In their recent book Be Strong and of Good Courage: How Israel’s Most Important Leaders Shaped Its Destiny, Dennis Ross and David Makovsky—who both have had long careers as Middle East experts inside and outside the U.S. government—analyze the “courageous decisions” made by David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitz?ak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon. Not coincidentally, three of these four decisions involved territorial concessions. Ross and Makovsky use the book’s final chapter to compare their profiles in courage with Benjamin Netanyahu’s cautious approach on the Palestinian front. Calling this an “almost cartoonish juxtaposition,” Haviv Rettig Gur writes:

Netanyahu’s indecision on the Palestinian issue is not shallow. Indeed, it may be what his voters like most about him. The optimism that animated the imaginations of leaders like Rabin and Sharon—who imagined peace with the Palestinians, then unilateral separation and deterrence—is now understood by the vast majority of Israelis to be relegated to a more naïve past. The Oslo process in the 1990s ended in the suicide-bombing waves of the second intifada in 2000, and the Gaza withdrawal of 2005 in the Hamas takeover of the territory in 2007, a result that may yet play itself out on a much larger scale if Israel pulls out of the West Bank.

To most Israelis, the shift from the era of Sharon to the age of Netanyahu does not feel like a country somehow grown less ambitious or innovative—witness other fields of human endeavor in which Israelis continue to shine—but rather like a country that has become wiser and more aware of the limits of optimism.

Netanyahu’s refusal to initiate new peace processes is not just about what his rightist flank will say (though of course that is one pressure he clearly feels). It is also due to the simple fact that he is convinced it will fail. . . . He has shown that he can be decisive, courageous, and as rude as any of his iconic forebears when he believes the times require it, as in his brazen and intensive efforts to torpedo the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

But there is another message in this book, a subtler critique of present-day Israeli leadership that begins by rejecting the usual run of the debate. Ross and Makovsky challenge the simplistic declamations of past U.S. administrations and countless foreign observers that the occupation is “unsustainable.” The diplomatic costs, they note, instead “remain manageable” for Israel, as do the military and financial burdens of the conflict, if only because Israelis do not see better alternatives. . . . And that’s the key: Israel’s indecision flows not from decline, but from strength.

“Until 1967, Israel did not hold an inch of the Sinai Peninsula, West Bank, Gaza Strip or Golan Heights...Year after year Israel called for …peace. The answer was a blank refusal and more war”-Yitzhak Rabin, 1976

The most righteous of men cannot live in peace if his evil neighbor will not let him be– from Wilhelm Tell Act IV, scene III, by Friedrich von Schiller, 1804.

It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. – R. Inge, Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1915.

He who comes to kill you, rise up early and kill him first – The Talmud

The Oslo process that resulted in the signature of the “Declaration of Principles” on the White House Lawns on September 13, 1993, was in many ways a point of singularity in the history of Zionism, after which everything was qualitatively different from that which it was before. It was a point of inflection in the time-line of the evolution of Jewish political independence, at which what were once vaunted values became vilified vices.

Metamorphosis: From deterrence to appeasement?
Thus, almost at a stroke, Jewish settlement and attachment to land, once the essence of the Zionist ethos, were branded as the epitome of egregious extremism. Jewish military might, once exalted as a symbol of national resurgence and self-reliance, was excoriated as the instrument of repression and subjugation.

This metamorphosis is decidedly perplexing. After all, even by the early1990s, Zionism had proved to be one of the most successful—arguably, the most successful—movement of national liberation that arose from the dissolution of the great Empires—providing political independence, economic prosperity and personal liberties to a degree unrivalled by other such movements.

Israel is a regional power that has existed for 70 years in a very dangerous neighborhood. If it cannot survive, it cannot sustain its founding principles, including democracy, toleration, and respect for minority rights. The greatest danger a nation can face is political delusion on the part of its elites. An unwillingness to face geopolitical realities jeopardizes a nation's interest and survival.

Great powers like America can rely on their latent strength to mitigate misperception's consequences. For small states, however, politics is existential - political death is a persistent possibility. Small states survive by anticipating, rather than reacting to, international events. The Jewish State in particular feels the existential edge of political competition, having faced annihilation from its inception.

America's partnership with Israel has improved U.S. defense technology and generated invaluable intelligence. American military assistance to Israel has given the U.S. exclusive access to Israeli military technology. Israel is a test-bed for frontline American military technology and tactics, particularly given similarities between the U.S. and Israeli air forces. Israel's Mossad intelligence agency has worked with the CIA since the early Cold War. Israel has been instrumental in slowing Iran's nuclear program.

US Representative Nita Lowey, a pro-Israel stalwart and one of the most influential Jewish lawmakers, said she will not run for re-election to Congress next year.

In her announcement Thursday, Lowey, a 82-year-old Democrat from New York, noted that she was the first woman to chair the House Appropriations Committee, the lower chamber’s most powerful committee, and included among her accomplishments upholding the US-Israel relationship.

“As the Chairwoman of the Appropriations subcommittee that writes the foreign aid bill, I have advanced record funding for women’s health and basic education — especially for girls — around the world, a strong US-Israel relationship with bipartisan support, and other investments that support American interests abroad,” Lowey said.

Through her close working relationship with Republican Representative Kay Granger of Texas, the Appropriations Committee ranking member, Lowey led resistance to Trump administration cutbacks in foreign assistance, which both women saw as critical to America’s defense. Both women are perennial guests at annual conferences of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from northeast Syria, former Israeli national security adviser Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror believes not much will change, in practical terms, for Israel's security. "I don't think Israel needs to be worried," he said in an interview Thursday.

"There are regional groups like the Kurds that need the U.S. to protect them. Israel, when it was founded, made the decision that it shall never depend on anyone for its security."

This is not always easy to implement; it requires a universal draft and enormous financial resources, noted Amidror. On the other hand, it puts Israel in a different league than many European states, Saudi Arabia, and the Kurds, who all depend on America for their safety.

"We understand that the Middle East from now on will [have to manage] without influence, or with less influence, from the Americans." The U.S. will continue to exert economic pressure on Iran, he stressed.

"According to foreign reports, we struck in Syria more than 200 times. The U.S. didn't strike the Iranians even once. Therefore, it's on us, not on them. The job of fighting the Iranians and their influence was always done by us. Our ability to continue to do that will not be limited once the Americans are out."

"We dealt with the Iranian aggression until now without the Americans, when they still were in the Middle East. We were alone in this 'war between wars,' as we call it. The fact that they are pulling out does not mean any significant change. It's more about psychology."

Here it is critical to note that Trump did not remove US forces from Syria. They are still deployed along the border crossing between Jordan, Iraq, and Syria to block Iran from moving forces and materiel to Syria and Lebanon. They are still blocking Russian and Syrian forces from taking over the oil fields along the eastern bank of the Euphrates. Aside from defeating ISIS, these missions are the principle strategic achievements of the US forces in Syria. For now, they are being maintained. Will Turkey’s invasion enable ISIS to reassert itself in Syria and beyond? Perhaps. But here too, as Trump made clear this week, it is not America’s job to serve as the permanent jailor of ISIS. European forces are just as capable of serving as guards as Americans are. America’s role is not to stay in Syria forever. It is to beat down threats to US and world security as they emerge and then let others – Turks, Kurds, Europeans, Russians, UN peacekeepers – maintain the new, safer status quo.

The final assumption of the narrative regarding Trump’s moves in Syria is that by moving its forces away from the border ahead of the Turkish invasion, Trump harmed regional stability and America’s reputation as a trustworthy ally.

On the latter issue, Trump has spent the better part of his term in office rebuilding America’s credibility as an ally after Obama effectively abandoned the Sunnis and Israel in favor of Iran. To the extent that Trump has harmed US credibility, he didn’t do it in Syria this week by rejecting war with Turkey. He did it last month by failing to retaliate militarily against Iran’s brazen military attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. Whereas the US has no commitment to protect the Kurds, the US’s central commitment in the Middle East for the past 70 years has been the protection of Saudi oil installations and maintaining the safety of maritime routes in and around the Persian Gulf.

The best move Trump can make now in light of the fake narrative of his treachery toward the Kurds is to finally retaliate against Iran. A well-conceived and limited US strike against Iranian missile and drone installations would restore America’s posture as the dominant power in the Persian Gulf and prevent the further destabilization of the Saudi regime and the backsliding of the UAE toward Iran.

As for Syria, it is impossible to know what the future holds for the Kurds, the Turks, the Iranians, Assad, or anyone else. But what is clear enough is that Trump avoided war with Turkey this week. And he began extracting America from an open-ended commitment to the Kurds it never made and never intended to fulfill.

Those of us opposed to intervention in Syria wanted Congress to think through these quite predictable outcomes before authorizing any further U.S. military involvement in this wretched region. Congress, however, much prefers to lay low in the tall grass, wait for presidents to act, and then complain when things go awry.

And so they have: The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of U.S. commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to U.S.-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?” (We might remember that recognition of Kosovo’s split from Serbia, over Russian objections, was exploited by the Kremlin as a rationale for promoting separatism and annexations in Georgia and Ukraine.)

It is true, as the editors observe, that “there are no easy answers in Syria.” That is no excuse for offering an answer that makes no sense: “The United States should have an exit strategy, but one that neither squanders our tactical gains against ISIS nor exposes our allies to unacceptable retribution.” Put aside that our arming of the Kurds has already exposed our allies in Turkey to unacceptable risk. What the editorial poses is not an “exit strategy” but its opposite. In effect, it would keep U.S. forces in Syria interminably, permanently interposed between the Kurds and the Turks. The untidy questions of how that would be justifiable legally or politically go unaddressed.

President Trump, by contrast, has an exit strategy, which is to exit. He promises to cripple Turkey economically if the Kurds are harmed. If early reports of Turkey’s military assault are accurate, the president will soon be put to the test. I hope he is up to it. For a change, he should have strong support from Congress, which is threatening heavy sanctions if Turkey routs the Kurds.

Americans, however, are not of a mind to do more than that. We are grateful for what the Kurds did in our mutual interest against ISIS. We should try to help them, but no one wants to risk war with Turkey over them. The American people’s representatives never endorsed combat operations in Syria, and the president is right that the public wants out. Of course we must prioritize the denial of safe havens from which jihadists can attack American interests. We have to stop pretending, though, that if our intentions toward this neighborhood are pure, its brutal history, enduring hostilities, and significant downside risks can be ignored.

The irony is that his isolationism is mirrored among his foes on the left. They oppose wars against America’s enemies because they tend to support those enemies. Trump opposes any foreign wars, period.

The Democrats have nevertheless piled in with the Republicans against this betrayal of the Kurds. Of course, the fate of the Kurds is a wonderful new stick with which to beat the president, and attacking Trump remains the only show in town for Democrats.

His outrageous treatment at their hands is due to the fact that he is the only man ever to have presented a roadblock to the left’s anti-West, anti-white and anti-Israel agenda, and his success in mobilizing millions who want America to be “great” again has driven the Democrats totally nuts.

But because Trump has been the genuine victim of an attempted coup to remove him—on account of his high crime and misdemeanor of having been elected president in the first place—that doesn’t mean everything he does is right.

The onslaught against the president, plus his support of Israel, has made many Jews who are not on the left into his passionate partisans, locked in verbal battles not just with Democrats but also with Republican “never-Trumpers,” whose attacks on the president have been scarcely less unhinged.

This has blinkered these Trump partisans to his faults. Filtering judgment through such a prism, instead of assessing his every action on its merits and with an open mind, is alarming.

Sherkoh Abbas, president of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, concurs that all US allies in the Middle East have good reason to be concerned right now, noting that Trump’s recent decision will lead to the strengthening of both ISIS and Iran in the Middle East: “This is a threat to Israel and the Kurds. It is a threat to Europe. It is essential to stop [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan for the stability of the Middle East. Trump should be accountable to the international community if any terror attacks occur because of this. Kurdistan was not a state during World War II [referring to Trump's complaint that the Kurds "didn't help us in the Second World War, they didn't help us with Normandy"]. The Kurds have helped the US many times and we now are being screwed by the Americans.”

UN goodwill ambassador and Yezidi genocide survivor Nadia Murad said, “Abandoning the Kurds is both shameful and dangerous. Civilian lives have already been lost and as the fighting escalates, women and children will suffer the most. This will lead to more displacement and more suffering. This act of aggression will lead to a reassurance of ISIS and other radical groups and a further destabilization of the region. Religious minorities in Syria and Iraq will once again be under the threat of radical groups. If the frontline against ISIS is destroyed, ISIS prisoners who committed genocide and enslaved women are likely to get away without facing prosecution for their crimes. The international community has a moral responsibility to stabilize the region. President Trump’s decision to tacitly support Turkey will have grave consequences.”

If the Kurds lose their enclave in Syria, the "Shia crescent" from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea will be expanded and reinforced. The SDF will likely have to turn to the Assad regime for assistance in halting Turkey’s aggression since it can no longer rely on the US.

In response to the move, Iraqi Kurdistan’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani has reached out to Russia. Feeling that he can no longer rely on the US, he seeks Russian President Vladimir Putin's friendship and assistance. He saw how America responded to Kurdistan’s independence referendum of 2017. The change in US policy also weakens the pro-democracy protesters in Iraq. With Iran gaining ground in other areas of the region, the Iraqi protesters are more isolated. Additionally, Trump's move advances Erdoğan's goal of resurrecting the Ottoman Empire.

Finally, Israel’s security situation will be aggravated as our adversaries are strengthened at the expense of a significant regional ally, the Kurds.

On Thursday, Sarai Idan, who was Miss Iraq, lauded Israel for its commitment to help the Kurdish people in the face of what Turkish dictator Recip Erdogan’s brutal assault on them. Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted Thursday morning, “Israel strongly condemns the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish areas in Syria and warns against the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds by Turkey and its proxies. Israel is prepared to extend humanitarian assistance to the gallant Kurdish people.”

Idan commented, “And people wonder why I stand with Israel … heard many countries say ‘They condemn’ but not a single one said they will extend assistance to #Kurds.”

As The Daily Wire reported in December 2017, at the Miss International Beauty Pageant, Idan posed for photos with Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman, for their respective Instagram accounts. Idan’s caption read: “Peace and Love from Miss Iraq and Miss Israel.” Gandelsman wroteon her Instagram post, “Get to know, this is Miss Iraq and she’s amazing.” She added on Facebook, “Practicing bringing world peace.”

The backlash from parts of the Muslim world targeting Idan, 27, was so fierce that she posted a defense on Istagram, writing in Arabic on Instagram, “I want to stress that the purpose of the picture was only to express hope and desire for peace between the two countries,” but adding that the photo did not indicate support for the Israeli government and offering an apology if the photo was harmful to the Palestinian cause.

Kurdish Academic Dr. Sarbast Nabi: “The Turkish Army is Coming to Fight the Kurdish People”; Erdogan Set on Demographic Engineering in Kurdistan pic.twitter.com/9k0cuC76PJ

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 11, 2019

In an article titled "Erdogan's Terror, Which the West Ignores" in the London-based daily Al-Arab, 'Ali Qassem, a Syrian journalist residing in Tunisia, castigated the West for its stance towards Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He argued that the West, led by the U.S., knows that Erdogan has been directly and personally supporting ISIS and other terror organizations for years, yet chooses to ignore this fact and the extensive evidence that proves it. He also called out Erdogan for his hypocrisy, noting that he condemns the "terror" and "terrorists," meaning the Kurds who fight ISIS, while he himself has been sheltering ISIS, enabling its activity and providing it with resources and financial support since 2012. When it comes to spreading lies, said Qassem, Erdogan is "a faithful disciple of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels" because he just "keeps lying, in hope that people will believe him even though the lie is obvious."

The following are translated excerpts from his article:[1]
"When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks about terror, what terror is he referring to? The terrorists he speaks about, are they the terrorists of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, or does he consider ISIS and Al-Qaeda to be saints? Erdogan says that whoever arms the terrorists... is party to [their] crimes and bears [responsibility] for the sin of shedding Muslim blood. That is what he stressed in his meeting with representatives of the Turkish diaspora and with [other] Muslims in New York, when he came there to attend the UN General Assembly. [But] the terrorists he hinted at, are they [actually] the people who are fighting ISIS, Al-Qaeda and the other jihadi groups [i.e., the Kurds]?

"Erdogan, who personally helped ignite flames inside Syria, [and] who opened the Turkish borders to masses of refugees and then threatened to expel them from Turkey in order to pressure and blackmail Europe... is [now] wondering how it is possible to remain silent in the face of the Islamophobia, antisemitism and growing antagonism to immigrants and foreigners that prevail in the West. Anyone listening to Erdogan... might think he is Mother Theresa, rather than a dictator who is determined to fill Turkey's prisons with journalists and oppositionists...

"The West, and especially the U.S., are well aware that Erdogan has been sheltering ISIS and proving it with financial assistance and [other] means since 2012. On orders from Turkish intelligence, Turkish customs officers help this organization's fighters cross the border to Syria and Iraq in droves...

In view of President Trump's warning to Turkey that if it "does anything" that he "consider[s] to be off limits" he will "totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey," it is worth considering the analysis below which explains why the president is, in fact, unable to do this.

The following is the analysis published by MEMRI on January 15, 2019,[2] at the time of the previous U.S.-Turkey crisis:

There have been inexplicable phenomena in the Middle East for some years now. Any attempt to explain them logically comes up against a dead end, and gives way to conspiracy theories. How can one logically explain both Israel's and the U.S.'s prostration to Qatar? Theories range from the conspiratorial, such as Qatari infiltration of the two governments, to the seemingly implausible assumption that these governments and their agencies are simply naïfs, fools, and ignoramuses (pick one or more).

Let us list some examples: The U.S. is the only country that surpasses Israel in groveling to Qatar, despite the latter's unending anti-U.S. incitement, particularly against the current U.S. administration. As far as the Al-Jazeera TV channel, owned by the Qatari emir, is concerned, the Democrats are the only legitimate party in the U.S., and the few Republicans worthy of coverage are Sen. Rand Paul – presented as a political heavyweight – and former senator Bob Corker, whose decision to not seek reelection in 2018 was concealed from the viewers as if it were a trifle.

For years, the U.S. has felt indebted to Qatar for hosting the Al-Udeid airbase and CENTCOM headquarters. Pentagon chiefs and American political leaders come and go, and no one remembers that it is Qatar that is indebted to the U.S. for maintaining the base. Qatar originally built it, at a cost of $2 billion, to guarantee an American presence there, since without this presence the Qatari regime would have been devoured long ago. Today, faced with the threat of a Saudi or Emirati offer to the U.S. outdoing Qatar, Qatar is buying Pentagon goodwill by building an entire city to host the American servicemen's dependents, and is expanding Al-Udeid. But this deal, that assures Qatar's survival, has exacted a heavy price from the U.S. American fighter bombers are engaged in the Sisyphean task of setting out from Al-Udeid to strike at Islamic terrorists who were nurtured by Qatari propaganda – propaganda that cultivates a new crop of jihadis for the Americans to bomb – and the cycle continues.

Statement by United Nations Watch, delivered by intern Avraham Spraragen before the 42nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, September 2019. Agenda Item 6, Universal Periodic Review of Qatar.

Original version attacking #Israel and revised (after my tweet) without Israel. Good to see @BoutinGboutin@UNICEFpalestine are paying attention; better if they stop exploiting children for propaganda from the beginning. pic.twitter.com/8oTzc6lYYG

— Prof Gerald M Steinberg (@GeraldNGOM) October 10, 2019

Counter-terror police were on Friday probing a mass stabbing at a shopping center in northwest England that left several people injured and needing hospital treatment.

The attack happened at the Arndale shopping centre in the heart of Manchester, the city where an Islamist extremist suicide bomber killed 22 after an Ariana Grande concert in 2017.

A man in his 40s was arrested on suspicion of serious assault.

Footage posted online appeared to show one police officer restraining the suspect on the floor as another stands over him pointing a Taser.

A shop worker who gave his name only as Jordan, 23, told Britain’s domestic Press Association news agency that “a man was running around with a knife lunging at multiple people, one of which came into my store visibly shaken with a small graze”.

Greater Manchester Police and North West Ambulance Service said four people were injured during the incident, revising downwards an initial toll of five.

A man wielding a knife attacked Indonesia's chief security minister Wiranto on Thursday (Oct 10) during his visit to a town on the island of Java, injuring the minister and three others.

Television footage showed the minister slumped to the ground beside his car after the attack in Pandeglang, in Banten province. Security officers were seen wrestling a man and a woman to the ground.

"Someone approached and attacked him," said national police spokesman Dedi Prasetyo, adding that the couple have been arrested.

The two suspects belong to the Islamic State-linked terror network Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), said State Intelligence Agency chief Budi Gunawan.

"We have been able to identify the perpetrators as JAD members," he told reporters in Jakarta.

JAD is among dozens of radical groups that have pledged loyalty to the Islamic State group in Indonesia.

An Israeli-American woman was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison by a Russian court on Friday for alleged drug smuggling, despite a “personal” plea to President Vladimir Putin for leniency from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Foreign Ministry condemned the sentence for Naama Issachar, 26, who has been detained in Moscow for the last six months on suspicion of drug smuggling after a reported 10 grams of marijuana was found in her bag during a stopover in Russia for a connecting flight.

“This is a disproportionately heavy punishment for a young Israeli woman without any criminal past who was on a connecting flight at the airport in Moscow on her way to Israel,” the ministry said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, the Russian authorities have not responded to our entreaties to deal with this case in congruence with the circumstances of her arrest,” it added.

Issachar, who also has dual Israeli-American citizenship, was returning from a trip to India in April and stopped over in Moscow airport to catch a connecting flight to Tel Aviv. As her backpack was moving along a conveyor belt a police sniffer dog identified it as suspicious. Authorities searched the bag and found the marijuana wrapped in plastic, concealed inside a toiletries bag.

IDF forces were mapping the home of one of the terrorists behind the bombing at Danny Spring near the Samaria settlement of Dolev on Aug. 23 that killed Rina Shnerb, 17, in preparation to raze the premises.

Shnerb's father and brother were seriously wounded in the attack.

The home belongs to Yazen Hassin Hasni and is located in the Jams neighborhood of Bir Zeit, north of Ramallah.

Hasni, 25, is an active member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and lives in Ramallah. He has been arrested for involvement in terrorist activity and was part of the planning and execution of the bombing at Danny Spring.

Three other members of the terrorist cell behind the attack were arrested last month. The head of the cell, Samer Mina Salim Arbid, was hospitalized in serious condition during his interrogation.

All the terrorists hail from the Ramallah area and are active in the PFLP.

UNRWA’s mandate from the General Assembly, which comes up for renewal every three years, was renewed during the session of the UN General Assembly that came to end on September 30, 2019. Nothing has emerged in the media to suggest that Guterres’ investigation into the ethics report came up in the discussions.

Speaking during the 42nd session of the UN Human Rights Council on September 23, 2019, former UNRWA general counsel James Lindsay declared that the agency’s major structural problem is its unique definition of who qualifies as a refugee. This differs fundamentally from the definition used by the UNHCR, which is responsible for all other refugees around the world. By not demanding that UNRWA adopt this definition,” says Lindsay, “the General Assembly has elevated politics over morality.”

Also speaking on September 23, former Knesset member Einat Wilf said that the Palestinians had “hijacked” UNRWA after refusing to accept the outcome of the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. “In their mind,” she said, “the State of Israel is temporary. If they view Israel as temporary, they will never sign an agreement that will bring peace. They will wait it out.”

All in all, the Palestinian refugee story is one of heartless exploitation of Arabs by Arabs – the callous manipulation of powerless victims for political ends, with little regard for their welfare or human rights. Whatever the result of the inquiry into the UNRWA ethics report, this inhumanity must be brought out into the open, the UNRWA farce of “refugee status” in perpetuity must be ended, and steps must be taken to allow people and their families who may have lived in a country for 50 years or more to settle and become full citizens.

Ahmed Abu Artima was one of the founders of the “Great March of Return,” the weekly protests along Gaza’s frontier with Israel meant to draw attention to the plight of the territory’s two million people. But these days, he mostly avoids the demonstrations.

He is among a growing number of Gazans who believe the protests have lost their way. With little to show from 18 months of demonstrations and border riots beyond the hundreds of people killed or wounded by Israeli fire, many Gazans are beginning to question and even criticize the Hamas-led protests, a rarity in a territory where dissent is barely tolerated by the Gaza rulers.

For several months now, Abu Artima has organized his own alternative protest. On a recent Wednesday, dozens of Palestinians gathered near the fence between Israel and Gaza, performing traditional dances and ballads between poem recitals and speeches by local community leaders. Children gathered around two camels decorated with embroidered saddles.

Abu Artima’s eyes sparkled as he watched. This is the kind of demonstration he envisioned when he and other young grassroots activists came up with the idea of building mass encampments along the fortified frontier. He calls it a protest that “tries to deliver our message as safely as possible.”

Held every two weeks, these events are in dramatic contrast to the main Friday protests.

and now the video version. pic.twitter.com/rCF0v6O2mT

— The Mossad: Elite Parody Division (@TheMossadIL) October 10, 2019

[Canan] Kaftancioglu [now under arrest for old tweets] came to prominence only after her critical role in defeating Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul's municipal elections on March 31 and June 23, ending Islamist rule in Turkey's biggest city after 25 years.

On September 20, a Turkish court held its first hearing of a case against two Bloomberg reporters accused of "trying to undermine Turkey's economic stability.".... "They've been indicted for accurately and objectively reporting on highly newsworthy events," said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait.

Thirty-six other defendants, including prominent economist Mustafa Sönmez and journalist Sedef Kabas, are also on trial for their social media comments on Turkey's economy and banks.

In May, Erdogan said that Turkey was still committed to full membership in the European Union. He must have forgotten that, among hundreds of other hair-raising democratic deficits, he is the president of a country that has banned more than 245,000 websites and domains.

Either all Gulf countries enjoy security, “or they will all be deprived of it,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Thursday in an opinion piece in the Kuwaiti Al Rai newspaper.

Saudi Arabia, which is locked in several proxy wars in the region with arch foe Iran, has blamed Tehran for attacks on Saudi oil plants on Sept. 14, a charge Iran denies. The kingdom has said it prefers that its differences with Iran are resolved politically rather than militarily.

Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement had claimed responsibility for the assault on Saudi oil facilities, but Saudi Arabia rejected that claim.

The United States and Saudi Arabia have also blamed Iran for attacks against six oil tankers in May and June, which Tehran also denied.

In the opinion piece, Zarif said the Gulf can be secured through dialogue among the countries of the region, including Saudi Arabia, and without the interference of foreign powers, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Although since President Trump's May 2018 announcement on the matter, the U.S. is regarded as having withdrawn from the JCPOA nuclear deal,[1] it in effect remains in the agreement because it continues to provide significant waivers to the U.S. sanctions for the rest of the countries in the JCOPA to help Iran develop its nuclear program. That is, the U.S. is preserving the civilian nuclear cooperation with Iran by the JCPOA members, allowing Europe, Russia, and China to continue to uphold the agreement (see July 2019 statements on this matter by former U.S. national security advisor John Bolton).[2]

It is Iran that is withdrawing from the JCPOA, emptying it of meaning by unilaterally cancelling the agreement's technical restrictions on its activity. For example, on September 4, 2019, Iran announced its third step in withdrawing from its obligations under the agreement; the two previous steps included increasing its enriched uranium inventory beyond the 300 kg permitted in the agreement, and enriching uranium to above the permitted 3.67%.

However, Iran is carefully preserving the framework of the JCPOA, even stating that it is doing so in order to preserve international recognition of it as a nuclear state and as a state entitled to enrich uranium. Iran will never announce that it is withdrawing from the JCPOA because it has no intention of relinquishing this recognition – since the Iranian regime's first and most important strategic and political aim in pursuing the JCPOA was to achieve it.[3]

In recent weeks, senior Iranian spokesmen have announced that Iran is further abandoning its obligations under the JCPOA. First and foremost, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei stressed, on October 2, 2019, that Iran would continue to cut back on its JCPOA obligations "until we attain the required result." Earlier, on September 4, Iranian President Hassan Rohani announced Iran's third step, namely, Iran's cancellation of the timetable to which it had committed under the agreement and its resumption and acceleration of its research and development free of all restrictions. A few days later, on September 7, Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi clarified the nature of this third step, explaining that Iran was in effect erasing the years-long restriction on its development of advanced centrifuges, and that it was now continuing its nuclear development program – ostensibly permitted by the JCPOA – without it being recognized as a violation of the JCPOA.

Following that, at a October 7 press conference, AEOI director Ali Akbar Salehi said that these steps by Iran were being undertaken as part of its cutbacks on its obligations under the JCPOA. He explained that Iran was accelerating its nuclear research and development, its uranium enrichment, and its activity at the Arak reactor.

An explosion set ablaze an Iranian oil tanker off the Saudi port city of Jeddah, Iranian state media reported on Friday, adding that experts suspected it was a "terrorist attack."

Iran's foreign ministry confirmed that the Iranian-owned oil tanker Sabiti had been attacked in the Red Sea on Friday and was samaged, state TV reported.

"Those behind the attack are responsible for the consequences of this dangerous adventure, including the dangerous environmental pollution caused," Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi told state TV.

The oil leak, caused by the attack on the tanker is now under control.

The Sabiti tanker suffered heavy damage and was leaking crude about 60 miles (96 km) from Jeddah port, Iranian media had reported.

They had to sit well apart from the men, and the stadium was practically empty, but thousands of Iranian women in merry jester hats and face paint blew horns and cheered Thursday at the first FIFA soccer match they were allowed to freely attend in decades.

In what many considered a victory in a decadeslong fight by women in Iran to attend sporting events, they wrapped themselves in the country's vibrant red, green and white colors and watched with excitement as Iran thrashed Cambodia 14-0 in a 2022 World Cup qualifier at Tehran's Azadi, or Freedom, Stadium.

