https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxBQLFLei70
And:
Who will hide you?
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There is nothing flat about Flatow:
My dear friends,
They used to say about Carlos Gardel, the legendary Tango Singer from Rio de la Plata (Uruguay and Argentina), “Cada vez que canta, el canta mejor!” Every time Carlos Gardel sings, he sings even better.
Every time Stephen M. Flatow writes a column, he writes an even better column, today’s Jerusalem Post.
The Member of the Knesset, Itamar Ben Gvir, is a real firebrand, in the spirit of Rabbi Meir Kahane z’l.
From: Stephen M. Flatow <sflatow1@comcast.net>
I originally called this column in the Jerusalem Post, "Walking the dog while Jewish," but the editor changed it. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/
Not mentioned here, but the sad part of the Sheik Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik mess is that the Israeli government is acting against an elected MK, calling his presence in the 'hood a provocation and incitement.
Reporting Palestinian violence undermines anti-Israel agenda
Everything about these attacks undermines everything that J Street and the slam-Israel media and the State Department crowd are trying to promote.
By Stephen M. Flatow
Did you hear about the young Arab man who was walking his dog in Jerusalem one evening last spring, and was assaulted and nearly lynched by Jewish extremists?
No, of course you didn’t hear about it – because it didn’t happen. Oh, there certainly was an assault. But the victim was a Jew. And the would-be lynchers were Palestinian Arabs. That’s why it wasn’t covered by the international media. That’s why there were no angry press releases from J Street or Americans for Peace Now. That’s why the usually-vocal Jewish ex-State Department officials were all silent.
Two of the attackers were convicted this week, so the ugly episode was back in the news—in the Israeli media, that is. Not in The New York Times or The Washington Post or CNN. They didn’t report the attack when it happened, and they didn’t report the conviction – because everything about the attack undermines everything that J Street and the slam-Israel media and the State Department crowd are trying to promote.
It was a lovely spring evening – April 24, 2021. Eli Rosen, 27, decided to walk his dog along Pierre van Paassen Street, part of which runs through the mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Shimon HaTzadik, also known as Sheikh Jarrah.
A number of Palestinian Arabs had gathered nearby. “When they noticed that the victim had a Jewish appearance, they began throwing rocks at him,” according to the bill of indictment.
Civil rights activists in the US have coined the term “driving while black” to describe unjust arrests of African-American motorists. I guess Eli Rosen didn’t realize that to some Palestinian Arabs, it’s a crime to walk your dog while Jewish.
The bill of indictment continues: “The rioters – including the defendants – ran toward him, surrounded him on all sides and began attacking him with fists, kicks, wooden batons, bricks, rocks, various objects and a shocker. All out of a nationalist-ideological motive.”
When Adnan Harbawi, 18, and Ibrahim Zaatari, 26, were convicted this week of taking part in the mob attack, the Israeli media mentioned an additional fascinating aspect of the story: “The rioters uploaded documentation [of the attack] to the social media.”
Before I go any further, I want to emphasize that I don’t like to compare contemporary events to the Holocaust. I don’t like it when the right does it, and I don’t like it when the left does it. Such analogies overstate what is happening today, and by implication understate what the Nazis did.
So, I’m not going to say that a mob beating up a Jew in Jerusalem is “like the Holocaust.” But this phenomenon of publicly boasting about one’s evil deeds should not pass without comment. Holocaust researchers have repeatedly uncovered photo albums which Nazi concentration camp commandants kept, to remember and celebrate what they did to the Jews.
There is a chilling book called “The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.” The title is from the cover of one such album, which was kept by a commandant at Treblinka.
It is worth reading. Not because the attack on Rosen was “like the Holocaust.” But because the depraved evil of which human beings are capable of committing – and being proud of – is an aspect of human psychology that is worth contemplating, whether it took place in 1945 or last year.
Those who assaulted Rosen were so proud of their violence that they wanted the whole world to see their vile actions. They celebrated. This, they said, is what should be done to Jews.
The Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood has been in the news a lot lately. Arab squatters have been illegally occupying several Jewish-owned apartments, setting off a years-long court battle. Meanwhile, other Arab residents don’t want Jewish neighbors, so they have been using violence to stop Jews from moving into the area.
J Street and the ex-State Department peace-processor crowd have been portraying the Jewish residents as wild-eyed extremists who are the villains in the conflict. They say that the Palestinian Arabs are victims of Jewish aggression, that the Jews should be kept out of the neighborhood, and that the Palestinians should be given their own state, with Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik as part of the capital of “Palestine.”
So now you can see why the critics of Israel – in the media, in the punditry, in the think tanks – haven’t said a word about the assault on Eli Rosen. The near-lynching of a Jew walking his dog undermines the pro-Palestinian narrative. It reveals the ugly, anti-Semitic hatred that consumes so many Palestinian Arabs. It reminds the world how crazy it would be to give a sovereign state to people whose response to a Jew walking his dog is to try to murder him.
And that’s something that J Street and The Washington Post don’t want anybody to be reminded of.
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- Israel: A New Iran Agreement Will Buy 2 1/2 Years at a Price of Tens of Billions
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday: "The talks between Iran and the major powers on a return to a nuclear agreement are advancing quickly. We may see an agreement shortly. The new apparent agreement is shorter and weaker than the previous one."
"Restrictions on Iran's nuclear program are expected to expire in 2025....If the world signs the agreement again - without extending the expiration date - then we are talking about an agreement that buys a total of two and a half years, after which Iran can and may develop and install advanced centrifuges, without restrictions....In return, the Iranians will currently receive tens of billions of dollars and the lifting of sanctions."
"This money will eventually go to terrorism in the area. This terrorism endangers us, endangers other countries in the region...and it will also endanger American forces in the region. In any case, we are organizing and preparing for the day after, in all dimensions, so that we can maintain the security of the citizens of Israel by ourselves." (Prime Minister's Office)
- Click here for PM Bennett’s remarks: Prime Minister Addresses the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Can we trust the media to report the truth about a new Iran deal?
As a partisan press continues to lose credibility, the treatment of Biden’s appeasement policy is providing yet another reason why many Americans don’t believe what journalists tell them.
(February 21, 2022 / JNS) In the spring of 2016, The New York Times Magazine published an article that was the Rosetta Stone for understanding media coverage of foreign policy during the presidency of Barack Obama. In a profile of then-Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, the piece let the failed novelist turned speechwriter turned faux international-relations expert explain how the Obama administration helped sell a skeptical public and Congress on its signature foreign-policy accomplishment: the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
While the portrayal of Rhodes’s trademark arrogance was the main takeaway from the feature, it also illuminated the process by which the White House marketed an indefensible policy. Rhodes boasted that the national press was so ignorant of the topic and so eager to parrot administration talking points that he had little trouble manipulating accounts of the negotiations with Iran and portrayals of what even its supporters had to admit was a flawed agreement.
Casting aside any pretense that what went on could be confused for actual journalism, what he described went beyond the usual process by which officials try to “spin” the news to the press. Instead of merely persuading writers to mimic pro-deal arguments, Rhodes did something that was referred to in the article as more akin to “ventriloquism.” What another Obama White House colleague called their press “compadres” were the puppets in a shadow play that largely controlled how the accord was portrayed in mainstream outlets. The result was the creation of a “media echo chamber” in which Obama’s narrative about the pact being the best possible option for the West and that the only alternative to what an honest media would have labeled appeasement was a war that no one wanted was blindly accepted.
Given all that has happened since then, the events of 2015 may seem like ancient history. But a discussion of the process that Rhodes was candid enough to reveal is just as, if not more relevant today than it was then.
There are two reasons for that. One has to do with the further decline in the mainstream press; and the other is the fact that the country is about to get another, even weaker and more disastrous Iran nuclear deal shoved down its throat by the Biden administration with the help of a pliant press corps.
