The violent Yemeni militant group that keeps attacking commercial ships—including American vessels—in the Red Sea and Suez Canal was removed from the U.S. terrorist list by President Biden at the request of the famously corrupt United Nations and other leftist humanitarian groups. The revocation, announced on February 12, 2021, of the terrorist designation stood even after the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned two key militants of the group, which lately is best known as Houthis but is also officially identified as Ansarallah or Partisans of God. |
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Israel’s 104th Day of War
By Sherwin Pomerantz
On the 104th day of the war, the Israeli military on Thursday sounded sirens in the southern port city of Eilat and a local radio station said an explosion had been heard as the result of the interception of an incoming aerial threat. Eilat, on the Red Sea, has been the target of past long-distance launches by Iranian-aligned Yemeni Houthis, in solidarity with Palestinian militants fighting Israel in Gaza.
Israeli Air Force jets attacked infrastructures used by Hezbollah in the Al Adisa area of southern Lebanon on Thursday. The IDF also attacked the Kafr Kila and Marjaayoun in southern Lebanon earlier.
The IDF announced that their operations in the Gaza Strip persist as they target terrorist operatives and infrastructure. In the past day alone, approximately 60 terrorists were killed. In the city of Khan Yunis, IDF troops carried out a targeted raid based on intelligence, resulting in the death of around 40 terrorists. The operation took place at the residence of a known terrorist, where troops uncovered ten grenades, AK-47 rifles, military equipment, and technological assets. Magazines, grenades, AK-47 rifles, and maps were also discovered during the operation. Additionally, IDF troops identified four terrorists advancing toward them in Khan Yunis. Responding swiftly, an IDF tank fired, eliminating the imminent threat.
In the northern Gaza Strip, IDF forces successfully thwarted an ambush planned by two armed terrorists. A series of aerial strikes were conducted to neutralize armed terrorists posing a danger to IDF troops, including those operating in proximity to a school. In Zabra, IDF troops discovered a cache of anti-tank explosive devices, RPG launchers, military equipment, and technological assets.
A significant development occurred in the northern Gaza Strip, where IDF forces intercepted terrorists preparing a vehicle with explosives. Simultaneously, as one of the terrorists exited a known Islamic Jihad compound, an IDF aircraft struck and killed the individual. Shots were fired at the rigged vehicle, leading to a subsequent explosion that confirmed the presence of explosives.
As the war continues here it becomes clearer every day that the present government has sorely underestimated the capabilities of our enemies. It's a tendency of all of us to underestimate our enemies. People do it all the time. Winning armies realize it and adapt. Politicians try to stop the adaptation as they see it as admitting error. Let’s hope we can effect the change required to bring in a new and more capable government so that this will be the last war we have to deal with for many years.
Seeking Future Leadership
Among Israel’s leading business women is Ofra Strauss, Chairperson, Strauss Group who has served as the Group’s Chair since 2001.
Ofra is a graduate of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. After serving as a regional manager at Estée Lauder in New York, Ofra returned to Israel, and since 1989 has held a variety of positions in the Group. In addition to her job in the Company Ofra holds a number of public positions: Former Chair of Maala – Business for Social Responsibility; the initiator and person responsible for the establishment of the Catalyst Index in Israel; President of Jasmine – Jewish-Arab Businesswomen’s Association; and former Chair of the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce.
Since 2003 she has been regularly ranked in the top 50 places on Fortune’s List of Most Powerful Women in Business, and in 2009 and 2010 she was ranked 12th and 16th in the Financial Times’ list of the Top 50 Women in World Business. In her role as Chair of Strauss she has forged strategic relationships in many countries around the world and has made the company into a serious worldwide economic force.
She has been actively involved in the furtherance of social objectives for many years, notably in the spheres of diversity and inclusion as well as support and advocacy of women-owned small businesses within and outside of the Strauss Group.
Clearly this series has highlighted a wide array of people whom we can tap for creative political leadership as we move forward.
