We got rid of Trump and we hired Biden. The only ones who benefitted are our enemies.
Jewish Leaders Correctly Demand We Address Root Causes of Hate in America, But Are Less Interested in the Increase in Anti-Israel Terrorism That is Taking Innocent Jewish Lives
When a White Nationalist opened fire in a Dollar Store in Florida, killing three black people, the Jewish world and Jewish Leaders were correct to quickly condemn the heinous act. While Jewish leaders responded in a moral manner consistent with Jewish values, the same cannot be said about their mostly silent response to the recent murders of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists. More Israelis have already been killed this year (34) than last year (33), and it’s not even September.
What explains the surge in the murder of Israeli Jews? What incentivized these murders are hatred and cash. In 2021, President Joe Biden proudly announced to Palestinian Authority Leader Mahmoud Abbas that “I reversed the policies of my predecessor and resumed aid to the Palestinians — more than half a billion dollars in 2021.” The Palestinian Authority routinely uses its cash to fund the “Pay to Slay” program that rewards Palestinian terrorists for killing Israelis. Moreover, the Biden Administration is funding the UNRWA, which literally teaches Palestinian children to hate Israel and Israelis in its textbooks.
Yet the leadership of the Jewish community continues to put their political considerations above Jewish lives. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) claims “we counter assaults on Israel’s right to exist, whether they arise on campuses, in multinational bodies, or anywhere else.” Apparently “anywhere else” does not include, “the White House.”
At the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, CEO Amy Spitalnick also rightfully and forcefully condemned the racist murders in Florida, but she is reticent to acknowledge and protest Biden’s policies of giving money to the terrorist PA. It’s hard to understand why she can not express her outrage when a terrorist kills an Israeli schoolteacher.
To read more about how Biden’s policies are leading to dead Israelis, go here
To read how Jewish Leaders are betraying their communities, buy “Betrayal” here
And:
Headlines Hazy on Details in Coverage of Palestinian Terror Attacks
Within the span of 12 hours, one Israeli was killed and at least six others were wounded in two separate Palestinian terror attacks.
In their coverage of these two terror attacks, several news outlets provided vague headlines that left readers with hazy information as to the nature of these attacks.
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Islamist Organizations Stripped from California Resolution - MEF Responsible
News from the Middle East Forum
https://www.meforum.org/64769/islamist-organizations-stripped-from-california
California Assemblywoman Eloise Reyes (third from right), whose resolution praising Islamist groups was amended to remove mention of them from HR 52, attends a 2018 event with the radical Council on American-Islamic Relations in attendance.
Quick action by the Middle East Forum (MEF) prevented California politicians from heaping praise on three radical Islamist organizations.
After MEF Action – MEF's activism project – launched an aggressive public pressure campaign, the California Assembly deleted several blocks of text praising the three radical groups from a resolution recognizing August as American Muslim Appreciation and Awareness Month.
The significant amendments to House Resolution 52 (HR 52) are a substantial achievement in a state where elected officials consistently defend Islamists in the name of cultural diversity.
California legislators sought MEF's approval before proceeding with a Rules Committee vote earlier today and sending a revised version of HR 52 to the Assembly floor. MEF agreed to formally withdraw its opposition to the resolution after submitting a position letter to the bill's permanent record that criticized the inclusion of the Sunni Islamist groups.
"Collectively, these groups possess appalling track records of bigotry and anti-Semitism, ties to foreign governments and political movements, and even involvement in terrorism-related prosecutions," MEF Action's August 17 letter warned.
Additionally, MEF Action organized an online campaign that put California constituents in touch with their elected officials, facilitating the exchange of hundreds of emails and targeted social media posts expressing opposition to HR 52. Concerned citizens promised to "stand against any legislation that encourages extremism and undermines moderate and minority faith communities."
Next, MEF Action rallied partner organizations to push for an amendment. The CLARITy Coalition, a pro-democracy group led by prominent Muslim reformers and counter-extremists, released a public statement denouncing the draft resolution for failing to acknowledge "minority Islamic sects and reform movements" that "challenge the political dominance of American Islamist institutions."
Ultimately, the amended version of HR 52 removed entire paragraphs praising the Muslim American Society (MAS), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), and the Institute of Knowledge – California-based organizations representing three ideologically distinct strains of radical Islam.