Media bias used to be a controversial subject since most journalists, and especially those in leading corporate outlets, clung to the claim that they were largely objective even long after that ceased to be true. But the presidency of Donald Trump caused a great many of them to cast aside any pretense of fairness and instead became openly partisan.
The willingness of publications and broadcasters to spend years reporting as truthful what were ultimately revealed to be inaccurate, if not entirely bogus, claims that the former president colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election was bad enough. But in 2020, the same outlets—abetted by even more powerful Big Tech firms in control of social-media platforms—refused to report on legitimate stories about corruption involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, lest any discussion of the charges undermine the effort to defeat Trump.
That has now been compounded by the same publications and broadcasters either refusing to report about the court filings from Special Prosecutor John Durham. His investigation points to charges about the Hillary Clinton campaign spying on the Trump campaign in 2016 and in the White House after he took office. Some in the Clinton camp apparently successfully peddled the disinformation about Russia they came up with to the intelligence community. That set in motion the three-year drama about Russia collusion that hobbled the Trump administration and convinced half the country to believe the myth that their president was either a traitor or a Russian stooge.
Yet many Americans have heard as little of Durham’s investigation as they did of Hunter Biden’s shenanigans during the 2020 campaign since the liberal press has chosen to either spike any discussion of the story or to dismiss it as meaningless.
The bifurcation of the media with those on the left reading, listening and watching one set of media and those on the right following different outlets has been a crucial factor in fueling the tribal culture war that largely characterizes most contemporary political discourse. Both political camps bear part of the blame for this ugly new reality. But the willingness of outlets like the Times, CNN and MSNBC to ignore stories that embarrass their political allies while The Wall Street Journal and Fox News highlight them makes any consensus about important topics impossible. Certain outlets on the right play the same game with stories that are negative for Trump, but that doesn’t excuse the mainstream press, which breathlessly highlighted the Russia collusion charges, to pretend that the Durham investigation isn’t happening.
This contributes to much of the press deliberately choosing to eschew its role as the public’s watchdog holding the government accountable. The point being is that if legacy media is only willing to shine a light on administrations when they oppose them, then not only does that undermine their credibility but results in a citizenry consistently robbed of the information it needs in order to properly evaluate crucial issues.
That was certainly the case in 2015 when the “echo chamber” failed to adequately report about what was actually in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—or JCPOA, as the deal was formally named—as opposed to what Obama’s aides wanted Americans to think about it. Had they done so, Obama and then-Secretary of State John Kerry might not have been able to get away with portraying a deal that actually guaranteed that Iran will get a nuclear weapon once its weak provisions expire at the end of this decade as preventing that outcome. They would realize that it did not give Tehran’s theocrats a chance “to get right with the world,” as Obama put it. Rather, it actually ignored their illegal missile program and status as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and then gave it the financial wherewithal to continue with both in an even more dangerous fashion.
Today, the challenge for the press is to honestly evaluate the Biden administration’s claims about Trump’s Iran policy that they have reversed. But the same echo chamber is again at work. Players involved with the first agreement are now dutifully regurgitating claims that Trump’s efforts to address the deal’s shortcomings by withdrawing from it in 2018 and then applying “maximum pressure” to the regime to get it to return to the negotiating table was a failure that could never have succeeded, as if Rhodes himself was still pulling their strings.
If another even weaker Iran deal will soon be concluded, Americans deserve more than partisan spin about an agreement that is likely to make the world an even more dangerous place than the one that Obama originally concluded. But because liberal journalists went into the tank for Obama, against Trump and now stand for Biden, a large portion of consumers of the news won’t get the information they need. And they’ll never see the truth about the pact since—like so many on both sides of the political divide—they shun any outlet that doesn’t confirm their pre-existing biases and opinions as purveyors of disinformation or worse. The price of a partisan press isn’t just paid by journalism’s growing credibility gap. Media bias on this scale is a devastating blow to democracy that all too many of those who claim they are worried about the peril to our form of government will never recognize.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).
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New Georgia Law points the way. Stacey Abrams double talks.