"We are so happy that finally we got the chance to go to the stadium. It's an extraordinary feeling," said Zahra Pashaei, a 29-year-old nurse who has only known soccer games from television. "At least for me, 22 or 23 years of longing and regret lies behind this."

As one woman shouted from a passing minibus before the match: "We are here finally!"

So far, Iran's hard-line Islamic theocracy is not willing to go as far as some women would like. Authorities announced they will allow women to attend only international soccer matches.

Women have been banned from many sporting events in Iran since 1981, during the early years of the country's Islamic Revolution. Iran is the world's last nation to bar women from soccer matches. Saudi Arabia recently began letting women see games.

Under pressure from FIFA, Iran let a carefully controlled number of women into the stadium, allocating them 4,000 tickets in a venue that seats about 80,000 people and arranged for 150 female security personnel in black chadors to watch them. They sat at least 200 meters (218 yards) from the few thousand men at the match.

Dear Gianni Infantino @FIFAcom:

Your own FIFA constitution prohibits discrimination against women. Iran's letting some women into a stadium yesterday for 1 game is just a cynical 1-day publicity stunt. #WakeUpFifa

Thread: https://t.co/83sX7WeBn1

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) October 11, 2019

The two victims in the Yom Kippur shooting at a synagogue in Halle, Germany have been named as Jana Lange, 40, and Kevin S., 20.

Lange was shot by extremist anti-Semite Stephan Balliet, who livestreamed the attack via a helmet camera as she attempted to stop him from shooting up the synagogue.

Balliet went on to shoot Kevin, whom local media described as a soccer fan, who was at a nearby kebab stand during the terrorist attack.

German media described Lange as a "warm, funny" person and a devoted music lover. She liked to share pictures of artists she admired on social media.

Kevin, the second victim, was a painter. He worked at a building site near the synagogue.

Kevin's father began to fear the worst when reports about the shooting began to circulate.

"All we know is that you're at the construction site nearby and you lost your phone. Kevin, we love you more than anything," the father wrote on his Facebook page prior to receiving the news of his son's tragic death.

The U.S.-funded Arabic channel Alhurra TV recently brought on Octavia Nasr, a former CNN senior editor who left the network after publicly expressing sympathies for a Hezbollah-tied cleric, as a consultant tasked with helping lead the outlet’s revamp.

Nasr has largely been out of journalism work for the past decade after losing her role as CNN’s editor of Mideast affairs. Her demise at the network she worked at for two decades came after she used her CNN Twitter account to praise Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a highly controversial Shia cleric who supported Islamist terrorist attacks and was regarded as the spiritual leader for Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon. The U.S. State Department currently labels Hezbollah a foreign terrorist organization.

“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot,” wrote Nasr in July 2010.

A source who spoke to Mediaite about Nasr’s role at the outlet said she acted as a producer, assisting the network with how they covered subjects and what details they decided to omit or include in their reporting.

When reached for comment, Alhurra’s spokesperson described Nasr’s role at the outlet as “a consultant on technical issues,” but claimed she has “completed her contract.”

“MBN is an equal opportunity employer. The company does not discriminate on any basis,” the spokesperson added in response to questions about Nasr’s past employment issues.

Nasr did not respond to Mediaite’s requests for comment.

In recent days, Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry published a report documenting some 100 examples in which activities of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign qualify as antisemitic, based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by 15 countries and by the European Parliament. Given the difficult task of operationalizing what antisemitism is, all cases documented in the report manifest at least one of the following characteristics: expressions of classic antisemitism; Holocaust inversion; and denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

Three central claims emerge from the more than 90-page report.
• One: Delegitimization and demonization of the State of Israel by the BDS movement invariably results in the stigmatizing of Jews worldwide and in Israel.
• Two: Some members of the BDS leadership are antisemitic.
• Three: The argumentation patterns and methods of the BDS movement – which include the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland and the singling out of Israel for boycott – are antisemitic.

It is worth scrutinizing each of these conclusions separately.
• The first point, which links the delegitimization of Israel spearheaded by BDS to the stigmatization of Jews, is also reflected in research conducted by the Institute for National Security Studies, based in large part on interviews with members of Jewish communities across the globe. We have seen this phenomenon play out in the personal security sphere. One domain in which the connection between BDS and manifestations of antisemitism is most readily traced in our research is the academic realm.

In this setting we found that Jewish (and Israeli) students studying on campuses outside of Israel fear for their personal safety, are intimidated by BDS activists, and experience obstacles related to their Jewish identity in competing for student leadership positions. While it is impossible to trace every antisemitic manifestation experienced by students to BDS, the ministry’s report is instrumental in demonstrating the connection between BDS and antisemitism on campus life through the documentation of antisemitic imagery and rhetoric adopted by student BDS-promoting organizations.

Antisemitism continues to rear its head in Germany, a place where 74 years after the end of World War II, the government has a special responsibility to spare no expense to quash anti-Jewish trends and attacks. Yet many German Jews feel unsafe on the streets of their hometowns.

It has long been the norm in Germany for synagogues, Jewish schools and even some Jewish-owned restaurants to have armed guards outside. In 2018, there was a 20% spike in antisemitic incidents in Germany. Official records state that most came from the extreme Right, including neo-Nazi groups, which the gunman – identified as 27-year-old Stephan Ballie – seems to have followed.

Such attacks have reportedly grown in popularity in eastern Germany, where Halle is located. That same year, 85% of German Jews polled by the EU said they found antisemitism to be a big problem, more than half said they had experienced antisemitism in the past five years, and a plurality of those said it came from Muslim extremists.

One German Jewish woman, Daphra Dreifuss, wrote on Twitter after the Halle attack that she generally feels safe and at home in Germany: “But on days like this...my feeling of safety is deeply shaken, and I can’t stop thinking about whether back in the ’30s, I would have been one of those Jews in Germany who stayed believing that everything would turn out fine.”

That German Jews have to be asking themselves the question Dreifuss asked in 2019 should shame the country’s leadership.

Earlier this year, Felix Klein, a German federal official responsible for combating antisemitism, recommended that Jews not wear kippot everywhere in public. Some shrugged it off as practical advice; certainly many Jews around the world do not wear a kippa in public for their safety.

But many pointed out that a German government official telling Jews to hide their identity, 75 years after the Holocaust, is a badge of shame.

British Colonel Richard Kemp summed up German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s predictable response to the Neo-Nazi’s alleged murder of two people in Halle, Germany, and the neo-Nazi’s attempt to create mass murder in the city’s synagogue with the following Tweet: “As always, words only, when action is needed.”

Merkel’s response to the outbreak of antisemitic violence on Wednesday allegedly carried out by Stephan Balliet in the eastern German city 170 kilometers southwest of Berlin was to rush to a vigil outside of Berlin’s New Synagogue and have her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, declare: “We must oppose any form of antisemitism.”

Intelligence and counter-terrorism policies demand that Kemp – who has been at the forefront of combating global antisemitism for years and commanded Operation Fingal in Afghanistan in 2003 – be taken seriously.

Hence Kemp’s succinct counterpunch revealed Merkel’s lackluster performance in combating all forms of Jew-hatred in Germany.

Merkel consistently delivers comments and speeches on her country’s need to protect Jewish institutions. She told CNN in a May interview that Germany “always had a certain number of antisemites among us, unfortunately,” adding, “there is to this day not a single synagogue, not a single daycare center for Jewish children, not a single school for Jewish children that does not need to be guarded by German policemen.”

Merkel declined to say what the “certain number of antisemites” means. For example, a 2017 Bundestag study showed that 40% of the German population holds a contemporary antisemitic view, namely, the intense loathing of the Jewish state. How this disturbingly high level of antisemitic attitudes in Germany translates into indifference toward rising antisemitic violence is a question that warrants research.

Former European Parliament president Martin Schulz and other speakers at the Dialogue of Civilizations (DOC) Rhodes Forum condemned the antisemitic attack on a synagogue in Halle, Germany. Expressing shame at the lack of security, the German politician described the attack as “one of the most unacceptable things in my life.”

The Rhodes Forum, which has brought together leaders in politics, business and other fields since 2003, included frequent references to the rising intolerance globally and in Europe in particular that has fed antisemitism and intolerance against Muslims and other groups. Schulz spoke passionately about the need to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets to show that Germany stands against rising antisemitism. He said the same should be the case across the European Union. “I remember after the attacks in Paris and 1 million came out to show solidarity. We must also tell stories to the people. One of the most touching events I saw in my life was the young man from Mali, a Muslim, working in the supermarket in Paris who saved 27 Jewish people attacked by this Islamist terrorists,” he said. This was a reference to the 2015 attack in Paris against the Hypercacher supermarket where five people were murdered.

Speaking at a press conference at the forum, Schulz said we should tell the positive stories of those who helped save people to show that the majority are willing to confront hate and send the right message to citizens. “I am ashamed as a German citizen after what happened in the name of my nation that Jewish people are not secured in my country.”

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who joined Schulz on stage at the event, also condemned the attack. “I think Angela Merkel coming to express solidarity was an important sign. It is incumbent upon the leaders in the respective countries to make very explicit statements that will try to impact the public opinion in the countries and make the expressions of anti-semitism unpopular,” he said. Olmert is one of several high-profile speakers at the Rhodes Forum this year, along with the President of Niger and authors and intellectuals from Europe to China. Olmert said that it was important for leaders in Europe to show zero tolerance for antisemitic expressions.”

The Chairman of the DOC Research Institute, Vladimir Yakunin underlined the importance of countries being able to protect citizens. He said that progressive forces should stand together against these kinds of attacks and not allow for a fruitful soil where terrorists can rise.

Following Wednesday’s deadly attack outside a German synagogue, Israel’s UN envoy has called on the international community to “declare war on antisemitism.”

Ambassador Danny Danon urged the president of the Security Council and the UN to “condemn the terrorist attack in Germany and take action against anti-Semitic terrorism.”

“The scourge of anti-Semitism is spreading in Europe, but threatens the entire world,” Danon said. “The international community must declare war on anti-Semitism and act firmly to end hatred of the Jewish people around the world. Jews should not have to look over their shoulders in fear for their lives during prayer.”

On Thursday, the suspected perpetrator of the shootings in the central German city of Halle, identified as Stephan B., was flown by a police helicopter to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

Ben Shapiro reacts to crimes against Jews during the Yom Kippur holiday and slams outlets blaming Israel for anti-Semitism.

Three Keren Hayesod donors – Mikhail Fridman, German Khan and Peter Aven, prominent international businessmen, have been generously supporting the JAFI Security Assistance Fund for years.

Yesterday, on Yom Kippur, they helped save the lives of 51 Jews who were praying at the Halle Synagogue.

As was widely reported the only thing that stopped the gunman from massacring those attending the prayer - was the synagogue's heavy door and security system.

This door, system, and other precautionary measures, have just recently been upgraded with the assistance of the fund supported by the donors.

As was reported in CNN, "The gunman pushed on the doors of a synagogue, fired several shots at a lock on the door, stuck an explosive in a door jam and lit it. But he couldn't get in."

The fact that the door held likely spared the lives of the dozens of people inside the synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

For the last few years the JAFI Security Assistance Fund has been providing funds to communities across Europe with assistance required to safeguard Jewish establishments from terror attacks.

American Rebecca Blady was hoping to spend a day in retreat from the outside world, turning to fasting and worship at Yom Kippur in the eastern German city Halle.

She and her husband Jeremy, two Jewish orthodox community leaders who recently moved to Germany, had eagerly agreed to celebrate in the “shul” or synagogue there, which rarely has enough worshipers to fill its space on high holidays.

They ended up being survivors and witnesses of a day of extraordinary violence.

With the pair came around 20 young practicing Jews from the US, Germany and Israel to “bring some extra energy to the prayers,” said Blady, the executive director of Hillel Germany, adding that she also brought with her sacred objects and photocopies of religious texts and songs.

To reach the temple, she had to make her way through the spartan blocks of flats characteristic of the city in the former communist East.

“We had incredible prayers, full of beautiful songs and even dance, until we suddenly heard a loud bang outside,” Blady said. “It sounded like it could have been a gunshot, maybe an explosion. We really had no idea.”

Some of the congregation ran to the display screens connected to the outdoor security cameras. After a few moments of silence, the sounds of blasts came again.

“Go somewhere away from the windows, where you can be safe, because they’re shooting at us!” the watchers said.

The suspect in an attack on a German synagogue on Judaism’s holiest day of the year had around four kilograms (nearly nine pounds) of explosives in his car and wanted to carry out a massacre, Germany’s top prosecutor said. Many questions remained about how the man was able to get hold of the weapons he used in the assault, in which he killed two people outside the building.

As officials sought to reassure an unsettled Jewish community and address concern about rising right-wing extremism, Germany’s president visited the scene of the attack in Halle and urged his nation to stand up for its Jewish compatriots.

The assailant — a German citizen identified as Stephan Balliet — tried but failed to force his way into the synagogue as around 80 people were inside.

He then shot and killed a woman in the street outside and a man at a nearby kebab shop. He is now in custody.

“What we experienced yesterday was terror,” said Peter Frank, the chief federal prosecutor. “The suspect, Stephan B., aimed to carry out a massacre in the synagogue in Halle.”

Frank said his weapons were “apparently homemade” and the explosives in the car were built into “numerous devices.”

With well-kept houses boasting renovated facades, solar-paneled roofs and neat gardens, Benndorf appears to be a peaceful and friendly German village of just over 2,000 residents.

But behind the pleasant veneer is a community still struggling with problems typical in much of ex-communist east Germany, including a brain drain and high unemployment, that the far right is exploiting.

It is here where the suspect in a deadly anti-Semitic attack this week in Halle, some 70 kilometers (40 miles) away, lived with his divorced mother in a neat yellow block of flats.

Stephan Balliet, 27, allegedly sought to storm a synagogue on Yom Kippur and shot two people dead after he failed to get inside the Jewish house of worship. Authorities say he had planned a “massacre.”

In his hometown, Balliet cut an isolated figure who made no contact with fellow residents in his neighborhood.

The identity of the German synagogue attacker may have sounded familiar to American Jews, who have endured multiple attacks by far-right extremists in recent years.

But the suspect’s identity was more surprising to Jews in Western Europe.

The murder of two people in Halle, central Germany on Yom Kippur was the first lethal anti-Semitic assault in decades in that region by a far-right extremist. Most of the terrorist attacks against Jews there over the past 30 years have been carried out by radical Muslims.

In that sense, Wednesday’s shooting represents a tragic milestone for Western Europe, where growing radicalization among both neo-Nazis and Islamists is leading to what some scholars on anti-Semitism are calling a “perfect storm” — violent anti-Semitism stemming from both the right and the left.

“We see this perfect storm coming from different directions,” Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, said in a speech in September, encapsulating the dual threat arguments.

The shooting suspect, identified as Stephan Balliet, 27, allegedly filmed himself killing a woman outside Halle’s synagogue after he was unable to shoot his way into the building. He then shot dead a patron nearby at a kebab shop, which have become ubiquitous in Western Europe and are often owned and operated by immigrants from Muslim countries.

During the assault, the suspect ranted about Jews, feminism and immigration, calling to mind the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter’s social media posts about HIAS, the leading Jewish group that aids refugees.

The German federal prosecution office called the attack an incident motivated by “extreme far-right and anti-Semitic” views.

French police investigating a woman for suspected ties to ISIS discovered a USB drive that contained personal details, including home addresses, of thousands of French police officials. Who provided that information?

"In the street, veiled women and men wearing jellabas are de facto propaganda, an Islamization of the street, just as the uniforms of an occupying army remind the defeated of their submission."– French journalist Eric Zemmour, September 28, 2019.

Le Monde, France's most prestigious newspaper, ran an op-ed after the recent attack, charging the country with "Islamophobic McCarthyism." Harpon, the terrorist who murdered his colleagues at police headquarters, would have agreed.

The problem is that France has, for years, been in a state of denial about the proliferation of radical Islam.

When Omar Barghouti was recently barred from entering the UK, many media reports referred to him as founder of the Israel boycott movement BDS. This is factually incorrect: he was added for marketing purposes four years after the BDS launch.

In reality, the BDS movement was officially launched in 2001 at the NGO Forum of the anti-Semitic UN World Conference on the Elimination of Racism, held in Durban, South Africa. The instigators were a group of radical NGOs that demanded "the complete international isolation of Israel as an apartheid state." A few months later, the first boycotts began when Trotskyite cells in the British academic union manipulated votes to get support for boycotts of Israeli universities. In parallel, anti-Israel activists in the U.S. organized rallies outside board meetings to demand an end to Israeli sales by corporations like Caterpillar.

As these activities increased, a movement ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian cause led by Westerners became visibly and politically awkward. To give BDS a more authentic facade, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was launched through a letter signed by a group of Palestinian intellectuals. In the years that followed, BDS activists sought to market their campaign as a response to the Palestinian boycott call, although this was false. BDS was and remains largely a Western anti-Semitic movement led by NGOs and financed by European governments.

Here in America we often have debates about whether it’s appropriate to mix sports with politics—whether athletes should speak out on political or social controversies. But in Palestinian Arab society, there is no such debate. Sports are a major platform for glorifying and promoting terrorism against Jews.

The Palestinian Authority’s Karate Federation recently held a “Sisters of Dalal Mughrabi Championship for Young Women.” Normal societies name sports events after a prominent figure in that sport, or after the donors who made the event possible. Not Palestinian society; it names sports events after its most cherished heroes—those who have massacred Jews.

On March 9, 1978, Ms. Mughrabi —who was just 19 years old at the time— led a squad of 13 Fatah terrorists that landed in several small boats on Israel's shore. Another young woman, Gail Rubin, happened to be on the beachfront that morning.

Gail, an American Jewish nature photographer, was taking photos of rare birds near the water. Gail’s work had been exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York City and other major venues. She was the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-Conn.).

Palestinian-American comedian, professor and activist Amer Zahr has officially been appointed a surrogate for Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign.

The controversial anti-Israel activist has served in this capacity before, being one of Sanders' surrogates in 2016.

Zahr is a staunch advocate of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and has campaigned against Israeli businesses in the US.

On Twitter, the comedian has made no secret his views on Israel, tweeting statements such as "American Jews are starting to realize that Israel is their ISIS,""Israel has a prime minister with an American accent and a spokesman with an Australian one. Foreign colonist settlers," and also added that "Describing defenders of Israel as 'scumbags,''pigs,' and 'bastards' is not necessary. 'Zionist' is sufficiently insulting."

However, while Israelis may hold him with disdain, Palestinians hold Zahr in high esteem.

“He represents our culture and holds on to our Palestinian heritage in exile,” says Silvia al-Bina, a Jerusalem resident, who attended one of his comedy shows in Ramallah in 2016.

Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar is a disgrace to the United States and as history of ‘virulent antisemitism,’ US President Donald Trump said on Thursday night at a campaign rally in the Congresswoman’s home state of Minnesota.

"Rep. Omar has a history of launching virulent antisemitic screeds, whether you like it or not,” Trump said.

“She said the US support for Israel is all about the Benjamins. She said that pro-Israeli lawmakers have an allegiance to a foreign country. Omar wrote, 'Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the people and help them to see the evil doings of Israel and the US,’” Trump said.

“Congresswoman Omar is an America hating socialist. She minimized the September 11th attack on our homeland, where far more than 3,000 people died,” he said.

“She pleaded for compassion for ISIS recruits right here in Minnesota,” he said.

“How do you have such a person representing you in Minnesota. I am very angry at you people right now. She is a disgrace to our country. She is one of the big reasons that I am going to win and the Republican party is going to win Minnesota in 13 months."

Everyone was expecting Labour Party conference to turn Brighton into an antisemitic sewer. One of the few wins was convincing Waterstones not to hold the launch of the book Bad News for the Labour Party in their Brighton branch.

Waterstones should be breathing a sigh of relief that they haven’t sullied their brand name further by hosting the assorted bunch of cranks who attended that launch, eventually held at the Rialto Theatre.

Here’s what Mike Cushman of Jewish Voice for Labour stood up and said:

“I’ve always assumed that this smear campaign is based upon the excavation of a huge depth of twitter and Facebook posts now I don’t know about anybody else but I can’t find a twitter post I did a month ago let alone what someone else did six years ago.

This is not an amateur job to find this stuff it requires serious, heavyweight artificial intelligence.

Now there are obviously two targets of this campaign one is Jeremy Corbyn and the Corbyn project the other one is our ability to talk about Palestine.

I always naively assumed that the heavyweight IT behind this was coming from Tel Aviv from Mossad because that’s the sort of thing they do. But reading an article in the Off Guardian last week about the way The Guardian has been subverted and taken away from doing any investigative journalism by direct intervention by MI5 makes me begin to suspect that this mining that’s fed to people like David Collier is actually coming from the British security services in an effort to stop us from having a socialist government in this country because this is what MI5’s job has been for many, many years”

[With thanks to Naomi Wimborne Idrissi for naming him and agreeing with his “excellent point about the security services for our listeners]

Heather Mendick, Labour Party liaison to the Jewish community, was there swallowing up the conspiracy theories without so much as a dissenting word. Hardly surprising bearing in mind that her, now deleted Twitter account was mentioned in a CST report detailing antisemitic hate speech on Twitter. Many of those in the room are members of Jewish Voice for Labour. Mendick has “shown solidarity with” JVL co-chair Jenny Manson & Chris Williamson in the past.

The NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers issued a statement Thursday night, denying that the team’s “Hometown Hero” partnership with a supplier to the U.S. military ended because of “external pressure.”

The team’s statement, posted via Twitter, followed a recent report in Willamette Week, that said several organizations – including the Portland Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) – had opposed the basketball team’s relationship with rifle-scope manufacturer Leupold & Stevens, which supplies the devices to the U.S. military and the armed forces of other countries, including Israel, which the socialist group described as a "brutal occupying force."

In its statement, the NBA team said the military contractor, not the basketball team, chose to end the partnership, in which local veterans were honored at the team’s home games.

“Leupold’s sponsorship contract officially expired at the end of last season and Leupold & Stevens made the decision not to renew,” the Trail Blazers said in a statement. “Their decision was business-related and not influenced by external pressure as being misreported by certain media outlets.”

After the Blazers’ statement appeared, Portland’s democratic socialists posted a copy on Twitter, accompanied by a mocking GIF of the Marcia character from a “Brady Bunch” movie saying, “Sure, Jan.”

Statement by Portland Trail Blazers regarding Leupold & Stevens partnership pic.twitter.com/ToTHMZ1idb

— Portland Trail Blazers (@trailblazers) October 11, 2019

.@ChrisDMcGowan there seem to be some contradictory statements. Please clarify: was the partnership with #LeupoldandStevens ended at least partly because of pressure from anti #Israel'activists'? https://t.co/4aAmkWE2H8@trailblazers

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) October 11, 2019

Sut Jhally, professor of communications at UMass Amherst, has made it perfectly clear that he regards college classrooms as indoctrination zones.

He revealed this in 2017, when he spoke at an event sponsored by the Media Digital Literacy Academy of Beirut. Jhally asked his audience to help him get his one-sided and dishonest movie, The Occupation of the American Mind, into college classrooms, because “the main place we want to get to and that we encourage is the classroom. And it’s the college classroom, because that is a captive audience.”

“Students have to watch.” Jhally continued. “If a professor says, ‘We’re gonna watch this, we’re gonna talk about it and it’s on the test,’ they have to watch. We want to make use of that captive audience.”

Jhally has done exactly that at UMass Amherst. He has shown his movie to his students, and then required them to affirm the misinformation it contained in a final exam. Students who don’t affirm Jhally’s agenda get a lower grade.

In a 70-question final exam recently obtained by CAMERA, Jhally devotes the last 20 questions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In order to get the “right” answer on many of the questions — which closely track the script of Jhally’s movie — all students must do is determine the choice that affirms the film’s distorted anti-Israel and anti-Western narrative.

San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi was named in a Title VI (Civil Rights Act) anti-Semitism complaint filed by StandWithUs and UCLA student Shayna Lavi against UCLA.

As a guest lecturer at UCLA, self-described "scholar-activist" Abdulhadi equated Zionism with white supremacy and then dismissed Lavi's objections to the offensive comparison during the Q&A.

Students were told beforehand that the mandatory lecture for anthropology professor Kyeyoung Park's class would cover "Islamophobia," but Abdulhadi, in keeping with her rabidly anti-Israel track record, clearly had another prejudice in mind.

The “Palestinian Information Center” is actually a Hamas-affiliated account. Good on @facebook for deleting this & similar accounts operated by terrorist organizations. pic.twitter.com/KgaquckdJM

— Jason D. Greenblatt (@jdgreenblatt45) October 10, 2019

Suggesting that the United Nations – a notorious inciter against Israel – could produce a valuable report on global antisemitism seemed farfetched. This however is what Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Ahmed Shaheed has done. Also remarkable is that the author hails from the island state of the Maldives, a Muslim country. He has been living in exile since 2012.
The unprecedented report – still officially in an “advance unedited version” – was positively received by Israel’s UN Representative Danny Danon and several Jewish organizations. Yet a balanced position is called for. One should praise what is good and mention what is missing in the report.

As to the merits: The report mentions that antisemitism is global and it exposes antisemitic tropes. It states that the perpetrators of the hatred of Jews include white supremacists, neo-Nazis, members of radical Islamist groups as well as leftists. The report also discusses the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement without taking a clear position. The rapporteur mentions the claims that the BDS movement is fundamentally antisemitic. He also brings up counterclaims from BDS supporters that it is not.
The report correctly points out that predominant antisemitic attitudes differ between various regions. Shaheed could have added here that they also differ substantially between individual member countries of the European Union. The major percentages of antisemitism among hate crimes in the US and Canada are also mentioned. So is the increase in antisemitic acts in various European countries. Online antisemitism receives attention as does the infringement by some governments of religious freedom.
The rapporteur gives extensive attention to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and considers it a valuable non-legal tool in the fight against this hatred. As far as the recommendations go, the rapporteur urges “states, civil society, the media and the United Nations to follow a human rights based approach to combating antisemitism.” He stresses correctly that the primary responsibility of addressing acts of intolerance and discrimination lies with states including their political representatives.”

What is missing from the report belongs to two categories. The first is issues which are de facto taboo in a report of the UN. The second concerns subjects which could and should have been mentioned. The main item in the taboo category is the huge role played by the UN and associated organizations in promoting antisemitism. Their focus is on hatred of Israel. As a result, the rapporteur could not explicitly mention that there are three major types of antisemitism: religious, nationalistic-ethnic and anti-Israeli hatred.

It is a fact that, as a small and vulnerable people, Jews have managed to create a Jewish homeland - which has stood firm despite the various attacks on it over the last 70 years. This is a source of tremendous pride.

Within the Jewish community in Britain there remains an enormous sense of insecurity. There is a widespread belief that anti-Semitism lurks just below the surface.

And in that context it is no surprise that many feel any attack on Israel may be linked to the idea that most people - in their hearts - harbor misgivings about the Jewish community in the UK.

A renowned Israeli-born psychologist was brutally murdered in South Africa this week during an armed robbery of her Johannesburg home, according to police and media reports.

Dr. Mirah Wilks, 69, was ambushed inside her home on Sunday shortly after her husband left for prayers at their local synagogue, The Daily Mail reported.

According to the report, the gang of robbers waited for Wilks’ husband to leave the house before they broke a hole in the ceiling and descended into the residence.

Her husband came home a short time later to find his wife of 46 years stabbed twelve times in the chest and back, and her throat slit.

Police said the robbers made off with two laptops and a cellphone, and have launched a major manhunt in the Johannesburg area for the perpetrators.

Wilks was born in Israel, but moved to Australia as a child. She married and raised her family in Melbourne and moved to South Africa with her husband after they retired.

A Jewish boy who was forced to kneel and kiss the shoes of a Muslim classmate has been sent threatening text messages.

The messages were sent Friday after a photo of the incident was splashed across the front pages of newspapers in Australia and around the world, the Daily Mail reported. The photo was first published by the Australian Jewish News.

The messages told the 12-year-old boy that he would be slaughtered and asked if he wanted to “talk about suicide,” according to the report.

Victoria Police confirmed to the Daily Mail Australia that they were investigating a report of such text messages but would not comment further.

Recently, attacks against Jews have sharply increased in New York City. According to a report published in May by the New York Police Department, from January through May of this year, New York City experienced an 83 percent rise in hate crimes. Fifty-nine percent of hate crimes in the city are directed against Jews, and anti-Semitic attacks have risen by 90 percent in the past year.

On September 22, a few hundred Jewish demonstrators congregated outside of New York City Hall to demand that city officials take effective action to stem the rising wave of anti-Semitic attacks. According to Caroline Glick, Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, was the only leader of a major Jewish organization among the participants. Aside from two New York City councilmen, no Jewish politicians attended the event. Chuck Schumer didn’t. Neither did any of the Jewish representatives from New York.

How to explain the apparent indifference of mainstream Jewish groups and politicians to the spike in hate crimes committed against Jews? Glick believes the explanation lies in the kind of Jews who are being attacked and the kind of people doing the attacking:
The Jewish victims in New York are not Reform Jews. They are ultra-Orthodox Jews. And they don’t live in Manhattan. They live in Brooklyn.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews are not progressives and not part of the Democratic coalition.

As for their assailants:
Most of the perpetrators are African Americans, and as such, like the Reform Jews, they are members in good standing of the progressive camp in American politics.

Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn., is investigating swastika graffiti discovered on steps of the school’s side entrance on Saturday night, days before Yom Kippur, the Yale Daily News reported.

“Yale Law School has zero tolerance for discrimination or harassment of any kind, and symbols of hate have no place on our campus or in our society,” Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken said in a statement on Monday. “We take an incident like this extremely seriously and are currently investigating.”