In 2014, the United Arab Emirates designated MAS as a terrorist organization, citing its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood movement, a violent Sunni Islamist network with outposts around the world. MAS has established hundreds of radical mosques, charities, and schools throughout America.
An ideological cousin to the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami is a revolutionary Islamist movement founded in British India to promote Islamic governance. ICNA, which state legislators initially praised in HR 52 for "providing compassionate service to victims of adversities," is widely regarded as the U.S. branch of Jamaat-e-Islami, despite the movement's documented participation in war crimes during Bangladesh's 1971 war for independence.
The State Assembly originally praised IOK for "empowering Muslim students and supporting them in promoting academic success," despite the Islamic seminary's role in spreading Deobandism, the Sunni revivalist movement espoused by Taliban militants. Californians concerned with IOK's inclusion in HR 52 pointed to the group's dean of academics, who has justified slavery under Islamic law.
"Thanks to the support of MEF advocates in California, as well as public statements and behind-the-scenes activism from our partner organizations, the California Assembly was forced to make sweeping amendments to a bill that threatened to mainstream radical Islamist groups," said Benjamin Baird, director of MEF Action. "We are encouraged by the state legislature's response and plan to duplicate this campaign in other states."
"Far too often, Islamist special interests are propped up by politicians too uninformed or indifferent to understand the damage caused by legitimizing extremism," said Gregg Roman, director of MEF. "MEF will continue to expose these partnerships and hold lawmakers accountable for pandering to radical Islamist groups."
State lawmakers were ultimately reluctant to remove references to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a terror-linked Muslim "civil rights" group with chapters in California. Although MEF will not support a resolution that praises CAIR, it formally withdrew opposition to the bill after legislators agreed to issue amendments.
The Middle East Forum, a non-profit organization, promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects Western civilization from Islamism. It does so through a combination of original ideas, focused activism, and funding allies. For more information, www.meforum.org.
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More about Israel:
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Young Palestinian girl from Hebron, who is receiving cancer treatment at Israel's Ichilov Hospital, was surprised by her medical team with a Barbie themed party to celebrate her 8th birthday. (video)
1) Startup aiming to keep kidney patients off dialysis
Electro-hydraulic acoustic therapy could treat late-stage chronic kidney disease and delay its progression by up to a year.
Additional reading: New Device Tests Your Sweat for Heart Fitness Israeli Firm Developing Tumor-Preventing Treatment Raises $75M
2) Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Jenin, Psychological Warfare, and the West’s Perceptual Failure
This document assesses Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) strategy of conducting both terror assaults and ideological and media warfare against the State of Israel. This analysis focuses on the IRGC’s recent terror and influence operations in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank city of Jenin, whose media effect is reflected via a survey of international media outlets.
Additional reading: After Destroying Lebanon, Iran-controlled Hezbollah Threatens War with Israel Iranian Infiltration of The Civil and Military Communications Infrastructure of Syria Lebanon’s Hezbollah stages war games, unveils drone weapon against Israel
3) Israel’s use of the F-35 benefits the US
Israel’s air force and aerospace industries is a cost-effective and battle-tested laboratory for the U.S. defense and aerospace industries and armed forces.
The critical upgrades of the F-35 have produced a combat aircraft that is substantially superior to the original generation and demonstrates Israel’s role as an important source of U.S. weaponry modernization, reduction of unit cost and job creation in the U.S.
Similar mega-billion-dollar benefits to the U.S. economy and defense have been generated by the hundreds of Israeli solutions and add-ons, which have upgraded the performance of the technologically less-challenging F-16 (Lockheed-Martin) and F-15 (Boeing). In fact, all U.S. manufacturers of military systems employed by Israel have benefited in a similar manner.
The annual $3.8 billion extended to Israel (to purchase only U.S. military systems) does not constitute “foreign aid.” It is an annual U.S. investment yielding to the U.S. an annual return of a few hundred percent. It is the most productive and secure U.S. investment, underlying the mutually-beneficial U.S.-Israel two-way street.
Additional reading: How Israel Helps the US: Why the Relationship Is a Two-Way Street The Case For US Military Aid to Israel Do Not Cut Off Aid to Israel
4) Deir Yassin: The ‘Massacre’ That Never Was
Prior to the declaration of the State of Israel, April 1948, 100,000 Jews were trapped in Jerusalem, as Arab fighters blockaded the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. They were in dire need of support and opening the road to Jerusalem became an important strategic goal of the Israeli side. Jewish militias began a campaign to capture Arab strongholds and villages along the road and establish a corridor that would enable convoys to safely travel to Jerusalem. Deir Yassin, a stronghold of Arab fighters targeting close by Jewish villages, was located close to the road and became a legitimate military target.