New Georgia law revives Israel oath for large state contracts
By Greg Bluestein
Gov. Brian Kemp signed a measure into law Monday that requires businesses with significant state contracts to sign an oath pledging not to boycott Israel.
The governor signed the legislation months after a federal judge struck down a similar 2016 law requiring state contractors to sign the oath on grounds that it violated free speech rights. That challenge was brought by a documentary filmmaker who refused to sign the pledge.
The new law, House Bill 383, raises the threshold for the anti-boycott pledge to state contracts worth more than $100,000. It also applies only to companies with five or more employees, limiting the number of firms affected by the mandate.
“In a deeper sense this reaffirms our support for a friend and a crucial ally in Israel,” Kemp said at a signing ceremony, before adding: “As your governor, I will never allow the state of Georgia to invest in a company that supports boycotts, divesting or sanctions against Israel.”
The legislation aims to counter the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that protests Israel’s policies regarding Palestinians. Georgia was among the first of dozens of states to enact such a law, which largely passed along party lines in the GOP-controlled Legislature in 2016.
Among the opponents was Stacey Abrams, then the top Democrat in the House, who called herself an “unwavering ally” to the Jewish community but said she voted against the measure because it could set a precedent that could deter advocacy movements from taking root.
The revised measure was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support and the backing of state Rep. Mike Wilensky, a Dunwoody Democrat who is the only Jewish member of the state Legislature.
Anat Sultan-Dadon, Israel’s consul general to the southeast U.S., said the law is designed to fight a movement that is “simply an age-old hatred agenda demonizing and delegitimizing the Jewish people.”
It was adopted despite opposition from the Georgia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which urged supporters to ask Kemp to veto the “last-ditch attempt” by state lawmakers to revive the pledge.
The opponents pointed out that U.S. District Judge Mark Cohen ruled that the anti-boycott pledge that the documentarian was asked to sign was “no different than requiring a person to espouse certain political beliefs or to engage in certain political associations.”
Supporters of the revamped measure say it reflects the state’s right to choose which companies it will contract with, but that it doesn’t penalize companies that choose not to do business with Israel for economic reasons.
“We will see what the federal courts have to say about this,” said state Rep. John Carson, a Marietta Republican who authored the measure. “But we feel it strikes the right balance between protecting our interests with the state of Israel and also allowing free speech.”
About the Author
Greg Bluestein is a political reporter who covers the governor's office and state politics for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Order his book on Georgia politics at bit.ly/FlippedTheBook.
Editors' Picks
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I can always expect a poignant response from my long time friend. This was in response to my recent memo about two spirals.
Dear Dick,
Since birth, we are all on the spiral to death. Some of us are just further along than others. As I have grown older, I have marked my decline in physical and mental ability. The decline has heightened my awareness and thoughts of death. Even though I hope to have decades ahead, yet I am increasing aware of my life’s close. But my thoughts are nebulous since the distant future is so clouded and unknown. Thus, I value more than ever the insights given me by those further ahead on life’s path.
My Father was an awesome man. He was an outrageously excellent pilot in WWII. He was an all-sport star varsity player in High School and remained fit, healthy and engaged in athletics his whole life. He was a musician. For example, in college he sang in the University of Virginia’s men’s acapella group, the equivalent of the Yale Whiffenpoofs, sang in groups throughout life, and made his own piano arrangements of popular songs. He was an artist and painted his whole life. For example, he often painted commissioned oil portraits in his spare time. He was a civic leader, serving in numerous capacities over his lifetime. But he was my father. So, what I remember is his love. One of his standout qualities, that to this day calls to me from any source, was his openness. He always gave me the benefit of his experiences. How valuable ever to receive full, open, and honest testimony! As a consequence, I have always taken those who share their stories with me as an act of love.
Mr. Berkowitz, your writing about the spiral to death gave me a glimpse of insight by one who is a bit further ahead on life’s path. I take it as a gracious an act of love.
With best regard,
S------
P. S. I too must have a bit of Shamrock Blood in me since my life too has been filled with blessings.
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