Student Leader at Columbia Facing Possible Discipline for Expressing Extermination Anti-Israel Views

I've blogged about this issue for a long time. The chickens are coming home to roost --- and I'm glad. It's too early to say we'll have a successful counterrevolution. But perhaps not too early. Have you seen the trailer for "Civil War"? 

At the New York Times, "Student Leader of Columbia Protests: ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live’: After video surfaced on social media, the student, Khymani James, said on Friday that his comments were wrong."

Antisemitism Is Rising at Colleges, and Jewish Students Are Facing Growing Hostility

Yes, and it ain't "right-wing" antisemitism.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Some students report being spat upon and harassed, while some campus groups have forced out those who support Israel":

Some college students say they have started hiding their Jewish identity in fear of rising antisemitism. “We have basically been shunned.” https://t.co/ibsI06h6xa

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 14, 2022

Adina Pinsker commutes to Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., to study supply-chain management. She is also active in Hillel International, the nation’s largest collegiate Jewish organization.

When she arrives on campus, she takes an indirect route to class and tucks inside her shirt the silver Star of David she wears around her neck. These are precautions, she said, to avoid harassment from students who dislike Israel, the people who support it, or both.

“We have basically been shunned,” said Ms. Pinsker, who said she has been subject to derogatory remarks about her beliefs.

Ms. Pinsker’s actions are emblematic of rising fear among some Jewish college students around the country, who have begun shrouding their religious identity and political beliefs to avoid growing ostracism and harassment, according to interviews with dozens of students.

College campuses have long hosted heated debates about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. But now, students say anti-Jewish antagonism is on the rise: Antisemitic incidents have increased, and a growing number of campus groups bar students who support Israel from speaking or joining.

Hostility, including vandalism, threats and slurs toward Jewish students on college campuses increased more than threefold to 155 incidents in 2021 from 47 in 2014, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights organization which has tracked reports of such behavior since 2014. The group counted 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. overall last year, up 34% from 2020 and the highest number in its records dating to 1979.

Students at schools including the University of Vermont, Wellesley College and DePaul University have ejected Jewish students who support Israel from clubs and study groups, according to interviews with affected students.

Students at Tufts University, University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles tried to prevent Jewish classmates from serving in student government or attempted to remove them from positions in student government because of their support of Israel, according to students, administrators and campus news reports.

The uptick in incidents and tension on some campuses comes amid a string of recent high-profile controversies that have drawn renewed attention to antisemitism. This month Twitter suspended the account of rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West—who now goes by the name Ye—after he tweeted to his 32 million followers an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David, weeks after he tweeted: “I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.”

On campus, students say that stereotypical antisemitic slurs are directed at Jews, but that much of the hostility derives from growing criticism of Israel’s handling of its political and military conflict with Palestinians over land rights. Jewish students say harassment often compounds when criticism of Israel increases.

Most American Jews feel an attachment to Israel, though many are critical of the Israeli government, according to a 2021 survey from the Pew Research Center.

Some of the conflict on campus stems from competing definitions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism and whether they overlap.

Anti-Zionism is a political position distinct from antisemitism, which is a prejudice, said Dylan Saba, an attorney with New York-based Palestine Legal, which works to support the civil and constitutional rights of people in the U.S. who advocate for Palestinians. The two are conflated by supporters of Israel to discredit critics, he said.

Condemning Israel may make some Jewish students feel uncomfortable, but that doesn’t mean it is antisemitic, he said. “All we are asking for is equal rights,” he said...

Bullshit. 

Anti-Zionism is anti-Israel is antisemitic. Full stop. "From the desert to the sea, Palestine will be free" means wiping Israel --- and all its Jewish citizens --- off the face of the map.

It's easy to prove, too. Just walk up to any pro-Palestine student organization --- literally in any college campus in America --- and ask its leaders if they support Hamas. In my experience they will not answer. Not only that, in my case, they'll call the police on you. 

For the Left, 'Antisemitism' is Just a Partisan Talking Point

From David Harsanyi, at the Federalist, "Anti-Jewish sentiment is far from a one-party problem":

“Jews are thriving in America, and even with the violent resurgence of antisemitism in the Trump era, I’ve rarely felt personally threatened, perhaps a function of my privilege,” writes New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg in a piece headlined “Antisemitism’s March Into the Mainstream.”

It must be privilege, then, that explains how a New Yorker could write an entire column in a New York paper about the resurgence of antisemitism during the “Trump era” without once noting what was going on in her hometown. As Armin Rosen detailed only a few months ago, there have been hundreds of violent attacks targeting Jews in New York since 2018, “many of them documented on camera, [and] only a single perpetrator has served even one day in prison.” Of course, mentioning that the culprits of anti-Jewish violence are predominantly black or Hispanic, and live in one of the nation’s most left-wing cities, would necessitate acknowledging that antisemitism can’t be neatly laid at the feet of Republicans. That is inconvenient, no doubt...

RTWT.

 

Dave Chappelle's Opening Bit on Saturday Night Live (VIDEO)

I watched it. Pure genius, and funny as hell. Un-PC, though. Some folks got their skivvies twisted. 

At Vanity Fair, "Live From New York: Dave Chappelle Turns SNL Into Chappelle's Show — The controversial comedian opened his third hosting turn with a passionate 15-minute monologue touching on Kanye and Trump."

 

'Kanye West's Dark, Twisted Fantasy

From Bari Weiss, at her Substack, "And Jewish reality":

Yesterday was any given Sunday in America, which meant that most Jews were not at all astonished when we looked down at our phones and discovered a former president was calling us ingrates and one of the most famous artists in the world was doing Louis Farrakhan one better. We are long past astonishment.

For those who don’t have an anxious Jewish mother or an internet connection, here’s a glimpse of this past weekend’s bile, starting with Kanye West.

“On TMZ I just saw yesterday it said, ’Pete Davidson and Kim have sex by the fireplace to honor their grandmother.’ It’s Jewish Zionists that’s about that life. That’s telling this Christian woman that has four black children to put that out as a message,” he said on a podcast, in which he went unchallenged by the hosts.

Another clip: “Jewish people have owned the black voice. Whether it’s through us wearing a Ralph Lauren shirt, or it’s all of us being signed to a record label, or having a Jewish manager, or being signed to a Jewish basketball team, or doing a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney.”

