Monday, October 21, 2024

10/21 Links Pt2: How to end the hundred years war on Israel?; How Terrorist Cutouts Colonize the Campus; The Liberal Jew in 2024

From Ian:

Andrew Pessin: How to end the hundred years war on Israel?
After several decades of a successful legal career, David Friedman became the U.S. ambassador to Israel in 2017 under then-President Donald Trump and orchestrated major diplomatic advances, including moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and helping to broker the 2020 Abraham Accords. In his new book, One Jewish State, Friedman presents ongoing challenges and obstacles, which has already inspired a new party vying for seats in the upcoming World Zionist Congress elections aptly named One Jewish State.

Friedman challenges “the most widely accepted but fatally flawed concept in Middle Eastern diplomacy: the two-state solution.” Though the two-state appeal from a certain perspective is clear, the case against it, from the pro-Israel perspective, is compelling. The Palestinians just don’t want it. They never have. The Palestinian leadership and most Palestinians do not accept the existence of a Jewish state in any borders. Any state given to them will only advance their agenda of destroying the Jewish state. If that wasn’t clear before the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, it is indisputably clear now. Israel gifted them Gaza, and Hamas used it to produce mass murder. That is what they did with their proto-“state” and what they say they will do with any future state.

For anyone who supports Israel and the right of Jews to live in this region in safety, a Palestinian state should be a non-starter.

So, what’s left if we jettison the two-state solution? Basically “one state.”

One Palestinian state “from the river to the sea” is obviously off the table for the pro-Israel side. Friedman does not consider a “binational state,” but one can speculate why: That is not a Jewish state, and his starting point is that there must be a Jewish state. That leaves, then, the “one Jewish state.” The basic idea is that Israel must exert its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria. (Gaza is a separate and difficult case, as Friedman acknowledges in a chapter devoted to it, which we shall not treat here.)

In addition to the main negative argument above, there are positive arguments for the idea. These boil down to this: Only under Israeli sovereignty will Palestinians be able to lead full lives of dignity and prosperity, ultimately producing a peaceful outcome for all. Israel is a vibrant democracy “with a track record of respecting the civil, religious and human rights of its minority population, almost all of which is Arab.” Most Arab-Israeli citizens “patriotically support living in their country,” where their standard of living, opportunities and prosperity are orders of magnitude greater than that of their Arab neighbors in surrounding countries, including in the territories administered by Palestinians themselves. The idea is to extend the same situation—i.e., Israeli sovereignty, to the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

With one essential difference. Israeli Arabs are full citizens of Israel with equal rights. Palestinians in Judea and Samaria cannot be. A secure Jewish state cannot swap the security risk posed by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria for the demographic risk of making them full citizens. They may become “residents” of Israel but cannot become full citizens.

Here we reach the point at which critics will explode, “Apartheid!”

Friedman addresses this through a deep dive into the case of Puerto Rico, which he sees as a possible model for the “One Jewish State.” Roughly, Puerto Ricans stand to the United States as Palestinians in Judea and Samaria might stand to Israel. The United States has sovereignty while Puerto Ricans have extensive rights of self-government but not collective national rights to vote in U.S. elections. Why does it work? Because Puerto Ricans live better than they would if they were entirely independent. They derive political, economic and civil benefits, and enjoy all the same basic civil rights as any U.S. citizen but pay less in federal taxes in exchange for not being full citizens. With Israeli sovereignty, Palestinians would have the civil rights guaranteed by Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity without the collective right to self-determination; they would pay less Israeli taxes; and they would not vote in national elections.

Friedman also asks which is a better option for Palestinians: Creating a Palestinian state that is likely both to fail by every metric and be overrun by terrorists and thus reproducing Gaza or absorbing those living in Judea and Samaria under Israeli sovereignty and providing them resident status?
How a year of hatred sparked a Jewish renaissance
When it came to attending the March Against Antisemitism in November, Rollinson was initially “nervous. I had an intrinsic fear that something would happen, but having felt isolated at times, I wanted to be around people who understood. It was an amazing feeling.” Since October 7, she has also started wearing a Star of David around her neck for the first time.

