An ongoing shooting attack was underway at several sites Monday evening in central Vienna, including in the area of a synagogue and the offices of the Jewish community, killing at least seven people, Austrian media reported, prompting a large-scale police operation.

Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said the incidents appeared to be a terror attack with multiple perpetrators.

The Kurier newspaper said at least one of the fatalities was a police officer. It added there were four people seriously injured in the series of attacks.

There were multiple gunmen, some of them still at large, according to messages sent to members of the local Jewish community.

Austrian news agency APA quoted the country’s Interior Ministry as saying that one attacker has been killed and at least one other could be on the run.

Reports said there was a hostage situation in the city’s seventh district. In addition, reports said there had been an explosion, with one of the assailants possibly blowing himself up.

Oskar Deutsch, the head of the Jewish community in Vienna, said the shooting took place in the street where the city’s main synagogue is located, in the first district, but that it wasn’t clear whether the house of worship had been targeted. He said there were no casualties among the Jewish community.

Deutsch noted that the synagogue and the community offices were closed at the time of the shooting, and asked all community members to stay away from the area.

#BREAKING: Active shooting near synagogue in Vienna, Austria. Casualties reported.

Please pray! pic.twitter.com/UVBMSuxcD0

— Hananya Naftali (@HananyaNaftali) November 2, 2020

American Jews have been reminded that the world’s oldest hatred almost never totally disappears, even in places where Jews are largely assimilated and communal life feels settled. During Donald Trump’s presidency, lunatics of various ideological stripes have launched deadly assaults on synagogues, kosher grocery stores, and Hanukkah parties, while a wave of dozens of physical attacks on Jews in New York City appeared to have no overt political motive. Multiple left-wing members of Congress support the BDS movement; on the right, the president has made uneasily frequent—though not outwardly hostile—mentions of Jewish money and political power and been less outwardly condemnatory of white supremacy than the overwhelming majority of American Jews would have liked. The alleged anti-Semitism of campus Israel haters, identitarian right wingers, mentally disturbed passersby, and actual members of the federal government jostle for room within a frayed American Jewish psyche.

Last year, the American Jewish Committee commissioned a poll aimed at understanding how American Jews perceived these various threats against them. This year it repeated the exercise, while also polling the general public on its views on American anti-Semitism. The results are worth examining.

Jews overwhelmingly believe that America is becoming a more anti-Semitic and physically dangerous place for them to live, work, and study: 82% responded that anti-Semitism has increased over the past five years. Some 27% reported that Jewish institutions with which they affiliated had “been the targets of anti-Semitism” since the October 2018 massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; 37% reported that they had “taken steps to conceal their Jewishness in public” since that attack. Meanwhile, 43% of Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 had “experienced anti-Semitism on a college campus over the past five years.”

American Jews are center-left in political orientation—the latest polling suggests that over 70% of them will vote for Joe Biden next week. Thus, the AJC’s findings about the perceived bipartisan nature of anti-Jewish hate reflects a certain fatalism, while also breaking down along lines of party affiliation: While 69% of respondents agreed that the Republican Party holds at least some anti-Semitic views, a not-insignificant 37% said the same about the Democrats.

One of the poll’s relative surprises is that BDS, which is almost exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, and which has vocal fans among growing Democratic Party constituencies, is viewed as either being anti-Semitic or having anti-Semitic supporters among a whopping 80% of Jewish respondents. While the statement “Israel has no right to exist” has adherents on both extremes of the political spectrum, it is mostly heard in left-wing quarters these days; 85% of Jewish respondents agreed it was anti-Semitic.

Here's the link to the youtube of the panel I moderated yesterday for @HabithonistimEn in English about the future of the (irrelevant) Palestinian Authority.https://t.co/vXcfH0HjBY

— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) November 2, 2020

A hardline settler leader and a Palestinian former terrorist have released a joint video calling on Americans to vote for Donald Trump in the US presidential elections. The clip, posted online Sunday, features Samaria Regional Council chief Yossi Dagan alongside Mohammed Massad, who served seven years in an Israeli prison for attacks committed during the First Intifada in the late 1980s before becoming a peace activist and a fierce critic of the Palestinian Authority. “During the Obama-Biden administration, our region was filled with chaos,” Dagan says in the video. “Two hundred and four citizens of Israel were murdered as a result of terrorist activities.” “The administration of US President Donald Trump stopped the support for the Palestinian leadership and scaled down the severity of the hostilities,” says Massad. “For the sake of our lives, for the sake of our future, vote for President Trump,” both men conclude. Massad changed his views dramatically after serving a prison term for his terror activities as part of the Fatah armed wing, and wrote a book arguing that suicide attacks go against the Quran. (h/t jzaik)

Thanks to @realDonaldTrump, there has been far less bloodshed...listen to this unlikely pair. pic.twitter.com/UPsK8tj0GP

— Jeff Ballabon (@ballabon) November 2, 2020

France has raised its security alert to the highest level following the horrific attack on October 29 in which a 21-year-old Tunisian shouting “Allahu Akbar” beheaded a woman and killed two other people in a church in Nice before he was shot and arrested by police.

The attack came 13 days after Samuel Paty, a middle-school teacher in a Paris suburb, Conflas-Sainte-Honorine, was beheaded by an 18-year-old Muslim who was apparently enraged by the teacher showing his students the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad during a civics lesson about freedom of expression. Police are also investigating Saturday’s shooting in Lyon in which a Greek Orthodox priest was seriously wounded.

These latest incidents can be traced back to the attack claimed by al-Qaeda on January 7, 2015, in which two Muslim brothers forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly, shooting dead 12 people and wounding 11 others. This triggered further violence, including the “Hypercacher” kosher supermarket siege in which a terrorist murdered four Jews.

President Emmanuel Macron came out strongly in favor of free speech and against what he called the “Islamic terrorist attack” in Nice, saying France had been targeted “over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief... And I say it with great clarity again today: We will not give in.” Macron added, “We will not give up caricatures and drawings, even if others back away.”

Macron’s words incensed the Muslim world, and several countries – including Kuwait and Qatar – announced a boycott of French products in protest. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even questioned Macron’s mental health. “It becomes more and more difficult to be a Muslim and live an Islamic lifestyle in western countries,” Erdogan charged, leading France to recall its ambassador from Turkey.

A man who beheaded a person in a church in Nice, France was radicalized by a recent controversy over another beheading in France. The chain of events shows that terrorists thrive off rumors of religion being “insulted” to then attack other religions, which would appear contradictory since media reports indicated that French “secularism” was to blame for the attacks. The attacks on French churches are not unique; terrorists have targeted them in the past, killing a priest in 2016.

Several media analyses and commentaries have pointed to France’s “extreme form of secularism” as the reason that terrorists are “angry” at France. However, the terror attacks look a lot more like hate crimes against Christians, including the attack on a church in al-Tabqah in Syria, than they do a protest against French “secularism.”

It is worthwhile to unpack the false claim that French “secularism” causes terror attacks. If that was the reason for attacks, then one would think that secular symbols of the French state would be targeted. That’s usually how terrorism is supposed to work. Because we are told terrorism is about getting attention through symbolic acts of violence, then the terror group should target the symbol of the state or thing that it is against.

However, there are few examples of these “terrorists” attacking institutions of the State in France. They don’t attack nude statues either. They attack churches. And they don’t only do it in France; attacks tend to target churches and Christians worldwide. If the extremists are radicalized by being offended over “blasphemy” and insults to their faith, then why is the response to attack religious buildings and innocent religious people?

In January 2015, after cartoons were published in France that were supposedly offensive, there were attacks on 45 churches in Niger. The churches had no connection to the cartoons, and Charlie Hebdo is not a Christian magazine. In short, the secularism that drives critique of religion tends to critique Christianity and Islam, and yet the extremist response is to kill Christians and bomb churches.

The trial over the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack has been delayed for at least a week after two more defendants tested positive for coronavirus, the presiding lawyer said.

Fourteen people are on trial accused of having helped the killers of 12 victims in the attack on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, a female police officer a day later, and four hostages at a Jewish supermarket.

After primary suspect Ali Riza Polat received a COVID-19 diagnosis over the weekend, the presiding judge ordered all those on trial to be tested.

“In view of the health protocols in force requiring isolation of both positive and contact cases, the hearing will not be able to resume this week,” Regis de Jorna said in an email sent Sunday to lawyers involved in the case.

The trial had already been suspended until Wednesday following Polat’s positive diagnosis, with Jorna telling lawyers the court would not sit again until all the results were in.

Two further defendants then tested positive, with two others remaining under supervision despite negative results as they were believed to be “contact cases,” according to Jorna’s email.

The results from the other defendants, detained in Fleury-Merogis, are due Monday.

The extended suspension of the hearing will further delay the conclusion of the trial, which opened on September 2.

Al-Aqsa Mosque Lesson by Sheikh Issam Amira: The Beheading of French Teacher Paty Is a Great Honor for All Muslims pic.twitter.com/qLhfmXrkBp

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 2, 2020

Kuwaiti Islamic scholar Nabil Al-Awadhi said in an October 24, 2020 interview on Channel 9 (Turkey) that any claims that slandering the Prophet Muhammad should be considered freedom of expression in France are deceitful. He called for a boycott of French products, saying that if billions of people boycott French products, this will have an impact on France’s economy. He said that in France, it is forbidden to mock a certain group of people, which he will not mention by name, and if anyone speaks out against them, they are accused of antisemitism, all the while it is considered freedom of speech to attack what millions of Muslims in France hold sacred. In addition, Al-Awadhi called on all French-speaking Muslims to spread Islam in France because the French nation is “miserable.”

In a video posted on his official YouTube channel on October 24, 2020, Pakistani politician and Islamic scholar Allama Khadim Hussain Rizvi urges the Pakistani government to declare Jihad against “those who slander the Prophet Muhammad." He urges the government to “use the atom bomb” and “[Let] everyone die.” He continues to say that he is declaring Jihad against those who slander the Prophet. Rizvi is the founder of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan political party in Pakistan, which was established to combat any change to the country’s blasphemy laws.

There it is, in black and white. For almost five years, Jews warned, nudged, reported, complained, pleaded and protested that there was a culture of anti-Semitism in the Labour party. For the most part, the party ignored them, although others assailed them, denounced them as fifth columnists, accused them of orchestrating a ‘smear’ campaign, of being agents of a well-financed ‘lobby’, of trying to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn in service of Israel.

Scarcely better, and in some ways worse, were those who knew they were telling the truth but whose solidarity with them and commitment to resisting anti-Semitism was conditional on there not being an election in the offing. British Jews were treated as Jews always are when they try to raise the alarm: disbelieved, disregarded and betrayed.

The report of the Equality and Human Rights Commission not only believes Jews, it damns those who didn’t and those who worked against them. It cannot undo the harm done, but in acknowledging that harm — in confirming, in official-sounding language and with footnotes, that the harm happened — it goes some way to correcting the lies and establishing the truth. For those weary, but never worn down, by five years of fighting back, it will come as a relief as much as anything. They no longer have to prove themselves. The burden has shifted to where it belongs.

The EHRC began investigating Labour under the Equality Act 2010 after complaints by the Campaign Against Antisemitism and the Jewish Labour Movement in 2018. Between them and other sources, the CAA and JLM documented 220 allegations of anti-Semitism within Labour and argued that the party had failed to handle complaints properly. The EHRC report, published today, concludes that Labour broke the law in three areas: harassment of Jews, political interference in anti-Semitism complaints and a failure to provide sufficient training to staff investigating those complaints. The statutory body has issued the party with an unlawful act notice and it now has until 10 December to outline how it will implement the report’s recommendations.

This is not one of those legalistic, depends-how-you-interpret-it jobs. The report says there were ‘unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour party is responsible’, ‘serious failings in leadership and an inadequate process for handling anti-Semitism complaints across the Labour party’, ‘evidence of a significant number of complaints relating to anti-Semitism that were not investigated at all’, and a failure to ‘take effective measures to stop anti-Semitic conduct from taking place’. While the report acknowledges ‘some recent improvements’, it finds ‘a culture within the party which, at best, did not do enough to prevent anti-Semitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it’.

To those unfamiliar with the history of the letter-writer’s smear that Jews make false accusations of antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel, it was first called out by Professor David Hirsh to describe a trope used by Ken Livingstone in 2006 – and thus referred to as the Livingstone Formulation.

Unfortunately, this ‘formulation’ – denying antisemitism by calling into the question the motivation of the Jewish victims – has not at all been limited to the former London mayor. As CAMERA UK has documented, it’s been peddled and legitimised by British media outlets, including the BBC .

Further, as CST revealed in a 2019 report “The online networks behind the Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis”, antisemitic narratives that took root in Labour-supporting online circles during that time included “allegations of antisemitism against Labour are a fake smear campaign” – that is, the Livingstone Formulation.

Of even greater relevance, the explosive EHRC report released on Thursday, which found the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn broke equalities law in areas including harassment and discrimination, cited Livingstone (pg 28) using this very smear as an example of Labour officials using antisemitic tropes:

Op-ed writers are allowed to express their own opinion. They should not be allowed to express their own "facts."

Palestine is not, and never has been, an independent state, @Telegraph. Using the word this way is misleading. pic.twitter.com/hwGYTfQMUq

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 2, 2020

On Friday October 23, 2020, an event titled, “We Will Not Be Silenced: Against the Censorship and Criminalization of Academic Political Speech,” was hosted by the NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, co-sponsored by the Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies, the American Studies Program, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Among those featured in the NYU webinar was Leila Khaled, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) — a US-designated terrorist organization. Khaled is the unrepentant hijacker of TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and TWA Flight 741, one of three flights the PFLP targeted in the Dawson’s Field hijackings of 1970.

The three webinar speakers were: CUNY law student Nerdeen Kiswani, a founder and chair of Within Our Lifetime-United for Palestine; Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal; and Fred Moten, a professor in NYU Tisch’s Performance Studies Department and 2020 MacArthur Fellow.

Moderating the event was NYU professor Andrew Ross, member of the US Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel (USACBI) and secretary of NYU’s chapter of AAUP. In 2019, Ross’ department of Social and Cultural Analysis, pledged non-cooperation with NYU’s own campus in Tel Aviv. (The senior leadership of NYU does not condone BDS or support academic boycotts.)

Khaled was featured last month at a San Francisco State University (SFSU) event, which Zoom refused to carry because of the event’s violation of Zoom’s Terms of Service. At NYU’s event, she is shown in a pre-recorded clip reiterating her defense of “armed struggle” (10:05).

To those speaking at the webinar, Khaled was and remains a freedom fighter and an icon. Moten praises her when he says: “Leila Khaled not only refuses to be silenced; she refuses to speak the language and the false pieties of those who prosecute the war in which we live” (30:45).

On Thursday, October 29, 2020, Save the Children will release a report on “the impact of the Israeli military detention system on Palestinian children.” NGO Monitor has obtained and reviewed an advance copy of this publication. Our analysis shows that Save the Children has produced an inaccurate report, which cannot support the (predetermined) legal and policy conclusions drawn. The numerous highly emotive illustrations present a very politicized narrative that is clearly designed to demonize Israelis, not to protect minors. The answer to violence by Palestinian minors, including acts of terrorism and murder, is to address the incitement behind such actions, and not to absolve them of accountability, as proposed in the report.

In addition, we note that the page cover notes the report was “co-funded by the European Union” and features the EU logo. The latest available data from the EU (through 2019) does not show any projects involving Save the Children in recent years; however, there may be funds from 2020 that have not yet been made public. The fundamental flaws in this publication suggest that the EU should focus on educating Palestinian children to not be involved in violent crime, in place of more advocacy to demonize Israel.

NGO Monitor’s analysis of Save the Children’s report shows:

1. False and outdated “context”: The section purporting to provide an “Overview of the Israeli military detention system” is based on highly misleading and outdated assessments of how Israeli military courts deal with Palestinian children suspected of involvement with terrorism and other crimes. It fails to account for significant changes, with an emphasis on treatment of minors, that Israel has instituted over the past five years, in cooperation and consultation with international experts. Most notably, Save the Children repeats the thoroughly discredited claims from a 2013 report issued under UNICEF’s imprimatur (see “The Origins of ‘No Way to Treat a Child’: Analyzing UNICEF’s Report on Palestinian Minors” for an extensive discussion of UNICEF’s distortions that undermine Save the Children’s claims.)

Two years ago Campus Watch called for Georgetown University to cut ties with Georgetown University Alwaleed Center for Muslim Christian Understanding (ACMCU) senior fellow İbrahim Kalin, who has served as press secretary for Turkey's Islamist, bellicose president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's since December 2014. The good news is that Kalin is no longer associated with Georgetown. The bad news is that his departure more likely stems from the routine completion of his appointments (he had two) than to a praiseworthy decision by the university.

The American-educated Kalin (Ph.D. in Middle East studies, George Washington U.), who also serves as Erdoğan's chief advisor, faithfully supported his boss's brutal persecution of thousands of political opponents, including imprisoning professors and teachers, in the aftermath of the failed July 2016 coup attempt. Ever his master's lapdog, this week Kalin declared that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's lewd cartoon of Erdoğan (here) could not be considered freedom of expression.

It was therefore – initially, at least – a pleasant surprise to read in Kalin's updated biography on the Saudi-funded ACMCU's website that he's now a "former fellow." His tenure at ACMCU (2016 – 2018) overlapped with his service to Erdoğan, although his bio omits that inconvenient fact. But the university deserves no credit for Kalin's exodus, as he appears to have rotated out after a standard appointment. Unlike most other former fellows, however, he retains his own biographical entry at ACMCU. Breaking up, after all, is hard to do.

So is getting enough of a "good" thing. Kalin had an appointment at Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs that has also ended, as a header in his bio there notes. Thanks to the Wayback Machine website (which didn't capture his ACMCU bio), we know this change occurred between March 7, 2016, when no such header appeared, and October 8, 2018, by which time it did. It's reasonable to assume his appointments at ACMCU and the Berkley Center coincided.

The University of Connecticut is investigating after multiple reports of anti-Semitic incidents on the Storrs campus.

Officials said the incidents happened in residence halls on South Campus and included vandalism to photos of a menorah and a kinara in one and there was disturbing language written on the whiteboard of another.

"These recent reports were all acts of physical damage to property, including swastika graffiti. These are undeniable symbols of antisemitism that elicit painful reminders of the Holocaust among our Jewish students, faculty, and staff," school officials said in an email to students.

"These acts and other discriminatory acts this semester are deeply upsetting and leave a scar on members of our community whose beliefs or identities are targeted," they added.

According to school officials, after each incident, the Residential Life staff reached out to impacted parties to offer support.

UConn said it is working with members of the Hillel community to plan an event to be held in November to address the concerns and work towards healing.

The Pace University student government passed a resolution Wednesday adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, the Jewish News Syndicate reported.

The resolution, viewed by JNS, states that the student government of the New York City-based university "was created as a forum for students to voice their opinions on issues presented" by the students, faculty and administration. In addition, the university “aims to create and sustain a living-learning community that embraces diversity in all its forms, challenges habits and assumptions underlying the structures of power, privilege and injustice, and works to ensure that we are inclusive, welcoming and empowering to all our members.”

Jewish students make up 10% of undergraduates at the New York City-based university, according to Hillel International. This includes a branch of Hillel International and a chapter of the group Students Supporting Israel (SSI), the president of which, Eden Litvin, was the one who introduced the resolution, JNS reported.

“Jewish students constitute an important part of the broader Pace University community, yet remain distinguishable from the majority by common ethnic, religious and cultural characteristics,” the resolution states, adding that its Jewish community represents “a distinct and significant cultural community within the university, which Pace University is charter-bound to support, protect and defend.​” However, Jews and Jewish institutions remain the primary victims for religious-based hate crimes in the US, JNS reported.

The resolution also cited a rising spike in antisemitic incidents in recent years. These included the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018, the Chabad of Poway shooting, the Jersey City kosher supermarket shooting and even an incident oon the Pace University campus in 2019, which saw a building vandalized with a Star of David drawn in feces, JNS reported.

Online antisemitism has been rampant for years. Platforms like Twitter, by their very nature, amplify even marginal voices, often thrusting their beliefs, including Jew-hatred, into the mainstream. But this seems not to have phased Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told a Senate panel that Holocaust denial did not violate his company’s guidelines.

On October 29th the BBC News website published a report headlined “US alters passport ruling for Jerusalem births” which opens as follows:

“Americans born in Jerusalem can declare Israel as their country of birth in US passports, the Trump administration says, in a reversal of US policy.

Before now, Jerusalem was identified without a country because of its contentious status as Israel’s self-declared capital.”

Seeing as countries have long chosen – and sometimes changed – their own capital cities, that highlighted statement may be confusing to readers unfamiliar with the BBC’s long-standing approach to the topic of Israel’s capital.

The BBC Academy’s style guide on ‘Israel and the Palestinians’ states:

“The BBC does not call Jerusalem the ‘capital’ of Israel, though of course BBC journalists can report that Israel claims it as such. If you need a phrase you can call it Israel’s ‘seat of government’, and you can also report that all foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv. This position was endorsed by the findings of a BBC Trust complaints hearing published in February 2013.”

Over the last several months, the coronavirus pandemic and the upcoming presidential election have left many Americans feeling confused and uncertain about the future. With normal social interaction limited, many have shifted towards the digital world to connect, share, discuss and debate.

During the 2016 election, tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google came under fire for becoming venues for the spread of false information on all kinds of subjects. In order to address these concerns, these platforms have stepped up policing in order to limit the spread of misinformation and to fact check news being shared. However, for some, these social media companies have gone too far in their crackdown, raising questions over the role that these companies play in the free exchange of ideas in the 21st-century.

In recent weeks, Facebook had moved to ban several pro-Trump groups that were mainly comprised of Russian American Jews.

"During the past several days, the following groups, numbering in the thousands, have been methodically and surreptitiously removed from Facebook: "Russian American Ashkenazi Jews" (15,000 members), "Patriotic Jewish Republicans" (8,400 members), "Russian Speaking Americans for Trump 2020" (16,500 members) and "Евреи Силиконовой Долины и Сан Франциско, Объединяйтесь!" ["Jews of the Silicon Valley and San Francisco, United!"] (18,600) have been eliminated by Facebook," Svetlana, a moderator for Russian American Ashkenazi Jews, said.

However, recently both Russian Speaking Americans for Trump 2020 and the San Francisco group, have been reinstated by Facebook, while the other two remain permanently banned.

"The majority of the members in the now-deleted groups are refugees from the former Soviet Union. Many of them are 'refuseniks' who had to fight for their right to live in a free country," she said. "Denying them their right to free speech so close to this year's most important election is both disconcerting and unacceptable."

A Florida principal who told a parent he “can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event” was fired Monday for the second time, with the school board reversing a decision from last month to rehire him.

William Latson made the comments to a parent in 2018 and was later removed from the Boca Raton high school where he had been principal. In October 2019, the school board voted 5-2 to fire him, citing not just the comments, but Latson’s refusal to answer questions about them.

Latson sued, saying he had been wrongfully terminated, and in August, a judge concluded that he should have been reprimanded, and not fired.

The board voted October 7 to rehire him, believing that the alternative would be to face a protracted and costly legal battle. He was given an administrative job, rather than one with students, and was to receive $152,000 in back pay, according to the Palm Beach Post.

The board was divided 4-3, with the only Jewish board member arguing strenuously against Latson’s rehiring. “If we rehire Dr. Latson, it is going be a stain on this school district that will never go away,” Karen Brill said during the meeting.

An additional, final vote was postponed to hear criticism from the public. There was a strong national backlash, with the board receiving outraged comments from Holocaust survivors, their families and others, according to Sun Sentinel.