As the Jewish soldiers encountered between 70-80 combatants in the village, questions remain as to why so many casualties were civilians. The warning mechanism not working properly. Expecting to face only combatants in a residential area, they carried out their original battle plan, which was to throw grenades into the houses that combatants were firing from before entering and clearing the houses not expecting to find civilians still sheltering in place. It was an avoidable tragedy had the military operation gone to plan, but the decades-long lie that the village is the site of a planned and deliberate massacre is just that — a lie. The allegations of rape and other extreme abuses were fabricated. It is now known that the head of the Arab Higher Committee in Jerusalem, Hussein Fakhri al Khalidi, convinced the survivors to spread this false narrative when they were being interrogated by the British, in order to discredit the Jewish soldiers and increase support for the Arab cause.
Additional reading: Tauber, Eliezer. Massacre That Never Was. Toby Press, 2021. Unprovoked Carnage: The Hebron Massacre of 1929
5) Jews were in MENA before Muslims, Arabs – opinion
There are no "Arab Jews." Jews predate Muslims, Arabs in much of the Middle East. There is one fundamental problem in historicizing the “Arab Jew.” Jewish populations constitute a pre-Islamic demographic in the MENA. Their presence in the wider region predates the Arab-Islamic conquests of the Prophet Muhammad’s armies by at least a millennium. By the time the Muslim caliphates consolidated imperial power over the entire region, Jews had already developed their own local cultures in diasporic sites.
Jews have lived in the wider MENA since at least 586 BCE, when King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the neo-Babylonian Empire. This forced many Jews into exile, marking the effective dispossession of their ancestral homeland in Israel. Some Jews chose to remain in Israel despite the challenges of everyday life wrought by such an enormous blow to their national and religious identity.
Others settled in lands conquered by their imperial subjugators in the Levant and Mesopotamia, whereas their more defiant brethren undertook risky and potentially perilous journeys to North Africa and southern Arabia. For example, the oldest Jewish community in Morocco – Ifrane – is believed by scholars to have been established in the 4th century BCE.
Additional reading: Saving the Last Synagogue in Mosul
6) Social Media and Search Algorithms Contribute to Proliferation of Online Hate, According to Two New Studies
Algorithms driving recommendations, amplification and search engines contribute to proliferation of antisemitism and extremism, says ADL and TTP research
7) A behind-the-scenes look at the IDF's secret underground intel center
Established in 2013, I-NET focuses on following and curating open-source information for Israel’s intelligence community.
Additional reading: New cutting-edge IAI spy aircraft closer to IDF delivery
8) Hezbollah, a Worldwide Criminal Organization
Hezbollah has established itself not only as one of the world's leading terrorist groups and Lebanon's effective master, but also as a prominent transnational crime syndicate. Hezbollah's criminal activities range from drug trafficking in cocaine and heroin, to cigarette smuggling, document and identity card forgery, and money laundering through Iran's and Lebanon's banking systems. These criminal enterprises fill its coffers, facilitate its domination of Lebanon's political system, and underpin the buildup of the organization's global terrorist and intelligence infrastructure.
9) The Kibbutz That’s Protecting US Soldiers From Bombs And Bullets
The armor, kitted hull, is being incorporated into the 150,000-strong fleet of new vehicles that is currently replacing the military’s all-purpose Hummers and jeeps. The company is located in Kibbutz Sasa, close to the border with Lebanon in northern Israel
Additional reading: US Marine Corps moves forward with purchase of Israel's Iron Dome
10) Book claiming Israel harvests Palestinian organs taught in Princeton humanities course
Syllabus for next term's course in The Healing Humanities: Decolonizing Trauma Studies from the Global South includes Prof. Jasbir Puar book The Right to Maim, claiming Israel now replaces the right to kill with excruciating mutilation
Additional reading: Elite University Students Invite Speaker Who Claimed Israelis Eat Palestinians’ Organs
Letter to the president of Princeton University defending Professor Satyel Larson
The Palestinian embassy in Argentina engages in anti-Semitic activism
11) Smart Headband Gives Blind Swimmers Confidence In The Pool
The device is equipped with a camera that continuously scans the bottom of the pool and the area in front of the swimmer. This data is then sent to the “brain” of the headband, a processor located at the back of the device, which dispatches alerts to two chips located on either side of the swimmer’s head. The chips use bone conduction, a kind of technology that sends sounds to the inner ear through the bones of the skull without having to block the ear itself.