And another: “You know they came into money through the lawyers, when after Wall Street when all of the, like, the Catholics, they wouldn’t divorce people so the Jewish lawyers came and they were willing to divorce people. That’s when they first came into their money.”

In one interview—an interview that the host, a rapper who goes by the name N.O.R.E, celebrated as having gotten more views than Sunday night football—West pulled off a perfect antisemitic hat trick: nod to our apparent sexual deviancy and perversion; accuse us of exploiting other minorities for our benefit; and suggest that our success is ill-gotten. It was almost impressive.

While those clips were going viral, Donald Trump offered his own take on American Jews. “No President has done more for Israel than I have,” the former president wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US. Those living in Israel, though, are a different story—Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be PM! US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel—Before it is too late!”

Here is the part of the column where I tell you things that are also true.

Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, is a brilliant musician. He is a brilliant musician who is mentally ill.

Also: The Trump White House did a tremendous amount for the cause of Middle East peace.

But those facts do not undermine what is undeniable. Namely, that the wealthiest musician in the world appears to hold deeply conspiratorial views about Jews informed by the antisemite Louis Farrakhan and a hate cult called the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose worldview—black people are chosen by God; Jews are pretenders—is disturbingly prevalent in large parts of American culture. And that the former president is criticizing American Jews for being ungrateful, commanding them to show him proper respect—and issuing a veiled threat if they do not. (His staunchest supporters may insist that Trump’s warning “Before it is too late!” meant “Before it is too late for America” or perhaps “too late for Israel,” the implication being that Biden isn’t as supportive of the Jewish state and so Jews need to support Trump. However you read the opaque missive, the toxic notion of the ungrateful Jew is unambiguous.)

...

Is Israel An Apartheid State?

It's Olga Meshoe, for Prager University:

"Really, the Word You're Using to Fight Antisemitism is 'Jewface'?"

Wait for it, from Bill Maher, on Real Time:

For Harvard Crimson's Editorial Board, Facts Are for Losers

It's Dara Horn, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "It turns out that nobody’s SAT scores can provide immunity to propaganda":

Twenty-five years later, I still remember the theatrics involved with becoming an editor at the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper produced by Harvard undergraduates every day for the past century and a half. The newspaper’s office had a room upstairs called the Sanctum, so named because only those who had jumped through the paper’s prescribed journalistic hoops were allowed to enter—and then only for Sunday night editorial meetings, at which the coming week’s worth of unsigned editorials were debated and approved under strict secrecy. Newly minted editors were welcomed into the room with the question, “What are your politics?” One’s answer determined the side of the room where one would sit for these debates.

Many participants cared deeply about these discussions—though this being the 1990s, many more didn’t, and attended mainly for the fun of it. My peers were largely the children of baby-boomer parents who had morphed from flag-burning hippies to mall-hopping yuppies; Gen Xers like us took people’s self-important opinions with a very large grain of salt. In the Sanctum, I sat on the left by vague default, but didn’t attach much meaning to it. I was far from alone: A good number of editors didn’t even bother to remain on their side of the Sanctum, instead simply choosing the comfiest chairs.

When I later became one of the editors responsible for drafting each week’s worth of unsigned opinions about subjects like university workers’ strikes, affirmative action, and the Clinton impeachment, I learned that the only real sign of success was to say something interesting enough to generate a dissent. The only way to do that, of course, was to marshal the facts and explain why they mattered. When an editorial prompted other editors to write a dissent objecting to it—about, for instance, a campus visit by China’s then-premier—it was the ultimate compliment. You’d actually had something to say.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for ages. My work as a writer for the past 20 years has been almost entirely solitary; none of my books involved convincing a roomful of people of my point of view. But I was reminded of this ancient student ritual last week when my phone blew up with messages from dozens of irate former Crimson editors, including many actual journalists, a group of alumni going back several decades.

The current Crimson editorial board, in a somewhat modified version of the procedures I remembered, had just published an unsigned editorial fully endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, reversing its position from two years earlier. There was no official editorial dissent. Afterward, copies of this editorial were posted publicly in undergraduate dining halls, just in case anyone missed it.

The BDS movement, as it’s known, is old news on college campuses and elsewhere; it’s been around long enough that it no longer bothers to hide its goal of eliminating the world’s only Jewish state. But I had to hand it to The Crimson for timing, given that the editorial followed several weeks of terror attacks in Israel during which 15 people were stabbed, shot and car-rammed to death while engaging in such provocative behaviors as drinking at a bar or walking down the street...

Keep reading. 

The Crimson editorial is outrageous, though not surprising. 

Read it here: "In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions and a Free Palestine."

And see, "The Crimson Faces Backlash Over Editorial Endorsing BDS Movement," and "To the Editor: From Six Crimson Alumni In Regard to BDS."

Whoopi Goldberg 'Apologizes' for Holocaust Comments on 'The View,' Then Doubles-Down on 'The Tonight Show with Stephen Colbert' (VIDEO)

This is just the most appalling, disgusting, insidious thing I've heard in a long time, and that's saying a lot. People are outraged and rightly so, and even some ABC News insiders are saying Whoopi's got to go. 

The main story's here, "Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes for Saying Holocaust Was 'Not About Race': Ms. Goldberg’s comments, on Monday’s episode of "The View," came amid growing ignorance about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism."

Yeah, obviously a faux apology. Commenting on Whoopi's "The Tonight Show" appearance, Batya Ungar-Sargon's not having it: "How can you say it's about race if you are fighting each other?" is how Whoopi Goldberg describes a GENOCIDE. The fact that most Jews had light skin to her—and many others on the woke Left—means they weren't victims but just the other side of a skirmish. Just unspeakably gross." 

Watch:

Texas Synagogue Terrorist Came Out of U.K. Islamist No-Go Zone

From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "His community hopes Allah will 'bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise'":

As far back as 2013, Pakistani Muslim terrorists had plotted to take "foreign Jews" hostage to trade for ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. In 2022, a Pakistani Muslim terrorist actually went out and did it.

The hostage crisis at Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform Temple in Texas, ended with Faisal Akram of Blackburn, another post-industrial English town where Muslims make up a third of the population and Pakistanis account for over 10 percent, dead, and his Jewish hostages set free.