The graffiti was of a white, spray-painted swastika above the word “Trump” and has since been removed. This is the first reported incident of a swastika appearing on the Yale campus since 2014.

Gerken said no evidence indicates that a member of the Yale community painted it.

She added that the antisemitic act is “utterly antithetical” to the school’s values and encouraged anyone with information to reach out to her office.

Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, Jewish chaplain at Yale, revealed on Monday night that investigators are examining video footage from late Saturday night and early Sunday morning.

Material and graffiti described as hateful and anti-Semitic were discovered at a Holocaust memorial in White Plains, New York, on the eve of Yom Kippur.

Stickers and posters were found on Tuesday at the Holocaust Garden of Remembrance. Writing described as anti-Semitic was found on a sign outside the garden and inside the park as well, ABC7 also reported.

The Garden of Remembrance, created by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, was dedicated in 1992.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a statement said that he has directed the State Police Hate Crimes Task Force to offer assistance to local authorities in investigating what he called a “heinous act.”

“On this Day of Atonement, I join with New York’s Jewish community in remembrance of the lives lost and I pray for love, peace and understanding. Hate has no place in this state,” he said in a statement.

Westchester County Executive George Latimer said in a statement that County Police were “actively investigating and reviewing video of the area.”

As commander-in-chief of the Allied Forces in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower was the primary driver behind the memorialization of the Holocaust; he ordered extraordinary measures to ensure the well-being of Jewish displaced persons during the occupation of Germany; and, following David Ben-Gurion's recommendation, he established a "temporary haven" in the American Zone of Occupation for persecuted Jews from Eastern and Central Europe - a policy that both the Soviets and the British strongly opposed.

Growing up in Abilene, Kansas, Eisenhower had virtually no firsthand knowledge of Jews or Judaism. He once told Abba Eban that as a boy he did not think there were any Jews on earth, that they were "all in heaven as angels."

On April 12, 1945, Eisenhower visited the recently liberated Ohrdruf-Nord concentration camp. In an effort to eliminate witnesses to their crimes, the SS guards had murdered 4,000 prisoners before fleeing. The surviving prisoners were emaciated skeletons, and bodies were piled everywhere. Eisenhower called the atrocities "beyond the American mind to comprehend," and ordered every American unit not on the frontlines to see Ohrdruf. The next day he visited Buchenwald. "I made the visit deliberately," he said, "in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

On display through November at the Israel Museum, the exhibit Through Time and Space juxtaposes the outer-space diary of Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in the 2003 Columbia disaster, with the oldest known text of the book of Enoch, a cosmological travelogue of a very different kind. Both manuscripts have dramatic stories of discovery and were reconstructed through painstaking work. Fragments of Ramon’s diary literally fell from the sky and were found in Florida; fragments of the book of Enoch, until then known only in translation, were collected from among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Reviewing the exhibit, Shai Secunda praises the diary’s “unadorned yet eloquent, almost literary” Hebrew, and describes the book of Enoch, one of several ancient works that take as their hero a character who receives a mere four verses in the fifth chapter of Genesis:

In the 3rd century BCE, Aramaic writings began to circulate that narrated the visions and teachings of Enoch who, although born of woman, had a place among God’s heavenly entourage and was privy to special knowledge, including the complex workings of the solar calendar. According to these texts, Enoch embarked on a number of heavenly journeys.

[In one such work], Enoch encounters a “wall built of hailstones; and tongues of fire were encircled them all around,” and then proceeds into a series of heavenly palaces, where he takes note of curious architectural features like snowy flooring and “a ceiling like shooting stars and lightning flashes.” [Then] he is treated to astounding sights, including “the place of the luminaries, and the treasuries of the stars and of the thunders, and the depths of the ether.” He sees heaven and hell, the mountain of the dead, and a gurgling paradise that recalls the Jordan River tributary where his interstellar journey began.

The Enochic writings present [their] hero as probing the cosmos in the service of humankind, not entirely unlike an astronaut testing scientific hypotheses in space for the people on earth below.

Hackers working for an Israeli company found their way into the secrets of a major European bank.

They took screenshots of the bank's senior leadership, turned on the security staff's webcams, generated codes that made ATMs spew out cash, and eventually made a 50 million euro transfer that evaded the bank's internal security.

Mission completed, CYE (which stands for Cyber-Eye) presented the results of the penetration test to the bank itself, demonstrating that there were security loopholes that needed to be closed.

The penetration test led to a five-year contract for the cyber security company.

The Israeli biotech startup Betalin Therapeutics created an artificial pancreas that will help diabetic patients deal with insulin dependency by reprogramming the current pancreas to function correctly.

The pancreas – located in the abdomen – is a vital organ crucial to the digestive process and doesn't produce enough insulin in diabetic patients, causing the amount of sugars to increase in the bloodstream, leading to symptoms such as nausea and shortness of breath.

Betalin's new artificial pancreas will not only help monitor sugar levels in the body but will also detect the amount of insulin that each patient needs and release it into the patient's bloodstream.

Betalin Therapeutics was founded in 2015 and has two famous Nobel laureates on its board, Professor Arieh Warshel and Professor Sidney Altman.

Altman relayed to Israel Hayom his own personal difficulties coping with the disease and his hope that this new device could be utilized to help patients.

A new PitchBook Venture Ecosystem FactBook focusing on investments in Israel reveals that California Bay Area-based firms contributed a cumulative $1.4 billion in associated deal value last year and have nearly matched that sum already in 2019.

In general, US-based firms made 167 investments in Israeli companies, totaling more than $2 billion in 2018. In 2019 so far, that number approaching $1.8 billion over 81 deals, the report notes.

European investment also is growing. “Israeli VC activity with European investor participation hit a high of 86 transactions for over $900 million in deal value last year, while $820.4 million has already been closed in the first half of this year,” according to the FactBook.

Software, healthcare and IT hardware companies have been especially robust in fundraising in 2019.

Looking at activity through the summer of 2019, the FactBook notes close to $2.3 billion invested across 153 deals. In all of 2018, Israeli startups raised nearly $3 billion in a record 331 deals.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 in recognition of his efforts to end his country’s long-running border conflict with Eritrea.

The Norwegian Nobel Institute on Friday also praised the “important reforms” that Abiy, Ethiopia’s leader since April 2018, has launched at home.

Chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said some people may consider it too early to give him the prize, but “it is now that Abiy Ahmed’s efforts need recognition and deserve encouragement.”

Abiy, 43, took office after widespread protests pressured the longtime ruling coalition and hurt one of the world’s fastest growing economies. Africa’s youngest leader quickly announced dramatic reforms and “Abiymania” began.

In a move that caused surprise in the long-turbulent Horn of Africa region, he said Ethiopia would accept a peace agreement with Eritrea, ending one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts.

Within weeks, Eritrea’s longtime leader, visibly moved, visited Addis Ababa and communications and transport links were restored. For the first time in two decades people could, long-divided families made tearful reunions.

BREAKING NEWS:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali.#NobelPrize#NobelPeacePrizepic.twitter.com/uGRpZJHk1B

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 11, 2019

Congratulations to Abiy Ahmed for winning the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

As for me, it was an honor just being nominated. https://t.co/b1v7XDVQOH

— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) October 11, 2019

Today's Europe has two faces. On the one hand, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decided last week, almost without mentioning Israel, that Holocaust denial is not a part of freedom of speech or a human right.

The petitioner, Udo Pastörs, is a member of the German far-right NPD party, who was already convicted for his inciteful language in court.

On the other hand, anti-Semitism continues to run rampant and this Yom Kippur, it led to an anti-Semitic attack on a German synagogue.

What is antisemitism? This is the hottest topic in Germany these days.

Last week, neo-Nazis marched the streets of Dortmund, calling for the Palestinians to destroy Israel.

Meanwhile, there is a debate about whether the BDS campaign is antisemitic. The German Bundestag already decided a few months ago that the answer was yes.

So did many other European countries that adopted this definition of antisemitism.

Extreme left circles, also from Israel, campaign against the decision and against the definition.

The debate intensified following a series of decisions linking political or racist positions with freedom of expression and creativity.

What would have happened if a city in Germany were to award a prize to Pastörs for his literary work, and only afterwards did it turn out he was an activist in an antisemitic movement?

The antisemitic movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel has gained a lot of traction in the music industry, thanks in large part to the activities of Roger Waters. BDS activists frequently threaten and harass musicians who schedule concerts in Israel, in an effort to intimidate them into cancellations. Irish singer Sarah McTernan told the Irish Sun, after she participated in the 2019 Eurovision contest in Israel, “Oh my God, I got threats, I got letters. Horrendous stuff online with someone threatening to do something to me. I had hundreds and hundreds of people messaging me saying the most horrible stuff. I got a few ­sinister threats.” Singer Eric Burdon told Israel Hayom in 2013, after cancelling and then rescheduling a performance, “it wasn’t my decision to cancel the show, but that of my manager, following numerous threatening emails, she was scared for my life.”

Prior to 2019, the music magazine Rolling Stone resisted being drawn down this road. In March of this year, however, the publication put BDS supporter Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on its cover, and did a glamour photo shoot and video with her as well as three other Congresswomen. In May, the magazine uncritically quoted the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, without any rebuttal, in its coverage of Madonna’s Eurovision performance in Israel. In August, in an article having nothing to do with music, Rolling Stone called BDS a movement that “aims to put economic pressure on the nation in order to force the nation to give equal rights to Palestinians.” (After contact from CAMERA, the magazine changed it to the only slightly better, “aims to use economic pressure to push the nation for large-scale changes in its policies related to Palestinians.”)

Then, on Friday of last week, Rolling Stone continued this unfortunate trend of promoting BDS’s goals in its coverage of the Grammy-nominated singer and songwriter Demi Lovato’s trip to Israel. (“Demi Lovato Apologizes for Accepting Controversial Trip to Israel,” Brittany Spanos, October 4, 2019.)

The change in direction appears to coincide with Rolling Stone’s coming under the full ownership of Penske Media, a company that, in February of 2018, sold a $200 million stake to the Saudi Arabian company Saudi Research and Marketing Group. SRMG is headquartered in Riyadh and is majority-owned by the Saudi government.

Gail Bradbrook, a former biophysicist and co-founder of the climate protest group, Extinction Rebellion, reportedly shared social media posts dismissing Labour antisemitism as a “smear” and defended offensive comments by Ken Livingstone.

According to The Sun Dr Bradbrook shared a post in 2016 that described claims that certain comments made by Mr Livingstone were antisemitic as “ridiculous” and “scurrilous” and that “you will hopefully then agree that what is happening is part of a massive project to manipulate public opinion against, and to destroy the popular progressive movement supporting, Jeremy Corbyn.” The post went on to say that “Corbyn represents a threat to the stranglehold the Netanyahu right-wing Israeli extremists have over any mainstream media coverage of the oppressive Israeli occupation of the little left-over scraps of Palestine.”

Another post reportedly said that Mr Corbyn’s critics “smear him with sexism, misogyny and antisemitism by finding sexist or antisemitic comments by a handful of his millions of supporters”.

The Sun, which broke the story, quotes Dr Bradbrook as saying: “I’m not interested in getting involved in a discussion that is clearly an attempt to create division. Antisemitism is a huge problem across the whole of society and I’m longing for a time when all of us are safe.”

Previously it was also reported that a Facebook page administered by Dr Bradbrook entertained numerous conspiracy theories, linked to a blog which quoted from the infamous antisemitic tract The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and contained a post expressing solidarity with disgraced Labour MP Chris Williamson a day after he was suspended for claiming Labour had been “too apologetic” over antisemitism.

Jews in Germany marked their first Shabbat since the deadly anti-Semitic rampage outside a synagogue in Halle on Yom Kippur.

Nearly 75 years after the Holocaust, the Jewish minority that had staked its faith in peaceful, democratic Germany found itself asking troubling questions about its security after the synagogue siege on Wednesday by a suspected neo-Nazi.

Members of the Jewish community, as well as locals, held vigils across the country on Friday evening for the two people killed in the attack. In Halle, over 2,000 members formed a human chain in front of the targeted synagogue.

“We have always been careful and now we will be even more careful,” said Nina Peretz, head of Berlin’s Fraenkelufer synagogue community group.

Peretz was speaking a few hours before the dusk service to mark the start of Shabbat at the synagogue, which was destroyed by the Nazis during the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938. The synagogue was rebuilt after the war and is now undergoing renovation.

Several members of the congregation who gathered in Halle to support its small Jewish community on the High Holiday were welcomed at Peretz’s synagogue in the capital.

The German suspect in a deadly attack targeting a synagogue has admitted to the shooting rampage and confessed that it was motivated by anti-Semitism and right-wing extremism, federal prosecutors said Friday.

Stephan Balliet, 27, made a “very comprehensive” confession during an interrogation lasting several hours, said a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe.

“He gave an extensive confession. He confirmed far-right and anti-Semitic motives” for the attack, the spokesman said.

Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer warned meanwhile in an interview with the ZDF broadcaster that there was now an “elevated” threat of another anti-Semitic or terrorist attack saying around half of 24,000 suspected far-right extremists had an “affinity” with firearms and could engage in violence.

Seehofer warned that more attacks could happen “at any moment” and that Berlin was taking the matter most seriously and was “extremely alert.”

“I have to express to you my deep concern regarding the unprecedented rise in antisemitic abuse and violence, especially after the deadly attack against the synagogue in Halle, Germany,” Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog wrote in a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

In the letter, Herzog emphasized the need for security in Europe during the upcoming Jewish holiday of Sukkot, the Feast of the Tabernacles.

“[T]he recent terrorist aggression on the Halle synagogue, which took place on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, should sound the alarm loud and clear throughout Europe,” Herzog wrote.

Sukkot, a week-long harvest festival, begins on October 13, and Jews around the world will gather in huts and synagogues to observe the holiday. Herzog “respectfully” called on Merkel “to ensure that security around synagogues and Jewish institutions gets high priority” over the holiday.

“These are times of clear and present emergency in these matters, and no efforts should be spared in the ongoing fight to contain and eliminate Antisemitic violence, wherever it may raise its head,” he wrote.

Herzog said that the European Commission’s findings “enhanced” the agency’s “preoccupation” with antisemitism in Europe.

Prayers and condolences poured in from around the world. The attack sent shock waves across Germany that reverberated around the globe.

“I am, like millions of people in Germany, shocked and dejected by this crime,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a trade union congress in Nuremberg.

But for us, Jews who live in Germany, “shock” is the last reaction that comes to mind following this heinous attack. In fact, it was just a matter of time until the extreme far-right scene in this country would turn its spotlight back on the true, eternal enemy of both Germany and Western civilization: the Jews.

“Jews are the root of all problems,” the gunman, identified as Stephan Balliet of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, could be heard saying, among other xenophobic and misogynistic statements, while livestreaming his attack on Amazon’s streaming platform Twitch.

He even had the temerity to deny the Holocaust, reminding us all that prejudice, conspiracy theories and hatred toward Jews never really vanished.

Wake-up call

Some in the Jewish community — albeit not many — were foolish enough to think that the far right in Europe was now occupied with the 2015 immigration wave, mainly from Muslim countries. Some even had the audacity to celebrate the extremists’ rise.

In Europe today, many of the attacks against Jews are carried out by Muslims, though there is much debate over the prevalence of such instances. Just a few days ago, a knife-wielding man tried to enter a Berlin synagogue, chanting swears against Israel and shouting “Allahu Akbar” in Arabic — a phrase that means “God is great” and also is often used by Islamists upon committing acts of terror. He was released from custody less than 24 hours after the incident and not charged with any crime, sparking concern among Jewish leaders in the country.

But celebrating the rise of anti-Muslim extremists because of a few attacks perpetrated by radical Islamists is not only abhorrent but also superbly naive — antisemitism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and racism more typically go hand in hand.

About 1,800 antisemitic crimes were committed in Germany in 2018, a 20 percent increase from the previous year. Violent crimes against Jews specifically rose to 62 from 37 in 2017, according to a report released by Germany’s Interior Ministry earlier this year.

The German man suspected of killing two people near a synagogue this week reportedly told German investigators that he received approximately $800 from an anonymous online donor prior to the attack.

The German publication Der Spiegel reported Friday that the accused, Stephan Balliet, had received the money in the form of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin from an unknown person with whom he communicated on the internet, according to his defense attorney Hans-Dieter Weber.

Weber also told the publication that Balliet denied being a neo-Nazi in his interrogation by German authorities. Balliet claimed to have acted alone and made the weapons used in the attack himself from cheap materials.

A jury at Manchester Crown Court has heard that a neo-Nazi teenager from Durham hoped to follow in Adolf Hitler’s footsteps and listed numerous targets “worth attacking” with Molotov cocktails, including synagogues.

The sixteen-year-old had reportedly also begun drafting a manifesto titled “A Manual for practical and sensible guerrilla warfare against the kike system in the Durham City area, Sieg Heil”. Other items seized from his home included a copy of Mein Kampf and material on explosives and firearms.

The prosecution claimed that the defendant had become “an adherent of neo-Nazism – the most extreme of right-wing ideology”, noting that he had written in his diary on the occasion of Hitler’s birthday that the Nazi leader was “a brave man to say the least. Although maybe having written proof that I admire their number one enemy isn’t such a wise idea. I will however say that I one day hope to follow in his footsteps.”

The trial is anticipated to last two weeks.

Turkey’s military said it captured a key Syrian border town under heavy bombardment Saturday as its offensive against Kurdish fighters pressed into its fourth day with little sign of relenting despite mounting international criticism.

Turkish troops entered central Ras al-Ayn according to Turkey’s Defense Ministry and a war monitor group, marking the most significant gain since the invasion began Wednesday. The ministry tweeted: “Ras al-Ayn’s residential center has been taken under control through the successful operations in the east of Euphrates” river.

Turkey’s continued push into Syria comes days after US President Donald Trump cleared the way for Turkey’s air and ground offensive, pulling back US forces from the area and saying he wanted to stop getting involved with “endless wars.” Trump’s decision drew swift bipartisan criticism that he was endangering regional stability and risking the lives of Syrian Kurdish allies who brought down the Islamic State group in Syria. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces was the main US ally in the fight against the Islamic State group and lost 11,000 fighters in the nearly five-year battle against the extremists.

An Associated Press journalist across the border in Turkey heard the sound of sporadic clashes as Turkish howitzers struck the town and Turkish jets screeched overhead.

Syrian Kurdish forces appeared to be holding out in some areas of the town.

Iran offered on Saturday to engage Syrian Kurds, Syria's government and Turkey in talks to establish security along the Turkish-Syrian border following Turkey's military incursion into northern Syria to fight Kurdish forces.

In making the mediation offer, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif referred to a 21-year-old security accord that required Damascus to stop harboring Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants waged an insurgency against the Turkish state. Turkey has said that pact was never implemented.

"The Adana Agreement between Turkey and Syria - still valid - can be the better path to achiev(ing) security," Zarif said. "Iran can help bring together the Syrian Kurds, the Syrian Govt and Turkey so that the Syrian Army together with Turkey can guard the border," he said in a tweet which carried part of an interview he did with Turkish public broadcaster TRT World.

Iran's call came on the fourth day of Turkey's offensive against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which Ankara regards as a terrorist group with links to the PKK.

The United States has ramped up its efforts to persuade Ankara to halt the incursion, saying Ankara was causing "great harm" to ties and could face sanctions.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday the 1998 accord could only be implemented if there was a political settlement to Syria's eight-year-old war. He also said implementing the Adana pact would require the Syrian government to be in control of northeastern Syria - which it is not.

The United States announced on Friday a new, large deployment of forces to Saudi Arabia to help bolster the kingdom’s defenses following the Sept. 14 attack on its oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh have blamed on Iran.

The planned deployment, which was first reported by Reuters, will include fighter squadrons, one air expeditionary wing and air defense personnel, the Pentagon said.

The Pentagon said it was sending two additional Patriot batteries and one Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system (THAAD).

“Taken together with other deployments, this constitutes an additional 3,000 forces that have been extended or authorized within the last month,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said in a statement.

It was unclear whether some of the newly-announced troops might replace other American forces expected to depart the region in the coming weeks or months.

The Pentagon has yet to announce, for example, whether it will replace the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and its strike group when it eventually wraps up its deployment to the Middle East.

The deployment is part of a series of what the United States has described as defensive moves following the attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities last month, which rattled global energy markets and exposed major gaps in Saudi Arabia’s air defenses.

The co-deployment of the troops to a territory on the border area between Israel and Syria is unrelated to "current events in north-eastern Syria," the Australian defence ministry said in a statement.

"They're going to be going there next week," Morrison was cited by Australian media as saying during his second visit to Fiji and his third official meeting with Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama this year. "Our Australians are going over there, training them, supporting them."

"We are living in a world of transition where a shifting of power dynamics is taking place," Morrison said ahead of his Saturday visit to the Blackrock military base in Fiji.

"Which means our friendship and partnership with countries like Fiji, in our own backyard, is even more important."

Prominent human rights advocates on Friday warned that a slate of states with records of systemic human rights abuse and enmity toward Israel are on the cusp of being elected to the UN’s highest human rights body.

A joint report by UN Watch, the Human Rights Foundation and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights — all leading human rights NGOs — called on UN member states to oppose the election of Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Mauritania, Sudan and Venezuela to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) when voting takes place on Oct. 17.

The five states were deemed “unqualified” due to their human rights records, as well as their voting records on UN resolutions concerning human rights.

Irwin Cotler — head of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, and a former Canadian minister of justice — said in a statement: “Regrettably, when the UN itself ends up electing human rights violators to the Human Rights Council, it indulges the very of culture of impunity it is supposed to combat. The world’s democracies must join in the preservation and protection of the Council’s mandate, and not end up accomplices to its breach.”

Hillel Neuer — executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch — said that electing the regime of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela “as a UN judge on human rights would be like making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief.”

Neuer added: “As made clear in our report, voting nations can and should refrain from electing rights abusers to the UN’s highest human rights body. We need to hear the EU’s Federica Mogherini and member states lead the call to oppose the worst abusers. So far, they have been silent.”

The Palestinians will prevent the IDF from entering Area A of the West Bank which, according to the Oslo Accords, is exclusively administered by the Palestinian Authority, PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said on Saturday.

“We will prevent the Israeli occupation army from raiding Area A,” Shtayyeh said in an interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Quds. “We won’t do this through violence, but with our bodies. Israel invades the areas of the Palestinian Authority, and the signed agreements don’t allow these incursions. We will break this fait accompli.”

Since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the IDF has been briefly entering Area A and other West Bank areas on a regular basis to arrest Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorism and other anti-Israeli activities.

Palestinians have long been criticizing the PA for failing to order its security forces to confront IDF soldiers, particularly in Area A.

In the interview, Shtayyeh did not say that the PA security forces would engage the IDF. His statement is seen as a call to Palestinian civilians to take to the streets and confront the IDF troops when they enter Area A.

Al-Quds will publish the full interview on Monday.

Around 20 tombstones were vandalized on Friday, some with swastikas, in a Haifa cemetery for British casualties of World War I and World War II, police said.

The incident at the Haifa War Cemetery was being investigated as a hate crime.

Three of the tombstones had been completely smashed, the Walla news site reported.

Graves had also been vandalized in an adjacent Templer cemetery.

The British military cemetery on the city’s Yafo street was temporarily closed to visitors.

Caretaker Adel Mor, who has maintained the cemetery on behalf of British authorities for 30 years, told Walla that the incident “pains the heart.”

“Why would someone want to cause pain in a place like this? I don’t understand it at all,” Mor said.

305 soldiers who fought in the region in World War I are buried in the cemetery, 86 of whom are unidentified, alongside 36 casualties of World War II, according to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Most of the soldiers died in area hospitals, and some were killed on the battlefield.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Naama Issachar's mother on Friday to let her know that he will do anything to have her released from prison in Russia as soon as possible, according to Mako.

He asked the mother to strengthen her daughter and to let her know that he is making an effort to move things along.

Issachar was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in Russia after being caught with nine grams on marijuana which she accidentally left in her bag when travelling from India through Russia back to Israel.

Issachar, a 25-year-old Israeli-American, was arrested in April after spending three months abroad.

Israel was offered to swap Issachar for Aleksey Burkov, a Russian hacker arrested in 2015 while he was visiting Israel, but rejected because Israel’s High Court had already agreed that he would be extradited to the United States.

The Prime Minister's Office claimed that Netanyahu "personally intervened on behalf of Naama Issachar in recent weeks."

"The Palestinians will never drop the matter of the Temple Mount. It's a tool that they, and parts of the Arab and Muslim world, use to take on Israel," former Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman and former head of the Shin Bet security agency MK Avi Dichter tells Israel Hayom in a special weekend interview.

Dichter was at the helm of the Shin Bet when the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out after Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount. Last week Israel Hayom accompanied him on a visit to the Mount in an attempt to understand if, since Sharon's visit, anything has changed at what is considered the most volatile site in the world.

"Do you know what the most frustrating thing about the Miss Universe pageant is?" Dichter asks as we set out. "Coming in second."

"The Temple Mount is in second place after Mecca and Medina. No one really makes pilgrimages to the Temple Mount. There is no Hajj here. For them, the fact that Israel captured the Temple Mount is outstanding leverage, but their real goal is elsewhere – it's conflict. The Temple Mount is just an instrument."

This time of year, the Temple Mount is crowded with visitors. An average of 7,000 tourists arrive each day, and another 150 or so Jewish visitors. Visitors begin making their way in early; Jews and tourists via the Mughrabi Bridge, and Arab worshippers use the other eight entrances to the Mount.

Facebook just deleted @PalinfoAr's page because it was basically a constant barrage of terror glorifying antisemitism soaked in a pile of hate laced with explosives.

Your turn, @Twitter@TwitterSupport. Let's at least start by getting rid of the blue tick! https://t.co/QXGnHTwtkV

— The Mossad: Elite Parody Division (@TheMossadIL) October 11, 2019

An Iranian government spokesman on Saturday described as a "cowardly attack" an incident that Iranian media have called the apparent targeting by missiles of an Iranian-owned oil tanker, and said Iran would respond after the facts had been studied.

The tanker Sabiti was hit in Red Sea waters off Saudi Arabia on Friday, Iranian media have reported, an incident that could stoke friction in a region rattled by attacks on tankers and oil installations since May.

"Iran is avoiding haste, carefully examining what has happened and probing facts," government spokesman Ali Rabei was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.

Separately, a senior security official said video evidence had provided leads about the incident, adding that the Sabiti was hit by two missiles, the semi-official news agency Fars reported.

"A special committee has been set up to investigate the attack on Sabiti... with two missiles and its report will soon be submitted to the authorities for decision," said Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's top security body, according to Fars.

"Piracy and mischief on international waterways aimed at making commercial shipping insecure will not go unanswered," he said.

The controversial filmmaker Ken Loach has described the BBC Panorama programme on antisemitism in the Labour Party as “probably the most disgusting programme I’ve ever seen on the BBC.”

The episode of the BBC’s flagship investigative documentary series was titled “Is Labour Anti-Semitic?” and was televised in July. Over the course of the programme, former Labour Party employees spoke out publicly to reveal Jeremy Corbyn’s personal meddling in disciplinary cases relating to antisemitism. The programme explained how senior Labour Party staffers, some of whom Campaign Against Antisemitism has known for years, used to run Labour’s disciplinary process independently, but soon after Mr Corbyn’s election as Party leader found themselves contending with his most senior aides, who were brazen in their efforts to subvert due process.

The programme was peppered with unconvincing denials from Labour’s press team, including claims that the staffers had political axes to grind and lacked credibility — assertions that apparently may now be challenged in court in a libel action brought by some of the staffers against the Party.

In his interview with The Guardian, Mr Loach said the programme was “disgusting because it raised the horror of racism against Jews in the most atrocious propagandistic way, with crude journalism…and it bought the propaganda from people who were intent on destroying Corbyn.”

The Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, has conceded that he is not happy with the way antisemitism in the Labour Party has been handled, but asserted that “I think we are on top of that now”.

Mr McDonnell made the comments in an interview with former Labour spin-doctor Alastair Campbell in GQ magazine, admitting that the Party should have been “firmer, more ruthless and faster” in dealing with antisemitism, but that they are “learning lessons all the time”.

He agreed with Mr Campbell that the Labour antisemitism scandal has done a lot of damage to the Party, but quickly shifted the blame to the media, contrasting the way Labour antisemitism has been covered versus claims of Islamophobia in the Conservative Party, a point with which Mr Campbell concurred. “I’m just saying look at the operation of the media with regards to that,” Mr McDonnell elaborated. “We are an anti-racist party and we have always been a leading party in that respect, but it does demonstrate the role of the media itself. We’ve got to cut through that all the time.”

In this report by Times of London I called on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to clarify his position for backing 'Iran-supporting propaganda group.

Please read the full article and watch the video made by @thetimeshttps://t.co/UOCNHjIEVVpic.twitter.com/h3akb4OZ1E

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 11, 2019

Audio recordings from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders will be made available to the public for the first time in digital form after nearly two years of work conducted in secret.

The Memorial of the Shoah in Paris will officially accept the recordings at a ceremony Thursday evening.

The files capture several hundred hours of the first, high-profile trial of top Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II. Since 1950, they have existed only on 2,000 large discs housed in wooden boxes in the International Court of Justice library in the Hague, Netherlands.

Now, curious listeners will be able to listen to the entirety of the judicial proceedings in reading rooms at the Hague, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Shoah Memorial head archivist Karen Taieb said she hopes the newly digitized audio files will allow researchers and students to better understand a powerful and emotionally fraught moment in history. Researchers previously had access to trial transcripts.

“You can read the trial, but when you hear the trial, it’s different,” Taieb told The Associated Press. “For the victims, for example, it’s different to hear their voices. The voices are very important, and the hesitation in them.”