Most swimmers who tested the product wanted a natural-looking and inconspicuous product, he says. As such, the headband will resemble regular swimwear, and will be made with the same materials as goggles. It will also come in shades of blue to blend in with the water.
12) The Nazi Officer Who Saved 100 Jewish Families
A bit of history: Inspired by Hitler, Dr. Albert Battel joined the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, serving as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht army reserves. Though he wanted to serve his country, he couldn’t stand idly by as people were being beaten and killed. He turned against Hitler and risked his life to save Jews. Battel was recognized by Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nation.
Additional reading: A Righteous Mayor in Occupied France
13) Anti-Semitism / Anti-Christianism in the Islamic world / anti-Jewish/Zionist on Campuses bibliography
A continuation from last week. (See: Palestine Media Watch (site)
All the best,
David Elazar Rishon LeZion, Israel
Home page https://sites.google.com/view/mtevans/Home
Weekly current events update and archive (link)
Signs of an open mind: Listening to opinions that make you think hard, not just views that make you feel good. Choosing friends based on the decency of their behavior, not the similarity of their beliefs. Seeing disagreement as a chance to learn, not a threat to your ego (Adam Grant)
1) Startup aiming to keep kidney patients off dialysis (full text) (top)
... Curespec, .... in Israel, ...., Nephrospec, can postpone the dialysis treatment of stage three and four CKD patients by up to 12 months. .... promotes new blood-vessel formation and restores damaged tissue function after six painless treatment sessions over a three-week period. ... hoping that one day Nephrospec could keep CKD patients off dialysis indefinitely.
.... application of electro-hydraulic acoustic therapy (eHAT) — an acoustic wave treatment that uses less intensity than traditional shockwave treatments ....
.... now working to prove the device’s efficacy by conducting clinical trials with a larger experimental group. .... also being promoted as an effective treatment for hypertension. ... hypertension is one of the risk factors for developing kidney problems.
Nephrospec is compact, designed for easy implementation in any medical facility. .... device has already been deployed at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center and Shaare Zedek Medical Center, as well as hospitals in Germany, Switzerland and the United States. If the trials are successful, the devices will remain at the respective hospitals as part of the facility’s CKD treatment plan.
2) Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Jenin, Psychological Warfare, and the West’s Perceptual Failure (full text) (top)
Foreign media coverage of the events in Jenin have erroneously reported that the Iranian regime’s recent terror and influence operations in the city were a “Palestinian-Israeli clash.”
Yet statements by Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, senior IRGC officials, and the regime’s official news agencies – documented here – present the broader strategic implementation of the IRGC’s West Bank operations. Statements from Palestinian officials also support the IRGC’s operations program.
There is a clear need to change the false narrative of young Palestinian freedom fighters struggling against the “Zionist occupier” to a more accurate narrative that reflects a carefully planned, Iranian regime-backed initiative that supports and directs Palestinian terror activity from the West Bank against Israeli civilians.
The battle in the West Bank, and Jenin specifically, is not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict per se but part of a more significant Iranian-Israeli conflict, part of Iran’s plans to support and build up terror capabilities along Israel’s borders and in Gaza and the West Bank.
This document underscores the need for Israel to wage a soft power war of perception alongside its counter-terror operations in Jenin to eliminate the IRGC-supported Palestinian terrorist nests there.
Simultaneously, Israel must provide the Palestinians with the evidence that what matters to the present Iranian regime is not Palestinian welfare, but the Shiite revolution.
3) Israel’s use of the F-35 benefits the US (full text) (top)
A recent mega-billion dollar increase in the export of Lockheed-Martin’s F-35 combat aircraft is due to overcoming a series of pivotal glitches. ... achieved by Lockheed-Martin, as well as by Israel’s air force and aerospace industries, ... a cost-effective and battle-tested laboratory for the U.S. defense and aerospace industries and armed forces.
