The Political Rise of Ultra-Orthodox Jews Shakes Israel's Sense of Identity

This is interesting.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Fast-growing group of religious conservatives allies with Netanyahu to take on Supreme Court, spawning mass protest movement; mandatory military service emerges as a key issue":

BNEI BRAK, Israel—Since Israel’s founding, mandatory military service for Jewish Israelis has been widely embraced as a unifying force in a divided society.

Now the issue threatens to tear the country apart. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews, a fast-growing and potent political bloc, have long shunned military duty along with other aspects of secular society. Their effort to obtain a permanent exemption from service has repeatedly been foiled by Israel’s Supreme Court. Allied with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, they are pushing for a judicial overhaul to weaken the court.

The first part of the overhaul, which sparked mass protests that have shaken Israel for 28 straight weeks, is expected to be ratified by the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, as early as Sunday.

The clash goes to the heart of Israel’s inherent identity issue: Is it a modern liberal democracy or a society defined by religion? Many secular Israelis see the judicial reforms as a step toward increasing the power of people who would use religion to roll back fundamental civil rights.

“Secular society wants a full modern state,” said Gilad Malach, a scholar with the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. “The ultra-Orthodox aim is to have a strong religious society.”

Ultra-Orthodox Jews such as Yehoshua Menuchin, who at 40 has a wife, six sons and no steady job, refer to themselves as Haredim, meaning those who tremble before God. Many Haredi men don’t work regularly, instead choosing to study holy texts in religious seminaries called yeshivas. They argue that they contribute to the state in their own way by preserving Jewish tradition and providing divine protection for Israel.

“I don’t think we are making any less of a sacrifice,” Menuchin said. “I’ve passed on the pleasures of this world. I’ve given up on restaurants, on the cinema, on going to clubs. I’ve given up many things in my life.”

One element of Israeli society Menuchin and many other Haredim avoid is mandatory military service, a rite of passage in mainstream Israeli society. Most Jewish men and women spend two to three years in the army beginning at the age of 18. Friendships made in the army can also serve as the basis for professional connections after military life.

The Israeli Supreme Court has twice struck down legislation aimed at formally exempting Haredim from the draft, most recently in 2017 on the grounds that it created unequal treatment of citizens. The court has permitted temporary exemptions so that the government can find a solution.

Those decisions exacerbated friction between religious conservatives and the Supreme Court, which has long served as a strong defender of individual liberties, upholding the rights of Israel’s Arab citizens, women and LGBTQ people.

The Haredim now have the political heft to fight back. Their two political parties—one representing Jews of European descent and the other Jews from the greater Middle East—make up the second-largest bloc in the current government after Likud, with 18 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. They are key to Netanyahu’s grip on power, since his alliance controls just 64 seats in total. They have often threatened to leave the coalition if their various demands aren’t met.

The Haredi bloc in the Knesset hopes to enact legislation that would permit separating men and women in some public places. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu called the Supreme Court “the most activist judicial court on the planet,” and said that “there is a growing understanding in the Israeli public that there’s a need for judicial reform.” Still, he says he has aimed to moderate several of the original proposals and instead “proceed in a measured way.”

The government wants to overhaul the system and hand more power to elected officials. Proposals include striking the court’s ability to overturn government decisions and giving lawmakers a majority say on the committee that picks new judges.

The backlash from secular Israelis and some moderate religious Jews has been intense.

In March, Ron Scherf, a 51-year-old reserve lieutenant colonel, helped organize a march through Bnei Brak, Israel’s largest Haredi city. Protesters carried signs urging Haredim to join the military. Some Haredim dropped fliers on protesters saying they would never serve in an “apostate” army.”

“We really believe there needs to be a new contract in Israel between the secular and Haredim,” Scherf said. “I don’t see a way that Israel can exist as a liberal, prosperous and strong country if the current situation doesn’t change.”

“We are getting close to a major clash,” counters Yisrael Cohen, a popular Haredi media figure. “If no side takes responsibility, it won’t end up in a good place.”

Military service aside, many in Israel believe the Haredi way of life represents a direct threat to the future prosperity of the country. About half of Haredi men don’t work. Instead, they pursue religious studies and live off a combination of their wives’s salaries, charity, government grants and subsidies. With a steadily increasing birthrate that today stands at around 6.5 children per female, compared with around 3.0 for the general population, according to the Israeli central bureau of statistics, the roughly 1.3 million Haredim represent 13.3% of the population. As its fastest-growing segment, they are on pace to be nearly one-third of all Israelis by 2065.

Haredim have used their political power to expand discounts on municipal taxes, subsidies for early child care and rental assistance for large low-income families—benefits that are technically available to all Israelis but that tend to favor Haredim because of their demographic characteristics. They or their yeshivas also enjoy stipends or grants for around 140,000 Haredim men who study full-time, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. The Institute, led by a former centrist politician, found Haredim pay one-third less in taxes than non-Haredi families.

In a letter to Netanyahu in May, over 200 leading Israeli economists warned that a plan to increase funding to Haredi educational institutions that refuse to teach secular subjects, along with the increase in stipends for full-time Torah learners, would transform Israel into a “Third World” economy by leaving Haredi children unprepared for today’s workforce.

The Haredim aim to expand religion in even more areas of public life. Since Netanyahu returned to power last year, they have passed a law allowing hospitals to ban bread products from entering public hospitals over the Jewish holiday of Passover. They have also said they hope to enact legislation that would permit separating men and women in some public places or events frequented by Haredim, something widely recognized by Israeli lawyers as unconstitutional.

Haredim already wield tremendous power over many aspects of public life. They control the Rabbanut, a governmental body that oversees marriage and divorce and determines who is a Jew. The Rabbanut’s long-standing refusal to recognize any non-Orthodox branches of Judaism has been a point of tension, particularly among diaspora Jews. They also have managerial control over prominent Jewish holy sites.

The recent protests in Bnei Brak left Yehoshua Menuchin’s wife, Dvora, unimpressed. “The people who are protesting, they don’t know anything about Judaism,” she said. “They are like babies. If they knew about Judaism, they wouldn’t do this.”

Her neighborhood is crowded, loud and vivacious, with pedestrians—including many children—filling the sidewalks on narrow streets lined with sacred book stores and small eateries selling traditional Eastern European Jewish food such as kugel, gefilte fish and cholent. On each corner and by each bus station stand rows of charity boxes, much of which will end up going to yeshiva students and their families...

Antisemitism Is Rising at Colleges, and Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility

Yes, and it ain't "right-wing" antisemitism.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Some students report being spat upon and harassed, while some campus groups have forced out those who support Israel":

Some college students say they have started hiding their Jewish identity in fear of rising antisemitism. “We have basically been shunned.” https://t.co/ibsI06h6xa

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 14, 2022

Adina Pinsker commutes to Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., to study supply-chain management. She is also active in Hillel International, the nation’s largest collegiate Jewish organization.

When she arrives on campus, she takes an indirect route to class and tucks inside her shirt the silver Star of David she wears around her neck. These are precautions, she said, to avoid harassment from students who dislike Israel, the people who support it, or both.

“We have basically been shunned,” said Ms. Pinsker, who said she has been subject to derogatory remarks about her beliefs.

