jewish Studies department at NYU to find myself among scholars who have chosen to speak out, but it cannot be left to them. Even if it means losing friends. Even if it means failing classes because a professor penalizes you, based on their own biases. Even if it means offending some of your classmates who consider Hamas to be trailblazers or somehow representatives of left-wing ideology.
Harvard ‘has no one to blame but itself,’ Torres says after donations dip
Harvard is “confronting a reputational crisis of its own making,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said on Saturday, responding to the disappointment of the university’s President Alan Garber with its fundraising efforts.

“More disappointing than Harvard’s fundraising is its failure to combat campus antisemitism. Therein lies the true disappointment!” tweeted Torres, adding that the university “has no one to blame but itself.”

Speaking ahead of the publication of Harvard’s 2024 financial report late last week, Garber told student paper The Harvard Crimson that some of this year’s donations have been “disappointing compared to past years.

“There are also some indications that we will see improvements in the future,” he said. “I can’t get more specific than that right now.”

Garber was appointed to lead the university until at least 2027, after filling in as the interim president following Claudine Gay’s resignation in January. Gay presided over the Ivy League institution during seething campus tensions over the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorists.

She submitted her resignation following remarks on antisemitism that caused public outrage. Testifying to the House Committee on Education on Dec. 5, Gay said that whether calls to commit genocide against Jews violated Harvard conduct was “context dependent.”

On-campus tensions intensified with an anti-Israel encampment that lasted for 20 days in April and May. The encampment was peacefully dispersed in the wake of an agreement between Harvard and the activists.


Clive Myrie calls pro-Palestinian protester a ‘f------ idiot’
Clive Myrie has been filmed condemning a “f------ idiot” protester, as the BBC journalist comes under pressure from pro-Palestine students.

The presenter was named chancellor of the University of the Arts London in June, but his appointment has been opposed by some students, who have branded him a “Zionist”.

Some activists claimed that the news anchor spread “Israeli propaganda” in his broadcasts.

Footage has emerged showing the presenter angered and defending the principles of public debate after a UAL student shouted at him and then stormed off. The student activist was making a point about the Hamas-Israel conflict.

Footage from a university Q&A event shows Myrie moments after the stunt condemning the “lunatic who just walked out and didn’t have the courtesy to hear my response”.

He adds: “I have a f------ idiot shout at me in public and then leave. He doesn’t want to hear the other side.”

The footage was filmed at a Meet the Chancellor event held on Sept 25.

Myrie, 60, later apologised for his choice of language but stood by his defence of open debate.

Footage shows Myrie engaging in real exchanges with other students in the auditorium and offering his thoughts on free speech.

He said: “He’s made his point and he’s left. Stands up and he’s left. He’s not stayed to listen to my argument, notice. Stands up, shouts, you (the audience) applaud. But he doesn’t stay to hear what I’ve got to say. That’s pathetic.”


Asif Kapadia Apologizes After Grierson Trust Patronage Rescinded Over Posts Accused of Being ‘Antisemitic’: ‘That Was Not My Intention’
Asif Kapadia has apologized after the Grierson Trust rescinded the patronage conferred on the Oscar- and BAFTA-winning British filmmaker over social media posts they have deemed antisemitic.

The “Amy” and “Senna” director had just been appointed a patron of the charity, which celebrates the best of documentary and factual filmmaking, on Wednesday alongside Dorothy Byrne and Louis Theroux.

“Since the Grierson Trust announced that Asif Kapadia had been appointed as one of our patrons, some social media posts shared by him have been drawn to our attention which are antisemitic,” the Trust said in a statement to Variety. “As a result, at an 8 a.m. board meeting this morning, we took the decision to rescind his role as patron of the Trust.”

The Trust added, “When we made the decision to appoint Mr. Kapadia, the board was not aware of these posts, some of which appear to be no longer available, and we are sorry that our due diligence was not thorough enough. The Grierson Trust is deeply committed to promoting both freedom of speech and diversity and inclusion in the documentary industry. Whilst we accept and support that everyone has a legitimate right to express their views on controversial issues, this cannot justify racist statements or behavior. As we have stressed in the past and will continue to uphold, the Trust has a zero tolerance approach to racism of all kinds.”
Anger as notorious anti-Israel director made a patron of top TV documentary body
A charitable organisation set up to honour the most talented people in the television documentary world is facing calls to review its decision to make a film director known for his extreme criticism of Israel a patron.