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This validates the essay I posted for viewing on 14 February about why America is no longer capable of winning wars or executing them to the end:
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week that Israel cannot defeat Hamas — that there is no “military solution,” and that Israel will have to accept a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu reportedly rejected the idea.
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Do the DAVOS attendees ever learn how to add and to have any sense of decency ?
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Delusional in Davos
Column: Iran, not Israel, is the obstacle to Middle East peace
Secretary of State Antony Blinken sat for an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday. It was not reassuring.
The exchange began with a discussion of the Middle East. The region has been aflame since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, murdering 1,200 Israelis, kidnapping hundreds more, and spiriting away the innocents into an underground hell.
For the past 104 days, Israel has sought to destroy Hamas and free the captives. Throughout, Hezbollah in Lebanon has been fighting a low-intensity conflict with Israel. Militias have attacked U.S. forces deployed in Syria and Iraq hundreds of times. Houthi terrorists have fired drones and rockets at commercial shipping and U.S. naval assets in the Red Sea. On the morning Blinken spoke in Davos, Iran launched missiles into Syria, Iraq, and nuclear-armed Pakistan.
War rages. What most interests Tom Friedman, however, are the chances for a Palestinian state. He says it's the key to peace in the Middle East—a position from which he has not wavered, despite all evidence to the contrary, for more than 20 years. Antony Blinken is more than happy to indulge in this delusion.
"If you take a regional approach," he told Friedman, "and if you pursue integration with security, with a Palestinian state, all of a sudden you have a region that's come together in ways that answer the most profound questions that Israel has tried to answer for years, and what has heretofore been its single biggest concern in terms of security, Iran, is suddenly isolated along with its proxies, and will have to make decisions about what it wants its future to be."
Pierce through the bureaucratic lingo, and you encounter a statement breathtaking in its unseriousness. In a world filled with crises, the U.S. secretary of state has decided to resume a generations-long quest for the diplomatic Holy Grail: a Palestinian state. Governed by whom? His answer is a "stronger, reformed Palestinian Authority that can more effectively deliver for its own people."
Where will that come from? Jupiter? This "stronger, reformed Palestinian Authority" won't be the product of the corrupt 88-year-old Holocaust denier who is in the 18th year of his 4-year term. Or the 72 percent of Palestinians who say Hamas's atrocities were "correct." To say nothing of Israel, which would not accept, nor should be forced to accept, a Palestinian state that coddles and provides safe harbor for terrorists.
A Palestinian state is a nonstarter until Israel defeats its enemies, reestablishes deterrence, and evicts UNRWA from the premises. It is a nonstarter until the Palestinian Authority ends its incitement to murder and its payments to the families of stabbers, killers, and mad bombers.
Antony Blinken—Harvard '84, Columbia Law '88—is apparently unaware that wishing does not make things so. The story he tells is fantasy. Before October 7, the "regional integration" Blinken desires was on track not because a Palestinian state was imminent, but because the Sunni Arab powers saw it in their national interest to join with Israel in balancing against Iran.
It was in the Sunni Arab interest to back the "strong horse" of Israel and its ally, the United States, to ward off the Shiite radicals. Nor is the region disintegrating because the Palestinians remain stateless. It's falling apart because Israel has been weakened and American power has declined.
Iran is missing from Blinken's analysis. He says that a Palestinian state will isolate Iran and force it "to make decisions about what it wants its future to be." Has he not been paying attention? Iran has made its decision. The mullahs want to remain in power. They want the revolution to spread. They want Israel gone and the United States in retreat. That's where any serious analysis must start.
The transcript of Blinken's conversation runs for 6,868 words. Israel is namechecked 23 times. Iran is mentioned just six times. And four of those six mentions are references to how Donald Trump shouldn't have withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal. "We had Iran's nuclear program in a box," Blinken said. "Since the agreement was torn up, it's escaped from that box, and we're now at a place where we didn't want to be because we don't have the agreement."