Ms. Pinsker’s actions are emblematic of rising fear among some Jewish college students around the country, who have begun shrouding their religious identity and political beliefs to avoid growing ostracism and harassment, according to interviews with dozens of students.

College campuses have long hosted heated debates about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But now, students say anti-Jewish antagonism is on the rise: Antisemitic incidents have increased, and a growing number of campus groups bar students who support Israel from speaking or joining.

Hostility, including vandalism, threats and slurs toward Jewish students on college campuses increased more than threefold to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights organization which has tracked reports of such behavior since 2014. The group counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. overall last year, up 34% from 2020 and the highest number in its records dating to 1979.

Students at schools including the University of Vermont, Wellesley College and DePaul University have ejected Jewish students who support Israel from clubs and study groups, according to interviews with affected students.

Students at Tufts University, University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles tried to prevent Jewish classmates from serving in student government or attempted to remove them from positions in student government because of their support of Israel, according to students, administrators and campus news reports.

The uptick in incidents and tension on some campuses comes amid a string of recent high-profile controversies that have drawn renewed attention to antisemitism. This month Twitter suspended the account of rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West—who now goes by the name Ye—after he tweeted to his 32 million followers an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David, weeks after he tweeted: “I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

On campus, students say that stereotypical antisemitic slurs are directed at Jews, but that much of the hostility derives from growing criticism of Israel’s handling of its political and military conflict with Palestinians over land rights. Jewish students say harassment often compounds when criticism of Israel increases.

Most American Jews feel an attachment to Israel, though many are critical of the Israeli government, according to a 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center.

Some of the conflict on campus stems from competing definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and whether they overlap.

Anti-Zionism is a political position distinct from antisemitism, which is a prejudice, said Dylan Saba, an attorney with New York-based Palestine Legal, which works to support the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who advocate for Palestinians. The two are conflated by supporters of Israel to discredit critics, he said.

Condemning Israel may make some Jewish students feel uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it is antisemitic, he said. “All we are asking for is equal rights,” he said...

Bullshit. 

Anti-Zionism is anti-Israel is antisemitic. Full stop. "From the desert to the sea, Palestine will be free" means wiping Israel --- and all its Jewish citizens --- off the face of the map.

It's easy to prove, too. Just walk up to any pro-Palestine student organization --- literally in any college campus in America --- and ask its leaders if they support Hamas. In my experience they will not answer. Not only that, in my case, they'll call the police on you. 

An Open Letter to Roger Waters (and Joe Rogan)

From Doug Ross, "What Really Happened In the Middle East."

Israel's Devastating Capitulation to Hezbollah

From Caroline Glick:

It is almost impossible to grasp the danger of Israel’s present moment. A month before the Knesset elections, the caretaker government led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz is moving full speed ahead with a maritime agreement with an enemy state that it insists will obligate Israel in perpetuity. The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement Israel is concluding with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon will fundamentally alter Israel’s maritime borders, deny the Jewish state tens of billions of dollars, which will go instead to a government controlled by Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion, Hezbollah, and transform Hezbollah and Iran into actors in the eastern Mediterranean.

The deal in question has been under negotiation for more than a decade. In 2010, as the natural gas deposits in the eastern Mediterranean were being rapidly explored and developed by Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Egypt, Israel signed agreements with its neighbors to delineate the boundaries of each state’s EEZ. Since Israel and Lebanon are enemy states, Israel did not negotiate an agreement with Lebanon. Lebanon did however negotiate an agreement with Cyprus, as part of which it drew a line delineating the southern boundary of its maritime waters. Israel accepted the Lebanese line and submitted its maritime economic zone borders to the United Nations on the basis of the Lebanese/Cypriot agreement and the bilateral agreement it had concluded with Cyprus.

Given that Hezbollah rejects Israel’s right to exist, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon surprised no one when it immediately objected to Israel’s map, even though it was based on Lebanon’s own demarcation.

Lebanon demanded 854 square kilometers of Mediterranean waters that formally belonged to Israel. The Lebanese demand included complete control over the massive Qana natural gas field, much of which extends into Israel’s waters. Fred Hoff, who served at the time as the Obama administration’s point man for the eastern Mediterranean, offered a compromise deal which would have given around 55 percent of the area to Lebanon and left 45 percent under Israeli sovereignty. Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon rejected the deal, and there the negotiations stood, more or less, until last July.

In the meantime, Israel began developing the Karish gas field, which by all accounts is located in its EEZ. Karish was scheduled to go online last month, but in July, Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah threatened to attack Karish if Israel began production before reaching a deal with Lebanon. Hezbollah then attacked Karish with four drones, which were intercepted by the Israel Defense Forces.

Rather than retaliate for Hezbollah’s aggression, fearful of Hezbollah, Israel delayed the start of work at Karish, and Biden administration envoy Amos Hochstein swooped into action. As Lebanon expert Tony Badran from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy has copiously documented, the Biden administration is dead set on giving as much money as possible to Lebanon—with full knowledge that money to Lebanon is money to Hezbollah. The administration’s desire to enrich a state dominated by Hezbollah/Iran stems from what Badran and the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran described in May 2021 as its overarching goal of realigning the United States away from its traditional allies—Israel and the Sunni states—and towards Iran.

During his visit to Israel in July, just days after Hezbollah’s drone attacks on Karish, Biden upped U.S. pressure on Israel to conclude a deal with Lebanon and so enable the Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese government to begin raking in billions of dollars in gas revenues from the Qana field. U.S. pressure only increased since then.

Rather than stand up to the administration and oppose a deal that empowers Hezbollah both economically and strategically at Israel’s expense, the Lapid-Gantz government caved. As head of the caretaker government, Lapid, and his partisan subordinate Energy Minister Karine Elharar began marathon U.S.-mediated negotiations with Hezbollah-controlled Lebanese negotiators over the maritime boundary. Gantz compelled the IDF to support the deal and present his capitulation to Hezbollah extortion as a massive strategic achievement that strengthens Israel’s deterrent edge over Hezbollah.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the deal is that it doesn’t obligate Lebanon. Israel’s deal is with the United States, not Lebanon. And judging by Nasrallah’s statements, Hezbollah views it as a starting point, not an ending point. During the course of the negotiations, the Lebanese negotiators suddenly presented a new, even more expansive territorial demand. Lebanon, they said, is the rightful owner of more than the disputed 854 km of Israeli waters. It is also the rightful owner of large swaths of the Karish gas field. Hochstein reportedly used the ploy, along with Nasrallah’s extortionate demands, to compel Lapid and Gantz to agree to give up a hundred percent of the disputed waters. But now that Lebanon has already tipped its hat to its next demand, and given that Lebanon is not obliged by the boundary line Israel has accepted, it’s obvious that Lebanon will disavow the deal at a time of Hezbollah’s choosing.

Lapid, Gantz and their allies portray the deal as a diplomatic and strategic masterstroke. By surrendering to all of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon’s 12-year-old demands, they brag that Israel has secured its ability to develop Karish. In other words, they’re bragging that they’re signing a protection deal with Hezbollah. In exchange for 854 square kilometers of sovereign Israeli waters, they believe that Hezbollah will permit us to exploit our natural resources—at least until Nasrallah decides to renew his threats and demands.