Simultaneously, the board learned that the court ruling regarding Latson’s firing had merely been a recommendation, the report said.

The harvest is a stressful time for fruit farmers. After planting, watering and weeding their fields, they need to quickly hire additional workers and coordinate the picking and packing of their crops within a few weeks before the oranges, apples or berries begin to decline in quality.

“This is hard, seasonal work,” says one apple grower in northern Israel, who, like many farmers, also needs to arrange housing, insurance, transportation and work visas for seasonal harvest workers. “Costs are rising all the time.”

Industry experts estimate that about 10 percent of the world’s fruit crops rots on the trees and goes to waste because there are not enough workers to pick it.

So this apple farmer is testing out a robotic fruit-picking system from Tevel Aerobotics Technologies, a local startup founded by veterans of Israel’s aerospace and electronics industries. Tevel has developed an autonomous driving platform with several tethered robots that fly up and pluck fruit from the trees. Instant artificial intelligence-based analysis of video of the trees allows the robots to pick only the fruit that is ripe. As the robots work, the system constantly updates farmers through a mobile phone app on how many pounds of fruit have been picked, and how much time it will take to finish the harvesting job.

“It solves the farm labor shortages,” said Yaniv Maor, founder and CEO of Tevel, based in Gedera in central Israel.

It has other advantages. The flying robots are more accurate and work longer hours than people. They can also carry out other tasks, like thinning and pruning trees, bringing down the cost of fruit production by about 30 percent.

After four years of planning, a new academic venture that aims to foster regional cooperation was launched last weekend in Cyprus.

The Pafos Innovation Institute (PPI) was sired by Uriel Reichman, the president and founder of IDC Herzliya, a nonprofit, private institution for higher education. The Cyprus academy, he hopes, will promote regional cooperation by creating connections between people of different nationalities who work and study together at the new center.

The institute aims to bring together university graduates from all the countries in the region and provide them with managerial and tech skills. They will study toward graduate degrees, engage in research, and build entrepreneurial collaborations, focusing on water, food security, energy, digital technologies for production and innovative management, the IDC said in a statement.

“We hope that the students will form friendships that will ultimately lead them not only to cooperate in their professional roles, but also turn them into a force that promotes regional progress and creates a culture of peace,” said Reichman in the statement.

The coronavirus pandemic has, however, thrown a spanner in the works, and students are only scheduled to start attending from September 2021. Until then the institute will host individual courses, attended by small groups of participants from Europe and countries in the region, the IDC said.

The Pafos Innovation Institute, housed on a campus specially built by the Pafos Municipality, is certified to grant graduate degrees (MAs and MBAs) recognized in Cyprus and Europe, as well as run programs on innovation. The academic management of the institute will be carried out by IDC Herzliya, in collaboration with institutions and researchers from the Middle East and around the world.

The degree tracks will emphasize intercultural and interdisciplinary collaboration and the institute will also operate an interdisciplinary innovation center with practical classes and applied research. Students will work in partnership with industry, academia, and the public sector.

Covid-19 is making this academic year a different kind of experience for university students. For ISRAEL21c’s 32 Digital Ambassadors from 23 campuses– including UC-Berkeley, Tulane, Barnard and Indiana University – the changes encompass a positive new direction.

This year, the Digital Ambassadors will design and launch a “Groundbreaking Israel” social-media campaign focusing on the diverse people of Israel and their vision, accomplishments and tenacity.

Geared to 18- to 24-year-olds, Groundbreaking Israel will leverage ISRAEL21c’s original content as well as the development of their own content to demonstrate – one amazing Israeli at a time — that Israel isn’t just one of the world’s most innovative tech hubs.

“Israel’s spirit of entrepreneurship, combined with creative imagination and drive, has resulted in achievements across many sectors and initiatives,” says Digital Ambassador Program Director Rachel Poulin.

Those sectors include Israeli culture, medical and health breakthroughs, humanitarian missions across the world, diversity, startups and entrepreneurship.

Making an impact

The five-year-old Digital Ambassadors program, with 257 college students participating in total, is a key factor in ISRAEL21c’s steady growth within the 18-24 demographic.

However, Poulin explains, “The main challenge with online interaction is it’s oftentimes hard to see the actual impact you’re making. We want to focus not on ‘likes’ but on potential changes in attitude and behavior that we will inspire with this campaign. This will be a key component.”

The Startup Nation developed along the simple idea that Israel was never going to be a powerhouse as an exporter of fuel or other natural resources. We joked that the Jews were given a barren land, while our neighbors were given an abundance of natural energy.

This allowed Israel to focus on developing its human capital, the only reliable type of transferable capital in today’s Covid tech world.

This “curse” of a barren land became a blessing in disguise, and Israeli leaders understood that as they laid the foundation for the Startup Nation.

In what looks to be a net positive for the economy, the Leviathan natural gas field in the eastern Mediterranean is helping Israel cement its status as an energy center. Offshore gas was discovered 10 years ago and will continue to play a key role both economically and geopolitically in the Startup Nation.

But gas is only part of the energy picture.

A fast-emerging energy-tech or climate-tech ecosystem is blooming alongside offshore gas exploration. Sustainable sources of energy such as wind and sun have been in development for years and are becoming more relevant today for a variety of factors, primarily economic.

We would be wise to follow the path of our newest partners for peace, the UAE and Bahrain, in how they diversify their natural resources and use technology to develop new ones.

Why now?

Though wind and solar energy have been supported by governments in places like Europe, widespread adoption has not reached a critical mass.

Our World in Data reports that “in 2019, around 11% of global primary energy came from renewable technologies.”

Austrian security forces were carrying out a massive manhunt Tuesday for at least one attacker still on the run, a day after several gunmen opened fire at multiple locations across central Vienna, killing at least four people and wounding 15 more.

“We experienced an attack last night by at least one Islamist terrorist,” Interior Minister Karl Nehammer told reporters.

“This is a radicalized person who felt close to IS,” said Nehammer, referring to the Islamic State terror group.

Two of the dead were men and two were women. No details were given on their identities.

On attacker was shot dead by police, and a manhunt was underway for at least one more assailant. Austrian authorities have not publicly identified the attackers.

Police said at least one of the attackers was wearing what appeared to be an explosives belt that turned out to be fake.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz described the assault as a “repulsive terror attack” and said he could not rule out an anti-Semitic motive for the onslaught, given that the shooting began outside Vienna’s main synagogue. It was closed at the time.

Israel and Austria are sharing intelligence in the aftermath of a shooting at a Vienna synagogue, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

Netanyahu said he spoke to Austrian Chancellor Sebastia Kurz and told him “the people of Israel stand with Austria…against the savagery of Islamist terrorism.

“We are cooperating in every way, with our intelligence and every other way we can,” Netanyahu added.

The prime minister made the remarks in a statement with Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban, who was in Jerusalem.

PM Netanyahu: "I spoke to our colleague @sebastiankurz in Austria. I told him the people of Israel stand with Austria, as I know the people of Romania do and so many others, against the savagery of Islamist terrorism. We are cooperating with our intelligence and every other way" pic.twitter.com/gupxJBpchh

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) November 3, 2020

Our prayers are with the people of Vienna after yet another vile act of terrorism in Europe. These evil attacks against innocent people must stop. The U.S. stands with Austria, France, and all of Europe in the fight against terrorists, including radical Islamic terrorists.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2020

Vienna's Chief Rabbi Schlomo Hofmeister has told LBC he saw multiple gunmen firing into bars and restaurants during tonight's attack@TomSwarbrick1pic.twitter.com/IRHXrDn4m2

— LBC (@LBC) November 2, 2020

Nehammer later told the Austrian APA new agency that the dead assailant, who had roots in the Balkan nation of North Macedonia, had a previous conviction in under a law that punishes membership in terrorist organizations. He was convicted in April 2019 for trying to travel to Syria, Nehammer said.

Fifteen house searches have taken place and several people have been arrested, he added.

The attacker, he said, “was equipped with a fake explosive vest and and an automatic rifle, a handgun and a machete to carry out this repugnant attack on innocent citizens.”

Authorities were still trying to determine whether further attackers may be on the run. People in Vienna were urged to stay at home if possible on Tuesday and children did not have to go to school. Some 1,000 police officers were on duty in Vienna on Tuesday morning.

Nehammer said two men and two women died from their injuries in the attack Monday evening.

Vienna’s hospital service said seven people were in life-threatening condition after the attack, APA reported. In total, 17 people were being treated in hospitals, with gunshot wounds but also cuts.

Among those wounded in the attack was a police officer, said Nehammer. The 28-year-old officer was in the hospital but was no longer in a life-threatening condition.

The shooting began shortly after 8 p.m. (1900 GMT) Monday near Vienna’s main synagogue as many people were enjoying a last night of open restaurants and bars before a month-long coronavirus lockdown, which started at midnight.

Vienna police chief Gerhard Puerstl said the attacker was killed at 8:09 p.m.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said that “we are victims of a despicable terror attack in the federal capital.”

The Chief Rabbi of Vienna Rabbi Jaron Engelmayer has condemned Monday night’s terror attack in the Austrian capital as an assault against coexistence in the city and against tolerance and peace in Austria itself.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post Tuesday morning, Engelmayer emphasized that it is still too early to tell if the attack targeted the Jewish community, and said the Jewish community was in “a state of uncertainty” while information about the precise motives of the attack are collected.

He added that the Jewish community stands together with the victims of the attack and is praying for their recovery.

Three people were killed and 15 injured in the terror attack in central Vienna on Monday night, with the Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehamme describing the assailant as “an Islamist terrorist” and an ISIS sympathizer.

“I totally condemn this attack which was an assault against coexistence,” said Engelmayer.

“Many communities live here side by side in peace and in tolerance, and this attack is designed to disturb that peace and tranquility.”

Austrian police have arrested 14 people in raids linked to Monday’s deadly terror attack in Vienna and have found no evidence that a second shooter was involved, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said Tuesday.

“There have been 18 raids in Vienna and Lower Austria and 14 people have been detained,” Nehammer told a televised press conference.

The minister added that police believe that the attack in central Vienna was carried out by a lone gunman, Kujtim Fejzulai, a 20-year-old Islamic State sympathizer who was killed by police on Monday night.

The video material evaluated by the police “does not at this time show any evidence of a second attacker,” Nehammer said.

Fejzulai, a dual Austrian and Macedonian national, was sentenced to 22 months in prison in April 2019 because he had tried to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State terror group.

Nehammer said he had been on a de-radicalization program and had managed to “fool” it and secure an early release in December under juvenile law.

“The perpetrator managed to fool the de-radicalization program of the justice system, to fool the people in it, and to get an early release through this,” the minister said.

Nehammer told news agency APA that Fejzulai had posted a photo on his Instagram account before the attack that showed him with two of the weapons he apparently used.

Austrian police raided 18 locations and arrested 14 people in a massive dragnet on Tuesday, after a gunman killed four people in a rampage in the center of Vienna overnight.

The gunman — who was shot dead by police minutes after he opened fire on crowded bars — was identified as a 20-year-old convicted jihadist released from jail less than a year ago, who had managed to convince authorities that he was no longer a threat.

An elderly man and woman, a young passerby and a waitress were killed in the attack, and 22 people including a policeman were wounded, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer told a news conference. Vienna’s mayor said three people were still in critical condition.

Describing the assault as a terrorist attack, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said in a televised address: “This is not a conflict between Christians and Muslims or between Austrians and migrants. No, this is a fight between the many people who believe in peace and the few (who oppose it). It is a fight between civilization and barbarism.”

Authorities had previously said they could not rule out the possibility that other shooters were still on the loose and asked people to avoid the center of Vienna, which was largely deserted on Tuesday with most shops closed.

Nehammer said footage of the incident filmed on mobile phones showed no evidence of a second gunman, although the possibility had not been completely ruled out.

Ladies and gents, the editor of 5 Pillars, a British Muslim website which wants people to mistake it for a credible news outlet. https://t.co/qIWVjYWT8F

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 3, 2020

"The beheading of the French history teacher proves that political Islam has become a real threat to world peace in light of its expansionist tendency, which is currently embodied by Erdogan's project, which not only targets the societies of Muslim countries, but also other societies that incubate important Islamic communities."— Al-Habib Al-Aswad, Tunisian journalist, Al-Arab, October 28, 2020.

He wants to represent himself as a defender of Islam. Which Islam does he speak for? Erdogan has committed crimes in Libya, Syria and all Arab countries. He is the one who is offending Islam."— Mustafa Bakri, Egyptian media personality, Al-Dostor Studio, October 30, 2020.

The reactions of many Arabs and Muslims show that they view Erdogan as a more serious threat to Islam than Macron or others in the West.

France’s Jewish community on Monday welcomed the decision of the country’s interior minister to ban a violent Turkish fascist group that adheres to antisemitic ideology.

In a post on Twitter, CRIF — the representative organization of French Jews — praised Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin’s move to ban the “Grey Wolves,” an ultranationalist organization with a record of assassinations and bombings that stretches back to the 1960s.

“Their violence, expressed again this weekend against the Armenian community in France, has no place in the territory of the Republic,” CRIF said — referring to attacks this week by Grey Wolves supporters on an Armenian demonstration against renewed fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, as well as the vandalizing of a monument to the Armenian genocide in the city of Lyon.

The ban on the Grey Wolves comes amid rising tension between France and Turkey following the beheading last month of a Paris school teacher by an Islamist assailant.

Darmanin described the Grey Wolves as “particularly aggressive” in comments to French legislators.

A Grey Wolves terrorist — Mehmet Ali Agca – was famously responsible for the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1981.

French President Emmanuel Macron could really use some friends right now. He’s being burned in effigy, and bloodcurdling vows to avenge the Prophet Muhammad have been shouted in street protests in Bangladesh, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Palestine. The world’s theocracies are taking aim at him and at the economy of the French republic itself, the birthplace of liberté, égalité and fraternité.

It’s a shame no help is coming from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose point-missing incoherence has sidelined Canada in the effort to defend France in its current agonies. Expressions of solidarity and sympathy are all well and good, but Macron’s defence of the right of satirists to publish vulgar cartoons was not a defence of the right, as Trudeau absurdly suggested last Friday, “to shout fire in a movie theatre crowded with people.”

A target had been painted on Macron’s back long before the 47-year-old middle-school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in broad daylight Oct. 16, the grisly culmination of a methodically organized incitement campaign orchestrated by France’s Hamas-affiliated Collective Cheikh Yassine. The pretext for the feigned outrage was Paty’s use of the contentious Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad from 2015, in a class discussion, to explore the disputes and arguments around free speech.

And those cartoons were not published in order to “arbitrarily or unnecessarily injure those with whom we are sharing a society and a planet,” as Trudeau put it. Specifically, the cartoons depicted Mohammad — a blasphemy all on its own, by some Islamic standards — lamenting the barbarism so often carried out in his holy name. For this, 11 Charlie Hebdo staff members were massacred on Jan. 7, 2015. To mark the beginning of the trial of those terrorists and their accomplices, Charlie Hebdo republished the cartoons on Sept. 1. In anger, a crackpot wielding a meat cleaver attacked and seriously injured two people Sept. 25 on the street where the Charlie Hebdo office used to be.

Neither did it help — although it was perhaps some small mercy that he was being merely obtuse and oafish — in the way Trudeau classified the acts of beheading a 60-year-old worshipper and slitting the throat of a 55-year-old church sexton and stabbing a 44-year-old mother of three to death at the Notre-Dame Basilica in Nice last Thursday morning. These are “unjustifiable acts,” Trudeau asserted, “which have no place in our society.”

Was this really something any of us needed to be told? Is France “our society”? Is it just “our” society where Trudeau would want us all to refrain from such savagery? Are there other societies where Trudeau considers head-chopping and the public disembowelment of innocents to be unobjectionable?

The Secretary General of the Houthi movement in Yemen claims French President Emmanuel Macron is a “toy“ and “puppet” of the “Zionist Jews”.

The Iranian revolutionary form of Islamism views Western democracy as an international Zionist plot, echoing Nazi propaganda in 2020: pic.twitter.com/xJqQ50wpaP

— The Conspiracy Libel (@ConspiracyLibel) November 2, 2020

Over 100 years ago Erdogan’s predecessor also incited terrorist attacks. Two Afghans, Badsha Mahomed Gül & Mullah Abdullah, murdered 4 & wounded 2 at Broken Hill, NSW, Australia, in 1915 responding to a call to jihad from Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V. pic.twitter.com/AWBlpptdPU

— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) November 3, 2020

Where @khamenei_ir is defending the vile Islamic terror attacks in Europe, which he himself has helped incite.

But that's ok @jack@Twitter, nothing to see here! https://t.co/8H5NtoRFbI

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) November 3, 2020

Iraqi Militia Official Sheikh Yousuf Al-Nasseri: The West Trains People to Carry out Terrorist Attacks, Then Blames the Attacks on Muslims to Prevent Conversion to Islam pic.twitter.com/3vjjaQu3vD

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 3, 2020

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday appeared to criticize the European Union for failing to understand the changing nature of the Middle East after Israel’s recent normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan.

At the beginning of a meeting with Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban in Jerusalem, Netanyahu thanked Bucharest “for helping us present a sensible case to the EU.”

“We’re in a period of peace. We’ve made peace and normalization agreements with three Arab countries in six weeks. So obviously they have a different view of the situation here in the Middle East than some of the traditional bureaucracies of the EU,” Netanyahu said.

“We will continue to value your assistance in explaining to the EU the changing circumstances in the Middle East that are advancing peace and prosperity for all.”

Orban, who had arrived in Israel earlier on Tuesday, said that he would discuss with Netanyahu the “critical importance of building a stable regional security environment in the Middle East.”

The next US President, whether US President Donald Trump remains in office or if Democratic challenger Joe Biden takes home a victory, will face several crises in the Middle East. These include dealing with the Iranian threat, the emerging extremism of Turkey, the failing leadership of the Palestinians, problems in Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean and an emerging disaster in the Sahel and potential destabilization of Iraq.

The Middle East has always been a challenge for US presidents going back fifty years. Many administrations come into power wanting to “do something” relating to the region, usually “solving” the Israel-Palestinian conflict. However the last decades have shown that this conflict is not the central conflict in the region. Other problems in the region, such as Islamist extremism, also appear to be reduced in the last years as ISIS was defeated. What is left is rising authoritarian regimes such as Turkey and the Iranian attempt to achieve hegemony over Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

Here are some of the five crises the US President must address.

Turkey’s growing extremismThe Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become increasingly extreme. This year alone it created a crises with Greece several times, bombed Iraq, continued military threats in Syria against US partner forces, threatened Armenia, Israel Egypt, the UAE and other countries. Turkey is at the intersection of the Middle East and Europe and it uses this to blackmail Europe regarding migrants and to meddle in all its neighbors.

Mounting evidence shows Turkey’s extremism is not only fueling terrorism but that it also is destabilizing the region. Countries and groups are seeking out Russia as they are increasingly pressured by Turkey, enabling Turkey, Russia and Iran to partition the region. This is because the US has not stood up to Turkey and defended its friends and allies. Turkey has lost out on the F-35 but is buying the Russian S-400 air defense system and has used it to threaten Greece. These are serious problems. There are calls to remove Turkey from NATO but Ankara’s lobbying arm in the US claims that if Turkey is pressured it could become more dangerous than Iran. In addition Turkey sells itself as balancing Iranian and Russian influence.

The reality is that Turkey is fueling extremism and working with Iran and Russia to remove US influence. The next US president will have to confront Turkey’s ambitions to control the eastern Mediterranean. In addition Turkey’s hosting of terrorists and incitement against Europe and others needs to be stopped. It is only a matter of time before Ankara sets its sights on Israel, the way it has threatened others.

Democratic Party candidate for vice president Kamala Harris indicated on Saturday in an interview via email with The Arab American News that under a Joe Biden administration, the United States will renew its ties with the Palestinians, and oppose Israeli unilateral actions that undermine a two-state solution.

Harris also said that a Biden administration will take immediate steps to restore economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, attempt to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and reopen the US consulate in east Jerusalem, in addition to working to reopen the PLO mission in Washington.

In an email to Detroit weekly bilingual newspaper, Harris said that "Joe and I also believe in the worth and value of every Palestinian and every Israeli, and we will work to ensure that Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal measures of freedom, security, prosperity and democracy. "We are committed to a two-state solution, and we will oppose any unilateral steps that undermine that goal. We will also oppose annexation and settlement expansion," she added.

Were former US Vice President and current Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to be elected, he would likely not reverse the US recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a senior Biden campaign official told JNS.

When asked if Biden would maintain the recognition in March 2019 by US President Donald Trump, the senior official said, “I don’t think a Biden administration would reverse that,” adding that “it was de facto recognized anyway. It was largely symbolic. It didn’t really change the calculus either by the United States or Israel or any of the neighboring nations.”

Biden, who faces Trump on Nov. 3, has said that he would leave the US embassy in Jerusalem, despite disagreeing with its relocation from Tel Aviv in May 2018, five months after Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The United Arab Emirates has become the first Arab country in decades to break through the fictional wall between Israel and Arab countries. It is now time for other countries, including Iraq, to follow in their footsteps to bring peace and prosperity into the region.

There is a rich history between the Jewish population of Israel and Mesopotamia, where Jews lived for thousands of years, and where they played a part in the construction of the country from the very beginning. Iraq’s Jewish community is the oldest Jewish community outside of Israel, dating back to the prophet Abraham. This community was established in Iraq for thousands of years, until the beginning of the first half of the twentieth century, when 120,000-130,000 Jewish Iraqis were airlifted to Israel.

Since the 1950s, various Iraqi regimes rejected the State of Israel and worked against it many times. However, despite these issues, the current situation is quite different, with a new pro-democratic Iraqi government in place. The new government, led by Mustafa al-Kadhimi, is looking forward to expanding its diplomatic relations and broadening its economic, infrastructure and energy relations with other states.

On August 25, Kadhimi met with the presidents of Jordan and Egypt in Amman, Jordan. Kadhimi wanted to expand Iraq’s economic ties with its regional neighbors, and he believed that these three countries might one day play a vital role in the region. Just weeks after their meeting, the UAE signed a historic deal with Israel, followed by the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Even though the Iraqi prime minister’s spokesmen recently affirmed that Iraqi laws do not allow such relations with Israel, this may be challenged if there is a strong determination from both parties. Hassan Kaiba, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, announced that Israel wishes to build a relationship with Iraq and looks forward to signing a peace deal with it.

Malawi plans to open an embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, making it the first African state to do so, Malawian Foreign Minister Eisenhower Mkaka announced during his visit to Israel on Tuesday.

Mkaka said that Malawi, which does not have an embassy to Israel, plans to open one by summer 2021.

Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi called Malawi a “pioneer,” and said the decision is “further proof of the ties between the country and the widening of the circle of peace.

“Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the State of Israel, will be a bridge of peace for the whole world, and I call on more countries to follow in Malawi’s path and move their embassies to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel,” Ashkenazi stated.

The US and Guatemala are the only countries that currently have embassies in Jerusalem, though several other others have said they would open one, such as Brazil, Serbia, Kosovo, Croatia, Honduras, Moldova, Romania and the Czech Republic.

Malawi is one of the few African states with which Israel has continuously had diplomatic relations since its founding in 1964, and Israel provided Malawi with aid, especially in the area of agriculture, for many years.

The Israel Defense Forces on Sunday razed the home of the Palestinian terrorist who murdered Rabbi Shai Ohayon in Petach Tikva in August.

Ohayon, a 39-year-old father-of-four, was found unconscious near the Segula Junction with multiple stab wounds and was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.