Wrong, Mr. Secretary. Iran was violating the misguided nuclear deal from the get-go. It used the money it received on cash pallets to fund its terrorist proxies across the Greater Middle East. John Kerry's piece of paper didn't box Iran in. The Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign, including the killing of IRGC general Qassem Soleimani, did that. Iran escaped when Joe Biden entered office and reversed the Trump policies, hoping that sanctions relief and an open hand would revive the deal.
Iran slapped the hand away. Worse: The ayatollah accelerated his nuclear program, crushed a popular uprising, supplied drones and missiles to Russia to use against Ukrainian civilians, watched gleefully as Hamas massacred Jews, and ordered his proxies to spread havoc. Yet the United States continues to refrain from imposing serious consequences on Iranian personnel, on Iranian equipment, on Iranian interests. We chase after dreams rather than confront the reality of Iranian malevolence.
Maybe the thin mountain air made Blinken feel lightheaded. Maybe he wanted to make Tom Friedman happy. Maybe beneath the Davos veneer of self-congratulation and cliché there is a democratic realist plotting the renewal of American power.
If not, we're in trouble. An individual in the grip of delusion endangers himself and others. A delusional superpower endangers itself—and the world.
And:
Bernie Sanders is an anti-Semite Jew who believes embracing Communism, association with the aggressor, allows him to escape the consequences of being Jewish. He is a pathetic Jew and there are far too many of his kind we have to endure.
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Bernie Sanders Abandons the Jews. Again.
by Rafael Medoff
(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America, a nonfiction graphic novel with artist Dean Motter, to be published by Dark Horse in February 2024.)
Bernie Sanders says his new bill to restrict aid to Israel is a response to the deaths of civilians in Gaza. Yet he also proposed cutting aid to Israel more than four years ago. The current war, it seems, is just a convenient excuse for Sanders to slam the Jewish state again.
In the immediate aftermath of the mass slaughter, torture and gang-rapes of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7, Sanders briefly took Israel’s side. He called Hamas “barbaric” and rejected the demands by his political allies that Israel cease firing at the terrorists. That enraged friends such as his ex-press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, who claimed there’s no evidence that Hamas raped Israeli women and called Sanders “the biggest political disappointment of our generation” for not agreeing with her.
It didn’t take long for Sanders to succumb to the criticism. He’s now the author of legislation to put restrictions on the supply of U.S. weapons that Israel needs to fight the gang-rapists.
But Sanders cannot pretend his motive is the current casualty toll in Gaza. In October 2019, addressing the annual conference of J Street, Sanders proposed reducing U.S. military aid to Israel—and he said a portion of the Israel aid should be diverted, “right now,” to Gaza.
Sanders said he was proposing that the funds to Gaza consist of “humanitarian aid.” But it has been well known for years that “humanitarian aid” such as concrete, ostensibly to build houses, was being used by Hamas to build tunnels. That is, the hundreds of miles of tunnels, underneath Gaza, where Israeli rape victims and other hostages are still being held to this day.
So it appears the new Sanders legislation represents nothing more than a political calculation. Impressing Briahna Gray and other rape-deniers is more important to Sen. Sanders than standing by Israel. And it’s not the first time that he chose to abandon Jews in their hour of need.
On May 17, 1988, then-U.S. Representative—today Senate Majority Leader—Chuck Schumer led a delegation of eight Democratic congress members to the Soviet Embassy in Washington to protest the Soviet regime’s persecution of Soviet Jews.
They were especially concerned about onerous new restrictions the Kremlin had imposed to deny requests for exit visas. Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate now had to prove that their departure would not cause financial hardships even for distant relatives. Invitations to Soviet Jews from relatives in America would no longer be accepted unless the relative was a parent, child or sibling. And not only were Jews who supposedly knew “state secrets” disqualified from emigrating, but now their spouses and children would be denied, too.
In addition, all families with children under the age of 17 would be denied exit visas until the children completed military service. That new rule was particularly cruel because it was a Catch-22: those who completed their army service were often then denied exit visas on the grounds that they had learned military secrets during their service.
Congressman Schumer said he was worried the Soviet Jewry issue would “be swept under the rug” in the name of pursuing détente between the U.S. and the USSR. He was right to be worried. Because his future Senate colleague, Bernie Sanders, was one of the ones doing the sweeping.