On Wednesday the Grierson Trust announced that Asif Kapadia had been appointmented one of three new patrons alongside Dorothy Byrne and Louis Theroux.

Grierson Trust Patrons, who include Sir David Attenborough and Sir Grayson Perry, represent the Trust by “lending their knowledge, influence and contacts to help bolster the charity’s work in fostering a strong, vibrant and diverse community of documentary filmmakers.”

Confirming the new appointments Lorraine Heggessey, chair of the Grierson Trust said Kapadia “has elevated the feature documentary genre, drawing millions of people in to watch films on the big screen around the world.”

But the decision to honour Kapadia immediately sparked anger amongst some of the most high-profile Jewish figures in the industry who highlighted the BAFTA and Grammy Award-winning film director’s prolific attacks on Israel over social media including the sharing of a post on X that included a scene from the classic Schindler’s List Holocaust movie with the claim “The same thing is happening in real time. They are Nazis.”


Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield expresses support for Gazans
Andrew Garfield, a patrilineal Jewish actor who played Spider-Man, expressed his support for Palestinians in Gaza during a Thursday airing of the “Happy Sad Confused" podcast.

“We should be putting our energy toward something that actually matters, you know? Yeah, maybe the lives of, I don't know, Palestinians in Gaza right now. Maybe that's where we put our hearts and our energy," Garfield said. "And anyone suffering, anyone oppressed — anyone that is suffering under the weight of the horrors of our world right now. Anyone who doesn't have a choice in, you know, living lives of dignity. Yeah — that's where our energy should be going right now."

The Hamas-run Palestinian health authorities in Gaza claim that over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the terror group invaded southern Israel and murdered over 1200 people - breaking the ceasefire. Hamas does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths and has been repeatedly accused of inflating figures.

Calls for a ceasefire
This is not the first time the actor expressed vocal support for Gaza, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In October 2023, only weeks after Hamas’s devastating attacks on southern Israel, Garfield joined a group of over 50 celebrities in a call for a ceasefire.

“We ask that, as President of the United States, you call for an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Gaza and Israel before another life is lost,” a letter signed by the celebrities, addressed to US President Joe Biden, read.

Numerous Hollywood artists and media personalities have signed a call for action urging for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, through the group Artists4Ceasefire.


Pro-Palestine rally: Serial protest princess ‘fired for activism’
A serial protester who wears Disney princess dresses at pro-Palestinian rallies to make children feel more comfortable taking part has claimed she was sacked from her job at the Black Dog Institute over it.

Sharna Southwell, originally from Cronulla, has been a weekly fixture at rallies across the country, including on Sunday when she wore a yellow dress at a Sydney protest.

In a recent Instagram post, she said she was falsely accused of anti-Semitism after donning her handcrafted “Princess Jasmine” dress which she claimed “ultimately resulted in my being fired – thanks Black Dog Institute”.

She said she had worked with the mental health research institute Black Dog for seven months as a digital engagement strategist.

Ms Southwell wrote in an earlier post on Instagram: “It got me thinking … cosplaying for liberation could help spread joy to affected families with children living in Sydney.

“Each week, these children march with my princesses with pride, knowing at least some of their favourite adults on TV stand with them.”

A Black Dog spokeswoman confirmed Ms Southwell was “no longer employed with the organisation”.

Ms Southwell’s LinkedIn says she previously worked for the Department of Premier and Cabinet (NSW) for nine months until December 2017.


‘Weather Channel’ apologizes, retracts keffiyeh ad campaign
The Weather Channel, a U.S. pay television content provider, apologized on Thursday for an ad campaign that featured a woman wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh, a symbol often associated with terrorism against Israel and Jews worldwide.

“We deeply apologize to anyone we offended through the inadvertent selection of an image in our recent ad campaign,” The Weather Channel said in a post on X, responding to the StopAntisemitism.org watchdog.

“We certainly don’t support or condone any form of antisemitism. We immediately removed the ad upon recognizing our mistake,” it added.