Back home, the Blackburn Muslim Community page announced that "Faisal Akram has sadly departed from this temporary world" and prayed that Allah "bless him with the highest ranks of Paradise".

The BMC page had previously promoted a “charity” event to raise money for “Palestinians” by the Human Relief Foundation, which had been banned by Israel over its ties to Hamas.

The town has produced no shortage of Jihadists, including the youngest terrorist in the UK, as well as a number of Jihadis who traveled to join ISIS, an associate of shoe bomber Richard Reid, and a terrorist who played a key role in an Al Qaeda plot that targeted New York and D.C.

Blackburn is one of the most segregated towns in the country and has been described as a “no-go zone”. The area that produced the Temple Terrorist has the highest Muslim population outside of London where some claim that flying the English flag has been effectively outlawed.

The setting couldn’t be any better for the media to whitewash the murderous terrorist with the familiar excuses that he was the victim of failed integration in the United Kingdom. His family, in an even more familiar excuse, is claiming that he “was suffering from mental health issues”.

That, along with the claim by FBI Special Agent in Charge Matt DeSarno that the terrorist, "was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community", is becoming the very familiar narrative for covering up the latest Muslim terror attack.

But antisemitism, like Islamism, was part of the air that Faisal Akram breathed in Blackburn.

Salim Mulla, Blackburn's former mayor and current Labour councilor, claimed that Israel was behind ISIS and school shootings in America. Last year, four Muslim men from Blackburn took part in a "Palestinian" convoy while shouting, "F*** the Jews... F*** all of them. F*** their mothers, f*** their daughters and show your support for Palestine. Rape their daughters and we have to send a message like that. Please do it for the poor children in Gaza."

Siddiqui aka Lady Al Qaeda, on whose behalf the Texas synagogue attack took place, was married to the nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and had assorted recipes for mass murder in her possession when she was captured. Despite graduating from Brandeis, a formerly Jewish university, she demanded at her trial that jurors undergo DNA tests to prove that they are not Jewish. And the Aafia Foundation posted bizarre antisemitic rants about the "degree of poisonous venum (sic) within the heart of American mainstream jewry".

The hatred of Jews, like the hatred of all non-Muslims, is a crucial motive for Islamic terrorism.

If Blackburn is a miserable place, the tale of the Akram family may reveal why. The official family statement by the terrorist’s brother, Gulbar Akram, claims that "although my brother was suffering from mental health issues we were confident that he would not harm the hostages" and denied that the FBI had rescued the hostages from being killed by his brother. "Don’t believe the bull#### in the media they were released from the fire exit and Not rescued.”

The Blackburn Community message describes the terrorist as having brothers named "Gulbar", “Malik” and the "Late Gulzameer Akram".

Two brothers named Gulbar Akram and Gulzameer Akram in Blackburn had been locked up over stolen cars. Another time, a Blackburn resident named Gulbar Akram almost had his nose sliced off. A Gulzameer Akram ran a massive counterfeiting operation from a Blackburn home. A Malik Akram was locked up for harassing girls. Were all of them members of the same clan?

The best way to cover up a terrorist attack is to shift the context. And that’s what they’re doing. But it’s important to dig into the true context to understand the true origins of the Texas attack.

In his book, Among the Mosques, ex-Islamist Ed Husain described Blackburn as “another global hub for the Deobandis and the Tableeghi Jamaat” where the mosques pray for the destruction of the enemies of Islam and texts declare that “there can be no reconciliation between Islam and democracy”.

The Deobandis, who control many of the mosques in Blackburn, originated the Taliban.

Aafia Siddiqui, better known as 'Lady Al Qaeda', is a Deobandi, the terrorist on whose behalf Faisal Akram took a synagogue hostage, and a popular cause with Pakistanis. A few years ago the Pakistani Senate had even named the Islamic terrorist, the “Daughter of the Nation”.

Indian Mujahideen co-founder Riyaz Bhatkal had plotted to take Jews hostage a decade ago in order to force 'Lady Al Qaeda's release. British Muslim “charities” were a major source of funding to the Jihadist group as they are for many Pakistani Jihadist enterprises.

While much has been made of the advocacy on behalf of Siddiqui by CAIR and other Islamist colonists in America, top Muslim politicians in the UK also vocally demanded her release, including Lord Nazir Ahmed and Lord Altaf Sheikh.

When Husain visited Blackburn, he warned that, "it is clear that a caliphist subculture thrives here, a separate world from the rest of British society.”

Tableeghi Jamaat, whose mosques are known as "breeding grounds" for Jihad, is closely intertwined with Pakistani Islamism and vectored Islamic terrorism. Quite a number have joined Al Qaeda. It is no coincidence that so many Islamic terrorists have come out of Blackburn.

Nor is it a coincidence that the latest Islamic terrorist attack on America originated there.

Faisal Akram traveled to Texas, where ‘Lady Al Qaeda’ sleeps at the Federal Medical Center, Carswell in Fort Worth. He was one of many Muslim pilgrims seeking to extricate her. Just last fall, the Dallas-Forth Worth CAIR and the Pakistani terror regime claimed that Aafia Siddiqui had been assaulted in U.S. custody in the latest effort of many on behalf of ‘Lady Al Qaeda’. Faisal’s target, a progressive Reform Temple which happened to carry the traditional name of Congregation Beth Israel despite its social justice activist clergyman’s hostility to Israel, was ideally selected to fit Muslim antisemitic obsessions with both Israel and Jews.

The antisemitic rants, the hostage crisis, and the rapid cover-up are all regular features of life for Jews in Europe. Changing demographics are making them a new reality for American Jews.

Any American city or town can become the new Blackburn. That’s the harsh lesson here.

Pakistani antisemitism and obscure Jihadist movements are not local issues, they are global threats. The poison nurtured in a declining British post-industrial town blew up in Texas. We are all interconnected, and that interconnectedness has made the Jihad into a global enterprise. Ideas, tactics, and organizations that once took centuries to colonize the world can travel around it at the speed of the internet and a terror plot can happen at the speed of a jet plane.

We can either police our borders, control our immigration, and build walls around our nations, or we must be resigned to being hunted, stalked, and killed anywhere and at any given moment.