.... first country to use the highly-computerized F-35 operationally. ... successful in solving initial glitches that caused concern among prospective buyers. ... communicates 24/7 with Lockheed-Martin ... solved most of the operational and maintenance glitches by marshalling its intrinsic features, .... derivatives of the uniquely challenging and threatening Middle East environment: Optimism, patriotism, defiance of odds, out-of-the-box thinking, risk-taking, do-or-die state of mind and a can-do and frontier-pioneering mentality.
.... solutions to the F-35 glitches—in the areas of data gathering and processing, electronic warfare and firing control accuracy—have been shared with the U.S. manufacturer and the U.S. Air Force, .... sparing Lockheed-Martin billions of dollars in research and development, enhancing the manufacturer’s competitive edge, increasing exports by a few additional billions and expanding the employment base of Lockheed-Martin and its multitude of subcontractors.
The critical upgrades .... have produced a combat aircraft that is substantially superior to the original generation. ... demonstrates Israel’s role as an important source of U.S. weaponry modernization, reduction of unit cost and job creation in the U.S.
Similar mega-billion-dollar benefits to the U.S. economy and defense have been generated by the hundreds of Israeli solutions and add-ons, which have upgraded the performance of the technologically less-challenging F-16 (Lockheed-Martin) and F-15 (Boeing). In fact, all U.S. manufacturers of military systems employed by Israel have benefited in a similar manner.
... 250 commercial U.S. high-tech giants have established research and development centers in Israel, leveraging Israel’s brain power and innovative spirit in order to sustain their global lead, yielding a consequential increase in global sales.
The U.S. defense and aerospace industries established their own Israeli research and development centers through the hundreds of U.S. military systems, which are employed—and systematically improved—by the Israel Defense Forces, ....
In 2023, .... intensifying anti-U.S. Sunni and Shiite Islamic terrorism, an imperialistic Iran with a solid strategic foothold in Central and South America, .... The Middle East ... epicenter of anti-U.S. Islamic terrorism, global drug trafficking and proliferation of ballistic and nuclear technologies, ... constitute a clear and present threat to U.S. national and homeland Security.
... Israel is the U.S.’s most reliable, battle-tested and cost-effective ally, as well as a potential beachhead in the face of mutual threats and mutual challenges.
Israel shares with the U.S. more intelligence than shared by all NATO countries combined. .... Israel’s battle experience has been shared with the U.S., saving American lives by serving as a basis for the formulation of US air force and ground force battle tactics, enhancing military medicine and training U.S. soldiers in urban warfare and facing car bombs, suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices.
... annual $3.8 billion extended to Israel (to purchase only U.S. military systems) does not constitute “foreign aid.” It is an annual U.S. investment ... yielding to the U.S. an annual return of a few hundred percent. It is the most productive and secure U.S. investment, underlying the mutually-beneficial U.S.-Israel two-way street.
4) Deir Yassin: The ‘Massacre’ That Never Was (full text) (top)
Israel’s legitimacy is consistently challenged by the false notion that its very establishment in 1948 is a kind of “original sin.” ... acquired through unjust means. ... decry the founders of Israel as rapacious conquerors who took the land by force and expelled or murdered anyone that got in their way.
Why Deir Yassin? A central story ... April 9, 1948, battle over the Arab village of Deir Yassin. ... invariably (and incorrectly) described as a “massacre,” which is used as evidence of alleged Jewish cruelty toward Arabs.
.... War of Independence, 100,000 Jews were trapped in Jerusalem, as Arab fighters blockaded the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. ...these Jews were in dire need of support. ... opening the road to Jerusalem became an important strategic goal of the Israeli side.... Jewish militias ... Operation Nachshon, a campaign to capture Arab strongholds and villages along the road and establish a corridor that would enable convoys to safely travel to Jerusalem.
Deir Yassin was located very close to the road and less than a mile away from neighboring Jewish villages. Residents of Deir Yassin fired at these Jewish villages days before the battle. .... being a stronghold of Arab fighters, it became a legitimate military target amid evidence combatants within the village were targeting Jewish civilians. .... Haganah acquired intelligence that more than 150 Iraqi and Syrian fighters entered the village ... this piece of intelligence was eventually proven to be false, Deir Yassin was nevertheless considered to be hostile.
Planning the Attack ... Israeli soldiers surrendered the element of surprise in order to warn the civilians .... so they could evacuate before the fighting broke out. .... drive a truck with a loudspeaker ... recording in Arabic that explained civilians should flee .... make it safely to a neighboring Arab village.