Earlier on Thursday, StopAntisemitism posted a photo of the advertisement at a New York City subway station, asking The Weather Channel why its promotional materials featured “a symbol now associated with violence against Jews post 10/7?” in reference to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre.


More Trouble for CBS News as Its ‘News Standards’ Executives Are Exposed for Writing Memo, One Day After October 7 Massacre, Cautioning Staff Against Calling Hamas ‘Terrorists’
CBS News executives cautioned their journalists against referring to Hamas members as “terrorists” in a memo issued the day after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, according to the Free Press. It’s the latest embarrassment for the news organization, which is in turmoil amid a daily drip of disclosures about institutionalized anti-Israel bias as well as anti-Trump bias.

Thursday night, the Free Press published an excerpt of an email sent to reporters on October 8, 2023, with the subject, “Standards guidance: Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

“Reporting on this weekend’s violence in Israel and Gaza requires a closer look at the language we use when describing events,” the email stated. “For instance, the U.S. government considers Hamas a terrorist organization; however, suggesting an individual is a ‘terrorist’ may be inaccurate depending on the facts.”

The email also noted there are disagreements over whether the attack was “justified” in response to “Israeli occupation of their lands.” The message then said there are “others” who “believe this to be an unprovoked attack on Israel and, as such, Israel has every right to defend itself.”

A source with knowledge of the situation confirmed the guidance to the Sun. They said the goal of the guidance is to avoid generalizations about people in Gaza, such as labeling a doctor or nurse with the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry a terrorist without information they engaged in terrorism.

However, even the left-leaning Council on Foreign Relations notes Hamas has “put in place authoritarian institutions” that leave little room for flexibility or the ability to operate independently. Those who step out of line can face harsh punishments.

Additionally, the Israel Defense Forces have released video footage as evidence that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure such as hospitals as “command and control” centers and even possibly to hold hostages from the October 7 attack.


‘Domestic terrorism,’ Canada parliamentarian says after Jewish school shot on Yom Kippur
A “firearm discharge” from a car targeted Bais Chaya Mushka Girls Elementary School in Toronto at 4:05 a.m. on Yom Kippur, the Toronto Police Service said on Saturday.

“This is domestic terrorism,” wrote Canadian parliamentarian Kevin Vuong, who represents Toronto and who noted that this is the second time that a shooter, or shooters, targeted the Toronto Jewish school.

Police said that there were no reported injuries, and that evidence of gunfire was found.

“I’m very disturbed to hear that last night, as families marked Yom Kippur, there were shots fired at a Jewish school in Toronto,” Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, stated. “As we wait for more details, my heart goes out to the students, staff and parents who must be terrified and hurting today.”

“Antisemitism is a disgusting and dangerous form of hate—and we won’t let it stand,” he said.

Pierre Poilievre, the Canadian opposition leader who is running against Trudeau, wrote that there were “more bullets fired at a Jewish school overnight in Toronto.”

“This is yet another shameful and terrifyingly common antisemitic attack in Canada in 2024. It is part of a 251% increase in hate crimes during the nine years of the NDP-Liberals,” he added. “I will ban the terrorists, secure our borders, lock up criminals and bring home safety for all.” (The NDP is the New Democratic Party.)


Police investigating Nazi-era slogans at Hendon Golf Club
The police and the Community Security Trust (CST) are investigating “appalling antisemitic slogans and symbols” at a golf course in Hendon, which was daubed with “Heil Hitler” and swastikas in the early hours of Friday morning.

The Nazi-era words and signs were drawn into the sand at Hendon Golf Club and police also reported damage to signs and property at the club. Videos shared on social media showed a swastika and the words "f*** the Jews" and "Heil Hitler" in the sand.

News of the incident at the golf club spread on Friday, in the hours leading up to Erev Yom Kippur.

In a statement to the JC, the Metropolitan Police said: “Police were called at approximately 08:45 on Friday, October 11 after a member of staff at a golf club in Devonshire Road, N7 reported offensive and antisemitic messages had been raked into bunkers on the course.

“There was also damage caused to signs and property at the club.

“The incident is being investigated as a racially aggravated hate crime.”

There have been no arrests and the Met appealed for anyone with information to contact them.

Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Branch of the North West Command Unit which covers Barnet said: “We are aware of the shock and distress that this incident has caused, especially coming at a time when the Jewish community is celebrating Yom Kippur.