The Council for Higher Education in Israel (CHE) this week officially launched the national initiative “Study in Israel” to double the number of international students enrolled in Israeli colleges and universities, initially targeting students in North America, China and India.

As many as 12,000 international students are currently studying in Israel.

The program touts dozens of short-term and longer study programs associated with high Israeli academic standards and an engaged approach to education with the theme “Engage in Excellence,” highlighting the country’s innovative academic and research landscape as part of the startup nation.

Recently, four Israeli universities were ranked among the top 50 undergraduate programs globally that produce the most venture capital-backed entrepreneurs, according to the latest ranking by PitchBook.

“We have committed to making Israel a ‘brain gain’ country for students and researchers from around the world—North and South America, Europe and Asia,” said Professor Yaffa Zilbershats, chair of the CHE’s Planning and Budgeting Committee. “With this new campaign, Israel is now more attractive than ever; we’re looking forward to bringing many more students from around the globe in years to come.”

Gal Gadot and her husband Yaron Varsano have formed Pilot Wave, a production company, and have announced that their first project will be a fact-based thriller set in the Warsaw Ghetto called Irena Sendler, the website Deadline reported.

Gadot will star as the title character in a gripping, true story of a courageous social worker who created an underground network during the Nazi occupation of Poland to save 2500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto. Sendler was honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. She was arrested 1943, but managed to conceal information about the thousands of children in hiding, even under torture. She was sentenced to death but activists bribed officials to release her.

The movie will be made for Warner Bros, and Gadot and Varsano will produce with Marc Platt.

The screenplay will be written by Justine Juel Gillmer, who just wrote the Holocaust-themed film, Harry Haft. The upcoming Harry Haft stars Ben Foster as a man who survived the concentration camps by boxing against fellow inmates.

Gadot will be starring in the Kenneth Branagh’s adaption of Agatha Christie’s novel, Death on the Nile, with Armie Hammer, Rose Leslie and Russell Brand.

Green is the color of fall in Israel, green with a hint of yellow. It’s been that way for centuries, though not on account of the mild Mediterranean climate. The colors of fall in Israel are steeped in Jewish tradition and a commandment from the Torah that Jews commemorate the time our ancestors lived in the desert, in temporary shelters called sukkot, as they journeyed from Egypt to the Land of Israel.
Before Sukkot, buyers search for the perfect etrog outside Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market. Photo by Yehoshua Halevi

This year, the weeklong festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles, in English) begins at sundown on Sunday, October 13, with the rise of the full moon of the Jewish month of Tishrei.

The holiday comes at the height of the harvest season, when farmers in times past built sukkot in their fields in order to spend the night close to their crops and maximize the hours of reaping.

The sukkah can be made of any material but according to Jewish practice the roof must be made of a natural material (such as branches or bamboo) with enough gaps so that the sky is visible to the people inside.

In Israel today, the harvest includes not only produce grown for food but also for the components of the arba’at haminim, the four species — etrog (citron) fruit, aravah (willow) and hadas (myrtle) branches and lulav (palm fronds) — which combine to form the central symbol of the holiday.

A private American organization is to build a hospital at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. Israel has already admitted hospital equipment into the Strip. But the project is being condemned by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Health, which claims that "the American hospital project is not innocent, and its goals are dangerous." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Sept. 27, 2019]

Elaborating on these alleged "dangerous goals," an op-ed in the official PA daily claimed that the hospital is run by "the CIA," and its purpose is not to treat the sick Palestinians but "to carry out experiments on the sick Palestinians," and "to be a partner in trafficking in human organs":

"The American administration and the CIA, which are actually supervising the hospital and its staff, transferred it to the southern Palestinian districts (i.e., the Gaza Strip) to serve the US as an early warning, monitoring, and espionage station where it was established. This was in addition to a matter that I think not one of the observers have noticed: The hospital has an additional functional role, which is to carry out experiments on the sick Palestinians, and not to treat them and care for their health... and it is possible that the hospital will be a partner in trafficking in human organs." [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Oct. 2, 2019]

The PA Ministry of Health said that it considers it Israel's "deliberate step to finally and completely separate the Gaza Strip and the West Bank by preventing any connection on any level between our people in the two parts of the homeland."

Palestinian Media Watch has exposed previous PA libels claiming Israel does medical experiments on prisoners and steals organs from dead terrorists, the so-called "Martyrs." Even the Arab League has repeated these PA lies.

As anti-Semitism grows in America, synagogue safety has become an urgent concern for most American Jewish leaders. Not so, it would seem, for the Massachusetts Board of Rabbis (MBR). Recently, MBR joined forces with the Hamas front group CAIR (the Council on American Islamic Relations) to picket the Ahavath Torah Congregation in the South Shore town of Stoughton for hosting speakers whom CAIR calls “anti-Muslim hate group leaders.” The scare campaign ended up working. The synagogue had to permanently shut down its speaker series after CAIR and MBR publicized the synagogue’s address on social media. The synagogue’s rabbi, Jonathan Hausman, got death threats and was forced to hire security guards for his family.

CAIR is a strange ally for a rabbinical board. CAIR’s Massachusetts branch is headed by an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist and an anti-police activist with a history of Israel-bashing. In 2009, a federal district judge ruled that there is “at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas.” Ever since, the FBI has refused to work with CAIR because there might still “be a connection between CAIR or its executives and Hamas.” Even the United Arab Emirates, not exactly the most Israel-friendly country in the world, banned CAIR as a terrorist organization in 2014.

Unlike CAIR, Ahavath Torah’s guest speakers would seem like strange enemies for a rabbinical board. Invited by Rabbi Hausman for a talk titled, “National Security Chaos: Are We Passing the Tipping Point?”, the panelists were all former U.S. government officials. One, retired Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin, is an American hero. A veteran of many wars, General Boykin commanded the Delta Force units in the Mogadishu battle dramatized in the movie Black Hawk Down. Off the battlefield, he served as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence between 2002 and 2007. Another guest was former congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, who worked at a kibbutz as a teenager and has spoken at many an AIPAC event without previous rabbinical umbrage. General Boykin and the event moderator, Tom Trento, together with the third guest, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, have all been honored with “Genesis Awards” by the Boston-based group, Christians and Jews United for Israel, which represents the values and opinions of many Jewish New Englanders.

US President Donald Trump swore allegiance to Israel as he decried endless Middle East wars and defended his decision to withdraw US troops from the Kurdish area of northern Syria when he spoke Saturday night at the annual Values Voters Conference in Washington D.C.

“We are standing with our close friend and partner, the State of Israel,” Trump said, as he reviewed the steps he has taken on behalf of the Jewish state since taking office, such as relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights.

In the same speech Trump defended the recent decision to withdraw US troops from the Kurdish region of Syria along the Turkish border, a move which paved the way for Turkey to attack that area. In the five days since the assault began, more than 100,000 people have fled to escape the violence.

The decision has sent alarm waves across the Middle East, where it is widely considered that Trump abandoned the Kurds after they had staunchly allied themselves with the US in the battle against ISIS.

Trump told the conference that he planned to protect the Kurds with the threat of economic sanctions against Turkey.

“I have made clear to Turkey that if they do not meet their commitments, including the protection religious minorities and watching over the ISIS prisoners that we captured, we will impose very swift and severe economic sanctions,” Trump said.

The United States is poised to move about 1,000 U.S. troops from northern Syria amid an ongoing Turkish incursion into the region, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said on Sunday, calling the situation "untenable" for U.S. forces.

The pull-back of troops from the region dovetails with President Donald Trump's long-standing desire for the United States to extract itself from foreign conflicts. It comes after Trump a week ago withdrew some U.S. troops deployed to support Kurdish forces in the fight against Islamic State.

That decision, which came under heavy fire from fellow Republicans and allies, helped open the door for Turkey to launch an offensive against the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who have been America's most capable partners in quashing Islamic State.

"In the last 24 hours, we learned that [the Turks] likely intend to extend their attack further south than originally planned, and to the west," Esper said on CBS'"Face the Nation."

"We also have learned in the last 24 hours that the ... SDF are looking to cut a deal, if you will, with the Syrians and the Russians to counterattack against the Turks in the north."

Esper said he spoke with Trump Saturday night, and that the president directed the U.S. military to "begin a deliberate withdrawal of forces from northern Syria."

U.S. officials had spent the last week ramping up pressure on Turkey to halt the assault on Syria and the Kurdish fighters that it considers a threat to national security.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Friday said sanctions against Ankara were all ready should the president choose to make good on his threat to obliterate Turkey's economy.

According to the NY Times, President Donald Trump’s decision to clear a path for a Turkish invasion of a broad strip of land on the Syrian side of the two countries’ border was made on the spur of the moment, in a phone call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Overnight, Trump opened the door to a massive Turkish assault on the Syrian Kurds, and the media are aghast at this seeming betrayal of a key ally who had sacrificed thousands in the war against ISIS.

Israeli political commentator and Middle East expert Guy Bechor is not impressed by the plight of the Kurds, whom he says have been collaborating with the Syrian regime for several years now. Moreover, Bechor sees the US move, followed by the Turkish incursion as serving Israeli security interests.

Describing the situation in terms of the eternal Sunni-Shiite conflict which has been splitting the Islamic world for 1,300 years, give or take a decade, Bechor suggested on Saturday that this Turkish (Sunni) invasion, with thousands—soon to be tens of thousands—of well trained and well armed Sunni militias, is rattling President Bashar al-Assad’s army, as well as, most important, the Iranian satellite Shiite militias (soon to include Hezbollah) which have received orders to abandon the southern front with Israel and move up north and build defenses against the invasion.

In other words, Trump’s move, leading to Erdoğan’s move, has revived the Syrian civil war and the vortex that pulls in Arab violence from across the region. And that, as far as Israel is concerned, is a very good thing.

Hamas has come out in support of Turkey’s #OperationPeaceSpring indirectly, condemning the Abbas government’s opposition and declaring that the Palestinian people support Turkey. https://t.co/u4iD98quw1

— NVD (@notvladedivac) October 11, 2019

France and Germany on Saturday suspended arms exports to Turkey over its military offensive into northeastern Syria against Kurdish fighters.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told the Bild am Sonntag weekly that “against the background of the Turkish military offensive in northeastern Syria, the government will not issue any new permissions for any weapons that can be used by Turkey in Syria.”

Maas’s remarks came as thousands of Kurdish immigrants rallied against the Turkish military offensive in cities across Germany, which is home to one of the biggest Kurdish communities in Europe.

France said it had suspended all planned exports of “war materials” to Turkey that could be used in the offensive in Syria.

A meeting in Luxembourg Monday of the European Union’s foreign affairs committee will decide on a coordinated European approach to the issue, the statement said.

Meanwhile, Arab foreign ministers condemned Turkey’s “aggression” in Syria, calling for an immediate withdrawal of its troops.

Turkey faces a choice today of whether to solve its security dilemmas in a Western, American-led framework or in a Russian and Iranian framework. I don't see how this suspension of arms exports helps push Ankara in the right direction. https://t.co/Uo6SnH62MZ

— Mike (@Doranimated) October 12, 2019

Responding to the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from northeast Syria, following which Turkey launched a military operation against the Kurds who were allies of the U.S. in the fight against ISIS, Kurdish writer Sarbast Bamarni penned a scathing attack on President Trump and his decision. In his column on the reformist website Elaph.com, Bamarni accused the president of "unbalanced" behavior that had turned the U.S. into a paper tiger. Warning that not just the Kurdish people would be harmed by his decision but that the entire world would be as well, he said that it "reopens the door to the return of global terror," allowing it to again "dispatch its suicide squads to Europe."

The Turkish people, he said, will pay the price for Turkish President Erdogan's dream of wiping out the Kurdish people and restoring the Ottoman Empire, and the U.S. would forfeit its global credibility entirely. He went on to stress that the Kurdish nation will "fight tooth and nail to defend its existence and its country."[1]

Below are excerpts from Bamarni's column:
"Anyone thinking that the people in Kurdistan will be the only loser because of the flaccid decision by the American president to withdraw from western Kurdistan and hand it over to Turkish President Erdogan is mistaken. The losers due to this foolish decision will be the entire civilized world and the international anti-terror coalition, as it reopens the door to the return of global terror that will recover and return to action, and will once again impose its hegemony on the region and dispatch its suicide squads to Europe. The biggest loser will be the U.S. itself, for by the very act of taking this decision, it loses the last fig leaf of its credibility... and henceforth no one will count on her and her false claims regarding [the importance] of democracy and human rights.

"Another [party] that will lose is the Turkish people, beset by a disaster in the shape of Erdogan, who seeks to push his people into the quagmire of interminable war against the Kurdish people. [This,] in order to run away from the domestic problems that enfeeble his absolute rule, to accomplish his racist, fantastical, and sick dreams to wipe out the Kurdish people and alter the national reality by settling three million Syrian refugees [there], and to expand regionally, restore the Ottoman Sultanate, and check the democratic experience in the Kurdistan-Iraq region, before they [the Turks] are rid of him. This man [Erdogan] does not hide the fact that he is an enemy to the Kurds wherever they may be, at a time that the Turkish public suffers under his [absolute] rule and dictatorship [while] he eliminates his opponents with utmost cruelty, and the country sinks deeper and deeper into the shifting sands of the approaching economic disaster.

Turkish-backed jihadist forces in Syria murdered two Kurdish prisoners and shot down a woman politician during Turkey’s offensive in Syria on Saturday. The reports have shocked observers of Turkey, a NATO member, and the increasingly brutal campaign it is waging in Syria.

In one incident Turkish-backed extremists who are members of an Arab rebel group that is embedded with Turkey’s military operation are accused of murdering Hevrin Khalef, a female politician in eastern Syria. In a second incident the Arab fighters backed by Turkey murdered two Kurdish prisoners, one of them tied up, on a video. Many of the extremists Turkey has recruited to fight in Syria have openly shouted jihadist slogans claiming they are coming to murder the “kuffar” or “infidels.” Their behavior in the fighting has been compared to ISIS.

Turkey has used the Syrian Arab fighters as a way to avoid casualties, unleashing them across the border to attack and murder Kurds after US President Donald Trump announced the US would leave parts of Syria and open the airspace for Turkish airstrikes. Since October 9 Turkey has launched devastating airstrikes across northeast Syria, causing 100,000 to flee an area that was peaceful. US forces, sheltering in place near Kobane, even came under artillery fire. Turkey has sought to send a message that nothing will prevent it from continuing its operation and using Syrian Arab forces as cannon fodder to attack Kurdish areas and sack towns and villages.

The cynical ploy is part of Turkey’s attempt to channel Arab fighters from Idlib and other parts of Syria to use them against the mostly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces. Turkey has promised them they will be resettled in 140 new towns with 200,000 new homes.

Arutz Sheva spoke with outgoing White House Mideast Envoy Jason Greenblatt, who discussed the US peace plan and summed up his work.

What can you tell us at this stage about the peace plan, when will it be released?

There isn’t much that our team will reveal about our vision for peace until it’s officially released – which we have always said will be when the time is right. Most people who understand the complexity of the conflict know that only a realistic solution has a chance at ending it. It’s our hope that our vision can advance the cause of peace and bring people together to start a productive, realistic discussion – even if it’s not embraced immediately. But it’s important to remember that nobody can force this vision upon anyone. When the plan is released, it will be up to both sides to decide how to proceed. When the vision is released, we hope that both parties will read it carefully and not make any hasty decisions. We fully expect criticism from all sides. No one can put forth a plan that everyone will embrace. But we believe our plan is a realistic and implementable plan, one which can significantly improve the lives of millions of people.

What is your message to Israelis who fear that the plan will include demands for Israeli land concessions, especially after seeing a map presented during the elections by the Yamina candidates?

I don't know where Yamina got that map. I had never seen that map. I think they may have acknowledged that they developed the map themselves based on how they understood the various messages being sent about the plan. As I said in my July 23 remarks to the UN Security Council, many participants in this conflict’s conversation continue to re-litigate the events of 1967, when Israel heroically acted to defend itself against a threat of its very existence. Both Israel and the Palestinians have asserted a claim to certain land. The dispute over the territory is a question that can only be resolved in the context of direct negotiations between the parties, not by throwing around the traditional phrases about this conflict that has led to nothing. Those who have weaponized the term “occupation” in order to criticize Israel are doing nothing to promote a resolution to this conflict. In fact, they are heavily undermining the chances for peace and the improvement of the lives of Palestinians and Israelis. I prefer the term "neighborhoods and cities" to describe what others call "settlements". Use of the term "settlements" is purely political and ignores the reality of what they actually are.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia can play a key role in the Middle East as it has good relations with Iran and the Arab world.

He was speaking in an interview with Arab broadcasters, including Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV, ahead of his first visit to Saudi Arabia in more than a decade.

Putin said nobody in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates wanted a confrontation with Iran. He also said Russia was working on a free trade zone with Israel and Egypt, similar to one between Russia and Iran.

He added that Russia sticks to two state solution to resolve Israel-Palestine conflict and that the US plan known as deal of century is still unclear.

The president also said Iran's missile program should be dealt with as a separate matter to its nuclear program.

"It is possible, and we should, discuss Iran's missiles program... but the missile program is one thing and the nuclear program is another thing," Putin was quoted as saying.

The interview was aired on Sunday ahead of Putin's visit to Saudi Arabia on Oct. 14, the first visit in over a decade.

Speaking about Syria he said any new constitution that is drawn up for the country should guarantee the rights of all ethnic and religions groups.

He added that Syrians "interact positively" with Russian military police and military stationed in the country and that most military police in Syria are Muslims drawn from Russia's north Caucasus region.

Russia has been a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his war with rebels and militants.

Israel has threatened to ban Palestinian produce from its markets unless the Palestinian Authority ends its boycott of Israeli calves and sheep which began in mid-September.

“Israel will not allow boycotts of any kind against Israeli produce," the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, Major General Kamil Abu Rukun announced on Saturday night. In specific, he explained that the PA has not allowed its farmers to purchase calves and sheep from Israeli farmers.

“Because of the Palestinian Authority's unilateral decision, which is hurting the economies of both sides, and after several inquiries to resolve the issue on various levels, I have warned that if the situation does not return to normal, we will not allow much of the Palestinian agricultural produce to enter Israel."

PA government spokesman Ibrahim Melhem said Palestinians had a right to diversity the items in its markets, including by replacing Israeli products with Arab ones, according to the Palestinian news agency, WAFA.

The step is also consistent with the PA’s long term strategy of disengaging from the Israeli market to protect its continued “occupation” of Palestinian territory, he said.

Palestinian Arab journalist Nasser Al-Laham says the Palestinian Authority (PA) is working to hold parliamentary elections within 90 days, followed by a presidential election.

In an interview with the Ma'an news agency, Laham said that PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas tasked the Central Election Commission with preparing for the declaration of parliamentary elections.

The last elections in the Palestinian Authority were held in 2006, when the Hamas terrorist organization won a majority, enabling the group to form a government.

The PA parliament has not met since 2007, when Hamas violently seized control of Gaza from Abbas’ Fatah faction.

Hamas and Fatah have been at odds since the 2007 coup and all attempts to reconcile the warring sides have failed.

Fatah and Hamas later signed a reconciliation deal, under which the PA was to have resumed full control of Gaza, but the deal hit “obstacles” and has never been implemented.

Abbas' term as PA chairman was meant to expire in 2009, but he has remained in office in the absence of elections.

Because heaven forbid the Arab states who attacked the nascent state of Israel, leading to the ‘refugee’ issue, are the ones to help out financially. https://t.co/zoVP4yQ7qr

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) October 13, 2019

Iran is prepared to hold talks with regional rival Saudi Arabia, with or without the help of a mediator, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday, ahead of a visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Asked about reports that Khan, due to arrive in Iran at the weekend, may try to mediate between Tehran and Riyadh, Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said: “I am not aware of any mediation,” according to state broadcaster IRIB.

“Iran has announced that, with or without a mediator, it is always ready to hold talks with its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, to get rid of any misunderstandings,” Mousavi added.

Iran’s foreign minister signaled this week that his country would be willing to discuss regional issues with Saudi Arabia, but that Riyadh had to stop “killing people.”

Saudi Arabia, which is locked in several proxy wars in the region with Iran, has blamed Tehran for attacks on Saudi oil plants on Sept. 14, a charge Iran denies. The kingdom has said it prefers a political solution to a military one.

Houthi Military Analyst Big.-Gen. Aziz Rashed: We Have Over 100 Targets Marked in the UAE; UAE Economy Would Collapse in the Wake of Such an Attack pic.twitter.com/g2OT1MgxJC

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 13, 2019

A useful reminder that, for all its claims to represent an ancient and sophisticated civilisation, the regime in Tehran is a bunch of crude thugs. https://t.co/lqCMHW3V7v

— Bobby Ghosh (@ghoshworld) October 13, 2019

Two Jewish German philosophers made what is perhaps the best case for grounding contemporary antisemitism in social psychology – the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) formulated the theory of guilt-defensiveness antisemitism to explain post-1945 German responses to the Holocaust.

This theory holds that pathological guilt about the Holocaust causes Germans to lash out at Jews. Put simply, it says that Germans are immersed in culpability about the crimes against humanity committed directly or indirectly by themselves or by their family members, and shift the blame to Jews in order to purge their distorted emotions.

A 2017 German federal government report revealed that 40% of Germans hold modern antisemitic views.

The study showed that nearly 33 million Germans – some 40% of the population of 82 million – are infected with a contemporary antisemitism: hatred of the Jewish state. According to the study, these millions of Germans agree with the following statement: “Based on Israel’s policies, I can understand people having something against the Jews.”

Accusing Israel of crimes in a process of psychological projection – in order to purge pathological guilt associated with the Holocaust – has a long, unsavory history in post-Holocaust Germany.

Does this mean that a great swath of Germans suffers from a kind of collective madness? Answering this question is a tall order.

“Are you just most unlucky anti-racism campaigner or are you just an outright liar?” - @jsl145https://t.co/Qhukod1UMG

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) October 13, 2019

For years, activists who seek the destruction of the State of Israel have propagated the false narrative that Zionists are “anti-Palestinian.” While much of the pro-Israel community emphasizes that the two are not mutually exclusive, Israel’s supporters largely fail to construe an obvious truth: anti-Zionists are the true “anti-Palestinian” activists.

How is this possible? Because persecuting the state of Israel while refusing to acknowledge the principal role of the Palestinian leadership’s rejections of peace inevitably condemns Palestinians to endure the status quo.

Noura Erakat considers herself a “human rights” activist who was blessed with an epiphany: The law is politics. As such, she has taken it upon herself to use her law degree to, in her words, advocate for Palestinian rights.

But how is she going about this?

One would think that she would hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for failing to accept a Jewish state with the Peel Commission’s Partition plan in 1937, the UN Partition plan of 1947, the Clinton parameters in 2000, or Ehud Olmert’s generous peace plan in 2008. If not, one would think that she would at least condemn the Palestinian Authority’s decision to use foreign aid to fund terrorism against Jewish civilians in Israel, instead of creating social-welfare programs or education initiatives that do not center around, for example, Farfour, the antisemitic mouse who blames all his life troubles on the Jews.

But no. Never mind that Mahmoud Abbas is finishing his 15th year in power after he was elected for a four-year term in 2004, and never mind that the Palestinian Authority failed to comply with the basic parameters of the Oslo Accords from the moment it was signed. On September 24, Noura was received at the Harvard University Law School and Tufts University to discuss her new book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

During the Harvard event, she presented the basic parameters of her book: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be understood through a settler-colonial framework; the international community has failed Palestinians by bending the law in favor of the Jews; and attempts should be made to prosecute Israeli veterans for war crimes.

This is what a Jewish antisemite looks like -> @normfinkelsteinhttps://t.co/RPOmQNVlVM

— (((David Lange))) (@Israellycool) October 13, 2019

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been facing a recent streak of anti-Semitic incidents, including a swastika being found on one of its buildings.

The Nazi symbol was discovered on Monday in the Foreign Languages Building, according to a campus email sent Wednesday by Chancellor Robert Jones.

Additionally, a recent presentation for the school’s residential living team, consisting of 11 student employees and a full-time staff member, contained anti-Semitic content, the specifics of which are currently unknown.

Jones said campus administrators are reaching out to those who attended the meeting to gather information about what transpired.

“This exercise was part of a university program created to help students learn to share diverse ideas and perspectives that lead to new understanding,” wrote Jones. “Instead of fostering dialogue, it incited division, distrust and anger.”

“The program allowed our students to enter an extremely challenging and potentially volatile situation without the preparation, training, education and professional oversight they needed to succeed,” he continued. “This is inexcusable and unacceptable. This is a failure to our students, and that is my responsibility.”

Chantelle Thompson, a spokesperson for the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, told The Chicago Tribune that “concerns were raised that the presentation inaccurately linked some identities or viewpoints with violence and terrorism.”

Witness the double standards from the statements of the Executive Director of @hrw - @KenRoth#Hypocrisypic.twitter.com/af4acjTy1X

— Borna Khiabani (@Borna___) October 12, 2019

A seven-year-old Jewish boy is in critical, but stable condition after a man slammed him on the ground outside of his grandparent’s home in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. The boy was reportedly waiting for a pizza delivery outside of his grandparents’ house.

The boy’s grandfather, Naftali Portonoy, who has been living in the area for 40 years, told NBC New York that he had never seen anything like this in the neighborhood. According to Portonoy, the suspect said “I’m bipolar. I wanted to kill the kid,” NBC New York reported.

Police caught the suspect who was identified as 35-year-old Laurence Gendreau. According to Arutz Sheva, the NYPD charged Gendreau with assault, harassment and acting in a manner injurious to a minor.

Gendreau was bothering people in the neighborhood earlier that day, Portonoy told NBC New York. While his grandson was wearing a kippah during the attack, Portonoy attributes the attack to mental illness and not hate.

A graffiti image of Adolf Hitler was found on Sunday near the grave of Rabbi Nachman in the city of Uman, Ukraine. Local police arrested a suspect, a local who was taken into questioning. According to Ukrainian law, the sentence for such a crime can be a maximum of five years in prison. Israel's ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion, thanked the local authorities and the police for their work.

The incident, which took place on the eve of Sukkot (the Feast of the Tabernacles), has been condemned across the country. Ihor Shevchenko, Head of Cherkasy County wrote on his Facebook page: "Antisemitism is unacceptable in Ukrainian democracy. I condemn antisemitism and its various forms. Embarrassing graffiti was sprayed and was photographed by the Israeli ambassador, I hope the authorities will punish those responsible for this. I respect the right of everyone to their own life, regardless of their nationality or religion, antisemitism must be made extinct."

The Head of Uman County where the graffiti was sprayed, wrote on his Facebook page: "Spaying graffiti of Nazi symbols is a disgraceful crime, and an insult to the memory of millions of victims. These days, Uman is a multinational city that supports respect and tolerance among religions and ethnic boundaries. The community as a whole and I personally, condemn the incitement of ethnic, racial and religious hatred, as well as any actions with the purpose of humiliating the citizens of the Ukraine, as well as foreign civilians. We will continue to fight discrimination and I hope these kinds of incidents will not be repeated."

On June 7, 2019 Concord California police were contacted by the FBI, who reported that local resident Ross Farca had made some alarming threats in an online video chat room

Farca's chilling words, as reported by the police:
"I currently own an AR 15 semi auto rifle but I can buy/make the auto sear and get the M16 parts kit. What do you think of me doing what john Earnest tried to do, but with a Nazi uniform, and unregistered and illegally converted "machine gun" and actually livestreaming it with Nazi music? I would probably get a body count of like 30 kikes and then like 5 police officers because I would also decide to fight to the death 10 you don't surrender to the ZOG 2) ever watch US prison documentaries? Also I would not spam full auto, I would use it for clusterfucks of Kikes. Generally you want to be on semi auto so you don't waste ammo, plus depending on target richness and need for suppression eventually I may go low on ammo so I would need to resupply from the dead officers since its 5.56"

In a separate post Farca wrote:
"Wanna see a mass shooting with a body count of over 30 sub-humans?"

Recovered from Farca's Concord home were an assault rifle, 13 rifle magazines, camouflage clothing ammunition and books about Hitler and Nazi life.

Ross Farca is now free on bail.

A recently released would-be jihadist who wanted to attack southern California military targets and synagogues will be subject to warrantless searches of his home and belongings, including computers, cellular phones, and other electronics.

US District Court Judge Cormac J. Carney on Monday made permanent a series of extra restrictions for Kevin James, who violated limits on cell phone use and outside activities almost immediately after his July release from prison.

While he was an inmate serving time for armed robbery in a California state prison, James created the radical Islamic group Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS). Prosecutors described JIS as “a Muslim extremist group who recruited others to carry out violent attacks … [against] US military locations and Jewish synagogues.” He designed the plot and recruited others “even while his freedoms were restricted in state custody.”

James pleaded guilty in 2007 to conspiring to wage war against the United States through terrorism. But at that time, prosecutors and probation officers did not anticipate the need to impose added restrictions once his sentence was over. As we reported last month, the case illustrates a pressing challenge facing the country as more jihadis complete their sentences.

The added restrictions on James’ computer use and movements would “have a detrimental effect on his rehabilitation,” his attorney argued.

After more than 20 years in prison, James does not appear to have walked out with moderated views. He posted a picture online in August describing himself as living “in the land of dogs and pigs. May Allah free me from it soon.” It would seem from this that James has no desire to be rehabilitated from his radical ideology.

Yosef Burg, a prominent former Israeli politician who was elected to the first Knesset in 1949 and served as an MK for the next 40 years, was issued a fake Polish passport in 1940 to help him escape Nazi-controlled Europe, according to the Polish Embassy in Switzerland.

