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It can be done if you have the guts:
Israel’s 65th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
On the 65th day of the war authorities here predict that the war will take until the end of February to complete Israel’s mission. Meanwhile the IDF reports that 559 soldiers have ben wounded since the beginning of the ground invasion of Gaza with 1,600 wounded since October 7th, and the daily casualty reports keep coming in as well.
The good news is that the US has used an emergency authority to allow the sale of about 14,000 tank shells to Israel without the need for congressional review, the Pentagon said on Saturday. The State Department on Friday used an Arms Export Control Act emergency declaration for the tank rounds worth $106.5 million for immediate delivery to Israel. This is a welcome piece of news as Israel does not have the capacity to produce enough materiel to conduct a war of this length without the support of the US. An important point to remember by those people who argue for us to make all of our own decisions without regard for what Washington says.
The shells are part of a bigger sale that was first reported by Reuters on Friday that the US administration is asking Congress to approve. The larger package is worth more than $500 million and includes 45,000 shells for Israel's Merkava tanks. As the war intensifies, how and where exactly the U.S. weapons are used in the conflict continues to come under more scrutiny, even though US officials say there are no plans to put conditions on military aid to Israel or to consider withholding some of it. Rights advocates, as expected, expressed concern over the sale, saying it doesn't align with Washington's effort to press Israel to minimize civilian casualties. A State Department official said on Saturday that Washington continues to be clear with the Israeli government that it must comply with international humanitarian law and take every feasible step to avoid harm to civilians.
Four people were killed in an alleged Israeli drone strike against a vehicle near the Syrian border in the Golan Heights, Syrian media reported Friday as Israel and Hezbollah traded fire across the Lebanese frontier, with several Israelis reported injured. According to the Syrian pro-government Sham FM station, the strike took place in Madinat al-Baath in the Quneitra province. It published a picture purportedly showing the car in flames that was hit by the drone. There was no comment from the IDF on the alleged attack. However, the military did confirm that it struck targets in Syria early Friday morning, in response to rocket fire the night before. The IDF says it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for our enemies, chief among them Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Additionally, airstrikes attributed to Israel have repeatedly targeted Syrian air defense systems.
The IDF needs another three to four weeks to complete its current offensive in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis and a similar amount of time after that to wrap up the first stage of the war against Hamas, according to a senior Israeli defense official. The official told Axios in a report on Friday that while the US has not given Israel a deadline on ending its military operations in Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 massacres, Washington has expressed that time was running out.
The defense official who spoke to Axios said the US and Israel disagreed by about a month on how long the war should continue, without further specificity.
According to the official, the Biden administration would be happy for Israel to finish intensive operations by the end of the month, but Jerusalem believes it needs until at least the end of January.
“The American message is that they would like to see us finish the fighting sooner, with less harm to Palestinian civilians and more humanitarian assistance for Gaza. We would also like this to happen, but the enemy does not always agree,” the official was quoted as saying.
Yemen’s Houthi rebels said Saturday they would start targeting any ship passing through the Red Sea en route to Israel, regardless of whether the ship’s ownership is linked to the Jewish state, as they continued to escalate attacks amid the Israel-Hamas war. The Iran-backed rebel group has fired several ballistic missiles and drones at Eilat since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in October, all of which were intercepted or missed their targets. The latest attack came last Wednesday when Israel shot down a ballistic missile over the Red Sea. They have also assaulted a number of ships, thus far targeting vessels allegedly owned by Israeli firms or with ties to Israeli businessmen. “If Gaza does not receive the food and medicine it needs, all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality, will become a target for our armed forces,” Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Sare’e announced in a video statement.
Tonight is the fourth night of Chanukah, the holiday that celebrates the Maccabean victory over Hellenistic forces who had taken control of the land and laid waste to the Temple. It was one of the many times in history that our enemies has sought do destroy us. In each case we prevailed and, in each case as well, our enemies no longer exist as a nation. Hopefully we will be privileged to see the same result in the current battle. May it be so.
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The Jewish director will be aided in his documentary by Israeli groups who seek to preserve testimonies from the invasion for the future.
The Day the Empress’ Clothes Fell Off
For his Substack The Weekly Dish, FAIR Advisor Andrew Sullivan writes about how the December 5th Congressional hearings on campus anti-Semitism only underscored what many people already believe is the path to saving higher education:
End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academic merit alone. Save standardized testing — which in fact helps minorities, and it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids,” as Steven Pinker said this week. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut or shout down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students, and see them as free human beings with open minds. Treat them equally as individuals seeking to learn, if you can remember such a concept.
Guess the Anti-Semite: Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, or Candace Owens?
