The media love a powerful, symbolic image, but exactly twenty years to the day after the brutal, barbaric lynching of two Israeli reserve soldiers, this one isn’t being republished.

This is the important story the media failed to retell today.

On 12 October 2000, two Israeli reserve soldiers dressed in civilian clothes, Yossi Avrahami and Vadim Nurzhitz were headed towards their unit’s assembly point in a town near Jerusalem. The pair were unfamiliar with the local road system, took a wrong turn and ended up in Ramallah.

Although previously Palestinian Authority policemen had sent wayward Israelis back, this time the two reservists were detained by Palestinian Authority policemen and taken to a local police station.

The incident coincided with a nearby funeral service for a Palestinian youth who had been killed in clashes with Israeli forces two days earlier. The funeral was attended by thousands, and soon afterwards, as rumors spread that Israeli undercover agents were in the building, an angry crowd of over 1,000 Palestinians gathered outside the station calling for the death of the Israelis.

While there are indications that at first police attempted to protect the soldiers, before long the enraged rioters managed to overcome the police and storm the building. It later emerged that Palestinian Authority policemen actually took part in the horrific assault.

What followed can only be described as a savage, barbaric lynching. The crazed mob beat and stabbed the Israelis, tore the men limb from limb and gouged out their eyes. During the attack, Mr Avrahami’s wife Hani called him on his mobile phone. Instead of being greeted as usual, an unfamiliar strange voice answered the phone : “I just killed your husband.”

As all this was happening, one man came to the window and, much to the delight of the delirious crowd below, triumphantly held up his blood-soaked hands for all to see.

The crowd stood below, waving fists and cheering. The body of one of the soldiers was then thrown out of the window. The baying crowd rushed to attack, beating and stamping the lifeless body in a frenzy. The body of the other soldier was set on fire. One of the soldiers was later seen upside down, dangling from a rope.

The European Union (UN) and Germany launched on Tuesday the “East Jerusalem Tourism Development Programme” and inaugurated the Tourism Development Hub in eastern Jerusalem, with an objective of “maintaining the Palestinian identity of the city.”

The German Development Cooperation is implementing this new program in partnership with “the different components of the Palestinian tourism sector” in eastern Jerusalem, the Office of the European Union Representative stated.

The East Jerusalem Tourism Development Programme aims at “maintaining the Palestinian identity of the city and supporting the tourism sector in East Jerusalem, against the backdrop of a worrying trend of increasing hardship for Palestinian life and economic activity in this part of the city.”

The program “supports a revitalized and vibrant tourism sector that provides great opportunities for Palestine’s private sector, foster economic development and protect the Palestinian culture and heritage in East Jerusalem.”

The EU did not detail in its statements what “Palestinian culture, heritage and identity” it was relating to.

EU representative to the Palestinian Authority Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff claimed that Arabs in Jerusalem face “daily political, economic, and social challenges. Tourism has always been one of the main income-generating activities in the city and helped maintaining the Palestinian presence and identity of the city.”

In the 1920s, Mufti Haj Amin El Husseini built his Palace Hotel on part of the same cemetery. It was publicized by some of his many Arab enemies in Jerusalem. pic.twitter.com/xzUhlz6Upt

— Lenny Ben-David (@lennybendavid) October 13, 2021

In an October 9, 2021 article in the English-language Saudi daily Arab News, Lebanese media figure Baria Alamuddin writes that Hizbullah continues its globe-spanning drug trafficking activities, now using West African countries as major transit states for its drug shipments. She notes that Hizbullah and Syria, both sponsored by Iran, continue to bolster their status as the world's major source of the amphetamine-based drug Captagon. However, since Saudi Arabia banned the import of Lebanese produce earlier this year, Hizbullah has had to divert its Captagon shipments through transit countries to obscure the country of origin. West Africa has become a preferred option, especially counties with large Lebanese communities, such as Cote d’Ivoire, where Lebanese control a large part of the economy, as well as Togo and Congo.

Alamuddin notes further that Hezbollah's illegal operations in West Africa -- including money laundering, weapons proliferation, drug trafficking and other organized crime -- are estimated to net the organization at least $1 billion a year. Warning that Hezbollah's illegal activities may come to dominate Lebanon’s entire economy, transforming it into a narco state, she calls on the international community to fight Hizbullah's globalized network for criminality and terrorism.

The following is her article:
"Following The Collapse Of The Lebanese And Syrian Economies, Assad Family Mafiosi And Hezbollah Set About Remodeling Their Nations As Narco States"

"When Saudi Arabia banned the import of Lebanese produce in April because these shipments were being abused to smuggle narcotics into the Kingdom, Hezbollah found itself with a problem.

"Following the collapse of the Lebanese and Syrian economies, Assad family mafiosi and Hezbollah set about remodeling their nations as narco states — world production centers for the amphetamine-based drug Captagon, a favorite among partygoers and terrorist groups. Syria’s Captagon trade is estimated to be worth over a billion dollars a year.

"Captagon production had become established in areas such as Homs and Aleppo, but given Syria’s extreme dysfunction, many major factories have been reconsolidating themselves along the Lebanon-Syria border, particularly in Hezbollah strongholds such as Qusair and the Bekaa Valley. Lebanon’s former Justice Minister and security chief, Ashraf Rifi, describes a “partnership between Hezbollah and the Syrian side in terms of manufacturing and smuggling” Captagon. This is in addition to Syria and Lebanon becoming favored routes for heroin, crystal meth and hashish.

The Northeast Alabama Cherokee held a ceremony on Sept. 25 in Guntersville, Ala., to establish a relationship with Israel. There, the tribe presented a resolution, unanimously passed by the Tribal Council, recognizing the "sovereign Jewish nation" of Israel, with Jerusalem as its "eternal undivided capital."

"We vow our full support in the pursuit of the peace of Jerusalem and the Nation of Israel by whichever means may be necessary," it said.

The event, centered around a potluck lunch, included expressions of solidarity with the Jewish community and comparisons to the experiences of native tribes in North America.

Chief Larry Smith began his remarks by noting that "if there is a people that can understand how the Jews feel, it's the Cherokee," which received an "Amen" from the audience.

"We have chosen to identify with a people as a people," he added.

Seth Penn, the deputy representative of the Red Wind Tribal District, said "the nation of Israel has a lot in common with the Cherokee people – they have been removed from their homeland, came back and have to fight for their homeland."

"Some historians even argue we can find our DNA roots in Israel," he said. "I'm not saying that's true."

Smith echoed that, saying "are we the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel? Debatable."

But "there are so many of our ceremonies, so many of our celebrations that coincide with Jewish traditions and the Jewish holidays," he added.

It was as remarkable as it was unexpected. More than 300 Iraqis, both Sunnis and Shiites, gathered at a conference in a hotel ballroom on Sept. 24 in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil to demand their country join the Abraham Accords and forge ties with the Jewish state.

Still more surprising, the participants weren't Kurds, as might be expected, given that the conference took place in the capital of Kurdistan and Kurds have a long history of cooperation with Israel. Instead, the participants came from six Iraqi governorates: Baghdad, Mosul, Al-Anbar, Salahuddin, Diyala, and Babel.

"They arrived in a fleet of 60 cars over 12 hours before the conference," Joseph Braude, founder and president of the Center for Peace Communications, the US-based group that organized the conference, told JNS.

While expressing his gratitude to the Kurdistan Regional Government for providing logistical and security support, he said the conference was about the parts of Iraq that haven't engaged with Jews and Israel, "where cultural change is most urgently needed now."

If the conference surprised many, the reaction to it did not – arrest warrants, death threats, and wanted posters the size of buildings targeting participants.

Few who listened to the conference speeches (some of which are available on YouTube with English subtitles) could doubt the courage of those who took part.

The best-known of the speakers, Sheikh Wisam Al-Hardan, who led the "Sons of Iraq Awakening" movement, the Sunni tribal fight against ISIS and Al-Qaeda, demanded "full diplomatic relations with the State of Israel."

.@DrMichaelOren believes that Israel is losing the PR battle because people today care more about feelings than facts. @benshapiro is right. Facts don't care about your feelings. But unfortunately in today's world of slogans, soundbites & headlines, facts are losing the war. pic.twitter.com/FnpwUpHJo4

— Joel M. Petlin (@Joelmpetlin) October 13, 2021

Sudanese Justice Minister Nasredeen Abdulbari met on Wednesday with two senior Israeli government officials while visiting the United Arab Emirates.

Israel and Sudan agreed to work towards normalizing ties last October as part of the Abraham Accords. But unlike other Arab states that forged open diplomatic relations with Israel last year — the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Bahrain — little public process has been made in the normalization process with Sudan since the dramatic announcement.

Abdulbari met Wednesday in Dubai with Israel’s Regional Affairs Minister Issawi Frej of Meretz, where the pair discussed binational projects and the promotion of stronger ties.

According to Frej’s office, Abdulbari said Sudan and Israel should work together on joint educational and cultural projects to strengthen ties between the two states. During the meeting, Abdulbari suggested establishing an exchange program.

“I believe in the power of education and cultural ties, so I think we must communicate at the cultural and educational level before promoting economic projects,” Abdulbari said.

Abdulbari added that last year’s Abraham Accords were a “correct and necessary step” toward regional peace. “At first a small group accepts the change, then more and more groups join in,” said Abdulbari, according to Frej’s office.

Qatari Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani on Wednesday ruled out an Abraham Accords-style normalization of relations with Israel as long as “there is no prospect of ending the occupation.”

The minister made the remarks on the second day of the Global Security Forum held in the Qatari capital, Doha.

“We should not focus on economic normalization and forget the (Israeli) occupation of Arab lands,” the Gulf state’s top diplomat said.

Al Thani dismissed the Abraham Accords signed last year between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with the later additions of Morocco and Sudan.

“We do not see any prospects for the peace process, and therefore we believe that the Abraham Agreement cannot contribute to resolving the crisis,” the minister said.

Al Thani said that the economic measures that Israel is taking to improve the lives of Palestinians solves only a small part of the problem.

The administration of US President Joe Biden has indicated that it wants to expand the Abraham Accords to include other Arab countries, but it appears with the minister’s comments that Qatar is not on the list.

The fact that a large number of Palestinians are desperate to work in Israel is a sign of the failure of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to improve the living conditions of their people despite the massive sums of money they receive from various sources, including the United States, European Union and United Nations.

Instead of holding Hamas responsible for what he called the "tragedy" in the Gaza Strip, al-Amsi and other Palestinians choose to blame Israel.

This view is in keeping with the longstanding habit of the Palestinian leadership to evade their responsibility for thievery and non-governance by blaming Israel for everything.

Many Palestinians and Arabs, however, are no longer buying this nonsense and know exactly who is trying to help and who has not done a thing to end their suffering.

"Thousands of Palestinians, including those with [academic] degrees, are fighting for a job in Israel. I guarantee you that if Israel announced that it wants workers from Algeria, they would cross the Sahara [Desert] on foot to work in Israel to escape the hell they are living in at home."— Hoda Jannat, Syrian journalist and political analyst, Twitter, October 7, 2021.

As has now become embarrassingly clear for all to see, Israel has become the only hope for the hungry workers in the Gaza Strip -- who have been abandoned not only by their leaders, but by the rest of their Arab brothers as well.

Contradicting its own previous coverage as well as the actual geography, Haaretz erroneously reported last week that construction in the area known as E-1, between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim to the east, would divide the West Bank in two. The Oct. 4 article, “Israel Holds Hearing on E1 Construction Plan Without Palestinian Objectors” errs: “Criticism of the E1 plans stems from the fact that construction in the area will cut off the north of the West Bank from the south, hindering the creation of a future Palestinian state.” (Emphasis added.)

While critics maintain that E1 construction would cut off the north of the West Bank from the south, a look at the map (at left) demonstrates that the claim is inaccurate, and hardly a fact. As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander and Gilead Ini detailed in 2012, those who charge that Israeli building west of Ma’aleh Adumim severs north-south contiguity disregard the fact that the northern and southern parts of the West Bank are connected by land east of Ma’aleh Adumim that is at its narrowest point about 15 km wide (about the same width as the narrowest point from the Mediterranean to the Green Line).

Indeed, in a December 2012 correction, The New York Times clarified the identical issue:
An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the effect of planned Israeli development in the area known as E1 on access to the cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem, and on the West Bank. Such development would limit access to Ramallah and Bethlehem to only narrow corridors far from the Old City and downtown Jerusalem. It would also create a large block of Israeli settlements in the center of the West Bank; it would not divide the West Bank in two.

Because of an editing error, the article referred incompletely to the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state. Critics see E1 as a threat to the meaningful contiguity of such a state state because it would leave some Palestinian areas connected to one another by roads with few exits or by circuitous routes; the proposed development would not, technically, make a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.

Haaretz itself had covered The New York Times’ correction when it appeared (Chaim Levinson, “NYT Retracts Claims That E-1 Construction Plans Would Divide West Bank,”

Just over 54 years ago, Syria joined an Arab-coalition comprised primarily of Egypt and Jordan in the Six Day War against Israel, launching artillery attacks against targets in the Galilee.

While false reports abounded of a crushing Egyptian victory against Israel, and the imminent destruction of the 19-year-old Jewish State, Israel defended itself, and in the process, secured new land at the expense of its aggressors, including the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza, Judea & Samaria, and the Golan Heights.

Though much of the land was given – Sinai in the 1979 peace agreement to Egypt – and in the 2005 disengagement which saw Israel give Gaza to the Palestinians, today, the Golan Heights, which was captured from Syria after the country attacked Israel, unprovoked, remains in Israeli hands.

Today, 1,200 of the 1,800 square kilometres of the Golan Heights are in Israeli control, and the rest are under Syrian control, and about 27,000 Israelis now make their home in the region. But it is more than just a bucolic and rural part of northern Israel teeming with wineries; due to its elevation and the region’s topography, it also serves as an important defense against any future potential of Syrian aggression against Israel.

In 1981, Israel’s government passed the Golan Heights Law, where it applied its sovereignty over the area, but despite that de facto annexation, in the half century since the Golan changed hands, Israel has offered to return the strategic plateau to Syrian control in exchange for a peace deal, but nothing ever came of that offer.

And despite frequent Syrian rhetoric to ‘liberate’ the Golan Heights, the Assad regime in Damascus has shown little interest in retaking the region.

But just this past week, the Golan Heights was in the news again, with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announcing that Israel would seek to solidify Israeli control, and increase the population there to 100,000.

The Oct. 7th print edition of the Daily Mirror included, in their daily segment ‘This Day in History”, a decidedly ahistorical account of the Yom Kippur War in the context of the anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s assassination:

We complained to editors under the terms of the Accuracy Clause, noting that Egypt of course wasn’t victorious over Israel in the war, and that the parade itself where Sadat was shot narrowly commemorates the army’s successful crossing into the Sinai on the war’s first day.

Our complaint was upheld, and the following print correction published today.

The Palestinian Authority is continuing its crackdown on political activists and rivals in the West Bank, notwithstanding protests by Palestinian and international human rights organizations, Palestinians said on Wednesday.

The clampdown, which has targeted dozens of Palestinians over the past few weeks, is emboldening Hamas, the PA’s main rivals, and threatening to undermine security and stability in the West Bank, according to the Palestinians.

Hamas sources said the crackdown was one of the fruits of the ongoing security coordination between the PA and Israel.

“Many of those arrested over the past few weeks are former prisoners who were held by Israel,” the sources said. “They are arrested by the Palestinian Security Services after being released from Israeli prison. Some are rearrested by Israel after they are freed by the Palestinian forces. This proves that the security coordination is as strong as ever.’

The PA security measures increased after the Israel-Hamas war in May and the killing of anti-corruption activist Nizar Banat a month later. Banat, 44, was beaten to death by Palestinian security officers who arrested him in Hebron. Fourteen officers who participated in the arrest of Banat are currently facing trial before a Palestinian military court in Ramallah.

Intent on assuring that Palestinians know he continues to support terrorists, PA Chairman Abbas made some propaganda phone calls to parents of recently killed terrorist “Martyrs” and had them broadcast to the entire Palestinian public on official PA TV News.

Following the death of two terrorists – one a stabber, the second an Islamic Jihad shooter – Abbas called to console their fathers. Abbas expressed his pride in the dead terrorists, calling them “heroes” and “Martyrs of Palestine,” thereby stressing the PA’s ideology that death for “Palestine” is honorable and heroic.

Abbas’ condolence call to father of Israa Khzaimiah – a 30-year-old female terrorist who attempted to stab Israeli security officers near Jerusalem’s Old City on Sept. 30, 2021. The officers shot and killed her in self-defense:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “Allah will increase your reward over our Martyr [Israa Khzaimiah], the Palestinian people’s Martyr… Allah will let her dwell in Paradise, and certainly her place is in Paradise because she is a Martyr of Palestine and Jerusalem.”

Father of terrorist Israa Khzaimiah: “Thank you Mister President. You are considerate and good-hearted, and you are our father.”

Abbas: “This is my duty and even more than that. I always bow to our male and female heroes.”

[Official PA TV News, Oct. 3, 2021]

Abbas also made a condolence call to father of Alaa Zayoud, a 22-year-old terrorist and Islamic Jihad member who shot at Israeli soldiers during a violent riot at the village of Burqin near Jenin on Sept. 30, 2021. The soldiers shot and killed him in self-defense:

Antisemitic Chants at Hizb ut-Tahrir Ausantralia Protest in Support of Palestinians: Oh Allah, Give Us the Necks of the Jews, the Evildoers! Seize Them with the Grip of the Almighty! #Australia#Antisemitismpic.twitter.com/Th37OYCHtg

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 13, 2021

A Palestinian in #Gaza says his family was left homeless by Hamas security forces. He asks who runs Gaza? Sinwar, Haniyeh, Abu Mazen, who else? The man throws his identification to the ground and exclaims he is no longer a Palestinian. An excerpt of the video below. pic.twitter.com/LwlYrCofUc

— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) October 12, 2021

GIVEN ALL this information, it is worth concluding that the Iranian threat to the region is mostly embodied by its support for proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. Tehran has a nuclear program and it uses enrichment to try to get concessions from the West.

The recent death of A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani scientist who became a key figure in not only Pakistan’s nuclear program but also trafficked in nuclear technology, may be a lesson for Iran. Whereas Iran’s Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a nuclear physicist and scientist, was assassinated, Mr. Khan survived to old age.

But what did the bomb actually bring Pakistan? It didn’t bring Pakistan wealth or power. Iran may see the failure of Pakistan to get much for its bomb as a reason never to fully develop one. North Korea, for instance, has nuclear abilities but doesn’t get much. Like Iran, North Korea also uses weapons to try to blackmail its neighboring enemy South Korea.

Iran may be happy to be on the brink of a nuclear weapon forever. This enables it to continue spinning centrifuges and inch closer and closer to one, while its real power rests in its militias and its export of technology to groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Hashd al-Shaabi.

The comments by Israeli leaders such as Gantz and Bennett, as well as former officials like Cohen, show that Iran’s program has threatening aspects and also has setbacks. They also reveal that there is agreement about the threat of Iran’s proxies – and that this is where Israel’s concerns are focused.

An Israeli last-resort military action against Iran is a risk of American appeasement and emboldens the Islamic Republic, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said Tuesday at the Jerusalem Post Conference.

Military action is “not in the best interests of anyone,” he told Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Yaakov Katz.

Pompeo defended the Trump administration’s decision to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iranian nuclear deal, in 2018, saying the policies it adopted had made the world safer from the Iranian regime.

“We denied them resources, and we denied them the ability to build out a Gulf-threatening culpability,” he said. “The strike on [former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force commander] Qasem Soleimani demonstrated our willingness to defend American interests around the world. The work we were engaged in would have prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

In a speech to the UN General Assembly in September, US President Joe Biden said the US was seeking a return to the JCPOA.

“The current administration wants to re-enter the deal, longer, better, stronger? Well, I want it longer, I want it better, and I want it much, much stronger,” Pompeo said.

Had the Trump administration stayed in office for another year or two, the cooperation between it and Israel would have been able to prevent Iranian nuclear advancements, he said.

“We were never going to let Iran get a nuclear weapon on our watch,” he added.

Nearly half of the Taliban government's leaders are on the United Nations' terrorist blacklist, a fact that hasn’t slowed U.S. efforts to engage in diplomacy with the anti-western regime.

At least 14 of the 33 ministers the Taliban announced as senior leaders in its newly formed government are designated as terrorists under the U.N. Security Council's 1988 Sanctions Committee. This designation includes Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hassan Akhund and his two top deputies, Mullah Baradar Akhund and Mawlavi Hanafi.

The Taliban's defense minister, foreign minister, and deputy foreign minister also are designated terrorists. And Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban's interior minister, remains on the FBI's most wanted list, with a $10 million bounty for his role in a 2008 terrorist attack in Kabul that killed six people, including an American citizen.

Even with these outstanding terror designations on the Taliban and its top leaders, the Biden administration and other Western countries are holding direct negotiations with the group that are aimed at providing war-torn Afghanistan with aid dollars. The United States held a series of talks with "senior Taliban representatives" during the weekend, meetings that the State Department described as "candid and professional." These powwows indicate the United States' willingness to legitimize the Taliban's rule since the terrorist group retook the country amid a hurried American withdrawal, according to national security experts.

"If past is precedent, Biden's team is more likely to reclassify whom they consider terrorists in order to justify their policy going forward," said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official who specialized in Middle Eastern affairs and terrorist organizations. "To recognize that they are empowering terrorism might force the hard sort of introspection in which no one from Biden on down is prepared to engage. It's the triumph of arrogance over rationality, and it's going to get Americans killed."