“Yosef Burg, who was trapped in Nazi-surrounded Switzerland, in August 1940 obtained an illegal Polish passport to escape to Spain and then to continue to Eretz Israel,” Polish Ambassador Jakub Kumoch said in a statement on Friday that cited previously unpublished documents from Israel’s state archives.

Kumoch said Burg was saved from the Nazis as part of a rescue operation by Aleksander Ładoś, who was Poland’s ambassador to Switzerland in 1940-1945, together with the World Jewish Congress.

Burg, who was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1909, was a Knesset member between 1949 and 1988, and served in many ministerial positions under seven Israeli prime ministers. He was one of the founders of the National Religious Party. Burg died in 1999. He never mentioned the Polish chapter of his life in public.

Burg’s son, Avraham Burg, himself a former politician and Knesset speaker, told The Times of Israel on Sunday that he had no information regarding the accuracy of the new information and could not confirm it.

He said that while he knows his father came to Israel with a Polish passport, he has no additional information on the matter beyond what has been published.

Happy Sukkot from the soldiers of the IDF! 🌿🍋⛺ pic.twitter.com/7yNYF6QC1a

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) October 13, 2019

The Kurdish experiment, in at least the territory's current quasi-independence, has shown the world a decent society where all its inhabitants, men and women, enjoy far greater freedoms than can be found anywhere else in the Arab and Muslim world.

The Jewish state must now, more than ever, not ignore the 35-40 million Kurds, who remain stateless and shunned by the world and who seek, at last, the historic justice they have craved for centuries, nay millennia, but have been denied; an independent Kurdish state of their own.

According to an article titled "Can Israel make it alone?" written some years ago by James Lewis in the American Thinker, Lewis wrote: "Nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests - like survival." He realized that with the stark reality of a profoundly unfriendly Obama Administration towards the Jewish state, creating facts on the ground was more important than ever. He wrote:

"If the United States abandons the Jewish State, Jerusalem will have to seek new alliances." Fortunately that is what Prime Minister Netanyahu successfully and largely has achieved. Since then Israel enjoys the friendliest American President it has ever experienced, but there is never any guarantee that a president will succeed to a second term.

Turkey has now chosen to break its alliance with Israel and instead has sought alliances with rogue states such as Iran and Syria, along with the Hamas occupied and terrorist infested Gaza Strip. Under Erdogan it has turned on Israel with a viciousness that is quite desolating. It is a nation turning its back upon the Ataturk secular revolution of the 1920s. Instead, it is sliding remorsefully back to the 7th century mindset and cesspit that so many of its neighbors wallow in.

Israel should advance the restoration of a profoundly just, moral and enduring pact with the Kurdish people, and assistance towards creating a future independent State of Kurdistan. An enduring alliance between Israel and Kurdistan would be a vindication of history, a recognition of the shared sufferings of both peoples, and bring closer the advent of a brighter and strategically stronger future for both non-Arab nations.

UNRWA’s mandate from the General Assembly comes up for renewal every three years. Due to expire in June 2020, it was renewed during the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, which came to end on September 30, 2019. Nothing has emerged in the media to suggest that Guterres’s investigation into the ethics report came up in the discussions.

Speaking during the 42nd session of the UN Human Rights Council on September 23, 2019, former UNRWA general counsel James Lindsay declared that the agency must evolve or dissolve. UNRWA’s major structural problem, he said, is its unique definition of who qualifies as a refugee. This differs fundamentally from the definition used by the UNHCR, which is responsible for all other refugees around the world. By not demanding that UNRWA adopt this definition,” says Lindsay, “the General Assembly has elevated politics over morality.”

Also speaking on September 23, former Knesset member Einat Wilf said the Palestinians had “hijacked” UNRWA after refusing to accept the outcome of the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel.

“The core issue,” she said, “is that in their mind the war is not over. In their mind, the State of Israel is temporary. If they view Israel as temporary, they will never sign an agreement that will bring peace. They will wait it out.”

Wilf castigated Western donor states “whose definition of peace is two states” but who continue to “funnel money into this organization that makes [Palestinian refugees] think otherwise.”

All in all, the Palestinian refugee story is one of heartless exploitation of Arabs by Arabs – the callous manipulation of powerless victims for political ends, with little regard for their welfare or human rights. Whatever the result of the inquiry into the UNRWA ethics report, this inhumanity must be brought out into the open, the UNRWA farce of “refugee status” in perpetuity must be ended, and steps must be taken to allow people and their families who may have lived in a country for 50 years or more to settle and become full citizens.

Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki:
"There is no avoiding an escalating policy on the ground with great momentum from the masses, which will not allow the occupiers to live routine lives. Their occupation of our land must have a heavy price, which they will pay every day"

"If we [Fatah and Hamas] consolidate our ranks and unify our internal front... then we will certainly defeat our enemy, which is Israel."

Zaki in speech to Palestinian youth:
"If this enemy [Israel] and America continue with their arrogance, then [our descendants will wave the flag] above Jaffa, the Negev, the Galilee, the Carmel, the Triangle, etc. Land that we don't restore - we are not worthy of it."

One of Fatah's top officials, Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, has called for Fatah-Hamas to unite in order to "defeat" Israel, the common "enemy":
"If we consolidate our ranks and unify our internal front we will begin to work with an open mind, will, and strategy that are undebatable, then we will certainly defeat our enemy, which is Israel."
[Donia Al-Watan, independent Palestinian news agency, Sept. 22, 2019]

In response to US Envoy Jason Greenblatt's statements at a UN Security Council Open Debate on the Middle East on July 23, 2019, that the West Bank is "disputed" and not "occupied" territory, Zaki called for escalation "on the ground" - implicitly calling for violence against Israelis - to "not allow the occupiers to live routine lives" but make them pay "a heavy price every day":
"There is no avoiding an escalating policy on the ground with great momentum from the masses, which will not allow the occupiers to live routine lives. Their occupation of our land must have a heavy price, which they will pay every day."
[Al-Dustour, Jordanian news website, Sept. 8, 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki: “Libya is also about to come out of its crisis.” Host: “How?” Abbas Zaki: “The external interference [in Libya] is the problem... Wherever there is a problem in the world, behind it is a Zionist fingerprint.” [Lebanese Al-Mayadeen TV, Jan. 1, 2019] Abbas Zaki also holds the position as Fatah Commissioner for Arab and China Relations

Now, while Syrian Kurds fear ethnic cleansing and the loss of their freedom, pushed through no fault of their own into the arms of the Syrians, Russians and Iranian militias, Congress has to act now to protect our even more important Kurdish allies in norther Iraq, or Iran will sense weakness and seek to exploit America’s perceived retreat.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq is an autonomous region under Iraq’s 2005 constitution that the US supported after the 2003 defeat of Saddam Hussein. For decades the Kurdish leadership in the Kurdistan Regional Government capital of Erbil has been close to the US and has created a region that is stable and prosperous. They were key allies against ISIS and the US has supported their armed forces, called Peshmerga, through training and budgetary assistance.

However in recent years the Kurdistan region has been sandwiched between a rising Iran and questions about US policy in Iraq and Syria. When the US decided to leave Syria it became clear that the Kurdistan region of Iraq could also be threatened. Unlike the US partnership with the SDF, the US relationship with the Kurdistan Region of Iraq is one of two governments, because the KRG is an autonomous region under the Iraqi constitution, akin to Scotland or Quebec. While there were critics of the US partnership with the SDF, critically Turkey, there is no criticism of the US work with the KRG. That is why it is essential now to shore up support for Kurdish allies in Iraq and make sure they understand that the US is standing behind them. Uncertainty in the Middle East leads to US enemies trying exploit division and pry away US allies.

Washington cannot allow another retreat from the region after the collapse of eastern Syria. Northern Iraq is now the hinge, a strategic key, to the border areas of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Iran must not be allowed to consume Iraq and Syria like an octopus. It is time for Congress to move fast and make clear the Kurdistan region is a key ally. That means support for security and the economy of the region. It means supporting the Kurdish region which hosts Yazidis and has large numbers of Christians. It means support for reconstruction and enabling the region to spread its wings at this key moment when US allies and interests appear under siege. An invite to the Kurdistan Regional president Nechirvan Barzani would be a good message from the US that the region is important. Listening to Erbil’s concerns is also important.

In other areas of Iraq protesters are being shot down by Iranian-backed militias. Not so in the Kurdistan region, an island of stability. But as we saw with eastern Syria, an island of stability can be threatened. The US needs to do the right thing and Congress has the tools to make that happen.

Why is everyone so much more upset with Trump than with Turkey?

My first ‘contact’with the Kurds was when I wrote a piece about Mustafa al-Barzani for Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit in the middle 1970s. Then, as apparently now, the response was deafening disinterest.

The volume hasn’t risen much since then, except Trump.

Unfortunately we are never likely to read a transcript of the conversation between Erdogan and Trump. I, for one, would love to know whether Trump was persuaded by the Turk’s arguments or intimidated by his threats.
If the threats, what were they?

I can think of two. The first, is simple. Turkey will ignore the presence of US troops, estimated at less than one thousand. If US troops remain in the area what chance would they have against a massive, modern army with armoured vehicles, artillery and planes?

This gives America three bad options:
- Do as Trump did and withdraw. That is in any case in line with his noninterventionist world view. You could argue that this was the world view that won Obama his Nobel.
- Keep the troops where they would either be useless or targets, leaving the President to console grieving parents and a hostile Congress.
- Expand the presence. Turkey is formally an ally and a N.A.T.O. member. Hostilities would be far more complicated than bombing the Taliban or ISIS.

About five thousand airmen, the 39th Air Base Wing (39 ABW) of the U.S. Air Force even share the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey!

The second threat is more indirect. Turkey would point the refugees it intends to rehouse in the safe zone towards Europe. As of September 2019, Turkey hosts 3.66 million registered Syrian refugees. Europe, especially the high social services countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia would be very unhappy but even less likely to go to war against Turkey, a N.A.T.O. member and applicant for EU membership than America.

Perhaps Trump’s ego won’t allow him to admit that he was taking what for him was the least worst option so he rubbishes the Kurds, instead?

ERDOGAN IS an antisemite. His hatred of the Jewish people and Israel is not transactional but ideological. He has accused Israelis of being Nazis and has repeatedly and falsely accused Israel of genocide. He has also destroyed Turkey’s democracy. He must be stopped from destroying the Kurds.

Turkey’s aggression also harms Israel by hurting one of its allies – the Kurds – and giving new confidence to the Iranians that the United States will not take military action to prevent their hegemonic activities and consolidation of forces inside Syria. It was Obama’s withdrawal of US troops from Iraq that first emboldened the Iranians. That mistake should not be repeated by a president who has proven himself to be Israel’s staunchest ally.

While the American withdrawal of troops has been the focus of critics, let us not ignore the continued complicity of the Europeans who have stood on the sidelines throughout the mass slaughter in Syria. They are doing nothing now to prevent Turkey from conducting its own campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Perhaps the only silver lining is the betrayal of the Kurds is a validation of Zionism. I agree with Yossi Alpher, who wrote in the Forward, “For anyone who has entertained doubts about the need for a state for the Jewish people, the Kurds represent a tragic reminder. They are consistently being abandoned to an ugly fate because they don’t have a country.”

Mr. President, you have shown your commitment to protecting innocent Arab life with your attack on Assad when he gassed his people. Now the United States must show the same commitment in making it clear to Erdogan that slaughtering the Kurds is a red line that he dare not cross lest he incur American wrath. Set up a no-fly zone and tell Erdogan in no uncertain terms that his atrocities against the Kurds will be punished. Europe is feckless, Mr. President. Only the United States can stand for morality and serve as the defender of all people against the threat of genocide.

You did it with Assad. Now do it with Erdogan and Turkey.

US President Donald Trump on Monday authorized sanctions on Turkey's leaders, reimposed steel tariffs and ended trade negotiations to protest Ankara's offensive into Syria. "I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey's economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path," he wrote on Twitter. Sanctions were placed on Turkey's defense and energy ministries as well as Ankara's ministers of defense, energy, and interior, the US Treasury said in a statement.

US President Donald Trump released an executive order on Monday authorizing the imposition of sanctions “against current and former officials of the Government of Turkey and any persons contributing to Turkey’s destabilizing actions in northeast Syria,” according to a White House statement.

It added that steel tariffs will be increased back up to 50%, the level prior to reduction in May.

“The United States will also immediately stop negotiations, being led by the Department of Commerce, with respect to a $100 billion trade deal with Turkey,” said the president.

“The United States will aggressively use economic sanctions to target those who enable, facilitate, and finance these heinous acts in Syria,” Trump continued. “I am fully prepared to swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy if Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path.”

He said that the executive order will enable the United States to impose powerful additional sanctions “on those who may be involved in serious human rights abuses, obstructing a ceasefire, preventing displaced persons from returning home, forcibly repatriating refugees, or threatening the peace, security, or stability in Syria.”

According to the statement, the order will authorize a broad range of consequences, including financial sanctions, the blocking of property, and barring entry into the United States.

The US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also announced on Monday new sanctions against two ministries and three senior Turkish Government officials in response to Turkey’s military operations in Syria.

Some 300 protesters gathered outside the Turkish Embassy in Tel Aviv late Tuesday afternoon to oppose Turkey's incursion into northern Syria.

The protesters, who represented most of the local political spectrum, shouted slogans against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and called on US President Donald Trump to cancel the withdrawal of American troops from Syria.

Yaya Fink, an IDF reservist major, initiated the demonstration on behalf of the Kurds.

"The commandment 'Do not stand idly by while your neighbor's life is threatened' [Leviticus 19:16] requires us, as Israelis and Jews, not to be silent when another people is at risk of being wiped out," Fink said.

"The abandonment of the Kurdish people is a moral and strategic wrong, and we are urging the leaders of the western world to take urgent action to ensure the safety of the Kurds and the other minorities who live in northern Syria.

"We also expect the Israeli government to provide the Kurdish forces with humanitarian aid and act on the phrase, 'Peace, peace to the far and to the near.'"

IDF veterans took part in a pro-Kurdish protest, marching from the Turkish embassy to Tel Aviv municipality. Our Emily Rose has the story.

Some who have criticized President Trump’s rationale pointed out that in fairness to the Kurds, they don’t have a state now and didn’t have one during World War II either, so it would have been impossible for them to fight at Normandy or in the other cited battles as if there had been a country of Kurdistan.

Of course, Israel also didn’t have a state, and so organized Jewish forces didn’t fight at Normandy either. But what Baldwin and most of her viewers don’t know is that organized Jewish forces did fight in World War II, on the side of the Allies. Under the British-ruled Palestine Mandate (which ended in 1948), some 30,000 Jewish volunteers from the territory fought with British forces during the war, and in 1944 the British finally agreed to form a Jewish Brigade of some 5000 soldiers, which fought alongside British forces in Europe, and therefore also alongside United States forces.

While the British also attempted to enlist Arabs from the Palestine Mandate to serve the war effort, in the end very few did.

Perhaps this is because the founder and first leader of the Palestinian national movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, known as the Grand Mufti, was an ally of Nazi Germany almost from the inception of Nazi rule, and fled to Berlin at the outbreak of World War II, where he closely collaborated with the Nazi leadership. Among the Mufti’s notable achievements during his Nazi years was his creation of a special Muslim Waffen SS Division in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Known as the Handschar Division, it committed brutal war crimes against Serbian Christians and Jews, leading the postwar Yugoslavian government to indict the Mufti as a war criminal.

The Mufti also made numerous pro-Nazi propaganda broadcasts to the Arab world. For example, in a broadcast from Germany on March 1, 1944, he urged Arabs everywhere to commit genocide against the Jews:

Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This serves your honor. God is with you. (Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, p213, Yale University Press, 2009)

The Mufti pressured the Nazis to adopt extermination as the solution to the “Jewish problem,” especially during the period when official Nazi policy was the so-called Madagascar Plan, which called for the brutal expulsion of Europe’s Jews rather than direct extermination.

Some media reports have tried to downplay the Mufti’s role, such as this one in the New York Times, which claimed:

… the mufti “met Hitler in person for the first time” on Nov. 28, 1941 — two months before the Final Solution was formalized and the construction of extermination camps accelerated, according to historians, but after the mass murder of Jews had begun, and roughly one million had perished.

But the meeting between Mufti and Hitler, and exactly when it took place is irrelevant – as stated above, the Mufti’s deep ties to the Nazis long predated 1941. The real question is what impact the Grand Mufti and those he ordered, inspired and incited had on the Holocaust. What role did the Grand Mufti and his Palestinian followers have in preventing Jews from escaping the Nazis and getting to the only territory that would take them, the Jewish community in British-run Mandate Palestine?

Dozens of Israeli farmers are facing an uncertain future after being informed that the land that they have been working for decades will soon be handed back to Jordan.

The area in question comprises two parcels of agricultural land: Naharayim, known in Arabic as Baqoura, in the Jordan Valley, and Tzofar, or Ghumar, in the Arava region in southern Israel, which together span 1,000 dunams (247 acres). These enclaves also include the Island of Peace, a park located at the confluence of the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers.

A special clause in the 1994 peace treaty between the countries allowed Israel to retain use of the land for 25 years, with the understanding that the lease will be renewed as a matter of routine. However, in October 2018, amid domestic unrest in Jordan, King Abdullah II announced plans to terminate the lease, and despite lengthy efforts by the Israeli government, negotiations to guarantee continued access to the areas were unsuccessful.

“I don’t think anyone has any idea what’s next and the fact that there is a transitional government in place is not helping the situation,” Oren Reuveni, the plantation manager at Kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov Ihud in the country’s north, told Zman Yisrael, the Hebrew sister site of The Times of Israel.

In hindsight, Jordan’s decision not to extend the lease was predictable, he said, adding that for several years, local farmers have only been cultivating low-maintenance crops in Naharayim, so as to overcome what he called the erratic behavior of the Jordanian officers guarding the site.

There were more than a few times when Israeli farmers and their workers were denied access to the land at the random whim of a Jordanian officer, he noted.

Both countries recognize that the peace accord serves their mutual interests and is of strategic importance given the volatility of the region, yet neither has done enough to prevent a deterioration in ties.

Israel must be considerate of the kingdom's weaknesses and sensitivities, among them the Palestinian issue, the Temple Mount, Syrian refugees, and the war on terror. This obligates Jerusalem to adopt a more moderate stance and avoid unnecessary provocations. Jerusalem must also act in Washington to soften the Trump administration's position toward the kingdom; the US still does not have an ambassador stationed in Amman. Finally, we should propose joint projects in the fields of energy, technology, and science, and expand the size of Haifa Port to allow Jordan to increase its exports in light of the closure of the Syrian border.

Abdullah, too, could be a little more sensitive. He could simplify bureaucratic processes to allow Jordanian businesspeople to visit Israel. He must also respond firmly to any parliamentarian that calls to blow up the Israeli gas pipeline to Jordan. And in particular, the king must extend Israel's lease of two small areas of land, in Naharayim in the northern Jordan Valley and Ghamr in the south, as delineated in the 1994 accord, and allow Israeli farmers to continue to work their lands. He would also be wise to tone down his criticism of Israel, as he did in his most recent speech at the UN General Assembly, and make clear to his public that the peace accord serves Jordan's interests. By now, he should know that the kingdom's policy of allowing the public and extremists to "blow off steam" has slowly revealed itself to be something a double-edged

And in the short term, both countries must also urgently establish teams, led by their respective ministries of Foreign Affairs, to examine what can be done to prevent a further deterioration in ties.

The peace treaty between Jordan and Israel is “under threat” due to Israeli “violations” against Jerusalem, according to the speaker of the Jordanian House of Representatives and president of the Arab Inter-Parliamentary Union, Atef Tarawneh, as quoted by Jordan’s government news agency.

Tarawneh spoke at the 141st International Parliamentary Union Assembly in Belgrade on Monday.

“We in Jordan, who are signatory to a peace treaty with the Israeli occupation government, see today that this peace is under threat, in light of the blatant violation of its terms, especially with the issue of Jerusalem,” said Tarawneh, adding that UN institutions cannot implement their decisions or authority in countries that don’t abide by international law, like Israel.

The speaker also called on parliaments around the world to push their governments to not move their embassies in Israel to Jerusalem, and to exert pressure on Israel to “stop its tyranny and brutal practices in the Palestinian territories.”

Tarawneh added that Israel’s policies are supported by a “clear bias” from the United States, according to the Jordan Times.

Thousands of people in Berlin protested against anti-Semitism on Sunday, four days after a German neo-Nazi attacked a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle.

About 10,000 people participated in the march through the German capital.

Several thousand others protested Saturday in other cities, including Hamburg and Marburg.

Many Germans are in shock over Wednesday’s attack in which two people were killed outside the synagogue and in a kebab shop.

The attack has renewed concerns about rising far-right extremism and questions about the slow police response.

The Jewish community’s security measures on Yom Kippur resulted in a failed mass murder attempt in the synagogue of Halle, the major town in the German federal state of Saxony Anhalt. The synagogue’s steel doors had not been paid for by the local authorities but by the Jewish Agency.

This absence is an indicator of the state of law of Germany’s unsettled liberal democracy. That sums up the wider meaning of the horrible incident. In it an extreme right wing shooter killed at random two people nearby and wounded two others.

It is too early for a full-fledged analysis of the main aspects of this event and the reactions to it. Yet already the various facets of the issues at stake should be listed so that they can be followed in the coming weeks. That will allow a more in depth assessment of the tragedy which could have been much bigger.

One major question is why all synagogues in France, Belgium and the Netherlands have police or military protection - while in Germany apparently only some, mainly in big cities do?

After activating the emergency alarm it took the police more than ten minutes to arrive. According to the community’s chairman Max Privorotsky the police have repeatedly played down the community’s security concerns. Joseph Schuster, President of the Central Council of Jews the umbrella organization of German Jewry, attacked the police saying “that the synagogue of Halle was not guarded by the police on a holiday such as Yom Kippur was scandalous.”

Assigning all the blame on the police is most convenient for the German political system. Yet if one digs a bit deeper one discovers that the police is greatly understaffed. This opens a hornet nest for politicians. It is their responsibility to make sure that the police receive the necessary funding to execute its tasks reasonably and protect threatened citizens.

German politician Roland Ulbrich, a member of the right wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), took to social media on Tuesday to belittle the shooting attack on a Jewish synagogue in Halle during Yom Kippur. The house of prayer contained 51 people, the 27-year-old shooter Stephan Balliet intended to kill them all but failed to do so thanks to security measures taken by the community.

He murdered two people who were outside the synagogue before he was arrested by German security services.

Writing on social media, Ulbrich said that the shooting only caused “property damage” and that “it wasn’t even an attempted murder in the synagogue,” Mako reported.

“What’s worse?” He asked, “that a door was damaged or that two Germans were killed?”

His remarks caused an uproar in Germany, with some users saying he hinted that “Germans” and “Jews” are two separate things and that he is attempting to “minimize” the shooting.

A commissioner tasked with combating antisemitism in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg clicked “Like” on an antisemitic Facebook post on Tuesday that compared Zionists to Nazis, just one day before a neo-Nazi murdered two bystanders while attempting to shoot Jews in a synagogue in Halle.

Michael Blume, the commissioner, liked a Facebook post from a user named Alexander Omar Loh who wrote: “Zionists, Nazis and radicals should quickly remove themselves from my friends list.”

Blume is now facing a fresh round of accusations that he stokes contemporary antisemitism on social media and is unqualified to be assigned with fighting Jew-hatred. Loh and Blume are Facebook friends.

The US State Department and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance both define comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel as an expression of modern antisemitism. Germany adopted the IHRA definition in 2017.

In March, the human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center said Blume “promotes antisemitism” because he used the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in a rambling article to demonize Malca Goldstein-Wolf, a German Jewish activist who campaigns against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in Germany.

Mosques in Germany are praying for the Turkish army’s success as it wages a fierce military offensive against the U.S.-allied Kurdish forces and civilians in neighboring Syria, German newspaper Die Welt reported.

The worshippers pray the victory verse: “Allah, Lead Our Glorious Army to Victory.”

The backing from mosques in Germany comes days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered a full-scale attack against Kurds in northern Syria following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region. German mosques read out the “victory verse,” or Surah al Fath, from the Muslim holy book Quran, celebrating Muhammad’s victory over his rivals in 7th century Arabia, media reports suggest.

Turkey’s state-controlled Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, issued the call to prayer. Germany’s largest Turkish Islamic group, DITIB, which runs some 900 mosques across the country and boasts of 800,00 members, has also allegedly participated in prayers calling for the victory of the Turkish military against Kurds in northern Syria. DITIB officials denied endorsing the call, but a media investigation showed several leading DITIB officials involved in the campaign. Mosques affiliated with Milli Görüs, Germany’s largest Islamic association with around 10,000 supporters, also reportedly took part.

A German court in the city of Bonn convicted Bilal Z. on Monday for an antisemitic incitement attack on an Israeli professor, Yitzhak Melamed, in 2018. Bilal, a German citizen of Palestinian origin, dubbed himself “Hitler 2,” reported the daily newspaper Bild.

Melamed’s face was bleeding and his glasses were broken after Bilal and the police attacked him. Following Bilal’s assault, police allegedly mistook Melamed for the assailant and began beating him, according to Melamed’s account of the incident. Melamed, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University in the US, was wearing a kippah when he was violently attacked by Bilal, who screamed “You are a Jew” and “No Jews in Germany” at the professor.

Bilal also said “I’ll kill all Jews.” The court sentenced the 21-year-old to three months in prison. He was previously sentenced to three years and nine months for additional crimes, including robbery, that are not connected to the attack on Melamed. The court did not convict Bilal for allegedly striking the professor in the face.

A psychological report said Bilal is shaped by “deeply inculcated Jew-hatred,” according to the Bild paper.

Kais Saied, recently voted in as Tunisia’s next president, expressed opposition to normalizing ties between his country and Israel, according to Maariv, sister publication of The Jerusalem Post.

“This is my view on the Zionist entity and it will not change,” said Saied in a televised interview on Monday. “If one day I change my mind, remind me about the things I said now. We are in a situation of war with Zionism, and normalization is treachery.”

On Friday, the president-elect said he viewed Jews and Zionists differently. “The Jews visit Tunisia; we protected them in the Second World War,” he said. “But whomever normalizes relations with the Zionist entity that stole the land of the Palestinian people and exiled them from their land is a traitor.”

Saied won the country’s runoff for president with some 73% of the vote. He now faces another major challenge since he will have to work with a deeply divided parliament, whose members were elected the previous Sunday in an outcome that indicates that there will be fierce bargaining to select a prime minister and establish a ruling coalition.

The interview includes some noteworthy comments from Bowen.
“I would say that the conflict, it looms with real weight and damage on the shoulders of many Palestinians, because they are weaker and don’t have the resources and many of them live under occupation. That’s the key thing, if you live under occupation, life becomes way, way more difficult.”

“…plenty of Palestinians feel very threatened by settlers, armed settlers, by soldiers, by raids in the middle of the night, by helicopters, you name it. And many Israelis have been hurt by and continue to be worried about attacks by Palestinians, though there haven’t been all that many in recent years.”

What Bowen means by “recent years” is not entirely clear but in 2015 there were 2,398 terror attacks in Israel (of which the BBC reported 3.2%). In 2016 there were 1,415 attacks (of which the BBC covered 2.8%), in 2017 there were 1,516 attacks – less then one percent of which were reported by the BBC – and in 2018 the BBC covered at most 30.2% of the 3,006 attacks launched. During the first nine months of 2019 the BBC reported 23.6% of the 1,709 attacks which took place.

Obviously the BBC’s ongoing failure to adequately report the scale of terror attacks against Israelis serves its Middle East editor just as badly as it does the corporation’s audiences.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to pardon Naama Issachar, 26, who was sentenced last week to seven-and-a-half years in a Russian jail for possession of nine grams of pot.

Issachar was arrested in April for carrying nine grams of cannabis in her checked luggage as she flew from India to Israel, while going to board a connecting flight in Russia.

On Sunday Rivlin sent Putin a letter asking him to pardon Issachar. On Tuesday, both Netanyahu and Rivlin forwarded a pardon request.

In his letter to Putin, Rivlin said that he recognized the Russian president as “a friend of the Jewish people and of the State of Israel,” and requested that Putin intervene and grant her a pardon.

“Na’ama made a grave mistake and has admitted her crime, but in the case of a young woman with no criminal record, the severe sentence handed down will have a deeply destructive impact on her life,” he wrote. “The Jewish people and the State of Israel are grateful for your sensitivity to human life and for your willingness to endanger the lives of your soldiers to locate and return the body of IDF soldier Zachary Baumel.

“Because of the particular and individual circumstances of Na’ama Issachar’s case, I am appealing to your mercy and compassion with a request for your personal intervention to grant her an extraordinary pardon,” Rivlin said.

Reserved, fiscally-prudent, and a devout Catholic whose opposition to abortion and gay marriage goes against the Canadian grain, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer is the main rival to Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the upcoming October 21 elections.

Two years after winning the leadership of the Conservative Party, Scheer, 40, remains an enigma, despite representing a district in Canada’s big sky prairies in parliament since 2004.

“It’s obvious that he isn’t charismatic like Trudeau. To a certain extent, he’s the antithesis of the current prime minister: he’s not comfortable in front of a crowd nor glad-handing voters,” Frederic Boily, a political scientist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, told AFP.

Scheer paints himself as an everyman: a father of five who enjoys a beer, watching football (his wife’s younger brother plays in the Canadian Football League) and “The Simpsons” television series.

But behind the chubby face atop a tall frame is also a shrewd strategist who was picked over 12 other candidates in 13 rounds of voting at a leadership convention as the consensus candidate of his party, with the backing of both fiscal and social conservatives.

A Canadian imam called candidates in the country’s upcoming elections “evil and filthy” supporters of Zionism who approve of homosexuality, warning Muslims they would be judged for their votes.