Aside from the Israeli media, no one has been buying their line. On Monday morning, former U.S. ambassador David Friedman tweeted incredulously, “We spent years trying to broker a deal between Israel and Lebanon on the disputed maritime gas fields. Got very close with proposed splits of 55-60% for Lebanon and 45-40% for Israel. No one then imagined 100% to Lebanon and 0% to Israel. Would love to understand how we got here.”

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted at a press conference on Monday that whereas he held the line against Hezbollah for a decade, Lapid folded after only three months.

To try to present their agreement as something other than capitulation to Hezbollah’s extortion, Lapid and Gantz are claiming the deal is the key to a Lebanon free of terrorist influence. This claim is weird on its face. After all, they insist that the Lebanon they are negotiating with is an independent entity not controlled by Hezbollah. And at the same time, they say Lebanon needs tens of billions of dollars from gas proceeds from Qana to free itself of Hezbollah control.

And that isn’t the only absurdity in their claim. Lebanon’s financial dealings are both controlled by Hezbollah and entirely opaque. Hezbollah can be trusted to take as much of the gas proceeds as it sees fit and leave the Lebanese with the crumbs at the bottom of its plate.

In his press conference Monday, Netanyahu said that the deal will not obligate a government under his leadership because it is “illegal.” And he is right. Under Israel’s 2013 Basic Law on territorial concessions, the government is required to present all agreements involving the relinquishment of Israeli territory to the Knesset for approval. To take legal effect, an agreement requires either the support of two thirds of the Knesset or the majority of the public in a referendum. Contrary to the basic law, Lapid and Gantz are refusing to bring the deal before the Knesset for approval.

And with the support of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, they insist that since the agreement is about economic waters, it isn’t about territory and therefore doesn’t require Knesset approval. Baharav-Miara initially said that all that is required is for the Security Cabinet to approve the deal. That it doesn’t even have to be made available to the Knesset for perusal—let alone approval. Under public pressure, she updated her position Sunday and announced that the deal has to be approved by the full government and submitted to—but not approved—by the Knesset. This too is a mile short of the requirements of the law. Baharav-Miara’s behavior is also a harsh commentary on the corrupted, politicized state of Israel’s legal fraternity.

It was her predecessor Avichai Mandelblit who insisted that caretaker governments may not carry out any non-essential functions or initiate policies that will obligate a successor government. On the basis of his dictate, Mandelblit barred Netanyahu’s caretaker government from appointing an acting state prosecutor. Obviously, the Lapid-Gantz surrender deal to Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government falls within the Mandelblit’s criteria for prohibited actions.

Baharav-Miara’s behavior demonstrates that as far as Israel’s politicized legal fraternity is concerned, there are two laws governing the state—one for the left, and one for the right. For the left, everything is permitted. For the right, nothing is. In other words, as far as the legal fraternity is concerned, Israel is governed by its leftist government lawyers, not by the rule of law.

This brings us to the media. In light of the strategic and economic implications of the deal, if Israel had a functioning media, journalists could have been expected to provide critical coverage of the agreement and carry out an informed debate. After all, that’s the purpose of the Fourth Estate. But rather than do its job, in a demonstration of its own political bias and corruption, with a few notable exceptions, Israel’s liberal media have done next to no due diligence in their reporting of the agreement. Instead, they have parroted the Lapid-Gantz government’s talking points one after the other.

The only Hebrew-language media outlet that has subjected the radical surrender agreement to significant scrutiny has been Israel’s new conservative outlet Channel 14. Last week, Lapid petitioned the Central Elections Commission to shutter Channel 14, which, he insists, is opposition propaganda because it doesn’t provide him with enough positive coverage.

On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, (R-Texas) tweeted, “I am deeply troubled that Biden officials pressured our Israeli allies to hand over their territory to the Iran-controlled terrorist group Hezbollah.” Cruz indicated that if the Republicans win control of Congress in next month’s elections, they will conduct a formal investigation of the administration’s actions. As Cruz put it, the deal is “another topic for the next Republican Congress to investigate.”

On Monday night, Globes reported that until a few weeks ago, Israel’s position was that it would retain a third of the disputed waters and its rights to the Qana gas field. But then, at a fateful meeting in the Defense Ministry, Gantz and Lapid’s representative, National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata, abandoned Israel’s long held stand and agreed to give up all of the disputed waters and Israel’s economic rights to Qana. Israel’s chief negotiator, Udi Adiri, vociferously rejected the capitulation and resigned in protest. Hulata was installed as the new head of Israel’s team.

Israel's Choice: Independence or Appeasement

From Caroline Glick, "For 12 years, under Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud, Israel pursued a foreign policy based not on dependence on the U.S. but on Israeli economic and military power. The results speak for themselves. The results of the Benny Gantz-Yair Lapid U.S.-reliant appeasement policies also speak for themselves":

Caretaker Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his supporters in the media went berserk Tuesday after Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out against the gas deal the Biden administration is mediating between Israel and Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon."

Since Hezbollah launched two drones against Israel’s Karish gas platform in July, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has repeatedly threatened to blow up Karish if Israel brings Karish online without first surrendering to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon large swathes of sovereign Israeli land underneath Israel’s recognized maritime economic zone, including the Qana gas field.

Rather than stand with Israel against Hezbollah, the Biden administration is siding with Hezbollah—Iran’s Lebanese foreign legion against Israel. U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein has pressed Israel to surrender to most of Hezbollah’s outrageous demands. And Israel has folded to the combined U.S.-Hezbollah extortion. Lapid has agreed to give “Lebanon” the Qana field. Together with his partner in strategic collapse Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Lapid insists that with the Qana field, “Lebanon” will be economically saved and once that happens, the Hezbollah-controlled country will magically free itself from Hezbollah’s grip and sign a peace deal with Israel.

Netanyahu’s statement popped their balloon. Summarizing the negotiations to date, Netanyahu warned, “Lapid has entirely collapsed to Nasrallah’s threats. Nasrallah threatened him that if we operate the Karish platform before we sign a gas deal with Lebanon, he’ll attack Israel. Lapid got scared and didn’t bring Karish online.

“Now he plans to turn over to Lebanon, with no Israel control or oversight, a gas field valued at billions of dollars that Hezbollah will use to purchase thousands of missiles and rockets that will target Israel’s cities.”

Netanyahu was right, of course, and that is the problem for Lapid and Gantz. For months the media have hidden the dangers implicit in the deal, and sufficed with parroting government talking points. Lapid intended to avoid public scrutiny, ram the deal through before the Nov. 1 elections and declare himself a genius statesman. When Netanyahu exposed the bluff, Lapid threw a tantrum, accusing Netanyahu of harming Israel’s national interests by interfering with the talks.

The gas deal with Lebanon—and Netanyahu’s decision to tell the public the truth about the deal—is one of three Lapid-Gantz foreign policies that have come under the full gaze of the public this week. Together they highlight the disparity between the Lapid-Gantz foreign policy they will continue to enact if elected Nov. 1, and the foreign policy Netanyahu and the Likud enacted during their 12 years in office, and will restore if they form the government after the elections.

On Tuesday, Lapid let it be known that in his speech before the U.N. General Assembly, he would announce his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. On the face of it, Lapid’s PLO advocacy makes no sense. There already is a de facto Palestinian state in Gaza. It is an Iranian-backed terror state which has waged five separate missile, rocket and terror campaigns against Israel since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

As for Judea and Samaria, the Palestinian Authority, which is supposedly the responsible adult of Palestinian governance, controls little of the territory it ostensibly governs. It uses its sparse resources to prosecute a legal, diplomatic and economic campaign against Israel and to facilitate and participate in terrorist operations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah against Jews.