Two weeks after the Schumer protest, Sanders and his new wife, Jane, decided to spend their honeymoon with a group of Vermont political activists on a visit to the Soviet Union to promote friendly relations with the Kremlin. Upon their return, Sanders—who was then mayor of Burlington, Vermont—held an hour-long press conference with his fellow travelers to discuss their trip.
Sanders spoke first. He heaped praise on the “friendship and openness” of the “extremely generous and warm” Soviet officials who hosted them. He hailed the Soviet government’s cultural programs for youth, which, he said, “go far beyond what we have in this country.”
Sanders focused on the trains in particular. “In Moscow we were extremely impressed by their public transportation system,” he said. “In fact, it was the cleanest, most effective mass transit system that I’ve ever seen in my life…The stations themselves were absolutely beautiful, including many works of art, chandeliers that were beautiful, it was a very, very effective system.”
While Sanders had much to say about the efficiency of Soviet trains, he had nothing to say about the vicious mistreatment of his fellow-Jews behind the Iron Curtain. He never mentioned the plight of the three million Soviet Jews who were being persecuted and prevented from emigrating. He never spoke about the grueling new restrictions the Kremlin had imposed.
When Soviet Jews needed Bernie Sanders to raise his voice in protest, he abandoned them. Today, when the Israeli victims of Hamas rapes and torture need Senator Sanders to raise his voice on their behalf, he has chosen to abandon them, too.
Finally:
Progressive Judaism ‘without Israel’ is a tool for anti-Semites
“Diasporism” was once based in Yiddish, socialism, naiveté about the fate of Jewish Europe or American assimilation
Now it’s a weapon that aids a genocidal cause.
By JONATHAN S. TOBIN
The post-Oct. 7 information war against Israel has many fronts. Some involve the denial of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Hamas during its pogroms in southern Israel. Others concern disinformation about the efforts of the Israel Defense Forces to eliminate the terrorist movement or a refusal to acknowledge the genocidal goals of Hamas and other Palestinian groups while falsely accusing the Jewish state of genocide. But as appalling as those smears and disingenuous narratives may be, even more insidious are those that seek to deny Jews the same rights as any other people.
At the heart of this sinister effort are its preferred mouthpieces: Israel-hating Jews who typically chime in to criticize the Jewish state “as a Jew.” They are essential props in the campaign to legitimize efforts to distort and deny traditional Jewish beliefs. While sometimes couched in the language of faith, scholarship and human-rights advocacy—and purportedly anchored in Jewish historical movements—the goal is much the same as that of bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists: destroy the Jewish state, something that could only be accomplished by the slaughter of its people.
Unsurprisingly, the outlet that is doing its utmost to mainstream such advocacy is The New York Times, a publication whose long record of hostility to Zionism and Jewish peoplehood is part of some of the most tragic chapters in modern Jewish history.
The latest entry in this category was a piece published on the 100th day since the Oct. 7 mass murders in southern Israeli communities titled, “Is Israel Part of What It Means to Be Jewish?”
The ‘Times’ campaign against Israel
The conceit of the piece is similar to other articles published in the Times that seek to generate support for left-wing groups that are harshly critical of Israel, like J Street, or to legitimize anti-Zionist organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, which openly traffic in antisemitism as well as seek the elimination of the Jewish state.
To so-called “progressives,” like those who edit and report at the Times, the aftermath of the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust—an event that also set in motion a surge of antisemitism around the world, and especially, in the United States—is the perfect time to lend credence to the tiny minority of Jews who sympathize more with the perpetrators of those crimes than the victims. As former White House speechwriter David Frum, who is now among the most bitter opponents of former President Donald Trump and pro-Israel Republicans, aptly put it, “On Day 100, the NYT features a closely reported profile of the Wicked Son from the Passover Seder. “What does all this mean to you?”
