Dear Friend of EMET,
Israel is under attack, fighting a seven-front war against the tentacles of the Iranian regime. As Israel works to finish off Hamas in Gaza, it is preparing for the next battle with one of the strongest armies in the region – Hezbollah. Meanwhile, global Jewry has faced the most antisemitism since World War II. The United States is not an exception, and over the past year, American Jews have helplessly watched as Western streets were taken over by keffiyeh masked rioters calling for their genocide in major metropolises like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
Every day, EMET’s team goes to Capitol Hill to ensure that American legislators and policymakers are well-informed about the threats and challenges that Israel and the Jewish community faces daily. We provide them with fact-based, non-ideological information about antisemitism both on campus and off, as well as geopolitical analysis of the reality in the Middle East. Over the past year, EMET’s main focuses have been: Iran’s nuclear program, how weak policy in the Middle East has emboldened Iran, the threat of Hezbollah, the need to pressure Qatar and Turkey for their support of Hamas, UNRWA extremism and antisemitism in the U.S. education system.
This is incredibly important as the media seeks to minimize the threats against Israel and the global Jewish community from terrorist groups and their sympathizers. Israel and the Jewish community need help. Now more than ever, American politicians need to hear from you, and EMET will guarantee that your voice is heard.
EMET was the first and only organization dedicating time and resources to work with congressional offices to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would institutionalize the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism to be used in cases at the federal level. Without this protection passed at the federal level through the Antisemitism Awareness Act, Jews across the US have no real recourse against acts of hatred perpetrated against them, unlike every other minority group. Due in part to EMET’s efforts, the AAA passed in the House. But our job isn’t over until it passes in the Senate!
Additionally, EMET has supported legislation seeking to sanction the International Criminal Court for its biased and politically motivated case against Israel. This legislation also passed in the House and EMET is working hard to see it pass in the Senate as well.
Over the past year, EMET has brought on-the-ground experts, and families of hostages, to Capitol Hill for meetings with Congressmen and Senators. We at EMET firmly believe that we must keep the story of the hostages front and center, and that we must do everything possible to bring them home safely. They are a reminder to lawmakers that Israel didn’t start this war.
EMET also dedicates resources to public outreach, ensuring that we provide the public with analysis from the best experts in Washington and the world through webinars and constant publications. View our past webinars here.
Notable speakers include Mosab Hassan Yousef, Professor Avi Bell, Ambassador John Bolton, Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, and many other regional experts, politicians, former officers and analysts.
We take no money from governments or agenda-driven donors. Given the growing challenges both in the Middle East and the US, EMET needs to expand and increase its activities to ensure that the Jewish people remain safe.
This is why we need your support. We cannot do this alone. EMET depends on you to make sure the Jewish people and Israel are strong in the face of so much adversity.
Investing in EMET is investing in the Jewish community and Israel’s future, and in the strength of the United States of America.
Invest in EMET. Invest in the Truth.
Thank you.
Sarah Stern
The 51 Intel Know-Nothings - WSJ
House investigators revealed last year the partisan truth: It was the Biden campaign that ginned up the letter. Campaign adviser Antony Blinken (now secretary of state) called former Obama Deputy Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Morell three days after the Post published the Hunter emails (and just before the second Trump-Biden debate), a chat investigators wrote “led to the issuance of the public statement.” Mr. Morell testified the goal was, among other things, to “help Vice President Biden” “win the election.”
But the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees this week released a second report that exposes the lengths to which this cabal went to craft their own disinformation campaign. Recall the slippery cleverness of the original statement. The signers went out of their way to include their prior official titles and experience—to boost the legitimacy of their declaration—alongside analysis suggesting special abilities that enabled them to credibly brand the emails Russian “disinformation.” Yet they included a careful caveat: They explained they didn’t have any direct “evidence” of Russian involvement—i.e., no access to classified information.
It turns out this know-nothingness was deliberate—making the letter even more scandalous. The new House report says that at least two signatories were CIA contractors at the time of the statement, while others retained access to classified material. All it would have taken was one call or briefing to ascertain that the laptop wasn’t part of a Russian campaign. The federal government certainly knew it. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been in possession of the Hunter laptop since 2019, while Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, on the same day as the statement, said that the laptop was “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”
Instead, these “professionals” with access to the truth purposely kept themselves in the dark—so as to retain their ability to engage in wild (and false) speculation in aid of a political campaign. In an interview with House investigators, former Obama CIA Director James Clapper—whose name appeared at the top of the statement—was asked why he didn’t first request a briefing on such a specific topic, given that he “had the clearance.” Mr. Clapper said he “didn’t think it was appropriate” because “I didn’t want to be tainted by . . . access to classified information.” Asked how the truth would possibly count as “tainted,” he dug himself a bigger hole: “Bad choice of words. . . . I wanted only to go on what I had seen publicly.” He didn’t want any truth to get in the way of the story.