To the extent U.S. funded Palestinian security forces take action against Hamas, they do so not to prevent terror attacks against Israel, but to prevent Hamas from taking over the P.A. Of course, the easiest way for Hamas to take over the P.A. would be through elections. Hamas has led P.A. head Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party in every poll since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006. This is why Abbas keeps cancelling scheduled elections, stretching his four-year term into its 16th year without end in sight. Abbas knows that any elections will oust him and his Fatah cronies from power.

Leaving aside the fact that Israel’s rights to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are far stronger than the Palestinians, the fact is that there is absolutely no prospect that a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem could possibly live at peace with Israel today or in the foreseeable future. So Lapid’s advocacy is at a minimum ill-timed and irrelevant.

But it is also devastating. In opting to advocate for the awarding the P.A. with a state, Lapid is legitimizing and empowering Israel’s enemies at Israel’s expense.

And Lapid isn’t alone. While Lapid does PR for a Palestinian terror state at the U.N., his partner Gantz is building one on the ground in Judea and Samaria. Over the past two years, Gantz has given the Palestinians and their European funders free rein to build illegal villages and seize agricultural land throughout Area C, which is administered entirely by Israel under the Oslo peace deals. Gantz has simultaneously barred Israelis from building in the areas and ordered the IDF to block all Israeli construction efforts. Thousands of acres of Area C, which were slated for Israeli settlement have been seized under Gantz’s watch by the Palestinians. These wholesale land seizures now threaten to turn flourishing blocs of Israeli communities like Gush Etzion into isolated enclaves.

Likewise, Gantz has been permitting Palestinian security forces to operate in areas where they are barred from operating under the peace agreements. He has even turned a blind eye to the illegal deployment of Canadian military forces in Area C. As Regavim documented last week, Canadian military forces which operate under the authority of the U.S. Security Coordinator in Jerusalem have been seen in uniform in Gush Etzion and the south Hebron hills harassing Israeli civilians and attempting to enter closed military zones. These operations are breaches of both Israeli and international law. But Gantz has been enabling them.

Gantz has renewed political contacts with Abbas and violated Israeli anti-terror laws by shoveling hundreds of millions of shekels into P.A. coffers. Gantz justifies his illegal policies by proclaiming them part of a strategy to “limit the conflict”—a euphemism for unilateral concessions to Palestinian terrorist groups.

For 10 years, Netanyahu worked quietly to render the P.A. irrelevant on the ground and in the region. This week, we marked the second anniversary of the Abraham Accords, the greatest demonstration of his success. Reached despite Palestinian opposition, the Abraham Accords showed that Israel does not need to appease Palestinian terrorists to end the Arab conflict with Israel. Through their Palestinian-centric policies, Gantz and Lapid not only legitimize Palestinian terrorists, by returning the Palestinians to center state, they undermine the Abraham Accords by forcing Israel’s Arab partners to stand with the Palestinians against Israel.

This brings us to the third disparity between the Lapid-Gantz foreign policy and the Netanyahu-Likud policies...

Still more. 

Is Israel An Apartheid State?

It's Olga Meshoe, for Prager University:

The Western Citizen is Dying? (VIDEO)

At the Friedman Center in Israel, Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America, with Caroline Glick:

For Harvard Crimson's Editorial Board, Facts Are for Losers

It's Dara Horn, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "It turns out that nobody’s SAT scores can provide immunity to propaganda":

Twenty-five years later, I still remember the theatrics involved with becoming an editor at the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper produced by Harvard undergraduates every day for the past century and a half. The newspaper’s office had a room upstairs called the Sanctum, so named because only those who had jumped through the paper’s prescribed journalistic hoops were allowed to enter—and then only for Sunday night editorial meetings, at which the coming week’s worth of unsigned editorials were debated and approved under strict secrecy. Newly minted editors were welcomed into the room with the question, “What are your politics?” One’s answer determined the side of the room where one would sit for these debates.

Many participants cared deeply about these discussions—though this being the 1990s, many more didn’t, and attended mainly for the fun of it. My peers were largely the children of baby-boomer parents who had morphed from flag-burning hippies to mall-hopping yuppies; Gen Xers like us took people’s self-important opinions with a very large grain of salt. In the Sanctum, I sat on the left by vague default, but didn’t attach much meaning to it. I was far from alone: A good number of editors didn’t even bother to remain on their side of the Sanctum, instead simply choosing the comfiest chairs.

When I later became one of the editors responsible for drafting each week’s worth of unsigned opinions about subjects like university workers’ strikes, affirmative action, and the Clinton impeachment, I learned that the only real sign of success was to say something interesting enough to generate a dissent. The only way to do that, of course, was to marshal the facts and explain why they mattered. When an editorial prompted other editors to write a dissent objecting to it—about, for instance, a campus visit by China’s then-premier—it was the ultimate compliment. You’d actually had something to say.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for ages. My work as a writer for the past 20 years has been almost entirely solitary; none of my books involved convincing a roomful of people of my point of view. But I was reminded of this ancient student ritual last week when my phone blew up with messages from dozens of irate former Crimson editors, including many actual journalists, a group of alumni going back several decades.

The current Crimson editorial board, in a somewhat modified version of the procedures I remembered, had just published an unsigned editorial fully endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, reversing its position from two years earlier. There was no official editorial dissent. Afterward, copies of this editorial were posted publicly in undergraduate dining halls, just in case anyone missed it.

The BDS movement, as it’s known, is old news on college campuses and elsewhere; it’s been around long enough that it no longer bothers to hide its goal of eliminating the world’s only Jewish state. But I had to hand it to The Crimson for timing, given that the editorial followed several weeks of terror attacks in Israel during which 15 people were stabbed, shot and car-rammed to death while engaging in such provocative behaviors as drinking at a bar or walking down the street...

Keep reading. 

The Crimson editorial is outrageous, though not surprising. 

Read it here: "In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions and a Free Palestine."

And see, "The Crimson Faces Backlash Over Editorial Endorsing BDS Movement," and "To the Editor: From Six Crimson Alumni In Regard to BDS."

Israel Lives

 Emily Schrader, on Twitter.

עם ישראל חי. @Vouch4Eachother pic.twitter.com/rL4RahZyqT

— Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) April 27, 2022

Ukraine Learns the Israel Lesson

From Lahav Harkov, a really sweet lady who writes for the Jerusalem Post, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Zelensky said his country will emerge from the rubble a 'big Israel.’ What did he mean?":

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky declared Tuesday that, when the war is finally over, Ukraine would emerge from the rubble a “big Israel.”

He meant that the war would never really be over, that Ukraine would be on a permanent war footing, just as the Jewish state is. He meant that it would view its neighbors the way Israel has long viewed its own: As enemies waiting to pounce. Most importantly, he meant that Ukraine would never again rely on anyone else for its security: not the West, not the international community, not the so-called liberal order. It would be, like Israel, a nation apart, answering to no one but its people, in control of its own destiny.