T. Belman. Kirk and Carlson get a pass. Owens does not.
The Hamas-ISIS Gaza War has erupted not only in the Mideast but also on Twitter, TikTok, podcasts, and YouTube. Social media language tends to be edgy. In the politically conservative Jewish community where I reside, three conservative commentators have elicited concern: Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, and Candace Owens.
First, Charlie Kirk. His work on colleges is amazing. Is he anti-Semitic? I don’t buy it. Is he “a little bit anti-Semitic”? First, I don’t buy it. He is a Christian Zionist. Second, there is no such thing as a “little bit anti-Semitic.” That’s like “a little bit pregnant.” Remember that as you read on.
The concern over Charlie Kirk is that he has endorsed Elon Musk’s observation that Jewish liberals have been major donors to certain horrible leftist causes. That’s not anti-Semitic. That’s true. For the past eight years in this column, I have written countless articles about the plague of Jewish apostate liberals, a problem to which my Catholic friends especially relate in a world of Catholic apostates like Joe Bidens, Nancy Pelosis, and Sotomayors who have done far more damage to America and have done more to promote abortion and homosexual marriage than even the Satanic George Soros has achieved.
Let us be clear. Judaism — real Judaism — is politically conservative. Open a Bible; it’s all there. Tough on crime. No abortions except to save a mother’s life. No homosexuality, and certainly no homosexual “marriages.” G-d created humans as male and female, binary. His pronoun is “He/Him/His.” Borders matter.
Everywhere in the world except in America, Jews are solidly conservative. They are the Conservative Party’s most reliable voting bloc in the United Kingdom. Jews from Russia and Ukraine despise communism more than anyone on earth. Israel — a place that reflects something about Jews — has been dominated mostly by conservative governments for the past 46 years. Even in America, Orthodox Jews — the fastest growing population of American Jews, and the ones who live by actual Judaim — vote 75 percent and more Republican.
So what’s wrong with the non-Orthodox Jews of America? Easy: they don’t know Judaism and are desperate to fit in with non-Jews. Therefore, many negate their Judaism. That’s how they think they make “friends” . . . until those “friends” turn on them or their college kids when war erupts in Israel or their daughter, Karen, applies to college. Alas, Jews who have stripped their Judaism of — Judaism — are left with nothing but “warped social justice.” Their refom rabbis cannot talk about kosher when they eat pork. They cannot talk about Shabbat when they have just driven 45 minutes to temple from the suburbs. They wouldn’t know the difference between a mikvah and the brine in a pickle jar. So they promote toxicity like DEI: “Look how progressive we are: we promote DEI even though that will keep our own grandchildren out of college.”
Idiots.
And, yet, do you know whom these Jewish idiots vote like? No, not Blacks. Not Puerto Ricans. Jewish liberals vote like White Protestant Dixie Southern Democrats. I explain:
For 125 years — a century and a quarter — White Protestant Southern Dixiecrats reliably voted exclusively for Democrats, despite their conservative values. They sent 12-14 Democrats to the U.S. Senate non-stop for 125 years. Deeply conservative White Protestant non-Jews in America’s Deep South were the same as mindless liberal Jews — and on the same 125-year time frame. Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana.
During the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republicans ended slavery, while the Democrats and their Ku Klux Klan sought to preserve slavery. As a result, the cotton-plantation South became uniformly Democrat. However, a century later, Deep South White Protestant conservative loyalty to Democrats no longer made sense. The Deep South was socially, culturally, religiously, and politically still conservative — the Christian “Bible Belt.” Yet, incomprehensibly, Southern White Protestant conservatives kept electing only Democrats until the 1980s, even though the Democrats had turned left. Consider these unfathomable results listing all the key statewide winners in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana through 40 years from the 1940s and through the entire decade of the 1970s:
Alabama:
Gov. Frank DixonGov. Chauncey SparksGov. Jim FolsomGov. Gordon PersonsGov. Jim FolsomGov. John Malcolm PattersonGov. George WallaceGov. Lurleen WallaceGov. Albert BrewerGov. George WallaceGov. Fob JamesGov. George WallaceSen. John H. Bankhead IISen. George SwiftSen. John SparkmanSen. Howard HeflinSen. J. Lister HillSen. James AllenSen. Maryon Pittman AllenSen. Donald Stewart
Mississippi:
Gov. Paul B. Johnson, Sr.Gov. Dennis MurphreeGov. Thomas BaileyGov. Fielding WrightGov. Hugh WhiteGov. James ColemanGov. Ross BarnettGov. Paul B. Johnson, Jr.Gov. John Bell WilliamsGov. William WallerGov. Cliff FinchGov. William WinterGov. William AillainGov. Ray MabusSen. Theodore BilboSen. James EastlandSen. Wall DoxeySen. John StennisSen. James Eastland
Louisiana:
Gov. Sam JonesGov. Jimmie DavisGov. Earl LongGov. Robert KennonGov. Earl LongGov. Jimmie DavisGov. John McKeithenGov. Edwin EdwardsSen. William FeazellSen. Russell B. LongSen. Allen EllenderSen. Elaine EdwardsSen. J. Bennett Johnston
There were approximately 50 statewide winners for governor or United States senator in deeply red Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana during those 40 years. Of those 50 elected statewide in the Deep Red South, all but one were Democrats.