In Blackburn, Muslims anticipate the Texas Jihadist ascending to the “highest ranks of Paradise" where he will enjoy the company of 72 virgins. More Muslims from Blackburn, marinating in the same hatred for America, for Jews, and for anyone unlike them, will follow in his footsteps.

 

Exclusive Video Shows Three Hostages Rescued from Congregation Beth Israel Synagogue, Colleyville, Texas (WATCH)

Following-Up, "Malik Faisal Akram, Terrorist in Colleyville Siege, Bought Gun 'On the Street', Biden Said (VIDEO)."

At WFAA Channel 8 Dallas:

Malik Faisal Akram, Terrorist in Colleyville Siege, Bought Gun 'On the Street', Biden Said (VIDEO)

The president called the siege an "act of terror." 

At the Dallas Morning News, "British hostage taker at Colleyville synagogue bought gun ‘on the street’, Biden said":

President Joe Biden said Sunday the British national who held four people hostage inside a Colleyville synagogue was armed with a gun apparently “purchased on the street.” The president said the hostage-taker spent his first night in Texas at a homeless shelter, and speculated that he might have gotten a gun there. Also on Sunday, Greater Manchester police in England said they detained two teenagers in connection with the gunman who took four people hostage for more than 11 hours over the weekend in Colleyville.

Greater Manchester police tweeted about the arrests but released few details about why counterterrorism officers detained the teens. It was unclear what connection, if any, the teens had to 44-year-old British national Malik Faisal Akram, who died after Congregation Beth Israel Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and the three other hostages escaped unharmed and authorities swarmed the building. Authorities have not said how how Akram died.

The FBI said early Saturday that Akram appeared to be the sole suspect. A spokeswoman for the Dallas office referred questions to British authorities and said the FBI hadn’t changed its statement. British law gives police wide latitude to make arrests during a terrorism investigation and diplomats counseled against drawing any conclusions.

Biden, speaking from Philadelphia, said Akram might have been in the U.S. for only a few weeks. Citing a senior law enforcement official, NBC Nightly News reported that Akram arrived in the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 29.

“This was an act of terror,” Biden said, adding that he doesn’t know why Congregation Beth Israel was targeted, or “why he insisted on the release of someone who’s been a prisoner for over 10 years” and used “anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli” language.

He said there were no bombs that authorities know of, despite the attacker’s claims that he planted some.

Biden said he had spoken with Attorney General Merrick Garland and they were working to “address these types of acts.” The president said he’d “put a call in to the rabbi” but indicated they hadn’t connected yet.

Biden also praised law enforcement. “They did one hell of a job,” he said. “Thank God. Thank God.”

An 11-hour standoff

Colleyville police were called to the synagogue in the 6100 block of Pleasant Run Road about 10:40 a.m. Saturday.

The synagogue was holding its Shabbat service, which began at 10 a.m. The service was streamed live on Facebook, and a man could be heard speaking. At times the man sounded angry and said he was going to die. The livestream was removed just before 2 p.m.

FBI negotiators were in constant contact with the hostage-taker throughout the day, officials said. Shortly after 5 p.m., authorities were seen bringing a hostage, a man in black yarmulke out of the building.

A loud bang was heard at the synagogue just after 9 p.m. Authorities said that was around the time that the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team breached the building.

Video from WFAA-TV (Channel 8) showed people running out a door of the synagogue, and then a man holding a gun opening the same door just seconds later before he turned around and closed it. Moments later, several rounds of gunfire could be heard, followed by the sound of an explosion.

Cytron-Walker said Sunday that the experience was traumatizing. He said in a statement that the hostage-taker grew “increasingly belligerent and threatening” towards the end of the standoff, adding that he feels grateful to be alive and “we are resilient and we will recover.”

He credited security training that his congregation has received over the years for helping him and the other hostages get through the situation.

“Without the instruction we received, we would not have been prepared to act and flee when the situation presented itself,” Cytron-Walker said.

‘Lady al-Qaeda’

During the standoff, Akram demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman serving an 86-year sentence for shooting at two U.S. military officers during an interrogation. Her lawyer, Marwa Elbially, said Sunday that his client condemns Akram’s actions, and “unequivocally condemns all forms of violence.”

“We are all thankful that the hostages were safely released and that no one was harmed,” Elbially said during a virtual news conference.

Siddiqui is being held at a federal prison in Fort Worth, about 20 miles southwest of the synagogue.

Faizan Syed, director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that Siddiqui’s family and those campaigning for her release from prison did not know the hostage-taker.

“We want to make it very clear that the actions of this individual do not represent Dr. Siddiqui, her family or her campaign and we want to deter anybody who might have sympathies for her campaign to not take these types of actions in the future,” Syed told reporters during the news conference with Siddiqui’s lawyer. “This is something that is appalling, heinous and against the wishes of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.”

Saleema Gul, a representative of The Aafia Foundation, added the Houston-based group’s sympathy for the hostages and their families.

“We do not condone the incident that took place yesterday, or any other means to secure Dr. Aafia’s freedom other than through advocacy and legal means,” Gul said. In September, pro-ISIS British preacher Anjem Choudary launched a campaign calling for Siddiqui’s release. “The obligation upon us is to either free her physically or to ransom her or to exchange her,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.

The post asserted that Siddiqui was the victim of “huge injustice” and that he aimed “to call on those who have the ability to free her from captivity.”

The architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, described her to interrogators as a top al-Qaeda courier and financier, though her supporters discount that and say his statement was the result of torture. U.S. officials came to describe her as “Lady al-Qaeda,” and the FBI placed her on its list of seven most wanted terrorists in 2004. She was caught four years later and convicted in 2010 of trying to shoot two interrogators.

Militants have tried to use hostages as leverage to secure her release for over a decade.

An outpouring of support

Rabbi Andrew Marc Paley of Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in Dallas, said in an email to his congregation that authorities asked him to help care for the hostages after they escaped.

Paley said the first hostage released was an elderly man who was reunited with his daughter.

“I was able to speak to both of them and both were obviously relieved and in general good spirits,” the rabbi wrote.

Paley said he then met with the rabbi’s wife, Adena Cytron-Walker, and one of their daughters, as well as relatives of the other hostages.

After the rescue, he hugged Cytron-Walker, saying later he was “a little dazed and surprised” but smiling.

Concerns about rising anti-semitism

The U.S. Department of Justice released data in the fall showing a 42% increase in hate crimes nationally since 2014. The data identified Jews as the most targeted religious group in America.