Sylvan Adams, co-owner of the Israeli national cycling team, revealed new details Tuesday of a mission that helped Afghan women cyclists and others to escape Taliban rule in an operation likened to a “spy novel.”

“We are about the only group that’s able to move people around in Afghanistan and get them out,” Adams said during a conference Tuesday held by the Jerusalem Post. “Of course, the Afghan National Women’s team was terrified. They were in a situation in a country like Afghanistan, where you could be killed for riding your bicycle.”

The Israeli-Canadian Adams owns Israel Start-Up Nation, the Jewish nation’s first professional cycling team that competes in international tournaments, and said he was approached for the initiative on the basis of past humanitarian projects.

For the mission, the philanthropist teamed up with IsraAID, as the Israeli non-governmental humanitarian aid agency had operatives on the ground. Together they devised a plan to help the women cyclists and others flee from Afghanistan. Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the cycling’s world governing body, was also part of the evacuation operation.

Adams recounted that the cycling team was taken to a land crossing of an unnamed neighboring country, where he knew somebody who was close to the president and could lend influence.

“It was crazy — like something you would read in a spy novel. To get them out at one point they had the guns of the Taliban at the border, trained at their heads. It was a very scary moment,” Adams said. “We got that call to the president of the neighboring country, and they were let in. They are now in the United Arab Emirates.”

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It's no accident that Israel is the country that is always singled out by so-called human-rights advocates for its alleged crimes even though other nations, which are actually tyrannies, get ignored. Israel is the only nation in the world that has spawned a worldwide movement that aims at its destruction. Only Jews and Jewish rights are treated in this manner, which is to say that BDS, in whatever form it takes, is, like anti-Zionism itself – inherently anti-Semitic. And the fact that some Jews, like Cohen and Greenfield, or groups with Jewish names like Jewish Voices for Peace, which promotes anti-Semitic blood libels, support it doesn't give them a pass for a movement that targets their own people for hate and discrimination.

That's why laws being pushed in states all around the country to punish those companies that engage in discriminatory commercial conduct against Israel and Jews are not only not a violation of free speech but desperately needed.

In much of the mainstream media and polite liberal society, BDS is still treated like a legitimate protest rather than antisemitism. The growing acceptance of critical race theory and intersectionality is part of the reason for this since those toxic ideas provide a permission slip to antisemitism so long as it is cloaked in the rhetoric of the left.

But the actions of people like Rooney and Ben & Jerry's rip the veil from this subterfuge. Those who think that only Israel's efforts to defend itself against the Palestinian war on its existence or to assert Jewish rights are the most intolerable acts happening anywhere on the planet mustn't be allowed to pose as do-gooders. Whether actively or passively, they are complicit in a hate campaign with an anti-Semitic goal that essentially justifies terrorist violence. Those who engage in such despicable behavior deserve the same opprobrium and boycotts that they would use against Israel and the Jews.

BDS is about destroying Israel – the only Jewish state in the world and the only democracy in the entire MENA region. And you support it. Yet as the slave trade flourishes in some Arab nations, democracy is non-existent and human rights are unheard of – you do not take an issue with translations into Arabic. Nor do you have a problem with Chinese – with China a Titan of human rights abuses. Nor Russian, or any of the languages of the world’s real human rights abusers.

But it isn’t just about brazen hypocrisy. Last week I published a devastating report on antisemitism in Ireland. Those people you seem to feel comfortable surrounding yourself with are neck deep in anti-Jewish hatred. You side with those that believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real, push Holocaust denial, rabid anti-Jewish conspiracy and wish for a violent end to Jews and Zionism. Not all of them sure, but how many antisemites do you have to stand alongside before you feel uncomfortable?

Because BDS plays on people’s antisemitism. The BDS National Committee is fully aware that they can make up any old story about Jews and Zionism and there are enough antisemites to drive their twisted demonising narrative into the mainstream. Once in the mainstream it find support from the naive virtue signallers. People it seems, such as yourself.

This obsession with Israel exists in certain bubbles, but like most false paradigms, eventually the bubble will burst. I don’t know whether it will be 10 years from now (doubtful), 20 (probably a little too soon), or 50 years from now (almost certainly) but at some point mainstream researchers will be looking at the obscenity that is the ‘obsession with Israel’ and tearing it apart. They will point to the UN and the UNHRC targeting of the world’s only Jewish state and explain them away as despots ruling the roost – and they’ll go on to wonder at how it was that anyone took these organisations seriously. They will talk about the damage done by the increasing Islamist influence of global NGOs like Amnesty and HRW too. But they will also turn to the players who supported the BDS boycott. By then it will be seen for what it is – just another attempt by the Arab ’empire’ to do away with the tiny Jewish enclave that fought for freedom in its midst. And those fools in the west that played along – boycotted the products of the Jewish state – or refused to have anything to do with publishing houses there – will be seen just as racists are always viewed through the lens of history. I have no doubt that your current actions will be held up as an example of the antisemitic fervour of the day. That will forever be part of Sally Rooney’s legacy.

So go ahead – boycott Israel. It isn’t like the Jews are not used to people boycotting them. Let your books continue to be translated into Chinese and not Hebrew – Israel will continue to thrive without the Israelis reading them. But you should always remember that the brave folk are the ones that stand up against the tide of rising antisemitism. Those who see the anti-Israel obsession for what it is and refuse to partake in the blatant attack on Jewish self-determination are the heroes worthy of remembering. Your actions are those of a coward.

Rooney is entitled to her political beliefs, however simplistic and ill thought through they might be.

But she is also a novelist, a highly regarded one at that. And all novelists – indeed all artists – should properly believe in free speech, the free exchange of ideas and art for art's sake.

As a committed Left-winger, she might also espouse some of the internationalist instincts that motivate Left-wing parties around the world. By allowing Hebrew speakers to read her books, she might in time convert some to her passionate cause.

Plenty of artists are clever enough to understand this.

One is the great Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave: he has called the BDS boycott 'cowardly and shameful'– while also making it clear that he doesn't support everything Israel does and that he hopes fervently for a resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.

Yet all too often the Left is incapable of understanding this – as the wretched regime of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour party showed us all. (I will never forget the time a Left-wing BBC journalist chillingly told me to my face that he thought that Israel, a state created out of the worst genocide in the history of our species, 'had no right to exist'.)

The same is true in Rooney's native Ireland, where Leftists and nationalists have long-standing links with Palestinian activism, seeing Ireland and Palestine as both being involved in a struggle against 'colonialism'.

If Rooney really wanted to address the serious injustices of the world, she might instead be campaigning on Communist North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe or plenty of others … and so aim for a shred of consistency.

Instead, she does a terrible disservice not only to Hebrew speakers around the world – but to all of us who believe that art should be widely shared.

I see @thetimes , like the @guardian , uses Alice Walker as an example of another BDS supporting author in their Rooney article but neglects to mention her love for David Icke and anti Jewish racism. You’re in the best company, Sally. @p_j_chappellpic.twitter.com/t1hPxR6DOy

— Felix Ungar #SaveSheikCorbyn (@Husker_Ju) October 13, 2021

The debate over Irish author Sally Rooney’s severing of ties with an Israeli publisher in line with her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement continues.

Over the last two days, numerous international media outlets have published articles about Rooney’s decision to partake in a “cultural boycott” of the Jewish state by preventing her latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, from being translated into Hebrew by Modan Publishing House.

A striking theme that many of these news reports have in common is how thoroughly they distort and misrepresent the true aims of BDS, making it seem palatable to the uninformed reader.

For example, the BDS website clearly advocates “for a boycott of Israel’s entire regime of oppression” and appeals to supporters to “pressure [their] respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel.”

Yet, The Washington Post minimizes the scope of the movement’s goal in its October 12 article, Sally Rooney won’t release new bestseller in Israel, publisher says, intensifying debate on cultural boycott:
The BDS campaign aims to change Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians by encouraging boycotts, stock divestiture and sanctions against Israeli and international companies that operate on land that Palestinians consider theirs. Land that Palestinians consider theirs encompasses the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

However, BDS does not discriminate between Israeli businesses that operate in the contested areas and those that do not. Rather, it urges the blacklisting of all companies – Israeli or foreign – that do any kind of business in any part of the Jewish state.

A list published by BDSGuide, which works to expose “the hypocrisy of BDS,” points out that proponents of BDS would have to boycott corporations including, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Facebook, Google, eBay, Viacom, Universal Studios, Coca-Cola, Nestle, McDonald’s and Walmart.

Indeed, were people to fully acquiesce to the BDS movement’s demands, it is unlikely they would ever eat, drink or use technology again.

This is a classic example of ‘stacking the deck’, highlighting, as opponents of BDS, only those figures the journalist knows her readers overwhelmingly dislike, whilst citing, as a prominent BDS supporter, a public figure readers hold in high esteem. Sandhu could have mentioned that Netanyahu’s position on BDS is shared across the Israeli political spectrum. Even Nitzan Horowitz, head of the far-left Meretz Party, opposes boycotts.

In the US, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the overwhelming majority of the Congress oppose BDS. Even Jimmy Carter opposes it, as does the European Union, Boris Johnson and the British Labour Party under Keir Starmer.

Sandhu also fails to explore the views of Jews on BDS – those who are either directly impacted by a boycott of the Jewish state, or, with diaspora Jews, have an organic, historically-informed hostility the movement – a community which has born the brunt of antisemitic attacks often inspired by the anti-Israel vitriol of those supporting the boycott movement.

A major EU poll of European Jews (including Britons) conducted in 2018 showed “82% of Jews classed calls by non-Jews to boycott Israel or Israelis as anti-Semitic”, and a poll of British Jews by Campaign Against Antisemitism in 2020 found that “83% felt intimidated by tactics used to boycott Israel”.

In the US, a poll in 2020 by Pew Research Center found that “the vast majority [of American Jews] who have heard of the [BDS] movement say they oppose it”, with only 10% supporting it, whilst an American Jewish Committee poll that same year found that 80% of US Jews believe BDS is compromised by some degree by antisemitism.

Once again, we see how media outlets publishing putatively straight news articles on BDS, through omission and misrepresentation, skew the story in a manner that leads readers to the desired pro-boycott position.

Remember that anti-Israel motion passed at the Labour Conference? Al-Jazeera said they believed Omar Mofeed ‘helped draft’.

For the first time, we can reveal that Omar is the son of Mufid al-Mukhalalati…Hamas’s Health Minister from their 2012 government.

Top Jewish and Swedish leaders met at Malmö Synagogue Tuesday to celebrate the history and vibrant life of the local Jewish community, most notably its resilience during a period of heightened antisemitism in the country.

The synagogue event, hosted by the World Jewish Congress (WJC), along with the Official Council of Swedish Jewish Communities and the Jewish Community of Malmö, was held one day ahead of the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism.

Malmö, the third-largest city in Sweden, has been slammed with antisemitism in recent years. In 2013, it saw near a tripling of reports of antisemitic attacks, JTA reported.

WJC President Ronald Lauder shared insight at the event about the history of Jewish life in Sweden and next steps in combating antisemitism. “I have been dealing with antisemitism since I became involved in the Jewish world. That’s most of my adult life. I’ve witnessed it, I’ve talked to too many victims of antisemitism. I’ve also been the target of it, myself. I have seen people lose their lives … because they happened to be Jewish," Lauder said.

“I am aware that a just and reasonable settlement must be found with the Palestinian people. I have pursued a two-state solution for years and I have never given up on this idea. Two states for two people is the only way that this long conflict can finally come to a just conclusion," he continued.

He added, “All schoolchildren must learn about the Holocaust and understand how it came about and where hatred ultimately leads.”

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven called on Wednesday for “concrete measures” to combat antisemitism and advance Holocaust remembrance, at the Malmö International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism.

Speaking at the conference, Löfven noted that antisemitism is present in all parts of society, observing specifically that it had been boosted in Europe by the arrival of immigrants where antisemitism is rife, an implicit reference to Muslim immigrants from the Middle East.

Malmö Mayor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, whose city has been a hotbed of antisemitic incidents and attacks emanating in particular from its large Muslim population, also addressed the conference, while Israeli President Isaac Herzog, French President Emmanuel Macron and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken addressed the event through video messages.

Speaking first in the plenary session of the conference, Löfven mentioned the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust of January 2000, which resulted in the founding of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the 2020 IHRA Ministerial Declaration as important milestones in efforts to combat antisemitism and preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

“We are not looking for another declaration, we are looking to translate these principles of these documents into reality,” Löfven said at Wednesday’s conference.

“I have therefore encouraged delegations that are representative here in Malmö today to present concrete measures to promote Holocaust remembrance and to combat antisemitism, anti-Gypsism and other forms of racism,” he continued.

Speaking at a major conference hosted by Sweden on Wednesday, President Isaac Herzog called on the world to more vigorously confront social media companies to ensure hateful material is dealt with.

“Antisemitism is an infusion of hate into pockets of ignorance, a force of destruction which wears down any virtue in its path,” he said.

“It will require not only improving Holocaust education in schools, such as the outstanding program of Yad Vashem, but also working aggressively on social media, including with and confronting social media companies to ensure that hateful incitement is quickly removed.”

He also urged leaders to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

“The IHRA has become a widely accepted reference point in the fight against antisemitism and Holocaust denial, with over thirty countries having adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and I call upon all nations to do so,” he said, speaking by video from Jerusalem.

Diaspora Minister Nachman Shai echoed Herzog’s focus on social media, telling the assembled media when he entered the conference site that “there is a dangerous rise of antisemitism all over the world mainly because of the new social media.”

?? Addressing #Malmo#RememberPact Conference on #Antisemitism, PM @ScottMorrisonMP announces #Australia's decision to "embrace" @TheIHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, reiterating "antisemitism has no place in Australia or anywhere in the world". pic.twitter.com/OvktPDvrl5

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 13, 2021

The Union of Jewish Students (UJS) has announced a new campaign to advance the leading definition of antisemitism at British and Irish universities, finding that less than ten percent of schools in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have done so.

“This is a critical step that must be taken to ensure that they support their Jewish students,” UJS said Tuesday, noting that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism has been adopted by just five of 61 Scottish, Welsh, Irish and Northern Irish higher education institutions.

According to the IHRA definition, “antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

Today, 107 universities have adopted the IHRA definition, the UJS said, up from 29 in July 2020. All but five of those institutions are found in England.

UJS President Nina Freedman wrote Monday to education ministers in the UK and Ireland, urging them to advance “this basic standard for supporting and protecting” Jewish communities.

A Toronto law professor has apologised for changing his Twitter profile photo to an image of a Jewish judge with a quote attributed to a well-known Nazi written over it.

Professor Mohammad Fadel, who teaches Business Organisations at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, changed his Twitter profile photo last week to that of Justice David Spiro, a Jewish member of Canada’s Tax Court, with the words “The sovereign is he who decides the exceptions” written below. This is a quote from Carl Schmitt, who was an active member of the Nazi Party. Prof. Fadela also changed his Twitter name to “Schmitt lives in Toronto.”

Prof. Fadel has since released an apology in which he said that although he “never intended to compare Justice Sprio to a Nazi,” he understood in retrospect why people accused him of making the connection. He went on to say that he was “deeply sorry for the pain” that he “unintentionally caused them.”

In August, the University of California Merced launched a formal investigation into the alleged antisemitism of Prof. Abbas Ghassemi after he reportedly tweeted that “Zionists” controlled the American economy, government policy, banking, and media. [edit. corrected name from Mohammad Fadela, h/t Dafna]

Hundreds of Google and Amazon employees have signed a public letter demanding that the tech giants cancel Project Nimbus, a billion-dollar contract to provide public cloud computing services to Israel.

In the letter, published by The Guardian on Tuesday, the authors state that they were “morally obliged” to speak out against the project, calling on Amazon and Google to cancel the contract and sever all ties with the Israeli military.

“We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court,” the letter stated.

According to the letter, 90 employees at Google and 300 at Amazon had signed the missive, but wished to remain anonymous “because we fear retaliation.”

The letter went on to state that the tech giants’ “aggressive” pursuit of military and law enforcement contracts, including Nimbus, was part of a “disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.”

Just weeks after constituting the tiny congressional minority that opposed funding for Israel’s civilian missile defense system, a group of vocal, ultra-progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives cited parallel reasoning in a failed bid to defeat legislation aimed at providing American law enforcement personnel with body armor.

Legislators from New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Minnesota supplied the sole “nay” votes on a bill to help police departments across the nation combat a spike in violent crime, with measures that include allocations for bulletproof vests and other protective gear. Invoking the same rationale as when they opposed funding three weeks ago for the Iron Dome – with interceptors manufactured by the American company Raytheon – “the Squad” railed against what they called the imbalance of power between police forces and violent criminals.

“We cannot allow police violence to go unpunished,” charged Ilhan Omar (D-MN). “My colleagues and I already went through this last month. Providing funding to shield Israel from rocket attacks deprives Palestinians of effective resistance, and thus endorses continued Israeli brutality. I’m not saying Israeli civilian lives aren’t valuable, and I’m not saying police lives don’t matter. I’m just saying they don’t matter enough to matter.”

“With rampant police brutality disproportionately affecting minority groups, this bill sends exactly the wrong message,” declared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who voted “No” this time, in contrast to her “Present” vote on the Iron Dome bill. “We need more dead cops, just as we need more dead Jews, if we are to make the world a better place.”

Antisemitism is being “introduced to teenagers” through Instagram and TikTok, according to a new report from the anti-racism organisation Hope Not Hate.

The report also found that users were being led down a “rabbit hole of political extremism” due to the social media platforms’ algorithms and that users were spreading antisemitic sentiments using emojis and filters.

Common, antisemitic hashtags used on the platforms allegedly included #JewWorldOrder and #synagogueofsatan. In addition, hashtags seemingly belonging to broader conspiracy theories such as #illuminati and #NWO (New World Order) embedded hidden content that redirected users to antisemitic tropes. It was also reported that Instagram’s algorithm would present people looking at these hashtags with far-right accounts for them to follow.

We reported last year that Instagram and Facebook came under pressure to take action following the revelation that a network of 80,000 white supremacists was operating on its platform.

A spokesperson for Instagram said: “Antisemitism is completely unacceptable and we don’t allow it anywhere on Instagram. We’ve always removed attacks against people based on their religion, and last year we made important updates to our policies, to remove any content that denies or distorts the Holocaust, as well as more implicit hate speech, such as harmful stereotypes that Jewish people control the world.”

Speaking to German media Monday, Gil Ofarim described the hate messages and personal threats he has received since the German Jewish singer-songwriter publicly reported an alleged antisemitic incident in a hotel in the city of Leipzig.

In a video posted on Instagram last week, Ofarim described how he was told by an employee at the Westin Hotel Leipzig to remove his Star of David necklace so that he can proceed with the check-in.

Ofarim told live German TV show “Zervakis & Opdenhövel” on Monday night that he had made himself a target by making the incident public.

“I am still speechless and shocked, but at the same time not surprised,” said the 39-year-old. “I have hardly switched on my cellphone over the past week. I have been getting open threats and hate messages via social media channels.”

“I got a message that said, ‘At the next cleanup, you will be first in line my friend,” Ofarim disclosed.

Ofarim recounted that earlier this week he played in a theater and “suddenly the police stood in my dressing room and asked for information about where I was going to spend the night. None of this made sense to me. Then I was escorted by the very friendly officers. A bus in front of me, a bus behind me.”

At the same time, Ofarim acknowledged that he receives a “lot of solidarity,” but raised the question of his disclosure will ultimately change, once the media attention dissipates. “What remains of it? Does it change anything? I don’t know. I would like it to.”

Antisemitism has “now arrived in the middle of society. And that must not be the case,” Ofarim warned.

“Especially when you experience something like that, you have to open your mouth and do something about it and say something,” he urged.

Jews are now the victims of more than one in five hate crimes related to religion – the highest percentage ever recorded.

The shocking Home Office statistics continue a disturbing rise over the past few years.

The latest data reveals that there were 1,288 offences against Jewish people in which their perceived religion was recorded as relevant to the case in England and Wales.

The figures amount to 22 per cent of the total for the 12 months up to March this year, making Jews the second largest group.

The findings come after members of the community have been the targets of a series of shocking attacks over the past few months.

Recent horrific incidents include violent assaults on Orthodox Jews in north London, and alleged offences related to the pro-Palestinian protests during the Gaza conflict in May.

The Muslim community suffered 2,703 offences over the year up March, amounting to 45 per cent of the total, the greatest share of any of the nine religions recorded.

For the year up to March 2020, Jews were victims of 19 per cent of religion-related crimes, amounting to 1,205 offences.

That was up as a share on the previous year, when Jews were targeted in 18 per cent of religious hate crime, in 1,326 incidents.

Gael actively promotes conspiracy theories related to 9/11 & anti-vax. Here are a few screenshots that prove that you couldn't get more confused than this.
2/ pic.twitter.com/HdhmqzKNak

— GnasherJew®????? (@GnasherJew) October 13, 2021

Israel’s tech sector once again broke capital-funding records, with firms raising a total of $17.78 billion in 575 deals since the start of 2021, almost double the total raised in all of 2020, itself a record year.

In the first three quarters (Q1-Q3) of 2021, the amount of capital raised by Israeli high-tech companies increased by 71 percent over 2020’s annual total of $10.3 billion, according to data released Wednesday by the IVC-Meitar Israel Tech Review, published by the IVC Research Center and the law firm Meitar. The historic amount was due in part to a significant number of funding rounds of over $100 million — 53 such deals — which accounted for a 51% share of the total sum for Q1–Q3, according to the report.