Mr. Morell similarly told House investigators that he hadn’t engaged in any conversations with the FBI, received a classified briefing, or availed himself of any investigative material, prior to organizing a bombshell claim that a foreign government was interfering in a U.S. election. The House reports that Mr. Morell was an active CIA contractor at the time of the statement. (In an email to the Post on Tuesday, Mr. Morell denied it.) Never forget: Those at the top of the intel game are there because they know the art of cons, double-cons, and plausible deniability.
The House report divulges other disturbing info, including that the CIA’s internal review board (which scours proposed publications for classified information) may have rushed its process at the request of the vaunted 51. Also, that while the highest echelons of the CIA were alerted to the statement prior to publication, nobody took any action to set the signers straight. Then there are the ethical problems of CIA contractors brazenly engaging in partisan politics and elections.
This year’s Biden campaign hasn’t (yet) been dumb enough to try to sell the voting public on another Russia-election plot. But it’s a long way to November, and this week’s report serves as a sharp reminder of the outsize and repugnant political roles the FBI and intelligence community played in the past two presidential elections. With a track record like this, voters should treat any wild claim with the distrust it deserves—and remember just which political party has proven itself more adept at spewing disinformation.
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https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1806087719174492269
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The Trump Gag Order Violates Your Freedom of Speech
The First Amendment protects the right to hear speech, including his criticisms of the trial.
By Alan Dershowitz
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg on Friday asked Judge Juan Merchan to keep his gag order against Donald Trump in place even though his trial has concluded. If the judge does so, Mr. Trump’s lawyers will almost certainly appeal the decision. But Mr. Trump isn’t the only victim of this ill-advised gag order. It violates your First Amendment rights and mine as well.
The First Amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, provides that no government agency can abridge the freedom of speech. This important freedom has two parts. The first is the right of the speaker to express his views. The second, less obvious but equally important, is the right of the public to hear the speaker’s views and evaluate them. Justice Thurgood Marshall summarized Supreme Court case law on this subject in Stanley v. Georgia (1969): “It is now well established that the Constitution protects the right to receive information and ideas.”
Although the high court has been definitive about the right of the listener to receive the speaker’s information, it has been less clear about appropriate remedies for violations of this right. Do undecided voters have standing to sue the New York courts for maintaining the gag order and denying them the right to hear the Republican candidate’s views on the honesty of the witnesses against him, the fairness of the jurors and the appropriateness of Judge Merchan’s presiding over a trial while his daughter is raising money for Democratic candidates? Under the current gag order, Mr. Trump is prohibited from discussing these issues, even during next week’s debate.
It is likely that during the debate President Biden will call Mr. Trump a “convicted felon.” The Democratic Party has spent millions of dollars in campaign ads focusing on the New York criminal convictions. Those who watch the debate and who have seen the Democratic attack ads have a First Amendment right to hear Mr. Trump’s full replies. We have the right to evaluate his views on the witnesses, jurors and judge’s daughter. Just as no one is above the law, no one is above criticism regarding the legal process. Mr. Trump may overstate and even distort his complaints, but in the marketplace of ideas protected by the First Amendment, all of us—not the New York courts—have a right to judge him on what he says.
It is important to remember that a gag order is a prior restraint on speech. The First Amendment prohibits prior restraints except in the most extraordinary circumstances, in which important countervailing interests are at stake. In New York Times Co. v. U.S. (1971), the Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court rejected such claims by the government and allowed the media to publish sensitive classified information. Prior restraints may also be permissible to protect the integrity of continuing jury trials, though the constraints must be narrowly tailored to actual dangers to fair-trial rights. Here any such dangers, if they ever existed, ended when the trial concluded. The judge has almost certainly already decided on the sentence he would impose, and even if he hasn’t, allowing the public (and him) to hear what Mr. Trump has to say wouldn’t endanger the sentencing process.