It said something heroic about Ukraine, which has gone from pleading with NATO to save it from imminent destruction to fighting—forcing—the Russians into peace talks in a matter of weeks.

It said something not so heroic about the West, which had failed to admit Ukraine to NATO and, more recently, to wean itself off Russian oil and gas.

But mostly it said something profound about Israel—a country whose behavior over the past seven weeks has confused and confounded. How did the Israelis—scrappy, abrasive—become the convener of presidents and nations?

Zelensky has repeatedly suggested that the Russians and Ukrainians could meet in Jerusalem to hash out a peace agreement. It’s an amazing suggestion, even if he’s just floated it. Not Washington, not London, not Brussels or Paris. Jerusalem. The Israeli capital, which, until just a few years ago, the United States did not even recognize as the Israeli capital.

It wasn’t Joe Biden who was shuttling to meet with Putin, but Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, an observant Jew who jetted to Moscow on Shabbat to meet with Vladimir Putin in the early days of the war. (He is the only Western leader to have done so.) Since then, Bennett has had countless separate phone calls with Putin and Zelensky, who repeatedly asked Bennett to mediate in the first place, and he has sought to remain as diplomatic as possible—the better to keep the Russians and Ukrainians talking to the Israelis.

All this has raised the increasingly burning question: whose side was Israel on?

Israeli politicians and the public overwhelmingly support Ukraine, but Zelensky, who is Jewish, was frustrated with what he saw as Jerusalem’s inaction. In an address to the Knesset last month, he tried to prod Israel into taking a greater stand by comparing the invasion of his country with the Holocaust. Noting that the invasion happened February 24, exactly 102 years after the Nazi Party was founded, Zelensky went on to rail against Russia’s “final solution,” repeating the Holocaust comparison so much that some Israeli politicians accused him of distorting its history.

On the one hand, Israel has flown plane loads of medical supplies, water-purification systems, winter coats and sleeping bags to the Ukrainians. And it is the only country that has built a field hospital in Ukraine. On the other hand, it won’t send military aid, including its famed Iron Dome anti-missile system. (Israeli officials say Iron Dome won’t work against Russian missiles.)

On the one hand, Israel has barred Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovich from using Israel as a safe haven. On the other, it has not sanctioned Russia—as the United States, the European Union and many other countries have done. (Israeli lawmakers have noted that they lack the legal mechanism to impose sanctions.)

On the one hand, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has repeatedly condemned Russia’s attacks, and on Tuesday, while discussing the Bucha massacre, he accused Russia of “war crimes.” On the other, Bennett has only expressed a more general sorrow about the loss of life. Reacting to the slaughter at Bucha, the Israeli prime minister said, “We are shocked by what we see in Bucha, horrible images, and we condemn them”—but he refrained from explicitly condemning Russia or Putin.

How did Israel end up walking this tightrope? In part, it’s because Israel exists to be a safe haven for Jews everywhere, and there are still nearly half a million in Ukraine and Russia. Israel wants to make sure it doesn’t alienate Putin—and complicate things for the Jewish community in his country. (Since the war began, over 10,000 Jews have applied to immigrate to Israel from Russia. The country has prepared to absorb as many as 100,000 refugees.)

But the bigger reason is waning American hegemony. America’s post-Iraq war exhaustion with the Middle East led Israel to begin to see what Ukraine has just discovered: That it cannot rely on the assurances of an America that has turned inward—and away from the rest of the world. As the United States backed away from its “red line” in Syria and pursued a nuclear deal widely viewed in Israel as an existential threat, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shifted Israel away from relying on the vaunted special relationship, forging new ones with China, India, and Russia, among others. Israel’s position in the Ukraine war has brought the Jewish state’s new geopolitical reality into stark relief.

When did the realignment begin? It’s a complicated story, but there are two years that matter most: 1989 and 2015...

Keep reading. 

GRAPHIC WARNING: Four Israelis Murdered in Terrorist Knife Attack in Beersheba, Southern Israel

I've never seen a knife attack this grisly. Frankly, I've rarely ever seen anything this grisly. It's personal when murdering by knife attack. 

God have mercy. How unbelievably horrific. 

Don't watch if you have a weak stomach, really. 

Brooke Goldstein has video on Twitter, "GRAPHIC: This is pure Jew-hatred. This is a sickness. 4 Israelis were killed today in a stabbing attack in Beersheba."

And at the Times of Israel, "4 killed, 2 wounded in stabbing attack at Beersheba mall; terrorist shot dead: Arab Israeli from southern Bedouin town stabs woman at gas station, rams cyclist, then attacks others at shopping center; attacker was formerly imprisoned for Islamic State ties," and "Funerals held for Beersheba terror victims as bereaved families mourn ‘heavy loss’: Addressing Doris Yahbas, husband says terrorist ‘cut you away from us’; Laura Yitzhak’s partner asks: ‘What will I do now?’; attending ministers heckled in 2 incidents."

ADDED: "Two mothers of 3, a Chabad rabbi, a brother of 4: The terror victims named: Doris Yahbas, 49, Laura Yitzhak, 43, and Menahem Yehezkel, 67, were stabbed to death; Moshe Kravitzky, 48, died when terrorist rammed his bicycle."

Israel's Balancing Act on Ukraine

 At the New York Times, "War in Ukraine Forces Israel Into a Delicate Balancing Act":

Israel is a strong ally of the United States, and its leaders have a good relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s Jewish president. But Israel also doesn’t want to provoke Russia.

TEL AVIV — On the day Russia invaded Ukraine, Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, did not mention Russia once. Mr. Bennett said he prayed for peace, called for dialogue and promised support for Ukrainian citizens. But he did not hint at Moscow’s involvement, much less condemn it — and it was left, as preplanned, to Mr. Bennett’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, to criticize Moscow in a separate statement that day.

The pair’s cautious double act embodied the bind in which the war in Ukraine has placed Israel.

Israel is a key partner of the United States, and many Israelis appreciate longstanding cultural connections with Ukraine, which, for several months in 2019, was the only country other than their own with both a Jewish president — Volodymyr Zelensky — and a Jewish prime minister. But Russia is a critical actor in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Israel’s northeastern neighbor and enemy, and the Israeli government believes it cannot risk losing Moscow’s favor.

For much of the past decade, the Israeli Air Force has struck Iranian, Syrian and Lebanese military targets in Syria without interference, trying to stem the flow of arms that Iran sends to its proxies in both Syria and Lebanon and to limit a military buildup on its northern border.

Israel also wants to leave itself enough room to act as a go-between in the conflict. After Ukrainian requests, Mr. Bennett has offered at least twice to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, most recently on Sunday — when Mr. Bennett rushed abruptly from a cabinet meeting to speak with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for 40 minutes. And Israeli officials, including Mr. Bennett, shuttled between their Russian, Ukrainian and American counterparts on Sunday afternoon, two senior Israeli officials said, a mediation that may have contributed to Ukraine’s decision to meet with Russian officials on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border.

Israel, which often asks that its allies support it unconditionally, finds itself in the uncomfortable position of appearing to refuse to publicly criticize Russia, even when other countries with seemingly more at stake have condemned Mr. Putin’s war.

It is a “delicate situation for Israel,” said Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister who dealt often with Mr. Putin during his time in office.