Here, Rollinson is in good company. Actress Felicity Kendall has worn hers every day too. She recently explained that soon after the massacre she was walking through a London park when a Jewish woman approached her and thanked her for wearing a Star of David around her neck. “I was quite taken aback. Would people say anything like that to someone wearing a cross or a turban? It made me think, right, I am wearing this all the time now, and I do,” she said in a July interview. She also attends synagogue weekly. A year on, she tells the Telegraph: “It gives me peace and a routine of meditative thinking.’’

Across the UK, Jews are seeking solace – and not just in their social lives. Anti-Semitism in the workplace has emerged as a new issue over the past year. Dave Rich is head of policy at the Community Security Trust, which protects British Jews from anti-Semitism and related threats. “Lots of workplaces and employment sectors now have new Jewish WhatsApp networks that emerged after October 7. Jewish employees need a space to discuss everything that has been happening,” he says.

Ruth* recently set up a group in her company. “Immediately after October 7, I felt really uneasy about going into the office,” she says. “Everybody there knows I’m Jewish and a Zionist, so I felt very self-conscious.” Her colleagues were going on pro-Palestinian marches and although they never said it outright, she felt there was a feeling amongst them that the Hamas attacks were somehow justified, which she found deeply offensive. “My boss was very understanding, but said there wasn’t anything she could do, and that I could work from home when and if I needed to.”

But Ruth didn’t want to shy away. In the end, she and a colleague set up a dedicated Jewish network. “It gives us a feeling of solidarity, despite the pervading unfriendly atmosphere amongst some of my colleagues,” she says.

So affected was former bookshop-owner Joanna De Guia by the relationship with colleagues in her industry, that she changed careers entirely. “I was hurt and angry by the silence of my friends who worked in publishing,” she says. “After October 7, I waited for my “allies” – such as those in the gay community – to jump in and support me. I have hundreds of people in my social circle, but barely 10 contacted me. So I either left my comfortable spaces, or felt pushed out.”

Rewind to September last year and De Guia, a married mother of one, lived a similar way to many Jews in Britain. “I was Left-leaning and barely celebrated the Jewish festivals,” she says. Nor – like many Jews in this country – did de Guia think very much about Israel. “I’d been for a couple of beach holidays in my late teens,” she says. “But I didn’t feel particularly politically aligned with the country.” October 7 changed that.

De Guia eventually sold her business and now works full-time at the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, combating anti-Semitism on university campuses. “Our goal is to change the weather in British universities,” she says. Universities in particular have been a difficult arena for young Jews, with pro-Gaza encampments hollering against “genocide”, and demanding their administrations cut ties with Zionists. In the meantime students have found comfort in university Jewish societies. President of the Union of Jewish Students Sami Berkoff explains: “Students have needed somewhere to join with other Jewish students and just be. Jewish students have as much of a right as any other to have the full student experience.”

Rabbi Naftali Schiff, the founder and executive director of Jewish Futures, a family of 10 educational and social organisations dedicated to engaging young Jewish people in a positive way, has also found that engagement has been unprecedented. “Over the past year, we’ve arranged dozens of Friday night meals for students on campuses across the country and events for young professionals,” he says.

“Like many people, I was shocked at the level of vitriolic hate that punctuated some elements of the demonstrations in the streets and on the campuses after October 7,” he says. “Let’s just say it’s been a trip down the memory lane of anti-Semitism. Young Jews have felt targeted, experiencing disconcerting levels of concern, especially on campuses. For the first time in my own life, when waiting at an airport with my beard and a yarmulke [skullcap], I found myself looking over my shoulder with a genuine sense of anxiety.”

However, Rabbi Schiff strongly feels that “the UK is a wonderful place to live as Jews. It’s easy to look at the darkness, however the authorities by and large have been very sympathetic to our concerns and I am confident we shall turn this corner.’’

Since October he has kept two treasured items in his pocket: “A cigarette case, which my grandfather received when demobbed from national service in the First World War, and my father’s dog tags from the Second World War.” Both are symbols of his British pride. Rabbi Schiff adds: “It’s a reminder that we are privileged to live in a liberal democracy and a reminder to be appreciative that in Britain we can live freely as Jewish people, contributing to society as we go. I feel grateful to live in a country like Britain.”
Seth Mandel: How Terrorist Cutouts Colonize the Campus
In other words, all the relevant information about Samidoun was known. That’s why, in fact, Columbia suspended four students associated with the “Resistance 101” event on campus and evicted them from university housing facilities. (They had been warned in advance multiple times not to host the event.)

