Sadly, Israel has demonstrated more commitment to a Palestinian state than has Palestinian leadership itself. Since 2000, Israel has proposed or accepted four land-for-peace proposals that would have created an independent Palestinian state. The PA has refused all proposals, despite one being so generous as to include all of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and 97% of Judea and Samaria. Palestinian self-sabotages at achieving statehood have been so in vain that Bill Clinton once lamented, "I killed myself trying to give Palestinians a state."
The PA's motive, instead of statehood, is corruption — which "thrives" as conflict exists. Conflict fuels international attention and the foreign aid that the PA has exploited to line its pockets and fortify its bureaucracy. In 2015, it was reported that the PA had received $25 billion in foreign aid since 1994. Yet Palestinians "saw no improvement in their living conditions." This sum should startle: Palestinian foreign aid, when assessed on a per capita basis, exceeds that designated for the Marshall Plan by 25 times. Unlike the Marshall Plan, which propelled Europe's reconstruction in four years, the "Palestinian Project" has now lasted over a quarter of a century without any end in sight.
So where has the money gone? Corruption. Arafat amassed $10+ billion, "[t]he main source" of which was "the approximately $6 billion contributed … as financial aid." Further, Arafat's financial advisor accumulated $500+ million, having had access to "hundreds of millions of [the PA's] dollars." Abbas also amassed approximately $100 million, despite being a career politician, and his two sons are millionaires who operate foreign aid contracting businesses. The PA suffers from systemic venality.
Palestinian-Arab leadership has long realized that conflict must exist for it to receive aid. Thus, in 2018, it distributed $330 million worth of stipends to thousands of terrorists and their families, thereby inspiring future generations of terror. PA leadership also realizes that its power remains dependent on keeping the Palestinian people dependent on its reign. Hence, in 2016, "[m]ore than half" of the PA's spending on Gaza was "spent on wages to PA employees." Further, between 1999 and 2007, the PA recruited 70,000 new government officials, while spending 70% of the Paris Conference foreign aid package on government salaries in 2008, and 58% of its entire foreign aid for 2001 on PA salaries. Through inciting violence and dependency culture, the PA exploits conflict to preserve its power and wealth.
In sum, Palestinian leadership has long been disingenuous. It wants not peace, but either a "Judenrein Palestine" or a conflict that will enable its corruption, power, and raison d'etre. If the world really wants a solution, it must stop blaming Israel, which has actually tried to establish a Palestinian state, and condemn the true motives of Palestinian leadership.
No matter how many times the think-tank "experts" are proven wrong in their predictions regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, they keep promoting the same old myths.
They must think that the public has a very short memory.
The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS) last week unveiled its recommendations for Israeli policy in 2020. The men and women who make up its roster have impressive credentials in their fields.
Yet remarkably, they keep promoting policy positions that have been discredited again and again and again.
Myth #1: Palestinian Arab terrorism is caused by poverty.
In 2020, "Palestinian disgruntlement will be mainly channeled into international diplomatic moves against Israel, not to violent unrest — unless the economic situation in the territories worsens," according to the JISS.
Call it the "Barack Obama Theory of the Causes of Terrorism." In an interview on CBS's This Morning on December 4, 2015, then-President Obama explained one view of what causes terrorism: "When people are not able to make a living or take care of their families," they become "desperate," and "as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen."
Many of the modern-day Zionist pioneers involved in rebuilding the Land of Israel in the late 1800s and early 1900s likewise believed that the Palestinian Arabs would drop their opposition to the Jews once they saw how much they would benefit from Jewish immigration.
Jobs. Running water. Electricity. Trains. They were followed by refrigerators, telephones, mail service, and automobiles. Arabs from Syria, Egypt, and across the Jordan River poured into the country and enjoyed better jobs, better homes, and better food. But it didn't stop them from hating Jews. In 1920, 1921, 1929, and continuously from 1936 to 1939, Palestinian Arabs shot, stabbed, and bombed Jews throughout the country, even when it undermined their own economic well-being.
On January 9, Tom Cotton of Arkansas made a speech on the floor of the United States Senate about the shocking rise of anti-Semitic crimes in and around New York City. Everyone should read it. Here it is: This holiday season, the ancient hatred of anti-Semitism cast a shadow over New York City during Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. The New York Police Department recorded at least nine separate attacks against Jews—more than one attack for each day of Hanukkah. New attacks are reported seemingly on a daily basis.
In Crown Heights, site of the deadly anti-Semitic riots incited by Al Sharpton in 1991, a group of men beat up an Orthodox Jew and attacked another with a chair.
In Williamsburg, another group terrorized an elderly Jewish man on the street. "Jew, Hitler burned you," one of the criminals reportedly said. "I'll shoot you."
And just outside the city, in Rockland County, a man with a machete stormed a Hanukkah celebration in a rabbi's home and injured five worshippers, leaving two in critical condition. The family of one victim, Josef Neumann, says he may never wake up from his coma.
These heinous attacks are part of a growing storm of anti-Semitism that has made Jewish Americans fearful to worship and walk the streets in their own communities. They come in the wake of the deadly rampage at a kosher market in Jersey City that left four innocent people dead, including a police detective. And of course, they come in the wake of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in our nation's history: the massacre of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a white supremacist.
According to the FBI, our country suffered a 37 percent increase in anti-Semitic crimes between 2014 and 2018. According to the New York Police Department, the city suffered a 26 percent increase in anti-Semitic crimes in the past year alone. That increase is alarming enough. So is the fact that most hate crimes reported in New York are crimes against Jews. And while some of the increase is due to better reporting, much of it is not. Jewish Americans bear witness to this harsh reality.
Anti-Semitism is the ancient hatred, but today it can appear in new disguises. It festers on Internet message boards and social media. It festers in so-called Washington think tanks like the Quincy Institute, an isolationist blame-America-first money pit for so-called "scholars" who've written that American foreign policy could be fixed if only it were rid of the malign influence of Jewish money. It festers even on elite college campuses, which incubate the radical Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement—a movement to wage economic warfare against the Jewish state. These forms of anti-Semitism may be less bloody than street crime in New York, but they channel the same ancient hatred, the same conspiratorial and obsessive focus on the Jewish people.
As an Arab activist and writer, I call on the Arab world to normalize relations with Israel — a move that would be almost entirely to our benefit alone. Israel would gain very little from this in practical terms, while Arabs stand to gain tremendously.
My people don't understand that Israel is actually our friend, and that if we followed the Jewish state's example, we too could become prosperous like America and Europe.
Israel is stronger and more stable than the Arab states on almost all fronts. If all borders were wide open in Arab states, few if any Israelis would flee Tel Aviv for Arab cities; but you would certainly see a flow of people in the opposite direction — and for the very same reason that multitudes of Arabs seek to emigrate to Europe.
The conflict over land must be put into perspective. The land which officially became the State of Israel was originally Jewish territory, one that was later controlled by a series of conquerors, including Arab-Muslims. The latter are the true occupiers, and they are fighting to reverse the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty.
Any sane person knows — or should know — that the Jews are not colonialists in this region, but rather an indigenous people. But we Arabs have grown arrogant, to the point of denying all historical records of Jewish sovereignty preceding Arab-Muslim rule in the Middle East. The Hebrew language alone is evidence enough of a long Jewish history in the land of Israel.
Two US senators from opposite sides of the aisle on Thursday introduced a bill to provide annual aid of $3.3 billion to Israel as part of a 2016 agreement.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Democratic Senator Chris Coons co-sponsored the bill, according to Reuters, which was originally part of wider legislation that stalled last year over a section that would have allowed local governments to impose punishments on those who boycott Israel. This was seen by some as an attempt to stifle free speech.
The bill would put into law the Memorandum of Understanding that was agreed between Israel and the Obama administration.
The Memorandum of Understanding has thus far been upheld by the US President Donald Trump's administration, but theoretically could be torn up at any time. Codifying it into law would protect the aid over the life of the agreement.
Rubio told Reuters that the legislation was important given the current global climate in which Israel faces "unprecedented threats," and Coons told the outlet that the "events of the past few days are a stark reminder of the importance of US assistance to Israel's security."
Israel raised a record $3 billion in foreign debt on Wednesday in an offering that received huge demand from investors despite a year-long political stalemate and rising geopolitical tensions in the region.
It sold $2 billion-worth of 30-year US-denominated bonds at 3.375%, or 115 basis points over comparable US Treasuries, and another $1 billion of 10-year bonds at 2.5%, or 68 basis points over Treasuries – the lowest-ever spreads for an Israeli international debt offering.