In Q3 alone, Israeli companies raised $5.89 billion in 177 deals, down slightly from the $6.5 billion raised in Q2 but more than the $5.3 billion in Q1.

The number of deals also reached an unprecedented level. According to IVC’s estimation, the projected deal number by the end of the year will reach 1,800, a 33% gain over 2020.

In addition, the value of high-tech exits soared so far this year, reaching $18.92 billion — up 92% from 2020’s annual results. According to the findings, this is mostly due to a surge in IPOs, 65 in total.

“We observed the current upward trend since March 2021, leading monthly averages in Q1–Q3/2021 to $1.98 billion, compared to a $864 million monthly average in 2020, as more mature Israeli companies have established trusted connections with their foreign investors, proving themselves as stable targets for growth investments. We believe that at least for the near term, this trend will continue,” said Mariana Shapira, senior analyst at IVC, in a statement accompanying the report.

Travel tech company TripActions, founded by Israeli entrepreneurs, raised $275 million in a Series F round at a valuation of $7.25 billion, the company announced on Wednesday.

The growth round was led by San Francisco-based Greenoaks Capital, with participation from serial entrepreneur Elad Gil, who was a former VP of corporate strategy at Twitter, and Brazilian investment firm Base Partners. It brings TripActions’ total fundraising capital to date to $1.3 billion.

Founded in 2015 by Ilan Twig and Ariel Cohen, TripActions set out to overhaul corporate travel, building an AI-powered platform that centralizes trip bookings including flights, hotels, car rentals and transfers, as well as tracks expenses and provides 24/7 personalized global support for executives and employees.

The company said in a statement that the funding underscores “the increased demand for end-to-end, corporate travel, payments, and expense management technology.”

TripActions, based in Palo Alto, California, established an R&D branch in Israel earlier this year. It has a customer base of over 5,000 companies including leading firms such as Zoom, Lyft, Canva, Heineken, and Crate & Barrel.

Hailo, a maker of chips that allows edge devices like smart cameras or smart cars to have artificial intelligence capabilities, said on Tuesday that it raised $136 million in a Series C funding round, considered the largest in the edge AI chip space to date. The round brings Hailo’s total funding to $224 million.

A source familiar with the company said the investment values Hailo at over $1 billion, making it Israel’s latest unicorn, a private company valued at $1 billion or over.

Edge devices are electronic devices that are installed at the edge of networks — the entry point to networks — in products such as autonomous vehicles, drones, and smart home appliances including personal assistants, smart cameras and smart TVs, alongside internet of things, augmented reality and virtual reality platforms, wearables and security products.

The investment in Hailo was led by Poalim Equity and Gil Agmon, CEO of Delek Motors, a publicly traded company and the sole importer of Mazda, Ford and BMW vehicles and products to Israel. The round was also joined by existing investors including prominent Israeli entrepreneur Zohar Zisapel, founder of the RAD Group and chairman of Hailo; Swiss-based ABB Technology Ventures (ATV); London’s Latitude Ventures; and Israel’s OurCrowd. Vehicle importer Carasso Motors and Shlomo Group joined the round as new investors.

Oracle on Wednesday opened the first of two planned public cloud centers in Israel, which will enable companies and other Israeli customers to keep their data on local servers and not be reliant on other countries.

The data centre, nine floors underground in one of Jerusalem’s technology parks cost an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars, and is designed to operate in the face of potential terror acts.

“This facility … can withstand a rocket direct hit, a missile direct hit, or even a car bomb, and the services will keep running with customers not even knowing that something so horrible has happened,” Eran Feigenbaum, Oracle’s Israel country manager, told Reuters.

The site, which has its own generators in case of power loss, is one of 30 such cloud centers globally. Until now, the closest to Israel was in the United Arab Emirates. Oracle also has a research and development centre in Israel.

Feigenbaum said there will be a second data centre in Israel as part of a plan to open 14 more centers by the end of 2022, which will meet growing demand by Israeli tech firms and serve as a backup to ensure data stays within Israel’s borders.

“This is going to be even more helpful for all the unicorns that we see here and for all the startups that have gone IPO,” he said, expecting Oracle’s competitors to follow suit.

For Israeli companies, having a local cloud could save costs since they would have the ability to rent storage instead of building their own servers or relying on other countries.

A Polish Jewish couple’s anti-fascist movie thought to have been destroyed by the Nazis was shown to the public for the first time in more than 80 years.

The 1931 anti-fascist short film “Europa,” by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, is based on a 1925 futurist poem of the same name by Anatol Stern. It was featured last week as part of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) London Film Festival, where it was introduced by the Themersons’ niece, according to the Independent.

The Themersons made the 12-minute movie in their bedroom in Warsaw. It is considered the first noteworthy avant-garde film from Poland, The Jewish Chronicle reported.

When the couple moved to France in 1938, they deposited all copies of their short film at the Vitfer Laboratory in Paris for safekeeping. Nazis seized all prints of their film after invading France and “Europa” was thought to have been destroyed.

The Themersons, who survived World War II, were lifelong collaborators as writers, filmmakers and illustrators. They died weeks apart in 1988 in London, still believing that their film was long gone.

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Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

All of my writing is informed by two principles. The first, both logically and rhetorically, is that there is no moral principle more important than the value of preserving the Jewish people. This is axiomatic for me: if we don’t agree on this, then there is no point to continue the discussion.
This means that preserving the Jewish people is more important to me than anything else, including democracy or even considerations of human rights. Not that I think that there is a conflict between the continued existence of this people and the legitimate rights of others; I do not. But if, in any particular case, I have to choose between Jewish survival and the good of others, I will choose Jewish survival.

Some say that this disqualifies me as an “objective” observer of events. Actually, it makes me like everyone else. We all have loyalties that override universal obligations to humanity. Who would sacrifice their immediate family in order to protect the rights of others?

The second principle is the necessity of a Jewish state. If the Jewish state were to disappear, so – in short order – would the Jewish people. Unlike the first principle, this is an empirical one. The early Zionists who called for a Jewish state did so to a great degree because the history of the treatment of the Jews in the Christian and Muslim worlds impelled them to the conclusion that a sovereign state was necessary to ensure the continuance of their people despite persecution and assimilation. Subsequent events – the Holocaust among them – provided evidence that they were correct.

So what are the consequences of these principles?

Here is an example: Hezbollah has 130,000 rockets aimed at Israel. If they were to be launched, they would kill thousands in Israel and imperil the continued existence of the state. Therefore I believe that a preemptive attack on the launchers, even if it would kill numerous innocent Lebanese civilians, is morally justified (whether such an action is a good idea from a military or political standpoint is another issue, which I am not discussing at this point).

Another example: the geographic characteristics of the State of Israel require that she maintain control of the high ground of Judea and Samaria and the western ridge of the Jordan Valley in order to have defensible borders. Therefore, regardless of political considerations, these areas cannot be transferred to Arab sovereignty. If you believe that Israel’s holding on to these territories poses a demographic threat to her Jewish majority, then you must find the solution in reducing their Arab population rather than in Israeli withdrawal.

I do not believe that the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” have a valid legal claim on the area called Eretz Yisrael. But even if I did, I would be opposed to them realizing it, because it is in direct opposition to the continued existence of the Jewish state. In other words, I am not impartial on this question. I do not give equal weight to Jewish and Arab aspirations in our little land.

That’s enough for many people to declare me a “racist” whose opinions are worthless. But there is no human being who does not privilege some group over others, even if it’s just their immediate family. The ideal of valuing all human beings equally always breaks down at some point. This is unsurprising. We are not abstract entities, we are animals, and like all living creatures we function according to evolutionary rules established by forces far more powerful than our reason (incidentally, this isn’t an anti-religious statement: halacha was developed with this in mind). Family feeling, tribalism, and peoplehood are not things that can be erased.

Here is the reality: it is not Jewish paranoia to think that much of the world opposes Jewish self-determination, and sometimes the existence of Jews themselves. It is not paranoid to notice that Jews living in the diaspora are facing more antisemitism and anti-Jewish discrimination and even violence from day to day. And neither is it paranoid to think that the Palestinian Arabs would kill, enslave, or expel all the Jews from the land if they had the ability to do so. Indeed, they’ll gladly tell you so.

I am not going to argue for the value of the existence of the Jewish people. And we don’t need to convince anybody. What matters, as Ben Gurion said, is not what the nations think, but what the Jews do.

Many consider the Biden administration's oft-expressed intent to open a U.S. consulate-general in Jerusalem a minor administrative change. In fact, it is a dangerous resurrection of a fiction that dominated American attitudes and policy toward Israel for decades.

It is nothing less than a devious scheme to reverse U.S. recognition that Jerusalem is in Israel by pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to abandon Israel's claim to sovereignty over its own capital city. If Bennett acquiesces to U.S. pressure, he will go down in history as the Israeli leader who gave away Jerusalem.

In May 1948, President Harry Truman was the first world leader to recognize the modern State of Israel, only 11 minutes after its creation. But for the following 70 years, successive U.S. presidential administrations steadfastly refused to formally recognize the City of Jerusalem as being in the State of Israel. It took us 18 years of pro bono litigation, with two appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court and working with the prior administration, to overturn the State Department's long-running position. That position had effectively treated as stateless thousands of American citizens born in Jerusalem.

We began representing Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky soon after he was born in Jerusalem. His American-born parents sought for him what most people take for granted—the right to list his country of birth on his American identity papers. That right was denied to him for almost two decades. His government-issued American birth certificate left blank the space for his country of birth. Although U.S. passports routinely designate the country of a foreign-born passport-holder's birth, Menachem's listed "Jerusalem" instead of "Israel"—as if the City of Jerusalem was not actually in any country.

Congress had overwhelmingly endorsed Israel's assertion of sovereign jurisdiction over Jerusalem in the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. Nonetheless, Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama—yielding to the State Department's Arabist contingent—overrode Congress' decision with various baseless "findings." They continued to deny that any portion of the city (neither "West" nor "East" Jerusalem) was actually in Israel. This led to confusion and embarrassment.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday the Biden administration intends to press ahead with its plan to reopen the Jerusalem consulate that traditionally engaged with Palestinians, despite Israeli opposition to such a move.

Blinken reiterated a pledge he originally made months ago on re-establishing the consulate, which had long been a base for diplomatic outreach to the Palestinians before it was closed by President Joe Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, in 2018.

But Blinken, speaking at a Washington news conference with visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and United Arab Emirates Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, stopped short of setting a date for reopening the consulate, which would strain relations with Israel’s new ideologically diverse government.

“We’ll be moving forward with the process of opening a consulate as part of deepening of those ties with the Palestinians,” Blinken said at the State Department.

The Biden administration has sought to repair relations with the Palestinians that were badly damaged under Trump.

The consulate was subsumed into the US Embassy that was moved to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv in 2018 by Trump — a reversal of longtime US policy hailed by Israel and condemned by Palestinians.

The Biden administration says it will reopen the consulate while leaving the embassy in place.

Important words from Israel’s Justice Minister. Israel cannot and will not agree to divide Jerusalem by permitting a US-Palestinian Consulate to open. It would violate Israeli and US law and betray the commitment of both countries to Israel’s eternal and undivided capital. https://t.co/Co55LP2ECL

— David M Friedman (@DavidM_Friedman) October 14, 2021

UN Watch's database monitors the actions and makeup of key UN bodies, highlighting the pernicious rise of dictatorships to high positions, and the global body's particular obsession with making Israel a scapegoat. This database lists all the resolutions enacted by the UN bodies over the last twenty years and what UN Watch has discovered is illuminating!

You just stood before the @UN and unequivocally embraced the antisemitic Durban Declaration, that, amongst other things, was infamous for its Holocaust distortion. Your @UN_HRC just reaffirmed it also.

Sorry Mr. @antonioguterres, your words are shallow and meaningless. https://t.co/pibEqj32S2

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 14, 2021

Zakaria foresaw a future in which some countries that "have clearly supported terrorism in the past, like Iran, seem interested in re-entering the world community and reforming their ways." As he wrote those words, Iran was harboring dozens of al-Qaeda operatives, including bin Laden's son Sa'ad.

More pearls of wisdom from Zakaria.

In another gem, Zakaria advised Americans "to give up some cold-war reflexes, such as an allergy to multilateralism, and stop insisting that China is about to rival us militarily or that Russia is likely to re-emerge as a new military threat." I'd say his crystal ball was cracked.

Zakaria's support for the "Arab Spring" included an argument for "Contra-like funding" to the Islamists trying to depose Moammar Qaddafi. He has consistently underestimated the threats of Islamist terrorists and advocated negotiating with terrorists — especially the Taliban.

Evidence of Zakaria's thinking persists. Praise for the Taliban as "very pragmatic and very businesslike" from the Department of Defense and as "professional and businesslike" from the National Security Council are examples. Opposition to designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization is another. And whenever there is a terrorist attack by Islamists, the propensity to ask "why do they hate us?" is ever-present.

Perhaps Zakaria's most damaging influence is his one-sided reporting on Israel. On September 19 of this year, he blamed Israel's "assault" on Hamas for the continued conflict. In June, he accused Israel of "killing [the] two-state solution for 15 years."

Zakaria recently apologized to Dore Gold for misattributing words and ideas to the former ambassador that he neither spoke nor advocates. Getting him to apologize for 20 years of bad policy advice will be much more difficult. Until then, every American can take three measures to inoculate themselves against the bad advice we have endured since 9/11: Stop blaming the U.S. for Islamist terrorism, stop asking the dumb question "Why do they hate us?" and, most of all, stop listening to Fareed Zakaria.

Palestinian advocacy groups and certain countries are pressuring the African Union (AU) to rescind Israel’s observer status, when the AU executive council meets this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But Israel’s expertise in health, agriculture, defense, and other fields should convince the AU to prioritize its partnership with the Jewish state over Palestinian grievances.

In July, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Yair Lapid welcomed Israel’s readmission as an observer at the AU, calling it “a day of celebration for Israel-Africa relations.” It “corrects the anomaly” that has existed since Israel lost its observer status when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) reorganized as the African Union in 2002.

Opponents of Israel’s upgraded status have lobbed tenuous arguments against the partnership. To tarnish Israel’s image in Africa, activists have portrayed the Jewish state as a racist colonizer. However, Israel’s restrictions on Palestinians are related to security issues, not race. And Israel is the product of a post-colonial national liberation movement, a trait it shares with many African countries.

Some have argued that African countries should not improve relations with Israel until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved. But it is unclear why Palestinian recalcitrance should hold Israeli-African relations hostage, especially in light of Israel’s numerous attempts to solve the conflict.

Shortly after its founding, Israel began its outreach to Africa. Their shared post-colonial legacy — and Israel’s desire to overcome isolation caused by the Arab League boycott — spurred this partnership. In the process, Israel shared agricultural and technological advancements crucial for countries breaking away from the yoke of colonialism. However, in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Arab and Muslim countries coaxed African nations to cut ties with Israel. Most nations complied with a 1973 OAU resolution calling on members to do just that.

The Ad Kan group, dedicated to exposing NGOs and countries that labor to alter Israel’s identity and values, as well as the activities of the Palestinian Authority and the European Union in Area C, on Thursday revealed the deep intrusion of the PA intelligence service into Israel’s Defense Ministry’s Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria.

This week, the PA’s preventive security forces once again arrested Nidal al-Atari, a Palestinian Authority citizen who serves as the lands inspector in the Israeli Civil Administration. Al-Atari was interrogated and remains in custody. During his previous detention, he was kept in jail for more than half a year.

Al-Atari stored confidential files in his home

Ad Kan revealed that al-Atari stored in his home, in violation of protocol, a large number of confidential files with transaction details of Jewish real estate purchases from Arabs in Judea and Samaria.

During his interrogation, al-Atari needed medical treatment and was hospitalized for a while in a hospital in Shechem while remaining under arrest. It should be noted that al-Atari is one of the most senior Palestinian employees of the Israeli Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria.

The Israeli Government knew of al-Atari’s arrest by the PA

The issue of his arrest was discussed at length in Israel’s State Comptroller’s report from the summer of 2020, in which an entire segment was dedicated to al-Atari’s arrest, which referenced the Shin Bet’s warning that employing a Palestinian without security clearance in such a sensitive position could result in leaked confidential and sensitive information from the Defense Ministry to the Palestinian security services.

To remind you: the law in the Palestinian Authority prohibits the sale of land to Jews, on penalty of death. With that in mind, the State Comptroller was understandably critical of the Civil Administration’s poor handling of the al-Atari incident.

A Israeli Border Police officer was seriously wounded on Wednesday night in what police are calling a terrorist attack at the Qalandiya checkpoint near Jerusalem.

“During a Border Police night operation at Qalandiya, a suspicious individual approached the officers in a vehicle, accelerated toward them and hit one of the officers,” police said in a statement.

Other members of the unit opened fire at the vehicle as the suspect attempted to escape, causing it to crash against a barrier. The driver, a 22-year-old resident of Qalqilya, was taken to Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital in fair condition to be treated for a head injury, according to Ynet. He was then handed over to the Israel Security Agency for questioning, police said.

“This attack is another reminder of the threats that exist in every operational activity and in every space in which we operate,” Jerusalem District Police Commander Doron Turgeman said, according to Ynet.

“The quick response and operational deployment of the officers in the field prevented additional injury to additional officers and led to a speedy end to the incident and the neutralization of the terrorist,” he added.

Outgoing Israeli National Security Advisor Meir Ben-Shabbat has served in the Israel Security Agency and other security positions for 37 years, spending most of his professional life dealing with Gaza.

He said in an interview: "Israel's long-term goal should be a demilitarized Gaza under leadership that recognizes Israel and does not take violent action against it. This goal can be achieved in one of two ways - either through a broad-scale military operation...that would come at a heavy cost, or by gradually wearing Hamas down at every level and leading the population to realize that it's a failed, corrupt regime whose time has come to an end."

"Sometimes there are chronic conditions that medicine can't heal completely, but allow you to live with them....Our security situation has to be evaluated with a long lens, by a long list of parameters - strict parameters of lives lost and disruptions to the public's daily routine."

"True, there are tense periods in the western Negev [opposite Gaza]. But even there, people live their ordinary lives most days of the year, and the communities there are thriving."

"Another consideration in dealing with Gaza is our priorities. Iran, of course, would be happy if we got involved in a conflict with Hamas and directed our attention to Gaza rather than at it."

Asked if Israel is depending on the Americans to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, he replied: "We aren't. Israel and the Jewish people can't accept an existential threat, and will not accept Iranian military nuclear capabilities. As for what we do about it, I'll just say that when the political echelon decides that we won't allow it, the military and intelligence echelons realize what that means."

Terrorism is the Cyprus Police’s leading theory for the motive behind the attempt to murder Israeli businessmen on the European Union island, consistent with Israel’s allegation that it was an Iranian plot.

Police in Cyprus arrested a 38-year-old Azeri-Russian man on September 27 for targeting Israeli businessmen. The case drew attention earlier this month, when billionaire Teddy Sagi said that he was tipped off by the Israeli authorities – likely the Mossad – that assassins were after him, and he escaped Cyprus, where he lives, to Israel.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s spokesman Matan Sidi said the following day that the attempted murder was an Iranian terrorist attack.

Cyprus Police has not confirmed that Iran was behind the attack, but found evidence that the Azeri planned his attack on Israelis to take place on a Muslim holiday, which led them to believe he was trying to send a message, Phile News reported on Thursday. However, they are still following other leads, as well.

Hamas has released from custody the Palestinian gunman who shot Israel Border Police officer Barel Hadaria Shmueli in August during clashes at the Gaza border, Yediot Aharonot reports.

Shmueli succumbed to his wounds nine days after being shot in the head when clashes erupted between Palestinian rioters and Israeli security forces during protests along the fence separating Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The terrorist who shot Shmueli is not a Hamas member, but is active in the military wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to the report.

He was transferred to a Hamas detention center in Gaza and held there for several weeks before being released.

The man’s identity was kept secret for fears of Israel eliminating the terrorist, but with the gunman’s release his picture has now been publicized.

According to the reporting, Hamas believes that Israel will attempt to take out Shmueli’s killer not during a period of calm but in the event of another military escalation.

However, Hamas has been operating under the assumption that the terrorist’s identity is already known to Israeli intelligence and that he has been blacklisted as an assassination target.

Tens of thousands of impoverished families in the Gaza Strip began receiving Qatari humanitarian funds on Thursday after Israel agreed to a new distribution mechanism involving the United Nations.

Recipients of the money lined up from early morning outside 300 distribution centers spread across the Palestinian enclave controlled by the Hamas terror group.

Qatari envoy Mohammed al-Emadi said the $100 handouts would be provided to “95,000 needy families” in Gaza via the UN.

Qatari support is considered a crucial lifeline for impoverished Palestinians living in Gaza, which has been under an Israeli and Egyptian blockade since 2007, seen by Israel as a necessary measure to limit the ability of Gaza’s terror groups to arm themselves.

Israel had been allowing millions in Qatari cash to flow through Israeli crossings into Gaza on a monthly basis since 2018, in order to maintain a fragile ceasefire with Hamas. As of early 2021, some $30 million in cash was being delivered in suitcases to Gaza each month through an Israeli-controlled crossing.

But Israel had objected to a resumption of the funding under the terms that existed before May’s hostilities with Gaza, claiming money was being used by terror groups rather than strictly for humanitarian needs.

A soldier of the Syrian Arab Army was killed and three others were wounded in an Israeli air attack on the Palmyra area in the eastern countryside of Homs in central Syria, SANA reported Tuesday night.

A Syrian military source told SANA that at around 11:34 PM Tuesday, “the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression from the direction of the Al-Tanf area towards the Palmyra area in the countryside of Homs, targeting a communications tower and some of its surrounding points, which led to the death of a soldier and the wounding of three others and the infliction of some material losses.”