In 2018, a gunman killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Tree of Life, while yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Paley said the Colleyville attack brought to the surface feelings of anger and sadness that “this terrible event is sadly not new to the Jewish community.” Rabbi Jeffrey Meyers of Tree of Life said in a statement his heart was heavy seeing the Colleyville attack.

“While everyone is physically safe, they are also forever changed,” Meyers said. “My own community knows too well the pain, trauma and lost sense of security that comes when violence forces its way in, especially into our sacred spaces.”

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wrote in a tweet that while the immediate crisis is over for Congregation Beth Israel and the Jewish community, “the fear of rising antisemitism remains.”

Rabbi Gary Zola, a professor at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, said he hopes there comes a point where people aren’t afraid to go into synagogues, mosques or churches because of incidents like the Colleyville standoff. He urged people to speak up and work together...

 

Jonathan Greenblatt, It Could Happen Here

Jonathan Greenblatt, It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable ― And How We Can Stop It.

The Escalating International War Against Israel

From Caroline Glick:

At the UN General Assembly last week, a large majority of member nations voted to lavishly fund a permanent inquisition against the Jewish state. The member states funded the operation of an “ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry,” against Israel.

The commission, run by outspoken haters of Israel with long records of demonizing the State of Israel and its people, was formed by the UN Human Rights Council in a special session in May. Its purpose is to deny and reject Israel’s right to exist, its right to self-defense, its right to enforce is laws, and its citizens rights to their properties and to their very lives.

The Human Rights Council’s decision to form its new permanent inquisition constitutes an unprecedented escalation of the political war the UN has been waging against Israel for the past fifty years. To grasp the danger, it is necessary to understand how Israel’s foes operate at the UN and how their partners in Europe and Israel itself operate.

We begin with the UN. In 2005, acting on pressure from the Bush administration, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan disbanded the UN Human Rights Commission. The Bush administration’s chief complaint was that the commission was endemically anti-Semitic.

The UN Human Rights Council was founded in 2006, and its members and UN staff wasted no time making clear that they intended for the new council to be even more anti-Semitic than its predecessor was.

Shortly after the Human Rights Council was established, it determined that demonizing Israel would be a permanent agenda item. Item Number 7 is the only permanent agenda item that deals with a specific country. And like the council’s nine other permanent agenda items, Item 7 is discussed at every formal council session. Item 7 enjoins the council to discuss, “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.”

Having a permanent agenda item dedicated to specifically demonizing Israel however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the Human Rights Council’s obsession with attacking the Jewish state. So since 2006, the council has convened nine special sessions to expand its focus on attacking the Jews. To get a sense of just how overwhelming the council’s focus on Israel is, in the same period, the council has convened just 19 special sessions to deal with every other country on the planet.

The council’s template for demonizing Israel has been fairly consistent through the years. Immediately after each Palestinian terror campaign against Israel comes to an end, the Holocaust denying, terror sponsoring PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas has his UN representatives ask for a special session to discuss the “war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity” Israel supposedly carried out against the Palestinians. No one ever mentions that ever single missile launched against Israel from the Hamas terror regime in Gaza constitutes a separate war crime. No one ever mentions Hamas at all.

In short order, the council accedes to the PLO’s request and convenes the special session. On cue the member nation’s representatives rise, accuse Israel of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, operating a killing machine, targeting children, and any other crime they can think of. Then a majority of the members vote to form a new “commission of inquiry,” led and staffed by “independent” investigators nearly all of whom believe that Israel has no right to exist and that Jews have too much power.

At the end of its “in-depth investigation,” the commission issues a report which determines that Israel conducted war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This brings us to the second arm of the international political war against Israel – Europe. Every Human Rights Council resolution to form a commission of inquiry, includes a call to non-governmental organizations and other parties to submit “testimonies” and “reports” that will substantiate the council’s blood libel that Israel committed war crimes and is inherently and incurably evil. NGOs registered in Israel, the Palestinian Authority and in Western countries answer the council’s call. And the final reports issued by each of the inquisitions include hundreds of citations from “testimonies” and reports submitted by these NGOs as proof of Israel’s inherent venality.

These organizations are not independent actors. European governments fund them and direct their operations. If they operated in the U.S., nearly every NGO involved in the Human Rights Council’s witch hunts against Israel would have to register as foreign agents of European governments. As MK Amichai Chikli put it, “Europe is waging a war against Israel.”

Last week, Chikli and MK Keti Shitreet were scheduled to hold a conference at the Knesset on European funding of radical NGOs. But in a sign of the depth of Europe’s commitment to its war against Israel, and to its power in Israel, the EU embassy in Israel placed massive pressure on the Knesset secretariat and the Knesset Speaker to cancel the conference. In the end, the conference was cancelled at the last moment, citing Covid-19 restrictions, even as the Knesset’s parliamentary operations went on unimpeded.

The reports the Human Rights Council publishes at the end of each fake commission of inquiry against Israel form the basis for various boycott efforts against Israel that European bureaucrats carry out. For instance, on the basis of one such report, EU member states stopped recognizing Israeli veterinary certificates relating to agricultural exports from Jewish farmers in Samaria.

This brings us to the third arm of the international political war against Israel – Israel’s European-influenced, progressive legal establishment. Last weekend, Haaretz published an interview with former attorney general and recently retired Supreme Court justice Meni Mazuz. Between the lines, Mazuz explained the legal establishment’s methods for transforming anti-Israel UN documents into “law.”

A significant portion of the interview dealt with Mazuz’s campaign from the bench to block military demolitions of homes of terrorists.

As Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University’s Law Faculty explains, “The law explicitly stipulates that it is legal to demolish the homes of terrorists. And there are dozens of Supreme Court decisions that approve demolition orders, based on the law.”

Mazuz told Haaretz that for many years, including during his tenure as Attorney General, “I thought that house demolitions were an immoral step, in contravention of the law whose effectiveness was dubious.”

But when Mazuz served as attorney general, he lacked the authority to end the practice. As he explained, “I couldn’t tell the government that it is prohibited when dozens of Supreme Court decisions say that it is permitted.”