Demand for the issues, the Finance Ministry said, reached an all-time high of $20 billion and attracted more than 400 different investors from 40 countries including the United States, Britain and Germany. Among the buyers were central banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other entities that already hold Israeli securities.
The Finance Ministry said there was high demand from Asian institutional investors, including Japan and Hong Kong.
Accountant General Rony Hizkiyahu said the results reflected confidence among the world's largest investors in Israel's economy and its bonds.
"The level of issuance and the low cost achieved will constitute an important element in financing the government's activities in the coming year," he said, adding Israel was well established in global financial markets.
UNRWA's mandate has been renewed by the UN General Assembly for the past 70 years, and its current mandate is set to expire on June 30, 2020. Yet, as additional countries join the ranks of those refusing to renew this financial and managerial black hole known as 'UNRWA,' the continuation of the charade of 'perpetual refugee-ism' may be in doubt.
This paper examines the exorbitant, highly inflated rise of UNRWA's budget demands over the past 10 years ($1.11 billion USD in 2018 alone), and both the misuse and the utter lack of transparency and accountability as to how those billions of dollars have been spent.
I. I. Historical Overview On 14 May 1948, the 30-year British Mandate for Palestine was formally ended by the British Colonial Office. Britain's chaotic evacuation of its civilian and military personnel was immediately followed by an invasion by seven Arab countries vowing to annihilate the newly declared State of Israel. In the course of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, approximately one million people, both Arabs and Jews, were left displaced and homeless. In the aftermath of these developments the UNGA responded by calling to a post-World II war refugee crisis upon international organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to provide humanitarian aid to the refugees.
Anti-Semitism watchdogs are calling on the Trump administration to designate France, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom as countries of concern due to the rapid rise of anti-Jewish hate crimes.
At a hearing of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom on Wednesday, notable Jewish and human rights activist, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, advised the commission to add the four major European countries to its Tier II watchlist for anti-Semitism.
Each of the four countries identified by Cooper—associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a global human rights organization committed to confronting anti-Semitism—saw alarming increases in anti-Semitic assaults and hate crimes committed in recent years. In all instances, he said, the states failed to decisively respond.
The addition of these countries would mark a milestone in American efforts to combat anti-Semitism abroad, Cooper said.
More than 40 world leaders are expected to converge on Jerusalem in two weeks for a momentous occasion.
Under the banner "Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Antisemitism," the dignitaries, accompanied by Israel's prime minister and president, will gather for the Fifth World Holocaust Forum to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in southern Poland, the largest Nazi death camp in World War II.
The unprecedented event at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, is to take place just ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day and against the backdrop of the rise in antisemitism around the world.
It is an occasion meant to be free of politics and provide a unifying topic that all visiting leaders can unquestioningly get behind. On Tuesday, though, Polish President Andrzej Duda announced he will not join his fellow leaders at the forum. The reason given was that he was not invited to address the gathering.
However, as Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev explained Wednesday on KAN Radio, only representatives from the four main powers of the Allied forces that liberated Europe and the world from the murderous tyranny of Nazi Germany – the United States, Russia, France and Britain – were invited to give speeches. German President Franz-Walter Steinmeier, President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as the forum's organizers, will also address the attendees.
The crux of Duda's rejection of the invitation is the continued dispute between Warsaw and Moscow over whether their countries collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
Polish President Andrzej Duda expressed his disappointment that the fifth World Holocaust Forum is being held at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and not in Auschwitz in Poland. His remarks came at a belated Hanukkah event in Warsaw on Wednesday night.
Duda said that he was "astounded" to be invited to an event in Jerusalem marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which will have the theme "Remembering the Holocaust, Fighting Antisemitism." He said that he has decided this week that he would not attend the memorial ceremony, because he would not be given the chance to address the forum.
"To me, it is precisely here in Poland, on our soil today, occupied back then by Nazi Germany, where those ashes are scattered," that such an event should take place.
"This is the place of immense symbolism," he said. "Deep within my soul, I believe this is the appropriate place, the best one. I believe that one must not deprive this place of its remembrance by transferring it somewhere else."
The Polish president said being in Auschwitz, where it is "bitterly cold… magnifies the sense of gravity. This stiffening cold makes one truly comprehend the horror of the place." He pointed out that prisoners in the concentration camps were there for years, with no heating and only wearing thin uniforms, many having to walk barefoot in the snow.
Eight people were reportedly killed in airstrikes against Iranian militias along the border between Syrian and Iraq, according to Ynet that quoted the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Trucks and militants were targeted in the airstrikes on Thursday night, according to the Beirut-based TV station Al Mayadeen. Violent explosions were heard in the area and "enemy planes" were seen above the city Al-Bukamal shortly before, according to the report.
Local news source DeirEzzor24 stated that target of the bombing is believed to have been a weapons shipment to Hezbollah in the border area. Several Arab media outlets, including Al Mayadeen, blamed Israel for the airstrikes.
According to Ynet, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization which opposes the regime of Bashar Al-Assad and his allies in Iran and the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah, reported that non-identified fighter jets struck warehouses and equipment belonging to pro-Iranian militias.
Israel has announced the release of two prisoners — one of whom was convicted of spying for Syria — as part of a swap deal brokered by Russia.
Sidqi al-Maqt, from the Druze town of Majdal Shams, was sentenced to 14 years behind bars in 2017 for spying on IDF positions on behalf of Syrian intelligence. He was arrested in 2015 on suspicion of passing photographs and written reports of IDF positions to Syrian intelligence officials.
He had already spent 27 years behind bars in Israel for spying and had been released in 2012 prior to his latest arrest.
"Security prisoner Sidqi Al-Maqt will be released tomorrow, January 10, before the scheduled end of his imprisonment," Israeli prison officials said in a statement late Thursday.
Upon his release al-Maqt thanked Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin for their work to secure his release.
"The Syrian resolve overcame the resolve of the occupation and the enemy," he said. "My release was without conditions, to the chagrin of the occupation."
Defense Minister Naftali Bennett on Thursday announced the appointment of an external adviser who will be tasked with combating illegal Palestinian construction in the West Bank.
Kobi Eliraz, who as Defense Ministry adviser on settlement affairs from 2016 to 2019 worked primarily on regulating illegal Israeli construction beyond the Green Line, will now "coordinate the fight against illegal Palestinian construction in Area C on behalf of the defense minister," Bennett's office said in a statement.
Last month, Bennett declared that combating illegal Palestinian construction in the roughly 60% of the West Bank that is under Israeli military and civil control based on the 1994 Oslo Accords would be a top priority for his office.
"The future of the Land of Israel is at stake," Bennett said in a statement introducing the appointment of Eliraz. "Unfortunately, while the Palestinians have been taking over territory in a largely uninterrupted manner, the State of Israel simply has not risen to the occasion.
"The defense establishment will begin fighting on the ground, and for this it is essential that there is someone to lead the campaign. Kobi Eliraz is the right person at the right time. He is an expert in the field and a bulldozer of a worker," Bennett concluded.
The IDF announced on Friday that it has notified the families of several terrorists responsible for fatal attacks that their houses are going to be demolished.
Hamas-affiliated Mahmoud Atuna was involved in the attack that killed 19-year-old Dvir Sorek in August. Sorek's body was found a short distance away from the security gate of the Migdal Oz settlement after he was stabbed multiple times. At the end of November, the army announced that it had already carried out other demolitions in connection with the attack.
Walid Hanatsheh and Yzaen Majame are among those standing trial for murdering 17-year-old Rina Shnerb in August at the Dani spring near the settlement of Dolev. The IDF added that the demolitions of other houses of those responsible for the attack are being investigated. The families of the terrorists have the opportunity to file an appeal against the demolition.
Palestinians from the villages around Naharia came out today with their expensive construction equipment, on their own time and expense & spent the day in the cold rain helping Israelis stuck and stranded. No BDS. No Apartheid. Just Community. (Thanks to @idatheleader for photo) pic.twitter.com/vz3NxaLm3e
In an address to the UN General Assembly last September, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas pledged to a sympathetic gathering of world leaders that he would hold parliamentary elections.
While the announcement garnered international headlines at the time, little progress has been made in the ensuing months towards elections, highlighting what experts see as entrenched corruption and little desire among the Palestinian leadership to be held accountable by its people.
Efraim Karsh, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, told JNS that, contrary to what it seems, Abbas is actually trying to postpone elections.
While Abbas promised that he would call for elections when he returned home from New York in the fall, he has since added a stipulation that Palestinians living in eastern Jerusalem under Israeli authority be allowed to vote in any Palestinian Authority elections.
According to Karsh, Abbas's threat "is nothing but another excuse to delay the elections."