A manhunt for his killer was launched immediately, resulting in the arrest of 46-year-old Khalil Doikat of Rujeib, a Palestinian town just under 2 miles southeast of Nablus in northern Judea and Samaria. Doikat held an Israeli work permit, allowing him to travel freely in the country.

He was found in the possession of a bloodstained knife, believed to be the murder weapon. Doikat was charged with Ohayon’s murder in September.

Sunday’s demolition was carried out after the High Court of Justice denied an appeal by Doikat’s family to stop it.

Some 150 Rujeib residents clashed with security forces, burning tires and hurling firebombs and stones at the troops, who responded with crowd control measures.

Lebanon’s prosecutor general decided Tuesday not to charge fugitive ex-auto tycoon Carlos Ghosn for visiting Israel in 2008 because a statute of limitations has expired, a judicial source said.

Three lawyers filed a motion in January calling for the 66-year-old businessman to be prosecuted over his trip to the Jewish state as Renault-Nissan chairman.

Lebanon is technically still at war with Israel and forbids its citizens from traveling there.

“Prosecutor general Ghassan Oueidat decided… not to prosecute Ghosn for the crimes attributed to him of entering the enemy country and dealing with it economically,” the source told AFP.

“A statute of limitations of ten years had passed since the alleged crime,” the source added.

Ghosn on January 8 apologized to the Lebanese people for having visited Israel to sign a deal to produce electric vehicles, saying he traveled on business for Renault on a French passport.

He also holds Lebanese and Brazilian nationalities.

A drone suspected to have been launched from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip was found in a field in southern Israel on Monday.

The Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot reported that the drone set off an infiltration alert, prompting the Israeli Air Force to dispatch fighter planes to intercept it.

The drone was apparently too small to be detected by the planes, and seemingly crashed on its own in an open field.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Office issued a statement saying, “Earlier today, fighter jets were scrambled to the Gaza Strip area following suspicion that an aircraft had penetrated Israeli territory from the territory of the Strip.”

Ground searches were subsequently conducted, leading to the discovery of the drone.

In a recent Facebook post, Abbas’ Fatah Movement made it clear what it means when it refers to ”Palestine” – it includes the entire State of Israel.

As part of its protests against the recent normalization agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan – and the fear that more Arab states will follow– Fatah posted the image above with four repetitions of the PA map of “Palestine” that includes all of Israel.

Posted text: “Our people’s resolve is stronger than all the enterprises of normalization, annexation, and treason, because the voice of truth is louder; here we remain and we will not leave; Palestine is a goal that dignifies and a flag that waves”

[Facebook page of the Fatah Commission of Information and Culture, Oct. 28, 2020]

Each map of “Palestine” is accompanied by an image of an upraised fist and the Palestinian flag with “Normalization is treason” written above it. Similarly, each section has “#Normalization_is_treason - #No_to_normalization” written in the upper right corner, whereas the upper left bears the Fatah logo that includes a grenade, crossed rifles, and the PA map of “Palestine.”

Palestinian security detainee Maher al-Akhras continued his hunger strike for the 100th consecutive day on Tuesday in protest of his detention without trial by Israeli authorities, who have accused him of involvement in a terror group.

For over a month, his attorney and human rights organizations involved in his case have been warning that al-Akhras is in serious medical danger should his hunger strike continue.

“He is in immediate, fatal danger. People who begin hunger strikes and drink nothing but water for days on end begin to die around the 75th day,” said Physicians for Human Rights-Israel staffer Anat Litvin, who specializes in prisoners’ rights.

The Palestinian Prisoners’ Commission said in a statement on Sunday that al-Akhras’s health has severely deteriorated over the past few days, and he has begun to lose his sight and hearing due to the damage caused by his self-imposed starvation.

2 Hamas figures got their assets frozen by the new Sudanese regime. Having lost their safe haven, Maher Salaam & Bassam Ahmed flee to...wait for it...Turkey.

H/T @lennybendavid& @TobyDershhttps://t.co/xakzW4JlSc

— Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer) November 2, 2020

Researchers reported this week they have managed what many are calling a tantalizing look into a long-theorized dimension of existence outside our own, in which organized massacres and systematic Zionist attempts to exterminate non-Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land did in fact take place.

A series of experiments at Harvard University’s Smithsonian Institute for Astrophysics and several other allied facilities around the world resulted in a brief look at another universe, the scientists reported in a press release, a universe that appears to resemble this one in most respects but for the occurrence in the glimpsed universe of an actual genocide of Palestinians at the hand of Jews establishing and securing a homeland of their own in what is now Israel and the territories it controls. A full write-up of the discovery has a tentative publication date of January 2021 in the journal Science.

Astrophysicists, quantum physicists, astronomers, particle physicists, mathematicians, and a total of more than four hundred scientists and engineers at eight scientific institutions worldwide collaborated on the unprecedented work, which integrated observations of matter-antimatter dynamics, the effects of gravity, subatomic particle behavior, and numerous other disciplines in an effort to open a lens to a realm that has been inferred, but never directly observed. The effort allowed the researchers to gain a snapshot picture of a small portion of a realm with different physical laws, a difference that accounts for the occurrence of a Palestinian genocide in that universe, when in this one the Palestinian population has mushroomed and no evidence of any such genocide exists outside the fevered imaginations of the malignant or deluded. The groundbreaking discovery of a universe in which this universe’s Palestinian propaganda is actually true already has members of the scientific community mouthing the words “Nobel Prize.” Analysts differ on which prize the discovery merits: physics, peace, or literature.

"In our civilization, conquest is not occupation or looting. It is establishing the dominance of the justice that Allah commanded in the [conquered] region.... This is why our civilization is one of conquest."— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, MEMRI.org, August 26, 2020.

"Turkey will take what is its right in the Mediterranean Sea, in the Aegean Sea, and in the Black Sea.... This is why we are determined to do whatever is necessary politically, economically, or militarily. We invite our interlocutors to put themselves in order and stay away from mistakes that will open the way for them to be destroyed."— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, MEMRI.org, August 26, 2020.

"The most savage treatment was always reserved for those visibly proclaiming their Christianity: clergy and monks 'were burned to death, while others were flayed alive from head to toe.'"— Raymond Ibrahim, historian, Frontpage Magazine, August 7, 2019.

In 2018, the Speaker of Turkey's parliament, Ismail Kahraman, described Turkey's military offensive against northern Syria as "jihad.""Without jihad," he added, "there will be no progress." During the same offensive, Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) also called for "jihad" and declared in a weekly sermon that "armed struggle is the highest level of jihad."

In a Rosbalt interview titled "Turkey Openly Backs the Islamic Ummah of Europe", Aleksey Kuchin interviewed Professor Alexander Tevdoy-Burmuli, an expert on ethnopolitical processes. Tevdoy-Burmuli saw Turkish influence behind the recent acts of terror in France and claimed that a dangerous synergy is created "when the accumulated [Islamic] terrorist potential and the corresponding practice... receives institutional support from the Turkish authorities." Tevdoy-Burmuli believes that Russian Muslims are being drawn into this trend as could be seen at the anti-Macron demonstration in Moscow, where the demonstrators shouted "Allah Akhbar". Tevdoy-Burmuli mildly criticized Russia's law enforcement authorities for treating the Muslim demonstrators more leniently than at other unauthorized demonstrations.

The interview with Tevdoy-Bumuli follows below:[1] Russian Muslims demonstrate against Macron at French embassy in Moscow (Source: Ria.ru)

"In the single day of October 29, three terrorist attacks by radical Islamists occurred against French citizens, including another beheading - this time that of an innocent woman in a Catholic cathedral in Nice. Additionally, attacks took place on police officers in Avignon and on a guard of the French mission in the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"These events forced Paris to declare the highest level of terrorist threat throughout the country. By order of French President Emmanuel Macron, the army was brought into French cities. Let’s note that the aforementioned attacks took place less than two weeks after the brutal murder of a college teacher, Samuel Pati, in the Paris suburb of Conflans-Saint-Honorine.

"Now, many claim that these tragic events coincided in time with a sharp deterioration in Franco-Turkish relations. The publication of a caricature of Erdogan in the notorious Charlie Hebdo added fuel to the fire. After Macron’s statement on firmly defending the principles of freedom of speech and conscience, Turkish President Recep Erdogan spoke about his French counterpart in an insulting manner. Things got to the point that France recalled its ambassador from Ankara, and the Turkish president called for a boycott of French goods in Muslim countries.

Syrian Minister of Religious Endowments Dr. Mohammad Abdul-Sattar Al-Sayyed Speaks out Against Arab Normalization with Israel: The Quran Repeatedly Tells Us about the Evils of the Israelites pic.twitter.com/pdidjX2fMU

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 3, 2020

The normalization between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states of Bahrain and the UAE is perceived by the Iranian leadership as a direct threat to it, and as trespassing in its backyard in the Gulf. The normalization agreements endanger Iran's hegemony in the Gulf – an exclusive hegemony that the Iranian regime has taken care to establish.[1] Furthermore, the Arab Gulf states' public joining up with and normalization with Israel deal a severe blow to Iran's narrative of Islamic unity and Islamic values, and to the ideological messages of the Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran that claims to be the standard-bearer of the defense of the pure and correct Islam.

Tehran called the UAE "a traitor to the Islamic ummah and to Palestine" and issued warnings and vague threats to it (see MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 8928, Iran Reacts To UAE-Israel Normalization: UAE Rulers Are 'Traitors'; The Agreement 'Heralds A Dangerous Future... Particularly For The Residents Of The UAE's Glass Palace,' September 11, 2020). However, Tehran's threats against the Bahraini royal Aal Khalifa family and its rule, after Bahrain announced that it too was normalizing with Israel, were much blunter and more and explicit.

Until 1971, as the Iranian regime mouthpiece Kayhan underlined on September 13, 2020, the Shi'ite-majority Bahrain was Iran's 14th province. On September 19, 2020 Kayhan claimed that Bahrain is "a province belonging of the Iranian people." Iranian officials regularly stress Iranians' sentimentality regarding Bahrain, and even reiterate Iran's demand for Iranian sovereignty over it.[2] Bahrain is perceived by Iran as the latter's strategic stronghold against its Sunni Arab rival Saudi Arabia, because of Bahrain's Shi'ite majority which Iran backs and cultivates. The Iranian regime has more than once been accused by Bahraini authorities of encouraging civil rebellion against Bahrain's Sunni regime.

Iranian spokesmen clarified to the Arab Gulf states that now, as they have openly stood alongside Israel, Tehran will treat them like an enemy, and warned them again that their move destabilizes their regimes. They also explicitly warned, on behalf of the resistance front and the Palestinians, of a decisive response and of the destruction of Israel.

Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tuesday that the Biden ticket is his country's "more promising" option in the 2020 presidential election.

"The statements by the Biden camp have been more promising, but we will have to wait and see," Zarif told CBS News.

Zarif said he would not renegotiate the Iran deal with a Biden administration but hopes it would "act differently" from the Trump administration.

During the Obama administration, Biden and top Middle East hands supported increased engagement with Tehran. Obama's presidency also brought the Iran nuclear deal—and many fits and starts in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel.

Many current top Biden advisers have had similar qualms about the Trump administration's Iran policy, in which the United States has moved closer to Israel and engaged with Gulf countries.

Despite criticisms, Trump's moves have helped Israel retain its cutting-edge defense capabilities while normalizing ties between the Jewish state and Muslim-majority countries such as Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Sudan. Those same countries have also increasingly condemned Iran and the Palestinian Authority.

In March @Twitter told @SenTedCruz the reason they continue to provide acct to @khamenei_ir, despite US laws imposing criminal penalties for doing so, is because "to deny our service to [Iran] leaders at a time like this would be antithetical to the purpose of our company" 🤔 https://t.co/cdRjolqhLr

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) November 3, 2020

Iranian Majles Passes a Bill Obligating Government to Increase Nuclear Activity; Delegates Celebrate by Chanting "Death to America!" pic.twitter.com/uL0qjCVo30

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 3, 2020

IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Gen. Hajizadeh in an Iran TV Documentary: Germans and Japanese Felt Our Attack on Ayn Al-Asad Airbase Was Revenge for WWII; Show Ends with the Trump Family, Pence, Netanuau Being Targeted by Crosshairs pic.twitter.com/a6rnk3tupG

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 3, 2020

Iran will send representatives to compete in the international e-sports world championship in Eilat this February, representing a significant departure from its longstanding policy.

Organized by the South Korea-based International e-Sports Federation (IESF) as well as with Maccabi World Union and the Culture and Sport Ministry, the decision for the tournament to be held in Israel was a closely guarded secret for months, and was the result of efforts made by Ido Brosh, chairman of Israel's representative organization in the IESF, the Israeli e-Sports Association (IESA) and a member of the IESF's board.

At the time the original announcement was made, Iran, alongside other nations that do not have diplomatic ties with Israel such as Indonesia, had expressed disappointment, as it seemed they wouldn't be able to compete. And while some countries in the region such as Lebanon and Syria did not agree to come, Iran did, after its teams won their regional qualifying tournament yesterday for eFootball PES Series, one of the three official games played at the event.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Brosh said they were excited to welcome Iranian representatives to their country, and explained that e-sports is a very effective means of bringing people together even when a lack of normalized ties could get in the way. "E-sports is a tremendous bridge between people," he explained.

British Jewry abandoned Labour in droves and devoted their communal efforts to calling out and fighting anti-Semitism in the Labour Party after Corbyn first won the leadership race in 2015. Some 90% of British Jews voted for Conservatives in last year's elections. In contrast, American Jews are among President Trump's most outspoken and peripatetic demonizers.

What explains the yawning gap between American Jews and other Western Jewish communities, not to mention between American Jews and Israeli Jews?

American Jews are giving the Democratic Party a pass for abandoning them because they don't want to acknowledge that they are being abandoned. Despite the progressives' hostility to the Jews, the Jews want to remain progressives.

Among the progressive Jews who have noticed the rise of anti-Semitic forces in their party, they are consoled and given permission to remain in the party from Jewish leaders and public figures who insist that while things are not perfect, or even good in their own camp, they can stay because Trump – while nice to Israel – is a crypto-Nazi.

Repeated, fact-free slanders from the likes of Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and from writer Bari Weiss alleging that Trump praised white supremacists at the Charlottesville riots in 2017 – even when he condemned them, both during and immediately after the riots three times; along with allegations that Trump dog-whistles to white supremacists and thus enables their attacks against Jews, enable progressive Jews who are concerned about what is happening in their party to stay put despite their concerns.

Skyrocketing assimilation rates among American Jews indicate that all things being equal, most Jews on the political Left will cease identifying as Jews within a generation and a half. So, too, the rise of anti-Zionist American Jews who support the annihilation of Israel as a Jewish state indicates that in the coming years, more likely than not, American Jews will take leading roles in the Democratic/progressive campaign against Israel. Notably, two months after he called for Israel to be destroyed in a column in the New York Times, last month the NYT gave leading American Jewish anti-Zionist Peter Beinart a regular column.

As their massive support for Biden indicates, regardless of what the future holds for them, American Jews today are isolated more than ever before. They are isolated within their political camp which doesn't care about them, and they are isolated within the Jewish world.

On the other hand, the battle goes well beyond the personalities of the incumbent and his rival, which is why many people championing the former are just as put off by his manner as those who would rather die than see him remain at the helm. Indeed, the outcome of this election will determine the very character – and reveal the self-image – of the United States.

At an Independence Day ceremony at Mt. Rushmore on July 3, Trump summed it up as follows: "Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children ... This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution."

Ironically, it is a description with which the "squad"– House Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilan Omar (D-MN.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) – would agree, albeit without the negative adjectives. They make no bones about their dim view of the country that they wish to reshape in their "progressive" image. They do not hide their intention to undo all of Trump's economic accomplishments at home and foreign-policy successes abroad.

Omar recently said that if and when Biden becomes president, all cabinet positions should and will go to members of her camp. She knew when she uttered those words that it didn't matter whether the Democratic candidate was listening.

She was right not to care, because it is the radical arm of the already extremely liberal party that is pulling the strings with or without Biden at the helm.

The Iranians invented the game of chess. Now they tensely wait for the next move, the most significant one immediately after the election. Trump has led a courageous policy of withdrawing from the Iranian nuclear deal and imposing significant sanctions. He recently hinted that he will be willing to enter direct negotiations with Iran. Biden has addressed the Iranian issue many times and also expressed his commitment to preventing a nuclear Iran.

His recent interviews have indicated that he is keen to reenter the JCPOA, improve the agreement and correct its shortcomings.

The US Department of Defense is busily preparing strategies and options in the face of the continuation of the Iranian nuclear race. However, before the president-elect enters the briefing on Iran, he must take into account a number of basic assumptions.

First, there is no probationary period. The Iranians do not work according to the US election schedule. While the US’s attention has largely shifted to the fight against COVID-19 and its own presidential election, Iran’s nuclear industry and concealment efforts have advanced at astonishing speed.

Second, any agreement with Iran is doomed to be breached. Prior to the signing of the nuclear agreement, Israel issued warning calls against the deal. Not long after, we witnessed live the full disclosure of Iran’s deception and the revelation of the Iranian nuclear archive, which unveiled the Iranian nuclear machine. We have heard unequivocal rulings by the International Atomic Energy Agency and have noted the numerous UN Security Council resolutions. With these facts at their disposal, it is clear to everyone that Iran has violated the previous agreement, and will unequivocally continue to violate any future agreement.

Third, the only language that leads to a real dialogue with Iran is the language of sanctions. It is this and the subsequent economic pressure that effectively motivates the Iranian leadership to recalculate its course. Yet, worryingly, there is not much time before the “sunset clause” kicks into force and the restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program will expire.

Mr. President-elect, the elections are clearly for the position of president of the United States. However, they are also an appointment for the leader of the free world. Tackling the Iranian issue is the most crucial challenge we face in our free and democratic society.

I know that synagogue in Vienna and I was a bit taken aback to read how the New York Times described it: as a “temple.” A temple? Perhaps a Greek temple? Or possibly a Hindu or Sikh holy site?

I stood right there long ago and at the time, it was guarded by police, just as the synagogues in Paris and Rome were similarly guarded. Palestinian Muslim terrorists had bombed or tried to bomb them at the same time they were also hijacking airplanes and shooting unarmed civilians in airports.

A nice group. I could not be happier to see them lose their strangle hold on peace between Israel and Sunni Arab states.

We may recall that such terrorists were seen as “victims” and their attacks against civilian populations were viewed, most heartlessly, as somehow justified.

A poster girl for airplane hijackings, Leila Khaled, was recently invited to speak at an American university. Amazingly, the panel’s access to the internet was cut short.

I remember asking Khaled if she would speak with leftist MK and “peace” activist, the late Shulamit Aloni, in Copenhagen. Her answer: “I speak to her only through the barrel of a gun.”

Now, that’s a hero for you. A real peace-nik.

It has just been estimated that Europe will primarily be a Muslim country within one hundred years. The Muslim birthrate far outpaces that of Europe’s indigenous peoples. If Muslim immigrants really wanted to become Westerners, Europeans, they could improve the future of the continent. Apparently, some do but even more do not.

Is this Europe’s long overdue karmic punishment for having destroyed their Jews, over and over again, and finally for having exterminated their friendly, non-violent, and productive Semites: The Jews? Will a less friendly and more violent group of Semites take Europe down? Is this Europe’s punishment for all their past colonial crimes and their trafficking in slavery?

Some 70 percent of Jewish Israelis believe a victory for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in the US presidential election would be preferable for the Jewish state, an opinion poll indicated on Monday.

The Israel Democracy Institute survey, released a day before the US election day, asked whether Republican incumbent Trump or his Democratic challenger Biden is the preferred candidate, “from the standpoint of Israel’s interests.”

Among Israeli Jews, 70% said Trump is the preferred candidate, 13% said Biden, and 17% don’t know.

Support for Trump was markedly lower among Arab Israelis, with 36% saying he was the preferred candidate, 31% saying Biden, and 33% saying they didn’t know.

Among all Israelis, 63% favor Trump, 17% Biden and 20% don’t know.

Broken down by political camp, 82% of right-wing poll respondents, 62% of centrists, and 40% percent of left-wingers said Trump is the better candidate for Israel.

Israelis are known for their tendency to be very direct. Thus, Trump's courage to call a spade a spade is appreciated in Israel, even if some of his statements border on vulgarity. It is refreshing to the Israeli ear to hear an American presidential candidate not beating around the bush, but rather addressing issues without the constraints of liberal political correctness. This quality has earned Trump some popularity in Israel.

We should also remember that since the late 1960s, Israelis generally have preferred Republican presidents. Yitzhak Rabin who served as Israel's ambassador to Washington (1968-73) openly supported the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon. Similarly, Israeli preferences for Mitt Romney over Obama were abundantly clear. In comparison to Europeans and many current American Democrats, Israelis are nationalist and conservative. The conservative Israeli Likud party has won almost every election since 1977.

Israelis followed the decline of American international fortunes during the Obama years with alarm. It frightened them to see America so weakened. Thus, a president who wants to "make his country great again" by increasing defense spending and standing tall against America's enemies abroad (especially Iran and China) strikes a responsive chord with Israelis.

Finally, it is worth noting that Trump's family enchants Israelis. His daughter converted to Judaism and belongs to an Orthodox community. Trump has Jewish grandchildren that he is proud of. His Jewish son-in-law is an important advisor. Living in New York may have sensitized him to the sensibilities of the Jewish community in terms of supporting Israel, and indeed he has made being pro-Israel a hallmark of his presidency.

In short, most Israelis hope the pollsters in America prove wrong once more.

There are four crucial issues that must be addressed by any incoming US administration from the point of view of the American commitment to Israel’s security.

Strengthening the US-Israel alliance as a stabilizing factor in the Middle East.

The bond between the US and Israel, especially in the security realm, is remarkable and must remain so. Israel is the closest American ally in the Middle East, and this extraordinary relationship benefits the shared values and interests of both nations. The attributes of this special relationship should be reflected in growing security cooperation and in a regional policy that strengthens the moderate camp in the Middle East that commits to peace with Israel, while maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge.

America’s and Israel’s technological advantage should be advanced through this alliance, which contributes to their leadership in innovation in the next generation as it has done in the current one. The main joint programs at present are military, but there is a need for enhanced cooperation in the fields of science and technology.

Dealing firmly with Iran’s aggression and nuclear plans.

Iran, the main state sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East, is utilizing proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen in order to control these countries and spread its extremist ideology. Iran also continues to enrich uranium, and is getting closer every day to being able to develop and manufacture nuclear weapons. If it succeeds, it could pose an existential threat to all of its neighbors in the region, and will create a nuclear arms race that endangers the entire world.

It must be stopped by any means necessary. Lifting the sanctions imposed on the regime and reentering the dangerous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the JCPOA, more commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal) may again pave a safe path for Tehran to acquire a large arsenal of nuclear weapons and enable it to launch attacks in and destabilize the Middle East.

The historic Abraham Accords have exposed the profoundly weakened position in which the Palestinian Authority now finds itself.

Mahmoud Abbas is almost certainly hoping for the return of a US Democratic administration — one he believes will turn back the clock on several recent US policies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Barely any ties remain between Abbas and the Trump administration. Relations are at their lowest point since the start of the Oslo peace process in the early 1990s.

Spawning that deterioration is a series of US decisions that constitute a major departure from long-held American positions towards the Palestinians.

Attempting to convey the PA’s ability to implement unified, decisive positions in the face of US treatment it views as unfair; Abbas has abandoned any pretense of cordial relations with America and has ramped up his condemnation of what he views as Trump’s unbalanced positions and bias. His audiences are the Palestinian street, the Arab world, and the international community.

It’s worth recalling what led to this breakdown.