Anti-Zionists quoted in the piece are searching for a way to express their discontent not merely with Israel but with the entire concept of Jews possessing the power to defend themselves. Most prominent among them is Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, who touts himself as a champion of “diasporism.”
According to the Times, diasporism is a belief “that Jews must embrace marginality and a certain estrangement from Israel the country, and perhaps even Israel the place.” And it argues that this is a worldview that has deep roots in Jewish history.
There have been movements that specifically rejected Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the Socialists of the Bundist movement and the authors of Reform Judaism’s 1885 Pittsburgh Platform. But the attempt to link Magid’s thoughts—and those of the clique of anti-Zionists who write for the extremist left-wing publication Jewish Currents cited in the article that put forward a Marxist argument against Israel’s existence—to either of those movements is both deeply dishonest and drenched in hatred for Israel and its Jews.
Today’s “diasporists” share Magid’s belief in Jewish “marginality.”
They are appalled by the reality of Jews living fully Jewish lives, whether religious or secular, Ashkenazi or Mizrachi, right-wing or left-wing in a Jewish state where its citizens speak Hebrew and live by the Jewish calendar in their people’s ancient homeland. To them, Jewish powerlessness—the root cause of millennia of persecution and martyrdom that culminated in the Holocaust—is a good thing since it relieves Jews of the responsibility to govern or protect themselves. In this way, they can bask in the faux righteousness of victimhood, absolved of any guilt that comes from the difficult and complicated task of survival in a hostile world.
This is deeply wrong on several levels.
Those who claim that support for Jewish life and sovereignty in the land of Israel is marginal to Judaism—and those who do make that argument are usually anti-Semitic non-Jews—are betraying their abysmal ignorance. Israel is integral to Jewish observance, prayer and its most profound beliefs, as well as to the history of the Jews. For two millennia, Jews prayed every day for their lost homeland, for the rains to come in season there, and for the complete rebuilding of Jewish life and worship there. Nor was there ever any time in history since the Roman expulsion when Jews were completely absent from it despite the hardships, humiliations and persecutions exacted by various foreign conquerors, of whom the Arabs were only relative latecomers.
Misunderstanding Bundism
What these diasporists and their cheerleaders at the Times don’t seem to understand is that the motivations of the Bundists and the late-19th-century adherents of “classic Reform” Judaism had nothing to do with a belief in marginality or powerlessness.
Bundists were Socialists who were sure that the coming worker’s revolution in which they believed would transform Europe from a death trap for Jews to a place where they could thrive. This was a reflection of two factors. One was their hopeless naivete about the strength of European antisemitism. The other was a misunderstanding of the fundamental hostility of Marxism to Jewish peoplehood and rights or that of any minority or faith, as Jews learned to their sorrow during the 70 years of Communist tyranny that only ended with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Though the events of the 20th century illustrated just how colossally wrong they were, the Bundists were not interested in powerlessness. They wanted Jewish autonomy over regions of Eastern Europe, where Jews predominated, and saw the promulgation of Yiddish language and culture as an expression of a Jewish national identity that was the polar opposite of Magid’s exaltation of marginality. Even as their dreams of a vibrant future for Jews in Europe went up in the smoke of the Nazi death camps, Bundists fought alongside Zionists—whose understanding of European history was more prescient and whose vision proved to be a path to Jewish survival—in futile yet heroic last stands like the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion.
Nor are today’s anti-Zionist diasporist foes of Israel comparable to 19th-century Reform Judaism.
The Jews who endorsed the Pittsburgh Platform were also not interested in marginality as a philosophical goal. What they wanted was complete assimilation into the American mainstream while preserving a minimal amount of Jewish identity. They were willing to forswear not just the hopes of a restored Jewish homeland but the entire concept of Jewish messianism and replaced it with faith in the American Zion.
The excesses of this mindset—including adopting Sunday rather than Saturday as the Sabbath and a sort of high-church Protestant approach to worship, as well as discarding the idea of Jewish peoplehood—now seem excessive and indefensible. But it was very different from a belief system that holds that Jews are better off as perpetual victims. And while a minority of Reform Jews persisted in opposing Zionism into the 1940s as the struggle for Israel’s rebirth took place, most American Jews did not. As it turned out, two of the greatest leaders of American Zionism of that era were Reform rabbis: Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver. Though the Reform movement is now often very critical of Israel, it is still, as a matter of doctrine, Zionist.