But the minute Mazuz was appointed to the Supreme Court, he began legislating his political views from the bench. To substantiate his position regarding the demolition of terrorists’ homes, Mazuz said that he relied on “the positions of legal scholars,” in Israel and abroad, and on the decisions of the UN Human Rights Council.

“The demolitions cause us international damage,” Mazuz said. “Do you think that these things stay here? That they don’t come up every year at human rights councils in Geneva and in international forums?”

In other words, Mazuz made clear that along with several of his colleagues on the bench, he used the anti-Israel reports generated by the obsessively anti-Israel UN Human Rights Council, to justify his rulings which denied Israel the right to act in accordance with Israeli law in a manner that the duly elected government, and the duly constituted leadership of the IDF deemed necessary in their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.

As Bell explains, aside from a limited category of UN Security Council resolutions, UN actions and decisions are all devoid of significance in international law. Decisions by the UN Human Rights Council, like those of all other UN bodies are political documents without any legal weight.

Mazuz and his colleagues in the legal fraternity exploit the public’s ignorance and the impotence of the government and Knesset to transform these political documents into “law” through their judgments and legal opinions.

And this brings us to the Human Rights Council’s permanent inquisition whose operations a large majority of UN member nations voted to fund last week at the General Assembly. As Prof. Anne Bayefsky explained in a detailed report published this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the commission of inquiry’s mandate is effectively limitless. The commission is empowered to rewrite the entire history of the Arab conflict with Israel and determine that Israel’s birth was an original sin which must be undone. The commission is empowered to carry out an “investigation” on the basis of “testimonies” which EU-funded anti-Israel groups will supply them describing entirely fraudulent “war crimes” that will form the basis of indictments of Israeli elected leaders, IDF commanders and line soldiers, and Israeli civilians who reside in Judea, Samaria and unified Jerusalem. The UN’s political “courts” in turn will agree to try them for these made-up crimes.

Moreover, as Bayefsky noted, the commission is charged with making “recommendations on measures to be taken by third States to ensure respect for international humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem…[to ensure] that they do not aid or assist in the Commission of internationally wrongful acts.”

A similar statement is made in the resolution’s preamble regarding “business enterprises.”

The message in both cases is self-explanatory. The reports the inquisition will publish will serve as the basis

for economic boycotts of Israel to be enacted by both government bureaucrats and businesses.

Israel has no choice but to fight this commission and any business, government or judge that uses its reality-free reports. Israel must ensure that the anti-Semitic propaganda the commission puts out does not turn into “law” through the actions of radical justices and government attorneys. And Israel must reconcile itself to the fact that the EU bureaucracy and much of Europe is waging a war against it, and launch a vigorous counter-assault...

 

What Happens When the Last Jew Leaves Afghanistan

From Dara Horn, at NYT: 

My dad called to tel me that @DaraHorn had written the best oped he'd ever read. I think he might be right. https://t.co/EfYuhh1D61

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) October 5, 2021

The Last Jew of Afghanistan is gone, and everyone is glad to be rid of him.

Zebulon Simentov, Afghanistan’s only remaining Jew, escaped three weeks ago after refusing early opportunities to flee Kabul amid this summer’s American withdrawal. He initially declined to leave, he once told reporters, so as to protect the country’s last synagogue — though it seems that he may actually have hoped to avoid his estranged wife in Israel, who had been waiting over 20 years for him to sign off on a religious divorce. According to The Associated Press, Mr. Simentov, a “portly man fond of whiskey, who kept a pet partridge” and charged “exorbitant fees for interviews,” was a headache for the Israeli-American businessman who arranged his rescue. He described his experience with the Last Jew as “two weeks of being a shrink.” Mr. Simentov’s wife finally received her divorce just this week.

The story of Mr. Simentov, whose name incongruously means “good omen,” was primarily presented as a moment of lightness amid the horrors of the Taliban takeover. This was also true when Mr. Simentov appeared in the news in the early years of the American occupation nearly 20 years ago. Back then, he was one of Two Last Jews of Afghanistan (the other died in 2005), and the story was that the Taliban had imprisoned both of them — until their endless bickering got so annoying that the guards kicked them out of jail.

These stories are used as comic relief, like a Mel Brooks skit injected into the relentless thrum of bad news. But when I read about the Last Jew of Afghanistan, a country where Jewish communities thrived for well over a thousand years, it occurred to me that there have been many “Last Jews” stories like this, in many, many places — and that the way we tell these stories is itself part of the problem.

Dozens of countries around the world have had their Last Jews. The Libyan city of Tripoli was, astonishingly, one-quarter Jewish in 1941; today the entire country is Jew-free. After the fall of Muammar el-Qaddafi, who banished the country’s lingering Jews during his reign, a lone Libyan Jew came back to Tripoli and took down a concrete wall sealing the city’s one remaining synagogue. But he was soon forced to flee, having been warned that an antisemitic mob was coming for his head.

Chrystie Sherman, a photographer for Diarna, an online museum of Jewish sites in the Islamic world, once told me how she tracked down the last Jewish business owner in Syria, a millenniums-old Jewish community that once numbered in the tens of thousands. In 2009, he took her to a magnificent 500-year-old synagogue. The structure didn’t survive Syria’s civil war. At another synagogue, she had to lie to government agents about why she was there; admitting that she was documenting Jewish history was too dangerous.

In my travels, I’ve also seen what happens in such places decades after the Last Jews have vanished. Often, thousands of years of history are completely erased, remembered only by the descendants of the dead. Sometimes, something even creepier happens: People tell stories about Jews that make them feel better about themselves, patting themselves on the back for their current love for Jews long gone. The self-righteous memory-keeping is so much easier without insufferable living Jews getting in the way.

Places around the world now largely devoid of Jews have come to think fondly of the dead Jews who once shared their streets, and an entire industry has emerged to encourage tourism to these now historical sites. The locals in such places rarely minded when living Jews were either massacred or driven out.

But now they pine for the dead Jews, lovingly restoring their synagogues and cemeteries — sometimes while also pining for live Jewish tourists and their magic Jewish money. Egypt’s huge Jewish community predated Islam by at least six centuries; now that only a handful of Jews remain, the government has poured funding into restoring synagogues for tourists.