Following his election, the American president delayed his response to Abbas’ request for a congratulatory phone call. That conversation, which took place some 10 days after the request was made, was interpreted as a clear attempt by Trump to downgrade Abbas’s status as head of Fatah and the PA.

I didn't vote in 2016. By that point, I had long been disenchanted with the Democratic Party mainly because I realized that they were betraying their own alleged values, particularly around issues of race. But I could not see myself voting for Donald Trump, either, so I didn't.

The Democrats, however, are not very friendly toward the Jewish state and, thus, toward the Jewish people. They honestly tend to believe that Israel is a racist, imperialist, militaristic, apartheid, colonialist, very bad, racist state. They even believe, following Barack Obama, that they get to tell Jewish people where we may, or may not, be allowed to live on the very land of Jewish heritage.

{Ho. Ho. Ho. I do not think so.}

In any case, I did not vote in 2016 because the media kept telling us that it was in the bag for Hillary. Besides, I live in California and most of my friends here would rather gnaw their right arm out of its socket and beat themselves silly with it rather than vote for a Republican. I even went on Nothing Left radio out of Melbourne with Michael Burd and Alan Freedman the day before to discuss what a Hillary presidency would look like in terms of Israel.

So, that day I hardly even bothered with the election news because there seemed no point. When Laurie showed up later that evening I asked her about the results and she said something like, "What? You haven't been watching? Turn on the news, you're in for a surprise." I flipped on the channels and, sure enough, newscasters were crying on station after station. Women were wailing in the streets and young men were beating up anyone wearing a red baseball cap.

The issue of Labour’s anti-Semitism is not just a party affair. The EHRC has uncovered a number of cases of lawbreaking which should now lead to criminal prosecutions and civil actions by the victims, whom law firm Mishcon de Reya has offered to represent. As the 2019 election approached, British Jews became increasingly anxious at the possibility of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. Yet when a prominent former Labour MP, Louise Ellman, drew attention to this anxiety throughout her own Jewish community, Sir Keir said: “I don’t accept that.” He, too, feared deselection by the far-Left. He, too, was in denial.

The reason why Sir Keir’s response to the EHRC has been so inadequate is that there is no precedent for what has happened. No major British political party has ever given itself over to the oldest hatred before. No words are adequate to describe the disgust and revulsion that Labour’s moral turpitude continues to inspire among Jews and non-Jews alike, in Britain and abroad. There is literally nothing that Starmer can say that would suffice to wipe away the shame. Still, there are things that he can and must do — not merely what the law requires, nor even a thorough cleansing of the Augean stables, but a genuine change of heart. It is not for him to decide when and whether it is enough, but for those whom he and his party have offended.

Last summer Sir Keir was photographed on one knee, in a gesture of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet it has not so far occurred to him to make an act of contrition for the deep hurt his party has caused the Jewish people. Less than a year ago, while Sir Keir was campaigning for a Corbyn-led government, the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, spoke out during the election campaign. This unprecedented intervention by a religious leader was denounced by the Left at the time, but everything Rabbi Mirvis said has now been vindicated by the EHRC. He was right to say that “a new poison — sanctioned from the very top — has taken root” in Labour. Corbyn was indeed “unfit for office” and his claim at the time to have investigated all cases of anti-Semitism was indeed a “mendacious fiction”. And the Chief Rabbi was not exaggerating when he declared that at the prospect of a Labour victory, “the overwhelming majority of British Jews are gripped by anxiety”.

Just a year ago, Sir Keir Starmer was still in denial about all these things. Has he now seen the light? Or is he engaged in yet another damage-limitation exercise? Never mind about Jeremy Corbyn — he is yesterday’s man. The anti-Semitism of the far-Left, however, is a problem for today and tomorrow. The EHRC report poses serious questions — existential questions — that have yet to be answered. Is Sir Keir himself fit for office? Is the Labour Party fit to be the official Opposition? Is anti-Semitism now a fixture in British politics? Is this country, which stood alone against Hitler, still a safe place for Jews to live?

Neither the report nor the accompanying analysis from BBC political correspondent Chris Mason made any effort to inform readers whether Corbyn’s claims have any factual basis.

Also on the same day, the BBC News website published a report headlined “Anti-Semitism row: Corbyn allies urge members to stay in the party” which highlighted statements from Corbyn’s supporters but yet again – including in analysis from political correspondent Helen Catt – failed to inform readers whether or not the statements which led to his suspension are accurate.

Moreover, the BBC found it appropriate to unquestioningly amplify the following:“Many have used social media to share their intention to end their membership subscriptions, including Andrew Cassidy, 44, from near Glasgow, who has been a Labour member for 10 years.

“The facts, as far as I see them, are that Jeremy Corbyn has shown a lifelong distaste for racism of any bent,” he told the PA news agency.

“Being pro-Palestinian is conflated as anti-Semitism, both by the mainstream media and now by Labour Party grandees.”

He described Mr Corbyn as “a good man” who had been “hung out to dry in order to distance (Sir Keir) Starmer’s Labour from the progressive, inclusive party that Corbyn aimed for”.”

In short the BBC News website published four items including contributions from experienced political reporters not one of whom (in contrast to their colleagues at Channel 4) was able – or willing – to inform BBC audiences whether or not the claims made by Jeremy Corbyn which led to his suspension from the Labour party have any factual merit. All those BBC correspondents preferred to bring their readers false balance in the form of ‘he said-she said’ statements rather than ‘looking out of the window’.

"Nobody else is asked to justify or qualify what they feel as a minority group" @SharpeFiona on antisemitism in the Labour Party pic.twitter.com/F6OdCpVPNE

— politics.co.uk (@Politics_co_uk) November 2, 2020

Russian state news has a fresh take from @SlavojTweezek: Corbyn did nothing wrong and was the victim of an international capitalist plot.

Antisemitism starts with delusions of Jewish power, wielded through conspiracy in places we can’t see:https://t.co/abQYFNA0T4

— The Conspiracy Libel (@ConspiracyLibel) November 3, 2020

John McDonnell faces suspension by the Labour Party after signing a letter claiming antisemitism has been “weaponised”.

This comes after the publication of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s report into antisemitism, which found that the party broke equality law when Jeremy Corbyn was in charge.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said after the report’s findings were published, that “there are still those who think there’s no problem with antisemitism in the Labour Party. That it’s all exaggerated, or a factional attack. Then, frankly, you are part of the problem too. And you should be nowhere near the Labour Party either.”

When Jeremy Corbyn refused to fully accept the EHRC’s findings and said antisemitism had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”, he was suspended by Labour.

On Saturday John McDonnell co-signed a letter by Progressive International, entitled “we stand with Jeremy Corbyn”, which says Corbyn “not only spoke out about the ills of antisemitism in British society broadly. He also took the issue of antisemitism in his own party seriously, listening to the concerns of Jewish constituents and improving the process for investigating and sanctioning cases of antisemitism.”

“As fierce opponents of antisemitism ….we abhor the weaponization of Jewish pain against the project of socialism and the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership in the United Kingdom.”

“The evidence of such efforts to weaponize the issue of antisemitism is clear”, signatories say, claiming most Brits “now believe that a third of Labour Party members .. are the subject of antisemitism allegations. The truth is less than 2,000, less than 0.3 per cent of the party.”

The McDonnell-signed letter also claims the “campaign against the character of Jeremy Corbyn did not begin with the issue of antisemitism, and it will not end here. A principled defence of the Jewish community demands that we distinguish between genuine appreciation of the community’s pain and cynical attempts to ride it toward political reaction.”

Holidaying Corbyn Hangs Out With Nudist Suspended from Labour Party Over Antisemitism https://t.co/baMUILSLeMpic.twitter.com/AD1R0TLRYT

— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) November 3, 2020

Former Norwegian diplomat and politician Terje Rød Larsen, an architect of the Oslo peace accords, has resigned as president and CEO of the International Peace Institute and apologized for his “failed judgment” in securing donations from foundations related to financier Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking minors.

The think tank’s board of directors, chaired by former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, said in a statement that Rød Larsen also apologized for securing his own personal loan from Epstein in 2013 — “neither of which the board was aware of.” The former UN undersecretary-general and top Mideast envoy has said the $130,000 personal loan was repaid in full from his own funds.

The board said in the October 29 statement that “Epstein’s crimes were hideous. The notion that IPI would be in any way engaged with such an odious character is repugnant to the institution’s core values.”

It said Epstein’s foundations donated more than $30 million to dozens of charitable and teaching institutions before his death in the summer of 2019 and many kept some or all of the money. But the IPI board announced that it would donate a sum equivalent to any donations to programs that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.

The board said its financial officers confirmed that IPI never made a payment to Epstein. It said a global accounting firm will be commissioned “to conduct an immediate audit of IPI’s finances to make sure that all Epstein foundation donations have been identified.”

The Norwegian business newspaper DN first reported the close ties between Rød Larsen, IPI and Epstein.

In 2020, around 80% of British Universities ignored calls from the government and more importantly students themselves to take action and adopt the universally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism.

Accepting the IHRA definition is crucial to fighting antisemitism, which continues to flourish on campus. Today more than ever we call on all universities to adopt the IHRA and send a clear message - there is no place for hate at our universities in 2020!

Instead, Netanyahu merely praised Trump’s Middle East policies and touted Israel’s sterling relationship with the U.S. administration.

The Associated Press reported that Netanyahu avoided openly taking sides ahead of the U.S. Presidential elections. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters that U.S. bipartisan support has been “one of the foundations of the American-Israeli alliance.”

Immediately after these reports were broadcast, HonestReporting Canada liaised with senior personnel at CP24, who to their credit, acknowledged their error and cancelled this segment from future broadcasts.

We thank CP24 for its cooperation.

Platforms like Twitter, by their very nature, amplify even marginal voices, often thrusting their beliefs, including Jew-hatred, into the mainstream.

But @Twitter CEO @Jack doesn't seem to mind too much. pic.twitter.com/nS8X1lDn2w

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 3, 2020

A Yale University professor and psychiatrist compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in a series of tweets and said Hitler, unlike Trump, improved the lives of his followers.

"Donald Trump is not an Adolf Hitler," Bandy X. Lee tweeted Monday. "At least Hitler improved the daily life of his followers, had discipline, and required more of himself to gain the respect of his followers. Even with the same pathology, there are varying degrees of competence."

She continued: "A refusal to make comparisons has been a problem, when they have such similarities. Donald Trump’s death count is higher than Hitler’s at the same period."

Lee later deleted the tweet but defended her comparison. "My statement was about how little Donald Trump believes he needs to do to retain his followership, NOT to minimize Adolf Hitler’s atrocities," she said.

A forensic psychiatrist and assistant clinical psychiatry professor at Yale, Lee is a longtime Trump critic. In 2017, she edited a book of essays from other psychiatrists analyzing the president’s mental state. In another tweet in January, the professor diagnosed Trump supporters with a "shared psychosis."

In March, Lee tweeted that Nazi Germany was a "more rational society" than America under the Trump administration. She’s compared Trump and his supporters to Nazis on Twitter before.

A 100-year-old Jewish cemetery in Michigan was vandalized with the words “TRUMP” and “MAGA.”

The cemetery in Grand Rapids belongs to Congregation Ahavas Israel, a 125-year-old Conservative congregation. The graffiti was found on Monday and is presumed to have happened over the weekend, according to Rabbi David Krishef.

The police have been contacted about the incident, according to Krishef.

However, both they and the local director of the Anti-Defamation League said it was too soon to deem the vandalism an act of antisemitism.

“It’s Halloween weekend, and there was nothing spray-painted that indicated anything specifically antisemitic,” Krishef told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday. “Whoever did this may or may not have known that this was a Jewish cemetery.”

“I don’t want to blow this up into a known and definite incident of antisemitism,” he added. “We don’t know that it was.”

Headstones were smashed and graves defaced at Jewish cemeteries in Hungary and Moldova.

At least five headstones were destroyed at a cemetery in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau on Saturday, the Jewish Community of Moldova said in a statement.

Swastikas, a pentagram and the number 666 were spray-painted on other headstones.

The same cemetery has been targeted for vandalism for three years straight, the statement said.

In a separate incident in Kecel, south of Budapest, three tombstones were smashed and human feces were found on a nearby headstone on Sunday, the Mazsihisz umbrella group of Hungarian Jewish communities reported on its website.

Police are investigating the incident, Mazsihisz said.

A Jewish family seeking the return of a $35 million painting stolen during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands that is still on display at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum has accused an official committee of bias after it ruled against them.

Lawyers acting for the heirs to Robert Lewenstein, who fled for France in 1940, told an Amsterdam court there was an “appearance of partiality and a conflict of interest” within the Netherlands’ restitutions committee, which advises on the return of art lost by Jewish families during the World War II, The Guardian reported on Monday.

Three members of the Lewenstein family — Robert Lewenstein, Francesca Davis and Elsa Guidotti — are seeking the return of Bild mit Häusern (“Painting with Houses”), painted by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky in 1909.

It was sold at a cut price to Amsterdam’s City Council, which runs the Stedelijk Museum, on October 9, 1940, at the Frederik Muller auction house — five months after the Nazi occupation commenced. Lewenstein and his wife had already fled to France by the time of the sale.

Simon van der Sluijs, a lawyer for the claimants, told the court in Amsterdam the idea that the sale was voluntary was “bizarre.”

“Immediately after the invasion, the Germans started looting art. Pressure and coercion and the justified fear that lived among the Jews were used,” he said. “That fear did not pass by the Lewenstein family. The Nazis marched past their offices on Dam Square. To label the auction of works of art belonging to the Lewenstein family as voluntary is bizarre.”

Israel’s Bank Hapoalim Ltd. and the Israel Export Institute will lead a business delegation to the UAE in December, consisting of 200 Israeli entrepreneurs, scientists and businesspeople, for four days of meetings with local investors, financial and government institutions, and tech firms.

The participants will also attend an Israel Day event, which will be part of the GITEX Technology Week event taking place in the Dubai Trade Center on December 6-10, in which the Israeli representatives will hold one-on-one business meetings with counterparts.

At Gitex, some 4,500 businesses are scheduled to exhibit and over 100,000 visitors are expected to attend from 140 countries. The event will be attended by over 750 startups as well, according to the website.

Bank Hapoalim and the Export Institute are calling on companies to join the delegation, which will focus on four main themes that are of interest in the UAE: financial technologies, including payments startups and insurance technologies; high-tech firms, academic research institutes, cybersecurity and investment funds; healthcare and medtech; and food security, which includes food and agriculture, water and energy technologies.

The normalization of ties between Israel and the UAE in September caused a flurry of activity on both sides, with businesses, investors and startups working to pave the way to strong and open ties between the nations.

Israel’s Bank Leumi Le-Israel and Hapoalim, two of Israel’s largest banks, have already led business delegations to the UAE. Hapoalim said in September it had signed an agreement with the biggest bank in Dubai, National Bank of Dubai. Leumi, also in September, signed cooperation memorandums of understanding with First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) and the Emirates NBD of Dubai.

The first volunteer in trials for Israel’s new coronavirus vaccine has been released from the hospital, saying he feels “great.”

Segev Harel, a 26-year-old undergraduate student, was injected at the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan on Sunday, and was kept in the hospital for 24 hours of observation.

In his first English-language comments, he said: “Hello everybody, good morning, thank you all for your support.

“I’m here after spending the night in Sheba Medical, and now I’m going home and I feel great, and I hope we will bring the vaccine to Israel and to the whole world.”

The vaccine, named Brilife, was developed by the Israel Institute for Biological Research. Some 15 million shots are already being produced, in the hope that the trial goes smoothly.

Eytan Ben-Ami, a Sheba doctor who is part of the team directing the trial, told The Times of Israel: “The first patient was kept in hospital for 24 hours to observe him in case of any adverse effects and there were none.

“Everything has been really smooth. It’s very early in the process, but until now, everything is going according to plan.”

Israel’s Health Minister Yuli Edelstein decided to send a delegation to Czech Republic in order to assist with a COVID-19 outbreak in the city of Brno, Hebrew media reported Tuesday.

The decision was made after a request was handed by Czech Republic and the World Health Organization (WHO), and following consultations with Israel’s Director-General of the Health Ministry Prof. Hezi Levi, outlet Israel National News reported.

The delegation will be headed by Colonel (Res.) Dr. Ram Sagi, deputy director of Beilinson Hospital, consisting of eight people in total.

Prague has been facing one of the largest surges of coronavirus cases in the world in recent weeks, having gone through a relatively small “first wave” back in March and April.

As of Tuesday, the European country’s death toll rose to 3,654 after it had stood at roughly 300 deaths all spring — serving a model for its neighbors in dealing with the pandemic.

According to the Daily Beast, at the beginning of October virus cases began to surge, recording more than 10,000 daily infections and 100 deaths per day.

In response, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš announced a nightly curfew that went into effect last week, and is weighing a second nationwide lockdown.

Millions of people planned to come to Israel this year but were forced to cancel due to the pandemic. This is disappointing for them − and downright disastrous for the Israeli tourism industry.

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Journalist Bari Weiss, who made international news when she resigned her position at the New York Times, received the Per Ahlmark Award, in recognition of her moral courage and eloquence in defending the principles of democracy and in combating antisemitism. In her keynote speech, Weiss exposes the truth behind the New York Times’s capitulation to the new ideology that threatens to replace the liberalism underpinning our democracy, and inspires us with her principled exit from the pinnacle of her profession.

This year’s American presidential election may contain plenty of twists and turns, but it’s still hard to top the campaign of 1948.

That year, the Democratic incumbent, president Harry S. Truman, faced three rivals — none more formidable than the Republican candidate, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York. It took place at a time of momentous developments in United States and world history, from the Cold War to the civil rights movement to the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Believing Dewey better equipped for the times, the pollsters and media overwhelmingly predicted his victory. A Chicago newspaper ran “Dewey Defeats Truman” as its front-page headline the day after election day. Yet virtually all got it wrong: Truman won in an upset.

In America’s first presidential election after World War II, Truman won the presidency in his own right after assuming the office after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The campaign is chronicled in a new book by Jewish-American author A.J. Baime, “Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for America’s Soul.”

When not writing a column about cars for The Wall Street Journal, Baime pens historical nonfiction books with subjects including the auto industry during WWII and the Ford-Ferrari racetrack rivalry in the 1960s. His new book is his second in a row about Truman. Its title mirrors the fateful newspaper headline, and its cover shows a photo of Truman brandishing a copy.

“In my two books on Truman I wanted to focus on very specific narratives with a beginning, middle, and a climactic end,” Baime told The Times of Israel.

The hot-button issue of Israel threads through the book, including a dramatic moment when the new nation, fighting a war for independence, became an “October Surprise” in the campaign.

Seventy-two years ago on October 28, 1948, Truman learned that without his approval, Secretary of State George Marshall was about to publicly support a UN peace plan named after its mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte. The plan would recognize both Arab and Jewish statehoods in the former British Mandate of Palestine, but it lacked the support of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s administration.

On this day, 103 years ago: Lord Balfour declares Britain's support of the establishment of a Jewish state in the Holy Land. pic.twitter.com/SNAfm9Jtzs

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 2, 2020

[Trump] understood that at the core of the conflict, the Arab and Islamic world view Israel as a foreign implant in the region. He understood that in order to bring peace, it must be understood by the Arab world that Israel is here to stay, that Israel is an indigenous, permanent presence in the region. He did everything to demonstrate that America has Israel's back, and America will not have any more of the indulgence towards the decades long Palestinian intransigence. This is why we are beginning now to reap the fruits of that policy.

Nevertheless, a Biden administration would challenge Israel on two core issues: The first is a diplomatic process that would see the government shirk US President Donald Trump's "deal of the century" and return to the framework adopted by former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, meaning a two-state solution based upon the 1967 borders and a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem.

The government would reopen the Palestinian Embassy in Washington, closed by Trump as well as the American Consulate in east Jerusalem, which prior to Trump served as the de-facto US Embassy to the Palestinians. The administration would further renew American aid to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, as well as other Palestinian institutions cut off by Trump. The administration would also revert to opposing Israeli construction in Judea and Samaria, as well as in unified Jerusalem, which it considers to be an "obstacle to peace."

From our perspective, however, it is Biden's stated intention of bringing the US back into the Iran nuclear deal and rolling back sanctions on the Tehran regime that is more problematic. Such a move would spare the Iranian regime from financial ruin and aid Tehran in once again conquering significant portions of the Middle East to be used as outposts against Israel. This would present a real strategic threat.

In contrast, should US President Donald Trump win a second term in office, he will certainly adhere to his current policy, which has been the most pro-Israeli of any American president since the founding of the Jewish State. These are not just gestures, like the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem and the recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, but significant steps, like standing with Israel at the UN and other international organizations.

For the first time in history, there has not been one American condemnation of any Israeli military of political activity in the four years of Trump's tenure. Nevertheless, Trump has made no secret of his intentions of entering negotiations with Iran. Should he win re-election, Israel should be prepared for such a scenario.

The pervasive view of these shared interests throughout the world, and even in the US and in Israel, stems from either deep ignorance or deliberate distortion. This view seeks to present US-Israel ties as the fruit of American affinity for Israel, US Jewish support, or the work of the pro-Israel lobby, all of which go against the "genuine" American interest in support for the "Arabs."

Yet almost all of the Arabs that matter to the US act on the advice of Israel and trust Israel. In addition, even those presidents who were less sympathetic to Israel, and even anti-Semitic like Richard Nixon, implemented policies that assisted Israel. Presidents, like Barack Obama, who saw themselves as supporters of Israel, sought to "save" the country from itself. And while the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is a dedicated and savvy sales agent for the State of Israel, if the "goods" Israel was selling were flawed, not even the most talented agent could continue to sell the country as well as it has for the past three generations. It is also worth noting that Jews make up less than two percent of the American electorate. A majority of them do not see Israel as a top issue and cast their vote automatically for Democrats.

Israeli "goods" are sought after because of the afore-mentioned ethos but largely due to American interests. From the US standpoint, Israel, situated in the one of the most important regions in the world, encompasses important virtues that no other ally does: Israel is strong, stable, responsible, determined, and always pro-American. Israel is the only US ally that does not ask American soldiers to fight its wars. It is militarily, economically, and technologically strong. It is a democracy that has proven its stability even in times of crisis. Its responsibility is reflected in its restraint in the face of the ongoing threats it has faced for generations, the likes of which no democratic country has ever experienced, and in the extreme caution it has exerted in relation to the strategic capabilities attributed to it.

Among democratic countries, it is difficult to find a comparable determination to act in times of crisis. At no point in time has Israel ever not stood with the American camp. While Israel is still the junior partner of the US superpower, it is not a negligible one. The US has been forced to downsize its physical presence in the Middle East in order to focus its attention on Asia, and the South China Sea in particular. But it can only allow itself to pivot this way if it knows it is leaving a coalition of pro-American countries interested in maintaining relative stability in the region behind. Strong, stable, loyal Israel is a vital tier in this coalition.

Presidents come and go. Some act in consultation with Israel, while others are for less receptive to its needs. Beyond these important differences, we must remember there exists a strong ethical and strategic framework for deep partnership, one that has survived unfriendly governments in the past.

No matter who wins the American elections, I have a suggestion for the State of Israel – forget about the Jews of America.

Election surveys reveal that 72-75 percent of the Jews in America are voting for Biden, turning their backs on the Jewish State, which clearly favored the re-election of President Donald Trump. In effect, they voted against Israel, against Judaism, and against G-d.

Who needs them?

In contrast, the 25% who, it is predicted, voted for Trump, by and large support the State of Israel and cherish the values of Judaism. They are true friends of Israel.