Palmyra (Tadmor) is located in an oasis in the middle of the Syrian Desert 134 miles northeast of Damascus and 110 miles southwest of the Euphrates River. The ruins of ancient Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are situated about one-third of a mile southwest of the modern city center.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activists reported hearing several explosions in the region of the T-4 military airbase, the largest airbase in Syria, in the eastern countryside of Homs, caused by airstrikes executed by Israeli fighter jets while flying over the Iraqi- Syria-Jordan border triangle.

At least six people were killed and 32 wounded as shots were fired during a protest by Hezbollah supporters against Tarek Bitar, the judge investigating the Beirut Port blast, in the Lebanese capital on Thursday, as tensions surrounding the case continue to rise. A cautious calm had been reached as of Thursday afternoon, according to Lebanese reports.

The shooting reportedly began in the Tayouneh area where it meets Ain El Remmaneh and Chiyah, a site famous for sectarian clashes during the 1975 civil war in Lebanon, since it marked the border between East and West Beirut.

Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army reported on Thursday that the shooting targeted the protesters. However, shortly after the shooting began, Hezbollah and Amal supporters could be seen firing towards buildings in the areas with automatic weapons and RPGs, raising questions as to whether the supporters who had claimed to be peaceful had come to the protest armed.

Video from the clashes showed gunmen hiding behind cars and garbage cans while firing at buildings and unseen targets. Many unarmed civilians could be seen in the area of the clashes.

A sniper opens fire at a Hezbollah-Amal protest to demand the removal of Bitar, the judge in charge of investigating the Beirut port explosion. There are dead and wounded. A very dangerous escalation pic.twitter.com/lZdWIlXHep

— Liz Sly (@LizSly) October 14, 2021

Chaos continues in the streets of #Beirut over the findings of the #BeirutBlast which a judge is set to decide on…terror org Hezbollah, backed by Iran, will do anything to keep from the truth coming out about their role. Now, an RPG is being fired in the streets of Beirut! pic.twitter.com/MnJkRxeP6e

— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? (@emilykschrader) October 14, 2021

Clashes erupted in #Beirut today during a protest organized by #Hezbollah and its allies against the jusge who is overseeing the Beirut port blast investigation. #Lebanonpic.twitter.com/UBSq21n2Bb

— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) October 14, 2021

Gunfire targeted Hezbollah members in Beirut on Thursday, during their protest designed to prevent an investigation into last year’s Beirut Port disaster.

Hezbollah’s goal was to cement its control of Lebanon, where it already has secured allies in the presidency, and to create a parallel communications network and infiltrate other state structures. Hezbollah’s goal – 16 years after it murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri in its first bid for control of the country – was to flex its muscles and get judge Tarek Bitar removed.

It appears that the gunman had other plans for today. Hezbollah is now a victim of its own success. What was once a “resistance” movement that was popular among a segment of the historically marginalized Shi’ite population has come to dominate Lebanon.

This is not because Hezbollah is so large – it has only a few seats in parliament. Instead, Hezbollah has an incredible mafia-like success because it maintains its own paramilitary state, its own phone network, its own financial system, it imports fuel, and has sent fighters abroad to wage war and conduct Lebanon’s foreign policy.

Hezbollah is so powerful and global that it is stronger than the state. As such, it occupies Lebanon, using classic Iranian tactics for building up parallel institutions, bankrupting the state and turning it into a branch of the Hezbollah militia terrorist movement.

But Hezbollah is also a victim of this “success,” because if you are too powerful, then you become the target of “resistance.”

Former Lebanese MP Mustapha Allouch: Hizbullah Was Founded Upon Destruction, Lacks Ideas about the Economy, the Future; The People Whom We Confront Are Superior in Science, Production, Arts, Other Fields #Lebanon#Hizbullah@allouchmustafa1pic.twitter.com/gZbfrxyhH0

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 14, 2021

A prominent Muslim organisation in Australia has cancelled a live webinar in which they invited two top members of the Taliban to speak after public outrage.

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils had organised a line-up of keynote guests to speak at Saturday's online event, which aims to discuss 'the future of Afghanistan and our role, regardless of whether we are in favour or against ­recent ­developments'.

The speakers had included long-time Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen and senior figure Sayed Abdul Basir Sabiri.

On Thursday afternoon AFIC released a letter saying Dr Rateb Jneid, the organisation's president, had made the 'executive decision' to cancel the event.

The group said it had invited the members of the Taliban to speak 'in the hope of obtaining assurances for the human rights of minorities, the rights of women to employment and education and to dissuade Australians from travelling to the region with any wrongful intent'.

'The event was not convened to legitimise any group or to offend any group,' Dr Jneid added.

'The event... generated both support and criticism, publicly and privately... In view of these developments I have taken the executive decision to cancel the event,' he said.

In recent weeks, Tehran has engaged in a crude campaign of intimidation of Azerbaijan that included military exercises near the border. Iranian officials are demanding that Azerbaijan end its alliance with Israel, which aided Azerbaijan during its 2020 war with Armenia.

Ethnic Azerbaijanis, a Shiite Turkic people, comprise 20-30% of Iran's population. When members of the Azerbaijani minority in Iran learned that Iran was helping Russia to resupply the Armenian army during the war, they sabotaged transport vehicles and launched public protests.

In 2012, when the Obama administration was courting Iran, senior American officials briefed the press on military cooperation between Azerbaijan and Israel with the clear intention of scuttling it. Although Washington is currently doing nothing to impede cooperation between Baku and Jerusalem, its posture in the face of Iranian aggression has created an environment that invites acts of intimidation. The Biden administration would be better served by following Israel's example.

The U.S. must find a way to deter nasty international actors while simultaneously respecting an electorate that is wary of military interventions. The best way is to forge productive understandings with countries that wield capable militaries - and who aren't afraid to use them.

Azerbaijan decided last month to levy customs tariffs on Iranian trucks crossing through its territory into Armenia. Tehran has embarked on consultations with Armenia over completing its Tatev road project, which would connect it with Armenia and Europe without the need to pass through Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan has accused Iran of sending help to Armenians living in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Baku regained from Armenia following last year's war. Azerbaijan, Turkey and Pakistan also recently held joint military drills in the Caspian Sea.

Meanwhile, on Sep. 19, Iran mobilized its forces on the border with Azerbaijan, where they carried out drills involving heavy weapons and helicopters for the first time. There have been radical calls by some Iranian lawmakers to annex Azerbaijan under the pretext that it was historically part of the Persian Empire and was "taken away" by the Russian Empire in the 19th century. In Baku, angry protesters attacked the Iranian Embassy in protest against Tehran's threats. Azerbaijani authorities also shut down the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's representative.

It could be said that Iran is getting a taste of its own medicine after spending decades undermining the security and stability of its neighbors. Tehran has created a new enemy on its northern border.

There have been five nationwide uprisings against the regime in our country in the past four years. Our government has slaughtered protesters and tortured political prisoners to suppress them. Yet most people in the West don't know our reality. Your Iran is defined by a pesky nuclear negotiation. Ours is much worse. It is a religious police state where we live in fear, with countless red lines that most dare not cross. I would know - I have spent six years in its jails.

Dissidents are jailed for holding up photos of their murdered children. Many relatives of those killed by the regime aren't allowed to hold funerals. They often are charged a fee to have their loved one's body released or are required to pay for the bullet or rope used to kill him.

You have been told that your solidarity would hurt us, that talking about our struggle would put us at risk. That is a lie. It is your silence and indifference that threaten us. Writing this could land me back in prison. But if that's the price for giving a voice to the voiceless, it will be worth it.

U.S. Iran envoy Robert Malley says the Biden administration is preparing for a "world where Iran doesn't have constraints on its nuclear program," comments that show how little progress has been made in negotiations with Tehran aimed at securing a return to the 2015 nuclear accord.

Malley, during a televised talk on Wednesday with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the United States has been talking to its allies about options for dealing with a fully operational and unrestricted Iranian nuclear program.

"We have to prepare for a world—which we're doing now in consultation with our partners from the region—about a world where Iran doesn't have constraints on its nuclear program and we have to consider options for dealing with that, which is what we're doing even as we hope that we can get back to the deal. Iran is giving us its answer by what it's doing and not doing every day," Malley said.

Iran flagrantly violates restrictions on its nuclear program that were applied under the 2015 accord. This includes uranium enrichment to levels needed to fuel a bomb and the resumption of nuclear work that international inspectors say can only be part of an atomic weapons program. Tehran has also blocked nuclear inspectors from entering its most contested nuclear sites.

Iran's election of a hardline new president and foreign policy team has complicated efforts to reach a deal, Malley said, even as the Biden administration has made clear to Tehran: "We are prepared to remove all of the sanctions that were imposed by the Trump administration."

After 10 months and 6 rounds of indirect talks, Malley said that "every day that goes by, we're getting a piece of Iran's answer. This is a team that may not in fact be prepared" to rejoin the deal and return to compliance.

Malley said the United States is pressing Iran to return to talks, but that it is unclear if diplomats can salvage the past year of talks and any progress made with the previous Iranian negotiating team.

Iran’s Nuclear Chief Mohammad Eslami: The Americans Resent Any Manifestation of Iran’s Power of Deterrence; If by Acquiring Uranium Metal We Make Them Feel Threatened - Let Them Feel Threatened #Iran#JCPOA@iaeaorgpic.twitter.com/8BOGKxwlbb

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) October 14, 2021

CNN (“Blinken says US is prepared to turn to ‘other options’ if nuclear diplomacy with Iran fails“), The Washington Post (“As Iran nuclear talks fail to make headway, Biden administration suggests increasing openness to a Plan B“) Agence France Presse (“Echoing Israel, US hints at force if Iran diplomacy fails“) and Voice of America (minute 1:1o) are among the additional media outlets to recognize the news importance of Blinken’s remarks on other options.

Haaretz, on the other hand, was a complete anomaly, entirely ignoring Blinken’s indications that options besides resuming talks are on the table. Haaretz‘s Ben Samuels studiously dropped any mention of options (“Blinken: ‘Time Running Short’ On Iran Nuclear Deal“). He reported:
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday “time is running short” on an Iranian return to full compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, but stressed in a joint press conference with Israel’s foreign minister that the U.S. believes “the diplomatic path is the most effective way to ensure” Tehran doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons.

“What we’re seeing from Tehran suggests that they’re not” ready to return to the nuclear deal, Blinken said. According to him, “we’re getting closer to a point where returning to full compliance with the JCPOA will not recapture” the benefits of the nuclear deal, which the U.S. withdrew from in 2018.

A note appended to the bottom of Haaretz‘s article indicates: “Reuters contributed to this report.”

But Reuters, for its part, had reported (“U.S., EU, Israel adopt tough tone on Iran, mull options“):
U.S., Israeli and EU officials took a tough line toward Iran on Wednesday, with U.S. officials saying they would consider all options if Tehran failed to revive the 2015 nuclear deal and Israel saying it reserved the right to act. …

“We will look at every option to deal with the challenge posed by Iran,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a joint news conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed.

Reuters’ compliance with Samuels’ preferred narrative mirrors Iran adherence to the 2015 nuclear deal. Samuels, it seems, himself opted for Plan B: editing out the most important of the story instead of reporting the facts as they are.

Horrific - scenes from #Iran today. Coming soon to #Afghanistan ??

pic.twitter.com/gswIoH71TO

— Emily Schrader - ????? ?????? (@emilykschrader) October 13, 2021

Turkish authorities arrest operatives of Iran who were preparing to kidnap an Iranian former military officer | pic.twitter.com/nkoH6cTtMh

— Mike (@Doranimated) October 13, 2021

On October 9, 2021, an animated video for children depicting a Quranic story about Jews being transformed into apes was uploaded to the Ibtikar Media channel on YouTube. The narrator told the story about a group of Jews in a seaside village who violated Allah's commandment to keep the Sabbath by casting fishing nets on Friday and gathering fish on Sunday. The narrator said that the group of Jews who did this were punished by being transformed into apes. Ibtikar Media is a Saudi YouTube channel.

"One Group Of Jewish Villagers Defied Allah's Commandment... By Employing Trickery And Deception"

Narrator: "There used to be a Jewish village on the seashore.

"One of Allah's laws that He laid down for them was that He forbade them from fishing on the Sabbath, in order to devote themselves to worship. Allah tested them by sending a lot of fish only on the Sabbath.

"So they employed a trick. They would cast their nets on Friday, the fish would get trapped in the nets on Saturday, and they would collect them on Sunday.

"The [Jewish villagers] were divided into three groups. One group defied Allah's commandment. They would fish [on the Sabbath] by employing trickery and deception. Another group abided by Allah's commandment, and never defied Him. They would warn the people about Allah's wrath and His punishment, and would forbid them from doing what they were doing. The third group would oppose the people who forbade these acts.

"The Punishment Of The Sinners Was That They Were Transformed Into Apes... [And Died] Leaving No Descendants"

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Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Rejecting My Jewish Heritage In The Face Of Antisemitism Will Work *This* Time

by Simone Sheodlo-Higanu

New York, October 14 - An aphorism attributed (wrongly) to Albert Einstein characterizes insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. With all due respect to the professor, I believe my current course will defy that pattern: unlike all the efforts of my ancestors who sought to relieve themselves of anti-Jewish persecution and discrimination by assimilating into the wider culture, only to find that the wider culture still considered them Jewish and therefore ripe for discrimination, in my case the effort to jettison everything of substance in my Judaism will engender only acceptance and approval from those whom I seek to join. I just know it.

I certainly will fare better than the hundreds of thousands of Jews who decided to convert to Catholicism rather than leave Spain in 1492, only to discover over the next several hundred years that their loving, tolerant neighbors and the Office of the Inquisition continued to suspect them of heresy and clinging to Jewish beliefs and practice, no matter how loudly or publicly the protestations of adherence to good Christian doctrine.

Nor will I face the fate of my predecessors in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Germany, where acculturation of Jews into every echelon of society proceeded with more thoroughness than anywhere else in history, but whose ancestry became subject to examination when Nazi racial purity laws went into effect in the 1930's.

Similarly, my path will prove other than that of the Yevsektsia, those proudly Communist Jews of the early Soviet Union who made it their mission to discredit, harass, and destroy all vestiges of Jewish life and culture so as to spare themselves the wrath of Lenin, Stalin, et al., and to prove themselves proper, loyal Soviet citizens. Then they were purged and executed when Stalin decided he no longer needed them.

That means my ongoing efforts to gain approbation from prominent progressive figures by disparaging the nine-out-of-ten Jews who profess support for Israel, and the rich tradition they preserve of longing for Zion through millennia of exile and outsider status, will end differently. I cannot explain why or how, exactly, that difference will manifest, but I can just feel it, just as I feel genocide happening in Palestine. Your efforts to explain to me that Jews who respect their Jewish heritage command respect, while those who do not, achieve the opposite result, will amount to nothing. I have already redefined my "Jewish heritage" to mean divorcing myself from anything authentically Jewish except where I can cherry-pick it to support my politics.

There's no way this goes sideways.

A century ago, anti-Semites sought to deny entry to Jewish immigrants on the grounds that they lacked the superior character traits of Northern Europeans who had populated this country in the 18th and 19th centuries and brought it to greatness. Now Jews face discrimination because they allegedly are co-conspirators with white supremacists or are simply part of the undifferentiated mass of American whites, the oppressor class.

The name-calling and stereotyping are bad enough, but if the equity agenda is broadly enacted, Jews will find few opportunities to land jobs in the civil service, education (especially in higher education), corporate America, and the innovation-based, creative economy emerging today. After all, Jews constitute only 2 percent of the population, but they are overrepresented in these fields. In the cause of pursuing equality of outcomes, quotas are now proposed as the solution to ensure proportional representation by every subgroup in every sector of the economy. Jews have seen this movie before: Their numbers at European universities were limited, as was their representation in the civil service of some countries; during the interwar era and well into the 1950s, American universities placed unofficial but very real quotas on Jewish enrollments on both the college and graduate-school levels. Under the “equity” regime, Jews will face the same obstacles. For a small minority population, this would lead to marginalization and downward mobility, and eventually emigration to countries that value merit.

The high-minded Jewish defenders of the “intersectionality” and “white privilege” (or “white supremacy”) industry are right about one thing: These terms and their implications are not sufficiently understood. In the name of these ideas, Jews are cast as part of the white, oppressor class, and their achievements through hard work, merit, and investment in vital institutions are denigrated. If Jews do not wake up to the threat that progressive ideology poses to their way of life in America, they will find themselves on a steep slope of downward mobility, or worse. For Jews, nothing less than their equality is at stake.

They are not alone. Other American minorities also have much to lose if these ideas gain traction. Hispanic Americans have been redefined by progressives as nonwhites and given a new name that means nothing to them—Latinx. This catch-all effaces the very real cultural, ethnic, and historical distinctions among immigrants of various Latin American origins. Even more damaging stereotyping now is applied to Asian Americans, perhaps the greatest victims of the progressive ideology. Arriving in the United States as poor immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, Vietnam, and other countries, these newcomers invested themselves in hard work and transmitted a strong work ethic to their children, with the result that their offspring have risen rapidly. Now these same Asian Americans are told that they actually are “white allies,” accomplices of the white oppressor group whose advancement in society should be limited by quotas and their earnings redistributed. As cases making their way through the courts make clear, some of these minorities are fighting back. A still silent majority of white and black Americans also does not accept the assumptions undergirding woke ideas.

Jews, once again, are the canary in the mine, but if they engage in the battle of ideas, they will find large numbers of allies prepared to marginalize the woke ideology threatening our country.

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

When you’re told that valued traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of people such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are an offense to Americans of color, don’t politely nod along. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” for African Americans, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights heroes by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history.

America is imperfect. I always knew it, as we all do—and the past few years have rocked my faith like no others in my lifetime. But America and we Americans are far from irredeemable.

The motto of Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery paper, the North Star—“The Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and all we are brethren”—must remain all of ours.

We can still feel the pull of that electric cord Lincoln talked about 163 years ago—the one “in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”

Every day I hear from people who are living in fear in the freest society humankind has ever known. Dissidents in a democracy, practicing doublespeak. That is what is happening right now. What happens five, 10, 20 years from now if we don’t speak up and defend the ideas that have made all of our lives possible?

Liberty. Equality. Freedom. Dignity. These are ideas worth fighting for.

What would my father have thought of being carved into a church?

Today a likeness of my father — author, activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel — is being unveiled in the stonework of the Washington National Cathedral. My family and I are deeply grateful to Dean Randy Hollerith and all the leadership at the cathedral for this profound measure of respect. It is good to see that five years after his passing, my father is still being recognized for his global work for human rights and his singular message of hope amid darkness.

But I wrestled with this honor, and I think he would have done the same.

My father - author, activist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel - didn't advocate just for the people of Kosovo, Darfur and Cambodia. He also supported Israel and defended her right to exist in peace and security. My father understood what it meant to live in a world without a Jewish state, and he saw the anti-Zionist movement as an extension of millennia-old anti-Semitism, which unfortunately is becoming more common and acceptable today.

Accusers throw the word "apartheid" at Israel, ignoring that thousands of Arabs serve voluntarily in the Israel Defense Forces and take their oath on a Koran or New Testament. Some celebrities charge Israel with ethnic cleansing, disregarding that as of 2017, the population of Palestinian citizens in Israel is more than nine times as high as it was in 1948. Meanwhile, almost all states in the Arab Middle East are Judenrein - "cleansed" of Jews.

In honor of The Algemeiner’s eighth annual gala, we are delighted to unveil our eighth ‘J100’ list of the top one hundred individuals who have positively influenced Jewish life this past year. Before you work your way through this exciting list, we wanted to first share some of the thoughts that we discussed as we developed it. If we could group these ideas together, the first would be about creating lists, in general; then, what’s unique about lists and Judaism; some finer points differentiating our honorees from the organizations they lead; and important reflections on all those every day and anonymous-to-us heroes we also want to celebrate without ever knowing their names. And, of course, to thank everyone who helped create the list and worked hard to put together our ‘J100’ gala.

It’s no secret that the Jewish community and the Jewish state of Israel has seen significant and rising challenges over the past 12 months, specifically during the Gaza war in May. History has shown that misinformation and false accusations lead to hate speech, which rapidly evolves into the widespread attacks on Jewish people that we saw in cities around the world. It affirmed for us our shared long-held belief that truth saves lives. As such, in the compilation of this year’s ‘J100’ list we’ve placed particular emphasis on those standing at the forefront of the battle for truth. We hope you find your review of the list to be as valuable as we did.

On Lists

There are lists, and there are lists. From the Forbes 400 to the Time 100, we are witness today to a proliferation of many lists in various magazines and newspapers. The New Yorker even made a list of The Hundred Best Lists of All Time! It seems that in the feeding frenzy of our information overloaded society, categorizations and listings get our attention by presumably helping us make sense of the data flooding our psyches. Lists also carry an element of sensationalism – who made the list, who didn’t – feeding the hunger for competition – yet another staple of our superficial times. No wonder we don’t find such popularity contests waged in earlier centuries; living as desert nomads or inside of a shtetl, where everyone knew virtually no one else but their neighbors by name (for good or for bad), did not exactly lend itself to creating a top ten list of favorites. This is an exclusive product of the communications revolution and the global village it created.

Israeli Ambassador to the US and the UN Gilad Erdan argued in his speech accepting The Algemeiner’s “Warrior for Truth” award at its annual “J100″ gala on Tuesday that “perhaps the biggest threat facing Israel and the Jewish people is the deadly combination of lies and disinformation.”