Samidoun, then, is part of a much larger problem. These types of organizations, whether officially designated as terrorist entities or not, have the same aims and the same general practices and certainly the same worldview—and get cash from the same sources and through the same progressive dark-money-donor clearinghouses. Samidoun itself will get taken off the donee list now (one hopes), but it will be replaced by an identical organization. There’s a whack-a-mole element to the pro-Palestinian cutouts in the West, and it enables groups like the PFLP to stay one step ahead of the very governments that have already banned them but can’t seem to stop them from raising money.

For legal purposes, of course, the terrorism designation means everything. But from the standpoint of basic societal decency, the designation changes nothing. The progressive protest movement and America’s elite universities are full of well-funded extremist groups going on recruiting sprees.

In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “wave of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses came on suddenly and shocked people across the nation. But the political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.”

Samidoun was but one of those groups—albeit one unconcerned with subtlety. “There is nothing wrong with being a member of Hamas, being a leader of Hamas, being a fighter in Hamas,” Kates said. “These are the people that are on the front lines defending Palestine.” She added that America’s university students and activists must “build an international popular cradle of the resistance.”

Among the other groups helping plan and train the future resistors of America were the national Students for Justice in Palestine, whose individual chapters have been among the most brazenly anti-Semitic and pro-violence participants in the tentifada.

At UCLA’s pro-Hamas encampment, members of Faculty for Justice in Palestine “had organized self-defense teams on the front lines.” One of the affiliated professors compared the current generation of goonish anti-Zionist trainees favorably to his own: “We had a lot of affect and feeling. But there’s a different kind of rigor to these students that is really striking.”

The triumph of terrorist front groups in recruiting and training and fund-raising is a success story to some and a cautionary tale to others. American institutions are increasingly treating it as the former.


John Podhoretz: The Liberal Jew in 2024
And that’s why, in the year since October 7, you have taken odd solace at odd moments, as when Israel comes under criticism for the supposedly indiscriminate tactics it’s using in Gaza. That wouldn’t seem to be a good thing, but it does allow you to express that wondrous complexity, according to which, yes, of course, Israel must be allowed to defend itself—but within limits, within reason, and certainly not with this brute at its helm. Gazans must eat! Israeli soldiers must be put at greater risk of harm to lower the death toll!

The fact that under any proper understanding of moral responsibility, Hamas is to blame for every bullet fired, every meal missed, and every death recorded since October 7 is just too simplistic for the wonderful complexity of your preferred worldview. And so, you take a byway rather than facing the stark reality. You focus your primary attention not on the need to protect Jews in the wake of October 7—which requires tough efforts to restore Israel’s deterrence and the establishment of new rules in the United States to address the unprecedented rise of anti-Semitism—but on a demand to “bring the hostages home.”

Does it matter that neither you nor anyone else has any idea how to achieve this aim? Does it matter that Hamas has rejected 14 separate cease-fire proposals designed with that very purpose? It doesn’t. Because the harsh reality—that Hamas and the Iran axis are evildoers who seek the mass murder of Jews and the elimination of the Jewish state—is just not very complicated at all. It’s something else. It’s an actual truth, not a relative truth, and it compels you to accept that the blessed gift of being an American Jew over the past century has lulled you and people like you into an entirely false sense of safety and security. From your privileged perch, you have spent decades viewing with withering contempt others who take in the span and arc of Jewish history and say, as on Passover, “In every generation, they stand against us to destroy us.”

So simplistic, you thought. So vulgar. And yet, so true.
American Jews silent on Israel’s survival as they fight antisemitism from the past
“In every generation, someone rises up to eradicate us,” goes the popular Jewish motto. In the 20th Century, the effort was directed to European Jews, and in the 21st Century, to Israeli Jews.

While the attempt to eradicate Judaism is naturally funneled through the largest and most relevant aspect of the Jewish population of the time, in both the 1940s and 2020s, there was another large and powerful Jewish population: American Jews.

In both cases, an election year elevated the ability of American Jews to influence the administration, and in both cases, some blame American Jews for not doing enough.

As the 1944 elections approached, it was clear that Jews were being murdered in Europe. President Roosevelt refused to intercept the destruction mechanism of Judaism and did not bomb the rail tracks leading to the extermination camps. Still, he received an astonishing 90% of the American Jewish vote.