From Israel's point of view, Palestinian elections are pointless. According to Karsh, "we already have security cooperation with the PA, and politically, it won't get better than it already is."
Abbas was last elected to a four-year term as head of the Palestinian Authority in 2005. The PA last held national elections in 2006, which resulted in a complete embarrassment for Abbas and his Fatah Party when Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist group, won a surprise victory.
Next week will mark beginning of the 15th year of Mahmoud Abbas 4-year term as Palestinian Authority President. But tell me more how PA is so democratic? pic.twitter.com/TMkrXg5lCc
Hamas MP Sheikh Salem Salameh: George Washington Killed Indians Because They Were Muslims; Normalization of Relations with Israel Is Betrayal of God, Islam pic.twitter.com/ju5d1MDRL2
Thursday marked the fifth anniversary of a deadly terror attack at a kosher supermarket in Paris.
On the afternoon of Jan. 9, 2015, shortly before the start of Shabbat, Amedy Coulibaly — who had pledged allegiance to ISIS — burst in to the Hyper Cacher at Porte de Vincennes in the French capital's 20th arrondissement and took more than a dozen hostages.
A multi-hour standoff with police ensued, at the end of which the heavily-armed Coulibaly was killed in an exchange of fire.
Four hostages were found murdered inside the store.
The victims — all Jews — were Philippe Braham, 45, Yohan Cohen, 22, Yoav Hattab, 21, and François-Michel Saada, 64.
The attack occurred two days after 12 people were massacred by a pair of Islamist gunmen at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
A memorial ceremony — organized by the French Jewish communal organization CRIF — was held on Thursday evening in front of the Hyper Cacher.
The Paris office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) tweeted an homage to those who lost their lives at the supermarket, saying, "Remember their names and faces, rather than the terrorist who cowardly murdered them simply because they were Jews."
Philippe Braham, Yohan Cohen, Yoav Hattab, François-Michel Saada.
Retenez leurs noms et leurs visages plutôt que ceux du terroriste qui les a lâchement assassinés il y a 5 ans, simplement parce qu'ils étaient #juifs. #Hypercacherpic.twitter.com/23K5PNnbCG
Jews must not sit idly by while antisemitism surges in the US, the editor-in-chief of The Algemeiner said in a recent television appearance.
While taking part in a panel discussion aired by the Jewish Broadcasting Service, Dovid Efune said recent events — such as the stabbing attack at a rabbi's home in Monsey, New York — had left him feeling "motivated" to fight antisemitism.
"The question of antisemitism and where this tragic saga ends, I think it's too big for any one person to answer," Efune noted. "It spans millennia. How do we get rid of this? How do we root it out? People have tried. Ideas have been presented. But the best that people seem to be able to come up with is some sort of agenda for containment, if you will."
He continued, "The question that we have control over is how to respond to it? And I think it's incumbent upon us to think about, if we are indeed living through a historic resurgence of antisemitism, or even a rebirth of American antisemitism…if that is the case, we need to be sure it is never said that the beast of antisemitism reawakened on our watch and it did so unopposed or it was met with timid resistance."
"It's our job to formulate the most aggressive, compelling and impactful response that we can in the face of such atrocities and hatred," Efune declared.
The US Department of Justice announced on Thursday that five additional federal hate-crime charges have been filed against the suspect behind the machete attack on Dec. 28 at a home and prayer hall known as Rabbi Rottenberg's Shul in Monsey, NY, injuring five of the around 100 celebrants at a Hanukkah candle-lighting party.
The new charges against Grafton Thomas, 37, include willfully causing bodily injury to five victims because of the victims' religion and five counts of obstructing the free exercise of religion in an attempt to kill.
"Since before our founding as a nation and ever since, this country has provided refuge for people from other parts of the world who suffered violence and other forms of persecution because of their right to believe and worship as they see fit," said US Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division.
"The United States remains today a beacon of freedom for persecuted religious people all over the world, and violent attacks against anyone because of religion is both illegal and against everything our nation stands for," he continued. "The United States Department of Justice will continue to prosecute anyone who engages in such conduct to the fullest extent of the law."
If convicted, Thomas could spend the rest of his life in prison.
The New York Police Department makes roughly one arrest for every four complaints of an anti-Semitic hate crime, department data show, making anti-Semitic crimes one of the least likely to result in arrest.
Data released by the NYPD and covering three years' worth of hate-crime complaints and arrests show that anti-Semitic hate crimes are by far the most common source of complaints, accounting for 49.2 percent of the total. Anti-Semitic offenders, however, account for just 32.6 percent of hate crime arrests.
While it is hard to conclude from these data what explains this disparity, they strongly suggest that not enough is being done to respond to anti-Semitic crime in New York City. According to one Jewish community leader who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon, the source of this issue may not be the NYPD itself, but an "impossibly progressive" mayor who has not been serious enough about combating the i
The NYPD did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.
Lord MacDonald QC, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, has revealed that he believes not only that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has had sufficient time to review the cases of the arrested Labour members and should announce its conclusions, but that the evidence suggests that crimes have indeed been committed.
Lord MacDonald, who headed the CPS from 2003 to 2008, made the intervention after the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, revealed that six arrests were made in connection with a secret dossier compiled by the Labour Party and subsequently leaked and referred to the Met by Campaign Against Antisemitism and the radio channel LBC, and that five of the cases were passed to the CPS in September 2019.
Commissioner Dick explained that the cases represented a "complex crime type" and that the CPS would have to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to bring charges and a public interest in prosecuting.
But Lord MacDonald opined that "these are allegations about the conduct of members of a major political party and so there is obviously a strong public interest in this being resolved, and resolved as quickly as possible." Moreover, he noted that a long delay fuels "rumours" and "unease" and therefore that "safe conclusions are needed sooner rather than later."
Lord MacDonald went on to say that "the sensitivity in these cases is that prosecutors have to balance two things: one is the suggestion that these messages, these posts may comprise incitement to racial hatred, or other hate crimes, on the one hand, and then on the other hand, free expression rights," adding that this "can sometimes be a tricky analysis but I should have thought that three months is plenty of time to come to conclusions in this case."
When an expert looks into a problem you have – whether it's a doctor, a mechanic, or a plumber – you take their advice and follow it without thinking twice.
So when the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), and imminently the Equalities and Human Rights Commission give the Labour Party specific recommendations about how we need to root out the poison of antisemitism from our movement, our starting point must not be to dispute their proposals but ensure every single one is implemented unless we can rationally explain why not.
If I'm elected Labour leader, I hope there will be very few recommendations we can't take on. But as a veteran of the bitter struggle inside the Shadow Cabinet to get us to endorse the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, and all its examples, I know how hard these fights can be.
However, even that didn't prepare me for the battle I had over Labour's 2019 manifesto, where the advisers around Jeremy Corbyn proposed to amend the language we had used in the 2017 version to remove the condemnation of rocket and terror attacks by Palestinian groups against Israel, while rightly continuing to condemn the illegal occupation of Palestinian land and the blockade of Gaza.
When I repeatedly complained that this was utterly unacceptable, I was told by Jeremy's office that they thought this was "very balanced considering the considerable imbalance in the conflict".
Disgustingly, attacks on Israeli civilians were being deliberately dismissed in a way that would never have been tolerated of attacks on any civilians in any other country around the world.
A vanquished Corbyn increasingly returns to familiar territory — student politics, anti-British protests and general rabble-rousing. I'm sure Press TV have already been back in touch. https://t.co/VNA56ylIE3
More disclosure would also help combat the core BDS argument. The typical anti-BDS argument is defensive, boiling down to "Israel's really not that bad" when compared to many other countries. Israelis, as well as Jews around the world, should want something much better than this. How about "Israel is a role model that other nations should emulate"?
No country rushes to aid nations in need of the way that Israel does. No other country provides heart surgery for children from all over the world, many from hostile countries. No country would bend over backward the way Israel does to help a population the leaders of which are actively seeking its destruction. No country in a similar situation would be providing energy and water to Gaza, or funding transportation and infrastructure projects in Arab communities in Judea and Samaria.
The vast majority of employment for Arabs living in Judea and Samaria is on the Israeli side of the security barrier. For example, many are Israeli-trained doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. As time goes on, there will likely be an increasing number of Arab citizens who will be willing to proudly speak up without fear of reprisal and tout the benefits of living in Israel.
The Prime Minister's Office can also effectively support both offensive and defensive long-term disclosure strategies. For example, if a country in Europe were to consider a national boycott policy against Israel or parts of Israel, can the prime minister appeal directly to Israel's supporters, for example, evangelical Christians across the globe, to support Israeli products made in those areas?