I have visited, and written about, many such “heritage sites” over the years, in countries ranging from Spain to China. Some are maintained by sincere and learned people, with deep research and profound courage. I wish that were the norm. More often, they are like Epcot pavilions, selling bagels and bobbleheads, sometimes hardly even mentioning why this synagogue is now a museum or a concert hall. Many Jewish travelers to such sites feel a discomfort they can barely name.

I’ve felt it too, every time. I’ve walked through places where Jews lived for hundreds or even thousands of years, people who share so many of the foundations of my own life — the language and books I cherish, the ideas that nourish me, the rhythms of my weeks and years — and I have felt the silence close in.

I don’t mean the dead Jews’ silence, but my own. I know how I am supposed to feel: solemn, calmly contemplative, and perhaps also grateful to whoever so kindly restored this synagogue or renamed this street. I stifle my disquiet, telling myself it is merely sorrow, burying it so deep that I no longer recognize what it really is: rage.

That rage is real, and we ignore it at our peril. It’s apparently in poor taste to point out why people like Mr. Simentov wind up as “Last Jews” to begin with: People decided they no longer wanted to live with those who weren’t exactly like themselves. Nostalgic stories about Last Jews mask a much larger and darker reality about societies that were once ethnic and religious mosaics, but are now home to almost no one but Arab Muslims, Lithuanian Catholics or Han Chinese. It costs little to wax nostalgic about departed Jews when one lives in a place where diversity, rather than being a living human challenge, is a fairy tale from the past. There is only one way to be.

What does it mean for a society to rid itself of other points of view? To reject those with different perspectives, different histories, different ways of being in the world? The example of Jewish history, of the many Last Jews in places around the globe, holds up a dark mirror to those of us living in much freer societies. The cynical use of bygone Jews to “inspire” us can verge on the absurd, but that absurdity isn’t so far-off from our own lip service to diversity, where those who differ from us are wonderful, so long as they see things our way.

On paper, American diversity is impressive. But in reality, we often live siloed lives. How do we really treat those who aren’t just like us? The disgust is palpable, as anyone knows who has tried being Jewish on TikTok. Are we up to the challenge of maintaining a society that actually respects others?

I hope so, but I’m not holding my breath. The Last Jew of Afghanistan is gone, and everyone is glad to be rid of him.

Kyrsten Sinema Faces a Growing Revolt From Her Former Supporters

Followingp-up, "Kyrsten Sinema Is Enigma at Center of Democrats’ Spending Talks."

This lady's got tremendous power, and radical leftists hate it. 

At the New York Times, "Kyrsten Sinema Is at the Center of It All. Some Arizonans Wish She Weren’t":

PHOENIX — Jade Duran once spent her weekends knocking on doors to campaign for Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the stubbornly centrist Democrat whose vote could seal the fate of a vast Democratic effort to remake America’s social safety net. But no more.

When Ms. Sinema famously gave a thumbs down to a $15 minimum wage and refused to eliminate the filibuster to pass new voting rights laws this year, Ms. Duran, a Democrat and biomedical engineer from Phoenix, decided she was fed up. She joined dozens of liberal voters and civil rights activists in a rolling series of protests outside Ms. Sinema’s Phoenix offices, which have been taking place since the summer. Nearly 50 people have been arrested.

“It really feels like she does not care about her voters,” said Ms. Duran, 33, who was arrested in July at a protest. “I will never vote for her again.”

Ms. Sinema, a onetime school social worker and Green Party-aligned activist, vaulted through the ranks of Arizona politics by running as a zealous bipartisan willing to break with her fellow Democrats. She counts John McCain, the Republican senator who died in 2018, as a hero, and has found support from independent voters and moderate suburban women in a state where Maverick is practically its own party.

But now, Ms. Sinema is facing a growing political revolt at home from the voters who once counted themselves among her most devoted supporters. Many of the state’s most fervent Democrats now see her as an obstructionist whose refusal to sign on to a major social policy and climate change bill has helped imperil the party’s agenda.

Little can proceed without the approval of Ms. Sinema, one of two marquee Democratic moderates in an evenly divided Senate. While she has balked at the $3.5 trillion price tag and some of the tax-raising provisions of the bill, which is opposed by all Republicans in Congress, Democrats in Washington and back home in Arizona have grown exasperated.

While the Senate Democrats’ other high-profile holdout, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, has publicly outlined his concerns with key elements of the Democratic agenda in statements to swarms of reporters, Ms. Sinema has been far more enigmatic and has largely declined to issue public comments.

Mr. Biden, White House officials and Democrats have beseeched the two senators to publicly issue a price tag and key provisions of the legislation that they could accept. But there is little indication that Ms. Sinema has been willing to offer that, even privately to the administration.

On Wednesday afternoon, she and a team from the White House huddled in her office for more than two hours on another day of what a spokesman for Ms. Sinema called good-faith negotiations.

“Kyrsten has always promised Arizonans she would be an independent voice for the state — not for either political party,” John LaBombard, a spokesman for the senator, wrote in an email responding to questions for the senator about her standing at home. “She’s delivered on that promise and has always been honest about where she stands.”

That posture helped her win election to the Senate in 2018 from a state whose voters are roughly 35 percent Republican, 32 percent Democratic and 33 percent “other.” And for all the passions of the moment, Ms. Sinema is not up for election again until 2024...

I love the senator at this point. If she can piss off left-wing nutjobs like this, and with so much hilarious gusto, I can dig it. 

More.

 

Kyrsten Sinema Is Enigma at Center of Democrats’ Spending Talks

She's an enigma alright. 

I blogged about her almost 10 years ago, when she, umm, came off a bit less moderates. See, "Kyrsten Sinema, Bisexual Israel-Hating Antiwar Radical, is Face of Today's Democrat Party."

And now, folks are tripping on her role of an extra-"moderate" senator who easily switch parties.

An engima alright.

At WSJ, "Arizona senator says $3.5 trillion price tag is too high, holds discussions with Biden, party leaders":

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.—Senate Democrats trying to pass a sweeping education, healthcare and climate package must first crack an enigma: What does centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema want?

Ms. Sinema, a key vote in the evenly divided Senate, has made clear she won’t support the package’s current $3.5 trillion price tag, announcing her opposition in July and reiterating it since then. The first-term senator from a swing state has held meetings with party leaders to discuss the legislation, but she hasn’t publicly suggested specific changes. Many Democrats remain uncertain over her policy stance and her political calculations.