While the Times seeks to depict advocacy for Zionism as linked to the idea prevalent in the movement’s first decades about “negation of the Diaspora,” that is something that few Israelis or their supporters still speak of. Indeed, Zionists have always been firm believers in the idea of supporting the rights of Jews everywhere, though many of their opponents in the first half of the 20th century feared that a Jewish state would lead to them being forced to move there whether they wanted to or not.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, an ardent advocate for Zionism, saw it as inseparable from support for Americanism, saying that “to be a good American meant that local Jews should be Zionists.” Belief in a Jewish state is not antithetical to support of Jewish life elsewhere. The triumph of Zionism in 1948 changed the lives of every Jew, whether or not they actively support Israel, for the better.
Marxist hypocrites
The best way to understand today’s Diasporists is to put them in the context of contemporary leftism, not Jewish history or faith.
If a certain small percentage of people who have some Jewish ties are openly anti-Zionist, it generally has little to do with seeking a non-nationalist vision of Israel or even the ultra-Orthodox belief that a Jewish state must await the coming of the Messiah—a point of view espoused by a minority of even those Chassidim who do not think of themselves as Zionist but still accept the reality of modern-day Israel.
Rather, it is a function of their acceptance of the toxic beliefs of the intersectional left, whose origins are related to the rise of critical race theory and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion. They accept the false idea that the world is divided between two immutable groups locked in perpetual racial conflict—oppressive possessors of white privilege and victimized people of color. In this formulation, Jews are wrongly labeled as “white” colonialists while Palestinian Arabs are their racial victims.
This is nonsense since the conflict is not racial; the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel and the same race as Arabs. But if you see the Jews as inherently white oppressors, then you are bound to support those who wish to kill and/or displace them, regardless of their tactics or goals.
Moreover, as even the Times article notes, while these anti-Zionist seekers of marginality and exile think that being homeless is somehow good for the Jews, they don’t think the same is true for the Palestinian Arabs. While they decry even the most liberal concepts of Jewish nationalism, they are strong supporters of “Palestinian self-determination” and statehood, despite its being anchored in the belief that the same right should be denied to the Jews.
While early-20th-century Bundists wanted merely a different kind of autonomous national life for Jews than Zionists, the Diasporists lionized by the Times, demanded that Jews, and Jews alone, should be denied not only that but the status of a people altogether. For them, Jews shouldn’t be merely homeless but must embrace the weakness and psychosis of powerlessness, so as to gain the prized status of permanent victimhood that their intersectional identity as “white” would otherwise deny them.
Hamas’s useful idiots
Nor should one take seriously their claims that they merely want Jews and Arabs to live together in a peaceful secular state of Palestine. Palestinians have repeatedly shown that they won’t accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. The only thing standing between the 7 million Jews of Israel and the fate of the victims of Oct. 7 is Jewish sovereignty and the Israel Defense Forces that the Diasporists wish to disband. To oppose Israel’s efforts to destroy Hamas—an ideological force that is the spiritual heir of Nazism—is to countenance not merely the survival of a group bent on Israel’s destruction but to act as “useful idiots” in aid of a genocidal jihad to repeat those horrendous crimes again and again.
Since the Holocaust and the birth of Israel, anti-Zionism can no longer be considered as having even a shred of intellectual integrity. Even before Oct. 7, for a Jew to delegitimize Zionism was to be an ally to those forces seeking to annihilate the Jewish state and its people. After Oct. 7, even if it is expressed as sympathy for the victims of the war that Hamas started, diasporism must be seen as, at best, the unwitting ally of those who slaughter, torture, rape and kidnap Jews or, at worst, their open allies. Such people should be seen for what they are: Jews who are the willing tools of murderous anti-Semites.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin
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