Israel may underestimate its friends' willingness to help and what harnessing their buying power could mean.
Fighting BDS is important. Israel and its supporters may want to press forward with at least as much effort in an offensive long-term strategy. Increased labeling and disclosure can provide important results for Israel.
The Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an elite New York City prep school, has fired a teacher who posted tweets opposing Zionism.
JB Brager, who taught history at Fieldston, was fired Thursday. The termination comes after Brager, who is Jewish, posted multiple tweets disparaging Zionism amid a controversy over anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism at the school.
"ECFS does not comment on personnel matters," the school said in a statement to JTA Thursday evening. "We can reaffirm, however, that the school does not tolerate hurtful, offensive, or exclusionary content or comments from any member of the community. Students, parents, employees and other members of our community all face consequences for misbehavior of this nature."
JTA reached out to Brager via email and their website for comment, but did not immediately hear back.
The controversy began in November when a speaker at the school, Kayum Ahmed, a lecturer at Columbia University Law School and a director at the Open Society Foundations, said that the Holocaust and Israel are examples of "victims becoming perpetrators," according to a video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Tablet magazine reported that parents were "shaken and outraged" by the remark.
If #BDS was nearly as successful as they claim it is, they wouldn't need to go around claiming victories that don't exist. @PSCupdateshttps://t.co/ryT0AHFeLX
A sixteen-year-old neo-Nazi teenager from Durham has been jailed for six years and eight months by Manchester Crown Court after being found guilty of preparation of terrorist acts between October 2017 and March 2019.
The teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is the youngest person ever to be convicted in the UK for planning a terrorist attack.
Reportedly a follower of far-right ideology since the age of thirteen, the boy had hoped to follow in Adolf Hitler's footsteps and listed numerous targets "worth attacking" with Molotov cocktails, including synagogues, which were listed under "Areas to Attack" in his manifesto, which was titled "A Manual for practical and sensible guerrilla warfare against the kike system in the Durham City area, Sieg Heil". Other items seized from his home included a copy of Mein Kampf and material on explosives and firearms.
During the trial, the prosecution claimed that the defendant had become "an adherent of neo-Nazism – the most extreme of right-wing ideology", noting that he had written in his diary on the occasion of Hitler's birthday that the Nazi leader was "a brave man to say the least. Although maybe having written proof that I admire their number one enemy isn't such a wise idea. I will however say that I one day hope to follow in his footsteps."
The jury did not believe the teenager's claims that his far-right musings were for "shock value" only, and he was found guilty of preparation of terrorist acts, disseminating a terrorist publication, possessing an article for a purpose connected with terrorism, and three counts of possessing a document or record containing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.
As Beijing's persecution of its Muslim population has grown ever greater in scope and cruelty, and its persecution of Christians who dissent from the state-controlled denominations continues unabated, it has also repressed the practice of Judaism. The Jewish community of Kaifeng, which dates back to the Middle Ages, had been absorbed into the Gentile population by the 19th century, but in the 1990s a revival began among people of Jewish descent, some of whom began to use the site where the synagogue once stood for prayer. But no longer, writes Wang Yichi:
Their religious activities were tolerated at the beginning, but suppressed after 2015 by the authorities, fearing they would lead to a reawakening of the Jewish faith. Traditional Jewish festivals such as Passover and Sukkot were prohibited. All Hebrew signs were removed.
In 2019, the regime once again targeted the site of the Kaifeng synagogue on the grounds that Judaism was not among the "Five Authorized Religions" that are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In April, personnel from the local [government] forced their way into the site and removed all Jewish signs, [identifying information], and Israeli flags from the doors and windows. Instead, signs promoting the government's attacks on, and repression of, religion were hung everywhere in the site.
To restrict the growth of Judaism, the CCP has set up layers of obstacles to prevent international organizations and foreign visitors from having contact with the Kaifeng Jews. In the summer of 2019, the government rented a house next to the site of Kaifeng synagogue and converted it into "a "Community Comprehensive Cultural Service Center." From Monday to Sunday, personnel assigned by the government are stationed there, taking turns monitoring the activities in the site and the movements of the passersby. A surveillance camera was installed at the entrance to the synagogue.
Jackeline Nichols knew it was time to leave her native Venezuela when within the span of a few months two of her neighbors were kidnapped. Though both were eventually returned after their families paid ransoms, the incidents shook Nichols.
Then, one of her kids got sick with a stomach flu and her husband needed to go to five different pharmacies to get medicine.
These situations are not out of the ordinary in Venezuela, whose once flourishing economy has collapsed over the last few years as the country has been mired in a political crisis. Poor living conditions — including a rise in professional kidnappings alongside shortages of food and medicine — have led millions of Venezuelans to flee.
"We were putting our families at risk," said Nichols, 43, who served as president of the Hebraica, the Caracas Jewish community center, from 2012 to 2014. "We have three children and they were getting to be teenagers, where we knew they would want to start going out with friends and going to the mall and doing the things that teenagers do, and we felt that it was no longer safe for them."
So in 2015, Nichols' family left for Miami.
Though her husband is American and has family in Chicago, and the couple had job offers in other cities, the choice was obvious. "We knew that here we had half of their classmates that had already moved in elementary school," Nichols said. "We had uncles and cousins that we could have Shabbat with. The neighborhood they were familiar with because they had been here on vacation many times. So Miami is the stepping stone. This is the easiest transition, in some ways, for many of us here."
A group of researchers at Tel Aviv University say they have developed a new way to produce and control terahertz waves, an elusive type of electromagnetic wave, using nanometric materials.
These waves can be used to create devices with advanced imaging abilities that can see through opaque materials like plastics or paper, identify small structures and their composition, or look through paint layers in works of art, the researchers said.
Terahertz waves are considered by scientists to be very important due to their unique ability to interact with materials: this makes them useful in accurately identifying different materials. In addition, terahertz waves can pass through materials and objects that appear opaque to other wavelengths, and thus can be used to detect hidden objects and even reveal their composition.
Despite their great importance, however, the ability to produce and control terahertz waves has been very limited compared to other forms of radiation.
Now, researchers at TAU's Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology say they have created nanometric surfaces known as meta-surfaces, which enable the "groundbreaking" and "unprecedented production and control of terahertz waves."
Israeli startup Watergen, which has developed a technology to make water from air, has been named winner of the Energy Efficiency Product of the Year in the 2020 Smart Home Mark of Excellence Awards at CES in Las Vegas for its GENNY product.
The annual award, presented during CES by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), recognizes the industry's top smart home innovations. The GENNY was also awarded a CES Best of Innovation Award in 2019.
Genny is a "water-from-air" system for homes or offices. Use of the system does away with the need for bottled water, helping cut back on plastic use, the firm said in a statement announcing the win.
Because GENNY creates water from air, which is an unending resource, the liquid is always available on demand, the company said. In addition, the water produced by the machine is of higher quality than that which runs through the filtration systems that are attached to municipal water lines, and the product also eliminates concerns of corroded water pipes that could lead to higher-than-normal levels of lead in drinking water, the statement said.
Watergen's GENNY also works as a home air purifier, circulating clean air back into the room as part of the water generation process, the company said.
A synagogue in Alexandria, Egypt, is set to reopen Friday following the completion of multi-million-dollar renovations of the almost two-century-old building, an Egyptian Antiquities Ministry official said.
The Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue is one of two remaining Jewish houses of worship in the city that was once home to a thriving Jewish community.
The heads of the Alexandria and Cairo Jewish communities are expected to attend the opening, according to Egypt's Assistant Minister of Antiquities for Engineering Affairs Hisham Samir.
Egyptian Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani, some 25 diplomats and others are also slated to attend the synagogue's reopening, Samir told al-Masry al-Youm, a privately owned Egyptian daily, in an article published on Tuesday.
Lior Haiat, a spokesman of the Foreign Ministry, said in a phone call that while Israeli diplomats would not be at the synagogue on Friday, they would take part in another event marking its reopening later in 2020.
Eliyahu Hanavi was once home to an estimated 30,000-40,000 Jews. Its current structure was erected in the 1850s, after the original building, which dated back to the 1300s, was badly damaged in the late 18th century, during a French invasion of Egypt. With room for approximately 700 worshipers, it is the larger of the two synagogues remaining in the city.
When archaeologists digging in the ruins of an ancient northern town found a few broken pots in the remains of one building last year, they didn't pay them much attention at first.
But researchers were astonished when a closer review of the clay vessels from Abel Beth Maacah revealed that one of them bore an inscription in ancient Hebrew, Haaretz reported Thursday.