The Tricky Part ... was militarily sanctioned and designed to minimize civilian casualties, the operation did not go to plan. ... there was heavy resistance mounted from within the village and dozens of civilians were killed.
.... numerous different testimonies given about what had occurred. ...survivors of Deir Yassin, who claimed that the Jewish soldiers raped women, cut fetuses from the stomachs of pregnant women, and executed civilians. .... Arab researchers Sharif Kan’ane and Nihad Zeitawi interviewed survivors of the attack in 1987 and not a single testimony mentioned rape or any mistreatment of Arab women. ... compiled a list of all of the villagers who were killed — 107 in total, which is significantly less than the initially reported figure of more than 200 dead villagers.
...Arab researcher, Walid Khalidi, wrote a book .. which he used the statements from 30 survivors, as well as other information ... there were isolated instances of Jewish soldiers killing civilians, but the allegations of rape and other extreme abuses were fabricated. .... now known that the head of the Arab Higher Committee in Jerusalem, Hussein Fakhri al Khalidi, convinced the survivors to spread this false narrative when they were being interrogated by the British, in order to discredit the Jewish soldiers and increase support for the Arab cause.
One True Act of Cruelty ... there was one atrocity committed by a Jewish soldier.
While fighting to take control of a house in the village, a soldier named Yehuda Segal was killed. ... occupants surrendered and were taken outside, ... Jewish soldier saw his friend Segal’s dead body and in an act of blind rage, he murdered 11 members of the household. .... was not representative of the behavior of Jewish soldiers in general.
The Lingering Problem ... Jewish soldiers encountered between 70-80 combatants in the village, .... why so many casualties were civilians. ... warning mechanism not working properly. ... loudspeaker truck got stuck in a ditch, ... Arab civilians were not properly warned that a battle was about to break out.
Expecting to face only combatants in a residential area, the Jewish soldiers — .... — carried out their original battle plan, .... throw grenades into the houses that combatants were firing from before entering and clearing the houses. Not expecting to find civilians still sheltering in place, they did not allow for that possibility. ... flawed tactics rather than intent to murder that were responsible for the civilian deaths.
The Real Terrorist Attack The battle over Deir Yassin was neither a terrorist attack nor a massacre. ... legitimate military objective for the Jewish soldiers ... planned to mitigate civilian casualties, even at the expense of their own tactical advantage. ... avoidable tragedy had the military operation gone to plan. ... decades-long lie that the village is the site of a planned and deliberate massacre . ....
.... lie that has had deadly consequences. On April 13, 1948, Arab militants killed over 70 medical workers and civilians in a revenge attack for Deir Yassin. Their objective was to kill as many unarmed civilians as possible.
Deir Yassin ... was a military failure. The pervasive and insidious narrative that a Jewish militia targeted the village and its inhabitants with a plot to commit unspeakable savagery is simply not supported by evidence.
The following sources were used to compose this article:
Avner, Yehuda. The Prime Ministers. New Milford, Conn: Toby, 2010.
Gordis, Daniel. Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul. New York: Schocken Books, 2014.
Karsh, Efraim. The Arab-Israeli Conflict the Palestine War, 1948. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010.
Lorch, Netanel. The Edge of the Sword: Israel’s War of Independence, 1947-1949. Easton Press, 1991.
Max Abrahms. “Why Terrorism Does Not Work.” International Security 31, no. 2 (2006): 42–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137516.
Morris , Benny. “The Historiography of Deir Yassin.” Taylor & Francis. Accessed November 28, 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13531040500040305.
Shapira, Anita. “Jerusalem in 1948: A Contemporary Perspective.” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 3 (2011): 78–123. https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.17.3.78.
Tauber, Eliezer. Massacre That Never Was. TOBY PRESS, 2021.
5) Jews were in MENA before Muslims, Arabs - opinion (full text) (top)
On August 3, Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim appeared on The Big Picture, a .... Shlaim’s family fled as refugees to Israel in 1951 when conditions for Jews in Iraq became intolerable. ... Shlaim referred numerous times to his status as an “Arab Jew”:
“It’s very easy to define an Arab Jew. ... lived in an Arab country. ...spoke Arabic at home. ... Arab culture. ... Arab friends. .... He is a witness to the traumatic and collective dispersal of nearly one million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the latter half of the 20th century. ...
.... important to deconstruct the problematic terminology and rationalizations he uses to frame his account of Jews in the MENA, and move past the romanticized memories upon which he draws to justify his view of Arabized Jews in the region as actually being Arab.