“On the one hand, Israel is an ally of the United States and a part of the West, and there can be no doubt about it,” Mr. Olmert said in a phone interview. “On the other hand, the Russians are present in Syria, we have delicate military and security problems in Syria — and that requires a certain freedom for the Israeli military to act in Syria.”

Israel also wants to avoid taking any action that might stir antisemitism against the hundreds of thousands of Jews in both Ukraine and Russia...

More. 

Texas Synagogue Terrorist Came Out of U.K. Islamist No-Go Zone

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "His community hopes Allah will 'bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise'":

As far back as 2013, Pakistani Muslim terrorists had plotted to take "foreign Jews" hostage to trade for ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. In 2022, a Pakistani Muslim terrorist actually went out and did it.

The hostage crisis at Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform Temple in Texas, ended with Faisal Akram of Blackburn, another post-industrial English town where Muslims make up a third of the population and Pakistanis account for over 10 percent, dead, and his Jewish hostages set free.

Back home, the Blackburn Muslim Community page announced that "Faisal Akram has sadly departed from this temporary world" and prayed that Allah "bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise".

The BMC page had previously promoted a “charity” event to raise money for “Palestinians” by the Human Relief Foundation, which had been banned by Israel over its ties to Hamas.

The town has produced no shortage of Jihadists, including the youngest terrorist in the UK, as well as a number of Jihadis who traveled to join ISIS, an associate of shoe bomber Richard Reid, and a terrorist who played a key role in an Al Qaeda plot that targeted New York and D.C.

Blackburn is one of the most segregated towns in the country and has been described as a “no-go zone”. The area that produced the Temple Terrorist has the highest Muslim population outside of London where some claim that flying the English flag has been effectively outlawed.

The setting couldn’t be any better for the media to whitewash the murderous terrorist with the familiar excuses that he was the victim of failed integration in the United Kingdom. His family, in an even more familiar excuse, is claiming that he “was suffering from mental health issues”.

That, along with the claim by FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno that the terrorist, "was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community", is becoming the very familiar narrative for covering up the latest Muslim terror attack.

But antisemitism, like Islamism, was part of the air that Faisal Akram breathed in Blackburn.

Salim Mulla, Blackburn's former mayor and current Labour councilor, claimed that Israel was behind ISIS and school shootings in America. Last year, four Muslim men from Blackburn took part in a "Palestinian" convoy while shouting, "F*** the Jews... F*** all of them. F*** their mothers, f*** their daughters and show your support for Palestine. Rape their daughters and we have to send a message like that. Please do it for the poor children in Gaza."

Siddiqui aka Lady Al Qaeda, on whose behalf the Texas synagogue attack took place, was married to the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and had assorted recipes for mass murder in her possession when she was captured. Despite graduating from Brandeis, a formerly Jewish university, she demanded at her trial that jurors undergo DNA tests to prove that they are not Jewish. And the Aafia Foundation posted bizarre antisemitic rants about the "degree of poisonous venum (sic) within the heart of American mainstream jewry".

The hatred of Jews, like the hatred of all non-Muslims, is a crucial motive for Islamic terrorism.

If Blackburn is a miserable place, the tale of the Akram family may reveal why. The official family statement by the terrorist’s brother, Gulbar Akram, claims that "although my brother was suffering from mental health issues we were confident that he would not harm the hostages" and denied that the FBI had rescued the hostages from being killed by his brother. "Don’t believe the bull#### in the media they were released from the fire exit and Not rescued.”

The Blackburn Community message describes the terrorist as having brothers named "Gulbar", “Malik” and the "Late Gulzameer Akram".

Two brothers named Gulbar Akram and Gulzameer Akram in Blackburn had been locked up over stolen cars. Another time, a Blackburn resident named Gulbar Akram almost had his nose sliced off. A Gulzameer Akram ran a massive counterfeiting operation from a Blackburn home. A Malik Akram was locked up for harassing girls. Were all of them members of the same clan?

The best way to cover up a terrorist attack is to shift the context. And that’s what they’re doing. But it’s important to dig into the true context to understand the true origins of the Texas attack.

In his book, Among the Mosques, ex-Islamist Ed Husain described Blackburn as “another global hub for the Deobandis and the Tableeghi Jamaat” where the mosques pray for the destruction of the enemies of Islam and texts declare that “there can be no reconciliation between Islam and democracy”.

The Deobandis, who control many of the mosques in Blackburn, originated the Taliban.

Aafia Siddiqui, better known as 'Lady Al Qaeda', is a Deobandi, the terrorist on whose behalf Faisal Akram took a synagogue hostage, and a popular cause with Pakistanis. A few years ago the Pakistani Senate had even named the Islamic terrorist, the “Daughter of the Nation”.

Indian Mujahideen co-founder Riyaz Bhatkal had plotted to take Jews hostage a decade ago in order to force 'Lady Al Qaeda's release. British Muslim “charities” were a major source of funding to the Jihadist group as they are for many Pakistani Jihadist enterprises.

While much has been made of the advocacy on behalf of Siddiqui by CAIR and other Islamist colonists in America, top Muslim politicians in the UK also vocally demanded her release, including Lord Nazir Ahmed and Lord Altaf Sheikh.

When Husain visited Blackburn, he warned that, "it is clear that a caliphist subculture thrives here, a separate world from the rest of British society.”

Tableeghi Jamaat, whose mosques are known as "breeding grounds" for Jihad, is closely intertwined with Pakistani Islamism and vectored Islamic terrorism. Quite a number have joined Al Qaeda. It is no coincidence that so many Islamic terrorists have come out of Blackburn.

Nor is it a coincidence that the latest Islamic terrorist attack on America originated there.

Faisal Akram traveled to Texas, where ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ sleeps at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth. He was one of many Muslim pilgrims seeking to extricate her. Just last fall, the Dallas-Forth Worth CAIR and the Pakistani terror regime claimed that Aafia Siddiqui had been assaulted in U.S. custody in the latest effort of many on behalf of ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. Faisal’s target, a progressive Reform Temple which happened to carry the traditional name of Congregation Beth Israel despite its social justice activist clergyman’s hostility to Israel, was ideally selected to fit Muslim antisemitic obsessions with both Israel and Jews.

The antisemitic rants, the hostage crisis, and the rapid cover-up are all regular features of life for Jews in Europe. Changing demographics are making them a new reality for American Jews.

Any American city or town can become the new Blackburn. That’s the harsh lesson here.

Pakistani antisemitism and obscure Jihadist movements are not local issues, they are global threats. The poison nurtured in a declining British post-industrial town blew up in Texas. We are all interconnected, and that interconnectedness has made the Jihad into a global enterprise. Ideas, tactics, and organizations that once took centuries to colonize the world can travel around it at the speed of the internet and a terror plot can happen at the speed of a jet plane.

We can either police our borders, control our immigration, and build walls around our nations, or we must be resigned to being hunted, stalked, and killed anywhere and at any given moment.

In Blackburn, Muslims anticipate the Texas Jihadist ascending to the “highest ranks of Paradise" where he will enjoy the company of 72 virgins. More Muslims from Blackburn, marinating in the same hatred for America, for Jews, and for anyone unlike them, will follow in his footsteps.

 

Exclusive Video Shows Three Hostages Rescued from Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue, Colleyville, Texas (WATCH)

Following-Up, "Malik Faisal Akram, Terrorist in Colleyville Siege, Bought Gun 'On the Street', Biden Said (VIDEO)."