True, when it comes to making Aliyah, they balk, for whatever reason. If they choose to join us, great, they are more than welcome. If not, they will perish with the Jews for Biden.

So why should Israel continue to waste a fortune of money on programs of Diaspora education and aliyah? With the expensive programs or without them, roughly the same number of idealistic Jews would make Aliyah each year.

The kind of separatism that Macron rightly fears in France has not happened in the United States. In this case, American exceptionalism appears to have continued to hold true since the overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans want nothing to do with those who justify terror even if some of those who claim to represent them, such as an extremist group like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—founded as a front for supporters of Hamas terrorists, yet masquerades as a civil-rights group—would indicate otherwise.

Europe, however, faces a very different situation, and the predicament of European Jewry illustrates the problem. The rights of American Muslims, like that of any other ethnic or religious minority group, are not in question the way they are in France. But by the same token, neither are Jews at risk when walking down the streets of major U.S. cities as they are in every Western European capital for those who wear kippahs or other identifiable articles, let alone clothing that indicates their Jewish identity.

By tolerating the kind of anti-Semitism that is largely driven by Muslim extremism in Europe, Jews have become—and not for the first time in history—the canary in the coal mine, which is an early indicator of peril for everyone.

Macron’s strong response to terror, like the French republic’s vigorous reaction to the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher murders, is encouraging. Still, as long as Jews feel insecure, the notion that Western freedom will survive and ultimately triumph over the Islamists should not be taken as a given.

That insecurity is measured by the fact that the Jewish population in Europe is in serious decline. As a study recently published by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research indicated, the European Jewish population is the lowest it has been in a thousand years. The reason for this is obvious. In addition to European Jews having a low birth rate like their Christian neighbors, they are recognizing they don’t have a future even in countries where communities were reconstituted in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

There are serious doubts as to whether Western Europe will fight to defend its liberal values as vigorously as Macron is trying to do. Until Jews feel secure, any optimism that those who agree with Macron will prevail over threats from the Middle East is more of a hope than a realistic prediction.

In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann, who would become the first president of Israel, signed an agreement with Emir Faisal, who would rule Syria and Iraq. Signed on the eve of the Paris Peace Conference at which the victors of World War I would determine how to administer the former colonies of the Ottoman Empire, the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement pledged Arab support for the restoration of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

As he signed the agreement, Faisal added a hand-written note making his support for a Jewish state conditional on the Arabs receiving the new states they had demanded across the region.

Faisal’s agreement with Weizmann remains significant for a number of reasons.

First, it is a crucial recognition by an Arab leader of the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in what had become Palestine. Faisal’s father, the Sharif of Mecca, had earlier referred to the Jews as the “original sons” of the land, claiming that their return would “materially and spiritually” aid their “Arab brethren.”

Second, it showed that Arab leaders were happy to concede Palestine if their greater territorial aspirations were met.

Third, and perhaps most significantly, the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement, and more precisely, Faisal’s hand-written afterthought, bound up the future of a Jewish state in Palestine in broader regional affairs. Whereas the original agreement dealt with Palestine as a discrete issue, the amendment explicitly connected the question of Palestine to what transpired elsewhere in the region.

This, in turn, enabled Palestinian-Arab leaders to frame the conflict with Israel not as a territorial dispute between rival claimants, but as a matter of pan-Arab pride and Islamic duty. This internationalized the conflict, resulting in an Arab boycott of companies that traded with Israel, three invasions of the Jewish state and the harnessing of collective Arab influence to seek Israel’s international isolation in multinational forums and civil society.

A Palestinian Arab terrorist was killed last week near the city of Nablus (Shechem) in the West Bank. What made the incident unusual was that he was killed in a clash with Palestinian Authority security forces. One wishes it was a sign that the PA is finally cracking down on terrorists. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

The terrorist, Hatem Abu Rizek, was affiliated with the Fatah movement, the largest faction of the PLO. Fatah was chaired by Yasser Arafat for four decades, then succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas, who heads both Fatah and the PA

Fatah, however, has various factions, and they often settle their disputes in ways reminiscent of the Wild West. Abu Rizek was part of a faction headed by Mohammed Dahlan, who is a rival of Abbas.

Last week, Abu Rizek and others from the Dahlan faction got into some sort of quarrel with members of Abbas’ PA security forces. Everybody reached for their guns. “Armed clashes” ensued, according to the Associated Press. There are two versions of how Abu Rizek ended up dead. His side says the PA security men shot him. The PA says he was about to throw a hand grenade at them, but it exploded in his face.

Media reports vaguely noted that Abu Rizek “previously spent time in Israeli prisons for security-related offenses,” which is a polite way of saying that he either was planning to, or tried to, murder Jews (or Arab rivals). The families of his victims, or intended victims, aren’t mourning his death.

According to the Oslo Accords, the PA was obliged to disarm terrorists like Abu Rizek, outlaw terrorist groups, and extradite fugitive terrorists to Israel for prosecution. Twenty-seven years later, the PA still isn’t doing any of that.

The historic Abraham Accords have exposed the profoundly weakened position in which the Palestinian Authority now finds itself.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas is almost certainly hoping for the return of a US Democratic administration – one he believes will turn back the clock on several recent US policies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Barely any ties remain between Abbas and the Trump administration. Relations are at their lowest point since the start of the Oslo peace process in the early 1990s.

Spawning that deterioration is a series of US decisions that constitute a major departure from long-held American positions toward the Palestinians.

Attempting to convey the PA's ability to implement unified, decisive positions in the face of US treatment it views as unfair, Abbas has abandoned any pretense of cordial relations with America and has ramped up his condemnation of what he views as Trump's unbalanced positions and bias. His audiences are the Palestinian street, the Arab world and the international community.

It's worth recalling what led to this breakdown.

Following his election, the American president delayed his response to Abbas' request for a congratulatory phone call. That conversation, which took place some 10 days after the request was made, was interpreted as a clear attempt by Trump to downgrade Abbas' status as head of Fatah and the PA.

Cori Bush, a Democrat who expressed support for the movement to boycott Israel, is set to become the St. Louis area’s next congresswoman.

Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who also support the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel — known as BDS — are also expected to win.

A now-deleted page on Bush’s campaign website had said she supported BDS. If she still holds those views, it will bring the number of BDS supporters in the Democratic caucus to three.

Projections are showing that Bush will win St. Louis’ traditionally Democratic seat handily, defeating Republican Anthony Rogers. She defeated Lacy Clay, the longtime Democratic incumbent, in a primary earlier this year.

BDS was not a notable issue in the Bush-Clay race, which hinged on the divide between progressive and establishment politics. Bush is a racial justice activist who was backed by progressives including Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Clay, a more centrist Democrat who had succeeded his father in the seat, had attempted to use Bush’s BDS support against her late in the campaign, highlighting it in a mailer.

Last night’s presidential contest may have produced a winner, but one Caldwell resident had explanations ready even before the results became known, to the effect that those results indicate a vast Jewish conspiracy that manipulates the government and its institutions behind the scenes, from the shadows.

Malcolm Rashid, 33, held forth Wednesday morning for a small group of like-minded regulars at a local hangout, explaining that only the existence of a near-omnipotent Hebrew cabal can explain the outcome of yesterday’s elections.

“They control the media,” he began. “That’s how it starts. All the polls are fake – they’re engineered to make you think the elections are going to swing a particular way so that the preferred candidate’s base gets energized and puts that side over the top. Stories drop at strategic points in the campaign to influence the maximum number of people, even things that the media people knew about months or even years ago. The sheeple swallow it because they’ve been blinded by the Jewish puppetmasters.”

Mr. Rashid had a different argument in reserve in the event of the opposite election result, insiders reported. “The surveys showing a likely result were to lull the leading side’s voters into complacency,” he would have contended, had the outcome proved opposite of what in fact occurred. “All the coverage of the leading candidate’s positions could have been lot more critical, or at least skeptical or challenging, but the Jew-owned media had a role to play in manipulating the masses, and they played that role well.”

But blaming the French state for the attacks and the rise of radicalism shows a dangerous moral confusion. Nor is secularism to blame here. While French secularism laws prohibit “ostentatious” religious signs (such as hijabs, kippas, or large crosses) in schools and state buildings, Paty’s killing and the new wave of attacks are linked to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and most recently to the trials of the accomplices of the 2015 attacks. Whatever one thinks of the magazine—which regularly mocks all religions, the far-right, or any politician for that matter—its staff is entitled, in a liberal democracy, to draw cartoons without being murdered. Besides, secularism or not, France is not alone in this fight. While France harbors the largest Muslim population in Europe, Belgium, Denmark, and Sweden, none of them harbingers of laïcité, have sent higher proportions of foreign fighters to Syria. Terrorist attacks have struck Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and others. France is at the forefront of a deeper battle striking major European societies.

A key fact often overlooked in this context is the diversity of France’s 5 million Muslims, of their political opinions, and of their religious practice. In public service, in the business community, in journalism, and in politics, a new generation of French citizens of multiple religious, ethnic, and social backgrounds are making a name for themselves. They often don’t want their public or political identities to be conferred by their religion. Other French people carry their religious identity more visibly, and that’s their full right, even if it is not always well received in a deeply secular, even atheist society. It is paradoxical that so many news outlets in the world claim to care for Muslims in France without giving a voice to the different opinions they have or even speaking with them. It is up to them, not Erdogan or Khan, to speak for their identity. Meanwhile, denouncing policies targeting Islamists as “Islamophobia” bundles all Muslims together with the radical minority that is precisely attempting to prevent their integration with society as a whole. It’s a trap.

To name things wrongly is to add to the world’s misery, Albert Camus said. In 2017, after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, after two years of terrorist attacks and structural economic difficulties, the French electorate chose to resoundingly defeat the far-right and opt for a centrist, pro-European government. Today France is the front line of another fight against illiberalism, and it is leading that fight with the same values. It deserves better than denial and accusations from its friends.

The streets of Vienna were returning to normal on Wednesday — albeit under the virus restrictions — after schools and shops had largely stayed closed after the attack.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has described the decision to release Fejzulai — who was shot dead by police on Monday evening — as “definitely wrong.”

“If he had not been released then the terror attack would not have been possible,” Kurz told public broadcaster ORF on Tuesday.

Austria’s top security chief Franz Ruf told local media that at his last session of a publicly funded de-radicalization program in late October, Fejzulai had condemned the recent jihadist attacks in France.

Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said Tuesday the attacker had successfully “fooled” the programs in order to achieve his early release.

Nehammer said his case had shown up a “fracture” in the system and that raids at Fejzulai’s home after the attack revealed plentiful evidence of his radical views.

He referred to a Facebook post in which Fejzulai posed with the Kalashnikov and the machete he would go on to use in the attack, together with IS slogans.

“Nobody would have thought him capable of something like this,” Nikolaus Rast, the lawyer who represented Fejzulai last year, told AFP on Wednesday.

He also raised questions about possible oversights by the de-radicalization programs Fejzulai had attended.

“Without wanting to put the blame on someone, if they are the experts, why didn’t they notice anything?” Rast said. “They must have had the most — and the last — contact with him.”

Police are now working on the assumption that Fejzulai was the sole gunman, after the authorities initially feared in the aftermath of the attack that more than one assailant could be at large.

The Islamic State terror group on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the shooting attack in Vienna the night before, which left four dead and 15 wounded.

In a statement delivered over an IS-linked Telegram channel, the terror group said “the Caliphate’s soldier, Abu Dajana al-Albani” attacked “gatherings of Crusaders” in downtown Vienna.

“All praise and favor to God,” the statement concluded.

The alleged perpetrator, Kujtim Fejzulai, was shot and killed by police during the incident. Fejzulai was an ethnic Albanian, which could explain his Arabic nom de guerre, which literally means “the Albanian.”

In a video distributed by the terror group, Fejzulai can be seen pledging allegiance to the IS caliph, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, while he holds a gun and a long, serrated knife.

Fejzulai, a 20-year-old Austrian-North Macedonian dual citizen, had a previous terror conviction for attempting to join the Islamic State group in Syria. Police searched 18 properties as well as the suspect’s apartment, detaining 14 people associated with the assailant who are being questioned, Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said.

“The fact is that the terrorist managed to deceive the judicial system’s deradicalization program” to secure his release, Nehammer said, adding that the system should be reevaluated.

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has seen long and difficult days since forming his second government at the beginning of January this year.

Shortly after forming a coalition that set a precedent in Europe – between his own conservative party and Austria's Green party – COVID hit the country. Now it's back, worse, requiring a very heavy shutdown throughout the country.

On Monday evening, shortly before lockdown began, an Islamist terrorist attack was carried out in the heart of historic Vienna that ended with at least four dead and some 20 wounded, some seriously. Despite the emergency situation, and under the shadow of an ongoing investigation to determine whether the terrorist, who was killed, was operating alone or was part of a cell, the chancellor on Tuesday found time to give an interview to Israel Hayom.

"The terrorist attack in Vienna, which is clearly an Islamist terrorist attack, is not an isolated incident, but part of a series of many attacks carried out against Europe," Kurz says.

"This was an assault on our democracy, on our basic values, on the European lifestyle. We will not let these terrorist acts threaten us. We will hunt down anyone who lent their hand to this attack and bring them to justice," he continued.

Austrian chancellor @sebastiankurz outlines in interview with @CNN’s @fpleitgenCNN need for fight against terrorism, political Islam and European cooperation in this regard. https://t.co/AF9eoTETM4

— Etienne Berchtold (@ebphilipp) November 3, 2020

Denver high school TEACHER Alex Borenstein had this reaction to the teacher who was beheaded in France:"I have some empathy for the person that beheaded him. Why the teacher didn’t expect a strong response to something obviously very sh**ty is ridiculous.”https://t.co/8DqBubu31lpic.twitter.com/0N4MSpfKDk

— Canary Mission (@canarymission) November 3, 2020

Khartoum, Sudan, was the setting for the infamous Arab League summit in 1967 that produced the Khartoum Resolution known as “The Three Nos”: no negotiations with Israel, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel. Now, 53 years later, Sudan has agreed to change these negatives into positives, meaning three yeses.

According to Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council, the Sudan-Israel agreement “is a significant development because it provides added momentum to the ‘normalization’ wave now taking shape between Israel and the Arab world.”

Berman told JNS the deal is also “symbolically important” because Khartoum has “historically been extremely antagonistic to Israel.”

For this reason, the agreement is “more of a true ‘peace deal’ than Israel’s entente with the UAE and Bahrain,” he said, noting that “the main benefit for Israel is that it creates another political ally for Jerusalem in the Muslim world.”

Aside from practical purposes, such as Israel’s ability to fly through Sudanese airspace, once the deal is signed, Israeli security officials can also now sleep slightly better knowing that Sudan will no longer be used as a transit base for terrorists and terror-related activity.

For years, Sudan cozied up to Iran as one of its few Sunni Arab partners. In 2009, unidentified aircraft, largely believed to be Israeli, hit a convoy of terrorists in Sudan. In 2011, Israel was accused of launching a missile strike in Sudan, killing two Hamas terrorists. And in 2012, Israel was again accused of destroying a Sudanese military facility in an airstrike.

If these reports are true, then it is clear that Sudan was a major security concern for Israel. Those concerns could now be allayed by an agreement that would see Sudan join other Muslim nations in normalizing relations with Israel.

During a meeting on Tuesday in Jerusalem with visiting Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his appreciation for Bucharest’s assistance over the years in presenting a “sensible case” to the European Union on Israel’s behalf.

Referring to Israel’s recent forging of US-brokered peace agreements with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, Netanyahu said that these Arab countries “obviously have a different view of the situation … in the Middle East than some of the traditional bureaucracies of the EU.”

Netanyahu also stated that Israel “will continue to value [Romania’s] assistance in explaining to the EU the changing circumstances in the Middle East that are advancing peace and prosperity for all.”

According to the Prime Minister’s Office, Netanyahu began the meeting by addressed in Monday evening’s terrorist attack in Vienna.

“A few moments ago, I spoke to our colleague, [Austrian Chancellor] Sebastian Kurz, [and] told him that the people of Israel stand with Austria, as I know the people of Romania do and so many others, against the savagery of Islamist terrorism,” said Netanyahu. “We are cooperating … with our intelligence and [in] every other way that we can.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Romanian counterpart Ludovic Orban held a joint press conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday, announcing a new treaty that expands trade between the two countries.

Netanyahu hailed the strong “human” and historic relations that unite Romania and Israel in his opening remarks, calling them “ties of friendship” that have lasted for years.

“Israel and Romania cooperate in many areas: cybersecurity, water management, health and agriculture,” the premier said.

“The most important thing today is that our companies are working on innovation. … This is why we signed a treaty to prevent double taxation and prevent tax evasion,” Netanyahu added.

He then thanked his counterpart for his support and assistance to Israel, particularly to the European Union, in the process of peace and normalization with the Arab world.

“We need to explain to the EU how we promote peace and security for all,” he said.

“Our mutual interest is to extend and deepen our dialogue in various fields. I would like to express my gratitude to Israel for the cooperation with the authorities during the coronavirus crisis,” said Orban.

Born in the old city of Jerusalem, near the Damascus Gate, Issam Ikirmawi has forged a 30-year career as a senior news broadcaster and producer working for CNN, ABC, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 (UK), and TV stations in Canada, Japan, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere.

Issam discusses his career, the state of Israeli-Palestinian relations, how Palestinians feel about their own leaders, and how, as a young man, he had roles as an extra in movies filmed in Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, including ‘Rambo’.

Issam talks about the leaders he has met as a journalist, including Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, Shimon Peres Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. And he asks why there is so much international interest in the Israeli-Palestinian Authority conflict.

The number of active or symptomatic COVID-19 cases in Israel has dropped below 10,000 for the first time in months on Wednesday, with the Health Ministry reporting 9,876 COVID patients with symptoms nationwide.

From Tuesday to Wednesday morning, 40,844 COVID tests conducted nationwide identified 831 new cases, a positive rate of 2.1%.

A total of 614 patients were hospitalized on Wednesday morning. The number of hospitalized patients listed in serious condition continued to drop, standing at 376, of whom 166 who were on ventilators. Another 107 patients were listed in moderate condition.

Israel's total death toll since the start of the pandemic was unchanged on Wednesday at 2,592. A total of 316,892 Israelis have tested positive for the virus, and 304,424 have recovered from it.

The Israel Defense Forces said on Wednesday morning that a member of the Palestinian Authority’s security services opened fire at troops in the northern West Bank and was shot dead by Israeli forces.

Though not unprecedented, it is highly unusual for members of Palestinian security forces, which often coordinate closely with the IDF and other Israeli defense agencies, to carry out attacks against Israeli troops and civilians.

“IDF soldiers who were at a military post near the southern exit of the city of Nablus responded with fire after a terrorist armed with a pistol arrived from the direction of the city and shot at them from his vehicle,” the IDF said in a statement.

The military initially said that the assailant was “neutralized” and later confirmed that this meant he was killed.

The Palestinian Authority official WAFA news agency named him as 29-year-old Bilal Adnan Rawajbeh. Rawajbeh, a resident of Nablus-area village Araq al-Tayeh, was a legal adviser with the rank of captain in the Palestinian Preventative Security Forces, one of the PA’s most powerful intelligence organizations.

It appeared as though the pistol used belonged to the Palestinian security service as well.

Video shows the moment IDF forces responded to the attempted shooting attack near the Samaria Brigade base. pic.twitter.com/QaK0KfKKU6

— Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian (@manniefabian) November 4, 2020

PFLP balloon unit Groups of the Martyr Wadih Hadad launched explosive-laden balloons in protest of the Balfour Declaration and in support of Maher al-Akhras as he continues his hunger strike. #Gazapic.twitter.com/XuwOOkvThG

— Joe Truzman (@Jtruzmah) November 3, 2020

The Jerusalem District Court ruled on Monday that the Palestinian Authority must pay NIS 13 million ($3.8 million) in compensation to the family of Tzipi and Gadi Shemesh, who were murdered in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in 2002.

The ruling followed another two years ago that held the PA directly responsible for their murder and that of their unborn twins, Ynet reported.

Suicide bomber Muhammad Hashika carried out the attack, which also killed Yizhak Cohen, a father-of-six from Modi’in, and wounded 80 other people.

“This evening we finally have closure after many years of struggles in court,” said Shahar and Shoval, the murdered couple’s daughters, according to the report. “From the first moment what was most important to us is that justice be served.”

The PA’s argument in court was that the claim for compensation was irrelevant, and that it related to complex historical issues that should not be argued in court.

The Committee on Human Rights of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international organization of national parliaments whose primary purpose is to promote democratic governance, accountability, and cooperation among its members, on Tuesday called on Israel to immediately release Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Sa’adat, who are both imprisoned in Israel.

The IPU said in a statement that it is “deeply concerned” that, after being incarcerated for 16 years, Barghouti has “no horizon for an early release.” The IPU said Barghouti’s trial was unfair and that his conviction was unfounded.

Barghouti was indicted in an Israeli civilian court in 2002 on 26 counts of murder and attempted murder stemming from attacks carried out by the group he founded, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, on Israeli civilians and soldiers. Barghouti refused to present a defense to the charges against him, maintaining throughout that the trial was illegal and illegitimate.

The IPU also claimed that Sa’dat was not receiving the medical treatment he needs, is not allowed to be visited by his family, and has been placed in solitary confinement. Also, according to the IPU, political considerations affect Israel’s decisions about his treatment.

Sa’dat was accused by Israel of organizing the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001. As part of an agreement with Israel, Sa’adat was tried by a Palestinian Authority court and sent to a Jericho prison in 2002. In the PA elections of January 2006, Sa’adat was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council, and in March of 2006, he was going to be released from prison. The US and British team monitoring Jericho prison left the site over what they said were poor security conditions, and so, on the same day they were leaving, Israeli forces took Sa’adat and five other security prisoners into custody. In December 2006 he was sentenced to 30 years by an Israeli military court.

No security, no peace, unless all Israeli settlements are removed from West Bank - PA Deputy Prime Minister

Official PA TV News, Oct. 14, 2020

PA Deputy Prime Minister and PA Presidential Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina: The [Israeli] settlement[s] will disappear in the end. There will be no peace as long as there is one settlement on the Palestinian. Just as the settlements were removed from Gaza, they will be removed from the West Bank. Either a peace that is based on an independent, fully sovereign [Palestinian] state with East Jerusalem as its capital and without settlers or settlements, or else there will be no security, no stability, and no peace.

"Palestinian land" or "occupied Palestinian land" - Although the PA calls them “Palestinian land” or occupied “Palestinian land,” neither Jerusalem nor Area C of the West Bank, where more than 815,000 Israelis live, were ever in history “Palestinian land.” Designated for the Jewish state by international agreements, these areas were illegally occupied for 19 years by Jordan in 1948. Since 1967, these areas are under full Israeli jurisdiction and remain so unless otherwise agreed upon during negotiations. The Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the PLO reconfirm this status. Since both Israel and PA claim all or parts of Area C, the more accurate term for these territories today is “disputed territories.”

Nabil Abu Rudeina also serves as PA Minister of Information, Fatah Commissioner of Information, Culture, and Ideology, and Fatah Central Committee member.

The recording titled "On the road to Jaffa" comes after Hamas published a statement condemning the terror attack in #Vienna giving the impression that ISIS killing civilians is condemned by the movement but killing Israeli civilians deserves praise. https://t.co/JAbr65uvjM

— Joe Truzman (@Jtruzmah) November 3, 2020

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday the result of the US election was not important for the country's clerical rulers, but that the next president in Washington should respect international treaties and laws.

"For Tehran, the next US administration's policies are important and not who wins the US election," Rouhani said in a televised cabinet meeting.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden has promised to rejoin Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with six powers if Iran returns to compliance with it. President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions that have crippled Iran's economy. In retaliation, Iran has gradually reduced compliance with the deal's terms.

