‘Jews Don’t Count:’ Former New York Times Editor Bari Weiss Breaks Down Antisemitism on Left and Right in Megyn Kelly Interview
“Right now, Jews are in a very precarious and strange position,” said author and former New York Times editor Bari Weiss in a wide-ranging interview Friday, with former Fox News and NBC host Megyn Kelly.
“Jews don’t count,” she argued. “If someone said to another editor at the New York Times, ‘are you writing about the Blacks again? Are you writing about the trans again? Are you writing about the gays again?’ — think about how that sounds to your ear; it’s disgusting. And yet some people think it’s acceptable to say about Jews.”
The former opinion section editor resigned from The New York Times in July 2020, publishing an open letter that criticized colleagues for “harassing” behavior.
“They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,'” she wrote in the letter.
Kelly, the former news anchor who launched The Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020, asked Weiss on Friday why antisemitism had recently become more prominent.
“In the antisemitic conspiracy theory … Jews or the Jewish state comes to stand for whatever a given culture or civilization defines as its most loathsome or disgusting qualities,” said Weiss, who in 2019 authored the book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. “That’s how the Jews can be so many things at once,” under ideologies like Nazism and Communism.
“You have the accusation that comes from the far-right — from people like the killer who stormed into my synagogue in Pittsburgh two years ago, and he said ‘all Jews must die,’ and he killed eleven of my neighbors,” said Weiss, referring to the 2018 Tree of Life massacre in her home town.
I loved this conversation with @bariweiss on leaving the @nytimes, fighting anti-Semitism and her engagement -she's brave & brilliant. Check it out:https://t.co/K0ZhCbI4xV https://t.co/tfHp6MUFu9
— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 22, 2021
Fighting Terrorists while respecting International Law
Fighting Terrorists while respecting International Law: Col. (ret) Adv. Pnina Sharvit Baruch, former head of the IDF's international law department and Col. (ret) Richard Kemp CBE, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, chaired by Natasha Hausdorff, Barrister.
Two exceptional speakers discuss the challenges facing moral armies when confronting terrorists, while seeking to avoid civilian casualties and comply with international law.
Col. Adv. Pnina Sharvit Baruch is a senior research fellow and the head of the program on law and national security at the Israel Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). She is also vice president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists (IJL) and active in Forum Dvorah - Women in Foreign Policy and National Security.
Pnina retired from the Israel Defense Forces in 2009 with the rank of Colonel after twenty years in the International Law Department, heading the Department from 2003. She was responsible for advising on international law, including the laws of armed conflict. Pnina served as a legal advisor and member of Israel's delegations to the negotiations with the Palestinians and with Syria.
After 2009 Pnina taught courses on public international law and on the legal aspects of the Israel – Arab conflict in the law faculty of the Tel Aviv University and at the National Security College. She has published numerous articles on issues relating to these topics. She holds an LL.B and LL.M from Tel-Aviv University.
Col. Richard Kemp CBE served in the British Army for 30 years, retiring in 2006. He completed eight operational tours fighting terrorism in Northern Ireland, including intelligence work, and was wounded in action. He took part in the 1990-91 Gulf war in Iraq and Kuwait. He served with the UN Protection Force in Bosnia in 1994 and was counter terrorism adviser to the Prime Minister of Macedonia in 2001.
He commanded British Forces in Afghanistan in 2003 and subsequently served again in Iraq during the second Gulf War. From 2002-2006 he was head of the international terrorism intelligence team at the British Cabinet Office and a member of COBRA.
Since leaving the Army he has addressed the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, refuting allegations of war crimes aimed at the IDF. He has also addressed the Knesset and several legislatures around the world on these issues as well as the threat from Iran. He is a media commentator and writer on defence, security, terrorism and intelligence and author of "Attack State Red", an account of the war in Afghanistan.
Grand Mufti’s Jerusalem mansion to become synagogue
Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and 1930s who spent much of World War II in Berlin as a Nazi collaborator and war criminal, must be spinning in his grave. In Jerusalem has learned that the landmark hilltop mansion he built 88 years ago in affluent Sheikh Jarrah between the Old City and Mount Scopus is slated to become a synagogue in a future 56-apartment Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem.
The 500-sq.m. manor house, called Qasr al-Mufti (the Mufti’s Palace) in Arabic, today stands deserted at the center of a largely completed 28-apartment complex, which itself lacks a tofes arba occupancy permit. The reason the new neighborhood is not being finished – and indeed has not been marketed in the 10 years since demolition and construction began – is that the developers have applied to rezone the 5.2-dunam site to double the number of units to 56, according to Daniel Luria, a spokesman for Ateret Cohanim, which backs the housing project.
Luria was unclear when the rezoning application, originally meant to build 70 apartments, would be approved. The historic house at the core of the site will be preserved and repurposed for communal needs including a synagogue and perhaps a day care center, he said.
“There is a beautiful poetic justice when you see the house of Hajj Amin al-Husseini crumbling down,” Luria noted.
Though al-Husseini built the mansion, he never lived in it. Following the outbreak in 1936 of the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate government, the mufti became a fugitive hiding in the Old City’s Haram ash-Sharif. When the British attempted to arrest him in 1937, he fled Palestine and the British made do with confiscating his property. The al-Husseini clan owned numerous properties in Jerusalem, among them the Palace Hotel (today the Waldorf Astoria), the Orient House, and the mansion subsequently turned into the Shepherd Hotel in Sheikh Jarrah on a plot of land known as Karam al-Mufti, named for al-Husseini.