“This voting is a testimony and will be recorded,” Sheikh Younus Kathrada of Victoria, British Columbia, said in a sermon on October 11.

“On Judgment Day, you will stand before Allah and be asked about it. If you plan on voting, ask yourself prepare the answer first — what am I going to tell Allah when Allah asks me: ‘You voted for that filthy non-Muslin, why?'” continued Kathrada.

“He or she approves of homosexuality, which Allah declared forbidden from above the seven heavens.”

In a video of the sermon from the Middle East Media Research Institute, Kathrada said the political candidates in the elections “oppose” Muslims and are all supporters of Zionism.

“You think that they want good for you? I already told you what Allah said: ‘Never will they [the Jews and the Christians] be pleased with you.’ They will continue to oppose you. You are fighting a losing battle. They are all evil. Every single one of them,” Kathrada said.

“They are all evil and filthy. Do you know that every one of them, without exception, supports the Zionists against Islam and the Muslims,” he added.

Canadian Cleric Younus Kathrada: All Candidates in Upcoming Elections are Evil, Filthy Non-Muslims Who Support Homosexuality, Zionism pic.twitter.com/wqEOCf1vJ4

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 15, 2019

In a two-part article in the Palestinian Authority (PA) daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, journalist Muwaffaq Matar called to adopt an idea presented by Palestinian President Mahmoud 'Abbas in a booklet from 1982, titled "We Need an Arab Keren Hayesod." [1] In this 14-page booklet, 'Abbas reviewed the activity of the Zionist movement after Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, with emphasis on the Keren Hayesod organization, which was established in 1920 to raise funds for encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine and consolidating the Jewish settlement there. 'Abbas concluded the booklet by stating that Keren Hayesod had served its purpose and that Israel no longer had any use for it. However, he advocated establishing an "Arab Keren Hayesod" that would help Jews leave Israel. He wrote that the Zionist movement had lured the Jews to Palestine with lies and false promises, and that their lives there have been nothing but "pain, difficulty, anxiety and loss"; therefore, many of them now wished to flee Israel, and helping them do so would benefit both them and the Palestinian cause.

After summarizing 'Abbas's arguments in the booklet, journalist Muwaffaq Matar writes that the Zionist Movement deliberately pushed Jews to leave their countries of origin and emigrate to Palestine by drumming up fear of antisemitism, and also by initiating terrorist actions against Jews around the world. The greatest victims of its activity, he said, were not only the Palestinians but also the Eastern or Sephardi Jews, i.e., the Jews originating in Arab countries, whom he calls "Jewish Arabs." According to him, the Ashkenazi Jews, i.e., Jews of European origin, took over Israel's state institutions and positions of power, while using the Eastern Jews as pawns and settling them in Israel's border regions to serve as cannon fodder in the conflict with the Arabs. Consequently, these Jews are now disillusioned with Zionism and would be happy to flee the state of Israel. The uprooting of the Jews from the Arab countries, he adds, was the most dangerous plot in the history of mankind, second only to the extermination of the native Americans.

Matar claims that the Eastern Jews have remained devoted to their Arab culture and heritage and yearn to return to their Arab countries of origin. It therefore behooves the Arabs to liberate them from "the shackles of the racist imperialist state [of Israel]" by helping them to realize this hope. To this end, he says, the Arabs should implement 'Abbas's idea and establish an "Arab Keren Hayesod" that would raise funds for this purpose. Matar calls on the Arab states to facilitate their return by giving them back the property they left behind when they immigrated to Israel and allowing them to return to their cities and homes. He also calls on the Palestinians to foster ties with the Eastern Jews in order to pave the way for their return, and notes that the PLO began doing this when it founded the Committee for Interacting with Israeli Society in 2012.

These suggestions to fund the emigration of the Jews – who were ostensibly deceived into coming to Israel and now yearn to leave it – may be intended to justify the demand to let the Palestinian refugees return to their homes within the 1948 territories. These suggestions correspond to the uncompromising official Palestinian position in this matter, which is that all Palestinian refugees must be returned to their original homes and given compensation.

After months of tensions, the Palestinian Authority and Saudi Arabia seem to be moving toward improving bilateral relations.

Tuesday’s soccer match between the two sides – hailed by the PA as a “historic” event – is seen by Palestinian political analysts as a sign that the two sides have decided to lay their differences aside.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas and senior Palestinian officials went out of their way to make the Saudi national soccer team feel welcome in Ramallah. Palestinians who were planning to protest the visit of the Saudi team on the pretext that it’s in the context of Arab normalization with Israel were summoned by the Palestinian security forces and warned to stay away from the stadium where the match was being held.

Abbas and several officials made it a point to thank Saudi King Salman bin Abdel Aziz and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for allowing their team to travel to the West Bank, despite protests by several Palestinians and Arabs who accused the Saudis of violating the Arab boycott of Israel.

The Palestinian Authority government in Ramallah has frozen the bank accounts of dozens of Palestinian non-governmental organizations in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO) revealed on Monday.

Palestinians believe the move is in the context of the PA’s economic sanctions against organizations that are affiliated with Hamas and other Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip.

“The Palestinian NGO Network expresses its deep concern over the continued freezing of the accounts of NGOs in the Gaza Strip by the [PA] Ministry of Interior in Ramallah and warns of the repercussions of these measures,” PNGO, an umbrella organization for civil society organizations, said.

According to PNGO, it has received many complaints from NGOs in the Gaza Strip about the freezing of their bank accounts, “which threatens the services they provide and undermines their role in enhancing the steadfastness of Palestinians.”

The organization also pointed out that some banks operating in the Gaza Strip have refused to open accounts for newly registered NGOs although they had obtained licenses from the PA Ministry of the Interior in Ramallah.

The steering committee that leads the weekly riots on the Israel-Gaza border is inaugurating a children’s park near a border area that has been a focal point for the often violent disturbances, Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported on Sunday.

According to the report, the so-called “Park of Return” is already prepared for use and includes games, entertainment facilities, lawns, gardens, a promenade, shaded areas for picnics, and fountains.

The committee said, “The park is a message of our people’s life and continuity in the face of the occupation, that we are rooted in our land and cling to hope and life.”

The park is likely a response to criticism of the ruling Hamas terrorist group that it has been deliberately putting children in harm’s way during the riots, the Yediot report states.

This criticism has also taken on a class dimension, as Hamas is being blamed for exploiting the children of the poor, who are disproportionately placed among the rioters, while children from wealthy and connected families are not.

There are also claims that Hamas is not funding medical care for children injured in the riots.

"We know it was the Iranian air force" that attacked Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure, a former Israeli senior security official told Al-Monitor.

"The Americans know it too. Everyone who needs to know does. Yet that doesn't prevent [Iranian Foreign Minister] Mohammad Javad Zarif from sitting in a TV studio and stating without the slightest hesitation that Iran had nothing to do with the attack."

Concern soared in Israel following the attack. "It's not as if we didn't know that Iran has cruise missiles and armed drones," a former senior military official said.

"The problem is that...so far, Iran's performance in its clashes with Israel has been feeble at best. They tried to fire rockets at the Golan Heights a few times, but these mostly landed on the Syrian side of the border. It turns out that they are capable of much more."

Israel believes that if there is an Iranian attack, it will not be launched from Iranian territory. Israel has stressed that if that does happen, Israel will not allow Iran to hide behind its proxies.

Would a real Iranian strike on Israeli targets by Iran's proxies force Israel to respond against Iranian targets in Iran proper? The answer is yes, and Israel believes that Iran knows it.

A team of British experts arrived in Iran on Monday to begin work to upgrade the Arak heavy water nuclear reactor, the UK embassy in Tehran said.

Iran removed the core of the Arak facility and filled part of it with cement as part of a 2015 deal that gave the country relief from sanctions in return for curbs on its nuclear program.

Located southwest of Tehran, the reactor is to be modernized with the help of foreign experts under the deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

“A team of British nuclear experts led by UK Chief Scientific Adviser Professor Robin Grimes arrived in Tehran today to take forward the next stages of the modernization of the Arak reactor, alongside a team of Chinese experts,” said the British embassy.

“The experts will hold talks with the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran on international technical assistance to the reactor construction,” it said in a statement.

The British experts would remain in Iran for three days, the embassy told AFP.

Iran's economy is expected to shrink by 9.5% this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, down from a previous estimate of a 6% contraction, as the country feels the impact of tighter U.S. sanctions.

The IMF forecasts, published on Tuesday in the fund’s World Economic Outlook report, are not far from estimates given last week by the World Bank, which said the Iranian economy by the end of the 2019/20 financial year would be 90% smaller than it was just two years ago.

Iran, a large oil producer, saw its oil revenues surge after a 2015 nuclear pact agreed with six major powers that ended a sanctions regime imposed three years earlier over its disputed nuclear program.

But new sanctions brought in after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from that deal in 2018 are the most painful imposed by Washington, targeting nearly all sectors of Iran's economy.

The IMF had previously forecast Iran's economy to shrink by 6% this year, but that estimate preceded Washington's decision in April to end six months of waivers which had allowed Iran's eight biggest oil buyers to continue importing limited volumes.

Former academic Norman Finkelstein, who now teaches fourteen-week classes at the Brooklyn Public Library, recently spoke on a "Black and Palestinian Solidarity" panel at Princeton University that was co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Displaying his well-known propensity for engaging in blood libels and other forms of anti-Semitism, Finkelstein made a number of reprehensible statements. He labeled Israelis "biped bloodhounds drinking the blood of one million [Palestinian] children"; likened Israelis to slave-owners and then repeated the phrase "shoot them dead"; refused to condemn terrorist organizations Hezbollah and Hamas, because, he claimed, "they're fighting for their basic rights"; and called a student in the audience who had served in the IDF a "concentration camp guard."

As that student later remarked about Finkelstein, "I don't care that he's Jewish. He's anti-Semitic. That's just a fact."

None of this was out of character for Finkelstein, yet panel organizer and student Leopoldo Solis, who disregarded warnings beforehand about the former academic's history of anti-Semitism, would only say that his "behavior derailed the conversation and distracted from our main goal. We do not condone how these words changed the conversation to a less-productive space."

A less-productive space? Weasel words. The real question is, what's Princeton's Near Eastern Studies Department's excuse?

MetroWest students created a “Kill the Jews” page though social media, recently.

Last night, a Christa McAuliffe Charter School student received a request to join the “Kill the Jews” page and reported it to her parents.

Her mother has since reported it to the school and to the police. A police officer was at the Framingham family’s house this morning, October 13.

“We are very upset by this and take this threat seriously,” said the mom to SOURCE. “I just want to educate children and adults on this hoping we can put an end to this type of behavior ASAP.”

“This should be taken as a serious threat,” said the mom, who is Jewish.

One boy types “(name) you’re a (K-word).”
Another boy responds “release the gas.”
The first boy then responds “F%&*ing k*#@ VSCO girl”

SOURCE contacted the Christa McAuliffe Charter School for comment.

“This evening I and other McAuliffe leaders became aware of anti-Semitic social media activity involving McAuliffe students,” said Christa McAuliffe Executive Director Kristin Harrison to SOURCE. “As soon as we found out, we reached out to Framingham Police, and have been told there’s an investigation underway.”

“We will be in touch with the McCauliffe community as we learn more about this incident,” said Harrison.

“Needless to say, our community does not tolerate this type of behavior,” said Harrison. (h/t Zvi)

People across the United States and around the world will join together virtually on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue building in suburban Pittsburgh.

The virtual commemoration, called “Pause with Pittsburgh,” is scheduled for 5 p.m. on Oct. 27. The moment of solidarity and remembrance for the 11 people who were killed during the attack will include, for those in North America, a text including a video with the mourning prayer and a link to Pittsburgh’s local community public memorial service via livestream, and an opportunity to post on a community message board. Overseas participation is through email.

The program is a project of the Jewish Federations of North America.

“Rather than become desensitized to the terror of a never-ending cycle of senseless deaths, we must focus on doing what we do best: building and sustaining community that brings people together,” Mark Wilf, chair of the Board of Trustees of The Jewish Federations of North America, said in a statement.

People across the United States and around the world will join together virtually on the one-year anniversary of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue building in suburban Pittsburgh.

The virtual commemoration, called “Pause with Pittsburgh,” is scheduled for 5 p.m. on October 27. The moment of solidarity and remembrance for the 11 people who were killed during the attack will include, for those in North America, a text including a video with the mourning prayer and a link to Pittsburgh’s local community public memorial service via livestream, and an opportunity to post on a community message board.

Overseas participation is through email.

The program is a project of the Jewish Federations of North America.

“Rather than become desensitized to the terror of a never-ending cycle of senseless deaths, we must focus on doing what we do best: building and sustaining community that brings people together,” Mark Wilf, chair of the Board of Trustees of The Jewish Federations of North America, said in a statement.

A Jewish man was slapped in the face and called a “dirty Jew” on Saturday in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

The Jewish man was attacked by a man riding a bicycle who rode in front of the Jewish man, slapped him and said “you dirty Jew,” COL Live local news site reported.

The victim immediately reported the incident at a local police precinct.

The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, police told the news outlet.

On Friday night in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, occupants of a car threw eggs at two Jewish men walking in the area. The NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating the incident, The Yeshiva World News reported, adding that that there are nearly two dozen extra police officers patrolling the streets in the neighborhood. (h/t Zvi)

An Israeli flag was found defaced with a swastika and the numbers “14” and “88” in front of the Falmouth Jewish Congregation in Cape Cod, Massachusetts on Thursday, hours after Yom Kippur ended.

The “14” on the flag stands for the white supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” while “88” is shorthand for “Heil Hitler” because “H” is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

Rabbi Elias Lieberman of the Falmouth Jewish Congregation told the Cape Cod Times that he believes the “flag initially was spread out in the courtyard or near the pavement by the main entrance” before it was blown into the bushes, where he found it.

“This should be a wake-up call for everyone who lives on Cape Cod,” Lieberman said. “The Cape is not the picture-perfect postcard people like to think it is, or for that matter, any place in the country.”

The Rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Grand Rapids, MI got an unwelcome surprise as he pulled up to the synagogue on Sunday morning before Hebrew school classes began.

Rabbi Michael Schadick found antisemitic posters sprayed with an adhesive stuck to the glass doors of the synagogue that face the parking lot. These doors are the ones all the students walk through every week to get to their Sunday school classes.

Edie Landman, the synagogue's president, said this is the first time, to her knowledge, that any antisemitic crimes have taken place there.

The temple wants to reiterate that they do have, have had and always will have extensive security in place and utilize all measures available.

After Schadick saw the posters, he called the police, who are investigating the incident as a hate crime. The Grand Rapids Police said they are familiar with the posters and have seen them before but didn't share where. The photos were found online but have since been taken down.

Fliers with what police described as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish messages were left on cars parked near a restaurant and movie theater in Evesham Township, New Jersey.

One of the fliers tied Jewish Hollywood producers to pedophilia and child rape, the CBS affiliate in Philadelphia reported. The township is considered a suburb of Philadelphia.

Police told the news outlet that a second flier made racist statements about Israel and a third is about Jews and world finances.

“Evesham Township has absolutely zero tolerance for such flagrant anti-Semitism, or any other form of evil and bigotry in our town,” Mayor Jaclyn Veasy said, CBS reported.

Bulgaria’s soccer union president resigned on Tuesday, a day after racist abuse marred a match against England in Sofia.

“Today the president of the Bulgarian Football Union Borislav Mihaylov presented his resignation, which will be handed in to the members of the executive committee on its meeting on Friday,” the union said in a statement on its website.

The decision “resulted from the tension created over the past days, which is detrimental to Bulgarian football and the Bulgarian football union,” the statement said.

The Euro 2020 qualifier, which England won 6-0, was twice halted as Bulgarian fans made Nazi salutes and directed monkey noises at England players who are black.

Earlier in the day, Bulgaria’s prime minister urged Mihaylov to resign.

A 74-year-old German woman who has spent three decades painting over neo-Nazi graffiti was convicted of property damage and fined some $330 for painting hearts over graffiti which read “NS-Zone” (Nazi Zone) in the central German town of Eisenach.

The €300 fine was handed down to Irmela Mensah-Schramm last Wednesday, Yom Kippur, the same day that a neo-Nazi German gunman attempted to break into the synagogue at Halle, a two-hour drive away, and massacre the Jews inside, failed to do so, and shot dead two bystanders nearby. Mensah-Schramm was also ordered to pay court costs.

A Stuttgart-born former teacher who lives in Berlin, Mensah-Schramm is known as the “Graffiti Grandma” for her activist work painting over extremist graffiti, or adjusting and amending it to convey positive meanings.

She was convicted on Wednesday of painting hearts over the “Nazi Zone” graffiti four times last December, after she was filmed by a local resident who filed a police complaint against her.

Mensah-Schramm, who said she would appeal the verdict, refused a compromise offered by the court which said she could make a contribution to local charities instead of paying the fine. Such an arrangement would be an admission of guilt, she said. “I did not do anything wrong,” Mensah-Schramm told a local broadcaster.

The largest photovoltaic (PV) power plant in Israel, set to provide solar energy to approximately 60,000 households, has been granted a permanent license to generate electricity by the Electricity Authority and the Energy Ministry.

The license granted to the Shneur Tze’elim plant in the Negev, constructed by Shikun & Binui Solel Boneh and Belectric, will enable electricity production for commercial purposes for a period of 20 years.

The NIS 600 million ($170m.) project spans 125 hectares (309 acres) of land, consists of some 360,000 solar energy panels and is built on land owned by Kibbutz Tze’elim, Be’eri, Re’im, Sde Avraham, Yated and Pri Gan.

The plant is capable of supplying 120 megawatt of power, twice the output of Israel’s previously most powerful PV plant at Mashabei Sadeh. The most commonly used form of solar generation technology, PV plants directly convert sunlight into usable electricity through large quantities of solar cells.

The facility at Shneur Tze’elim was initially designed as a thermo-solar power plant, a more expensive and complex technology for the production of clean energy. A December 2015 government decision, however, approved plans to convert the plant into a PV plant, leading to annual savings of approximately NIS 120m. in operating costs.

“This is another significant project that will generate electricity for tens of thousands of Israeli homes with clean energy,” said Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz. “We will continue to work to advance renewable energy in Israel and, in light of actions taken so far, I am currently looking at increasing the target for 2030 set by the government.”

An 11-minute video of renowned Israeli artist Sigalit Landau floating naked on the Dead Sea within a slowly uncoiling spiral of 500 watermelons made a big splash in the art world in 2005.

The Dead Sea has beckoned Landau to return again and again from her Tel Aviv studio since 2003.

Called the “Salt Sea” in Hebrew, and actually a lake, the Dead Sea is the lowest continental surface on Earth. It is hailed for its healing powers and mined for cosmetics and industrial products.

Landau and her team submerged objects ranging from a tutu to a cello in the mineral-rich lake and documented their crystallizing transformation.

“Magical moments happen under the water, so my co-creator Yotam From followed the process through underwater photography,” Landau explains.

Salt Years is a newly published pictorial and prose salute to Landau’s unique artistic genre.

“Her art pieces are cultivated with salt crystals, like an oyster farm, using an organic process to transform mundane, everyday, usually useless artifacts into objects of mesmerizing, haunting beauty,” writes editor David Goss in his introduction.

Seeking to reverse decades of diplomatic isolation, and in response to increasing hostility from Western Europe, Jerusalem in recent years has cultivated better relations with a variety of states, including some with unsavory rulers—ranging from the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. While such a policy has provoked sharp criticism in some quarters, Seth Cropsey and Harry Halem explain that a small country like Israel does not have the luxury of disdaining potential allies, and, moreover, continues to do much to support American interests and with them the “liberal international order,” such as it is. Take the fraught case of its relations with Russia:

Small powers such as Israel illustrate the liberal international order’s pathology. The Jewish state in particular feels the existential edge of political competition, having faced annihilation from its inception. Today, Iran is Israel’s greatest adversary. A unique blend of Shiite supremacism and Persian imperial revanchism drives Iran’s leaders to recover Sassanid and Safavid lost glory.

Rather than striking Iran directly, Israel has opted to attack its network of proxies that stretch from the Tigris to the Levantine basin. However, the United States no longer dominates the region’s airspace. Any Israeli action against Iran requires Russian assent as a simple geographical fact. This situation will persist indefinitely, as America shows no desire to challenge the Russian presence in Syria. So Israel must work with Russia if it hopes to combat Iranian expansion—as a matter of course, small powers must search for other options during periods of strategic turmoil, whatever their ideological preferences may be.

The irony is that Israel’s cognizance of Russian interests actually furthers American security goals. Iran poses a threat to the United States irrespective of its alliance with Israel. If a hostile power were to control the Middle East, it could sever the U.S.’s sea lines of communication and supply, preventing effective coordination between American forces and allies in Europe and Asia. Moreover, it could use its oil exports to threaten the reliance of U.S. partners on oil imports, such as Japan.

It is therefore no surprise that the U.S.’s interest in a stable Middle Eastern balance of power has persisted since the 1940s. But the age of imperial dominion has passed. America cannot govern as Britain and France once did. It must work with and through local actors. Critically, every attempt that the U.S., or any Western power, has made to court the “Arab street” has failed irrespective of support for Israel.

IDF Brig.-Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, former head of the IDF Military Intelligence research division, told JNS that the strengthening of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated extremist Sunni forces in northeast Syria "should disturb us." He stressed that Turkey had launched its offensive with "problematic, radical forces."

Kuperwasser predicted that "if the Kurds feel distressed, and American pressure can't stop the Turks, they will try to link up with Assad, as well as with the Russians and the Iranians." The Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) signed such a cooperation agreement with the Assad regime on Sunday.

While Israel can provide humanitarian assistance to the Syrian Kurds and also apply diplomatic pressure, military intervention is out of the question, said Kuperwasser, director of the Project on Regional Middle East Developments at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Kuperwasser insisted that the events in northeast Syria will have no direct repercussions on U.S.-Israel relations. "The depth of the U.S. commitment to Israel is very different" from its commitment to the Syrian Kurds.

He added that while Israel "is acting decisively to prevent an Iranian base in Syria, what is important in this context is that the American economic pressure on Iran continues."

"Despite pinpoint [Iranian] achievements on the ground, the infrastructure of Iran is still eroding. They can't hold on for a long time without money. It all costs money in the end."

During the run-up to the Iran deal in 2015, the main narrative put forward by those who supported it was that if the US did not do a deal then there would be a “war.” During the phone call between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US President Donald Trump, reports indicate, the same “If you don’t do this, there will be war,” threat was used.

US foreign policy has increasing been hostage to the notion that the US must cater to both allies and adversaries to avoid wars. Oddly, those countries, including Turkey and Iran, are able to bluff their way into things by alleging they are prepared for war with the United States. There is no evidence that either country is willing to risk a real conflict with the US, but their threshold for claiming they do is higher than the US, and they have learned that after decades of foreign wars Washington is more cautious about new tensions.

In 2015 the Obama administration presented a claim, through a sophisticated network of op-eds and surrogates sent to speak to media, which argued that “the only alternative to the Iran nuclear deal is war.” An April 2015 piece at The Atlantic noted that the alternative could be a “substantial war.” In May 2018, when Trump left the Iran deal, the BBC reported that a possibility might be a “new and catastrophic regional war.”

Turkey presented the US with a threat that Turkey would begin its operation regardless of the US presence and begin bombing US partners on the ground, the 100,000-strong Syrian Democratic Forces that the US had helped train since 2015 to fight ISIS.

Trump agreed to let Turkey conduct its “long-planned operation” to attack peaceful towns and cities that the US had enjoyed being stationed next to. Turkey has become proficient at using threats against Western powers to get them to do what it wants. It threatened to send 3.6 million refugees to Europe if the EU critiqued its operation. Is it normal for US allies to threaten to send refugees forcefully into their countries to punish them for policies?

A stateless people comprised of a large number of Sunni Muslims is being bombarded by a country with an overwhelming military advantage. It’s the kind of thing that normally has American Islamist groups organizing protests and lighting up social media feeds.

But this time the aggressor is Turkey’s authoritarian leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a man who has positioned himself as a defender of violent Palestinian terrorists like Hamas and a patron for Muslim Brotherhood leaders who sought refuge from Egypt’s military rulers. He is bombing Kurdish targets in northern Syrian, and has sent his troops into the country.

American Islamists, normally not shy about Middle East conflicts, are largely silent about Turkey’s crimes. When Israel has launched defensive operations to stop Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorists from raining rockets on civilians in southern Israel, the same groups were quick to condemn it, organize protests, demand US government action, and organize social media campaigns.

Kurdish victims fail to generate similar concern. Images on social media show Turkish bombing and shelling of civilians all along Syria’s northern border. Civilians in the town of Kobane, who withstood a 2014 ISIS onslaught, found themselves under attack by Turkish artillery.

Turkey claims it is conducting an anti-terrorist operation against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). But the PKK’s ideology has moved away from revolutionary Marxism and now supports autonomy within Turkey, American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin noted in a January National Interest column. Erdogan sought peace with the PKK before turning against it in 2015.

“To refuse to acknowledge, let alone appreciate the evolution of the PKK and to refuse to recognize the achievements and stability of Syrian Kurdish governance against the backdrop of a horrendous civil war not only does an injustice toward the Kurds, but it also signals that in order to achieve their basic human rights, they must fight to the death in Turkey,” Rubin wrote.

When those issues are combined with the US bolstering its forces in Saudi Arabia, the only conclusion is that the US goal is to increase pressure on Iran. This, in addition to paralyzing sanctions, should force the ayatollahs to make a decision about how they will proceed – whether or not to go back to the negotiating table or persist with escalation.

There is another factor in the equation – Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia, after all, has been working to stabilize Syria for five years. Trump's move and the Turkish operation could put Putin under pressure to steer the Iranians into talks. None of the actors wants to see further escalation, but it appears that the Americans are posing the bigger challenge, and the game is heading into critical moments: what will the Iranians do when Trump makes things hard for them and he himself is facing an election?

Continued escalation of the situation in the Persian Gulf does not serve Iran's interests since its economy has already sustained a fatal blow. However, it's not certain they take the West seriously. It should be said that if Trump intends to create serious leverage, he needs to have more forces at the ready around the Gulf. This might be why the US cut down its involvement in Syria.

Amid all this, we must not ignore the human suffering the Kurdish issue entails. While Trump took a tough line toward Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lest he harm them, the significance of the current situation is clear – the Kurds might be facing a tragedy.

This can teach us that nothing has really changed in our world in the 21st century. National interests come first and humane concerns are marginalized. A people without self-determination and without a sovereign state doesn't "count." This dynamic only underscores how lucky our generation is; there is no way to know what would have happened if the historic decision of Nov. 29, 1947 to declare a national homeland for us had never been made.

Much has been said and written about the Turkish incursion into northern Syria and their attacks against the Kurds.

But, for Israel, another location is important.

Al-Bukamal is located on the Iraqi/Syrian border. It has been the target of recent Israeli airstrikes. Al-Bukamal is also the site of a key crossing between Syria and Iraq which allows it to become an important hub for Iranian weapons transportation to Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

In the early days of the Iranian and Iraqi militias' control of the town of Al-Bukamal, the means of communication between them were wireless radios. After a few months of controlling the Syrian/Iraqi border town of al-Bukamal, assassinations increased in the area, which affected a number Iranian militias. The targeting of Iranian militia vehicles and their movements by cells opposing the militias were detected by the frequency used by the wireless radios.

Due to this detection, the Iranian militias issued orders not to speak on radios except when it was an emergency. After a few months, Iranian militias secured cellular lines from the company Zain Iraq through its members in the Popular Mobilization Forces.

About two months ago, Iranian militias set up a reinforced communication network for Zain Iraq on Jabal al-Baghouz on the Iraqi side of the border to gain greater coverage in al-Bukamal and its countryside. To obtain a line of communication, it requires personal identification and sometimes permission from militia commanders.

Few leaders of the Iranian militias have satellite telephones. Some members of the security branches of the Syrian regime in the city of al-Bukamal use Syrian lines, and there are some important figures from the Iranian militias in addition to the Iraqi line have another Syrian line to communicate with the Office of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Damascus.

The Kurds of Rojava are not asking for independence, they are not demanding the dissolution of Syria and they declare that they want to live under the Syrian flag.

The Palestinians, unlike the Kurds, have repeatedly been offered proposals for independence and the establishment of a separate state but they declined time and time again.

The Kurds never received such an offer, but it did not stop the Palestinians from becoming the world's darling and that also didn't stop some idiots whose connection with reality was always a bit wonky from depicting Israel as a carbon-copy of Turkey.

Have the Kurds ever threatened to eradicate Syria, Iraq or Turkey? Have they ever launched rockets at population centers? Are their educational systems laden with jihadist racist propaganda?

The invasion is intended, among other things, to create a "safe zone" in which Turkey could settle Syrian refugees who fled due to the civil war raging in the country, but in the meantime, it also creates a new wave of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Where exactly will they run to?

We live in a world where atrocities against Muslims are firmly condemned – they were slaughtered in Darfur, they faced ethnic cleansing and massacres in Myanmar, they are locked up in re-education camps in China – these were always condemned with the support of the Arab and Muslim world.

But now when it is the Kurds, again the Kurds, who are facing a new wave of war crimes, the world keeps silent.

As the Voice of America itself reported on January 23, Erdogan's plan was to resettle three million or more refugees from other parts of Syria in this "security zone" extending twenty miles deep into Syria. Twenty miles may not sound much, but – the VOA omitted to mention – almost all the Kurdish towns of northeastern Syria lie within that area. So Erdogan's intention to annihilate the Kurdish presence in that area and replace it with others has been manifest ever since the beginning of 2019.

A whole series of Trump's Republican supporters in the Senate expressed outrage over his decision, starting with Lindsey Graham ("Pray for our Kurdish allies who have been shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration") and continuing with Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, who remarked: "As we learned the hard way during the Obama Administration, American interests are best served by American leadership, not by retreat or withdrawal."