"We want to be respected, not subject to sanctions (by the United States). No matter who wins the US election ... For us, policies and principles are important," Rouhani said.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said in a November 3, 2020 address that aired on Channel 1 (Iran) that the West’s “attacks” on the honor of the Prophet Muhammad are a sign of the oppressive, unjust, ignorant, and barbaric nature of Western civilization. He also said that the U.S. is suffering from political, civil, and moral decadence that will spell its end regardless of who wins in the 2020 Presidential Election, however, Khamenei added, certain candidates would accelerate America’s demise more than others. In addition, he said that Israel will be destroyed.

If you want to know why the Ayatollah can call for the elimination of Israel without fear of ever being flagged, hidden or frozen by @Jack@Twitter on grounds of hateful conduct, it’s merely because their policy is to allow Ayatollahs to call for the elimination of Israel. https://t.co/MSM8BHeObD

— Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) November 3, 2020

Iran's traditional Student Day march, which marks the anniversary of the Iranian seizure of the United States Embassy in 1979, will not be held for the first time in 40 years, due to coronavirus concerns, the London-based Iran International reported on Monday.

Iran, which has recently seen another major surge in coronavirus cases, has also been dealing with the financial fallout of the ever-expanding list of US sanctions on the country.

However, one official from the student section of the Basij militia organization is getting creative with his methods of protesting the US regime.

While talking to a local television news station, Mojtaba Bastan, Acting Head of the Student Basij Organization announced a new campaign, titled 'Everyone together [says] down with the USA."

The statement of the student mobilization of Payame Noor University of Ilam province states: "We do not trade our independence and freedom with anything from the yoke of arrogance and we note the endurance and spirit of jihad and resistance and martyrdom in the revolutionary and provincial youth until the complete destruction of global arrogance. The freedom of the oppressed of the world from the yoke of arrogance continues."

It happens every election: celebrities—and just generally spoiled people (cough cough)—swear that if their candidate doesn’t win, they’re leaving. But author Lauren Ariel Hoffman decided to write about leaving America from a Jewish perspective. Hoffman describes her own Orange Man trauma and exit plan, comparing it all to an escape from the Nazis. She then quotes a few Jewish friends on their own plans for fleeing the country. The odd thing is, not one of them considers Israel as a viable option for relocation, and in fact, Israel is not mentioned in this article at all.

Hoffman’s article was featured in Alma, which—no surprise—also includes articles on such subjects as, “Why Does My Interfaith Relationship Disqualify Me From Rabbinical School?” and “Now’s the Perfect Time to Teach Your Non-Jewish Partner All About Judaism." So perhaps it's not quite the right place to discover love and loyalty for the one Jewish State. You'd think, nonetheless, that in an article about fleeing the country, a Yid might consider Israel.

Never heard of Lauren Ariel Hoffman and her epigenetic intergenerational trauma? Neither had I, but her byline was linked to this handy dandy author’s blurb:

Lauren Ariel Hoffman (she/her) is a photojournalist from Royersford, Pennsylvania. Her coverage includes stories relating to chronic illness, medical injustice, and human interest.

Well there you have it. Perhaps Israel, as a subject for liberal Jews, is somewhat beyond human interest.

But back to the article: Hoffman, it is clear, wants to celebrate her distress in a Jewish way. But the closest thing she can get to kosher-style anguish is by referencing the Holocaust and her family roots in the Ukraine:

It is not 1939, and yet the police are still slaughtering unarmed Black men and women in the name of “justice,” still separating refugee families at the border and putting their children in cages, still performing medical experiments on female-bodied prisoners.

Sound familiar?

My recurring nightmare of Nazis breaking into my house and capturing me is becoming more tangible, but now it’s informed and comprehensive and absolutely terrifying. And while I’m a fan of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, I don’t think I’ll be knocking Nazi skulls anytime soon. I’m more prepared to find myself in a police-state wherein me and my loved one’s basic liberties will be stripped and some of our lives taken, along with members of every other oppressed group in America.

I am not going to back down from this fight, mainly because I have nowhere else to go — as a descendant of Ukrainian Jews, my ancestor’s recent homeland does not exist anymore.

Which is odd, because last I looked, the Ukraine still exists. Or so Google says:

Ukraine is a large country in Eastern Europe known for its Orthodox churches, Black Sea coastline and forested mountains. Its capital, Kiev, features the gold-domed St. Sophia's Cathedral, with 11th-century mosaics and frescoes. Overlooking the Dnieper River is the Kiev Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, a Christian pilgrimage site housing Scythian tomb relics and catacombs containing mummified Orthodox monks. 

But I don’t blame Lauren for not wanting to go back to the Ukraine. I wouldn’t want to go back there, either. It was bad enough the first time.

Still, to say she has nowhere else to go—why not go back to the place her family came from in the first place—before they were expelled and forced to wander? Why not go back to Israel, where today there is a flourishing Jewish State? But no, it’s not on Hoffman's radar. Nor was it apparently on the radar of her Sephardic friend Rebecca Brier:

Rebecca Brier, 37, who asked to use an alias, feels differently. She and her husband are in the process of getting Portuguese citizenship for themselves and their two young children.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my family, it’s that it’s okay to be the first one to go,” she said. “It’s harder with kids. We speak Spanish, but Spanish is not Portuguese.”

Brier said she is mainly torn between leaving her family behind in the Bronx or figuring out how to get them all to Portugal.

“We’ve set up our lives around our support system, our family. If we left, would we be that anchor again? At some point, flight becomes easier, because if I fly, at least I still have my family.”

On the other hand, if she would only make Aliyah to Israel, the Briers would have new family everywhere they turned. As new immigrants they would be embraced and surrounded by fellow Jews, living proud and free in their indigenousterritory. But no, Brier instead prefers to return to the land of the Inquisition, where Jews were tortured for their beliefs, forced to go underground with their observance, and slaughtered if they refused to convert. Somehow this is, to Brier, infinitely preferable to moving to the Jewish State. 

“But not everyone has the luxury of leaving,” continues Hoffman:

Aviva Davis, 21, is a biracial Jew whose ancestry is more closely linked to slavery than the Holocaust. They feel it is a luxury that white Jews are able to consider leaving at all.

“I would love to have an escape plan, but it’s not a viable option for me,” they said. “Where would I go? My ancestors were carted over here as slaves — white Jews can trace citizenship back to their ancestors. It’s very frustrating for me to feel like I have nowhere to go.”

Leaving aside the odd use of the pronoun "they," um. Where would "they" go? To ISRAEL. Where Jews of every color of the rainbow live full, satisfying, Jewish lives.

But no. These people are stuck in a time warp of pogroms, auto-da-fé, and slavery:

As Brier said, “Do we become Jews lighting candles in the closet in Spain? Or do we flee to the Ottoman Empire? I’m not sure who did it right. But the trauma is still there.”

As I write this piece, no one knows who will win the 2020 presidential election. But one thing I know for sure: Israeli Jews did it right.They left the trauma and the ghettos behind to build a beautiful, shining new world, where anything is possible, and dreams can come true.

H/T Ardie Geldman

In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, it wasn’t hard to meet Russians who knew the Communist system was incorrigibly corrupt, dysfunctional and oppressive. But it was one thing to whisper such truths to trusted friends, quite another to speak openly, to make oneself a target of the police state.

A member of the intelligentsia who kept his head down asked me this question: “What do you call a man of integrity in the Soviet Union?” When I shook my head, he dolefully provided the answer: “An inmate.”

Natan Sharansky was born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky in 1948 in Stalino, a grimy Ukrainian coal town renamed Donetsk following the death of the second Soviet dictator in 1953. He showed enormous aptitude for mathematics and chess—useful pursuits for those who did not want to risk being “cancelled” (to borrow a contemporary expression) by the KGB. But he was not such a person.

In his 20s, he became a vocal Zionist (i.e. a believer in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in part of their ancient homeland), refusenik (a Soviet citizen denied the right to emigrate) and human rights activist (not just for Soviet Jews but also for dispossessed Tartars, oppressed Pentecostalists, Armenian nationalists and others).

Before long, he was arrested, tried by a kangaroo court and, in 1978, sentenced to the Gulag. Released nine years later, he went to Israel where he spent nine years in politics, followed by nine years as head of the Jewish Agency, an organization that links Israelis with the remaining (or surviving) Jewish communities abroad.

He tells the stories of his life—along with large sprinklings of history, philosophy and polemics—in “Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People,” written in tandem with Gil Troy, the eminent historian.

I had the opportunity to speak with Sharansky last week. I mentioned that I had attempted to report on his trial but, because it was closed to the press and public, the best I could do was hang around outside the courthouse with his supporters.

One day, a van arrived and backed up to the building’s exit. The van’s rear doors opened and then closed. The van drove away. We knew he was in it and where he was being taken.

Plaintively, his supporters called out what was then his nickname: “Tolya! Tolya! Tolya!” For more than 40 years, I’ve wondered: Had he heard them?

A year before the coronavirus hit, the Times was blaming Jews for the spread of measles. But it goes back even further than that.

A 1921 Times editorial headlined “Typhus Still a Menace” declared, “the immigration danger has been obvious for decades,” complaining about “the problems of infectious disease brought here by immigrants.” What was that a reference to? A Times editorial from 1892, headlined “Typhus and Immigration,” holds an answer: “Two weeks ago the steamship Massilia brought to this city 248 Russian Hebrews, and within the last two days it has been discovered that about one-third of these immigrants are suffering from typhus fever, one of the most virulent and menacing of the diseases which test the powers of sanitary officers. …Typhus fever is a disease caused by filth, overcrowding, destitution, and neglect of the fundamental laws of sanitation… This outbreak of dreaded disease must bring forcibly to the attention of all intelligent citizens the evils of unrestricted immigration. The Times has made the sufferings of the persecuted Hebrews in Russia the subject of a notable investigation, the results of which our readers are familiar. No one will accuse this journal of having failed to appreciate the hardships of these unfortunate persons… But it is the duty of the people of this country to protect themselves against the importation of such persons as these whom the Massilia brought to this port. Especially it is the duty of the people of New-York to protest against the admission of those whose habits and condition invite deadly infectious diseases and who carry with them the seeds of a plague that can be stamped out only by the most energetic measures of a large body of sanitary officers. Such immigrants are not wanted either in this city or in any other part of the United States. They should excluded. The doors should be shut against them.”

The 1892 editorial is still available on the Times website with no correction, apology, or retraction appended, not even a trigger warning.

What’s remarkable here is the continuity. The New York Times has been blaming Jews for the spread of deadly diseases in New York City for 128 years. The newspaper did not want us here in America to begin with. It would have preferred that we perished in Europe. Shmuel Rosner writing on the Times op-ed page in 2020 with the absurd claim that “Ultra-Orthodox Jews tend to be poor by design” and the assertion that they “live in densely populated areas” sounds like an echo of the 1892 Times editorial about “destitution” and “overcrowding.”

If the New York Times had been publishing in Europe between 1348 and 1350, it would be blaming the Jews for the Black Death.

But enough looking backward. What about the future?

With any luck, the Jews will be around in another 100 years. As to whether the Times will be around then to blame us for the latest pandemic—well, that’s a different question. One hopes that the market for this sort of scapegoating is diminishing over time.

He’s exactly the sort of person conservatives and some of Israel’s most ardent supporters despised. Yet today he’s being lionized by supporters of the most pro-Israel president in history and attacked by left-wingers who once idolized him. Perhaps more than anyone else, Glenn Greenwald embodies the contradictions and the ironies that abound in politics and the press in 2020. As such, the sympathy or scorn that he is now generating for his refusal to play by the contemporary rules of a tribal media culture has broad implications not just for the future of journalism but for democracy.

Greenwald led the team at The Guardian that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for writing about the massive leak of US intelligence information by Edward Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor. Snowden had provided the material directly to Greenwald, who had already made a name for himself writing scathing critiques of the tactics used by the Bush administration’s war on Islamist terror, as well as for vitriolic attacks on Israel in its efforts to defend itself against Palestinian terrorists.

Born to Jewish parents in New York, Greenwald is the sort of polemicist that defended the use of antisemitic slurs like “Israel-firster” to denigrate Jews who support Israel as disloyal to the United States. That demonstrated his antipathy for the right of the one Jewish state on the planet to exist or to defend itself against Hamas terrorists whose actions he justified. But it was also rich since, as his aiding and abetting of Snowden indicated, he didn’t seem to have much loyalty to the United States in its struggles against foreign enemies like Al-Qaeda and Iran.

Nevertheless, Greenwald’s undeniably intrepid reporting on US security issues, including his documenting the way Americans were being spied on by the agencies that were tasked with defending their freedoms, earned him a lot of respect among journalists as well as political liberals who shared his distrust of the intelligence establishment.

Aaron David Miller had a long and distinguished career in the US State Department — distinguished that is by failure to achieve the objective of Israeli-Arab peace. Nevertheless, he has continued to advocate the wrongheaded policies he pursued, and to criticize President Trump’s Middle East policy. It was a shock, therefore, to read his mea culpa in The Washington Post. Even while admitting his errors, however, he could not abandon ideas that are equally mendacious.

He starts by confessing that he and other “peace process veterans” were wrong in their insistence the Arab states would not normalize relations with Israel before the Palestinian issue was resolved. Miller concedes that, in May, he had expressed skepticism about Arab countries establishing diplomatic ties with Israel.

What Miller does not acknowledge is that he and other Arabists turned their views into a self-fulfilling prophecy by refusing to make much of an effort to either help pressure or entice Arab states to make peace with Israel. Instead, their obsession with the Palestinian issue, and misguided ideas of how to resolve it, led them to advocate pressure on Israel to capitulate to Palestinian demands. By doing so, they reinforced Palestinian intransigence. By lauding the Arab Peace Initiative, they endorsed giving the Palestinians a veto over Arab states’ normalization of ties with Israel. Due to a lack of imagination, rather than jettison an approach to peacemaking that failed for decades, they insisted there was no alternative.

The misreading of Arab sentiment dates to before and after partition, when the Saudis made no secret of the fact that they cared less about Palestine than the survival of the monarchy. Had the State Department exploited their weakness and pressured them to accept Israel rather than behaving as if Saudi Arabia was the superpower and fearing their reaction, history might have been much different. Perhaps unconsciously, Trump’s advisers understood this and used the Gulf Arabs’ fear of Iran — combined with their rapacious desire for US weapons — to their advantage and helped nudge the UAE and Bahrain to expand their quiet ties with Israel to open and full diplomatic relations. The Saudis are still holding out, but cooperation with Israel is an open secret and normalization may follow.

Dehrar Belhoul Al Falasi, a member of the Federal Council of the United Arab Emirates, told i24News in an interview that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are “corrupt” and “murderer[s].”

“The UAE is committed to the cause, to the Palestinian people … Hamas and the [PA] Authority—both of them are corrupt, both of them are murderer[s],” he said. “Now the anger … on the UAE from both of them [is] because the UAE stopped paying anything. If we want to pay, we pay the people,” not the leaders.

Falasi went to call Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas “a common traitor,” and that when he visited the UAE, his son came with and tried to do business deals.

“Now you came to help the Palestinians or you came to sell yourself or your companies,” accused Falasi. “So now, the UAE had enough and Saudi Arabia had enough. Every time, they miss a chance by refusing to negotiate and they lose more.”

Falasi added that to stop terrorism, it is necessary to cut off the financing coming from Qatar.

“We know Hamas is a terrorist, but if you cut the money from it, it cannot continue,” he said. “They will start fighting and will kill each other.”

“It feels like we are dating” – those are the words that Fleur Hassan Nahoum, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor uses when describing the new relationship between the UAE and Israel.

“In all our conversations and the new friends we’ve made, what is really clear is that both sides have a real thirst for a warm peace. And I’ve never experienced that. I think we are living in historic times, we are curious about each other and we want to get to know each other. It’s so interesting and exciting – we are really making history here,” Nahoum, who is also co-founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council, tells Gulf Business.

There has been a strong momentum following the signing of the historic Abraham Accords between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel in the US in September. Last month, the first-ever official delegation of UAE ministers visited Israel, where a number of landmark agreements were signed across sectors including investment, tourism, financial services and technology.

The UAE, US and Israel have also jointly established a $3bn Abraham Fund to help stimulate private sector-led investments across the region. The fund will bolster regional trade, enable strategic infrastructure projects and increase energy security. From a business perspective, it is almost as if the floodgates have been opened in terms of potential collaborations between the UAE and Israel, opines Dorian Barak, also a co-founder of the UAE-Israel Business Council.

The council, which was established in June of this year – prior to the peace treaty being signed between the countries – aims to foster economic cooperation and business partnerships between the two sides.

“I think there are three specific areas where you are really going to see the floodgates open. The first is employing the UAE – and Dubai in particular – as a hub [by Israeli companies]. It is an unparalleled hub for Israeli companies to tap the greater Middle East, South Asia, East Africa and in fact the entire Indian Ocean base. I think you are going to see a lot of Israeli companies establishing themselves in this remarkable business hub,” he states.

“The second is the direct export of technologies here in a much more organised and open way in areas where Israel is traditionally strong such as agricultural technologies, clean technologies, solar and other renewables.

United Arab Emirates airline Flydubai on Wednesday said it would start direct fights to Israel this month with twice daily services between Dubai and Tel Aviv.

The announcement comes after the Middle East states in August agreed to establish formal ties, including launching direct flights between the two countries.

Dubai state-owned Flydubai will operate 14 weekly services between the UAE’s and Israel’s financial capitals from Nov. 26, it said on its website.

Tickets for those flights were now on sale.

Dubai’s Emirates, the UAE’s biggest airline, will sell tickets on the Flydubai service through a codeshare agreement between the carriers, an Emirates spokeswoman said.

UAE and Israeli citizens are able to visit each others’ country without applying for a visa before traveling as part of agreements recently signed between the two states.

Israeli airlines Israir and Arkia have advertised packages to Dubai for flights starting on Dec. 9, but say they are yet to receive final approval for the flights.

El Al Israel Airlines, the country’s biggest airline, has not advertised flights.

Israel and India share a close bond of friendship and complement each other, Israel's Ambassador to India Ron Malka said, the Press Trust of India reported.

Speaking at the foundation stone laying ceremony for the Indo-Israeli Centre of Excellence for Vegetables Protected Cultivation in the outskirts of Guwahati, the ambassador praised the close collaboration the two countries have had in fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

This followed a meeting between a Malka-led delegation and Sarbananda Sonowal, chief minister of the Indian state of Assam, where they discussed a number of issues benefiting both India and Israel. This includes the Centre of Excellence, which Sonowal has said will be a valuable addition to government efforts at boosting farmer income through the infusion of new technological innovations in agriculture and food processing, the Press Trust of India reported.

The project is valued at Rs 10.33 crore, and will see Israeli technologies used by Assam's farmers to help them maximize production and income, Sonowal explained.

He further asked for Israeli help and cooperation in aiding the state's growth in other sectors, such as industry.

On Oct. 6, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued the now-notorious Executive Order 202.68. Citing rising positive COVID-19 rates in parts of New York state, the order designated certain areas into red, orange, and yellow zones based on their case load. Notably, these regions included significant Orthodox Jewish populations and the order imposed sharp restrictions on their communal religious practice. In red zones, houses of worship were ordered to limit their attendance to 25% capacity or 10 people, “whichever is fewer.” In orange zones, attendance was similarly capped at 33% capacity or 25 people, whichever was fewer. This held true no matter how large the congregation, its building, or its outdoor property.

With these restrictions coming during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, it was unsurprising that Orthodox Jewish groups soon filed lawsuits against the order and its impositions on their schools and houses of worship. What’s more surprising is that their case has since been joined by an array of Muslim advocacy groups.

On Oct. 16, the Muslim Public Action Council, the Religious Freedom Institute’s Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team, and religious liberty lawyer Asma Uddin filed an amicus brief in support of one of these lawsuits, petitioning the state to allow the Oct. 27 reopening of Bais Yaakov Ateres Miriam (BYAM) school.

In the popular imagination, Muslims and Jews might seem like an odd pairing to prosecute this case. But to those involved, the partnership is intuitive, based on an understanding that threats to traditional religious practice do not stay confined to one community.

The current reaction by UConn President Tom Katsouleas and his administration has been wholly inadequate. To date, the South Campus incidents have been addressed through a town hall for students of these residence halls, and a public statement released on October 30. Most of the individuals who attended the town hall were either staff, members of the Jewish community, or resident assistants on South Campus. While this virtual gathering provided a productive outlet to discuss hatred and antisemitism, it was not enough. Not to mention that the university has not responded to the allegations of the @JewishOnCampus post. The tacit acceptance of such ignorance at the faculty level represents an affront to the Jewish community. To compare the systematic, targeted murder of millions of European Jews with the bloody Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a false equivalency.

Although the university administration denounced these antisemitic actions, they did too little too late. Unfortunately, this delayed reaction follows a striking pattern of hesitation in responding to acts of hate on our campus. Simply put, our administration needs to respond to these incidences sooner. In order to do so, the university should bolster its existing response protocol to hate incidents that target other minority communities. Furthermore, the university should make public the outcome of their ongoing investigation into the South Campus incidents. Lastly, the university should muster its power as an institution of higher education, and address the dangerous misconceptions that produce hate and antisemitism. Put plainly, UConn needs to be much more transparent in its response to incidents of hate across campus.

UConn’s mission statement claims that the university seeks for each student to “grow intellectually and become a contributing member of the state, national, and world communities.” If this is to be accomplished, UConn must be outspoken in denouncing hate in all forms including antisemitism, anti-Black racism, xenophobia, and homophobia. It must educate its student body to understand and appreciate the stories of historically oppressed communities. Most importantly, UConn must ensure that course material is taught in a factually nuanced way, which addresses the full scope of perspectives.

In a July 23 message addressing UConn’s response to anti-Black racism, President Katsouleas and Chief Diversity Officer Tuitt eloquently stated that teaching and learning are what we do best as a university: “Through education and scholarship, we address the needs of our students to understand and contextualize the world around us, empower them with that knowledge, and address the misperceptions that underlie bias and bigotry.” As a member of the Jewish community, I agree; and I intend to hold the UConn administration responsible for the values it espouses. An act of hate against one faith, culture, or identity is an affront to us all. It is time for our university to be an outspoken voice for change: to educate, speak up, and speak out against antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and all forms of hate on our campus.

The University of Connecticut has been investigating multiple reports of antisemitic incidents on its main campus in Storrs, including swastika vandalism and other kinds of property damage.

“These recent reports were all acts of physical damage to property, including swastika graffiti. These are undeniable symbols of antisemitism that elicit painful reminders of the Holocaust among our Jewish students, faculty, and staff,” said school administrators in an email to students.

“These acts and other discriminatory acts this semester are deeply upsetting and leave a scar on members of our community whose beliefs or identities are targeted,” they added.

Following each incident, the Residential Life staff reached out to impacted parties to offer support, according to school officials.

The university said it’s working with members of the Hillel on campus to organize an event regarding concerns and working towards healing.

The City of Toronto is reportedly bringing charges against a Bloordale food services business that made headlines over the summer with pro-Palestinian signage indicating “Zionists” were not permitted inside.

In a news release, Jewish service organization B’Nai Brith Canada said city bylaw inspectors told a complainant they’ve concluded an investigation into Foodbenders (at 1162 Bloor St. W.) and will be proceeding “administratively” at the Toronto Licensing Tribunal.

In a partially-redacted email provided by B’Nai Brith, from a staff person in Toronto’s Licensing and Standards Division to an anonymized complainant, it stated that the city has also filed charges against Foodbenders for “contravention of Toronto Municipal Code Chapter 545, for discriminate (sic) against any member of the public in the carrying on of a licenced business.”