In fact, the single word was a nametag of sorts. On the jar, believed to be a wine vessel, was simply written: "LeBenayau," meaning "Belongs to Benayau."
But that single word could lead experts to rethink their views on the territory of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, according to the report.
Abel Beth Maacah, mentioned in the bible, is located just south of Israel's border with Lebanon, near the modern-day town of Metula. Benayau is a Hebrew name analogous to the modern Benayahu. But while the pot is believed to be from the 10th-9th century BCE, the Kingdom of Israel had not previously been thought to stretch so far north during that period.
Hunters - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Inspired by true events, HUNTERS follows a diverse band of Nazi Hunters in 1977 New York City who discover that hundreds of escaped Nazis are living in America. And so, they do what any bad-ass vigilante squad would do: they set out on a bloody quest for revenge and justice. But they soon discover a far-reaching conspiracy and must race against time to thwart the Nazis' new genocidal plans.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Imad Mughniyeh, Qassem Suleimani and Hassan Nasrallah
Al Manar (English), Hezbollah's media outlet, says:
Representative of Hamas resistance movement in Lebanon Ahmad Abdu Hadi revealed that Hezbollah top commander Hajj Imad Mughniyeh and Commander of IRGC's Quds Force General Qassem Suleimani had visited Gaza repeatedly and contributed to resistance actions against the Zionist entity in the coastal enclave.
"There are 360-kilometer underground tunnels in Gaza. The idea of these tunnels was introduced by two men: the first was Imad Mughniyeh, while the second was Qassem Suleimani," Abdul Hadi said in a meeting with journalists on Wednesday.
Martyrs Suleimani and Mughniyeh went repeatedly to Gaza and contributed to the defensive plans by the resistance factions in the besieged strip, Abdul Hadi added.
"Thanks to Suelimani and Mughniyeh the resistance managed to have and produce Kornet rockets and anti-aircraft rockets as well as missiles equipped by three warheads that are capable to reach Tel Aviv."
Yet another reason to pass out the candy.
(h/t @iTiIL972)
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If Trump's reality-based policies succeed, he will dismantle their foreign policy legacy. All their protestations of wisdom, all their fancy resumes and titles as former senior officials will lose their allure and market value.
Since Pompeo's statement regarding the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria related to an issue which, while critical, is less in the headlines today than it was under Obama, aside from a few peremptory condemnations, the foreign policy aristocrats ignored it. As they saw it, once they return to power and start working with an Israeli government led by someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the anti-Israel phony narrative will be restored to its rightful place as the foundation of US policy.
The Iran story is different. Days before the drone strike that killed him, Soleimani tried to re-enact the 1979 "student" takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran with "protesters" in Baghdad. But this time it didn't work. And Soleimani paid with his life for his failure. Iran's half-hearted, failed missile attack against US forces in Iraq showed that the Iranian regime is terrified of Trump and their reversal of fortune.
Trump's policies expose the mendacity and rank insanity of his predecessors' policies towards Iran and Israel. Since Obama's policies were particularly radical, divorced from reality and devastating, Trump has reasonably singled them out for particular rebuke and condemnation. Among other things, reasonably, Trump said the missiles Iran shot at US forces in Iraq were paid for by the 150 billion dollars in sanctions relief and 1.8 billion dollars in cash that flowed to the coffers of the IRGC through the 2015 nuclear agreement.
Rather than keep quiet as their signature policy was exposed as a strategic disaster, Obama administration officials and their supporters in Congress and the media went into very public paroxysms of rage. Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser and chief propagandist, who sold the nuclear deal to a credulous and eager media, said Trump's move would lead to war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the US strike against Soleimani was "disproportionate," hinting it was a war crime to kill the terrorist who had just ordered the seizure of a US Embassy. She scheduled a Congressional session to curb Trump's power to confront Iranian aggression and nuclear proliferation.
On cue, a group of psychiatrists wrote an open letter to Congress insisting that Trump is crazy and must be restrained. (The same group has written several nearly identical letters since Trump took office.)
To protect and preserve their 40-year old delusion-based policy, Trump's domestic opponents are effectively supporting the Iranian regime against the United States. And as they see it, they have no choice. They are in a race against time. The more successful Trump's reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power. Given the stakes, we can assume that their attempts to clip Trump's wings and debase him will increase in intensity, churlishness and irrationality as time goes by and as his successes mount.
Those who said there will be war may not have realized there already was war. This doesn't mean killing Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was good. It almost certainly wasn't. Iran quickly retaliated by targeting two American military bases in Iraq and may find new ways to escalate, but Iran had already been escalating. The regime of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, with its Iranian patrons, led by Soleimani, has been waging a brutal assault on Syrians for more than eight years. War, in short, has been happening—costing hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians their lives—since long before Donald Trump ordered the drone strike against Soleimani.
In the aftermath of the strike, critics of the Trump administration's foreign policy, particularly on the left, have described the move as one more rash American intervention that's sure to further destabilize the region. Yet this formulation gives U.S. policy, for all its flaws, too much credit. Not everything is America's fault; others are sometimes to blame; and no one, not even the weaker parties, are devoid of agency or freed of responsibility. The burden of de-escalation does not fall entirely on the United States; Iran, too, can choose to de-escalate.
There is also the problem of Trump himself. Because killing Soleimani was very much his decision—reflecting the impulsiveness and disarray a decision by him implies—it seems fair to assume that one's view of the president will affect how one interprets the fallout from Soleimani's killing. Correcting for subconscious bias isn't easy, but at the very least, observers should be aware of the Trump effect.
Middle East experts, and particularly those from the region, have tended to be less alarmist than most other commentators. These experts are likely to be less fixated on Trump himself and less likely to put the United States at the center of their analysis. And they are more likely to be aware of the sheer scale of brutality, mass murder, and sectarian cleansing that Soleimani helped orchestrate. Soleimani wasn't just another bad guy. He was one of the region's worst. (Yet another humanitarian catastrophe has been unfolding in Syria, but it has garnered little attention. The Assad regime, with crucial military support from Iran and Russia, has been bombing Idlib province. More than 200,000 Syrians have already fled, and hundreds of thousands more could be forced from their homes.)
It is not an overstatement to say that Qassem Soleimani "haunted" the Arab world. As Kim Ghattas wrote here in The Atlantic, "Soleimani was so central to almost every regional event in the past two decades that even people who hate him can't believe he could die." It is a rich irony that as Democrats portrayed the strike as one of the worst foreign-policy blunders of the Trump presidency, a significant number of Syrians and Iraqis rejoiced—one of the very few times they have reacted positively to something, anything, that the United States has done. Their interests, of course, are not the same as Americans', but there should at the very least be an effort to understand why they might have celebrated.
It would be outrageous if:
🇸🇦 Israel launched a "Mecca Force" to conquer Arabia 🇮🇹 Turkey launched a "Vatican Force" to conquer Italy 🇮🇳 France launched a "Sapta Puri Force" to conquer India
But the world's ok with:
🇮🇱 Iran trying to conquer Israel with their "Jerusalem Force"
A few hours into the new year, pro-Assad forces targeted a school in southern Idlib with a cluster bomb. The bombing took place at 11am when it was clear the school would have been busy. Five children were killed. Two of those who died were just six years old; the oldest child victim was only thirteen. Four adults were also killed. I will forever be haunted by the faces of Yahya and Hour, the innocent six-year-olds who were amongst the child victims who attended – and died at – the school run by the organisation I work for.
This isn't the first time one of our schools has been destroyed. In fact, six of our schools have been hit in as many months in Syria. Make no mistake: this is a clear co-ordinated bombing campaign against children.
Yet with the Syrian civil war entering its ninth year, the reaction to these dreadful, evil crimes is muted. Instead, the outrage appears to be directed elsewhere.
Two days after the New Year's Day attack in Syria, Iran's Quassem Soleimani was killed by a US airstrike near Baghdad airport. Many of my friends were furious. But why?
Were they concerned about the impact it would have on the region? No, they had never heard the name Soleimani until news of his death broke.
They knew little of his influence in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and further afield. Instead, quite simply, they were furious because his death resulted from a decision made by Donald Trump. Trump is bad and therefore this was bad, the logic seemed to be. Few paid heed to the crimes against humanity Soleimani is accused of. Soon, many of my Facebook friends had turned into foreign policy experts queuing up to predict that "WWIII" was inevitable. It was all Trump's fault, they said. In the aftermath of Iran's retaliation against US airbases, this fervour has only increased.
The United States learned the "kindergarten lesson" this week, something Israel has sharpened and perfected over the years in the way it formulates policy.
It goes something like this: if Hamas fires a rocket but it doesn't hurt anyone then there is no reason to retaliate aggressively.