Erdan, who has been active in combating anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, asserted that “these lies are the ammunition that our enemies use to incite hatred against so many innocent Jews and Israelis.”

“These lies are the weapons that our enemies use to delegitimize our fundamental right to defend ourselves,” he said.

“I am the proud grandson of Holocaust survivors,” Erdan explained. “Their horrific and heroic stories ingrained in me from a young age that the disinformation may only begin with words, yet physical violence is always only one small step away.”

As “the most recent example of the danger that distorting the truth poses,” Erdan cited Israel’s Operation Guardian of the Walls in May, which saw a massive outbreak of antisemitic violence in the US and Europe.

“The facts were straightforward: Hamas fired 4,000 rockets indiscriminately at innocent civilians, including Jerusalem,” he said. “Israel, in stark contrast, did everything to protect human lives on both sides and to minimize civilian casualties. Yet those who hate Israel and the Jewish people began a campaign of lies and false accusations to defame Israel. And these messages spread quickly with the help of social media.”

“These lies translated into physical acts of violence against Jews around the world,” he noted.

UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) have warned Unilever PLC against claiming that it cannot overrule the BDS decision of its Ben & Jerry’s subsidiary.

A Letter sent by UKLFI to Unilever’s Chief Legal Officer points out that this claim would not comply with Unilever’s Code of Business Conduct, its Governance Report, statements in its Annual Reports, the UK Corporate Governance Code, or its premium listing on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

According to UKLFI, the provisions of the merger agreement that established Ben & Jerry’s independent board do not require Unilever to accept the BDS decision. On the contrary, the BDS decision is in breach of that agreement since it does not comply with Unilever’s Code of Business Conduct.

This means, on the one hand, that Unilever’s Board can assert control in this situation, if it has the will; but on the other hand, if it fails to do so, investors could lose confidence in the group.

The BDS decision has exposed Unilever to sanctions and legal action under multiple laws, some of which are detailed in UKLFI’s letter. Since the BDS decision, Unilever’s share price has fallen by 11% resulting in a loss of market capitalisation in excess of £12 billion. Over the same period, the share price of its rival, Procter & Gamble, has held steady.

Ben & Jerry’s was acquired by Unilever through its US subsidiary, Conopco, in 2000 under an unusual merger agreement which established an independent Board of the company that “shall be the custodians of the Ben & Jerry’s-brand image and shall have primary responsibility for safeguarding the integrity of the essential elements of the Ben & Jerry’s brand-name”.

Although Ben & Jerry’s is wholly owned by Conopco, the latter appoints only two out of eleven members of its Board. However, the merger agreement also requires all members of the Ben & Jerry’s Board to abide by Unilever’s Code of Business Conduct.

Unilever’s Code of Business Conduct in turn requires Unilever companies to comply with the laws and regulations of countries in which the Unilever group operates.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has launched an ad campaign in Jewish newspapers urging stores to stop selling Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream as a means to pressure its parent company, Unilever, to confront anti-Semitism within its ranks. The campaign comes several months after the ice-cream maker announced that it would stop selling its product in parts of Israel come 2022.

“Ben & Jerry’s is boycotting Israel. Tell your grocer to stop selling anti-Semitic ice-cream,” says the ad, which appeared in the Sept. 24 issue of the Cleveland Jewish News, one of nine Jewish media outlets running the advertisement.

Also at issue, says the Wiesenthal Center, is the company’s current board chair, Anuradha Mittal, who has expressed support for BDS, criticized AIPAC and in her previous job at a think tank posted positive articles about the Hezbollah and Hamas terror groups.

According to the decision by Ben & Jerry’s, “it was never just about ice-cream sold in East Jerusalem. It is all about Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream company profits being leveraged by an activist anti-Semite who hates Israel and defends Hamas—and the corporate executives at Unilever letting it happen,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and global social action director at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

“This is about arrogance and irresponsibility, enabling the odious anti-Semitic BDS movement to use money from a global brand to brand Jews as occupiers in their own land at a time when there is a spike of violent attacks against Jews from Germany to the United Kingdom to the United States,” he said.

A D.C. City Council member who claimed Jewish bankers control the weather is running for mayor, according to a Wednesday announcement.

Trayon White Sr. (D.) is the second city councilman this week to throw his hat into the mayoral race. He announced his candidacy on Instagram, in response to a post about Councilman Robert White (D.) launching his mayoral bid on Wednesday.

White's candidacy is likely to cause a stir due to his history of espousing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In 2018, he claimed that the Rothschilds—a historically wealthy Jewish family that is often the center of anti-Semitic assertions—manipulate the weather and control the levers of federal power.

"Man, it just started snowing out of nowhere this morning, man. Y'all better pay attention to this climate control, man, this climate manipulation," White said in a video he posted on Facebook. "And DC keep talking about, ‘We a resilient city,' and that's a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities, man. Be careful." During a city council breakfast meeting, White also argued that "the Rothschilds—control the World Bank, as we all know—infusing dollars into major cities."

"They really pretty much control the federal government, and now they have this concept called resilient cities in which they are using their money and influence into local cities," he said.

White's comments drew condemnations from Jewish groups and anti-Semitism watchdogs at the time. He later agreed to visit the Holocaust museum with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington in an attempt to make amends but left without explanation halfway through the 90-minute tour.

Dan Whitfield, a Progressive Democrat running in Arkansas to unseat John Boozman, likes to also tweet out outrageous lies such as Israel using white phosphorus to commit genocide in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/5dKaa5lXcm

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) October 14, 2021

If it is true that Irish author Sally Rooney is refusing to allow her latest novel to be translated into Hebrew because she supports the cultural boycott of Israel, then that's a new low for the anti-Israel set. It also speaks to the prejudices that swirl around the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

This has led to some despicable scenes in the UK and the U.S. in recent years: the booing of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; the cancellation of an Israeli-produced hip-hop opera at the Edinburgh Fringe; the jeering, harassment and No Platforming of speakers from Israel in certain universities; the removal of Israel-produced food from shop shelves. It's from the Jewish state? Then bin it, ban it, shout it down. This is the singular, dubious motivation of the BDS mob.

This is a species of bigotry. BDS treats Israel by a staggering double standard, in singling out Israel for a unique and extreme form of censorious punishment, for bans and boycotts that they do not seek to impose on any other state. Being "Israel-free," ostentatiously refusing to buy Israeli products or to engage with Israeli culture, has become the ultimate and most nauseating virtue-signal among smug radicals. It is prejudice dolled up as political principle.

As a writer, literature professor and one of the 82% of US Jews who report that “caring about Israel” is either “essential” or “important” to their Jewish identity, I am pained when I see authors whom I admire launch exaggerated or misinformed attacks on Israel.

But I also take solace in a correspondence, celebrated in a new children’s book, that showed how one Jewish reader engaged an author who she felt trafficked in anti-Jewish tropes. That the correspondence took place in the 19th century, and the author in question is Charles Dickens, does not make its lessons any less timely.

I was distressed when Irish novelist Sally Rooney said Tuesday that she wouldn’t allow her latest novel to be published in Hebrew by an Israeli publisher “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”

Saddened but not surprised: Earlier this year, Rooney signed a “Letter Against Apartheid” — a text issued in the wake of the latest round of violence between Israel and Hamas. It called for governments to “cut trade, economic, and cultural relations” with the Jewish state, which it said had committed “ethnic cleansing,” “massacres” and more in its response to the thousands of rockets fired into Israel by Hamas.

With their particular focus on words, writers should do better, especially when they organize, join or promote such endeavors. If their misrepresentations are without malicious intent, they’re in desperate need of further education.

“A Chinese translation of [Rooney’s] Normal People has been available… since last July. It was published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, a state-approved company. At least four of [its] senior execs… are members of the ruling Communist Party.” https://t.co/vx7OV0W3gc

— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) October 14, 2021

"Boycotting Israel might make sanctimonious Westerners feel virtuous but does nothing to help Palestinians or create peace" | Writes Ian Austin https://t.co/6Le0Esoba2

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) October 14, 2021

Many us share a love for Young Adult Womens’ literature, but found it lacked a particular focus on boycotting a certain country. A country populated by certain Rootless Cosmopolitans who lacked a capacity for British irony. A country located to the Southwest of Syria, a nation whose leader I consider a friend. So imagine how chuffed I was upon hearing the news that Sally Rooney has decided not to translate her works into Hebrew.

As I told my comrades in the Islington Gardening Allotment this morning, Chick Lit finally has a champion in the struggle to erase the Zionist Entity for Palestine. Sally’s books now truly have “something for everyone”. Our steadfast colleague Diane Abbott noted that Sally’s female protagonists “display terrible choices in men that remind me of some of the choices that I once made as a young woman.” I’m not sure what she’s referring to, but it sounds like a rather authentic endorsement.

Ms. Rooney’s stand is truly a breath of fresh air. For too many months, the Progressive Left in this nation has been hectored by a series of reactionary Kulaks Blairites spinning yarns such as “Why did Cotbyn’s Labour rallies feature a sea of Palestinian flags but no Union Jacks?” Yet what these critics don’t understand is that the Northern Counties that abandoned Labour were not interested in jobs or their childrens’ education. Rather, they were waiting for a Woke Novelist to rally the Proletariat in the Struggle for Palestine.

Ms. Rooney, please consider yourself invited to my next High Tea at the House of Commons.

People that truly support BDS should no longer us any Amazon or Google services anymore. If you care about the boycott movement, if you truly want to show solidarity, no longer use Amazon or Google. #YahooSearchOnlypic.twitter.com/c53mM5XZer

— Ari Ingel (@OGAride) October 14, 2021

Update: Abdulazeez (Abood) Swaiti is longer a medical student as @ECUBrodySOMhttps://t.co/kocQlawaP4

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) October 13, 2021

A top Facebook officer on Wednesday said that the platform was removing 15 times more hate speech than it was five years ago and pledged to keep fighting the harmful expressions, the Associated Press reported.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg was one of the government and social media representatives who attended the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance in Sweden, where many blamed social media for contributing to widespread rises in antisemitism.

Participants at the Malmo conference, including Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union's executive branch, pledged to curtail harmful language online and in the real world by pushing back on hate speech, disinformation and the rejection of facts, the AP reported.

The European Commission chief said that Holocaust denial and antisemitism are "a threat to Jewish people, but it is also a poison for our democracies, our values and our open societies." The EU plans to develop "a network of young European ambassadors for Holocaust remembrance" in response, von der Leyen said.

"Who is in a better position to teach the lessons of the Shoah to their peers than our young?" she added.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the streaming service will not remove Dave Chappelle’s new comedy special “The Closer,” which has faced a backlash for featuring controversial comments, including an antisemitic joke.

After “The Closer” premiered last week, Chappelle was criticized by the LGBTQ+ community for poking fun at trans people and gender identity. The comedian was also denounced for making an antisemitic joke about “Space Jews” seeking world domination, which plays into a common antisemitic trope.

In a memo sent on Friday, Sarandos told senior staff members that “some talent may join third parties in asking us to remove the show in the coming days, which we are not going to do.”

“Chappelle is one of the most popular stand-up comedians today, and we have a long-standing deal with him,” he wrote. “As with our other talent, we work hard to support their creative freedom, even though this means there will always be content on Netflix some people believe is harmful.”

Sarandos noted as an example the reality series “My Unorthodox Life,” about a fashion executive who left the ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith. He then explained that the streaming giant does not allow titles “designed to incite hate or violence, and we don’t believe ‘The Closer’ crosses that line.”

The pro-Palestinian propaganda, factual errors and the blurring of fact with mere claims in a recent Belfast Telegraph article would make Guardian editors cringe. The deceit in the piece (“How Palestine changed my life: NI teacher Charlotte Carson who stood in front of Israeli tanks to run for Assembly”, Oct. 13) begins in the first few sentences:
Belfast woman who risked her life acting as a human shield to prevent Israeli soldiers shooting civilians and demolishing Palestinian homes is to run as an SDLP candidate in the Assembly election. Charlotte Carson stood in front of bulldozers and accompanied women and children past army checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank

Her friend Rachel Corrie, an American student, was crushed to death by an Israeli Defence Force armoured bulldozer in 2003.

As is evident further into the article, it’s merely the (completely unsubstantiated) claim by Charlotte Carson that, while volunteering with a radical anti-Israel group during the height of the 2nd Intifada, she was preventing Israeli soldiers from “shooting civilians”. The fact that the Belfast Telegraph journalist, Suzanne Breene, failed to make this distinction is a violation of the accuracy clause’s demand that the press must “distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact”.

The journalist also fails to note that an Israeli court ruled, in response to a lawsuit by Rachel Corrie’s parents, the her tragic death was an accident, not the result of criminal behavior by the driver of the bulldozer.

It continues:
After two years as a volunteer in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which was blacklisted by the Israeli authorities, Ms Carson was arrested and deported from the occupied Palestinian territories.

The journalist makes no effort to explain that ISM was “blacklisted” by Israel because it is openly pro-terrorism, and has directly supported terrorist organisations by, among other activities, serving as human shields for terrorist operatives, and even sheltering Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives involved in suicide bombing attacks.

Also unmentioned by the article is the reason why Carson was arrested and deported: she reportedly disrupted IDF soldiers operating against Palestinians who threw Molotov cocktails at them, preventing the terrorists’ detention. According to the soldiers, she also exposed a previous IDF ambush by shining a flashlight on them, jeopardizing the soldiers’ lives.

Listeners are given no information that would help them understand what that would mean for Israel and the millions of Jewish former refugees and their descendants living there or for the chances of a peaceful solution to the conflict. Indeed Long then implies that “return for Palestinian refugees like Basma” would be a viable option were it not opposed by Israelis.

Long: “Basma is clearly in it for the long haul. But just listen to Michal Rozin, a member of the Israeli parliament for the Left-wing Meretz party. Michal has a long history of campaigning for refugees’ rights in Israel. Yet when I asked her about return for Palestinian refugees like Basma, as so often in this series, there was a but.”

Michal Rozin tells listeners that “you can’t solve the issue by bringing back millions of Palestinians back to [the] Israeli state” and predicts that most of the Palestinian refugees and their descendants will stay in other countries in the region while a future Palestinian state could absorb some.

Once again listeners are given no information that would help them understand Rozin’s position.

In her closing remarks Long states:
Long: “100 years ago the world decided refugee crises couldn’t continue indefinitely. Camps were not a solution. Yet 100 years on we have more refugees, more refugee camps, more endless cycles of exile. So how does this end?”

Clearly in relation to Palestinian refugees, Katy Long failed to provide listeners with the background information which would help them understand how their deliberately prolonged refugee status could be resolved.

By failing to address the issue of UNRWA’s perpetuation of the refugee status of Palestinians and the Arab League’s politically motivated exploitation of the topic, Long fell well short of her declared intention to “examine the refugee business” for Radio 4’s audience.

PRIME Minister Scott Morrison announced on Wednesday night that Australia will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism.

A month after federal Education Minister Alan Tudge told Jewish leaders the IHRA definition was being considered by the Morrison government and that he was “determined to see this implemented and adopted as government policy”, Morrison made the announcement at the Malmo International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism in Sweden.

“In the history of humanity the Holocaust serves as a perpetual and brutal reminder of exclusion, of racism, of systematic political hatred and evil, itself,” Morrison said via video link.

“My government pledges to embrace the definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

“Australia does so as a people, and as a nation. Antisemitism has no place in Australia. It has no place anywhere in the world.

“And we must work together, resolutely and as a global community to reject any word or any act that supports antisemitism towards individuals, towards communities or religious facilities.”

It's a shame that @NIFAustralia would rather give cover to antisemites, than join the rest of the mainstream Jewish community in Australia (and over 35 countries and hundreds of civil society orgs), in supporting the IHRA definition. https://t.co/heBAgvkvWZ

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 14, 2021

European Jewish Association Chairman Rabbi Menachem Margolin opened the annual gathering of Jewish leaders in the continent on Tuesday in Brussels, saying the newly published EU strategy to combat antisemitism by the European Union was not enough.

"We welcome any effort that seeks to do something positive in the fight against antisemitism, but it appears that the EU Commission has chosen to focus on the easy tasks while avoiding a clash with member states that are not making an effort to fight it," Margolin said, adding that the "main problem is the freedom of religion for Jews, which is being restricted by some member states."

According to Margolin, "the EU commission has been ignoring our pleas to act against states that have been limiting our ability to keep our tradition," referring to circumcision and kosher slaughter.

During the conference the EJA published a 10-point plan to rid the world of antisemitism, outlining the specific steps that need to be taken. The plans called for the EU to impose heavy monetary fines on social media groups that fail to take off antisemitic content, including hate speech that is directed against Israel. It also called for new legislation that would mimic the US measures in some states that prohibit fundraising from groups calling for the boycott on Israel.

Joël Mergui, the president of the Israelite Central Consistory of France which serves as the umbrella organization for the country's Jews, said that in some countries it is still taboo to talk about antisemitism perpetrated by Muslims. "This is the antisemitism that kills in Europe today; some countries have seen Muslims and Jews unite against the restrictions on their religious traditions, and Muslims have even been fighting the radicals Islamists," he said.

https://t.co/04ztRKkxyo

— David Hirsh (@DavidHirsh) October 13, 2021

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Wednesday that the role of special envoy to combat antisemitism created during his first term in government would be made permanent.

Trudeau made the announcement in a video address to a high-level international forum in the Swedish city of Malmo on antisemitism and commemorating the Holocaust.

Trudeau said the commitment was in line with “Canada’s commitment to promote and defend pluralism, inclusion and human rights.”

The current incumbent of the post, Irwin Cotler — a former Canadian Minister of Justice and prominent human rights advocate — was appointed in Nov. 2020. Trudeau’s announcement means that the antisemitism envoy, up until now an unfunded position, will have a budget and dedicated staff.

Trudeau remarked that antisemitism “isn’t a problem for the Jewish community to solve alone. It’s everyone’s challenge to take on, especially governments.” He pledged to “develop and implement a national action plan on combating hate, working in concert with Jewish communities and our special envoy.”

Canadian Jewish groups gave a warm welcome to Trudeau’s announcement.

The spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on social media is exposing a new generation of users to antisemitic canards that they would otherwise be unlikely to encounter, a new report by a group of European anti-racist organizations has warned.

The report, published by the UK charity Hope Not Hate in partnership with the Amadeu Antonio Foundation in Germany and the Expo Foundation in Sweden, analyzed antisemitic content on nine social media channels, including Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and 4chan/pol.

“The most worrying finding of this report is that we found antisemitism on every platform we explored,” the introduction stated. “While the amount of different types of antisemitism varies between platforms, it remains possible to locate all forms and extremes of antisemitism on all platforms.”

Among the report’s key findings were that 4chan/pol/ — shorthand for “politically incorrect,” a sub-channel of the wider 4chan platform — features the most antisemitic slurs of all the platforms surveyed.

The channel could be likened “to a sewer overflowing with hate speech and bigotry, targeting every group imaginable but most usually women and minority groups, and especially Jews and people of color,” the report stated.

Malmö city archivist Anette Sarnäs decided to display Jewish books and posters books in the window of the city archive office only to be told to cover them to avoid potential vandalism.

The multicultural Swedish city is hosting a conference on the Holocaust this week and Ms Sarnäs decided to post the books and posters in the window to coincide with the conference and was shocked after she was told to cover them up.

“I was really upset and pissed off. I protested but the message I received was that it could be removed again on Monday when there are staff and security guards on-site,” she said, newspaper Expressen reports.

City archivist Adam Hidestål stated that the incident was a misunderstanding and that the purple blanket, which had been placed over the books, was later taken away.

“Of course, it sends an unfortunate signal that we absolutely do not stand for,” he said, claiming that the City Archives were “not afraid” to display such material publicly.

A “disgraceful” antisemitic poster put up by Millwall football hooligans has been removed by the club and reported to the British Transport Police.

The south London club took down a sign which had the words ‘Achtung Juden’ [attention Jews, in German], the Tottenham Hotspur symbol, and blood.

The poster included the symbol of hooligan group ‘Millwall Berserkers’, which has previously posted the neo-Nazi odal rune on its Instagram page, a Nazi-style eagle and death threats to the left.

After saying the poster had been removed from a cycle path by its stadium, near South Bermondsey station, the club said: “Millwall Football Club has a zero-tolerance policy against discrimination of any kind.

“This is a disgraceful action which the club immediately reported to the British Transport Police. Millwall will provide them with full and comprehensive cooperation with their investigation and any individual or group identified will be banned from the club for life.”

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker canceled a fundraiser with a conservative film producer who until Wednesday used a rendering of a swastika as her Twitter profile picture.

Walker’s campaign said in a statement that the event at the Texas home of Bettina Sofia Viviano-Langlais has been “called off,” hours after the campaign initially contended the symbol wasn’t a swastika but a sign of opposition to vaccine requirements.

The candidate had come under heated criticism after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported details of the fundraiser hosted by Viviano-Langlais, who long featured a set of syringes arranged in a swastika as her Twitter profile picture. The Nazi symbol, which she removed shortly after the story published, is being used by some opponents of vaccine requirements in Texas.

Walker’s campaign spokeswoman early Wednesday said the swastika is “clearly an anti-mandatory vaccination graphic.” In another statement hours later, the campaign disavowed Viviano-Langlais’ usage of the symbol and said Walker opposed antisemitism and bigotry “in all forms.”

“Despite the fact that the apparent intent behind the graphic was to condemn government vaccine mandates,” the campaign said, “the symbol used is very offensive and does not reflect the values of Herschel Walker or his campaign.”

A new Israeli technology that can “see through walls” at long-range is slated to be unveiled for the first time at a military expo in Paris next week.