There are no "Arab Jews." Jews predate Muslims, Arabs in much of the Middle East
.... Jewish populations constitute a pre-Islamic demographic in the MENA. .... predates the Arab-Islamic conquests of the Prophet Muhammad’s armies by at least a millennium. ... Jews had already developed their own local cultures in diasporic sites. ... lived in the wider MENA since at least 586 BCE, ... forced many Jews into exile, marking the effective dispossession of their ancestral homeland in Israel. Some Jews chose to remain in Israel despite the challenges of everyday life ...
Others settled in lands conquered by their imperial subjugators in the Levant and Mesopotamia, whereas their more defiant brethren undertook risky and potentially perilous journeys to North Africa and southern Arabia. ....
... uses “Arab” as an umbrella term ... implicitly erases a thousand years of distinctly non-Arab culture-building, not to mention the millennia spent living within their indigenous territory in Israel.
The term also confuses audiences who may not fully understand the subtle underpinnings of Jewish history in Arabized environments. ... certain historicity to the term Jewish Arabs, that references the few ethnic Arabs who converted to Judaism in the pre-Islamic period before the Muslim conquests. ... no way denotes the process of mass Arabization undergone by definitively non-Arab Jewish populations in the MENA ... 1,400 years under Muslim rule in the MENA had its effect on the Jewish population living in the midst of Arab hegemony. ... large proportion of Jews became thoroughly Arabized. .... Jews in the Islamic world were far more able to blend in with the cultural fabric of their surroundings and establish close relationships with their Arab counterparts. ....“[Jews] contributed at every level: the economic, the financial, the political, the literary, and journalism. The Jews were a very positive force in the making of Iraqi society.”
.... ignores the religious hierarchies of an Arab imperialist environment which subjected Jews to the second-class status of the ahl al-dhimma (people of the covenant’). It did not matter how Arabized they became or how much they contributed to their surroundings: Jews, like other minorities who safeguarded their own ethnoreligious identities and refused to convert to Islam, were condemned to the fate of cultural “others’’ who could never become considered equal to Arab Muslims.
... Jews were never allowed to become “Arab” in the same way that non-Arab Muslims in the MENA could attain Arab status. Even Arabized Jews who converted to Islam .... nicknamed al-Isra’ili by their new Muslim co-religionists, a symbol of continued attachment to their ancestral roots in Israel.
.... in the colonial era of the late 19th and 20th centuries, that Jews across the MENA attained some degree of emancipation and obtained the same rights to vote and hold elected office as their Arab neighbors. The increased potential for Jews to reach upper-class status in Iraq, ... granted by a combination of Ottoman reforms and later British control, rather than by the Hashemite elites.
.... on the issue of the conflict between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs, the Arab states were quick to remind Jews of their inferior non-Arab status. Even in Morocco, .... Jews were actively discriminated against during the 1930s.
....decried Jews as foreign parasites with ambitions for socioeconomic domination through Zionism. ..., Jews were fundamentally non-Arabs who, hand-in-hand with European empires, sought to undermine the Islamic foundations of the “Arab” world.
.....Jews across the MENA would be ethnically cleansed by Arab nationalists and radical Islamist organizations, and forced to abandon a grand total of $300 billion in assets, for which no compensation was ever paid. ... not only erase pre-Islamic Jewish cultures when he refers to MENA Jews as “Arab Jews.” .... whitewashes centuries of discrimination against Jews in an Arab-Muslim society whose rejection of Jewish autonomy only grew stronger when its sociopolitical subordinates sought to empower themselves through Zionism. ....
.... Shlaim’s narrative of Muslim-Jewish relations as all sunshine and rainbows before the rise of the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel can only be considered a dangerously ill-conceived form of historical revisionism. .
... does a tremendous disservice to those who are trying to discover why there used to be 850,000 Jews in the region, where now there are nearly none outside of Israel. As of 2022, there were only four Jews left in Iraq and three in Egypt, formerly two of the largest Jewish communities in the Islamic world .....Abraham Accords have made Jews feel more welcome in some Arab states, but there is still a long way to go. ...
6) Social Media and Search Algorithms Contribute to Proliferation of Online Hate, According to Two New Studies (full text) (top)
A pair of new studies from ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) and Tech Transparency Project (TTP) shows how some of the biggest social media platforms and search engines at times directly contribute to the proliferation of online antisemitism, hate and extremism.