What's the "kindergarten lesson?" Since everyone knows that if a rocket were to hit a kindergarten in Sderot, Kfar Aza or somewhere else along the southern border and cause extensive casualties, Israel would have no choice but to launch a large-scale military offensive. As long as that doesn't happen though, Israel doesn't have to.
The problem is that this is no way to formulate policy. If rocket fire is a threat, then it needs to be dealt with whether the rockets hit and hurt someone or don't. A government shouldn't wait for people to be killed before dealing with a threat. That is not a strategy.
A variation of this played out on Wednesday morning, when Iran fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at bases that house US soldiers in Iraq.
Iran is pulling back from its latest confrontation with the U.S. because it fears President Donald Trump, veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari wrote on the Mako news site on Thursday.
He said Iran was "taking a step back or maybe just a time out" because Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was "scared of Trump."
Yaari said, "Iran has instructed Shi'a militias in Iraq not to make good on their threats for now to launch a terror campaign against the 5,000 American soldiers in the country."
Even Kataib Hezbollah, the pro-Iran group whose leader was killed along with Soleimani, was "now calling for 'de-escalation' instead of revenge."
"In short: the roar of threats being heard from Tehran should be heard without too much anxiety. When the Iranians talk about 80 American dead as a result of the missile fire, they know very well that they are clinging to lies."
Hosted by Abe Greenwald, Christine Rosen, John Podhoretz, Noah Rothman Trump seems to have taken Iran's calibrated response to the U.S. strike that took out Qasem Soleimani as an opportunity to take the temperature down in the region. Will cooler heads prevail? And does the Democratic narrative, which suggests that Trump is itching for a war with Iran, make any sense?
The U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone strike that eliminated top Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani on Jan. 3 was a measured, timely, and appropriate combat action.
It occurred after 18 months of U.S. restraint in the face of a series of increasingly provocative Iranian violations of international law, including 11 Hezbollah Brigade attacks on facilities occupied by U.S. personnel who were conducting security training for Iraq's military.
What comes next? To deter Iran, its leaders need to believe the U.S. will use its power. This is akin to pushing back on a bully. At some point, a counteroffensive is required, or the abuse will continue.
Some on the national stage are pandering fear of potential Iranian reaction to Soleimani's death. The fear of possible consequences should not outweigh the logic that forceful action is sometimes necessary to defend U.S. and allied personnel and to shore up the value of deterrence.
The reality is that taking no action would have increased the odds for further Iranian aggression. Peace through strength is key to deterring open conflict with Iran - projecting fear or appeasement is not.
An extensive interview with Maj.-Gen. Qasem Soleimani appeared in English on the official Khamenei.ir website on Oct. 1, 2019. It raised the question of whether Iran's leadership was grooming Soleimani for higher office, possibly as a candidate for president.
Bragging of his presence in Lebanon throughout the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Soleimani described working with Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah and military commander Imad Mughniyeh. He claimed that the war ended in "a great victory for Hizbullah. In fact, it was not only a victory in that war, but a turning point and an end to the fear of Israeli aggression toward Lebanon."
Soon after the interview, on Oct. 7, Soleimani told a conference of senior IRGC officers: "The IRGC has expanded the resistance in terms of both quantity and quality. It has expanded the resistance from a geographical territory of 2,000 sq. km. in southern Lebanon to a territory of half-a-million sq. km....The IRGC has created territorial continuity for [the different parts] of the resistance. It has connected Iran to Iraq, Iraq to Syria, and Syria to Lebanon."
Soleimani viewed events through the lens of a preordained divine plan guided by the ultimate authority of Iran's religious leadership. This leaves only so much room for accommodation to political realities.
The Iranian missile attacks on Ain al-Asad and Erbil in Iraq on Jan. 8 indicate that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has chosen to de-escalate and draw a line under the episode of the killing of Qasem Soleimani.
Finding Americans and killing them in either Iraq or Syria does not present a problem for the Iranians, given their known capabilities. But an attack of sufficient magnitude to settle the account over Soleimani would almost certainly invite further, wider American retribution. This could descend into a direct clash between the U.S. and Iran, which Iran could not possibly win, and which could mean the destruction of much that Iran has gained in the region over the last decade.
The latest round of hostilities indicates that those who helm the Iranian bid for regional hegemony are aware of their limitations in the military arena, are not suicidal, and are capable of formulating policy in line with the prevailing power realities.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin announced President Donald Trump's administration placed sanctions on Iran's textiles, mining, and iron ore sectors.
The sanctions come after Iran attacked two Iraqi military bases with American troops.
Mnuchin stated that the administration chose the eight "senior Iranian officials for their involvement and complicity in Tuesday's ballistic missile strikes."
The eight Iranian officials include " Ali Shamkhani, the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council; Mohammad Reza Ashtiani, the Deputy Chief of Staff of Iranian armed forces; and Gholamreza Soleimani, the head of the Basij militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC)."
Concern mounted Thursday in Iran over the fate of the Islamic republic's only woman to have won an Olympic medal, who is believed to want to settle in The Netherlands.
Kimia Alizadeh clinched a taekwondo bronze medal at the Rio Olympics in 2016, drawing praise from her compatriots including the country's President Hassan Rouhani and even conservatives in the Islamic Republic.
In keeping with Iran's strict Muslim custom, Alizadeh, then 18, competed wearing a head scarf over her taekwondo uniform and protective gear.
There were high hopes she would compete at the Tokyo Olympics later this year and bring home another medal, but it appears this is not to be.
The semi-official ISNA news agency on Thursday carried a report saying: "Shock for Iran's Taekwondo. Kimia Alizadeh has emigrated to The Netherlands."
According to ISNA, the coach of the women's national team said that Alizadeh is suffering from an injury.
It said Alizadeh did not show up for trials ahead of the Tokyo Games.
The alert came to the White House shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, a flash message from American spy agencies warning that an Iranian attack on American troops was almost certain. Three hours later, a hail of ballistic missiles launched from Iran crashed into two bases in Iraq, including Al Asad, where 1,000 American troops are stationed. The missiles destroyed evacuated aircraft hangars.
Spy satellites had been tracking the movements of Iran's arsenal of missile launchers, and communications among Iranian military leaders were intercepted by the National Security Agency. No Patriot antimissile systems protected Al Asad base. They had been deployed to other countries in the Middle East deemed more susceptible to Iranian missile attacks.
In the days before Gen. Soleimani's death, CIA director Gina Haspel had advised President Trump that the threat the Iranian general presented was greater than the threat of Iran's response if he was killed, according to U.S. officials. Indeed, Haspel had predicted the most likely response would be a missile strike from Iran on bases where American troops were deployed.
Though Haspel took no formal position about whether to kill Soleimani, officials who heard her analysis came away with the clear view that the CIA believed that killing him would improve - not weaken - security in the Middle East.
Around 5:30 p.m. in Washington, the Pentagon detected the first of 16 short- and medium-range Fateh 110 and Shahab missiles, fired from three locations in Iran. At Al Asad they hit a Black Hawk helicopter and a reconnaissance drone, along with parts of the air traffic control tower. A senior American military official dismissed the idea that Iran had intentionally avoided killing American troops.
Video obtained and verified by The New York Times on Thursday appears to show an Iranian missile hitting a plane near Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran, the same area where a Ukrainian passenger plane went down earlier this week.
"A small explosion occurred when a missile hit the plane, but the plane did not explode," The New York Times reported. "The jet continued flying for several minutes and turned back toward the airport, The Times has determined. The plane flew toward the airport ablaze before it exploded and crashed quickly, other videos verified by The Times showed."
All 176 people on board the plane were killed in the crash.
BREAKING: New video appears to show missile hitting Flight 752 before it crashed near Tehran, killing 176 people pic.twitter.com/Jb3Cy3OgUT
The development comes after a Ukrainian passenger plane, which presumably is the plane shown in The Times video, crashed over Tehran on Tuesday night after Iran fired numerous missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq.
Iran on Friday denied Western allegations a Ukrainian jetliner that crashed outside Tehran was brought down by an Iranian missile and called on the US and Canada to share any information they have on the crash, which killed all 176 people on board.
Western leaders said the plane appeared to have been unintentionally hit by a surface-to-air missile near Tehran, just hours after Iran launched a series of ballistic missiles at two US bases in Iraq to avenge the killing of its top general in an American airstrike last week.
"What is obvious for us, and what we can say with certainty, is that no missile hit the plane," Abedzadeh, head of Iran's national aviation department, told a press conference.
"If they are really sure, they should come and show their findings to the world" in accordance with international standards, he added.