Camero-Tech, part of the SK Group, is an Israeli firm that specializes in pulse-based UWB (ultra-wideband) “through-wall-imaging” solutions. Its latest invention is Xaver™ LR40 (XLR40), a portable system that can detect live objects hidden behind walls from over 50 meters (roughly 164 feet) away. The XLR40, which the company says is lightweight, can accurately pinpoint the presence and number of objects moving behind walls in real-time.

“The uniqueness of the XLR40 is the fact that we can now do it from a much longer range than before, [longer] than any other existing system in the world,” Ilan Abramovich, VP of business development, sales and marketing at Camero-Tech, told The Media Line.

The technology is particularly helpful in standoff situations or covert operations where a tactical team needs to remain at a safe distance from a target. It is also relevant for search-and-rescue operations.

For soldiers in 669, the IDF’s Airborne Combat Rescue and Evacuation Unit, every day is unpredictable. After all, this special forces rescue unit is dispatched when things go horribly wrong, from rescuing wounded soldiers, to civilians in need of emergency aerial evacuation. As one of the most elite units in the IDF, candidates go through grueling testing, tryouts, and 18 months of intense training. They become experts in survival; rescue at sea, under fire, and at night; as well as urban warfare, and complete full medic training.

669 responds to emergencies both in Israel and abroad. After the earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and Nepal in 2015, unit members were part of the IDF’s rescue missions. And in 2018 they were sent to assist the rescue of a Jordanian school bus that was swept away in a flash flood. It makes sense that this unit’s motto is “In distress you called and I rescued you” — in a time of need, 669 is on its way.

Behold the face of Israeli “apartheid:

May Alhajouj, a Bedouin from the south of #Israel, dreamt of becoming a lawyer all her life.

Now she’s the first ever Bedouin to work at @Israel’s Southern District Attorney’s office.

Israel, where dreams come true ????@benshapiro@JNFUSApic.twitter.com/3ZFdftpze1

— Shahar Azani (@ShaharAzani) October 14, 2021

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The Biden administration on Thursday rejoined the U.N. Human Rights Council, just days after the council overwhelmingly voted to endorse an anti-Israel resolution that several Western nations boycotted due to its anti-Semitic nature.

The United States was elected to the body just three days after the Human Rights Council by a 32-10 vote endorsed the "Durban Declaration," a resolution that affirms support for the notoriously anti-Israel 2001 Durban Conference and its conclusion that, of all nations, only Israel is guilty of racism.

The Durban Conference, which the United Nations has endorsed repeatedly during the past 20 years, was called the "most potent symbol of organized hate against Israel" by the founder of NGO Monitor, an institute that analyzes non-governmental organizations. U.K. diplomats, in a statement on the council's latest Durban vote, said the United Nations "has downplayed the scourge of anti-Semitism" and that "this must end" immediately.

Whereas the Trump administration withdrew from the council in 2018, citing the body's anti-Israel bias and anti-Semitic agenda, the Biden administration says a seat at the table will help the United States reform the body. Former senior Trump administration officials and Republicans in Congress criticized the Biden administration's move, saying the United States should play no role in an organization that routinely targets Jews and includes among its members some of the globe's foremost human rights abusers, such as China, Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela.

"If President Biden truly cared about human rights, he would keep us far away from the cesspool that is the U.N. Human Rights Council," former Trump administration ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told the Washington Free Beacon. "America left it under President Trump because we refused to lend our credibility, as the most generous country in the world, to cover for the world's worst tyrants and dictators. [Biden's] actions today aren't just embarrassing; they're dangerous."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a statement thanking member nations for allowing the United States to rejoin the council, said the body "suffers from serious flaws, including disproportionate attention on Israel and the membership of several states with egregious human rights records." The Biden administration will use its voice to "push back against attempts to subvert the ideals upon which the Human Rights Council was founded," he said. Blinken did not mention the council's latest endorsement of Durban in his statement.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley called the Biden administration’s decision to rejoin the United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday “dangerous” hours after the U.S. was elected to join the body.

“If President Biden truly cared about human rights, he would keep us far away from the cesspool that is the U.N. Human Rights Council,” Haley told Jewish Insider on Thursday afternoon. “America left it under President Trump because we refused to lend our credibility, as the most generous country in the world, to cover for the world’s worst tyrants and dictators. [Biden’s] actions today aren’t just embarrassing; they’re dangerous.”

Former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the council in 2018, citing hypocrisy among members of the body, whom the administration accused of committing human rights violations and bias against Israel.

“For too long,” Haley said at the time, “the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.”

Current U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the U.S. “will oppose the Council’s disproportionate attention on Israel, which includes the Council’s only standing agenda item targeting a single country.”

“The Council provides a forum where we can have open discussions about ways we and our partners can improve,” Secretary of State Tony Blinken said in a statement on Thursday. “At the same time, it also suffers from serious flaws, including disproportionate attention on Israel and the membership of several states with egregious human rights records. Together, we must push back against attempts to subvert the ideals upon which the Human Rights Council was founded.”

This brings us to Lapid and his weird visit to Washington.

While Iran was ostensibly the focus of Lapid's visit, the Biden administration made clear that it has no intention of reconsidering its commitment to maintaining its nuclear appeasement policy towards Tehran. Then there are the Palestinians. Ahead of Lapid's arrival, the administration used the anniversary of the Abraham Accords, (which it refuses to call by their name), to underline that they are with Merkel in their hatred of the peace deals and their determination to reinstate the Palestinian veto over Arab-Israeli peace.

"The Biden administration has started out with a clear commitment to the two-state solution…. We continue to welcome the economic cooperation between Israel and all countries in the region. We hope that normalization can be leverage to advance progress on the Israel-Palestinian tracks," an anonymous State Department spokesman said.

Lapid papered over Israel's concern over the administration's pro-Iranian stance and its diminution of the historic peace. And this makes sense. Just as Bennett ignores Abdullah's hostility and blames Netanyahu for bad relations with Jordan, so Lapid scapegoats Netanyahu as the cause of Democrat antagonism towards Israel.

In the interest of castigating Netanyahu, Lapid has long ignored both the radicalization of the Democrat Party and the rapid spread of antisemitism through the American Left over the past decade.

Tuesday Lapid met with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday. Lapid heaped praise on Harris just two weeks after she praised a student who accused Israel of committing genocide. Harris, he said, is "one of Israel's best friends in Washington. A leader who always stands with us in all the important struggles and who we can always count on in difficult moments."

In Lapid's follow-on he didn't simply ignore what Harris had just done. He indirectly justified her behavior. In his write-up of the meeting on his Twitter feed, Lapid said that in addition to discussing Iran's nuclear program, he and Harris spoke about how to "strengthen the bipartisan connection with the next generation of Americans."

Lapid didn't express concern over galloping antisemitism on campuses. He heaped praise on younger Americans. "They aren't just busy with wars and confrontations but also with the climate crisis, the global immigration crisis and with questions of identity," he cooed.

Last year Israel had a reality-based foreign policy. It was predicated on the basic truth that the justice of Israel's existence and power is immutable. That foreign policy ended the Palestinian veto and brought four robust peace agreements with Arab states. Now Israel has a reality- denying foreign policy which is reinstating the Palestinian veto and glorifying Israel's enemies.

In Episode 22 of the Caroline Glick Mideast News Hour, Caroline and co-host Gadi Taub talked about Israel’s diplomatic week. In a week marking the first anniversary of the Abraham Accords, the Lapid-Bennett government worked with Angela Merkel, King Abdullah of Jordan and the Biden administration to push a completely different diplomatic approach. The last part of the show focused on the battle Gadi is leading against right wing media organs in Israel that are legitimizing the government.

It may not have been planned or coordinated, but efforts by Middle Eastern states to dial down tensions in the region serve as an example of what happens when big power interests coincide.

It also provides evidence of the potentially positive fallout of a lower US profile in the area. Afghanistan, the United States’ chaotic withdrawal notwithstanding, could emerge as another example of the positive impact when global interests coincide. That is if the Taliban prove willing and capable of policing militant groups.

Analysts credit President Joe Biden’s focus on Asia, and growing uncertainty about his commitment to the security of the Gulf for efforts to reduce tensions between Gulf states and others. Doubts about the United States’ commitment also played an important role in efforts to shore up or formalize alliances like the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab countries via the Abraham Accords.

For its part, Saudi Arabia has de facto acknowledged its ties with the Jewish state, even if Riyadh is not about to formally establish relations. In a sign of the times, that did not stop then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from visiting the kingdom.

Yet, what rings alarm bells in Gulf capitals also sparks concerns in Beijing, which depends to a significant degree on the flow of its trade and energy from and through Middle Eastern waters, and Moscow with its own security concerns and geopolitical aspirations.

Little surprise then that Russia and China, each in their own way and independent of the United States, over the last year echoed the United States’ message that the Middle East needs to get its act together.

Catherine Connolly, deputy chairperson of the lower house of Ireland’s parliament, asked a parliamentary question of the country’s foreign minister that dripped of antisemitic tropes.

Connolly asked if the ministry’s “indicating support for the Jewish character of the Israeli state agrees with the treatment by Israel of Palestine communities in its attempts to accomplish Jewish supremacy.”

Her question – and use of the term “Jewish supremacy” – could have featured as an example in a report the investigative journalist David Collier recently published in Ireland’s social media on antisemitism: how Irish politicians and activists promote antisemitism under the cloak of articulating “legitimate” criticism of Israel.

“The spread of antisemitism throughout the Irish mainstream is clearly worse than in almost any other Western nation,” he wrote. “It requires a massive educational drive to even begin to unravel some of the damage.”

The report noted that in Ireland, “anti-Jewish racism spreads within the corridors of power and unlike in the United Kingdom or the United States, appears to be as much driven from the top-down as the reverse. Some Irish politicians are obsessed about attacking Israel and Zionism, treating it in a manner different from the way they treat all other international issues.”

And that is something that seems to have filtered down. Need proof? Just look at Sally Rooney.

Irish politicians share the content of extreme antisemitic social media accounts that are clearly untrue, the report said. For instance, one Irish parliament member liked a post that stated Hitler "'may have not been too far wrong."

The following question was recently posed to Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney by left-wing PM Catherine Connolly: Is your ministry's support of Israel's Jewish character not tantamount to taking part in the discrimination against Palestinians?

The foreign minister provided Connolly with an answer but failed to call her out on her antisemitism.

Coveney is scheduled to visit Israel on an official visit in November. The relations between Israel and Ireland are strained, so much so that the Israeli Foreign Ministry talked of closing down its embassy in Dublin.

It is highly unlikely that Foreign Minister Yair Lapid will confront Coveney on the issue of state antisemitism in Ireland during their upcoming meeting. However, the Irish official is also slated to meet with President Isaac Herzog, whose paternal grandfather was the chief rabbi of Ireland. He must take advantage of this connection to get the Irish foreign minister to face, at last, the problem of state antisemitism in his country.

After all, Ireland is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and should therefore be committed to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which states that calling Israel's existence racist and applying double standards to Israel are examples of antisemitism.

And if the president's efforts are unsuccessful, Israel should seriously consider severing ties with Ireland, where antisemitism and hatred of Israel have become institutionalized.

We utterly condemn the comments made by Irish TD Catherine Connolly in which she continually used the term “Jewish supremacy.”

We call on all Irish political leaders to demand an immediate apology from @catherinegalway and denounce antisemitism.
?? https://t.co/dfJPN9ZSMhpic.twitter.com/PBbMDNlie3

— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) October 14, 2021

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Judea and Samaria this week. Not being content by just crossing Jerusalem’s border to visit the Psagot Winery, he ventured deep into Israel’s heartland and visited ancient Shiloh. He also made several bold declarations during his time in Samaria.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Waqf and a multi-billionaire Palestinian businessman have all gotten together to build a luxury complex in East Jerusalem. Their stated intention is to provide housing for Palestinians. The real reason they want to build a 300 million dollar complex in Jerusalem, is much deeper.

A British lawmaker was stabbed to death on Friday in a church by a man who lunged at him at a meeting with voters from his electoral district, knifing him repeatedly.

David Amess, a 69-year-old lawmaker from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, was attacked at around midday at a meeting at the Belfairs Methodist Church in Leigh-on-Sea, east of London.

“He was treated by emergency services but, sadly, died at the scene,” police said. “A 25-year-old man was quickly arrested after officers arrived at the scene on suspicion of murder and a knife was recovered.”

Armed police swooped on the church and detectives said they were not looking for anyone else in connection with the incident. There was no detail about the motivation for the attack.

Emergency services had fought to save his life inside the church – where a sign says “All are welcome here” – but in vain.

Colleagues from across parliament expressed their shock and paid tribute to Amess, who held regular meetings with voters on the first and third Friday of the month, saying he was diligent in his duties to his local area.

Flags in Downing Street were lowered in tribute.

Amess, married with five children, was first elected to parliament to represent Basildon in 1983, and then stood for Southend West in 1997. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his public service in 2015.

Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, said: “We are devastated to hear the news of the murder of Sir David Amess MP, killed while serving the public in his constituency surgery.

“Such violence is an intolerable affront to our democracy and must be met with the full force of the law. We will never forget Sir David’s long and deep friendship to our community. Our hearts go out in profound sorrow to his wife Julia and five children”.

The Jewish Leadership Council tweeted: “We are shocked by the news that Sir David Amess MP has passed away. He always had a very strong and warm relationship with his local Jewish community. Our thoughts are with his family and friends at this time.”

The Community Security Trust tweeted: “We are deeply shocked and saddened at the awful news that David Amess MP has passed away. Our thoughts and condolences are with his family at such a terrible time.”

Chief Rabbi Mirvis said: “As we usher in Shabbat this afternoon, we will have the family of Sir David Amess MP in our prayers. Such an attack on an elected parliamentarian is an attack on the whole country. May he his memory be for a blessing.”

The United Synagogue’s CEO Steven Wilson said: “The news of the murder of Sir David Amess is horrific and chilling. Democracy is a cherished right and one we can never take for granted. I know all US members and colleagues will join me in sending condolences to Sir David’s family who are in our prayers.”

The All Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism said it was “devastated to learn of the death of our friend and colleague Sir David Amess MP. A long-standing and active member of the APPG Against Antisemitism, he was an excellent public servant. He will be sorely missed. Our thoughts are with his friends and family.”

It may not have been planned or coordinated, but efforts by Middle Eastern states to dial down tensions in the region serve as an example of what happens when big power interests coincide.

It also provides evidence of the potentially positive fallout of a lower US profile in the area. Afghanistan, the United States’ chaotic withdrawal notwithstanding, could emerge as another example of the positive impact when global interests coincide. That is if the Taliban prove willing and capable of policing militant groups.

Analysts credit President Joe Biden’s focus on Asia, and growing uncertainty about his commitment to the security of the Gulf for efforts to reduce tensions between Gulf states and others. Doubts about the United States’ commitment also played an important role in efforts to shore up or formalize alliances like the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab countries via the Abraham Accords.

For its part, Saudi Arabia has de facto acknowledged its ties with the Jewish state, even if Riyadh is not about to formally establish relations. In a sign of the times, that did not stop then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from visiting the kingdom.

Yet, what rings alarm bells in Gulf capitals also sparks concerns in Beijing, which depends to a significant degree on the flow of its trade and energy from and through Middle Eastern waters, and Moscow with its own security concerns and geopolitical aspirations.

Little surprise then that Russia and China, each in their own way and independent of the United States, over the last year echoed the United States’ message that the Middle East needs to get its act together.

Although the Bank of Israel does not print dollars, earlier this year it foreign exchange reserves broke above the $200 billion barrier for the first time ever - an enormous amount of money for such a small country.

The shekel is exhibiting a strong and impressive performance, with the difference between the national debt and Israel's GDP is low, and the international balance of payments seeing an additional influx of $15-20 billion into the economy, annually.

It is evident, therefore, that there is no real need to request special U.S. funding of over one billion dollars in order to replenish the Iron Dome missile defense system following the May war against Hamas.

In fact, Israel would be wise to inform the White House that the funding is not necessary and the Jewish state could reach into its considerable reserves without it impacting the budget or adversely affecting the Israeli standard of living.

The Israeli ambassador to Guatemala officially inaugurated a road this week named “Jerusalem Street, the capital of Israel,” becoming the 27th street in the country named after Israel’s capital within the past two years.

Ambassador Matanya Cohen, who came up with the idea, attended the event in the city of La Gomera and was joined by the mayor and other local figures, reported Ynet. “The intention was for the cities of Guatemala to display their friendship with Jerusalem,” he said.

Under former President Jimmy Morales, the Central American nation recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2018 and relocated its embassy there. The country then began to name streets and parks domestically after the city.

“On June 2018, a month after the embassy was relocated to Jerusalem, the first city joined the initiative. Since then, other cities, including Guatemala City—the only capital in the world with a street name ‘Jerusalem, capital of Israel’—joined in,” said Cohen, according to the report.

Next year, he hopes that 34 cities will join the initiative.

The ambassador said that more than 50 percent of Guatemalans are evangelical Christians and very pro-Israel.

The largest and most advanced multi-national air combat exercise yet to be hosted by the Israeli Air Force will take off on Sunday.

Taking part in the Blue Flag 2021 exercise are seven air forces, from Germany, Italy, Britain, France, India, Greece and the United States.

“We are living in a very complicated region, and the threats to the State of Israel from the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran are only increasing,” commented Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin, Commander of the Israeli Air Force, on Thursday. “Holding an international exercise in this current reality, while continuing our overt and covert operational activities on all fronts, is of utmost strategic importance and has extensive impact over the Israeli Air Force, the IDF, and the State of Israel.”

The exercise aims to cement strategic international cooperation through shared learning about the integration of fourth and fifth-generation aircraft in complex operational scenarios, and to conduct joint tactical flights against a variety of threats using advanced technology, the Israeli army said.

Norkin described the exercise as “groundbreaking” in terms of technology, quality of training, and the number of participating nations.

“It illustrates the partnership and strong bond between the nations’ air forces and acts as a stepping-stone toward regional and international cooperation,” he added.

The international aerial exercise will kick off on Sunday and last through October 28th. It will mark the first deployment of a British fighter squadron in Israel since the establishment of the country, the first-ever deployment of an Indian Mirage fighter squadron, and the first deployment of a French Rafale fighter squadron.

Don’t expect a fair trial, though. On September 27 – a day after trial opened – PA forces arrested key witness Hussein Banat, Nizar’s cousin, beat him unconscious, and warned him about his testimony. A week later, on October 5, PA security forces again raided Banat’s home to arrest another twelve family members.

Banat’s death and its aftermath have received only modest attention from Western media and politicians. Compare it, for example, to the big dust-up when Israel bombed a Gaza building housing Hamas and Associated Press offices, after warning AP to evacuate. AP decried Israel’s supposed targeting of journalists’ offices. (AP quieted down a bit after evidence emerged that it knew Hamas was its neighbor and had failed to report on its activities.)

The White House lectured Israelis that “ensuring the safety and security of journalists and independent media is a paramount responsibility.” President Biden discussed the matter with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. But, the Palestinian Authority throws journalists into jail, murders a critic, and arrests and intimidates key witnesses after trial starts? That’s only a small story.

Some time ago, while in Israel, this author spoke with a couple of young men from the United Kingdom. They weren’t malicious, but they incessantly criticized Israel’s supposed ill-treatment of Arabs. Asked why they seemed so obsessed with Israel’s purported misdeeds, but never said a word about the actual misdeeds of its neighbors, one of them responded: “Deep down, no one really expects the Arabs to behave any better.”

Though shocking, his bluntness illuminates an outlook that’s far more widespread now than it was then and is currently rampant among politicians and media: what former President George W. Bush called the soft bigotry of low expectations. The problem isn’t just discrimination against Jews by imposing an absurdly high standard on them, but discrimination against Arabs by failing to impose any standard on them.

It certainly explains why the PA’s abuse and oppression of its own people, arrests and murder of its critics, and attempts to derail the trial of its henchmen, have received only perfunctory attention. Westerners don’t really expect Palestinians to behave any better.

In a Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia rally, held in Sydney in support of Palestinians during the May 2021 conflict in Gaza and Jerusalem, a speaker said: "Oh Allah give us the necks of the Jews [...] of those evildoers!" A recap of the rally was posted on the Hizb Media YouTube channel on May 11, 2021. Ismail Al-Wahwah, the leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia, said that his audience will soon see the end of the "evil, illegal occupier in Palestine." The MC of the event chanted: "We will liberate Palestine!"; "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews! The army of Muhammad will return!" and "Destroy the Jews!" For more information about Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia and Ismail Al-Wahwah, see MEMRI TV clips nos. 8270, 8241, 8229, 7788, 7572, 5440, 5112, 4826, 4672, 4403, 3695, 7212, and 7211.

"We Will Liberate Palestine!"; "Oh Jews... The Army Of Muhammad Will Return!"

Protestor 1: "Saladin said:"
Crowd: "Saladin said:"

Protestor 1: "We will liberate Palestine!"
Crowd: "We will liberate Palestine!"

Protestor 1: "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews!"
Crowd: "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews!"

Protestor 1: "The army of Muhammad will return!"
Crowd: "The army of Muhammad will return!"

Protestor 1: "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews!"
Crowd: "Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews!"