B'Nai Brith said the names were struck out from the email as a matter of organizational policy.

A spokesperson from the City of Toronto's Strategic Communications department would not comment on the email because the matter is “an open investigation,” but in an emailed statement advised toronto.com to check back in two weeks’ time.

We reached out to Foodbenders owner Kimberly Hawkins for comment, but did not hear back from her before our publication deadline.

B’Nai Brith Canada Chairman Michael Mostyn said in an interview that the news from the individual complainant that charges were being laid was “very important.”

The Swiss city of Basel, where Theodore Herzl ushered political Zionism into the world in 1897, is engulfed in an anti-Israel row over a Green Party candidate’s longstanding support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign targeting the Jewish State.

The Green Party candidate for Basel’s city government, Heidi Mück, launched a parliamentary initiative in 2008 against Israel. She sought to stop the work of the Basel city building department with the French company Veolia because it had helped construct Jerusalem’s light rail system.

For the last 14 years, a picture of Mück has been on a BDS website that calls for the boycott of Israeli goods. In 2010, Mück signed a document in support of BDS.

The prominent Swiss-German daily Basler Zeitung reported critically over the past week about Mück’s pro-BDS activities, ostensibly leading her to walk back her support for BDS.

When asked about her BDS activities, Mück told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday that “I signed at the time the BDS call for a boycott of Israeli products on humanitarian grounds. As early as 2016, I made it clear in a reply in the Basler Zeitung that I am neither a member nor a supporter of BDS, but only supported this one appeal.”

Mück would continue to meet with BDS activists in 2017 in connection with the 120th anniversary of the first Zionist congress in Basel – appearing to suggest a way to strip Israel of its legitimacy, according to critics.

Success ! Thank you to @GoFundMeUK me for stopping Palestine Action raising money as their supporters and members were arrested for assaults recently on innocent supporters of Israel Elbit london. Thank tou to all who complained #eyeonantisemitism#elbit@Campaign4T

— Eye On Antisemitism (@AntisemitismEye) November 4, 2020

First, he wasn’t merely ‘critical of Israel’.

As our posts have demonstrated, he possessed what can more accurately be described as a malign obsession with Israel. However, even being obsessively critical of Israel isn’t necessarily evidence of antisemitism. The only evidence in our view worthy of examination is the question of whether journalists or commentators have actually employed antisemitic tropes – “antisemitic” as defined by the IHRA Working Definition.

In this regard, the evidence is clear.

In 2019, we posted about an Indy piece by Fisk which unleashed the kind of unfiltered venom fancied by unabashed bigots in charging the media with “grovelling, cowardly, craven obeisance” to Israel”, accused the US Congress of being “in thrall” to Jerusalem, and concluded that the Jewish state has “annexed America”. (The original headline charged that “Israel controls America”.)

Indeed, Fisk’s use of the ‘Jewish control’ narrative goes back many years.

In April 2006, the Independent carried a four-page piece by Fisk – mirroring his more recent charge that Israel “annexed” America – titled ‘The United States of Israel”, profiling professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel lobby.

Robert Fisk’s Arabic language skills and factual inaccuracies were the topic of a blogpost by former Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker in 2013.

“Fisk is at his most comical when he gets on his high horse and immediately falls off. Writing with (justified) indignation about the killings in Baba Amr last year, he began:

“So it’s the ‘cleaning’ of Baba Amr now, is it? ‘Tingheef’ in Arabic. Did that anonymous Syrian government official really use that word to the AP yesterday?”

Well, no. Obviously a Syrian official wouldn’t use the word ‘tingheef’, since it doesn’t exist in Arabic.

Fisk likes to drop the occasional Arabic word into his articles – they add local flavour and possibly impress readers who are unfamiliar with the language. For those who are familiar with Arabic, on the other hand, it only draws attention to his carelessness.

Fiskian Arabic is often based on mis-hearings or rough approximations of real words. […]

First, contrary to the assertion that the Balfour Declaration failed to protect Palestinian Arabs, the letter in fact says that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”.

But, the more important distortion is the claim that the Balfour Declaration is “one of the main causes of the Israel/Palestine conflict”, absurd reasoning which conflates cause and effect. It wasn’t the Balfour Declaration, which set in motion international recognition of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland, that caused the Israel/Palestine conflict. It was the Arabs’ and Palestinians’ consistent rejection of the morally intuitive idea endorsed in Lord Balfour’s letter – that “Jewish people constitute a nation and deserve an equal place among the family of nations in its own homeland” – that caused the conflict.

If Arabs and Palestinians had accepted the idea behind the Balfour Declaration, and tolerated but one Jewish state in a tiny sliver of land between the Mediterranean and Jordan, there wouldn’t have been the calamitous wars of 1948 and 1967, and Palestinians might have recently celebrated their 72nd year of independence.

Ofcom has fined the Islam Channel £20,000 for broadcasting a programme that contained “antisemitic hate speech.”

The watchdog ruled that an episode of The Rightly Guided Khalifas, a religious education series broadcast in November 2018, contained three breaches of the Broadcasting Code.

Confirming that a hefty fine had been imposed on Islam Channel Limited, Ofcom referred to a decision it had made last October over the programme’s contents, which it said contained “uncontextualised hate speech” and breached Rules 2.3, 3.2 and 3.3 of the Code.

Explaining the decision, it said: “Ofcom’s Breach Decision found an episode of the programme The Rightly Guided Khalifas contained uncontextualized antisemitic hate speech which amounted to the abuse or derogatory treatment of Jewish people.

“The Breach Decision found this episode of The Rightly Guided Khalifas ascribed a perpetually negative characteristic to Jewish people; namely corrupting Holy Books and seeking the destruction of Islam in both ancient and more recent times.

“In addition, through the conflation of Israel and Jewish people the content characterised Jewish people as ‘tyrannical’ and having an ‘evil mind’. It was our decision that this content met Ofcom’s definition of hate speech and that Rule 3.2 was breached.

Google Play banned the third-party app BitChute this week, which was promoted as a “free speech” alternative to YouTube that has become a safe haven for neo-Nazis, hosting racist, violent and antisemitic videos that are later posted on social media.

Google suspended the app, stating that it is in violation of its affiliate spam policy, although BitChute denies this claim, tweeting a photo of Google’s notification.

The UK-based video platform was set up in January 2017 by tech entrepreneur Ray Vahey and Richard Anthony Jones. It has become a platform used by alt-right groups, with UK-based Community Security Trust (CST) finding it to be one of the four most dangerous outlets of extreme anti-Semitic content on the Internet.

According to pro-Israel lawyers and activists, in the context of rising antisemitism, public access to this platform and the site’s active promotion of antisemitism are cause for major alarm. Recently, social media companies are being pressured to clean their platforms of hate speech and adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, but this has led antisemites and white supremacists to look for other places to share their content.

Despite the site’s community guidelines that say “incitement to violence” and “malicious use of the platform” will not be tolerated, on the site are pro-ISIS content, calls for the killing of Jews, Holocaust denial, classic antisemitic characterizations of Israel and Israelis, and drawing comparisons to a contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis—each with tens of thousands of views.

Twitter has banned the account of British conspiracy theorist David Icke.

"The account referenced has been permanently suspended for violating Twitter's rules regarding Covid misinformation," a spokesman told the BBC.

The action comes six months after Facebook and YouTube took similar action, saying Mr Icke had posted misleading claims about the pandemic.

The 68-year-old had about 382,000 followers on Twitter.

His recent posts had included attacks on Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci and the philanthropist Bill Gates.

In a blog, Mr Icke said was banned for a tweet he had made about plans to pilot city-wide coronavirus testing in Liverpool.

But over recent months he has made false claims such as suggesting that 5G mobile phone networks were linked to the spread of the virus, and that a Jewish group had also been involved.

Covid rules

Mr Icke has promoted fringe theories since the 1990s, but his recent return to prominence was propelled by the spread of Covid-19.

Holocaust denial and distortion is one of the most insidious forms of antisemitism

While the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by the Nazis is the most documented genocide in history, far too often, its factual basis is denied, its scope mitigated, and the deliberate intentions of the Nazis and their collaborators are dismissed. According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Definition of Antisemitism, which Canada is a member, Holocaust denial is a modern-day example of Jew hatred.

While Holocaust denial is not explicitly banned in the Canadian Criminal Code, these deniers seek to erase Jewish victimhood from the history books and to wilfully incite hatred. They accuse the Jewish people of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust, claiming it’s just a hoax perpetrated by manipulative and sinister Jews.

With antisemitism on the rise domestically and surging worldwide, fueled by the proliferation of online hate, the concern is that digital bigotry may descend into real-world violence. As Voltaire forewarned: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

In recent days, Facebook announced it will now ban content which, according to its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, “denies or distorts” the Holocaust. Only two years earlier, Zuckerberg was publicly opposed to this ban noting that while he found such antisemitism offensive, he didn’t want to intervene. He had argued that “… at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that (Holocaust denial content) down because I think there are things that different people get wrong.” But as Edward R. Murrow once said: “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.”

There is an important debate to be had on the limits of free expression in Canada, which is a protected privilege under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but it’s undeniable that antisemitic actions are often spurred on by incitement. The Holocaust, after all, didn’t start with the gassing of the Jews, it started with words. Nazi propaganda in newspapers and radio helped characterize the Jew as sub-human and paved the way for the slaughter of European Jewry. Once Jews are no longer seen as human, committing a massacre against them becomes significantly easier and, to its proponents, justified.

The new governor of a Brazilian state was forced to condemn her father, who has praised Hitler and other Nazis, but Jewish groups say her repudiation was not forceful enough.

At a press conference last Tuesday, Daniela Reinehr, the new governor of the Santa Catarina state in southern Brazil, was asked about her father Altair, who has written texts that relativize Nazi atrocities during World War II and once said “it is not even allowed to remember Hitler’s positive works” in the caption to a photograph of himself in front of the house where Hitler was born in Austria.

“Your father, as a history teacher, preached in the classroom Holocaust denial, including using books by a publishing house that was condemned for telling lies about World War II,” Intercept Brasil’s Fabio Bispo said. “We want to know if you corroborate these neo-Nazi and denialist ideas about the Holocaust.”

Reinehr gave a long answer without taking a position on Nazism.

“I cannot be judged by what anyone else thinks. I respect individual rights and freedoms. I repudiate any regime that goes against what I believe,” she said.

An Icelandic company has plunged the country’s publishing industry into a debate about censorship with its plan to publish a 1976 book that argues the Holocaust is a hoax.

The book, an Icelandic-language translation of “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry” by Arthur Butz, is being advertised online ahead of its launch in the coming weeks, in time for the Christmas shopping period, the news site Visir reported Wednesday.

Separately, the city of Malmo in Sweden last week suspended its ties to an association called the Arab Book Fair, which puts on events across Europe. The suspension follows the flagging of anti-Semitic literature at previous fairs and on the fair’s website, the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote in a statement.

Denying the Holocaust is not illegal in Iceland, but the Association of Icelandic Book Publishers has the means to intervene to stop the book’s sales, Visir reported. However, the head of that organization told the news site he is not inclined to do so.

“One of the cornerstones on which book publishing here and elsewhere is based is freedom of the press and expression,” Heiðar Ingi Svansson said. He called this “a basic premise.”

Jewish organizations in Long Island have demanded the immediate resignation of the sanitation commissioner in the town of Oceanside because of a series of racist and antisemitic posts on social media.

A statement on Monday issued by the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) of Long Island, American Jewish Committee Long Island, Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County, Simon Wiesenthal Center and StandWithUs called on Oceanside Sanitation Commissioner Ryan Hemsley to step down from his position because of “hateful social media posts…which include the denigration of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, antisemitism, white supremacy, ableism, and anti-black, anti-Muslim, misogynistic, and homophobic sentiments.”

When the offensive posts were revealed last month, Helmsley initially said that the entries on Facebook had been “doctored or completely made up.” He subsequently admitted to the Long Island Herald that he had been aware of the posts for many months, but that other people had posted them on his page, and that he was asked to remove them before commencing his role.

“These posts that were released are not who I am as a person,” Hemsley said on Oct. 15. “It is absolutely disgusting, and I did not post them. I am a veteran, family man and a member of an Oceanside volunteer group” — the Oceanside Community Warriors.

The controversial posts, which included the n-word and jokes about the Ku Klux Klan and the Holocaust, among other things, were sent to the Herald by a group called Oceanside Against Racism. They were posted between 2014 and 2017, and featured racist jokes against African Americans and jabs at Jewish people that made light of the Holocaust. They also took aim at homosexuals and people with disabilities. The posts are no longer visible.

The statement put out by Jewish groups accused Hemsley of having “issued what can only be regarded as a disingenuous apology after he was caught in a lie, having originally denied responsibility for the hateful posts.”

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) studied the movements of cockroaches and lizards to create a new palm-sized high-speed amphibious robot that is able to swim, run on water, and crawl on challenging terrain.

The robot is intended to be used for agricultural, search and rescue, and excavation purposes, where both crawling and swimming are required, David Zarrouk, the director of the Bioinspired and Medical Robotics Laboratory in BGU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, said in a statement. The lab studies animal movements for inspiration for the robots it develops.

The mechanical design of the robot, called the AmphiSTAR, and its control system were presented virtually last week at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) by Zarrouk and graduate student Avi Cohen.

The movement of the robot very much resembles that of cockroaches as they scurry across terrain — managing to continue to run even in a puddle of water 20 centimeters (eight inches) deep, a video presented by the researchers shows. It can also swim at a slow speed and run over water.

Excavation works will start within two weeks to prepare for construction of the controversial cable car planned to connect West Jerusalem with the Old City, even though the High Court has not yet ruled on a petition to scrap the project.

On Thursday, project director Shmulik Tzabari met with stakeholders on Mount Zion to explain that works to move infrastructure would soon commence at the parking lot adjacent to the Shulhan David event hall, which is currently undergoing renovation.

Existing infrastructure such as water, sewage and telecommunications systems will need to be removed.

Also last week, the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), which is responsible for implementing the cable car project, won approval from the Agriculture Ministry’s Forest Commissioner’s Unit to remove trees along the cable car’s route.

Emek Shaveh, a not-for-profit organization that strives to prevent politicization of archaeology in Israel and has been leading the campaign against the project, appealed through its lawyer to the forest commissioner to freeze any tree-related action until the High Court has ruled.

A survivor of the Auschwitz death camp who assisted a German court in convicting an SS war criminal passed away on Tuesday in Chemnitz — the eastern German city of his birth.

Justin Sonder, who died at the age of 95, was deported by the Nazis to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1943 — when he was 17.

While Sonder and his father Leo survived, his mother Zita and eleven other members of their family were exterminated in the gas chambers.

In 2016, Sonder gave crucial evidence at the trial in Germany of Reinhold Hanning — a former SS guard who was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 170,000 Jews.

In his testimony, Sonder recalled that he had been lined up for the notorious “selektion” process — when Nazi officers decided which prisoners to send to the gas chambers and which to retain as slave labor — no less than 17 times.

“I don’t have the words to describe how it was, when you know that you could be dead in one or two hours, it made you sick, made you crazy,” Sonder told the court in a voice quivering with emotion.

In an interview with the German newspaper Bild prior to his passing, Sonder — who lived in communist-ruled East Germany after the war — said he hadn’t spoken about his experience in Auschwitz following the Holocaust. In 1990, in the wake of the collapse of the GDR, he began speaking at schools, giving lectures several times a week.

Do you know an outstanding English-speaking Oleh who has made a meaningful and lasting contribution to the State of Israel? https://t.co/lrQ0toKtyB

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) November 4, 2020

In the aftermath of the new peace treaties between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, and Sudan, important Arab public figures - from political officials to clerics to intellectuals - are now openly proclaiming that the Arab world has been the primary author of its own pain. These admissions may signal the beginnings of a new sensibility among Arabs and Sunni Muslims about their political and social situation. Their error was the notion that Israel was the most crucial enemy of Arabs, Muslims, and their states, an enemy that had to be not only defeated but utterly eradicated because it disrupted the harmony and progress of the Arab and Muslim world. Until recently, this view was central to Arab and Muslim sensibility.

As Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has observed: "For most Arabs the terms peace and normalization with Israel were associated with extremely negative connotations: humiliation, submission, defeat, and shame." To the question of what ailed Arab and Muslim politics and society, there was always this widely-accepted answer: the state of Israel. If only it could be eliminated, all would be well.

The new deals have now shattered that discourse, declaring that Israel is not the enemy it was alleged to be, and promising a "warm peace" with broad economic and cultural exchanges. They acknowledge that Israel is not the problem, but rather a partner on the path toward solving Middle Eastern woes.

Most crucially, the changes in Arab discourse regarding Israel have not unleashed the vehement and widespread explosions of opposition throughout the Sunni world which would have been expected in decades past. Rather, they seem to bespeak views that were developing over some time, waiting for the opportunity to be let out.

Last week, Sudan agreed to the normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for its removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, joining Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and a growing chorus of nations that have seemingly put an end to decades of Arab-Israeli conflict. The Trump and Netanyahu administrations have heralded these achievements as byproducts of their diplomatic efforts, and President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Despite these claims, such an assessment would be a poor interpretation of events. Although the Abraham Accords are encouraging and historically significant developments, they are more a byproduct of tectonic changes that have transformed the region over decades than the result of diplomatic work of the parties involved. Most responsible for the accords is the restructuring of the Middle East regional balance of power as well as massive domestic transformations across the Arab world.

For three decades, the two Iraq wars and their aftershocks have restructured the power dynamic of the Middle East, producing what scholars term the phenomenon of balancing, when countries shift alliances to collectively meet the challenges of a rising power. States that have little in common and few incentives to form partnerships band together against what they perceive to be a common and larger foe. Here, the decline of Iraq and the rise of Iran have led countries across the region to reassess their regional and international partnerships.

Such a change in circumstance did not occur overnight. America’s two wars with Iraq, Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, militarily emasculated Iraq, which had long been considered Iran’s regional counterbalance. Iraq’s armed forces, which in 1990 were the fifth largest in the world, now cannot even provide domestic security.

While the middle eastern winds of change have brought about peace agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan, the Palestinian leadership is still as intransigent as ever. For the Palestinian leadership it appears that peace with Israel can only be achieved in a “judenfrei” Palestinian state – a state free of Jews, ethnically cleansed of the over 800,000 Jews who now live in West Bank and Jerusalem.

This point was recently reiterated by PA Deputy Prime Minister and PA Presidential Spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina, who said:

“The [Israeli] settlement[s] will disappear in the end. There will be no peace as long as there is one settlement on the Palestinian lands. Just as the settlements were removed from Gaza, they will be removed from the West Bank. Either a peace that is based on an independent, fully sovereign [Palestinian] state with East Jerusalem as its capital and without settlers or settlements, or else there will be no security, no stability, and no peace.”[Official PA TV News, Oct. 14, 2020]

In order to understand the PA approach, it is important to point out two critical points.

The pillar of the PA demand is based on the Palestinian narrative which defines the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” as “Palestinian lands”.

While Abu Rudeina’s definition of the “Palestinian lands” is reflective of the often-repeated PA narrative, it lacks any historical veracity.

At no period in time were the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” under “Palestinian” control or part of an independent “Palestinian” State.

A United Nations General Assembly committee today adopted a resolution that referred to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Haram al-Sharif, one of seven resolutions passed today that single out or condemn Israel, with zero on the entire rest of the world.

“The UN today showed contempt for both Judaism and Christianity by passing a resolution that makes no mention of the name Temple Mount, which is Judaism’s holiest site, and which is sacred to all who venerate the Bible, in which the ancient Temple was of central importance,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based, independent non-governmental watchdog organization.

One of the other texts condemns Israel for “repressive measures” against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, another renews the mandate of the corrupt UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), while another renews the mandate of the UN’s “special committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories.” (Click here for texts and voting sheets.)

All 193 UN member states belong to the Special Political and Decolonization Committee, or Fourth Committee, that each year adopts the texts with large majorities. Countries’ votes are repeated in December when the GA plenary formally ratifies the texts.

“The UN’s assault on Israel with a torrent of one-sided resolutions is surreal,” said Neuer.

“Just two weeks after the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group assaulted Israeli civilians with a barrage of rockets from Gaza—while the UN’s General Assembly and Human Rights Council stayed silent—the world body now adds insult to injury by adopting seven lopsided resolutions, whose only purpose is to demonize the Jewish state.”

“While France, Germany, Sweden and other EU states are expected to support most of the estimated 20 resolutions to be adopted against Israel by December, the same European nations have failed to introduce a single UNGA resolution on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, or on 175 other countries,” said Neuer. “Where’s their supposed concern for international law and human rights?”

“Three of today’s resolutions concern UNRWA — yet none mentions that the agency chief was fired last year after top management engaged in what the UN’s own internal probe described as ‘sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain.’ All EU states are complicit in this conspiracy of silence that enables the culture of impunity at UNRWA.”

“One of today’s resolutions—drafted and co-sponsored by Syria—falsely condemns Israel for ‘repressive measures’ against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights,” said Neuer. “This is but the latest act in the UN’s theater of the absurd.”

A committee at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday passed with overwhelming majorities a series of resolutions critical of Israel, lambasting the Jewish state, among other things, for ostensible human rights violations against Palestinians and “repressive measures” against Syrians in the Golan Heights.

The three Arab countries with which Jerusalem recently signed normalization agreements — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan — did not change their traditional voting pattern and supported all resolutions critical of Israel.

The motions are passed annually by the UN’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee, with minor adjustments, and ratified by member states in December. Nearly all European countries, including staunch allies of Israel such as Germany and the Czech Republic, traditionally support most of these resolutions.

Israel’s new ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, participated in the debate that took place before the vote, making an impassioned but ultimately unsuccessful plea for countries to reject the motions.

“What is the point of these resolutions? Just to pave the way for future resolutions?” he asked. “By supporting these resolutions you are not only wasting UN resources, you are also sabotaging any chances of future peace.”

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan on Wednesday criticized UN bodies for consistently supporting anti-Israel resolutions that he said perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Erdan made his remarks at the UN General Assembly Fourth Committee, where 139 countries adopted a resolution referring to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Haram al-Sharif.

It was one of seven pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel resolutions passed on Wednesday. Endorsing the “resolutions package” were the Palestinian Authority, Cuba, Indonesia and other countries.

“What is the point of these resolutions? Just to pave the way for future resolutions?” Erdan asked. “By supporting these resolutions you are not only wasting UN resources; you are also sabotaging any changes of future peace.”

“Instead of persuading the Palestinians to choose the path of negotiations and peace, these resolutions only encourage them to harden their positions. Every voice in favor of these resolutions is another step toward turning the UN into an irrelevant body,” Erdan said.

Erdan assailed the UN for supporting a resolution pertaining to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), saying that “one of the biggest reasons for the UN’s failure in ending the conflict is its continued support of UNRWA. Simply put, UNRWA’s very existence makes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unsolvable, and I don’t intend to allow business as usual anymore.”

But "dishonor" cannot be allowed to legitimize violence. If it were, the disgruntled employee who has just been fired should have every right to shoot his former boss, the jilted fiancé the right to burn his beloved's face with acid. And yet, while Muslim extremists slice the throats of men and women at prayer, the Times and others busy themselves with accusations that the French have failed to integrate their Muslim population – which is to say, it is not the fault of the attackers. It is the fault of the French people. Worse, France not only "had it coming," but their treatment of Muslims is on par, somehow, with Muslim extremists' treatment of them.