Historian Alex Grobman recounts that in 1943, Jewish Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who was close to President Roosevelt, was told by Polish resistance leader Jan Karski the extent of the murder and was urged to do something to save European Jews. Frankfurter did not: “Either Frankfurter found the thought of Jews being killed in this fashion inconceivable, or he knew that if he acknowledged the systematic destruction, he would have to act publicly in their defense.”

A two-headed existential threat
Eighty years later, Judaism is once again under an existential threat, sustaining a dual assault - a physical attack coming from Iran and its proxies and an ideological attack coming from the West.

While Iran and its proxies have the capability to kill many Jews and indeed have done so over the last year, they do not have the capability to destroy Judaism. The West does. As I show in my new book, The Assault on Judaism, the 21st-century path to destroy Judaism is not through war but through war crime indictments, alongside sanctions, demoralization, and delegitimization. Those mechanisms have been activated in 2024, and we are now far along the path of a Western attempt to negate the idea of the Jewish state and, through it, the concept of Judaism.

Once again, the United States failed to intercept the destruction mechanism of Judaism. It refused to sanction the ICC, which in turn led to the expansion of its effort, alongside new actions in the International Court of Justice and a growing list of European countries who pledge to collaborate.

Nobody needs to tell American Jewish leaders that the ICC is preparing the groundwork for the rest of Israeli Jews - it says so openly.

And yet, American Jews seem to be silent when it comes to urging America to defend Judaism from the existential threat of the 21st Century. Instead, with an 80-year delay, there is a focus on defending Judaism from the last Century’s threat: antisemitism. The second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, even led a committee to combat antisemitism – putting together a comprehensive strategy to counter the threat of yesterday while ignoring the contemporary threat to Jews and Judaism.
Trump says expanding Abraham Accords will be ‘absolute priority’ if he wins election
Former President Donald Trump said in an interview released on Sunday that expanding the Abraham Accords would be “an absolute priority” if he wins the election.

“Everyone wants to be in it,” he said in an interview with Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned news channel, claiming he would have added “12 to 15 countries literally within a period of a year” if he had won the 2020 presidential election. “If I win, that will be an absolute priority,” he added. “It’s peace in the Middle East — we need it.”

Trump also reiterated his controversial claim that Iran would have joined the Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab neighbors, during a hypothetical second term.

“I make the statement, and it sounds foolish but it’s not foolish — I think even Iran would have been in, because Iran was desperate to make a deal,” he said. “They had no money.”

He declined to elaborate on how he would address Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapon while in office, even as he recently suggested he is open to talks with the Islamic Republic about a renewed nuclear deal that he himself ended while in office.

“They won’t acquire it,” he said. “Now they may get it if they get it very quickly. I’m not president, so I won’t have much to do with that.”

Trump also did not discuss whether he would seek to include Saudi Arabia in the Accords, as the Gulf kingdom has indicated that forging diplomatic ties would be contingent on Israel accepting a Palestinian state.

In the interview, focused on Middle East policy, Trump described Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman as a “visionary” and a “great guy” who is “respected all over the world.” He vowed to bolster U.S. ties with Saudi Arabia, saying Vice President Kamala Harris would damage the relationship.
FDD Morning Brief | feat. Robert Greenway (Oct. 18)
FDD Senior Vice President Jon Schanzer delivers timely situational updates and analysis, followed by a conversation with Robert Greenway of The Heritage Foundation, who played an instrumental role in the groundbreaking Abraham Peace Accords.


PodCast: Ben Shapiro: Doug Emhoff is as Jewish as a ham and cheese sandwich
Doug Emhoff, the Jewish husband of US Vice President Kamala Harris, is "as Jewish as a ham sandwich," conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said in an interview with Zvika Klein on The Jerusalem Post Podcast.

Shapiro criticized Harris's position on Israel, stating that while US President Biden "at least has some sort of baseline interest in the security of the State of Israel... Harris does not."

Rather, he claimed, both Harris and Emhoff don't care about Israeli security. He further took issue with Emhoff being touted as a representative of the Jewish people, saying it "is the most insulting thing about this entire campaig."

"I have a personal allergic reaction to Doug Emhoff trotting out his Judaism, which he has not cared about for one smidgen of 1% of one moment of his entire life, on the campaign trail," Shapiro said. "My culture is not your costume."