.... created a series of online personas designed to mirror what real users experience on the tech platforms. ... searched for terms related to conspiracy theory.
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It has been tried before and did not work and will not work again.
If at first you don't succeed the government thinks you should keep on sucking until it succeeds.
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Drug Price Controls Mean Slower Cures
The squeeze on pharma begins, and the effects won’t be what President Biden claims.
By The Editorial Board
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the worst legislation to pass Congress in many years, and its drug price controls are especially harmful. On Tuesday President Biden announced the first 10 drugs for controls, and he’s exaggerating the benefits while ignoring the larger damage.
The IRA requires the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to “negotiate” prices for the top-spending Medicare drugs, starting with 10 this year and a total of 60 by 2029. The law sets the drug price ceiling at between 25% and 60% of its list price, with no price floor. Drug makers that don’t participate or reject the government’s price will incur a crippling daily excise tax that starts at 186% and eventually climbs to 1,900% of the drug’s daily revenues. This is extortion, not a negotiation.
In the first round, the Administration is targeting drugs that treat common conditions such as Bristol Myers Squibb’s blood-thinner Eliquis, Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly’s diabetes medication Jardiance, Johnson & Johnson’s blood-thinner Xarelto, Amgen’s rheumatoid arthritis drug Enbrel and Novo Nordisk’s insulin NovoLog.
“This plan is a key part of Bidenomics,” the President proclaimed. Like his other command-and-control government plans, this one relies on deceptive advertising.
Start with the claim that the 10 drugs accounted for $50.5 billion—or about 20%—of “gross” costs for Medicare’s Part D drug program. “Gross” spending excludes the discounts that drug makers pay Part D plans for higher placement on formularies. Medicare drug prices are already negotiated by insurers, and Part D net spending is about half Medicare’s “gross” costs.
The Administration also overstates the rise in prescription drug costs. Medicare spending on prescription drugs has grown less than for hospital and physician services in the last decade. Total U.S. out-of-pocket spending on prescription drugs in nominal dollars is lower than it was in 2003 and accounted for only 1% of the $4.25 trillion the U.S. spent on healthcare in 2021.
Competition from generics has held down drug prices. Yet the IRA will discourage investment in new generics and biosimilars because their manufacturers could later be undercut by government price controls on brand drugs. That means Americans may end up paying more for prescription drugs thanks to the IRA.
The law will also give companies the incentives to launch drugs at higher prices and raise prices for privately insured patients to compensate for the Medicare cuts. That means the 218 million Americans with private insurance will pay more for drugs. Call it the Private Insurance Inflation Act.
The Administration claims its regime will decrease prices “for up to 9 million seniors,” but this estimate is inflated too. Several drugs on its list will soon lose market exclusivity and could face competition from generics that reduce prices without government intervention. Now those generics might not be developed or launched.
It’s true that some patients incur high out-of-pocket costs, but Democrats didn’t need to impose price controls to help them. The law caps Medicare patient out-of-pocket drug spending, which doesn’t distort incentives to innovate as price controls do.
Genentech CEO Alexander Hardy recently explained some of the law’s distortionary impact. Normally, drug makers seek to launch drugs that have multiple potential indications—say for prostate, ovarian and breast cancers—in the market in which they can be developed fastest. This is often for rare diseases and small populations since trials don’t have to be as large.
The IRA encourages drug makers to slow-walk development of treatments for smaller populations since Food and Drug Administration approval would start the clock on eligibility for price controls. The law will also discourage drug makers from studying and launching drugs for new indications, as AstraZeneca explained in a lawsuit last week.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association this month estimated that about a quarter of FDA-approved orphan drugs were developed for at least one follow-on indication. Under the IRA, many wouldn’t have been. There’s no such thing as a free drug.
Price controls will reduce venture biotech investment by limiting potential future profits. A University of Chicago study estimated that the drug price controls would reduce research and development by $663 billion through 2039 and result in 135 fewer new drugs being approved. These are among the IRA’s unseen costs, which will include lives that could have been saved or extended by new treatments that were delayed or never developed.
Drug makers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are challenging the IRA’s constitutionality in court. They make a compelling argument that the sham negotiations violate the Eighth and Fifth Amendment prohibitions against excessive fines and the taking of private property without just compensation. Let’s hope they make it to the Supreme Court.
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