Hassan Rezaeifar, the head of Iranian investigation team on Friday told the same press conference that recovering data from the black box flight recorders could take more than a month and that the entire investigation could stretch into next year.
He also said Iran may request help from international experts if it is not able to extract the flight recordings.
The ballistic missile attack on the bases in Iraq caused no casualties, raising hopes that the standoff over the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani would end relatively peacefully, though Iran has sent mixed signals over whether its retaliation is complete.
Iran has scrubbed the crash site of the civilian jet they downed. Meanwhile they're putting on a show of inviting outside parties to conduct an investigation of the site they've already scrubbed. https://t.co/5NlcWu8jz1
Just hours before a Ukrainian plane was shot down Wednesday over Iran, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a no-fly order over Iran and Iraq, potentially saving scores of American lives.
A Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) warning of potential hazards along flight routes in the war-torn region was first issued Tuesday evening by the FAA, just before a Ukrainian plane crashed near Tehran. U.S. officials believe Iran may have mistakenly shot down the plane in its airspace as tensions with the United States hit new levels.
"Our NOTAMs were published roughly three hours before the accident," an FAA spokesman confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon Thursday.
The no-fly order outlined "flight restrictions that prohibit U.S. civil aviation operators from operating in the airspace over Iraq, Iran, and the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman."
"The FAA will continue closely monitoring events in the Middle East," the NOTAM said. "We continue coordinating with our national security partners and sharing information with U.S. air carriers and foreign civil aviation authorities."
While the FAA official would not "speculate on what effect [the notice] might have had," one senior congressional official who works on airline issues told the Free Beacon that the order "may well have saved American lives."
Neither Soleimani nor the soldiers were registered on the passenger manifesto, according to a Cham Wings airline employee who described the scene of their departure from the Syrian capital to Reuters. Soleimani avoided using his private plane because of rising concerns about his own security, said an Iraqi security source with knowledge of Soleimani's security arrangements.
The passenger flight would be Soleimani's last. Rockets fired from a U.S. drone killed him as he left the Baghdad airport in a convoy of two armored vehicles. Also killed was the man who met him at the airport: Abu Mahdi Muhandis, deputy head of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the Iraqi government's umbrella group for the country's militias.
The Iraqi investigation into the strikes that killed the two men on Jan. 3 started minutes after the U.S. strike, two Iraqi security officials told Reuters. National Security agents sealed off the airport and prevented dozens of security staff from leaving, including police, passport officers and intelligence agents.
Investigators have focused on how suspected informants inside the Damascus and Baghdad airports collaborated with the U.S. military to help track and pinpoint Soleimani's position, according to Reuters interviews with two security officials with direct knowledge of Iraq's investigation, two Baghdad airport employees, two police officials and two employees of Syria's Cham Wings Airlines, a private commercial airline headquartered in Damascus.
One day after the Iranian missile strike against U.S. military bases in Iraq, Iraqi media reported that caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi appears to be attempting, along with the support of pro-Iran lawmakers, to win the parliament's blessings to stay in his position, or to head the upcoming government.
Abdul-Mahdi, the son of a Shi'ite cleric who had served as a minister in Iraq's monarchy, announced his resignation on November 3, 2019, after Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, urged legislators to withdraw support for the government over its use of violence against Iraqi protesters.
However, reports in Iraqi media[1] quote a lawmaker from the Al-Bena' bloc, who said that "many Shi'ite MPs are in favor of reinstating Adel Abdul-Mahdi to form the new government". The Al-Bena' bloc is a pro-Iran coalition that claims to be the largest parliamentary bloc, and is therefore entitled to select a new premier according to the Iraqi Constitution.
"Political blocs have begun to accept the idea of reinstating the resigned prime minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi to form the new government," MP Salem Al-Tufayli of Al-Bena' bloc said on January 9.
Al-Tufayli also said that "this scenario surfaced after the prime minister showed up in the parliament and opposed the presence of U.S. forces," in reference to Abdul-Mahdi's speech to the parliament about ending the U.S. military presence in Iraq following the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi has told the US secretary of state to send a delegation to Iraq tasked with formulating the mechanism for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, according to a statement released Friday.
The statement, from the office of the Iraqi caretaker prime minister, said the request came in a telephone call between Abdul-Mahdi and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday night. It says Pompeo called the Iraqi premier.
Abdul-Mahdi's comments to Pompeo suggests he was standing by his previous statements that US troops should leave Iraq despite recent signals toward de-escalation between Tehran and Washington following the tit-for-tat attacks that brought Iraq to the brink of a proxy war.
Abdul-Mahdi confirmed Tuesday that he had received what the US said was a draft letter describing steps its military would take to "move out" of Iraq.
The Pentagon had said an unsigned draft version of the letter had been mistakenly sent, but the Iraqi premier disputed that claim.
An imam in Michigan eulogized Qassem Soleimani, praising him for propping up the Assad regime against what he called efforts by the United States and the "Zionists" to destabilize Syria.
Soleimani, who was killed in Baghdad on January 3 in an American airstrike, oversaw Iran's support for militias and terror groups in his capacity as head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Quds Force. He has been blamed by the US for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers during the Iraq War.
In a sermon following Soleimani's death that same day, Sheikh Ibrahim Kazerooni of Dearborn, Michigan, recited a prayer of mourning for Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi paramilitary commander who was also killed in the strike
"Who was this general? His presence brought hope to the marginalized and to those who were afraid, and it brought hatred and fear to the enemies of Islam – particularly the United States," Kazerooni said of Soleimani.
"He was instrumental in keeping the government in Syria intact against all attempts and the billions of dollars that were spent on arms and guidance that were given by the United States, Zionists, and everybody else [in order] to destabilize and turn Syria into a dysfunctional state," he added, according to a transcript of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
European foreign affairs ministers and the NATO secretary general are gathering in Brussels for an emergency meeting during which they are expected to reiterate their support for the nuclear deal brokered with Iran.
Despite calls from US President Donald Trump to break away from the deal, which is aimed at preventing Iran from getting atomic weapons, the European Union remains committed to the treaty amid an escalation of tensions in the region.
Iran struck the deal in 2015 with the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Russia and China. It has, however, been damaged by Trump's decision to unilaterally abandon it in 2018, triggering sanctions that have badly hurt Iran's economy.
Iran has gradually rolled back its commitment to the accord and the recent exchange of hostilities between Iran and the US has dealt further blows to the pact.
In an interview that aired earlier this week, firebrand Al Jazeera presenter Faisal al-Qassem attacked his guest, an Iranian diplomat and journalist, and questioned the Islamic Republic's fixation on supposedly liberating Jerusalem from Israel, while appearing to criticize the competence of Iran in its proxy activities throughout the Middle East.
Qassem, who hosts a show in which he presents opposing views on issues, and who often acts as devil's advocate with his subjects, hosted Amir Mousawi, who has served as Iran's cultural attaché in Brussels, Sudan and Algeria and is a frequent guest on panels as a defender of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
The host ridiculed Iran's vow of revenge against the US and Israel for Washington's killing of top general Qassem Soleimani, noting Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's promise in 2008 to avenge the death of top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh (reportedly killed in a joint Israel-US operation in Damascus).
"What did Nasrallah do? He poured two buckets of water on Israel," Qassem said.
Mousawi began explaining that Iran's response would come, while noting that "the abilities of the resistance axis are not [equal to] those of the big devil and its collaborators," a reference to the US and its allies.
Qassem continued his attack against Iran's bluster, and its frequent vow to liberate Jerusalem from the Jewish state.
"You want to liberate Jerusalem, right? And what will you do with Jerusalem? Who will you join Jerusalem with?" he said.
"Will you join Jerusalem, after its liberation, with Baghdad, which is characterized by the world — these are not my words — as the world's dirtiest capital? Will you join it with Beirut, which has become the Middle East's biggest dump? Will you join it with Damascus whose residents are starving? Will you join it with the Houthi [rebels in] Sanaa?"
Democrats on Soleimani's death: "He was a murderer and terrorist BUT" | SUPERcuts! #732
Democrats point out Iranian general Qassem Soleimani was a terrorist who killed Americans, but .... The Washington Free Beacon is a privately owned, for-profit online newspaper dedicated to uncovering the stories that the powers that be hope will never see the light of day.