The prosecutors’ filing includes an affidavit attesting that the New York City Police Department has logged 56 “actionable threats” against Mr. Bragg, his family and employees. Threats demand action from the NYPD, but they don’t justify gagging Mr. Trump’s speech. Supreme Court justices have been the target of many threats and at least one assassination attempt in recent years, but the government can’t suppress criticism of their decisions on that basis.
The Trump team may eventually ask the Supreme Court to take up the gag order. Whether it does is up to the justices. But when they consider this important issue, they should take into account the right of the voting public in addition to the right of the candidate and his party. The marketplace of ideas shouldn’t allow one candidate to take unfair advantage of a questionable conviction while the other candidate has one hand tied behind his back by a questionable gag order.
Voters who haven’t yet made up their minds, and who might be influenced by what both Messrs. Biden and Trump have to say about the fairness of the conviction, should consider filing friend-of-the-court briefs so that the justices can consider their interests as well as Mr. Trump’s.
And consider the following possibility: Mr. Trump loses a close election. Polls show that his loss might have been attributable, at least in part, to the effectiveness of the Biden ads about his conviction, coupled with Mr. Trump’s inability to respond fully. After the election, a higher court reverses the conviction and condemns the prosecutor for having brought it. Imagine the outcry among Americans who voted for Mr. Trump.
There would be considerable pressure on the appellate judges to affirm the conviction precisely to avoid this troubling scenario. It’s another way in which the politicization of the courts poses a threat to due process and the rule of law.
Mr. Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of “Get Trump: The Threat to Civil Liberties, Due Process, and Our Constitutional Rule of Law.” He represented President Trump during his 2020 impeachment trial.
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Save me from the clueless "do-gooders."
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The driver of Western Jew-hatred
Well-meaning people supporting the Palestinian Arab cause are actually empowering Islamo-Nazis.
Melanie Phillips,a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for The Times of London, her personal and political memoir, Guardian Angel, has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, The Legacy, in 2018. To access her work, go to: melaniephillips.substack.com.
(JNS) Jew-hatred in the Diaspora is out of control and escalating.
In Los Angeles last Sunday, a vicious mob swarmed the Adas Torah synagogue and violently assaulted pro-Israel counter-demonstrators and Jewish locals.
With many faces masked by keffiyehs, the mob prevented Jews from entering the synagogue. The attackers used pepper spray and bear spray. Some of their victims required medical treatment.
It took an hour before the police finally pushed back the attackers. Then the mob, chanting calls for “intifada” and the destruction of Israel, moved on to target two smaller synagogues attended by Iranian Jews. Targeting these synagogues showed that the mob’s real agenda was not to attack Israel but to attack Jews. This was not a protest against policy but an anti-Semitic onslaught against people.
It’s routinely claimed that the violence and intimidation perpetrated by mobs in the name of “Palestine” ever since the Oct. 7 Palestinian Arab pogrom is anti-Israel rather than anti-Jew. This is a demonstrable fiction.
Jews are being actively discriminated against in the literary and cultural worlds with publishers refusing to publish Jewish authors and with the homes of American Jewish museum directors vandalized.
Jews are being picked on by companies such as the firm of British plumbers that refused to work for someone because she had opposed the BDS movement and given “cover to the State of Israel.” And Jews are being personally attacked or abused by individuals or institutions.
In London this week, several students at the Jewish boys’ school Hasmonean were attacked at an underground station. The mother of one of the boys said one was kicked to the ground, another was elbowed and hit his head against a wall, and a third pushed towards the edge of the platform amid shouts of “Get out of the city, Jew!”
At the annual meeting of the British Medical Association, a female doctor was heckled with repeated shouts of “shame” after she said she was Jewish. Around one in 10 policy proposals being put forward at the meeting was removed from the debates on legal grounds because it related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and was said to risk “being perceived as discriminatory, more specifically anti-Semitic.”
The BMA was accused of becoming a “vehicle for Jew-hatred.” Such is the scale of this bigotry among doctors that some British Jews are now hiding their Jewish identity when admitted to a hospital.
The notion that such unambiguous attacks on Jews are an unfortunate but essentially fringe by-product of the “protests” over “Palestine” is a bad misreading of the situation. What’s been unleashed in the West ever since the Oct. 7 atrocities is an insurrection against the Jews that isn’t marginal to these “pro-Palestine” demonstrations and anti-Semitic incidents. It’s fundamental.