How explain that the most conservative electorate in America consistently assured Congressional Democrat majorities, thus also assuring decades’ endless domination of left-wing Supreme Court picks and federal judges? The historical record saw the White Protestant Deep South stick like barnacles to Democrats for approximately 125 years consecutively until they finally were compelled to choose between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
White Christian Dixiecrat voting patterns offer the “Rosetta Stone” insight into the Jewish historical tendency to vote Democrat. Once a voting demographic attaches to a party, it becomes very challenging to detach them even when continued affiliation becomes insane. Essentially, the group’s most politically ambitious individuals join the party of group choice and become invested in that party’s success.
Just as the individual aspiring politico invests himself or herself in a party, so does the larger group. They donate to “their” party. They meet personally with “their” party’s candidates, invite “their” party’s most prominent leaders to address their annual church or temple banquets, encourage their teens to apply for minimum-wage patronage summer jobs picking up trash in the neighborhood park by using connections with that local politician.
That’s how the Jewish pattern began. When they first arrived, Jewish immigrants were greeted at the boat and in Ellis Island by Democrat hacks while white-shoe Republicans barred Jews from their country clubs and hotels. Democrat hacks played and manipulated the immigrants — just as they do today — while Republicans mocked their accents and denied them jobs at their white-show law firms and medical practices. So Jews understandably cast their fates with the Democrats. That is how the mess began, just as White Protestant Dixiecrats began. And once it starts, White Protestant Bible Belt Dixiecrats show it takes 125 years to sever completely. Orthodox Jews already have done so, ahead of schedule. Others are following — slowly. Every time Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, or Ocasio opens her mouth, another ten Jews become Republican. Every time Biden sends money to Iran, ten more. Every time a Jewish kid gets ostracized at college because of Israel or DEI, ten more.
So Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk are 100 percent right. We all know it: Too many Jews give liberal and woke money and influence liberal and woke governmental policy. But don’t forget that the Adelsons were Trump’s biggest donors, and that a whole bunch of others like Norman Braman, Nicolas Muzin, Stephen Schwarzman, Jeffrey Yass, Bernie Marcus, and Paul Singer give multi-millions to Republicans. Don’t forget that American Jews include hard-right radio broadcasters Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, Michael Savage, Andrew Klavan, and Alan Stock, the dean of Nevada talk radio. And the 2,500 Orthodox rabbis represented by Coalition for Jewish Values, where I am vice president. Jews include playwright David Mamet and the right-wing Zionist Organization of America. The late Milton Friedman inspired American conservative capitalism, and Ayn Rand was Alisa Rosenbaum.
Answer #1: Charlie Kirk is a Zionist.
Next: Tucker. I repeatedly have defended Tucker. See here and here, for example. Tucker often has attacked the Anti-Defamation League, but so have I. The ADL is not Jewish and no longer speaks for Jews. Its chief professional officer, Jonathan Greenblatt, is a former Obama lackey, and he Obamized the ADL. When Tucker talks about Obama’s and Biden’s efforts to import millions of poor, needy immigrants reliant on government largesse who would vote Democrat and would replace the mainstream White voting class, Tucker is right. ADL attacked him as racist, so he hit back. He rightly noted that the same ADL that wants porous borders to bring in a replacement population in America hypocritically opposes efforts to import millions of Arabs into Israel to replace the Jewish majority. Tucker is right.
I do have one Tucker concern: whether his ongoing rightful battles against ADL may eventually give rise to a broader animus. That would be like blaming all White Protestant Dixiecrats for their 125 years of Democrat bullet-voting. I don’t blame Catholics for giving America Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Sotomayor, and scores of other toxicities. I hope Tucker gives more air time to like-minded Jews so we, too, can break through the iron wall of leftist media.
Answer #2: Tucker? Not yet.
Finally, Candace Owens. I have been a fan of hers from that early Congressional hearing where she nailed it to her debates on Laura with madman Cornell West. She led Blexit and did some great videos for “Prager U.”