Meanwhile, as Syria's Kurds try desperately to stave off a massacre at the hands of Turkish forces, Iraqi Kurdistan lies directly in the line not only of Turkish but also Iranian fire. As the Iranian regime continues — through Shia militias and other proxies, including the Houthis and Hezbollah — aggressively to expand its influence across Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, the Iraqi Kurds interviewed fear that they could be next in Iran's crosshairs.

In September 2018, for instance, IRGC forces fired seven missiles into Kurdistan in what Iran's regime claimed was an attack on Iranian Kurdish dissidents based there. At least 11 people were killed in the strike, which occurred just a short distance from a Peshmerga military position visited by the author.

Today, the U.S. troop withdrawal from neighboring Syria, combined with the glaring lack of response by the West in the face of escalating Iranian and Turkish aggression in the region, have left Iraq's Kurds and other U.S. allies in the Free World feeling more exposed than ever to the expansionist aims of both Erdogan and Iran's mullahs.

Given the Kurds' painful history, including genocide at the hands of Saddam Hussein, and the threats they currently face, it's no wonder that many shared an affinity for Israel — and a concern for the future.

"We defeated ISIS," a Peshmerga general said, "only to see Iran and its Shia militias become stronger. They are filling the vacuum."

Islamist-led Turkey has now joined those same Iranian-led forces in filling that vacuum — with the full acquiescence of the United States.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper will travel to Brussels next week to demand NATO members implement “collective and individual diplomatic and economic measures” on Turkey as punishment for its incursion into Syria, he said today in a statement, setting in motion a process that could lead to historic penalties against a NATO ally.

It’s not clear what exactly those penalties might be, but a number of NATO states have already halted weapons sales and military aid to Ankara, as Congress readies its own punishing round of sanctions on the Turkish military that would effectively cut it off from the West.

The Trump administration today imposed a slew of economic sanctions on Turkey raising steel tariffs by 50 percent and halting negotiations over a $100 billion trade deal with the country. The Treasury Department also levied sanctions on Turkey’s ministries of defense and energy, as well as three senior Turkish officials.

Overseas, the European Union and some NATO countries have already started to move. EU foreign ministers today unanimously condemned Turkey’s bloody incursion, which has already seen its proxy forces film a roadside execution of a Syrian politician, as well as those of a number of Kurdish fighters. The Turkish actions “seriously undermines the stability and the security of the whole region,” the ministers said, but they stopped short of issuing a EU-wide arms embargo against Ankara.

Canada on Tuesday announced it had temporarily suspended “new export permits” to Turkey, particularly of military equipment, in response to Ankara’s offensive into northern Syria.

“Canada firmly condemns Turkey’s military incursion into Syria,” Global Affairs Canada, the foreign ministry, said in statement.

“This unilateral action risks undermining the stability of an already-fragile region, exacerbating the humanitarian situation and rolling back progress achieved by the Global Coalition Against Daesh [Islamic State], of which Turkey is a member,” the statement added.

The suspended export permits cover “controlled property,” essentially military equipment, according to a list provided by the ministry.

Ottawa’s move follows similar measures by several European countries.

Turkey is using M60-A1 tanks upgraded by Israel during the height of diplomatic relations between the two countries in their offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria.

Pictures of M-60 tanks upgraded by Israeli Military Industries (IMI) near the Turkish border town of Akcakale during Operation Peace Spring have circulated on social media. In the week since Turkey’s offensive began in northern Syria, hundreds of Kurds have been killed and 160,000 people, including 70,000 children, have been displaced from their homes.

All the main systems of M60-A1 tank, which were originally manufactured in the United States in the 1960s, were replaced with more advanced and modern systems already integrated into the main battle tanks of the IDF at a cost of $687 million.

Between 2003 and 2010, around 170 M60-A1 tanks were fitted with a 120 mm. cannon as well as advanced fire and turret control systems, and a new power unit with a 1000HP engine and transmission. The tanks were also fitted with hybrid armor (both active and passive) over its frontal arc.

Dozens of other subcontractors were involved in the project, with Israel’s Elbit systems as the primary subcontractor and smaller defense companies Urdan and Orlite also taking part.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan dismissed a US proposal to broker a ceasefire in northern Syria and said he was not worried over US sanctions, in comments published in Turkish media Wednesday.

He also said the Syrian army’s entry into the flashpoint northern Syrian city of Manbij was not a “very negative” development for his country as long as the region is cleared of Syrian Kurdish fighters.

“They tell us ‘to declare a ceasefire.’ We can never declare a ceasefire,” Erdogan told journalists on a flight back from Azerbaijan, in comments published by the Hurriyet daily.

US Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel Wednesday to Ankara to press Turkey to halt its offensive against Syrian Kurdish fighters, President Donald Trump said Tuesday.

Pence’s office released a separate statement adding that he would “voice the United States’ commitment to reach an immediate ceasefire and the conditions for a negotiated settlement.”

“It is not possible for us to declare a ceasefire” until Turkey clears the “terror organisation” from its border, Erdogan said, referring to the Kurdish forces.

Despite an earlier statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday that he would not meet visiting US Vice President Mike Pence, his office said the meeting would go ahead after all.

“Earlier today, the President told @SkyNews that he won’t receive a US delegation that is visiting Ankara today. He does plan to meet the US delegation led by @VP (Pence),” wrote Erdogan’s communications director Fahrettin Altun on Twitter.

As US President Donald Trump dispatched Pence to Ankara to demand a ceasefire, Turkey rebuffed international pressure to curb its military offensive against Kurdish militants in Syria.

Erdogan rejected any negotiations, telling parliament the only way to solve Syria’s problems was for the Kurdish forces to “lay down their arms… destroy all their traps and get out of the safe zone that we have designated.”

Battles raged in the key Syrian border town of Ras al-Ain on Wednesday, with Kurdish fighters burning tires in a bid to blind Ankara’s warplanes and digging in against a ground offensive by Turkish-backed Syrian rebels.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan Threatens to Open Border to Europe, Send 3.6 Million Refugees If EU Considers Turkish Activity in Northern Syria to Be an Occupation pic.twitter.com/SiAeeBZIfO

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 16, 2019

Jordan on Wednesday denied Israeli officials’ claim that it was willing to extend for another season Israel’s access to border lands that Amman wants back, as leases for the areas are on the verge of expiring.

King Abdullah II has agreed that Israeli farmers be allowed to continue working their crops in the Tzofar enclave in the southern Arava desert for another season, sources in the Foreign Ministry and the National Security Council told Israeli media earlier in the day.

However, Jordan swiftly denied the report, with the country’s foreign ministry saying in a statement that the decision to take back the lands is “final and decisive.”

The development came amid ongoing talks between senior Foreign Ministry representatives and Jordanian officials regarding two parcels of land along the border between the countries — Tzofar and an enclave in the north known in Israel as Naharayim.

A special clause in the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries allowed Israel to retain use of the land for 25 years, with the understanding that the lease would be renewed as a matter of routine. However, in October 2018, amid domestic unrest in Jordan, Abdullah announced plans to terminate the lease. Despite ongoing efforts by the Israeli government, negotiations to guarantee continued access to the areas have so far been unsuccessful.

What do Arab governments know about Hezbollah that the European Union refuses to acknowledge? The Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have both labeled Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

The EU, by contrast, determined six years ago that only Hezbollah’s so-called “military wing” belongs on its terrorism list. Partial recognition was at the time a welcome achievement: the 28 member states had finally overcome their longstanding resistance to adding the Iranian-sponsored group to the list.

Prompted by the leadership of the United Kingdom and determination of Bulgaria, which experienced a deadly Hezbollah attack the year before, and Cyprus, which arrested a Hezbollah operative scouting target sites, the EU recognized the threat Hezbollah posed in European cities.

But the EU uniquely opted to bifurcate Hezbollah, leaving its “political wing” off the terrorism list.

If there ever was a distinction without a difference, this was it. None other than Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Lebanon-based chief, said as much, stressing that no one could divide his organization. Mocking the EU’s decision, Nasrallah asserted: “Just as a joke, I propose that our ministers in the next government be from the military wing of Hezbollah.”

The European argument asserts that Hezbollah is a “legitimate” political party in Lebanon, runs in elections, and has members in the government. Thus, to blacklist Hezbollah in its entirety denies those who vote for its candidates their basic rights, in addition to jeopardizing the fragile stability of the Levantine country.

This line of defense fails to acknowledge the obvious.

The conservative youth organization, Young Union of Germany (JU), defied its party’s leadership from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU/CSU) and the Christian Union Party over the weekend by urging the relocation of the country’s embassy to Jerusalem.

The JU, with roughly 105,000 members, passed a resolution titled “Recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital” at its 59th Germany Day convention, held in Saarland. According to reports in German media, the JU urged the CDU and CSU parties in the Bundestag to “follow the examples of the USA, Russia and Guatemala, and relocate its embassy to Jerusalem and therefore recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

The JU document said that a continued refusal by the German federal government to relocate its embassy could continue to damage the relationship between Germany and Israel.

The Jerusalem Post exclusively reported in 2018 that Merkel intensely lobbied European countries not to relocate their embassies to Jerusalem.

The foreign policy spokesman of the CDU, Jürgen Hardt, who is an MP in the Bundestag, rejected the demand of the JU, stating: “The relocation of the embassy would not solve any problems, rather [it would] create new problems," according to the the daily outlet Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.

The German Union of Jewish Students praised the JU conference on Twitter for urging Germany and the EU to outlaw the entire organization Hezbollah, writing: “Thank you for this clear signal against terror and antisemitism. Stop Hezbollah.”

This latest attack also demonstrates how inadequately prepared France is to tackle the problem. The murderer was not just any civil servant: his security clearance allowed him to have access to sensitive files such as the personal details of police officers and individuals monitored by the department, including several individuals suspected of terrorism.

Beyond the political sphere, there is also a culture a denial of the Islamist threat in the French media. Journalists, academics and politicians, with a few exceptions, have consistently played down not only the risk of terrorist attacks but also the threat of growing Salafist radicalization in the country.

According to a study by the Montaigne Institute, 29% of Muslims in France believe that Sharia law is more important than French law. This means that almost one-third of French Muslims live according to values that are fundamentally incompatible with French or Western standards.

It is important to note that theses quotes are not from right-wing thinkers or activists. Both François Hollande and Gerard Collomb were long-time eminent figures of the Socialist Party.

These are typical examples of what some call "la démission des élites" (the abdication of the elites): refusing to act on a situation of which they are perfectly aware but afraid to mention because of the dominant ideology of political correctness.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS)’s calls to invite Israeli Arabs to live and work in Saudi Arabia could be either a diplomatic breakthrough or a cynical ploy. If the former, it could indicate that, at long last, the Arab world is awakening to the possibility that to fully enter the modern world, it must normalize relations with Israel.

To the surprise of many, Saudi Arabia announced recently that it will offer work visas to Arab citizens of Israel. Responses were divided into two main camps: those who see this as a diplomatic opportunity for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the entire region; and those who see it as both a cynical move and a dangerous temptation for Israel and the US.

A central objection to the plan is that it sidesteps the Palestinian problem. Eighty percent of Palestinians see the Saudi overture to Israeli Arabs as an abandonment. By diminishing the priority of the Palestinian issue, it allows Jerusalem and Riyadh to work together on their “real” problems, which include national security threats like ISIS and Iran.

The initiative opens up the possibility of increased economic interaction between Riyadh and Jerusalem, which could result in economic benefits accruing to both countries. As a senior journalist in the kingdom said, “The best way to improve relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is to allow Israeli Arabs to work in the Gulf and thus build a bridge between the states.”

It is unclear whether MBS envisions full normalization with Israel. At the grassroots level, Palestinians, Saudis, and Israelis are already engaging through social media channels. Spokesmen and officials representing all three parties have been communicating peacefully.

Despite the diplomatic schism between Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan, senior security officials from Israel, Jordan, and the PA are confirming that security coordination and intelligence cooperation are operating with "Swiss clock" precision.

Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Amman are in rare agreement when it comes to elections for the Palestinian presidency in east Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. In a speech at the United Nations last month, PA President Mahmoud Abbas declared that PA elections would lead to Hamas defeating Fatah and the organization seizing control of the Palestinian Authority, quickly and brutally ousting Fatah officials from all government agencies, ministries, and the PA security and intelligence apparatuses.

Senior Palestinian officials say that Abbas' close associates acknowledge that recent polls indicate clearly that if PA parliament elections were held now, not only would Hamas beat Fatah, but Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh would also beat Abbas in a race for the presidency by a considerable margin.

The last time parliamentary elections were held in Gaza and the West Bank (2006), Hamas secured a majority in the PA parliament. A year later, Hamas carried out a putsch in Gaza and took control of all government agencies, while lynching many Fatah officials and deporting others from Gaza, along with their families.

Salah Diab, an Egyptian businessman and the owner of the daily Al-Masri Al-Yawm, who writes under the pen name Newton, published a number of articles titled "Liberating the Mind" and "Is [Showing One's] Hair Considered Nudity?" in which he argued that the hijab (head scarf) and niqab (full-face veil), which are worn by the vast majority of Egyptian women, are not mandated by the Islamic shari'a. Egyptian women, he wrote, adopted this custom as a result of religious indoctrination which prevailed in Egypt in the 1970s and which falsely presented it as a religious duty. He noted that Egypt once had prominent reformists who strove to renew the religious discourse, but that conservative forces, including Al-Azhar, excluded them from the public arena and prevented them from promoting their liberal views.

Stressing that he is not urging women to reject the hijab, but only calling to respect the choice of those who do not wish to wear it, Diab attacked the preachers who, over the years, established the view that almost every part of the woman's body, including her hair, is 'awrah, i.e., nudity that must be covered, a view that has no basis in the Quran. He added that liberating the Egyptian mind of the prevailing religious discourse will also liberate the Egyptian womens' heads from the hijab.

The articles sparked a lively debate among Diab's readers, and expressions of support for his view, some of which he quoted in his articles.

A senior Iranian lawmaker on Wednesday blamed Israel, the United States and Saudi Arabia for an alleged attack on an oil tanker last week off the Saudi coast and said he would take the complaint to the UN.

Tehran says the Iranian-flagged Sabiti tanker was hit by two separate explosions off the Red Sea port of Jeddah on Friday.

“The footages that the cameras mounted on the oil tanker have taken show that the attack has been carried out by the US, the Zionist regime and al-Saud,” MP Abolfazl Hassan Beigi was quoted saying by the Fars news agency.

Hassan Beigi, a member of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, claimed without evidence that the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia were alleging the Islamic State jihadist group or Afghanistan’s Taliban was behind the explosions in the Red Sea.

He also asserted Iran was in possession of documents pointing to the involvement of “certain governments” in the incident.

“There are abundant documents and evidence of interference of certain governments in the attack against the Iranian oil tanker and they will be presented to the UN and UN Security Council and the countries which played a role in the terrorist attack should pay the price for their deeds,” he said.

The United States carried out a secret cyber operation against Iran in the wake of the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh blame on Tehran, two U.S. officials have told Reuters.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the operation took place in late September and took aim at Tehran's ability to spread "propaganda."

One of the officials said the strike affected physical hardware, but did not provide further details.

It highlights how President Donald Trump's administration has been trying to counter what it sees as Iranian aggression without spiraling into a broader conflict.

The strike appears more limited than other such operations against Iran this year after the downing of an American drone in June and an alleged attack by Iran's Revolutionary Guards on oil tankers in the Gulf in May.

The United States, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and Germany have publicly blamed the Sept. 14 attack on Iran, which denied involvement in the strike. The Iran-aligned Houthi militant group in Yemen claimed responsibility.

Publicly, the Pentagon has responded by sending thousands of additional troops and equipment to bolster Saudi defenses - the latest U.S. deployment to the region this year.

The United States has criminally charged a major Turkish bank with helping Iran evade sanctions against it, potentially raising diplomatic tensions as the US tries to contain Turkey’s military offensive in Syria.

The charges against Halkbank, a state-owned bank, were announced Tuesday, years after a wealthy gold trader was arrested in Florida. Before pleading guilty and testifying against a co-defendant, the Turkish-Iranian businessman, Reza Zarrab, hired Rudy Giuliani to lobby the administration of US President Donald Trump to drop the charges as part of a prisoner exchange.

The timing of the charges could be significant as the Trump administration tries to press Turkey to limit its military incursions in Syria, a move Trump himself allowed by declaring US troops would be withdrawn.

The US imposed limited sanctions on Turkey this week and has threatened more. While the charges against Halkbank are not related, they could give the US leverage as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien travel to Turkey on Wednesday.

In a release, US Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said senior officials at Halkbank had designed and carried out the scheme to move billions of dollars of Iranian oil revenue illegally.

Turkey's Halkbank said on Wednesday that U.S. charges against it amount to an escalation of Washington's sanctions on Ankara over its military incursion in Syria, while President Tayyip Erdogan called them an "unlawful, ugly" step.

U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday charged the state-owned lender with taking part in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran. In response, Halkbank's shares plunged as much as 7% on Wednesday despite a new ban on short selling.

The indictment came a day after the United States imposed sanctions on Turkish officials, hiked tariffs and halted trade talks in an effort to persuade Turkey to stop attacks against the Kurdish YPG militia in northeastern Syria.

The indictment in a U.S. district court in New York, which further strains ties between the NATO allies, alleges Turkey's second-largest state bank conducted fraud, money laundering, and other sanctions offenses.

While the U.S. prosecutor did not tie the charges to sanctions over Syria, Halkbank did.

"These were filed as part of the sanctions introduced against our country by the U.S. government in response to Operation Peace Spring, heroically launched by the Turkish army to secure our borders and establish peace in the region," the bank said of the incursion now in its eighth day.

Former German soccer player and coach Winfried Schäfer spoke to German publication t-online.de and said that during the time he spent in Iran, he never met anyone who supports the regime of the ayatollah. Schäfer worked in Iran for two years, managing government-owned soccer club Esteghlal, one of the most popular teams in the country.

"In two years, I never met a person who was in favor of the regime, and I speak of people from very different backgrounds –industrialists, academics, football players, taxi drivers and even ministers," Schäfer said, as quoted by Radio Farda.

"The people I've met, no matter young or old, are not at all in line with the [Islamic] regime," he added, also highlighting that Iranians are scared, in a way that is hard to understand for someone who does not live in Iran.

The report also honored the memory of Sahar Khodayari, a 29-year-old woman who set herself on fire in front of a Tehran court in September in protest of a six-month prison sentence she was possibly facing for trying to enter a men's soccer game back in March. She eventually succumbed to her wounds.

Khodayari was a big Esteghlal fan and became known in the country and abroad as "Blue Girl," after the team's color.

Following her death, world soccer's governing body FIFA and women's rights campaigners pressured Tehran to lift the ban on women attending soccer matches. On Thursday, for the first time in 40 years, female fans were allowed to attend a game between the Iranian national team and Cambodia in a World Cup qualifying match.

An Iranian-American businessman tied to a network of pro-Tehran advocates coordinated with a Middle Eastern monarch to target prominent Americans in an international hacking-and-disinformation campaign, according to court documents filed in the United Kingdom in September.

Amir Handjani, an oil executive and attorney who sits on the board of directors of Washington's Atlantic Council think tank, has worked as a registered foreign agent for Ras al Khaimah, or RAK, one of the seven monarchical states that make up the United Arab Emirates. The RAK has deep financial and diplomatic ties to Tehran. According to a $16.7 million complaint filed in September in a London court, RAK's ruler, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al Qasimi, ordered Handjani to execute a smear operation which appeared to be aimed in part at perceived critics of Iran, including former Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon.

In the complaint, American aviation magnate Farhad Azima says that RAK and its associates were behind a hack of his email and devices as part of an effort to blackmail him in 2016.

Experts on Iran and its espionage operations said the smear campaign appeared to be another example of Iran using its proxies and allies to target its perceived critics, even inside the United States.

David Asher, a former State Department official and expert in money laundering schemes, told the Washington Free Beacon that the alleged hacking attack on Azima and Solomon reflects "a classic Iranian information warfare exercise."

Qadhafi Loyalist Abdel Hadi Moussa: Libya Is Colonized and Must Be Liberated; The Arab Spring Suckled Its Ideology from Qadhafi’s 1969 Revolution pic.twitter.com/6SR769ZJHa

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 16, 2019

Tunisia’s new president is a hardline opponent of any form of ties with Israel and recently called moves toward relations with the Jewish state “high treason.”

Kais Saied was the clear winner in Sunday’s second and final round of the North African country’s presidential elections, beating rival Nabil Karoui with 77 percent of the votes.

Two days earlier, in the final televised presidential debate, Saied became animated when moderators asked about his stance on normalization of relations with Israel, a sensitive issue in the Arab and Muslim world.

“‘Normalization’ is the wrong word to use,” he retorted. “We should be talking about high treason.”

That is a common Arab nationalist position that ended up earning him praise among supporters and voters.

Tunis currently has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Its parliament was due to vote last year on a draft law criminalizing ties with Jerusalem, but the proposal did not get the endorsement of then-president Caid Essebsi, who died in July.

During the debate, Saied also said Tunisia was in a state of war with the Jewish state.

Beyond all acceptable norms
It is wrong to describe this as a textbook, and some of the distortions and omissions are beyond all logical understanding. Most of the damage is done in the early pages. Anti-Israel feeling works like a computer virus inserted into the base code. If you can shape the way the initial history is viewed, then you no longer need to worry how that person will see the defensive barrier or the blockade on Gaza. This is something anti-Israel activism has long understood, and whilst pro-Israelis spend most of their time justifying a clampdown on Hamas – anti-Israel activists are revising the timeline of the 1920s and 1930s. They know how this works.

There is no point listing every error. It would take a year to completely unpack a textbook such as this. The report chiefly deals with errors in the first chapter. I have just opened a random page and found additional errors in the description of the 1948 war. The book suggests the Israelis ‘broke the truce‘ after the first phase – which left it able to suggest that ‘once again, Israel broke the truce early‘ at the start of the third. Which would be fair if it were true. But Egypt launched a surprise attack on the 8th July, which renewed the hostilities and opened the second phase. (Morris, 1948 p273). Which once again begs the question – what is the source material for this book?

The manipulation of students
The book continues in similar fashion, Israel are always looking for the ‘excuse’ to fight. Students are manipulated through imagery, misleading maps and distorted statistics. The book’s exercises and suggested activities are all designed to reinforce the story the book is clearly trying to tell. During the Arab anti-British violence, the focus is on Arab victims and the unfair and harsh British attitude. When the Jewish people were violent, sympathies are switched. Suddenly the focus becomes the British victims. The book creates a hierarchy. Arabs>British>Jews. Through the provided exercises, the students are forced to swallow it. When the book wants to get its message across, it really is not shy about how it does it:

The distortion is all one way. As are the errors. This book fails the David Irving test. A book that is simply sloppy would make errors in both directions – this book NEVER does. The Irgun are openly and consistently described as terrorists. The PFLP are a ‘Guerrilla’ group and the Fedayeen could be classed as ‘freedom fighters’, depending on your ‘point of view’. The book does describe the violence of the Second Intifada but never uses the word terrorist to do so. Throughout the book, the word terrorist is (almost) exclusively reserved for Jewish actions.
Needing answers for a textbook such as this

To explain the massive influx of immigrants into Israel, the book describes how growing antisemitism in the Arab countries was ‘making it dangerous’ for Jews in Arab lands. The Mizrahi Jews ‘asked to leave’. The cause given was the 1948 conflict – not rising Arab nationalism. The book continually ignores all the pre-Zionist antisemitism – and any Arab motivation for violence other than opposition to Zionism – because it doesn’t fit the narrative. The destruction of Jewish civilisation in dozens of countries across the Middle East and North Africa is not mentioned.

We need to take stock of this. This type of damage is far larger than some meeting of ageing Marxists in a local scout hall – and much more insidious. How many times is this type of material entering our schools. How many children have sat through this course? In truth we need to work out how this book was ever considered acceptable. We really do need answers.

A controversy that began last summer, pitting community library-event planners in a New Jersey suburb and various Palestinian sympathizers against a Jewish community, is now moving into the legal arena.

The almost 20-year-old Central Jersey Jewish Public Affairs Committee (CJJPAC)—a pro-Israel advocacy organization headed by Dr. Marc Hanfling and Marc Kalton, in concert with Zachor Legal Institute, an anti-BDS legal think tank—is launching action against both the borough of Highland Park, NJ, and its library. The suit will center on the library’s planned book reading of P Is for Palestine, an alphabet book written for young children by Golbarg Bashi, a professor of Middle East Studies.

In its current form, the book is thought to be an adaptation of a Palestinian teacher manual, designed to indoctrinate children to vilify Jews and Israel, as well as advocate for the destruction of the Jewish state. It is widely considered to be antisemitic in nature, and includes the phrase “I Is for Intifada” (for the letter “I”; each letter of the alphabet matches a phrase with the respective letter), which, according to the book, means “to stand up for what is right.”

However, the word “intifada” means something else to Jews and to Israeli law. In Jerusalem district court documents (Shurat Hadin), the word was defined in 2018 as a premeditated terror and murder campaign, the second of which justified claims for damages to the Palestinian Authority from terror victims and their families.

The book event was initially set to take place in June, but was delayed due to a significant backlash from the Jewish community. After canceling a planned public meeting on the topic because of concerns regarding potential violence and an insufficient location to hold the event, library personnel, with borough leadership, announced a closed-door compromise, paving the way for the event to go on.

Contemporary antisemitism has the ability to graft itself onto a variety of causes and movements. But the social and information environment in the US and Europe is strongly conditioned by virtue-signaling among elites and increasingly among portions of the middle class. Antisemitism, in part through BDS-fueled antipathy toward Israel, is becoming a signal of middle class respectability. At the same time, though left-wing Western elites remain strongly anti-national, the working classes and other parts of the middle class are becoming renationalized. These and other class conflicts will shape antisemitism in the next decades.

Class has emerged as one of the most important features of global politics. Predictably, antisemitism and the boycott-Israel movement are enmeshed in class-based patterns of belief and behavior – but some of these patterns are new and counter-intuitive.

One unique feature of the BDS movement, consistent with antisemitic movements historically, is the ability to graft itself onto other contemporary concerns and movements. Three to four years ago in North America the equation was between the burgeoning Black Lives Matters movement and the Palestinian experience under the Israeli “occupation,” and moving from there to alleged connections between American and Israel “police” violence.

In the past year the migration crisis on the US southern border was the cause célèbre, with American “concentration camps” equated with the Palestinians’ “open air prison” of Gaza. Now, with the rise of “climate change” (rebranded from “global warming”) as the latest moral panic, the BDS movement has taken to equating portents of climate damage with the environmental “crisis” in Gaza.

It is tempting to dismiss such blatant hijacking as a variant of the much-parodied left-wing trope “world ends tomorrow; women, minorities hardest hit.” But the pattern indicates that the BDS movement sees an advantage to the strategy. The now well-documented association of ersatz grassroots organizations such as IfNotNow with incubators that train and fund-raise for a variety of far left causes demonstrates that at least some parts of the BDS movement are instruments for broad spectrum social mobilization. That these are aimed at Jews and Jewish interests demonstrates further that antisemitic agitation remains a useful revolutionary strategy. And as always, Jews are given the choice of either joining the revolution for “justice” or being condemned for their tribal adherence to retrograde parochial causes.

There is growing evidence that in Western social and information environments saturated with virtue-signaling, such strategies are having some success with members of the image-conscious, predominantly white middle class. Class attitudes are being set by a limited number of sources from the elite, interlocking media-education-NGO sector, which is to say coastal universities, celebrities, late night television hosts, “human rights” organizations, minority activists, and, increasingly, K-12 teachers. Perceptions of grievance, real and imagined, are the primary drivers in a victimhood arms race, where the reliably malleable notion of “social justice” has been weaponized against the foundations of the middle class itself. (h/t Elder of Lobby)

In December 2018, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPG) published its “Report on the inquiry into a working definition of Islamophobia / anti-Muslim hatred”.

This decreed that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”

The government’s response was wary. It observed that the MPs’ proposed definition “has not been broadly accepted – unlike the IHRA [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance] definition of antisemitism before it was adopted by the UK government and other international organisations and governments. This is a matter that needs further careful consideration”.

Its reference to the definition of antisemitism was telling. For the push to define and thus outlaw Islamophobia is using the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism as a battering ram of equivalence. If the Jews can get protected against antisemitism, goes the argument, then we Muslims want the same because Islamophobia is the equivalent of antisemitism.

Well no, it isn’t. Antisemitism is a uniquely unarguable form of bigotry — a murderous, paranoid, mendacious and irrational hatred of Jews, Judaism or the collective Jew in Israel.

There is undoubtedly bigotry against Muslims, among people who dislike them on principle and lump them all together as a sinister force. And that is as unacceptable as any other form of true prejudice.

Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel By Matti Friedman

“Time spent with old spies,” author Matti Friedman writes in his new book, “is never time wasted.”

Friedman, a Canadian-born Israeli and former Associated Press correspondent, has devoted much of his career to shedding light on the unexplored and misunderstood aspects of Israel and the Middle East. His latest work, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel, examines the careers of four spies, born in Arab lands, working for the fledgling Jewish state. Their stories, he notes, have “something to tell us about the country they helped create.”

Friedman tells their tales in vivid and highly readable prose — the careful Gamliel Cohen, alias Yussef, born in Damascus, Syria; the quiet Yemeni-born Havakuk Cohen, alias Ibrahim; Yakuba Cohen, an impatient Jerusalemite who goes by the name Jamil; and Isaac Shoshan, aka Abdul Karim, a Jew from Syria, whose dalliances with a Lebanese Christian woman endanger the unit. That unit is the Arab Section, or — as it appears in official reports — “The Dawn.”