In the second incident of its kind in the last few days, vandals attacked a restaurant-bar in the Bethlehem area for holding mixed parties and offering alcohol. pic.twitter.com/5HbTmGTi5T

— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) October 15, 2021

If Iran's proxies were concerned about 10 parliamentarians, in Lebanon Iran's proxies seems to be concerned about one judge. Judge Tarek Bitar only took over the investigation of the Beirut Port explosion earlier this year, after the previous judge was removed at the request of two former government ministers connected to the Amal party of Nabih Berri, a close ally of Hizbullah.[5] Even though many Lebanese already believe that there was a Hizbullah connection to the blast (one explanation was that this was a shipment of nitrates used in barrel bombs against Syrian cities during that country's civil war), the idea of a judge actually clarifying the case and fingering some corrupt officials – a category of which Lebanon has a surplus – seems to have become a Hizbullah redline. This led to a violent provocation in Beirut on October 14, as Hizbullah and Amal opened fire on unnamed assailants, even firing rocket propelled grenades at office buildings. Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea sarcastically noted on Twitter that he thought that Hizbullah had nothing to do with the explosion, but that after the day's events, he was not so sure.

The fact that Hizbullah and Amal thugs attempted to aggressively show force in Christian parts of Beirut, blame a Christian party for escalating tension, and appeared to have been repulsed (the facts are unclear) has heightened sectarian feeling, although the whole event has a sense of fabricated theater about it.[6] But the "clashes" certainly escalated Christian-Shia tension, a reality which places tremendous pressure on Lebanon's seemingly senile president Michel Aoun and his ambitious son-in-law Gibran Bassil, who aspires to become president in 2022 with the help of Hizbullah. Their Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) is closely allied with Hizbullah and poses as the great protector of Lebanon's remaining Christians. The clashes and rhetoric make maintaining both of those poses difficult.[7] Expectations are that somehow the government will shut down Judge Bitar's investigation, a victory for Hizbullah, perhaps by transferring it to the military justice system.

Why have Hizbullah in Lebanon and its counterparts in Iraq, near hegemons in both countries, reacted with such vehemence to what may seem to the outsider to be relatively small reverses? It is because Iran's proxies in both countries are indeed almost all-powerful but they are very strong in only relative terms. Anti-Iranian-regime feeling is strong in Lebanon, in Iraq, and in Syria (and is strong inside Iran too). Aside from a fanatical and heavily armed hard core – essential henchmen for Iran's hegemony – nobody much likes Iran, even if they also don't like the U.S. or Israel. It is that small and fanatical hardcore that projects its power, through the triple venues of politics, propaganda, and violence, over much larger populations who serve under Iranian hegemony, at varying levels of willingness, because of fear, weakness or greed.

The key elements of such an approach are the perception of inevitability and an aura of impunity. It is those elements, coupled with actual violence, that generally keep the masses in line. That is why a single judge in Lebanon, a mere handful of deputies in Iraq, or one lone heroic voice like Lokman Slim constitute a threat.[8] They shatter the narrative of inevitability.

Iran is simultaneously both dominant and fragile in its exercise of that near total dominance over most of its subject Arabic-speaking populations. Iranian-orchestrated repression and the pandemic eventually silenced anti-Tehran, anti-system protests in both countries in 2020, but nothing has really changed negative popular views. There is little evidence that support for Iran exists in these countries beyond that small but fanatical hardcore and enabling corrupt politicians. But that may be enough. Iran and its proxies hope that a combination of repression, distraction, and emigration will help them maintain the status quo. And that is probably right. It will work until it doesn't, until some spark makes the whole shaky edifice come down.

Iran condemned the killing of protesters in Lebanon, describing Thursday’s shootings as seditions backed by Israel, state-run Press TV said on Twitter on Friday.

“Iran believes that the people, the government, the army and the resistance in Lebanon will successfully overcome seditions backed by the Zionist entity,” IRNA news agency quoted the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh.

The clashes in Beirut began in the largely Christian neighborhood of Ain el-Remmaneh, the same location where the 1975-1990 civil war broke out.

The violence centered around Tayouneh, an area of the Lebanese capital where battle lines were drawn between Muslim and Christian militias during the civil conflict that ended three decades ago.

Thursday’s shootings occurred during a demonstration by supporters of the Shi’ite Hezbollah and Amal movements who are demanding that the judge investigating last year’s deadly Beirut port blast be removed.

A Lebanese court on Thursday ruled against the removal of Judge Tarek Bitar.

Six people were killed and 32 were wounded when snipers opened fire on the demonstrators, with the Shi’ite movements that organized the protests saying that people were shooting from rooftops.

Bursts of gunfire could be heard for hours.

Hezbollah agents helped run the port.

The blast was caused by a massive amount of ammonium nitrate, a material Hezbollah often uses in bombs.

Hezbollah has threatened and intimidated a judge presiding over the case.

Did @BBC include any of this in its report?

Of course not! pic.twitter.com/72EWBieQAq

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 15, 2021

A large gathering of armed men before the funeral of Hezbollah member Muhammed Sayyed who was shot and killed yesterday during clashes in Beirut. #Lebanonpic.twitter.com/VppSn61pOe

— Joe Truzman (@JoeTruzman) October 15, 2021

Saudi Arabia, like the United Arab Emirates, Israel and others, had harshly criticized the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear agreement between Iran and global powers, and Riyadh applauded US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the accord, while welcoming the former president’s "maximum pressure" campaign. Saudi Arabia also opposes Iran's ballistic missile program as it sees in it a threat to its existence.

"For the sake of regional stability, Iran is more than willing to reestablish ties with the Saudis," Marandi said, adding that this comes with a caveat: "The Saudis have to accept the fact they have lost the war in Yemen."

Brodsky says the two neighbors have the same goal, but they differ on how to get there.

"The Saudis want progress in Yemen as the prelude to the reestablishment of diplomatic ties, but Iran wants the reestablishment of relations to come first. In essence, Iran wants a gesture in exchange for no concessions, and that is probably a non-starter," he said.

Iranian-backed Houthi militia have been intensifying their drone attacks deep into Saudi territory causing a major headache for Riyadh, including worries that a continuation of the war will exhaust the country’s treasury and tarnish its image internationally.

"The Saudis have to accept the reality on the ground in that country and that is the government, the real government in Yemen, has won the war against Saudi Arabia,” Marandi said. “They have to accept that fact to end the war and that they are not in a position to gain concessions," he added.

So desperate has Biden been to restore the deal, he lifted some sanctions on the oil-rich country’s energy industry and other sectors before Iran even agreed to direct talks. In return, the Islamic Republic upped its uranium-enrichment levels from 3.67 percent to more than 60 percent, built more advanced centrifuges and started work to produce uranium metal — which has no peaceful use — even as it blocked the International Atomic Energy Agency from agreed-upon monitoring. It likely has enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz urged Western countries counting on diplomacy to develop a Plan B two months ago. Team Biden is only now taking his advice, after first trying to talk China into cutting purchases of Iranian oil to give America more leverage; China, of course, said shove it.

After meeting Wednesday with Israeli and Emerati diplomats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said his team will finally examine “other options if Iran doesn’t change course.”

If. Blinken remains loath to admit failure, even as he confessed, “Time is running short.”

Wake up: Iran isn’t going to change course. Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign brought the regime to its weakest point since its start in the 1979 revolution. Reviving that is a minimum, and harsher action should follow unless and until Tehran truly bends.

At Blinken’s side, Yair Lapid, Israel’s top diplomat, put it right: “There are moments when nations must use force to protect the world from evil.”

In October 2020, a group of former political prisoners in Iran, families of executed political prisoners, human rights activists who work for justice and accountability, and international jurists who have examined Iran’s gross human rights abuses began calling for the removal of Mohammad Jafar Mahallati from his post at Oberlin College.

Mahallati, who has been accused of crimes against humanity by Amnesty International , is serving as the Nancy Schrom Dye Chair in Middle East and North African Studies at Oberlin College.

Based on the information outlined in a letter dated Oct. 8, 2020 , Oberlin employs a human rights abuser in a tenured position. This is an insult to his victims and a grave injustice that contradicts Oberlin College’s "enduring commitment to a sustainable and just society."

In the summer of 1988, thousands of political prisoners were sentenced to death by Iran’s notorious "Death Commission," co-chaired by the Iranian regime’s current president, Ebrahim Raisi, nicknamed “The Butcher of Tehran.” The prisoners, who had already served several years after being sentenced in sham trials, were asked a series of arbitrary questions about their religious or political beliefs and then unilaterally sent to the gallows. Many of them endured gruesome torture before being murdered. Their bodies were dumped in unmarked mass graves.

One of the organizers of this atrocious scheme was Mohammad Jafar Mahallati. As the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, he was a crucial player in the regime’s efforts to minimize, obscure, and erase this mass slaughter.

Iran on Friday sharply criticized the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency for keeping its eyes trained on the Islamic Republic while ignoring its arch-enemy Israel’s suspected nuclear program.

Israel is widely believed to be the Middle East’s sole nuclear arms possessor, but it has long refused to confirm or deny it has such weapons and — unlike Iran — is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

“Silence and negligence about Israel’s nuclear program sends a negative message to the NPT members,” tweeted Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s ambassador to the UN agency.

Being an NPT signatory meant “accepting the robust verifications,” while being outside it meant being “free from any obligation and criticism, and even [getting] rewarded,” he wrote. “What is the advantage of being both an NPT member and fully implementing the agency’s safeguards?”

Gharibabadi was reacting to an interview given by IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi to Energy Intelligence earlier this month.

Asked why the IAEA is so focused on Iran’s nuclear program but not Israel’s, Grossi responded: “Our relation with Israel is based on the one that you have with a country which is not a party to the NPT.”

---

---

The latest such useful idiot is the best-selling novelist, Sally Rooney. She has refused to have her new novel published by Modan, the Hebrew-language Israeli publisher of her first two books, because she supports a cultural boycott of Israel.

Rooney happens to be Irish; and the Irish Republic — one of the most anti-Israel countries in Europe — is a boiling cesspool of Jew-bashing.

The dogged British antisemitism researcher David Collier has just published a 202-page report in which he chronicles horrific anti-Jewish attitudes in Ireland driven from the top down by Irish politicians and echoed by journalists, academics and other cultural leaders.

There are many plausible explanations for this Israel animus in Ireland and the west. Ireland sees itself as the victim of English colonialism and so identifies with the Palestinians’ false narrative of Jewish colonialism.

Rooney is a self-confessed Marxist. Israel is being demonised through a perfect intellectual storm: a combination of Marxist identification of capitalism with oppression; liberal internationalist hostility to the western concept of the nation-state; and the Palestinian propaganda programme cooked up in the 1960s with the former Soviet Union to turn the Arab war of annihilation against Israel into Israel’s oppression of the newly-minted “Palestinians”.

This propaganda narrative is now the signature cause of “progressive” folk who astoundingly therefore make common cause with deeply regressive Islamists, who endorse throwing gay people off rooftops and stoning women to death.

What actually binds these groups together, however, is a deadly animus against Judaism and the Jewish people.

The Palestinians’ hatred of Israel is based on hatred of the Jews founded upon Islamic theological sources. Medieval and Nazi-style antisemitism pour out of the PA in an unstoppable torrent.

Even those Palestinian supporters who harbour no ill-will towards Jews as people therefore promote a Palestinian narrative that is based on Jew-hatred. So it’s no surprise that threaded through pro-Palestinian western discourse are unambiguous antisemitic tropes.

The deeper question, though, is why it’s always the Jews who get it in the neck from so many different groups. No other people has ever had this experience.

In “On the Jewish Question,” published in 1844, Karl Marx famously stood the notion of Jewish emancipation on its head, writing that “Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as Christians have become Jews,” i.e., admirers of Mammon. Far from being ghettoized and excluded, deprived of basic freedoms, and subjected to horrific individual and mass accusations and physical violence for centuries, Marx explained to his followers, the Jews of Europe were in fact historical oppressors bent on conquest. “The everyday Jew devoted himself to endless bartering ... It was still Judaism, practical in its nature, that was victorious,” Marx explained. “Egotism permeated society.”

Jews were not only all-conquering, Marx continued, but also maleficent. “We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development—to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed—has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” Case closed.

Quantities of ink worthy of a Talmudic discussion have been spilled explaining away the explicit content of Marx’s essay. But his private writings make it impossible to assert that Marx was not a carrier of a virulent strain of racist Jew-hatred that has infected some of his followers to this day. In a letter to Engels on July 30, 1862, attacking Ferdinand Lasalle, Marx’s Jewish opponent among socialists, for example, Marx wrote that “It is now quite plain to me—as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify—that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger).”

But even Marx at his worst did not approach the venomous opinions of his rival, the father of anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon expressed his feelings for Jews in his notebooks in an entry dated Dec. 26, 1847, an entry less anti-capitalist than exterminationist: “Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Demand its expulsion. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated.”

"There is absolutely nothing that anti-Zionists say that I, as a Soviet Jew, did not hear or cannot find in Soviet literature." ~ Izabella Tabarovsky.

The Soviet Union created the ideological underpinning of the modern anti-Zionist movement, including the infamous 1975 'Zionism is Racism' resolution at the United Nations, an ideological foundation that groups like BDS are built on today. Join our special guest Izabella Tabarovsky Senior Associate at the Kennan Institute (Wilson Center), as we delve into the history of the Soviet Union and how their anti-Zionist propaganda shapes the antisemites of today.

While this episode was filmed before the Durban Conference at the UN, in which 38 countries withdrew, it underscores the importance of remaining relentless in the fight against antisemitism in all its manifestations, including the assault on Zionism.

I was born and grew up in the Diaspora (admittedly not in the United States) and like many of my generation my politics was of the Left – though mine especially so as I was a proud member of the Labor Zionist youth organization Habonim. At the time of Israel’s 1981 election, I eagerly volunteered to a public debate with a Likud supporter at a Melbourne University campus event. I spoke in favor of Shimon Peres’s attempt to unseat Menachem Begin, my loyalty to the Labor cause preventing me from being impressed with Begin who had signed Israel’s first-ever peace treaty with an Arab country and had just destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor.

I immigrated to Israel in 1982 with the goal of personally voting Begin’s Likud out of office. I chose to live on a kibbutz to realize my then socialist ideals, and after acquiring Israeli citizenship, I immediately joined the Labor Party. The Sabras on the kibbutz even voted this then idealistic young Australian immigrant to be their representative at the Labor Party congress (where from the perspective of defeating the Likud, I mistakenly supported Peres over Rabin).

Why is any of this important? Because I know from personal experience that disagreeing with the politics of a given Israeli government, should in no way alienate one from Israel as a country or from the Zionist vision of an independent Jewish homeland. American Jews who hated Trump didn’t stop being loyal Americans, and detesting Netanyahu is no valid reason to disengage from Israel.

That liberal American Jews would identify with the politics of their liberal Israeli cousins is understood. But there can be no excuses for those ultras who deny Israel’s right to exist and ape the lines of Israel’s sworn enemies. Such erroneous positions can only stem from alienation, ignorance and a psychological desire to fit in with a certain milieu (reminding me of my grandparents’ generation of German Jews who constantly felt the need to prove to their gentile neighbors that they were loyal Germans).

I know that there are many American Jews who are deeply troubled by the anti-Zionism and antisemitism prevalent in contemporary progressive circles. I also know that those who uncritically parrot the rejectionist Palestinian mantra are a marginal phenomenon. But while being an aberration, these young Jews repeating “Israel is committing genocide” are symptomatic of a larger failure. The incoming head of the Jewish Agency, whoever it turns out to be, has some very serious work to do.

I came late to the story of the Falahs and Pittsburgh, having learned of it from Marlene, who is a friend of mine. The more I dug into the saga, the more I couldn’t help wondering: Had all these people who helped the Falahs been working, if only subconsciously, through their own trauma and grief?

Not everyone was inclined to make the link between Tree of Life and the Falahs when I asked them. “We’re Israelis,” Anat said. “We’re used to these kinds of attacks.” Debbey, Marlene and Nina — while admitting how deeply the shooting affected them — instead spoke of compassion, and having had an ill family member or friend, as their motivations. Anat, too. And Nina echoed, virtually verbatim, what they all said drew them most strongly to the Falahs: “How could we not fall in love with their kindness, their devotion to one another, their dignity?”

All that held true for Michael as well. But he also saw a connection between Tree of Life and the Falahs. He told me that he and AJ had heard the rapid-fire gunshots from their kitchen while eating breakfast. He described feeling raw after that morning. Helpless, too. Giving the Falahs a place to stay, trying to ease their pain, doing something tangible — all, he said, were balm to his post-shooting despair. “It was so comforting,” Michael explained, “to be able to offer them comfort.”

There is certainly a tradition in this town — long predating the Tree of Life massacre — of Jews helping other Jews, Jews helping Israelis, Israelis helping other Israelis. And yet, Nina said that in all the years she had being doing this kind of work, she had never witnessed anything like the support and succor showered on the Falahs. Nor had Anat. It seemed possible, to me at least, that something more was at play.

Stefanie Small, of Jewish Family and Community Services, agreed. “After a tragedy such as a mass shooting, people are desperate to make any kind of human connection,” she told me. “The warmth that comes from those connections, the feeling of being able to do something good, makes us believe that the world as we knew it hasn’t ended.” Perhaps, mired as we all were in what the FBI’s handout described as the Disillusionment Phase, the profound bond that many members of the community forged with the Falahs provided a way into the next phase — that of Rebuilding and Restoration.

And how did the Falahs, in the midst of their anguish, feel about the way they were greeted in Pittsburgh? Astonished, to say the least. At times, overwhelmed by the constant attention. But also grateful. Zaid told me that when they returned to their village, relatives asked how the family could have withstood the ordeal alone. “We never felt alone for one minute,” he replied. “We only felt surrounded by love.”

Ruth R. Wisse’s new book, Free as a Jew, begins as a personal memoir, turns midway into an intellectual memoir, and finally becomes what she calls “cultural testimony”—her witness to her times. She has written a work of remembrance, of growing up in Canada, teaching Yiddish literature at McGill and later at Harvard, and, in the process, becoming “a combatant in the war over the future of America” and in the defense of Israel.

Her three literary forms merge near the end of the book, in her personal, intellectual, and cultural account of a seminal moment at Harvard in 2005—one of the rare times, she writes, when history “issues us a red alert.” It still reverberates today.

She begins with her family’s flight from Romania in the summer of 1940, packing on a few hours’ notice, as the Soviet Union invaded. The family crossed Europe as stateless persons, arriving in Lisbon to seek transit visas from the American consul, since their trip to Canada required them to pass through New York. The consul told them that the doctor authorized to administer their medical exams would not be available until after their ship had sailed:

Grabbing the consul’s hand, [my father] pointed it at my brother and me and shouted, “You are a crazy man! Will you throw away the lives of these children? Give me the name of another doctor or I will kill you!” His English was not strong, nor was he, so I cannot imagine that his words struck fear into the consul’s heart. Mother, recalling the scene, said she knew we were finished.

The consul extricated himself from her father’s grasp and issued the visas. Perhaps he was moved by her father’s desperation; perhaps four-year-old Ruth reminded him of his own daughter. But the key was her father’s courage—leaving his successful business in Romania, saving the family’s lives in Lisbon, building a new business in Canada. In later years, she “aspired to emulate” him, and she eventually opened her classic 1995 Commentary essay, “What My Father Knew,” with this incident.

The government of Sweden should be commended for convening the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism in the city of Malmo this week. Seventy-five years after Nazi Germany and its allies perpetrated the Shoah, Jew-hatred is again (or still) manifested in growing levels of vicious incitement and violent attacks in Europe, North America and elsewhere.

But in parallel, many of the participating governments, including the Swedish hosts, are complicit in the systematic efforts to demonize Israel, the Jewish state, which is the main component of 21st-century antisemitism. The new hate takes the form of obsessive and single-minded anti-Zionism, wrapped in a facade of support for “Palestinian suffering” at the top of the ideological pantheon.

Many of these campaigns are led by powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to promote agendas based on human rights and international law. These groups, in turn, are often funded by European governments – the same ones, including Sweden, that hold conferences and declare their firm opposition to antisemitism.

For 20 years, beginning with the infamous antisemitic Durban NGO Forum, European-funded networks have been at the center of the boycott movement (BDS). They also cooperate with officials in the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in promoting false or highly distorted accusations used to push images of Israeli war crimes and “apartheid.”

In using these labels, NGOs and their followers are singling out and delegitimizing Israel, regardless of borders or policies, and uniquely denying the Jewish people the right of self-determination. In turn, this propaganda is transformed into incitement and violence.

If the governments of Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and the rest were serious about countering antisemitism, they would begin by openly investigating the uses and abuses of the NGO industry. European governments, together, allocate on the order of €100 million annually to what are actually FONGOs (foreign government-funded NGOs) active in these campaigns. This is a massive amount of money, focused year after year on demonizing one country – Israel.

Bernie Sanders’s knitted mittens were the sensation of Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration at the beginning of the year. For weeks, memes of the poker-face Vermont senator wearing a winter coat with his hands hidden in oversize mitts ruled the viral world. The image came back to me this week when I learned that the Bernie’s Mittens-look is a popular Halloween costume.

Sanders is haunting me – and not in the sense of a Halloween icon. When it comes to Israel, the progressive Democrat who had himself wanted to be president takes his gloves off. Or maybe switches them for boxing gloves.

Last week, the senator took his idea of moral equivalence to a new level. It’s incredible how going through the motions of being evenhanded can reveal such a deep bias. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Sanders apparently conditioned his support for the $1 billion aid to Israel to replenish the defensive Iron Dome anti-missile system with a similar amount of aid being given to Gaza.

The letter reportedly said: “If the goal of this supplemental funding is to help Israel replenish Iron Dome after the war that took place in May, it would be irresponsible if we do not at the same time address the enormous destruction and suffering that that war caused the Palestinians in Gaza. Just as we stand with the Israeli people’s right to live in peace and security, we must do so for the Palestinian people as well.”