“Following the incident, we have attended the golf course to support the club and have spoken to community leaders to ensure they are updated on the progress of this investigation. Local residents will also continue to see a visible police presence in and around key areas across our boroughs.


TV star Ed Halmagyi receives chilling two-word threat at his bakery - but he has a very blunt message for the mystery cowards
A popular inner-city bakery has been defaced with shocking anti-Semitic graffiti, with a threatening note reading 'be careful' - but the owner has defiantly left the graffiti there.

Avner's Bakery in Surry Hills, Sydney, was hit with the menacing attack sometime between 10pm Saturday and 1.30am Sunday, with an upside down red triangle painted onto the bakery's window and the note shoved under the door.

The triangle is a Nazi symbol that was used to mark out individuals in concentration camps and it has been used by terror group Hamas to identify Jewish targets.

Former TV chef and Better Homes and Gardens star Ed Halmagyi, the owner of the bakery, revealed the shocking attack on his social media channels.

'Being Jewish in Sydney, 2024 edition,' his Sunday morning post read.

'This note was shoved under the door of our bakery overnight.

'But the fact is, it's hard to be intimidated by inner-city middle-class Cosplay Radicals who graduated primary school without their pen license.'

But Mr Halmagyi decided not to wash graffiti off the bakery window on Sunday morning because 'people need to know' that it happened.

The bakery was open for business on Sunday, with customers drinking coffees in the sun with the triangle symbol still on display.

The former Better Homes and Gardens star continued to serve customers on Sunday afternoon.

'The only reason I didn't take it down this morning … I thought about it, but I thought, that's a very silly thing to do because people should know that this stuff happens,' he told The Australian.

'The reaction of wanting to scrub it off immediately and pretend like it's not there. That implies two things. One, that it was effective, and made me feel somehow vulnerable.

'And it simultaneously says you're a victim of your circumstances. I'm not a victim,' he said.


Nazi Party member killed during hike on Hitler's favorite mountain
A prominent German neo-Nazi activist, Andreas Münzhuber, fell to his death about two weeks ago while hiking on Mount Untersberg in Bavaria, near the Austrian border. He was hiking with around 30 others on a mountain once favored by Adolf Hitler.

The view from the 1,972-meter-high peak was so beloved by the Nazi leader that he chose to build his infamous retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, in the area. German police reported that Münzhuber likely tripped over an exposed tree root and fell 60 meters to his death. He was killed instantly. The recovery of his body involved two helicopters.

According to the German news site T-Online, Münzhuber was a senior member of The Third Way, a far-right neo-Nazi political party in Germany, serving as treasurer for its Bavaria branch. The party was founded in 2013 by former officials of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) and activists from the banned Free Network South. The party is estimated to have around 600 members across Germany.

In the German news reports, Münzhuber was identified only as Andreas M. due to privacy laws, but media outlets worldwide covering the incident over the weekend published his full name.


Iranian journalist stabbed in UK: I feel safer in Israel
A British-Iranian journalist stabbed outside his home by gangsters linked to Tehran has said the government’s failure to outlaw Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was a key factor in his decision to leave the UK.

Pouria Zeraati, a presenter at Iran International, says he feels “much safer” after moving to Israel to continue to broadcast his weekly Farsi-language show.

His criticism in particular of Labour, which in opposition pledged to ban the IRGC, comes as the net closes in on the thugs who carried out the attack in Wimbledon, southwest London, in March. Counterterrorism detectives at Scotland Yard have identified three suspects who fled Britain hours after the stabbing and are now working with prosecutors to seek their extradition from an undisclosed location in eastern Europe.

The men are believed to be members of an organised crime group hired by Iran to carry out the stabbing as a “warning shot” to its opponents. At least one of them is thought to have entered the UK about a week before the attack in order to track Zeraati’s movements.

The Iranian regime has previously used criminals in the Czech Republic and Slovenia to target a high-profile women’s rights activist in the United States. Last week Ken McCallum, the director-general of MI5, revealed the security service has identified 20 Iran-backed plots “presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents” since the start of 2022.

“We’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK at an unprecedented pace and scale,” McCallum said. Many of the assassination and kidnap attempts are thought to stem from the elite Quds Force, the overseas wing of the IRGC.