We know these stories. If only the boy had been silent while his father was reading, he would have been spared the whipping with a belt. If only the young woman had agreed to marry her suitor, he never would have disfigured her. If Theo van Gogh had kept from speaking out against the abuse of Muslim women, he would still be alive today.

It is an argument verging on the obscene. As Brendan O'Neill so astutely noted in Spiked, "This is as morally degenerate as it would be to say that the Muslims massacred in Christchurch by the racist terrorist Brenton Tarrant brought it upon themselves by attending mosque – don't they know that's offensive to white-nationalist extremists?" Equally, this argument would say it was the fault of the 69 children of liberal Norwegians that their parents weren't racist that on July 22, 2011, white supremacist Anders Breivik bloodied the island of Utoya with their bodies.

To accept any of these events as just, as true, is to adopt the values and the behaviors of extremism. And it has no place in civilized society, or in a post-Enlightenment western world – a fact that even some Muslim rulers have confirmed. Anwar Gargash, the UAE's minister of foreign affairs, recently sided with Macron in the French president's clash with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the Mohammed cartoons.

"With his attacks on France, Erdogan manipulates a religious issue for political purposes," a courageous Gargash told German newspaper Die Welt. "You should listen to what Macron really said in his speech: he doesn't want the ghettoisation of Muslims in the west, and he is absolutely right."

And Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan categorically rejected using "hate speech" as a justification for violence or terrorism, according to Gulf News.

That these men understand what so many Western leaders seem not to recognize is at once heartening and disturbing – heartening to see leaders in the Arab world condemn the terrorists, and not the victims, but disturbing that more Westerners fail to understand why this response matters.

In a tribute to Van Gogh written after his murder, then-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali recalled his words even as he faced the threats against him: "As soon as such considerations dissuade you from expressing your opinion, isn't that the end of free speech?"

Yes. Yes, it is.

In his November 5, 2020 column in the English-language Kuwaiti daily Arab Times, former Kuwaiti oil minister Ahmed Al-Baghli wrote against the Arab boycott of French products in response to the recent publication of the Muhammad cartoons by the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. Al-Baghli noted that, according to the president of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, Mohammed Moussaoui, Muslims are not persecuted in France, for they are free to construct mosques and practice their faith. Al-Baghli added that, although the cartoons of the Prophet are indeed offensive, Muslims must consider their reaction rationally. They must remember that revenge was not the way of the Prophet, who pardoned his adversaries and exhorted his followers to do the same. Furthermore, he said, boycotting French products harms Muslims who import these products and use them more than it harms the French economy.

The following is his article:[1] "President of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) Mohammed Moussaoui said, 'Muslims are not persecuted in France.' This comes at a time when demonstrations and calls to boycott French products intensify following the statements made by French President Macron regarding the offensive cartoons depicting the noble Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Moussaoui told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that, 'France is a big country. Muslim citizens are not persecuted. They freely construct their mosques and freely practice their religion.' He urged French Muslims to 'defend the interests' of the nation in the face of the international outcry (Al-Shahid daily, Oct 27 issue).

"We are definitely against what happened in terms of the offense committed against our noble Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), but we must think about how to rationally respond to such offenses.

"Boycotting French products will not restore the honor of our noble Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) whose mission on this earth was to fulfill the best of moral behaviors. Revenge is not part of the great morality represented by the best creation of all, Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The act of revenge prevailed in the pre-Islamic era among Arabs, alongside aggression of the weak against the strong, dishonoring the principles of neighborliness and dishonesty, all of which were against the core teachings of the great Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

"It is enough that Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) pardoned his antagonist who caused him and Muslims in general to suffer at that time to such an extent that they were forced to migrate and leave their hometown Makkah. That was not the end of it, but it continued for a decade until the Prophet returned to his hometown victorious and pardoned all the enemies of Islam. His actions in this regard was in accordance with the eternal Islamic teaching – 'Forgive when able …'

Authorities in Belgium have announced additional measures to secure the Jewish community in the city of Antwerp following the terrorist attack in the Austrian capital of Vienna on Monday.

Antwerp Mayor Bart De Wever said on Tuesday that the decision had been taken based on police intelligence reports indicating a rising risk.

The size of Antwerp’s mainly Orthodox Jewish community is estimated at around 20,000 people.

A spokesperson for the community advised “extra vigilance” in the coming weeks.

“The Jewish community in our country is in full alert after the attack in Vienna,” Michael Freilich said in a statement.

“Synagogues and Jewish cultural centers are closed, but a number of schools provide emergency accommodation and kosher supermarkets are of course also open,” Freilich added. “The mayor of Antwerp immediately had extra security measures activated, for which the Jewish community is grateful.”

According to OCAD, the Belgian government agency responsible for analyzing terrorist threats, Antwerp’s community is facing a “Level 3” threat, which indicates a serious possibility of a terrorist attack.

Neo-Nazi gunman Stephan Balliet on trial in Germany. Photo: Reuters / Christian Schroedter.

The German neo-Nazi who carried out a gun attack on Yom Kippur services at a synagogue in the city of Halle in October 2019 was not suffering from a pathological disorder and was fully responsible for his act, an expert psychologist said in court on Wednesday.

The gunman, Stephan Balliet, murdered two people — a passerby and a customer in a nearby kebab restaurant — after failing to penetrate the security doors of the Halle synagogue, where more than 50 worshipers were holding Yom Kippur prayers inside the sanctuary.

Speaking at 28-year-old Balliet’s trial at a court in the city of Magdeburg, psychologist Norbert Leygraf said that Balliet suffered from a “complex personality disorder” alongside “features of autism.”

But Leygraf was not convinced that Balliet exhibited pathological tendencies.

He said that Balliet had carried out his preparations for the attack “meticulously.” Balliet’s ideological views had been formed through contact with like-minded extremists on the internet, supplying him with a worldview in which “xenophobic beliefs and paranoid conspiracy theories are combined with antisemitism.”

Leygraf concluded that Balliet was completely culpable for his act and that there was no reason to diminish his culpability from a “psychiatric point of view.”

Balliet’s trial began in July amid renewed concern over growing antisemitism in Germany.

Imam Hassen Chalghoumi, President of the Conference of Imams of France: Political Islam Is the Cancer of This Nation; The Muslim Brotherhood Should Be Outlawed, Affiliated Organizations Dissolved pic.twitter.com/gRFnIm86Cs

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 5, 2020

Amid the ongoing Charlie Hebdo cartoons controversy in France, the Mumbai-based Islamist organization Raza Academy has emerged as one of the lead groups in India at the forefront of anti-France protests. Though it calls itself an "Academy," it has absolutely nothing to do with research and academic work. It is a religious organization with a militant intellectual outlook. In 1988, it was the first Islamic organization in the world to issue a fatwa ("religious decree") against the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses – a year before Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie's murder.

In January 2012, the Indian government was forced to issue a security alert following threats from the Raza Academy to British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie.[1] At a protest in Mumbai in January 2012, the Raza Academy called for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The protest was organized against Rushdie's planned visit to the Indian city of Jaipur to attend an annual literary festival. To prevent Rushdie's visit to Jaipur, Muhammad Saeed Noori, the General Secretary of Raza Academy, announced a reward of 100,000 rupees "to anyone who would hurl a slipper on [Salman] Rushdie during his visit to Jaipur."[2] Noori successfully forced the Indian government to prevent Rushdie from visiting India. His influence is so much that the Indian government did not allow Rushdie to speak to the audiences at the Jaipur Literary Festival even via a video conference.

The Raza Academy owes its allegiance to the Barelvi school of Sunni Islam. The Barelvi movement in Sunni Islam was established by Ahmad Raza Khan (1856-1921) of Bareilly, a northern Indian town. Raza Academy has branches in dozens of countries, including in the cities of: Colombo, Sri Lanka; Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa; and Lahore, Pakistan.[3] The Barelvis call themselves Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, or the people of the Prophet's tradition. In recent years, a misconception has grown deep that the Barelvi sect is peaceful. Such a misconception emanates from the fact that Barelvi Muslims visit Sufi shrines and approve of syncretic practices such as music and dance at those shrines.

Palestinian Islamic Scholar Mraweh Nassar: France Is Hostile to Muslims Because It Fears the Spread of Islam; Macron's Wife Is a Relative of Rothschild pic.twitter.com/eDC3xp9XDT

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) November 5, 2020

A US policy shift on Iran could lead to war between Israel and Tehran, Israeli Minister of Settlement Affairs Tzachi Hanegbi warned on Wednesday night, speaking to Channel 13 News.

Despite expectations that Democratic candidate Joe Biden will be harder on settlements, a matter that will directly affect the settlement minister, Hanegbi said the Iran deal is what worries him.

“Biden has said openly for a long time that he’ll go back to the nuclear agreement,” Hanegbi said, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action US President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018.

“I see that as something that will lead to a confrontation between Israel and Iran,” he said. Hanegbi praised Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran, saying it “works and we see results.”

Hanegbi said he sided with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view, shared by most Israelis according to the settlement minister, that the Iran deal signed by former US President Barack Obama in 2015 was a mistake.

“If Biden stays with that policy,” he said, “there will, in the end, be a violent confrontation between Israel and Iran.”

Amid tensions surrounding the elections results in the United States, the Sovereignty Movement in Israel has declared its support of Yamina MK Bezalel Smotrich in his call to establish facts in the potential application of sovereignty over parts of the West Bank.

The issue has become more pressing for the movement because if Joe Biden emerges victorious from the US elections, his government will resume power in January.

Biden has expressed opposition in the past to Israeli plans to annex settlements in the West Bank under President Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century."

Sovereignty movement leaders Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar called upon all members of the Knesset's national camp and Land of Israel loyalists who support the application of sovereignty “to join the call of MK Smotrich and to exert significant political pressure to exploit the window of opportunity created in the interval between the two US administrations in order to apply sovereignty without establishing a Palestinian state.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has understood American politics since his teen years living in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

True, he clashed with Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Republican politicians in the US have said they see Netanyahu as a mentor. But Likud officials said the prime minister would get along well with Democratic candidate Joe Biden if he won Tuesday’s election. Sources close to Netanyahu revealed that he prepared for the possibility of a victory by Biden. Netanyahu has close ties with American pollsters, and he knew that his close ally, US President Donald Trump, had to fight an uphill battle.

Looking back, Netanyahu’s first step in preparing for a Biden victory was the surprising headline he gave The Jerusalem Post in an interview in February.

The headline was “Netanyahu to ‘Post’: Democratic president can’t stop Trump plan.” In retrospect, it could be very important.

Netanyahu was talking specifically about annexation plans that did not end up getting implemented, but also more generally about Trump’s approach to the Middle East.

“Once the Trump plan is put forward, the goalposts will have been moved, and it will be very difficult for any administration to move them back,” Netanyahu said.

Despite comprising just 2 percent of the total US population, Jews have always played an outsized role in politics.

In the outgoing 116th Congress, nine Jewish members served in the Senate and 27 served in the House of Representatives. Reflective of American Jewish voting patterns overall, every Jewish member of the Senate and 25 members in the House are Democrats or caucus with Democrats, with the exceptions of David Kutsoff (R-Tenn.) and Lee Zeldin (R-NY).

While Congress traditionally does not play a prominent role in foreign policy, support for the State of Israel has long been a bipartisan consensus view. However, with the election of several supporters of the BDS movement in Congress comes concerns about the erosion of support on the left. At the same time, Jewish congressional members also largely reflect the liberal and progressive views of the majority of Jewish Americans, with support for expanding access to health care, climate change, reproductive rights, racial justice and gun control.

Here is a breakdown of how Jewish candidates have fared so far in the Nov. 3 general election.

President Trump received more than 30% of the Jewish vote across the country on Election Day, a record-setting number for a Republican nominee going back three decades.

Exit polling of Jewish voters conducted by the Republican Jewish Coalition showed Trump with 30.5% with this bloc versus Democratic nominee Joe Biden, an improvement of 6.5 percentage points over his performance four years ago. That figure translated into even more support from Jews in Florida, a critical swing state where media-conducted exit polls showed Trump receiving more than 40% of the vote from this cohort.

The Republican Jewish Coalition invested more than $5 million to turn out the Jewish vote for Trump in Florida. The group said their effort worked because the president’s message was appealing, as was, especially, his record on issues relating to Israel. During his first term, Trump moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and negotiated peace agreements between Israel and three Arab nations.

“The Jewish community did respond to things that Donald Trump has done,” said Norm Coleman, national chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition and a former Minnesota senator.

In exit polling of Florida conducted by Fox News and the Associated Press, Trump won 43% of the Jewish vote. Post-election surveys from the New York Times pegged the president’s support among Jews in the state at 41%. The Republican Jewish Coalition said Trump’s performance with this voting bloc was critical to his 3 percentage-point victory in Florida, a state he absolutely needed to win to reach 270 Electoral College votes and to secure a second term.

Nationally, the 30.5% of the Jewish vote Trump received was the highest level of support a Republican nominee for president has received from Jews going back to at least 1992. That year, George H.W. Bush received 11% of the Jewish vote, followed by Bob Dole four years later with 16%, George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 with 19% and 24%, respectively, John McCain in 2008 with 22%, and Mitt Romney in 2012 with 30%.

Strongly pro-Israel progressive Ritchie Torres of the Bronx will be among the new members of Congress this January, following his electoral victory on Tuesday.

The 32-year-old New York City Council member easily won his race in the 15th Congressional District, making him the first openly-gay black or Latino man to be elected to Congress.

Torres’ district is located next to that represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose record on Israel-related issues is generally viewed as hostile, but Torres is very much a supporter of the Jewish state.

In an interview with Jewish Insider last year, Torres said he was pro-Israel “not despite my progressive values, but because of my progressive values.”

Addressing the issue of the BDS movement, Torres said, “The attempt to delegitimize Israel, the attempt to question Israel’s right to exist or right to defend itself, that, to me, crosses the line to destructive criticism.”

“I consider anti-Zionism a form of antisemitism, and I am not going to give consideration to antisemitic voices, voices that are dedicated to delegitimizing Israel as a Jewish state,” he added.

“The notion that you cannot be both progressive and pro-Israel is a vicious lie, because I am the embodiment of a pro-Israel progressive,” Torres asserted.

Cori Bush, a Democrat who expressed support for the movement to boycott Israel, is set to become the St. Louis area’s next congresswoman.

Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who also support the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel — known as BDS — are also expected to win.

A now-deleted page on Bush’s campaign website had said she supported BDS. If she still holds those views, it will bring the number of BDS supporters in the Democratic caucus to three.

Projections are showing that Bush will win St. Louis’ traditionally Democratic seat handily, defeating Republican Anthony Rogers. She defeated Lacy Clay, the longtime Democratic incumbent, in a primary earlier this year.

Pointing both to the confusion in counting the vote in the US presidential election and the likely prospect of a head of state losing power, leaders across the Arab world are pointing to the US presidential election as a warning of the evils of democracy.

“When we have an election, we never spend days and days waiting for the results,” explained Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “We know who has won the night of the election, and sometimes the night before.”

Middle Eastern officials also noted questions of whether President Donald Trump would concede defeat and leave office if the vote does not turn out in his favor.

“I will never have to worry about losing an election, giving a concession speech, and all that bullshit,” said Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. “I will serve until the day I choose to retire, or until the army drags me out and throws me in prison to appease an angry mob.”

The Israeli Navy is slated next week to receive the first of four new German-made Sa’ar-6-class corvettes, stuffed to the gills with sensors, weapons and defensive systems to aid them in their task of protecting Israel’s natural gas rigs and trade routes.

As Israel tapped into the natural gas reserves located in its territorial waters just over a decade ago, the government officially designated them a strategic national asset and tasked the navy with defending them. This was no small feat for the navy, which until then was primarily concerned with protecting Israel’s coast.

The arrival of the Sa’ar-6, planned for Wednesday, is expected to significantly boost Israel’s ability to protect the country’s two operational gas rigs from missiles and other types of attacks.

Every nearly 2,000-ton missile ship is equipped with two Iron Dome interceptor launchers — known as the Naval Dome — to intercept ballistic missiles and a Barak-8 battery to shoot down cruise missiles.

The ships are also covered in some 260 static radar arrays — known as a phased array — that allow them to detect incoming projectiles and aircraft in the sky, as well as ships and low-flying cruise missiles at sea level. In the past, a ship would have needed two separate radar systems, one to detect objects at sea level and one to scan the skies. That the 260 or so arrays stay in place also means that the ship is less easily detectable than vessels with radar systems that rotate.

The European Union and the United Nations have condemned the Israeli demolition of a Palestinian community in the Jordan Valley on Tuesday, which rendered around 73 Palestinians — including 41 children — homeless.

Such demolitions constitute “an impediment to the two-state solution,” the EU spokesperson said in a statement Thursday.

“The EU reiterates its call on Israel to halt all such demolitions, including of EU-funded structures, in particular in light of the humanitarian impact of the current coronavirus pandemic,” the spokesperson said.

Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians said the army had destroyed structures erected illegally in a military live-fire zone. The site in question, Khirbet Husma, is one of 38 Bedouin communities on land the Israeli military has designated for training, the UN said.

“An enforcement activity was carried out by the Supervision Unit of the Civil Administration against 7 tents and 8 pens which were illegally constructed in a firing range located in the Jordan Valley,” the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said in a statement.

Particularly outrageous is the fact that Erekat was admitted to an Israeli hospital for the best medical treatment at a time when the Palestinian government is denying ordinary Palestinians permits to go to Israeli hospitals.

The Palestinian official's treatment in an Israeli hospital shows that the Palestinians themselves "are in a reality of full normalization with Israel."— Nadim Koteich, Lebanese journalist, Asharq Al-Awsat, October 27, 2020.

The fact that Erekat chose to go to an Israeli, and not a Jordanian hospital, was a sign that he "has full confidence in the Israelis despite his public statements against them."— alarab.co.uk, October 19, 2020

If and when Erekat recovers from his current illness and returns to his family, it would behoove him to apologize to the UAE and Bahrain for having denounced their normalization agreements with Israel. Next, he might want to apologize to the Palestinian people for depriving them of the superb medical treatment that he himself received at Hadassah Hospital.

Perhaps Erekat might also consider thanking the Israeli doctors who worked around the clock to keep him alive. Additionally, he can thank the Israeli medical teams and soldiers who escorted him from his home in Jericho to Jerusalem. Finally, Erekat might inform the world that he regrets having called for the boycott of Israel -- the country he knew he could turn to save his life, no matter what harm he had inflicted upon it.

A Jordanian helicopter landed Wednesday evening at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, with a patient that was described by sources in the hospital as a “senior” official who came to receive treatment for the coronavirus, Army Radio Meir Marciano reported.

Marciano added that the patient was the Jordanian Army’s Chief Medical Officer, Brigadier General Doctor Adel Al-Wahhadneh, Director General of Royal Medical Services.

Al-Wahhadneh’s Facebook page noted on Tuesday that he was in critical health and may be transferred to the Queen Alia Hospital in Amman because he is already on a respiratory support device, and if necessary, he would be placed on a ventilator.

Gaza is governed by the Hamas, who have been in charge of the strip since 2006.

Kareem has been part of organised protests against Hamas rule in the strip by Gaza citizens - protests that have allegedly been cracked down on hard by the ruling forces.

In 2018, a Human Rights Watch report alleged Palestinian authorities "routinely use torture" against dissenters, including using cables to wrench their arms behind them to tear their shoulders apart.

Kareem makes his feelings very clear towards the political situation, saying he has "lost all meaning of life" at home.

"Here we live in a reactionary tyranny and do not discuss ideas," Kareem claims.

"You are directly suppressed, if you express your opinion.

"I am also, here, a human rights activist against the Hamas movement. I have been arrested more than once and have gone out in many demonstrations against them and have been severely suppressed.

"I also worked in fishing for a while, but I was prevented from doing so by the ruling authorities here under the pretext that I did not obtain a license.

"We went out in more than one demonstration, the last of which was the Hirak We Want to Live in 2019, but it was severely suppressed by security.

Reason 4837 why #Lebanon govt cant be trusted to receive emergency aid post-#BeirutBlast

1000s of tons of wheat donated from Iraq was found unsafely/unhygienically stored under stadium bleachers. Meanwhile, 1/2 of pop living in extreme poverty, unable to afford basics like food https://t.co/g98Pz7VpQb

— Aya Majzoub (@Aya_Majzoub) November 4, 2020

Iran’s security and intelligence services have renewed their active espionage and intelligence operations abroad, targeting opposition activists worldwide, especially in Europe. Iran’s primary modus operandi is to lure them to various countries in the region – Turkey or the United Arab Emirates – to abduct them and transfer them for investigation and trial in Iran. Sometimes Iranian agents assassinate them on European soil.

During the 1990s, Iranian intelligence agencies carried out a series of assassinations of top leaders of Iranian opposition organizations operating in Europe. However, in recent years, Tehran has refrained from carrying out high profile assassinations in an attempt to improve relations with European countries and harness them to combat sanctions imposed on Iran.

The executive committee of the “Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz” (ASMLA) announced on October 30, 2020, that the former party leader and current deputy head, Habib Asyoud (also known as Habib Farjallah Kaabi), was abducted in Turkey by Iranian intelligence services – the Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran (MOIS) and the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Habib Asyoud, a Swedish citizen who lives and works in Sweden and other Western European countries, such as Denmark, is one of the founders of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz (ASMLA). The separatist movement functions in Iran’s oil-rich province, Khuzestan, in the southwest of the country. Habib Asyoud was considered the party leader until the day he disappeared.

The movement is called “AlNidal” (“the Struggle” in Arabic) by the Iranian Arabs and was established in 2005. The Iranian authorities have accused Saudi intelligence of supporting and launching the movement.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has arrived in Venezuela for the start of a tour of Latin America, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, amid intense efforts by Washington to limit Iran’s influence in the western hemisphere.

Zarif is also scheduled to visit Cuba and to attend the inauguration of Bolivian president-elect Luis Arce, who has said he will strengthen ties with Iran.

He was “received by Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza upon his arrival to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, where he will carry out an intense work agenda at the highest level,” Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry wrote on Twitter.

Tehran has become a crucial ally for Caracas as the United States tightens sanctions meant to force President Nicolas Maduro from power.

Iran has sent two flotillas of fuel tankers to Venezuela this year to help resolve debilitating gasoline shortages in the South American nation, spurred by a collapse in its refining network as well as the sanctions, which have complicated fuel imports from more traditional trade partners.

Israeli viewers are losing their minds over Channel 11’s amazing new Series “Tehran”, the story of a Mossad agent named Tamar who goes deep undercover in Iran and the Iranian Secret Police’s attempts to find her. In fact, Apple TV just bought the rights to distribute it worldwide! Start Up Nation in the House! Here at the Daily Freier we have been watching this show on the edge of our seats, so we were really excited about this week’s episode where the Iranians hack into the Mossad’s Fax machine in order to locate Tamar. The Daily Freier spent the morning wandering around Dizengoff Square discussing the episode with random people. (Spoiler Alert!)

“The series is just so realistic!” raved Adi, a yoga instructor. “When the Iranian Double Agent pretends to be Israeli but then he says ‘Sorry’ and blows his cover? Incredible.”

The Daily Freier then spoke to Alon, who was walking 12 dogs when we met up with him. “My favorite scene was where the Iranian hackers inside Mossad Headquarters lose Internet access at the very last minute because of Hot Mobile’s poor Customer Service. It just made me feel incredibly proud to be Israeli.“

“I really liked the scene where the Iranians are about to intercept an important fax.” explained Alert Local Ronit S. “But the machine runs out of paper because the office manager was on maternity leave and left the key to the supply cabinet at home!“

Tune in next week when the Iranians hack into Yair Netanyahu’s Twitter account and decide not to change a thing!