That might sound fair – if you ignore the facts. So far, there are no signs that Gaza spends the aid it receives on building or rebuilding homes, jobs, schools etc. On the contrary, the extensive terror tunnel system and the thousands of rockets that have been launched on Israel are clear signs of where the priorities of the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip can be found.

Handing Hamas another $1 billion will not make it lay down its arms, it will encourage it to carry out further attacks. Hamas isn’t being punished for launching 4,500 rockets and mortars on Israel during the 11-day war in May, it’s being rewarded. Sanders’s ungloved hands are arming a terrorist movement. Sanders points an accusative finger at Israel, and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar flexes his trigger finger.

This is a useful reminder that BDS is, at its core, an eliminationist movement. It is not against the so-called “occupation.” It seeks to get rid of the State of Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. As its founder, Omar Barghouti has said, the movement “oppose[s] a Jewish state in any part of Palestine” and “there won’t be any Zionist state like the one we speak about [presently].”

It should go without saying that there is only one Jewish state, and eliminating it would certainly put a plurality of the world’s Jews in danger. It would arguably put all Jews in danger by bringing us back to the vulnerable situation we were in before 1948, when we did not have a place of our own to flee to from genocide, expulsions, pogroms and farhuds.

In addition, BDS and its supporters have never come up with a convincing argument for why Palestinians deserve self-determination and Jews don’t.

The bottom line is, as Board of Deputies of British Jews Vice President David Mendoza-Wolfson put it, that Rooney “will not allow her latest work to be published in Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people, unless it is permitted by those who advocate for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.”

Rooney is no fool; she surely realizes this. All the evidence points to her promoting an antisemitic movement. The onus is still on her to prove otherwise.

With anti-Semitism rising, now is the time for executives to reject these hate-filled extremists and stand with their Jewish employees, instead of kowtowing to discrimination. As a first step, the companies should formally adopt the working definition of anti-Semitism put forward by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Thirty-six countries plus the European Union have endorsed the IHRA definition, which the U.S. State Department adopted at former President Barack Obama's direction and which the Biden administration reaffirmed earlier this year.

Natan Sharansky, the respected former Soviet dissident, wrote that the way to tell whether someone is anti-Semitic when criticizing Israel is to apply what he called the "3-D test"—demonization, double standards and delegitimization. On all three counts, the anti-Israel organizers prove themselves to be Jew-haters—not human rights activists. Adopting the IHRA definition will give human resource executives a clear path to stop employees from isolating, harassing and persecuting their fellow Jewish employees whose identities are deeply connected to the Jewish state.

If, however, the moral obligation to defend Jewish employees is not enough to swat down activist calls to boycott Israel, there is another compelling reason for C-Suites and board rooms to stay above the fray. State laws around the country, which were established to defend against this bigotry, could inflict significant financial, legal and reputational harm on companies that inflict politically motivated economic harm on Israel or Israeli companies. More than 30 U.S. states have legislation or executive orders placing restrictions on companies engaging in anti-Israel boycotts. More than 20 states prohibit state contracts with companies engaged in boycotts of Israel, while a dozen don't allow their pension funds to invest in such companies.

Google has contracts with Illinois, Arizona and other states, while Amazon provides services for California, Maryland and Rhode Island, among others. Additionally, many states with investment prohibitions on companies boycotting Israel own shares of these technology firms. Together, these states hold more than $3.3 billion in Amazon and $2.1 billion in Google.

If Big Tech companies want to take a stand against hate and prove they'll defend all their employees—even Jews—their first move should be to adopt the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism. Next: Take a hard look at DEI staff and consultants to eliminate the insidious anti-Semitism creeping into their ranks. Finally, don't give into calls to boycott Israel—doing so is not only morally corrupt, but will trigger significant financial, legal and reputational costs.

A Texas school district administrator suggested that teachers covering the Holocaust should assign a book that has "other perspectives."

NBC News obtained audio of the comments made by Gina Peddy, executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas. Peddy was addressing teachers concerned that they would have to remove "antiracist" books from classroom libraries in response to a state bill, House Bill 3979, that restricts the teaching of critical race theory.

"You are in the middle of a political mess. And so we just have to do the best that we can," Peddy said. "You are professionals. … So if you think the book is OK, then let's go with it. And whatever happens, we will fight it together."

The teachers, one of whom said she was "terrified," pressed Peddy for specifics on how to comply with the state legislation.

"Just try to remember the concepts of 3979," Peddy responded. "And make sure that if, if you have a book on the Holocaust that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives."

Teachers in the meeting could be heard on the audio erupting in response to Peddy's comments, some of them laughing. "How do you oppose the Holocaust?!" one asked.

"Believe me, that's come up," Peddy said.

State senator Bryan Hughes (R.), who wrote his chamber's version of H.B. 3979, denied that the bill would require educators to offer books preaching Holocaust denial. "That's not what the bill says," Hughes told NBC News.

NEW: A school administrator in Southlake, Texas, advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also have a book with an "opposing" perspective.

Listen to the audio recording obtained by @NBCNews: https://t.co/vS0IjlROMupic.twitter.com/yPtM1ncjgV

— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 14, 2021

David Hirsh, a 54-year-old lecturer in sociology, thinks it must. He is one of the UK’s foremost analysts of antisemitism, and has placed himself beyond the pale of the liberal-left colleagues by refusing to minimise anti-Jewish hatred or excuse it away as an understandable accompaniment to opposition to Israeli policy. He told me he could not imagine young academics repeating his arguments. They would hide their views to find a job. By the time they secured fulltime posts, they would have forgotten their original ideas and blended into the consensus.

First you kneel, then you pray, then you believe.

Hirsh’s argument feels plausible, but try proving it. Self-censorship is the most effective form of censorship because it leaves no outward trace. Once it is established, there is no need for police forces or online mobs to act as enforcers. The self-censored police themselves. Perhaps there are hundreds of academics living in fear of speaking their minds. Perhaps, like so many of us, they just go along with authority for the sake of a quiet life. There is no truer slogan than the old anarchist line that “it is not the will for power that’s terrifying but the willingness to obey”.

You can never find conclusive proof. All you can do is listen out for the thumps on the chest and shrill, tinny notes in the voice that always accompany the declaration of party lines.

You can say, however, that there is no cliché more ludicrous than the picture of the academic closeted in an ivory tower ignorant of the how life is lived in “the real world”. A Wellcome Trust study of university researchers found that competition for jobs had created miserable workplaces. Young staff talked of an “unkind and aggressive atmosphere”, where bullying and harassment were commonplace. Most telling to my eyes, the report found that “just one in three felt comfortable speaking up”.

The government is, rightly in my view, legislating to protect academic freedom. But it does not begin to think about how freedom of thought and speech is repressed by the casualisation of labour.

All most young academics know is that the waves of money the Cameron government sent rolling over higher education a decade ago never reached them. Universities kept them on insecure contracts and cheap rates while splurging on vice chancellors’ salaries and new buildings to attract fee-paying students. They could not have come up with a better way to radicalise the young intelligentsia if they had tried.

A national coalition of Jewish alumni is pressuring universities to take a stand against rampant anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Alums for Campus Fairness recently published a study that found 80 percent of Jewish students have personally experienced anti-Semitism on campus. The group, compromised of alumni from 45 colleges across the country, will share the results of its survey in over 3,000 letters to campus administrators.

"Today's universities take great pains to embrace and protect students from all races, religions, and backgrounds," the letter, a copy of which was shared with the Washington Free Beacon, said. "But Jewish students are often left to fend for themselves against discrimination. Administrators, like yourself, must take immediate steps to remedy this situation."

Hate crimes against Jews have been on the rise in recent years. The latest FBI crime statistics found that Jews faced more attacks in 2020 than Muslim, Asian, and transgender people combined, the Washington Free Beacon reported in September. More than 2,000 anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded on college campuses since 2017. Leaders of College Democrats, as well as the anti-Semitic Students for Justice in Palestine, have helped normalized anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric at universities.

Forty-four percent of students surveyed this year by Alums for Campus Fairness said they either experienced, or knew someone who experienced, physical threats for being Jewish. Nearly 70 percent of respondents said that because they were Jewish they avoided locations or events on campus. And almost all students said anti-Semitism is an issue on college campuses. Seventy-five percent said it was a "very serious problem."

The minds of tomorrow’s leaders are being forged at universities around the world. Yet those students are being fed a diet of antisemitism on many Western campuses.

This is one of the greatest perils facing the Jewish world.

It is not only extremist student activists who are poisoning the minds of their peers. The most dangerous incitement sometimes comes from academics. The imprimatur of a professor can appear to bestow legitimacy on antisemitic groups, individuals or ideas.

I cannot think of a better example of this toxic cocktail than Prof. David Miller of the University of Bristol, who was fired earlier this month – a rare instance of a British academic being dismissed following repeated antisemitic comments.

Miller is obsessed with anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and his classes have alarmed Jewish students. In a course titled “Harms of the Powerful,” for example, Miller accused the “Zionist movement” of a hatred of Muslims, promoted in the United Kingdom by a sophisticated Jewish conspiracy.

He has also claimed that the new leader of the Labour Party is “in receipt of money from the Zionist movement,” whilst Miller himself spends his time in the company of high-profile figures expelled from Labour in relation to antisemitism, describing allegations of anti-Jewish racism against them as a “witch hunt.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors (UNC-AAUP) issued a statement last week in support of instructor Kylie Broderick, who recently tweeted the term “Zionist dirtbags,” and promotes the view that Israel should not exist.

The UNC-AAUP statement says, “We commend Ms. Broderick’s courage.”

Broderick — a PhD student currently teaching a course at UNC on the Israel/Palestinian conflict — also says that “Palestinians are being murdered for just being alive,” and believes students should be taught to reject Zionism.

The UNC-AAUP statement did not mention that all three of its officers are anti-Israel activists. President Michael Palm, Vice President Jay Smith, and Secretary-Treasurer Karen Booth all signed a 2021 statement saying, “We acknowledge our complicity in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians … [and we] reject the prevalent ‘two-sides’ narrative.”

In May of 2021, Karen Booth signed a statement pledging to promote the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel “in the classroom and on campus.” This statement dismissed concerns about “Hamas rockets” aimed indiscriminately at Israeli civilians as “stale talking points.” To Jews, such statements treat our humanity as expendable.

The latest episode of my @JNS_org"Top Story" podcast is out. I'm joined by journalist @bethanyshondark to discuss the impact of the pandemic on children; #VaccineMandates, #Antisemitism& the way women’s rights are trashed by left-wing activists. https://t.co/D2GmzT9ztQ

— Jonathan S. Tobin (@jonathans_tobin) October 14, 2021

In the last six months, two HonestReporting investigations brought to light shocking antisemitism espoused by journalists working for mainstream publications.

After our May 23 article on Tala Halawa, who tweeted that “#HitlerWasRight,” the reporter was promptly fired by the BBC. In August, our work on Mariam Barghouti, who contended that “Israel has been beating Hitler at his own game since 1948,” led to her effectively being blacklisted by the outlets that had previously disseminated her anti-Israel talking points.

Now, we expose a pundit whose sheer volume of vile Judeophobic tweets towers over Halawa’s and Barghouti’s.

On May 13, at the height of the 11-day Hamas-initiated conflict against the Jewish state, The New York Times published a guest essay by Refaat Alareer titled, “My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’”

The article falsely alleged that the Israel Defense Forces hit targets in the Gaza Strip with “no strategic value,” while implying that Israelis “draw straws” or “roll a dice” to decide “which block to annihilate” — essentially promoting a modern-day blood libel.

Nevertheless, Alareer’s malicious propaganda piece was included in a lesson plan for high schools by the Times’ Learning Network.

The writer and literature professor has also been cited or interviewed by The Washington Post, The Guardian, NBC News, NPR, PBS, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Qatar’s Al Jazeera

Mayim Bialik is too pro-Israel to be the host of the television game show “Jeopardy.”

That’s the weird, underlying premise of a recent front-of-the-arts section New York Times news article.

The headline is framed as a question: “Mayim Bialik Wants the ‘Jeopardy!’ Job. Is She ‘Neutral’ Enough?” But the viewpoint is clear enough. Had Bialik expressed any number of conventionally acceptable or New York Times-readership endorsed political opinions — Black Lives Matter, democracy is in danger, Ben & Jerry as exemplars of ethical businessmen, you name it — there’d be no section-front rumination questioning her suitability for the position. The job, is, after all, that of a television game show host, not Middle East peace envoy, moderator of a presidential debate, or anchor on the CBS evening news.

Yet here is the Times: “Bialik — a popular sitcom actor who blogged when blogging was popular, vlogged when vlogging was popular, and now has her own podcast — has long drawn attention, and controversy, with copious public statements of her own… She blogged about donating money to buy bulletproof vests for the Israel Defense Forces.” The Times doesn’t quote a single individual suggesting that that blog post should disqualify Bialik from the “Jeopardy” job. Yet a Times photo cutline identifies her as “Bialik, who has courted controversy by weighing in on hot-button issues online.”

Jewish groups have condemned German public television broadcaster ZDF for hiring a woman accused of antisemitic statements as a comedy writer for a TV sitcom.

Feyza-Yasmin Ayhan, also known under the stage name Yasmin Poesy, has been accused of repeated antisemitic remarks, including the posting on social media networks of a cartoon showing Jews with hooked noses. In 2015, the Berlin resident participated at an event by the Hamas-affiliated German Youth for Palestine, where she spoke in favor of justifying violence against Israel and hoped for an end to the Jewish state.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung, antisemitism commissioner Felix Klein said that “private antisemitic statements” are “covered by freedom of expression if they are not criminally relevant.”

However, he said, “as with right-wing extremism, in all forms of antisemitism, care must be taken not to place people who have attracted attention in positions that they could use to spread Jew-hatred. Germany has a historic responsibility on the issue,” Klein remarked.

“Public broadcasters should therefore always carefully examine who they are giving the floor to,” he added.

Klein demanded “urgent clarification” from the ZDF and suggested that the writer herself also comment on the allegations.

We're not sure if we're reading David Duke's twitter feed or @DanWhitCongress ?

The antisemitic obsession that Israel is "buying" and "influencing" anything and everything is quite frightening. https://t.co/kEXSQGRnD4pic.twitter.com/XEvQflSfGz

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) October 14, 2021

Australia will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism (IHRA), Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Wednesday night at an international conference in Sweden.

“In the history of humanity the Holocaust serves as a perpetual and brutal reminder of exclusion, of racism, of systematic political hatred and evil itself,” Morrison said in a taped address at the International Forum on Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism. “My government pledges to embrace the definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.”

Australian Jewish groups said the news sent a “strong statement.”

“Antisemitism is increasing around the world and the key to its reduction is education,” said Zionist Federation of Australia President Jeremy Leibler. “The IHRA working definition provides the central plank to this educational endeavor. Antisemitism should have no place in our society. It should be defined, identified, and rejected.”

The definition has been endorsed by hundreds of governmental bodies, universities, corporations and other institutions.

The European Jewish Congress called the move a “vital tool to help governments identify, monitor & address anti-Jewish hatred in all its forms.”

Users and Jewish organizations quickly took to social media platforms to condemn the club – named Unfair – for its use of Nazi imagery.

"Japanese women are supposed to be attracted to men dressed up as SS Nazi murderers?" tweeted the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "Vile desecration of the memory of six million Jews ... Where is Japanese outrage?"

The center's mission is to fight antisemitism and protect the safety of Jews worldwide. It is named after Holocaust survivor and writer Simon Wiesenthal.

In response to the uproar, the club was shut down immediately. The parent company also issued a statement apologizing for their "lack of knowledge and awareness."

It is difficult to say what was going through the mind of decision-makers. Perhaps it reflects the broader ignorance or lack of knowledge among many young Asians about the atrocities perpetrated by Nazis during World War II.

A woman poured gasoline and started a fire outside the Yeshivah of Flatbush Joel Braverman High School at 1609 Avenue J in Brooklyn Thursday evening, police said. A yeshiva security guard quickly put out the fire.

The woman approached the front of the high school around 6:45 PM Thursday, poured gasoline on the sidewalk, and set it on fire. The security guard rushed over and quickly put out the fire, then called the NYPD.

Lieutenant Ira Jablonsky of Brooklyn South Community Affairs told Hamodia: “There was no danger or damage. The NYPD and the FDNY dealt with the situation and took samples to determine just what type of liquid was used.”

Gasoline.

WATCH: Woman pours gasoline, lights fire outside Brooklyn yeshiva, police say; NYPD Hate Crime Unit is investigating

Full story: https://t.co/IUWh0s3gMNpic.twitter.com/eWakZrYabv

— PIX11 News (@PIX11News) October 15, 2021

Jewish actress and activist Debra Messing was honored with the “Warrior for Truth” award at The Algemeiner’s 8th annual “J100” gala on Tuesday night.

“My Judaism has always been a vital part of my identity,” Messing said in a pre-recorded virtual message after accepting the award. “It’s been a source of great pride for me throughout my entire career.”

“The Wedding Date” actress added that while playing one of the title roles in the hit television series “Will & Grace,” it was important to her that her character’s “Jewishness” be “central to her identity, because representation matters.”

“It’s for that reason that I can’t stay silent when I see or hear antisemitism,” she went on to say. “I’ve encountered it since my early childhood growing up as one of just three Jewish girls in my public school, and I’ve seen it as my responsibility to fight against bigotry, ever since. It bothers me deeply when I see antisemitism ignored, sidelined, or minimized.”

In June, Messing spoke out in support of a woman who resigned after controversy followed her statement condemning antisemitism. She mentioned the ordeal in her speech on Tuesday night and also addressed the “widespread misinformation” surrounding the conflict in May between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. She said the conflict “led to an avalanche of violent attacks against Jewish people.”

Disgusting antisemitism and Holocaust denial from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center student Jeff Riddle.

Riddle also posted on Facebook "I do not value human life".

More in thread from Riddle. pic.twitter.com/KrC4iRzX4x

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) October 14, 2021

An Israeli-American project is aiming to provide treatment for Alzheimer's disease with cutting-edge, made-in-Israel ultrasound technology.

Alzheimer's is a neurodegenerative disease that affects over 30 million people worldwide, with six-to-seven million new cases every year. It is the cause of 60%-80% of dementia cases.

However, no effective treatment has so far been found.

The cooperation between Dr. Zion Zibly, director of neurosurgery at Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and Dr. Ali Rezai, head of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University, intends to fight the disease using non-invasive ultrasound waves to deliver therapy directly to the brain without endangering it or requiring any surgery.

“This technology allows us to temporarily and safely open the blood-brain barrier, which is a barrier in the blood vessels that usually prevents antibodies or large molecules of medications from getting to the brain,” Rezai said.

“For the past five years, we have been working together using ultrasound waves to treat tremor, whether produced by Parkinson or by other causes,” he said. “The patient comes to the clinic, wears a helmet that delivers the waves to their brain and then goes home in two hours.”

During their exodus from Iraq during 1950 -1, the Baghdad Jewish community took charge of the welfare of the 18,000 Kurdish Jews who passed through the capital. It had to request a special budget to bury the many elderly Kurdish Jews who died in Baghdad.

According to Sami Sourani, who volunteeered to translate some files, the Baghdad Jewish community stepped up to the challenge of caring for the refugees during their short stay at the Massouda Shemtov synagogue.

The community took on the responsibility of feeding the refugees. The cook was Shalom Saleh who was hanged in January 1952 together with Yousef Basri on charges of Zionism.

Saleh worked very hard to feed the Kurdish arrivals. A ladies’ committee boiled 100 eggs a day.

The Community appointed a rabbi to take care of the Kurdish refugees. Some of the very old who could not stand the warm weather of Baghdad and passed away. To their credit, the Jewish community of Baghdad made sure that the dead were buried with dignity, regardless of their financial situation. This was done by the Hebra Kadisha – the Burial Society. The rabbi in charge wrote a letter to the Rabbanut of Baghdad asking for a special budget to buy cloth for shrouds.

The rabbi wrote that the dead people were so numerous, he could not afford to buy shrouds. He told how he was working every day until midnight just to talk to the refugees and deal with their welfare. Sometimes he had to buy them material using his own money. He requested a raise in his salary – about eight dinar per month, at that time. The Rabbanut responded favourably and he got what he wanted.

On October 15, 1894, Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully arrested for espionage in France. He would later be convicted and exiled. Dreyfus was born in October of 1859 to a wealthy Jewish family in France. He entered the École Polytechnique, an institution for higher education, in 1882, before settling on a military career.

Within seven years, Dreyfus had risen to the rank of captain by 1882. In 1894, Dreyfus was working in the War Ministry when he was accused of selling military information to Germany and arrested in October. He was convicted two months later and sent to life imprisonment in exile in the penal colony of Devil's Island.

The legal proceedings that led to Dreyfus' conviction were clearly not genuine. While Dreyfus and his family continuously insisted on his innocence, public opinion and the French press echoed widespread antisemitic perceptions of Jews as disloyal - a view that was especially voiced in the newspaper La Libre Parole.

New evidence was found, however, that Dreyfus was indeed innocent. Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart discovered that Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy was engaging in espionage. He also found that a letter that was used as significant evidence against Dreyfus was written in Esterhazy's handwriting.

Picquart was removed from his post soon after this discovery, and it is believed that his superiors did not want to deal with the evidence because it was inconvenient for them.

#OnThisDay (1898) Emile Zola published #Jaccuse - exposing the 'Dreyfus Affair' & setting in motion the very foundations for the creation of the State of #Israel.

Although Israel is today a flourishing state, 123 years later, #Antisemitism is still rampant in Europe. pic.twitter.com/PGChUP5zYP

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) October 15, 2021

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