He further took issue with Emhoff appearing on stage at the Democratic National Convention, where he said that Harris made him more Jewish.

"That's a hell of a statement," Shapiro noted, before criticizing Emhoff's conduct. "Activities I do not consider Jewish include nailing your nanny, probably paying for her abortion, possibly beating up your ex-girlfriend according to three contemporaneous witness reports. Like, these are things that I think maybe you not a great representative to the Jewish people."


The Gulag Academia
I’m used to a great many things. Recently, a friend asked me whether I wore a Star of David proudly. “Of course,” I said—but I had forgotten that I tuck my Star of David inside my top when I ride the BART subway system to campus from my apartment in a nearby city. As I later explained to my friend, “If someone attacks me on campus, I can scream and run. But on the BART, I’d be trapped, and no one would help me.”

Then my friend asked me whether I display a mezuzah. Again, I said, “Of course,” but then I was forced to acknowledge that I have placed it on my inside door frame, not on the outside where it belongs, so that my apartment will not be targeted.

And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut said. I have become numb to the posters all over campus depicting Netanyahu as a beast with dripping fangs, and to the daily chants on campus of “Globalize the intifada” and “The only solution is intifada revolution.” I walk to and from class surrounded by an all-pervasive miasma of contempt for my very existence as a Jew. Curiously, even though I am Russian, my national background is never the reason I fear for my safety, nor are there any audible chants or visible posters denouncing Russia or threatening its destruction, despite the fact that Russia indisputably started its war with Ukraine by means of an invasion. The fact that Israel, on the other hand, was the entity that was invaded—by the Iranian proxy group Hamas—seems of no interest or relevance to Berkeley’s anti-Israel mobs.

I did object when a guest lecturer in one of my classes claimed that Netanyahu once said, “I wish death to all the Arabs.” When I pointed out that this was a fabrication that was subsequently disseminated by the Jordanian media, she doubled down, saying we “would have to agree to disagree.” No, we didn’t; I wrote a letter of complaint. But I don’t object when certain other professors take certain anti-Semitic actions, for fear of jeopardizing my grades and my future as an academic. In the same way that I tread carefully from stone to stone across that small creek to get to my classes, I must navigate cautiously (here at Berkeley and, perhaps in the future, at the graduate school that accepts me) around those professors—even some professors of Hebrew language and Jewish studies!—who have well-documented reputations for anti-Semitic or virulently anti-Israel rhetoric.

In short, I find myself in the same terribly awkward position of Jews everywhere in the Diaspora now. I am afraid, so sometimes I hide my Jewishness, just as my mother and father did. And then I become ashamed that I am hiding—having emigrated to America for the freedom of speech and religion it offers its citizens—so I speak out boldly for Israel and the Jews.

And then, some of the time, I become afraid again.

This isn’t just about me, of course. Nor is it just about Jews or Zionists. It is about anyone who cares about academic freedom, and the freedom of Americans anywhere to speak their minds and to assemble peaceably without fear of the kind of intimidation happening on the Berkeley campus and that could erupt again anytime against any group, Jewish or otherwise, that the mobs disapprove of.

The Algemeiner described one such incident of intimidation that occurred last winter:

In February, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at its Zellerbach Hall featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police. Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach. The mob then, according to witnesses, eventually stormed the building—breaking windows in the process, according to reports in The Daily Wire.

Nothing has changed in the autumn of 2024, my junior year at Berkeley. The impending defeat of Hamas and, soon enough, Hezbollah, has not made the marchers any less furious and hateful. Not long after the murder of Berkeley native son and American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, I passed a small group of students holding an impromptu memorial for him, featuring a long banner depicting his now-familiar face. From behind the banner, where a group of terrorist-sympathizers stood, came the sound of mocking, triumphant laughter. I felt chilled to the bone.

My father was a math and physics professor at another great university, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, up until the day he was attacked by a group of Chechen students. They beat him severely, demanding a better grade for one of their number, and called him a “gorbonosyy” and a “zhidyara” (you can look up these viciously anti-Semitic terms if you want to, but I am quite certain they won’t brighten your day). After that, my father resigned and has lived a quiet life in the village of Kholmskaya, nine kilometers from Sinegorskiy. He is an unassuming, mild-mannered man who steps carefully wherever he goes.