Democrat Rep. Pramila Jayapal defends Iran, says "had we not assassinated Gen. Soleimani…we would be in a safer place." pic.twitter.com/zB1md8HLrq
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg declined to condemn our enemies for killing a plane-load of civilians and instead blamed "an unnecessary and unwanted military tit for tat." Democratic Representative Jackie Speier called the tragedy "collateral damage from the actions that have been taken in a provocative way by the President of the United States." Various members of the media said that the plane had been caught in the "crossfire" between Iran and the US. Canadian media personalities called it an "unintended consequence" of Trump's actions. Seth Abramson, never willing to a lose a Who's The Biggest Hack contest, pointed the finger at both Trump and Sean Hannity, suggesting that the Iranian government may have been spooked by the cable news host's broadcast on the night of the missile launch, prompting them to shoot down a plane in panic.
This is all nonsense, obviously. There was no "crossfire" because the United States was not returning fire. Trump has expressly declined to participate in a "military tit for tat," as Buttigieg calls it. Trump ordered the strike on Soleimani because he was a dangerous terrorist who had killed many Americans and had, just days earlier, staged an assault on our embassy. The justified and lawful killing of war criminal in a war zone in Iraq on January 3 clearly did not cause a plane in Iran to crash on January 8. If Iran is too incompetent or reckless to launch missiles without running them into passenger airlines, the fault lies completely and totally with them. The missile strike was nothing but a face-saving gesture in the first place. That they blew up 176 civilians in an effort to soothe their bruised ego is only a further indictment of our enemy, not us.
I shouldn't need to explain this, and I won't. The media understands it. So do the Democrats. But they are both possessed of a pathological need to hate Trump and blame America at all costs and under all circumstances. Normally these antics can be shrugged off. But not this time. They are providing PR cover to a foreign enemy that has murdered an American, attacked our embassy, and now blown up a commercial aircraft, all in the span of a month. This is despicable bordering on treasonous. And it further demonstrates why Democrats can never be given control of the government. They do not have the interests of Americans at heart. They do not love our country. And we cannot trust them.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D., Calif.) on Thursday said that Iran's shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner was collateral damage from President Donald Trump's killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.
"If what is being projected is true, this is yet another example of collateral damage from the actions that have been taken in a provocative way by the president of the United States," Speier told CNN.
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer had asked Speier if she believed Iran confused the commercial flight for a U.S. military plane, suggesting that "it certainly sounds like it was a mistake by the Iranians." Speier did not mention Iran in her response, only implicating Trump in the downed flight.
U.S. officials are confident the crash, which resulted in the deaths of all 176 people on board, was caused by an Iranian missile, possibly fired accidentally. The plane was shot down just hours after Iran launched missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq.
Kerry would have us believe that the JCPOA contained rather than enabled Iran. In response to this ludicrous and reckless contention, I must become a whistleblower. I know for a fact that the Obama admin sent letters - plural - directly to Soleimani. https://t.co/yY3NPCZ7Q6
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) cried "racism" on Thursday after a member of Congress accused her and her far-left cohorts of being Ayatollah sympathizers and spreading Iranian propaganda.
Rep. John Rutherford (R-FL) called out far-left Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) on Wednesday after Jayapal spread Iranian propaganda during a press conference, falsely calling the drone strike on Qasem Soleimani an "assassination."
"President Trump recklessly assassinated Qasem Soleimani," Jayapal falsely claimed. "He had no evidence of an imminent threat or attack."
In an interview with The Daily Wire on Thursday, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said that U.S. officials withheld sensitive information about the U.S. military operation to take out Soleimani from being released to members of Congress because they were apparently concerned that certain members of Congress would leak the information to the news media or to America's enemies.
Rutherford responded to Jayapal's comments by writing on Twitter: "I was in the same briefing as you, @RepJayapal, and this is absolutely false. You and your squad of Ayatollah sympathizers are spreading propaganda that divides our nation and strengthens our enemies. #Iran"
Standing behind Jayapal was Ocasio-Cortez, who responded, "I find it highly amusing that my coworkers angrily yell stuff like this and then clutch their pearls and cry when they are called out for their racism."
Rutherford responded, "It's honestly pretty simple. @realDonaldTrump eliminated a dangerous terrorist. If you don't want to be called an Ayatollah sympathizer, don't sympathize with the Ayatollah."
Trump addressed the nation the morning after Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at two bases in Iraq where U.S. service members are stationed. He also announced the U.S. would impose new "powerful" sanctions against Iran until "Iran changes its behavior."
"This makes no sense. Sanctions are economic warfare," Omar also tweeted after Trump's address. "They have already caused medical shortages and countless deaths in Iran. You cannot claim to want deescalation and then announce new sanctions with no clear goal. This is not a measured response!"
Meanwhile, Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. -- the first two Muslim women to be elected to Congress -- have come out in support of the BDS movement since they were first sworn into Congress last January following the 2018 midterm elections. Tlaib is Palestinian-American, whereas Omar fled the Somali Civil War in 1991 and spent four years at a Kenyan refugee camp before immigrating to the U.S. in 1995. She later became a U.S. citizen.
Critics on social media said Omar's positions regarding Iran and Israel didn't add up.
"Ilhan Omar views sanctions on terror regimes to be 'economic warfare' but supports them when aimed at the world's only Jewish state. Must just be a coincidence," one Twitter user quipped in response to Omar's tweet.
"Ilhan Omar has now decried sanctions on the Castros in Cuba, Maduro in Venezuela, and the Ayatollah in Iran," Michael Abrams, a GOP communications director, wrote. "At the same time, she's the leading voice in Congress on sanctioning the Jewish people in the world's only Jewish state. Wonder why."
"Yes, constitutionally intl boycotts & sanctions are tools of war and NOT 'free speech.' @IlhanMN should remember that next time she advocates for BDS (Boycott Divestment & Sanctions) against Israel: a US ally," Daniel Pomerantz, an on-air law expert, also chimed in. "We don't fight wars against allies. We do against enemies."
The Democrat-led House of Representative overwhelmingly approved a bipartisan resolution in July opposing the "anti-Semitic" BDS movement aimed at encouraging a boycott against the longtime U.S. ally. Omar, Tlaib and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., were among the 16 Democrats who voted against the resolution.
After the #US imposed additional economic sanctions on Iran, Congresswoman @IlhanMN condemned the decision, tweeting that "sanctions are economic warfare."
Which is an interesting point, given that Omar is one of the #BDS movement's biggest supporters... pic.twitter.com/cEIYZCHyBS
On the menu today: In light of the recent military tensions with Iran, it's worth looking back at how the major U.S. and other Western media covered the attack on the Saudi Arabian oil facilities in September, and how they consistently suggested the administration's claims were flimsy and that Iranian denials were worth keeping in mind; some terrific reporting on how the administration responded to intelligence that Iran was planning a missile attack; and Senator Mike Lee just wants a little consultation that's consistent with the Constitution.
How the Media Botched Their Coverage of Iran's Attack on Saudi Arabia in September Foreign affairs are covered and discussed poorly in the Western media, and the habits, instincts, and mental framework of those who cover these events work to the benefit of dishonest and authoritarian entities such as the Iranian regime. Let's look back at the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities from this September.
On September 14, 2019, drones attacked two key oil installations inside Saudi Arabia, damaging facilities that process most of the country's crude oil and briefly disrupting world oil supplies. America's intelligence community quickly determined this was an Iranian attack. Despite the Iranian regime's long sponsorship of terror, aggression against its neighbors, and well-established history of lying about all of it, the Western media treated the Tehran's denial of responsibility as sufficiently plausible to doubt claims of U.S. intelligence officials. Few Western media entities came out and outright denied that Iran launched the attacks, but almost none were willing to spotlight the implausibility of the Iranian regime's denials. The net effect was to create a blurry gray area and confusion about who launched the attack, which was exactly what Tehran wanted.
The day of the attack, Secretary Pompeo declared on Twitter, "There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."
"This is such irresponsible simplification, and it's how we get into dumb wars of choice," Senator Chris Murphy, (D., Conn.) said about Pompeo's tweet to ABC News. "The Saudis and Houthis are at war. The Saudis attack the Houthis and the Houthis attack back. Iran is backing the Houthis and has been a bad actor, but it's just not as simple as Houthis [equal] Iran."
On September 15, a tweet from Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, claimed, "having failed at 'max pressure,' Secretary Pompeo's turning to 'max deceit.' US & its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will lead to military victory. Blaming Iran won't end disaster." That denial was all it took to get the Western news media to treat the U.S. claims about the attack with a consistently skeptical tone.
The (AMERICAN!) Media Praises Iran & Soleimani For 3 Minutes Straight
The mainstream media and Democrats praise Iran and mass-genocider Qassem Soleimani for 3 minutes straight.
The Nation should let us know where Obama, who ordered hundreds of drone strikes on nations where we were not at war- killing many civilians- falls into their ranking of "blood on his hands" https://t.co/3cDB5eGsne
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