At WFAA Channel 8 Dallas:

Malik Faisal Akram, Terrorist in Colleyville Siege, Bought Gun 'On the Street', Biden Said (VIDEO)

The president called the siege an "act of terror." 

At the Dallas Morning News, "British hostage taker at Colleyville synagogue bought gun ‘on the street’, Biden said":

President Joe Biden said Sunday the British national who held four people hostage inside a Colleyville synagogue was armed with a gun apparently “purchased on the street.” The president said the hostage-taker spent his first night in Texas at a homeless shelter, and speculated that he might have gotten a gun there. Also on Sunday, Greater Manchester police in England said they detained two teenagers in connection with the gunman who took four people hostage for more than 11 hours over the weekend in Colleyville.

Greater Manchester police tweeted about the arrests but released few details about why counterterrorism officers detained the teens. It was unclear what connection, if any, the teens had to 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, who died after Congregation Beth Israel Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and the three other hostages escaped unharmed and authorities swarmed the building. Authorities have not said how how Akram died.

The FBI said early Saturday that Akram appeared to be the sole suspect. A spokeswoman for the Dallas office referred questions to British authorities and said the FBI hadn’t changed its statement. British law gives police wide latitude to make arrests during a terrorism investigation and diplomats counseled against drawing any conclusions.

Biden, speaking from Philadelphia, said Akram might have been in the U.S. for only a few weeks. Citing a senior law enforcement official, NBC Nightly News reported that Akram arrived in the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 29.

“This was an act of terror,” Biden said, adding that he doesn’t know why Congregation Beth Israel was targeted, or “why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been a prisoner for over 10 years” and used “anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli” language.

He said there were no bombs that authorities know of, despite the attacker’s claims that he planted some.

Biden said he had spoken with Attorney General Merrick Garland and they were working to “address these types of acts.” The president said he’d “put a call in to the rabbi” but indicated they hadn’t connected yet.

Biden also praised law enforcement. “They did one hell of a job,” he said. “Thank God. Thank God.”

An 11-hour standoff

Colleyville police were called to the synagogue in the 6100 block of Pleasant Run Road about 10:40 a.m. Saturday.

The synagogue was holding its Shabbat service, which began at 10 a.m. The service was streamed live on Facebook, and a man could be heard speaking. At times the man sounded angry and said he was going to die. The livestream was removed just before 2 p.m.

FBI negotiators were in constant contact with the hostage-taker throughout the day, officials said. Shortly after 5 p.m., authorities were seen bringing a hostage, a man in black yarmulke out of the building.

A loud bang was heard at the synagogue just after 9 p.m. Authorities said that was around the time that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team breached the building.

Video from WFAA-TV (Channel 8) showed people running out a door of the synagogue, and then a man holding a gun opening the same door just seconds later before he turned around and closed it. Moments later, several rounds of gunfire could be heard, followed by the sound of an explosion.

Cytron-Walker said Sunday that the experience was traumatizing. He said in a statement that the hostage-taker grew “increasingly belligerent and threatening” towards the end of the standoff, adding that he feels grateful to be alive and “we are resilient and we will recover.”

He credited security training that his congregation has received over the years for helping him and the other hostages get through the situation.

“Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself,” Cytron-Walker said.

‘Lady al-Qaeda’

During the standoff, Akram demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman serving an 86-year sentence for shooting at two U.S. military officers during an interrogation. Her lawyer, Marwa Elbially, said Sunday that his client condemns Akram’s actions, and “unequivocally condemns all forms of violence.”

“We are all thankful that the hostages were safely released and that no one was harmed,” Elbially said during a virtual news conference.

Siddiqui is being held at a federal prison in Fort Worth, about 20 miles southwest of the synagogue.

Faizan Syed, director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Siddiqui’s family and those campaigning for her release from prison did not know the hostage-taker.

“We want to make it very clear that the actions of this individual do not represent Dr. Siddiqui, her family or her campaign and we want to deter anybody who might have sympathies for her campaign to not take these types of actions in the future,” Syed told reporters during the news conference with Siddiqui’s lawyer. “This is something that is appalling, heinous and against the wishes of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.”

Saleema Gul, a representative of The Aafia Foundation, added the Houston-based group’s sympathy for the hostages and their families.

“We do not condone the incident that took place yesterday, or any other means to secure Dr. Aafia’s freedom other than through advocacy and legal means,” Gul said. In September, pro-ISIS British preacher Anjem Choudary launched a campaign calling for Siddiqui’s release. “The obligation upon us is to either free her physically or to ransom her or to exchange her,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

The post asserted that Siddiqui was the victim of “huge injustice” and that he aimed “to call on those who have the ability to free her from captivity.”

The architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, described her to interrogators as a top al-Qaeda courier and financier, though her supporters discount that and say his statement was the result of torture. U.S. officials came to describe her as “Lady al-Qaeda,” and the FBI placed her on its list of seven most wanted terrorists in 2004. She was caught four years later and convicted in 2010 of trying to shoot two interrogators.

Militants have tried to use hostages as leverage to secure her release for over a decade.

An outpouring of support

Rabbi Andrew Marc Paley of Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in Dallas, said in an email to his congregation that authorities asked him to help care for the hostages after they escaped.

Paley said the first hostage released was an elderly man who was reunited with his daughter.

“I was able to speak to both of them and both were obviously relieved and in general good spirits,” the rabbi wrote.

Paley said he then met with the rabbi’s wife, Adena Cytron-Walker, and one of their daughters, as well as relatives of the other hostages.

After the rescue, he hugged Cytron-Walker, saying later he was “a little dazed and surprised” but smiling.

Concerns about rising anti-semitism

The U.S. Department of Justice released data in the fall showing a 42% increase in hate crimes nationally since 2014. The data identified Jews as the most targeted religious group in America.

In 2018, a gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life, while yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Paley said the Colleyville attack brought to the surface feelings of anger and sadness that “this terrible event is sadly not new to the Jewish community.” Rabbi Jeffrey Meyers of Tree of Life said in a statement his heart was heavy seeing the Colleyville attack.

“While everyone is physically safe, they are also forever changed,” Meyers said. “My own community knows too well the pain, trauma and lost sense of security that comes when violence forces its way in, especially into our sacred spaces.”

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a tweet that while the immediate crisis is over for Congregation Beth Israel and the Jewish community, “the fear of rising antisemitism remains.”

Rabbi Gary Zola, a professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, said he hopes there comes a point where people aren’t afraid to go into synagogues, mosques or churches because of incidents like the Colleyville standoff. He urged people to speak up and work together...

 

The Escalating International War Against Israel

From Caroline Glick:

At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel.

The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives.

The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.

We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.

The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was.

Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.”

Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.

The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.

In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.

At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality.

These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.”

Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.

The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.

This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.”

A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.

As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.”

Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.”

But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.”

But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council.

“The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?”

In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.

As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight.

Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions.

And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.

Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.”

A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.”

The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis

for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.

Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...

 

Gal Gadot

"Telavivian."

Enjoying the last days of Telavivian sun ☀️ pic.twitter.com/WUP1kP7pXG

— Gal Gadot (@GalGadot) October 3, 2021

Kyrsten Sinema Faces a Growing Revolt From Her Former Supporters

Followingp-up, "Kyrsten Sinema Is Enigma at Center of Democrats’ Spending Talks."