Recently, something snapped. Ignorant of Mideast history, amplified by a personal tiff with Ben Shapiro — a wonderful Jew with a yarmulka who makes us all proud — she suddenly unhinged. She alleged apartheid in Israel because the Old City of Jerusalem has a “Muslim Quarter” and a “Jewish Quarter.” Her ignorance was palpable. The four “quarters” of the Old City (also a “Christian Quarter” and an “Armenian Quarter”) were not created by Israel but by a British cartographer mapping out the Old City in the 1840’s, two centuries ago. It was like mapping out 1960’s New York and calling Brooklyn’s Boro Park, Crown Heights, and Flatbush the “Jewish Quarter”; Bedford-Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill-Brownsville, and Harlem the “Black Quarter”; Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and “Little Italy” in Manhattan the “Italian Quarter”; and also Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan the “Irish Quarter.”
She is simply ignorant. No one (except for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit) can know everything. But it is surprising that Ms. Owens so freely comments acerbically and assertively on things she manifestly does not know. Now in a tiff with Shapiro, she seems bent on smacking Israel, despite ignorance on that front. Thus, she sarcastically “endorsed” Nikki Haley for “president of Israel” because Haley agrees Hamas-ISIS must be crushed. Yet the same Ms. Owens supports Donald Trump, who is ten times the supporter of Israel. Owens does not know. Much worse: she does not know that she does not know. She does not even know that the head of government in Israel is the “prime minister,” not the “president.”
Ms. Owens amplified concerns when she recently provided a platform to despicable Israel hater, Norman Finkelstein, whom Israel once banned from entering for ten years. Finkelstein is another example of apostate Jews. The Soviet Union leveraged the likes of Karl Marx, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek, Leon Trotsky, and their whole Yevesektzia. America has Bernie Sanders, Ben and Jerry, Noam Chomsky, and Norman Finkelstein. Our apostates and albatrosses.
Why did Ms. Owens suddenly give him a platform amid the Hamas-ISIS Gaza War and her tiff with Mr. Shapiro? Was she childishly showing: “Hey, Ben — and Dennis Prager — both of you Jews helped launch my career, but I now will demonstrate my independence by giving this horrid man my Daily Wire platform?”
There are three aspects to intelligence: Smarts (Chokhmah), Insight (Binah), and Knowledge (Da’at). Ms. Owens was blessed by G-d with the smarts. Alas, she does not have a great deal of knowledge. That is why G-d created books. She needs to grasp that she lacks critical knowledge, and Norman Finkelstein hardly is the beacon. Without adequate knowledge, Ms. Owens is not positioned to offer insight because, plainly put, she does not know what she is talking about on matters pertaining to Israel/Palestine.
Is she a Jew hater? Remember what I wrote above. After her Nikki Haley “endorsement,” her pegging the “Muslim Quarter” as reflecting Israeli apartheid, and her giving Finkelstein a platform, I now believe that Candace Owens is “little bit anti-Semitic.”
Adapted by the writer for The Jewish Press from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
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Op-ed: Hamas War has brought out the Best and the Worst of Civilization
In Shin-Bet interrogation: Former Gazan minister harshly condemns Hamas leadership
Former Hamas Communications Minister Yusuf al-Manasi told his interrogators he hasn't seen anyone in the Gaza Strip who supports the Hamas leader.
During a Shin Bet interrogation, former Hamas Communications Minister Yusuf al-Manasi harshly criticized Hamas' policies and spoke of the damage, destruction, and decimation that the organization brought to the Gaza Strip.
During the interrogation, al-Manasi stated that "people in the Gaza Strip say that (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar and his friends destroyed us; we have to get rid of them."
He added, "I haven't seen anyone in the Gaza Strip who supports Sinwar; no one likes Sinwar. There are those who pray day and night that God frees us from him."
Al-Manasi stated that "Hamas' achievements are death and destruction of over 60% of the buildings, infrastructure, streets, and public facilities."
Regarding Sinwar, he said: "He's a megalomaniac. He feels he's above everyone. Does only as he thinks. He makes decisions without consulting with anyone."
Al-Manasi also discussed Hamas' funding: "There is funding for projects, and there's funding that comes from Iran to the military wing of Hamas. That money goes to destruction."
The former minister declared: "October 7th was the opposite of the Islamic religion. It is heresy. Madness. What they did there is not acceptable to logic, religion, and intelligence. The ones responsible for this are Sinwar and his friends."
He turned to Gazan residents: "My advice to the people in Gaza is that they oppose Sinwar's bunch. Let us live, and deal with the people. We will build Gaza; it will take time; the wound is great."
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