Friedman is careful not to exaggerate or embellish history. The heretofore untold story of the Arab Section is thrilling and interesting enough.

The Arab Section had its origins as a British creation to bolster the fight against the Nazis in the Middle East. Training was haphazard at best, and disorganization was rampant. Initially, the Arab Section “didn’t even own a radio,” Friedman notes. In another case, an operative tasked with being the getaway driver had never driven a car. Operational security was often — certainly by today’s standards — lackluster. Language skills were practiced in Arab markets, barbershops, restaurants, and buses.

Portions of the Koran were memorized — although, as Friedman recounts, this didn’t prevent the agents from feeling scared when entering mosques and posing as Muslims. The men lived and worked on a knife’s edge. The fact that they were working for a small country that, for much of the story, had an uncertain future, compounded the danger. There was no Langley to save them if trouble arose. Communication with superiors back home was scattershot and — often for many months — non-existent.

In 1929, Arab clerics and politicians provoked riots across Palestine by accusing Jews of plotting to take control of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. This month marks the 90th anniversary of those riots — but they are not a bygone. Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders incite violence today using similar falsehoods and ideology.

The 1929 riots destroyed the Jewish community in Hebron. They persuaded Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion that socialist fraternity among Jewish and Arab workers and peasants would not ensure peace. They impelled Palestine’s Jews to bolster the Haganah, their underground self-defense group. And they vindicated Zionist warnings against relying on foreigners for security.

To investigate the riots, the British government, which controlled Palestine at the time, appointed an inquiry board known as the Shaw Commission.

The commission noted that Arab objections to Zionism were ideological, comprehensive, intense, and inflexible. In its report, it nonetheless devoted thousands of words to minute details of specific Arab grievances. It plumbed complaints that Jews, on one occasion, brought a chair to Jerusalem’s Western Wall and, on another, set up a screen there to divide male and female worshipers.

All this brings to mind the story of a man who thoroughly detests his wife but makes his case for divorce on the grounds that she doesn’t put the cap back on the toothpaste tube. Obviously, what he gripes about is not what accounts for his detestation. Confusion on this score was characteristic of Middle East policy officials in 1929, and it still is.

Different Responses from the Jewish Communities of California and Newton

Across the United States, radicalized educators are foisting their anti-Israel agenda onto susceptible schoolchildren. Frequently this is done under the guise of the trendy “intersectionality” concept that associates the Palestinian cause with less controversial “social justice” causes. Feckless school committees and administrators fail to block the infiltration of flawed material into the classroom or reprimand teachers who misuse their classroom stature to indoctrinate students. It is left up to vigilant citizens to oppose the hijacking of public education.

This report examines two cases, one in California, and the other in Newton, Massachusetts, that evoked sharply different responses from their respective Jewish communities:
- The California case involves an attempt to inject anti-Israel activism and anti-Jewish tropes into an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum mandated by California’s legislature.
- The Newton case tracks the insertion of biased units on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into history courses by ideologically-motivated teachers.

In California, exposure of the radical politics embedded in the proposed curriculum elicited a strong reaction from the Jewish community and responsive politicians, including the governor. This impressive grass-roots response persuaded state education officials to delay the curriculum’s implementation and promise to make revisions.

In Newton, the city’s school committee has treated public concerns with disdain. Lacking curiosity to investigate the claims of bias and factual flaws, the school committee has failed to hold the superintendent accountable for ensuring that students receive an education free from bias and indoctrination. An entire generation of Newton children are being inculcated with a distorted depiction of Israel and the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib are endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.

The Sanders campaign confirmed Tuesday the backing by three members of “The Squad,” a group of four congresswomen, including Rep. Ayana Presley of Massachusetts, who are trying to pushing for more left-wing policies in the Democratic party.

Omar and Tlaib, the first two Muslim women in Congress, were expected to separately publish statements of support for Sanders, who is Jewish, Haaretz reported Wednesday.

The endorsements are a major boon for the 78-year-old Vermont senator, who has faced questions over his health since suffering a heart attack two weeks ago.

The 30-year-old Ocasio-Cortez, 38-year-old Omar, and 43-year-old Tlaib are progressive stars and frequent targets of US President Donald Trump.

Sanders’s deputy communications director Sarah Ford said Ocasio-Cortez will appear with the senator at a rally in her home district in New York this weekend.

Sanders appeared to hint at her backing during Tuesday’s Democratic debate in response to a question about his age, saying his skeptics should attend his Saturday rally featuring a “surprise guest.”

Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar have all been more critical of Israel than most Democratic lawmakers, while Sanders, who has spent time on a kibbutz in Israel, is considered to be more critical of Jerusalem than others running for the Democratic nomination.

Presidential hopeful Julián Castro (D) told Breitbart News in CNN’s spin room following Tuesday night’s debate that he does not believe Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are antisemitic despite their history of controversial comments.

“Of course I don’t believe in any kind of antisemitism,” Castro said.

“So will you condemn Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib for their antisemitism?” Breitbart News’s Aaron Klein asked.

“I don’t know which comment you’re talking about, so all I can speak to is, and I believe — I don’t believe that they are antisemitic,” Castro said.

The presidential hopeful was presented with Omar’s remark about support for Israel being “all about the Benjamins,” but he willfully ignored the example.

“I don’t believe they are –” Castro began as he walked away, refusing to address Omar’s specific remarks.

US Senator Amy Klobuchar accused President Donald Trump of endangering Israel through his order to pull US troops out of Syria, a move that cleared the way for Turkey to invade an area of the country held by the Kurds, who are US allies.

“Think about our other allies, Israel, what do they think now — ‘Donald Trump is not true to our allies,’” Klobuchar said Tuesday at a debate for Democratic presidential candidates in the suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

Following Trump’s announcement last week, Turkey launched a broad assault on Kurdish-controlled areas in northeastern Syria, with intensive bombardment paving the way for a major ground offensive.

Other candidates also condemned Trump’s pullout, although there were particularly tense exchanges between Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who said that US troops should leave the Middle East entirely, and others — like South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former vice president Joe Biden — who said some kind of a troop presence is necessary to prevent mass killing and protect US interests.

Buttigieg called fellow former veteran Gabbard “dead wrong” for her earlier support of withdrawing troops from Syria.

Antisemites from the left claim to be anti-racist and yet they’re racist.

They claim to be in favour of human rights and are silent on the grossest violations of human rights on the planet.

Remember their rules:
1 Always claim you’re being smeared
2 Always smear others.
3 Always have a Jew or someone claiming to be a Jew front your activities
4 Always raise a straw man argument to divert attention from being called out.
5 Always pretend it’s legitimate to talk about a Jewish conspiracy, call it a lobby Israeli, Zionist, (allowing point 6)
6 Always talk as the underdog fighting against an all powerful machine looking to hide the truth

We don’t debate these people we offer evidence of their racism.

American Jews you’re slow to this fight, Jews are being pushed out of the anti-racism space.

The Forward thinks it’s nice to present a bunch of different views as to whether antisemitism really happens to their own Opinion Editor.

Take a fucking stand!

There aren’t any half measures here, they aren’t playing for the sake of playing, they’re playing to win and they’ll do whatever they have to to push Jews out of any space they find them.

We must do the same.

Both domestically and internationally, Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn presents himself as a friend to Muslims, aware of and sympathetic to the problems they face. And superficially his presentation is valid. In stark contrast to his problems with the Jewish community, Corbyn does seem at ease with Muslims – he supported the community after Islamophobic attacks and frequently visits Mosques around the UK. Internationally, he can also point to his long record of support for the Palestinian cause. But amid speculation that Boris Johnson will call a general election later this year, and with the prospect that Jeremy Corbyn could soon be in power, it is worth scrutinising the Labour leader’s relations with the Muslim community more closely.

First, we need to be clear: Corbyn only supports some Muslims in the same way that he only supports some Jews. If you are Jewish and reject the state of Israel, you are perfectly acceptable to the Labour leader, as you have passed the key test – you no longer back what he sees as an imperialist regime. But if you do support Israel, then you lose your right to complain about anti-Semitism.

Less blatantly, Corbyn applies the same logic to Muslims. Corbyn’s model of the world is entirely binary, with anti-imperialists on one side and imperialist states – like the US, or the West as a whole – on the other. The list of anti-imperialist states varies but it often includes Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Russia, and China. And here lies the problem: if you are a Muslim and are victimised by one of these states, then you get little to no support from Corbyn. You are not suffering from the actions of an autocratic regime; you have become a pawn of imperialism. In effect, in Corbyn’s world, the nature of your oppressor matters.

So his much-vaunted support for the Palestinians is actually conditional. If Palestinians support the anti-Assad resistance in Syria, then they are not worth the UK’s support. They have crossed the line from being oppressed by the imperialist state of Israel to opposing the supposedly anti-imperialist Bashar al-Assad regime.

The climactic face-off of the 2019 Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg took place on a wide, sunny plaza, between a statue dedicated to the millions of anonymous miners who had toiled under inhuman conditions to enrich their white masters and build one of the most fundamentally unequal and oppressive societies on earth, and a tent selling gourmet miniature doughnuts. Here was a psycho-political map of today’s South Africa: a recent and cruel history facing the promise of a normal bourgeois existence, with a bunch of confused or angry or radicalized young people in the middle and the invisible majority busy doing something else.

Apartheid week crescendoed this past April with a shouting match between members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee and the South African Union of Jewish Students in which campus security eventually intervened. A photo of Israeli activist Ashager Araro facing down an irate PSCer captured the weirdness of the scene, with convulsive, finger-wagging anger directed at a young Israeli Ethiopian woman amid signs with pink hearts and the words UNITY WINS. “Classic Thursday,” a SAUJS supporter remarked to me, offering this verbal eye roll as matters escalated. IAW always ends like this.

The week-long anti-Israel event is almost never incident-free at Wits. In previous years, a microphone cable had been cut while an Arab speaker from Israel addressed a SAUJS counterevent. Pro-Palestine activists have goose-stepped past the SAUJS tent; last year’s furor was over PSC-sponsored posters of Anne Frank wearing a keffiyeh. Everyone seems to agree that the PSC went a little too far in hanging black mannequins from trees during IAW in 2016, but it’s not so great the rest of the year, either. In 2013, pro-BDS protesters disrupting a concert by an Israeli jazz group on campus broke into a rousing chorus of “Shoot the Jew.”

The seeds of this year’s confrontation were sewn about 20 minutes earlier, as a couple hundred students gathered in a green oval in front of the science buildings on West Campus, where a facsimile of the West Bank security barrier and a banner reading “AMANDLA-INTIFADA” announced IAW’s home base. “Amandla” is an Nguni word meaning “power,” and was a rallying cry during the struggle against the apartheid regime; a nearby display showed parallel photos of wounded children being carried through smoke-filled streets, labeled: 1976, Soweto, South Africa; and 2014, Gaza, Palestine. Keffiyehs and hijabs dotted the multiracial crowd, which included a woman wearing modish earrings, face-sized sunglasses, and a neon-pink shirt reading, “The World Defeated Nazism. The World Defeated Apartheid. The World Will Defeat Zionism” in red lettering.

The chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is under fire for saying that a presentation to residence-hall advisors on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians was antisemitic.

The presentation, called “Palestine & Great Return March: Palestinian Resistance to 70 Years of Israeli Terror,” prepared by a Palestinian-American student involved in the Students for Justice in Palestine organization, was critical of Israel but not antisemitic, critics responded, according to the local newspaper the News-Gazette. They urged the university to formulate a definition of antisemitism.

Chancellor Robert Jones had made the assertion in a campus-wide email last week, which also referenced the recent discovery of a swastika in in the Foreign Languages Building. The presentation to about a dozen resident advisers and multicultural advocates was made late last month. Complaints were filed about both the presentation and the swastika, the Daily Illini student newspaper reported Monday.

“This exercise was part of a university program created to help students learn to share diverse ideas and perspectives that lead to new understanding. Instead of fostering dialogue, it incited division, distrust and anger,” Jones wrote. “The program allowed our students to enter an extremely challenging and potentially volatile situation without the preparation, training, education and professional oversight they needed to succeed. This is inexcusable and unacceptable. This is a failure to our students, and that is my responsibility.”

All housing staff, RAs and advocates will be required to undergo antisemitism training, Jones said.

The Illini Public Affairs Committee, which works to support U.S.-Israel relations at the University, called the presentation “a narrative of demonization of Israel and its citizens and Jewish students.”

On September 17, a planned Islamist lobbying day at the Ohio Statehouse flopped after the Middle East Forum's Islamism in Politics (IIP) project convinced Ohio legislators to snub the Council on American-American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and its supporters.

During CAIR's third annual "Muslim Day at the Capitol" event, IIP carried out an aggressive lobbying campaign and visited the Ohio Statehouse to monitor CAIR's influence operation, only to find the capitol building largely deserted.

In the weeks leading up to CAIR-Ohio's lobby day, IIP met with state and federal politicians to warn them about CAIR's extremist past, noting that the FBI and Columbus Police Department cut ties with the nonprofit because of its status as an unindicted co-conspirator in the nation's largest terrorism financing trial. Additionally, IIP distributed a letter to every member of the Ohio General Assembly recounting evidence of extremism from CAIR and its Ohio chapters.

IIP also disseminated this information to Ohio voters, who sent letters to their state and federal representatives. "Do not be fooled by this self-styled civil rights and advocacy group," the letters warned. "Ohio's growing Muslim American community deserves better."

At the statehouse, CAIR's delegation heard from keynote speaker Linda Sarsour — a Muslim activist who was recently kicked off the board of the national Women's March for making anti-Semitic statements — before breaking into groups to meet with Ohio lawmakers.

The news cycle is a term we hear a lot of. It may evoke in us the exciting rush of 24/7 news-on-demand or arouse stressful feelings of information overload. For some, it recalls memories of simpler times, when the news cycle consisted of perusing the paper over breakfast, catching a mid-day radio update and tuning in to the nightly news before turning in.

“News cycle” might elicit all of the above.

The problem is that news cycle can mean different things to different people. The differences aren’t contradictory, but because the term is often used so casually, the confusion is understandable. It’s difficult to sort through broadcast, print and online media for news that’s relevant, informative, proportionate and engaging. This misunderstood term fuels feelings of “Stop the news cycle, I want to get off.”

But when we unravel the definition, we’ll see that we can actually master the news cycle, improve our news habits, and become better informed.

The narrative that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by extremist Yigal Amir killed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is advanced in the headline of an Oct. 11th Guardian review of a new Israeli film on the 1995 tragedy:

It’s also included in the opening paragraph of the review, written by Anne Joseph:
The murder of an Israeli prime minister by an Orthodox Jew was inconceivable,” says American-Israeli film-maker Yaron Zilberman. “For anyone who was pro-peace, it was beyond anything that we could fathom.” The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the religious ultra-nationalist law student Yigal Amir, at a peace rally on 4 November 1995, was one of the most traumatic events in Israel’s history. Rabin’s death buried the prospect of peace, further divided an already riven society and left an indelible mark on Israel’s politics.

The Guardian claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

First, shortly after Rabin’s assassination, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister. Despite the fact that he was fiercely opposed to the Oslo Accords, on his watch Jerusalem still signed the Wye River Memorandum and Hebron Agreement, which obligated Israel to further territorial withdrawals from the West Bank, including from 80% of the historic Jewish city of Hebron.

Israel’s next prime minister, Ehud Barak, negotiated a final status agreement with the Palestinians that would have created a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and most of the West Bank, with Palestinian control of Arab neighborhoods and Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which iis Judaism’s holiest site ). Yasser Arafat rejected the 2001 offer, which exceeded the demands of the Oslo Accords, that, let’s remember, never called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Not only did Arafat reject what would have been the creation of the first sovereign Palestinian state in history, but responded by intensifying a violent intifada that preceded the breakdown of negotiations with Israel in January 2001. The Palestinian led violence, from 2001-2005, marked by scores of deadly suicide bombing attacks on innocent civilians, would ultimately claim more than 1,100 Israeli lives.

The BBC used the term terrorism in its reporting on all those previous attacks in the European locations mentioned by Gardner.

On the same day an edition of the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newshour’ also included an item about the Halle attack which was introduced by presenter Tim Franks as follows:
Franks: “Wednesday was the holiest day of the Jewish calendar; the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur. In the German town of Halle it was also a day of terror as a gunman sprayed fire on the closed doors of the synagogue inside which about fifty Jews were praying.”

Once again we see evidence of the BBC’s double standards on ‘language when reporting terrorism’: when a gunman motivated by a particular political ideology attacked a synagogue in Germany, the BBC accurately described that act as terrorism.

But when similarly motivated gunmen attacked a synagogue in Jerusalem in November 2014 the BBC avoided describing the incident as a terror attack in its own words and compromised its own impartiality by refusing to discuss the blatant discrepancy it perpetuates between reporting on terror attacks against Israelis and coverage of attacks in some other locations.

FIFTEEN Australian gravestones were sprayed with graffiti at the Commonwealth War Graves in Haifa in what is being described as a “hate crime” by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA).

”There are 65 headstones with graffiti, plus one headstone that has been broken and since removed,” a British Defence Attache who visited the cemetery reported.

“Of the 65 headstones, 15 are Australian, one is Canadian and the remainder are British.”

The Commonwealth War Graves Commission confirmed that slogans and graffiti, including a swastika, were spray-painted across many of the headstones.

The AJN understands that some of the graves were of Australian Light horsemen who were killed during the Battle of Semakh on September 25 in 1918.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison condemned the attack.

“This is disgusting, appalling and nothing other than just hate-filled desecration of our own diggers, our light horsemen and it is terribly upsetting,” he said.

His comments were echoed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said the desecration of the graves of the World War I heroes in Haifa was an “abhorrent crime”.

“We owe these soldiers a historical debt for the liberation of the Land of Israel from Ottoman rule.

“We are doing everything necessary to find those responsible and bring them to justice.”

The MFA condemned the act as a “hate crime” and said those responsible “chose to smash and draw swastikas on gravestones of Commonwealth soldiers killed during the two world wars”.

They confirmed the incident is being investigated by the Israel Police.

MFA’s director general, and Israel’s former ambassador to Australia, Yuval Rotem, said he expected to see those responsible brought to justice.

“Shocked and appalled by the despicable act of vandalism at the British cemetery in Haifa,” Rotem said.

“We are forever committed to honour the memory of Commonwealth soldiers who sacrificed their lives fighting in the region.”

Sunny Isles Beach police have arrested a man who allegedly assaulted two people as they were leaving a prayer service from a local synagogue because of their Jewish faith, officials said.

According to a police report, 66-year-old Larry Greene, who identifies himself by his Hebrew name Elijah Israel, was arrested Monday on two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Greene approached the two victims as they were walking from prayer at a local synagogue in the 18000 block of Collins Avenue, raising a knife over his head and yelling anti-Semitic remarks, the report said.

The men were wearing Yarmulkes on their heads when Greene approached and told them to "go back to Israel," the report said.

Greene lunged at one of the victims and threatened to kill the, while he continued to yell the anti-Semitic remarks before officers were called to the scene, the report said.

Police were able to detain Greene and found a knife in his pocket during a pat down, the report said.

While detained, police said Greene identified himself as a Black Israelite and referred to the victims as "fake Jews."

The man who attacked a visiting Jewish-American professor by throwing a kippa off his head several times in the western German city of Bonn was sentenced to four-and-a-half-years in prison.

The man, 21, a German citizen of Palestinian heritage, assaulted Professor Yitzhak Melamed in 2018. During the incident, German police officers wrestled to the ground and arrested the 50-year-old visiting professor after believing him to be the assailant.

The Israel-born professor was teaching philosophy at the University of Baltimore and was visiting Germany to deliver a lecture. While the professor and a friend were strolling in a park, the attacker shouted anti-Semitic insults in English and German, including “No Jew in Germany!” and knocked the kippa from the professor’s head, and then shoved the professor and hit him on the shoulder.

The professor, who did not attend the court hearing on Monday, said through his attorney that the actions of the police were worse than the assailant, the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported.

A teacher has been sacked for ‘joking’ with Jewish pupils that she would ‘ship them off to the gas chambers’ if they did not finish their homework.

Newberries Primary School dismissed the woman on Friday following an outcry from children and parents.

The teacher is said to have made the anti-Semitic remark on Thursday while teaching a class of 28 ten-year-olds, 11 of whom are Jewish. According to parents, she said: ‘You better finish off your work quick, or I’ll ship you all off to the gas chambers.’

It is understood that when challenged by one of the pupils, the teacher said she was ‘joking’ and apologised, before asking the children not to tell anyone.

However, pupils informed their parents and the news soon spread on school WhatsApp groups.

Many parents telephoned and emailed the head teacher to complain, with some even threatening to withdraw their children unless the staff member was dismissed.

The number of reported hate crimes against Jews in England and Wales doubled in the past year, according to government statistics reported Tuesday by The Guardian.

Some 1,326 hate crimes targeted Jews, compared to 672 offenses last year. Attacks on Jews made up 18 percent of the year’s religious-based hate crimes, according to statistics from the UK’s Home Office.

In one account recorded by the Citizens UK community organizing group, a Jewish student in her 20s named Alicia was walking through Manchester when two men approached her and said, “We need you to run our business. We need a Jew to run our business because the Jews have all the money.”

She tried walking away, but one of the men proceeded to assault and sexually harass her. “If you can’t run our business, you can at least fuck me,” Alicia recalled him saying.

The 3,530 attacks on Muslims made up 47% of religious-based hate crime offenses, a similar figure to that recorded last year.

The overall number of hate crimes in England and Wales has more than doubled since 2013, to a total number of 103,379.

On October 16, 1943, the Jews of Rome were jolted awake by Nazi soldiers pounding at their doors.

The Nazi raid targeting the ancient Jewish neighborhood of the Italian capital, as well as Jews living in the rest of the city, started at 5:15 a.m. It was Shabbat, and as was the case this year, it was the third day of Sukkot (dates on the Hebrew and Gregorian calendars cycle once every 19 years).

Over 1,000 Jews were arrested that day. Two days later, they were all deported to Auschwitz. Only 16 survived.

October 16 has become a day of mourning for the Italian Jewish community. Every year, the anniversary is marked by solemn commemorations, which in the past few years have consistently been attended by major representatives of the local and national authorities.

“We must respond to what happened with life,” Chief Rabbi of Rome Riccardo Di Segni said during a march on Saturday night, as reported by the Italian Jewish newspaper Pagine Ebraiche. “This is the testimony we must bear.”

The event was organized by the Jewish community and by the lay Catholic association Sant’Egidio right before the beginning of Sukkot, a time when one is obligated to be happy and rejoice.

Several hundred participants walked through the very same streets where Jews were gathered to be sent to their death 76 years ago, and which today buzzes with Jewish life thanks to the Jewish school, kosher restaurants and synagogues.

A Muslim man from Albania who saved Jews during the Holocaust will attend an event in Poland honoring rescuers from across Europe.

Xhemal Veseli, 93, who is among a handful of Muslim rescuers alive today, will travel to Warsaw with Albania’s foreign minister, Edmond Panariti, whose family also saved Jews from the Holocaust. They will attend in Warsaw an event titled “An Evening for the Righteous” on November 14.

“In the remarkably fragmented and aggressive world we live in today, religion sadly often divides us,” said the organizer, Jonny Daniels of the From the Depths commemoration group. But testimonies like Xhemal’s, Daniels added, “bring us together as Jews and Muslims.”

In addition to Albania, the event will be attended by rescuers from Poland and Belarus as well as officials from Israel, Denmark and the United States.

Xhemal Veseli and his late brother, Hamid, rescued two Jewish families from Italian occupation forces in 1943. Xhemal, then 17, walked with elderly Jews for 36 hours to his family home, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Israel. Yad Vashem recognized the brothers as Righteous Among the Nations in 2004.

As many as 17 ancient Bible fragments that Hobby Lobby’s owner, billionaire Steve Green, bought for the Museum of the Bible were apparently stolen by a world-renowned Oxford University professor, the museum has acknowledged.

The acknowledgment builds on a slow drip of revelations over the past two years regarding the problematic origins of many of the antiquities stored in the museum, located just south of the National Mall in Washington, DC. The museum, which opened nearly two years ago, was created by the Green family at a cost of $500 million.

The biblical fragments belong to a British nonprofit, the Egypt Exploration Society, and were apparently sold in batches between 2010 and 2013. It was unclear on October 15 whether any charges will be filed in the case.

The fragments in question include four New Testament papyri that were bought by Hobby Lobby in 2013 from Oxford Professor Dirk Obbink but remained in the possession of the Egypt Exploration Society’s collection, where Obbink was apparently studying them. Another 11 Old and New Testament fragments Obbink sold to Hobby Lobby are in the museum’s collection in Washington, along with two additional fragments that came from another antiquities dealer, the Israeli Baidun family, but also belong to the society.

The US organisation Sephardic Heritage Museum is leading a project to 'restore' the Great synagogue in Aleppo, Syria. One of the leaders of the community, Joseph Sitt, has urged the community to help advance the work on the roof and walls before the winter sets in. There are no Jews living in Aleppo and only a handful in Damascus.

Photos on the recent newsletter show the Great Synagogue in 2008 and the alleged destruction following the Syrian civil war. It is not known if the Sephardic Heritage Museum is in consultation with experts.

Joseph Sitt traces the history of the synagogue in his Succot newsletter: "One of the recent initiatives of the Sephardic Heritage Museum has been to oversee and fund the restoration of the Great Synagogue of Aleppo. According to legend, the foundation for this holy place of worship was constructed by King David's General, Joab Ben Zeruyah (circa 950 BCE) after he conquered the city. Visitors throughout the centuries were impressed by its beauty. An Italian nobleman, Pietro della Valle, who visited the synagogue on August 23, 1625, writes, “The synagogue of the Jews of Aleppo ... is known for its beauty and antiquity."

"For 3,000 years this synagogue has been a silent witness to our illustrious community's steady growth, yet ultimately has been left standing alone as our entire community of over 25,000 emigrated from the area over the course of the past century.

"Unfortunately the synagogue was severely damaged in a 1947 riot, but rebuilt again by Murad Guindi, Albert Nakash and Jack Chakalo in the 1980's.

The Israeli company's first consignment of Trophy anti-missile protection systems is part of a $500 million deal with the US Army.

Israeli defense electronics company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. says that it has delivered a first consignment of Trophy anti-missile protection systems to the US Army for Abrams tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs).

The Trophy anti-missile protection system is sought after for its ability to defend tanks against a wide range of battlefield threats including rocket propelled grenades (RPGs). The system has been in operational use with the Israel Defense Forces since 2011. It is fitted on the Merkava tank and Israeli APCs and has on many occasions intercepted missiles fired at Israeli armored vehicles during incidents in and around Gaza.

During 2018 and early 2019, Rafael signed deals with the US army to supply Trophy systems worth $500 million. Rafael said that the Trophy system has been adapted to the operational needs of the US forces. The system is being supplied in partnership with Leonardo DRS, a US unit of Italian company Leonardo, and Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI) (TASE: ARSP.B1) unit ELTA Systems. Production of about half of the components making up the Trophy system is being carried out in the US.

When Harold “Smoky” Simon grins at you, it’s hard to remember that, at 99, the man is one of a dwindling club: the heroes of Israel’s War of Independence.

“Unhappily, that’s true,” he says in an accent reflecting his South African roots.

Simon went on to help found not only the infant country’s air force in May of 1948, as Chief of Air Operations in Israel’s War of Independence, but also World Machal, whose thousands of volunteer soldiers from around the world have served alongside the Israel Defense Forces, beginning in 1948. Years later, with a partner, he established the Simon & Wiesel life-insurance agency, one of Israel’s top firms.

For all these accomplishments and the remarkable impact he’s had on the Jewish state since its birth, Simon received Nefesh B’Nefesh’s Sylvan Adams Bonei Zion Lifetime Achievement Award on September 24, shortly before the start of the High Holidays.

It was his years flying as a navigator-bombardier for the South African Air Force (SAAF) during World War II that Simon says prepared him for this extraordinary life and his role in Israel’s history.

In 1948, as newlyweds, Simon and his wife, Myra, who had been a meteorologist in the SAAF, joined a South African Zionist Federation group to volunteer to fight with their brethren in Palestine/Israel, in what was threatening to be a serious war against the Arabs.

“Fighting the Nazis gave us the skills and the experience we needed to fight for Israel,” he says more than seven decades later. “Without that expertise, none of us would have known how to win that war.”

Still, he adds, “we had to muster all of our nerve to do the job against these powerful enemies. We were up against six Arab armies — the Egyptians were supplied by the Brits, the Syrians by the French, and we didn’t have a single combat plane of our own.”

 UNESCO’s Executive Board has unanimously endorsed a draft resolution on the city of Jerusalem and its walls during its 207th session, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Sufian Qudah said on Wednesday.

Qudah underlined the importance of the decision, which was the result of Jordanian diplomatic efforts, in coordination with Palestine and UNESCO’s Arab and Muslim groups, according to a Foreign Ministry statement.

The decision affirms all previous gains that have been stipulated in the Jerusalem file, he added.

Qudah highlighted that the resolution and its appendix stress all the components of Jordan’s stance on the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls, including Muslim and Christian holy sites, noting that it also reiterates rejection of all Israeli violations and unilateral measures at these locations.

The resolution calls on Israel to halt all illegal unilateral procedures and violations against Al Aqsa Mosque/Al Haram Al Sharif and in the Old City, Qudah said.

7. The first week of May 2019, a serious eruption of hostilities took place in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. In total 25 Palestinians were killed, including militants, four women and two children, in addition to 154 injured. The hostilities also caused a significant amount of destruction including damage to 41 housing units and 13 education facilities in Gaza1. On 6 May a cessation of hostilities was established, ending the escalation, after intense efforts by the United Nations and Egypt.