But I am different. I live in America. I don’t have to hide. Or, to be more accurate, sometimes I do hide, but I shouldn’t have to. Not even in the belly of the beast at Berkeley. Not even in a network of great but deeply compromised universities across America that I have come to think of as the Gulag Academia.

I won’t be afraid. I am afraid. But I won’t be afraid.
Jewish students at Cambridge ‘horrified’ after Palestine group shares eulogy ‘glorifying’ Yahya Sinwar
Jewish students at Cambridge University have criticised a pro-Palestine organisation for “glorifying” the architect of the October 7 massacre, after it re-posted a eulogy for Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas on its Instagram.

Cambridge for Palestine (CFP), which has over 11,000 followers on Instagram, shared the tribute of the terror chief last week on Friday, following his killing by Israel troops in Gaza on Wednesday.

The social media post contained the phrase “Glory to the resistance”, followed by its translation in Arabic, below a picture of Sinwar delivering a speech at a podium.

The commemorative post quoted Sinwar speaking in 2021 about how when he is killed, he will die as a martyr and a symbol of resistance.

Speaking in anticipation of his own death, Sinwar is quoted stating that his enemies “will say this is the photo of victory and the end of the battle and that we’ve assassinated Sinwar, now the battle is over. He wants a victory image, I’m ready.”

He goes on: “The greatest gift the enemy and occupation can give me is to assassinate me… I prefer to die a martyr than die a meaningless death.”

Below the text are two inverted red triangles, a symbol used by Hamas in videos and pictures to mark targets for attack.

Naomi Bernstein, a third year English student and a member of Cambridge University Jewish Society (CUJS), said: “As we approach the Hebrew anniversary of the October 7 attacks, it is troubling to see our fellow students glorifying its architect.

"We hope campus this year will be a safe and inclusive space for Jewish students to mourn the loss of innocent lives and express their identity.

"We, the Cambridge University Jewish Society, will continue to proudly mark the festivals as a community.”
ZOA, other Jewish groups demand resignation of Cooper Union chairman
The Zionist Organization of America, the Israel Law Center, the Batar Zionist Movement, Shields of David and other Jewish organizations are advocating for the resignation of Jamie Levitt, chairman of Cooper Union in New York City.

“This demand comes in response to repeated acts of heinous antisemitism” at the private college in Lower Manhattan, where “students and faculty gathered to celebrate acts of jihad and praise terrorists,” the organizations said in a joint statement on Oct. 16.

“Nothing is done, and nothing changes. We demand that Jamie Levitt resign immediately as chairman of Cooper Union,” said Nitsana Darshan Leitner of Shurat HaDin.

The statement outlined specific instances of antisemitism and the praising of terrorist acts, including administrators characterizing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza after the terrorist attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, as “one year of genocide.” That month, students at Cooper Union harassed a group of their Jewish peers to the point where they had to barricade themselves in the campus library for safety.

“There must be zero tolerance for this rising scourge of Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred, which pose a huge danger to Jews and the entire country and world,” said Morton Klein, national president of ZOA. “Cooper Union had failed that important principle. Its board chair must go.”


Following year-long ban, Twitch publicly enables sign-ups from Israeli IP addresses
Twitch, the Amazon-owned video live-streaming platform, has reinstated sign-ups from Israel on Monday after it was reported that the platform had disabled access from Israeli IP addresses for over a year.

This follows reports from multiple people of being unable to sign up to Twitch due to their IP addresses, which identify devices on a network or the internet, being blocked.

Twitch Support posted a statement on X/Twitter on Monday addressing the issue, admitting that, following the October 7 massacre, it had “temporarily disabled sign-ups with email verification in Israel and Palestine.”

Twitch added that it had “inadvertently” forgotten to re-enable email sign-ups, calling it an “unacceptable miss.”

The ban was originally intended to prevent uploads of “graphic material related to the attack and to protect the safety of users,” according to the platform.

Twitch noted that while it had disabled email verification, it had not at any point disabled phone verification.

However, one Twitter account added context to the Twitch statement, disagreeing that phone sign-ups had been possible.

“The ban was based on IP addresses, not email addresses (which in most cases cannot be geolocated based on the address only). Sign-up was impossible even when using a phone number.”