This lady's got tremendous power, and radical leftists hate it. 

At the New York Times, "Kyrsten Sinema Is at the Center of It All. Some Arizonans Wish She Weren’t":

PHOENIX — Jade Duran once spent her weekends knocking on doors to campaign for Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the stubbornly centrist Democrat whose vote could seal the fate of a vast Democratic effort to remake America’s social safety net. But no more.

When Ms. Sinema famously gave a thumbs down to a $15 minimum wage and refused to eliminate the filibuster to pass new voting rights laws this year, Ms. Duran, a Democrat and biomedical engineer from Phoenix, decided she was fed up. She joined dozens of liberal voters and civil rights activists in a rolling series of protests outside Ms. Sinema’s Phoenix offices, which have been taking place since the summer. Nearly 50 people have been arrested.

“It really feels like she does not care about her voters,” said Ms. Duran, 33, who was arrested in July at a protest. “I will never vote for her again.”

Ms. Sinema, a onetime school social worker and Green Party-aligned activist, vaulted through the ranks of Arizona politics by running as a zealous bipartisan willing to break with her fellow Democrats. She counts John McCain, the Republican senator who died in 2018, as a hero, and has found support from independent voters and moderate suburban women in a state where Maverick is practically its own party.

But now, Ms. Sinema is facing a growing political revolt at home from the voters who once counted themselves among her most devoted supporters. Many of the state’s most fervent Democrats now see her as an obstructionist whose refusal to sign on to a major social policy and climate change bill has helped imperil the party’s agenda.

Little can proceed without the approval of Ms. Sinema, one of two marquee Democratic moderates in an evenly divided Senate. While she has balked at the $3.5 trillion price tag and some of the tax-raising provisions of the bill, which is opposed by all Republicans in Congress, Democrats in Washington and back home in Arizona have grown exasperated.

While the Senate Democrats’ other high-profile holdout, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, has publicly outlined his concerns with key elements of the Democratic agenda in statements to swarms of reporters, Ms. Sinema has been far more enigmatic and has largely declined to issue public comments.

Mr. Biden, White House officials and Democrats have beseeched the two senators to publicly issue a price tag and key provisions of the legislation that they could accept. But there is little indication that Ms. Sinema has been willing to offer that, even privately to the administration.

On Wednesday afternoon, she and a team from the White House huddled in her office for more than two hours on another day of what a spokesman for Ms. Sinema called good-faith negotiations.

“Kyrsten has always promised Arizonans she would be an independent voice for the state — not for either political party,” John LaBombard, a spokesman for the senator, wrote in an email responding to questions for the senator about her standing at home. “She’s delivered on that promise and has always been honest about where she stands.”

That posture helped her win election to the Senate in 2018 from a state whose voters are roughly 35 percent Republican, 32 percent Democratic and 33 percent “other.” And for all the passions of the moment, Ms. Sinema is not up for election again until 2024...

I love the senator at this point. If she can piss off left-wing nutjobs like this, and with so much hilarious gusto, I can dig it. 

More.

 

Kyrsten Sinema Is Enigma at Center of Democrats’ Spending Talks

She's an enigma alright. 

I blogged about her almost 10 years ago, when she, umm, came off a bit less moderates. See, "Kyrsten Sinema, Bisexual Israel-Hating Antiwar Radical, is Face of Today's Democrat Party."

And now, folks are tripping on her role of an extra-"moderate" senator who easily switch parties.

An engima alright.

At WSJ, "Arizona senator says $3.5 trillion price tag is too high, holds discussions with Biden, party leaders":

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—Senate Democrats trying to pass a sweeping education, healthcare and climate package must first crack an enigma: What does centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema want?

Ms. Sinema, a key vote in the evenly divided Senate, has made clear she won’t support the package’s current $3.5 trillion price tag, announcing her opposition in July and reiterating it since then. The first-term senator from a swing state has held meetings with party leaders to discuss the legislation, but she hasn’t publicly suggested specific changes. Many Democrats remain uncertain over her policy stance and her political calculations.

Ms. Sinema is constantly engaged in “direct, good-faith discussions,” said Sinema spokesman John LaBombard. He shared a list of more than two dozen meetings or calls she has had to discuss the legislation.

Six of those conversations were with President Biden directly and three were with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). The rest were with Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), who is a member of the Finance and Budget committees, and White House and Democratic leadership staff. Representatives for Messrs. Biden, Schumer and Warner didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Given the size and scope of the proposal—and the lack of detailed legislative language, or even consensus between the Senate and House around several provisions—we are not offering detailed comments on any one proposed piece of the package while those discussions are ongoing,” Mr. LaBombard said.

The package under discussion would represent a vast expansion of the country’s safety net, including paid family and medical leave, universal prekindergarten for three- and four-year-olds, affordable housing, and an expansion of Medicare benefits, among other measures. It would also increase taxes on companies and high-income households. Democrats hope to tackle climate change with provisions aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 80% and economywide by 50% by 2030.

Republicans are united in opposition to the proposal, calling it wasteful and potentially damaging to the economy. Democrats are aiming to pass the package through a process called budget reconciliation that allows a bill to advance in the Senate with a simple majority, rather than the 60-vote supermajority usually needed.

In private negotiations, Ms. Sinema has been focused on targeting how the funding of new programs will be distributed among income levels, according to Senate Democratic aides. Narrower targeting of benefits could lower the overall cost. Ms. Sinema has also expressed concerns centering on the structure of the proposed tax changes, aides said.

In a recent interview with the Arizona Republic, Ms. Sinema expressed interest in climate proposals, which she said would directly affect the desert state which is already experiencing droughts, wildfires and damaged infrastructure.

The focus on Ms. Sinema comes amid a broad negotiation within the party between the moderate and progressive wings. While some senators have expressed concerns about parts of the proposal and haven’t committed to funding the entire $3.5 trillion, Ms. Sinema and fellow centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of deep-red West Virginia have been the only members of the caucus to rule out supporting that level of spending.

In a meeting Wednesday at the White House with Mr. Biden where both centrists were present, lawmakers discussed reducing the size of the package to below $3 trillion, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

“The main goal is to get all 50 of us together which means that we really need to get down to what are the things that will enable Joe and Kyrsten to say yes,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii). “I personally am not sure what it is programmatically that they can support. I’d like to get that identified.”

Rep. Scott Peters (D., Calif.), a centrist Democrat and close friend of Ms. Sinema from their days serving together in the House, said Ms. Sinema will be pivotal in the talks. “I certainly think that everyone is well advised to be listening to her. She’s got strong opinions and she’s not going to be pushed around.”

Others note that along with the thin control of the Senate, Democrats can afford to lose just three votes in the House, and Mr. Biden can’t afford to take his eye off any lawmakers...

I dare say I like that woman. *Shrug.*

Still more.

 

Saturday Cartoon

This is nasty, anti-Semitic.

At the Jerusalem Post, "Republicans want to brand Mark Zuckerberg as ‘Zuckerbucks.’ ADL says stop. This month, the term made it into Congress: Rep. Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, proposed the End Zuckerbucks Act, which would ban nonprofits classified as tax exempt and nonpartisan."