The alliance between left-wingers and Muslims that’s behind such attacks has been put down to “intersectionality.” This is the doctrine of overlapping victim groups that divides society into victims and oppressors, based on a Marxist view of the powerful and the powerless in which Jews are deemed to be the most powerful of all.
This venomously distorted and paranoid characterization of the Jews makes “intersectionality” itself a prime source of anti-Semitic bigotry. However, the Palestinian cause that’s promoted not just by these extremist culture warriors but also by the entire “progressive” world is innately anti-Jew.
This is not confined to Hamas. The Palestinian Arab cause itself is based on the aim of exterminating Israel and falsely appropriating historic Jewish identity in the land of Israel as its own. The Palestinian Arab cause writes the Jewish people out of their own history.
That program of cultural extermination is what all who support the Palestinian Arab cause are actually signed up for.
They may heatedly deny it.
They may believe they are supporting two states existing in harmony side by side.
They may claim that most Palestinian Arabs merely want to live peacefully alongside their Israeli neighbors.
They may tell themselves there would be peace in the Middle East if it wasn’t for Israel’s “right-wing” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
They are delusional. They have not merely contributed to the madness that is now sweeping the Western world; they have sanitized and legitimized it. They have enabled the world to claim that Arab Palestinianism is respectable because it is anti-Israel and not anti-Jew.
This was never true.
The Palestinian Arab agenda targeted Jews from the start. During the Nazi period, the Mufti of Jerusalem—Haj Amin al Husseini, who declared Islamic holy war against the Palestinian Jews—allied with Hitler and pledged that if Germany won the war, the Mufti would exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, hero-worships al Husseini and teaches Palestinian Arab children that their highest goal is to murder Jews and take their land. The P.A. couches its murderous incitement against Jews in the language of Islamic holy war and Nazi-style demonization.
The Palestinian Arabs are the true heirs to the Nazis. As a consequence, well-meaning people in the West who fondly believe they are supporting Palestinian Arab rights are, in fact, supporting Islamo-Nazis.
Politicians who hand on heart profess their horror at today’s upsurge in antisemitism but push a state of “Palestine” that will have the power to destroy the Jewish state—and who then punish Israel for resisting this—are themselves deeply complicit in fueling Jew-hatred.
President Joe Biden has condemned the mobbing of the Los Angeles synagogue as “appalling,” “unconscionable” and “antisemitic.” Yet his administration does everything it can to prevent Israel from eviscerating the “appalling,” “unconscionable” and “antisemitic” regimes of Hamas and Hezbollah, while also forbidding Israel from striking the head of the genocidal snake in Tehran.
Moreover, not only does America continue to fund the P.A. despite its murderous Jew-hatred, but the Biden administration also continues to promote the Islamo-Nazi entity as the worthy rulers of a post-Gaza war Palestine state.
In Britain, the Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, who is expected to become prime minister in next week’s general election, has written affectingly about sharing Israel’s current trauma through his wife’s Jewish relatives.
Nevertheless, Labour’s election manifesto suggests, albeit in ambiguous and deniable form, that a Labour government might unilaterally declare a state of Palestine—a supremely hostile act that would greatly imperil Israel’s security still further and is promoted by those who want the Jewish state gone.
In a party election broadcast, Starmer also pledged to London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, that a Labour government would have a “zero tolerance approach” to Islamophobia.
Since “Islamophobia” covers any criticism of the Islamic world, Labour’s policy appears to mean stamping upon any critic of Islam with the force of law, including anyone who dares call out the wildly disproportionate level of Jew-hatred in the Muslim world.
The never-ending war between the Palestinian Arabs and Israel has been created and perpetuated by the West’s behavior in sanitizing, excusing, legitimizing, funding and incentivizing the Islamo-Nazis and their preposterous, mendacious, brain-frying “Palestinian” cause.
In The Wall Street Journal this week, Seth Cropsey, president of the Yorktown Institute and a former U.S. deputy under-secretary of the Navy, wrote that Iran has activated a network of global Islamist sympathizers to ramp up public pressure on Israel as an essential element of its strategy of attrition to destroy the Jewish state.
Tehran’s goal, he wrote, is to get Western politicians to back a ceasefire. “By slowing the conflict down and splitting Israel from the U.S. and its allies, Iran aims to make Israel an international pariah,” he said.
The Palestinian Arab cause has been manipulated by Iran into a wedge issue. It has turned America against Israel, lined up liberals with Islamo-Nazis, and set Jew against Jew. And after Iran finishes with Israel, the West is next.
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