Commenters on Reddit also expressed doubt over Twitch’s reasoning, with one user writing that if Twitch wanted to block violent content, they could have done this by preventing streaming, not banning user registrations.


Man gets 14 months for role in shotgun attack on Albany synagogue
Andrew Miller, 38, received a sentence of 14 months imprisonment on Oct. 18, followed by three years of supervised release, for illegally purchasing a Kel-Tec 12-gauge pump shotgun for Mufid Fawaz Alkhader, 28, who still faces charges.

Police say that Alkhader then used the shotgun to fire shots on Dec. 7 outside of Temple Israel in Albany, N.Y. The attack occurred with at least two dozen preschoolers present, prompting a lockdown.

Miller, who had pleaded guilty on June 20, confessed that he had lied on a Firearms Transaction Record (Form 4473 of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF) when buying the gun.

Alkhader reportedly yelled “Free Palestine” at or near the site of the shooting. He faces up to 20 years in jail and up to $250,000 in fines.
Bolton man jailed for repeated and 'sickening' antisemitic abuse
Robert Taylor, of Ullswater Drive, Farnworth, was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to the offences at Manchester Crown Court.

In May 2021, Taylor attended a car boot sale in Tyldesley and filmed himself approaching a Jewish man and verbally abusing him with antisemitic comments.

After the man walked away, Taylor made his way around the car boot sale and handed out leaflets containing information of the same nature.

A couple of months later, the 42-year-old started sharing propaganda videos and sticking antisemitic posters in public places around Bolton.

Taylor would also graffiti existing posters with antisemitic rhetoric and stuck white supremacy stickers to street signs, while also handing out racist flyers to members of the public.

Returning to the same Tyldesley car boot sale in July 2022, Taylor targeted a Jewish family with verbal abuse, making various references to the Holocaust, and was seen hurling antisemitic insults at a member of the public at a protest in Bolton.

Regularly bragging about his activity on his social media accounts, and posting reams of antisemitic, racist, homophobic, and transphobic content, Taylor’s online activity was initially identified by the Community Security Trust (CST) and reported to police.

Following Taylor's arrest in February 2023, an examination of his electronic devices found that he was in possession of instructional information on the manufacture of explosives which may be useful to someone who commits or prepares acts of terrorism.

He had also sent a propaganda video for a proscribed organisation to another person.
No, we shouldn’t retire the word ‘Zionism.’ We should take it back.
In the face of campus attacks on “Zionists” and a global backlash against the very ideology of “Zionism,” there have been calls to retire the word Zionism. The latest came from Case Western Reserve university professors Alanna Cooper and Sharona Hoffman, who argue that because Israel’s enemies use the word to avoid saying ”Israel,” and distort the historical meaning of the word, the terms “Zionism” and “Zionist” “should be retired from our vocabulary.”

This would be a mistake of epic proportions. It won’t make our enemies love us. In fact, it will have the opposite effect and just embolden them to keep chipping away at our narrative, our heritage and our people. So, we must double down on that word, reclaim it, and remind everyone what it really means.

And here’s what it means (the Anti-Defamation League got it right): “Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel.” That’s it. Nothing more and nothing less.

Calling for retiring the word Zionism, even in the interest of defending Israel, is a short-sighted response that will only backfire. The word is not only still relevant today, but it represents something vitally needed for world Jewry at this hour: Jewish pride. So instead of giving in, we must push back and reclaim the terminology. We must be proud and show them that we won’t bow to their pressure on this or any other antisemitic attack, and here’s why:

First, words matter. Our enemies have long used language to stoke Jew hatred. From passion plays that proclaimed Jews killed Jesus to blood libels that claimed Jews drink the blood of Christian children to Hamas lies that Israelis harvest Palestinian organs to anti-Israel protesters screaming that Israel commits genocide and apartheid — our enemies have always used words to inflame hatred against us, and it has often led to real violence. They’re doing the same thing today by turning the word Zionism into a bad word. But we cannot let them.