Zeraati, 37, who was repeatedly stabbed in the back of the leg during the attack on Good Friday, said in an interview that the stance of successive UK governments towards Tehran was a significant factor in his decision to move to Israel with his wife, Oldouz, in the summer.

“When the new [Labour] administration was campaigning before the election it said it would designate the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, but they haven’t done it,” he said. “They have just imposed some nonsense sanctions again against Quds Force units to show that they are dealing with the issue … These policies are not working.”
Fleeing My Iranian Family, Home, & Muslim Life to Experience the Judaism I Fell in Love With
William Mehrvaz grew up in Tehran, Iran, as a devout Muslim, but his life took a dramatic turn when he embarked on a personal journey to find truth. After years of questioning, William ultimately embraced Judaism, leaving behind his family, home, and Muslim upbringing. Today, he lives in America as a proud Jew, inspiring others with his story of courage, faith, and the pursuit of spiritual truth.


Paul McCartney seen in shul on Yom Kippur
Paul McCartney was spotted in a synagogue in Chile on Yom Kippur.

He and his Jewish wife Nancy Shevell were caught on camera at Circulo Israelita de Santiago by photographer Nathan Gani in an image which reveals the surprise and glee of the congregants when they spotted the world-famous fellow shul-goer.

The photograph, which shows McCartney wearing a kippah, was published on the website Infobae.

The 82-year-old Beatles’ singer was taking a break from his solo tour, which is currently in South America.

His appearance was greeted enthusiastically on social media, with one person posting on Reddit: “Dear Sir Paul Mccartney-- You are a Mensch !!!, Thank you - for standing with us.”

In previous years, McCartney and Shevell have been spotted at St John’s Wood Liberal Synagogue, only a stone’s throw away from Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles recorded the majority of their songs.

In 2008, McCartney performed in Israel despite pressure to cancel. He was later given the Wolf Prize in 2018, awarded to artists and scientists for “achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among people”, but he did not attend the ceremony, blaming scheduling clashes.

McCartney’s first wife Linda Eastman was born into a prominent Jewish family from Scarsdale, New York.


Christopher Columbus was a secret Jew, scientists claim
The famous 15th-century explorer Christopher Columbus was a Sephardic Jew from Western Europe, according to DNA experts, who have concluded an investigation into the centuries-old mystery.

Researchers claim that analysis of the remains of Columbus and his illegitimate son, Hernando Colón, showed Jewish origin, something that may have been concealed at the time as Jews were being persecuted in Spain and Europe.

The traditional theory that Columbus came from Genoa, Italy, has often been questioned. Other theories have ranged from him being a Spanish Jew or Basque, Greek, Portuguese or British.

Researchers conducted a 22-year investigation, headed up by forensic expert Miguel Lorente. Scientists tested samples of remains buried in Seville Cathedral, believed to be the last resting place of Columbus, and compared these with those of known descendants.

Their dramatic findings were announced in a documentary titled Columbus DNA: The true origin on Spain's national broadcaster TVE on Saturday, coinciding with Spain’s national day.

The Sunday Telegraph reported: “Both in the ‘Y’ chromosome and in the mitochondrial chromosome of Hernando, there are traits compatible with Jewish origins,” according to Antonio Lorente, professor of legal and forensic medicine at the University of Granada.

Professor Lorente said the DNA showed a “western Mediterranean” origin.

Francesc Albardaner, a historian who has written about Columbus’ origins in Catalan-speaking eastern Spain, claimed that being Jewish and from Genoa was effectively impossible during the period. “Jews could only spend three days at a time in Genoa by law at that time,” said Albardaner.

Albardaner claimed that Columbus was from a family of Jewish silk-spinners from the Valencia region.

“There were around 200,000 Jews living in Spain in Columbus’ time. In the Italian peninsula, it is estimated that there were only between 10,000 and 15,000. There was a much larger Jewish population in Sicily of around 40,000, but we should remember that Sicily, in Columbus’ time, belonged to the Crown of Aragon.”

“Christopher Columbus had to pretend all his life that he was a Roman Catholic Christian. If he had made one mistake, this man would have ended up on the pyre,” said Albardaner.




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