Second, we get to define our own lexicon, not our adversaries. Cooper and Hoffman write that Jewish Voice for Peace, the United Nations and others have chosen to give Zionism “pernicious meanings.” So what? We are already starting to lose the nomenclature fight when it comes to defining antisemitism because we are letting our enemies tell us what Jew hatred is and what it is not. Why do we think caving to our adversaries is ever the right strategy? Winston Churchill famously said, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

Third, it’s a slippery slope. What’s next? Jew haters will go back to the UN to attempt once again to define “Zionism as racism” — an argument the American Jewish community and government officials spent 16 years fighting to repeal — and then where will they then go from there? Will they try to turn the word “Israel” or “Jewish” into bad words too? In 1975, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., called the effort to sully the word Zionism “a great evil has been loosed upon the world.” A half-century later, surely the Jewish people can say the same thing.

Fourth, the attack on the word Zionism is something more nefarious in disguise: It is our enemies’ attempt to erase the Jewish connection to Zion altogether. Hoffman and Cooper write that “Zionism should continue to be used to refer to the movement that predated the establishment of Israel in 1948.” But if we allow our enemies to turn Zionism into a dirty word, then that will pave the way for them to turn the entire Zionist enterprise into a dirty movement, which will pave the way for them to discredit not just the word Zionism, but the whole Zionist project, meaning the State of Israel itself. If we retire “Zionism,” with all of its deep historical resonance, it will only embolden them to keep lying about the lack of Jewish connection to the land of our people.
Daniel Pearl and Me
Just a few days later I found myself in Encino, California, in the living room of Judea and Ruth Pearl, laughing and sometimes crying along with Danny’s mother and father while I stole glances at a large photograph of Danny propped up against the mantel of their fireplace. I turned to look out their picture window then, and it was as if I saw that letter A rising again over the low-slung mountains of the San Fernando Valley.

That afternoon I had awakened to the idea that the things we do, the actions we take, have a much greater resonance in the world than we can possibly imagine, and that despite the conclusions we may have drawn from our many fears and our many failings, we do matter; everything matters. I woke up as well to the idea that even the smallest things—the thoughts in our heads, the gestures we make, the expressions we wear, the words we write, the things we say—have a weight far beyond our limited reckoning. And as for things we say, there is a Psalm, number 126, my favorite, composed by the world’s greatest songwriter, King David.

We are called dreamers because we are, all of us, asleep—asleep to the beauty of being alive. The promise of the Psalmist is that an alarm clock will ring one day and wake us up from our dream, a terrible dream that says, “Nothing is real except satisfying your own hunger and slaking your own thirst.” And when we wake up, once and for all, we will laugh. We will laugh because in a flash of light, the kind that banishes all darkness for all time, we will see how we have been tricked into thinking that we need anything more than what we have right in front of us. Yes, we’re hungry, hungry for miracles. But here they are right now, all of them, arrayed before us. Each one silently wishing we’d take notice.

Being asleep and its consequences are nothing new: We are simply doing what sleepers throughout the generations have done. We reach for the wrong things. We reach for Netflix instead of reaching for our partners. We reach for Facebook instead of reaching for our children. We reach for our credit cards to buy things we don’t need instead of reaching for our creative spirits.

Like you, I’ve probably been awake around 0.005 percent of my time on earth. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to create a need. Because once you’ve experienced that millisecond of wakefulness, you crave it all the time. Unfortunately, I don’t have the Psalmist’s alarm clock. All I have is my love, my faith, and my music. But I do use them occasionally to try to make that letter A rise. And sometimes it does.
Oct. 7 massacre survivor commits suicide
Shirel Golan, a survivor of the Nova music festival massacre by Hamas and Palestinian terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023, took her own life on Oct. 20, her 22nd birthday. She was found lifeless in the yard of her home in Moshav Porat in central Israel. The exact cause of death was not made public.

She was set to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron with her family.

According to family members, despite suffering from post-trauma, the state failed to provide Shirel with mental health services.

“She said she received no assistance from the state. She said that she only had assistance from the [Tribe of] Nova foundation,” her brother, Eyal, told Israel Hayom.

The Tribe of Nova Foundation was set up following the massacre to provide mental, financial and occupational assistance to survivors, bereaved families and hostages’ families.

More than 380 people were murdered at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas overran southern Israel, massacring 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping 251.

“The State of Israel murdered my sister twice. Once in October, mentally, and a second time today, on her 22nd birthday, physically,” Eyal told Israel’s Channel 12 News.

“My mother had to take early retirement to be near her daughter,” he said. “We didn’t move a millimeter from her, and the only time we left her alone was today—and she decided to end her life.”




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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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