Ms. Sinema is constantly engaged in “direct, good-faith discussions,” said Sinema spokesman John LaBombard. He shared a list of more than two dozen meetings or calls she has had to discuss the legislation.

Six of those conversations were with President Biden directly and three were with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). The rest were with Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), who is a member of the Finance and Budget committees, and White House and Democratic leadership staff. Representatives for Messrs. Biden, Schumer and Warner didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Given the size and scope of the proposal—and the lack of detailed legislative language, or even consensus between the Senate and House around several provisions—we are not offering detailed comments on any one proposed piece of the package while those discussions are ongoing,” Mr. LaBombard said.

The package under discussion would represent a vast expansion of the country’s safety net, including paid family and medical leave, universal prekindergarten for three- and four-year-olds, affordable housing, and an expansion of Medicare benefits, among other measures. It would also increase taxes on companies and high-income households. Democrats hope to tackle climate change with provisions aimed at reducing carbon emissions in the electricity sector by 80% and economywide by 50% by 2030.

Republicans are united in opposition to the proposal, calling it wasteful and potentially damaging to the economy. Democrats are aiming to pass the package through a process called budget reconciliation that allows a bill to advance in the Senate with a simple majority, rather than the 60-vote supermajority usually needed.

In private negotiations, Ms. Sinema has been focused on targeting how the funding of new programs will be distributed among income levels, according to Senate Democratic aides. Narrower targeting of benefits could lower the overall cost. Ms. Sinema has also expressed concerns centering on the structure of the proposed tax changes, aides said.

In a recent interview with the Arizona Republic, Ms. Sinema expressed interest in climate proposals, which she said would directly affect the desert state which is already experiencing droughts, wildfires and damaged infrastructure.

The focus on Ms. Sinema comes amid a broad negotiation within the party between the moderate and progressive wings. While some senators have expressed concerns about parts of the proposal and haven’t committed to funding the entire $3.5 trillion, Ms. Sinema and fellow centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of deep-red West Virginia have been the only members of the caucus to rule out supporting that level of spending.

In a meeting Wednesday at the White House with Mr. Biden where both centrists were present, lawmakers discussed reducing the size of the package to below $3 trillion, according to two people familiar with the discussion.

“The main goal is to get all 50 of us together which means that we really need to get down to what are the things that will enable Joe and Kyrsten to say yes,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii). “I personally am not sure what it is programmatically that they can support. I’d like to get that identified.”

Rep. Scott Peters (D., Calif.), a centrist Democrat and close friend of Ms. Sinema from their days serving together in the House, said Ms. Sinema will be pivotal in the talks. “I certainly think that everyone is well advised to be listening to her. She’s got strong opinions and she’s not going to be pushed around.”

Others note that along with the thin control of the Senate, Democrats can afford to lose just three votes in the House, and Mr. Biden can’t afford to take his eye off any lawmakers...

I dare say I like that woman. *Shrug.*

Still more.

 

Dark Clouds Over the 'New America'

 From Caroline Glick, "Dark Clouds: Google, Amazon, Israel and the New America":

America is changing before our eyes. But the Finance Ministry apparently hasn’t paid it any mind.

Last week, the head of procurement at the Finance Ministry’s General Accountant’s Office formally announced that Amazon (AWS) and Google won the government tender to provide cloud services to the government as Israel moves forward with the first phase of the Nimbus Project. Tender bids submitted by Microsoft and Oracle were rejected.

The Nimbus Project is a massive, multiyear project that will replace the data management infrastructure of government ministries and the IDF. To date, government ministries have used decentralized servers and dozens of independently operating websites to house and manage their data. The Nimbus Project will move all government computing data and applications to commercial clouds provided by technology giants.

When the government computer systems migrate to Google and Amazon’s data clouds, these firms will manage all of official Israel’s non-classified data and computerized applications. This will include everything from government and military payrolls to welfare payments, to government pensions. It will include the medical files of all Israelis. It will include their personal and corporate tax returns.

It’s possible that from the technical and financial perspectives, the General Accountant’s tender committee’s decision to award the cloud contracts to Google and Amazon was reasonable. The two corporations are the industry leaders in cloud technologies. But even on the technical and financial levels, there are differing opinions about the committee’s decision.

Oracle’s bid was allegedly lower than those submitted by Google and Amazon. Moreover, the tender requires that the clouds be physically located inside of Israel. Oracle and Microsoft have both built cloud centers in Israel. Oracle’s is set to open in August and Microsoft’s is scheduled to open in January 2022. Google and Amazon for their part have yet to begin building their data centers, so for the next two years, and more likely the next 3-4 years, contrary to the stipulations of the tender, Israel’s government and IDF data will be housed in Europe.

Then there is the issue of redundancy. The trend today among governments and large corporations is to spread their data out among several cloud providers. Israel could have chosen to award the contract to all four companies and kept costs lower by forcing them to compete over pricing every year. Redundancy in cloud servers also lowers the risks of sabotage and technical failures that can lead to loss of data or failure of computing systems.

At any rate, assuming the tender committee followed the best practices from both financial and technical perspectives in granting the cloud contract to Google and Amazon exclusively, the decision is disconcerting all the same. The problem is not financial or technological. The problem with Google and Amazon is cultural. The organizational culture of both corporations raises significant questions about the wisdom of granting them exclusive control over Israel’s government data for the next seven years.

During this month’s Operation Guardian of the Wall, some 250 Google employees who identified as anti-Zionist Jews wrote a letter to Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai. They began by asking that Google reject the determination that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and that the company fund Palestinian organizations.

The “Jewish Diaspora in Tech” called for “Google leadership to make a company-wide statement recognizing violence in Palestine and Israel, which must include direct recognition of the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence.”

Then they turned to the Nimbus contract.

“We request a review of all…business contracts and corporate donations and the termination of contracts with institutions that support Israeli violations of Palestinian rights, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Shortly after the Google employees published their letter, some five hundred Amazon employees entered the anti-Israel fray. They signed a letter that was almost identical to the Google employees’ letter. They called for Amazon to reject the definition of anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism. They insisted that Israel is a racist colonial project and that the land of Israel belongs to the Palestinians. They called for Amazon to financially support Palestinian organizations. And they asked that the firm, “commit to review and sever business contracts and corporate donations with companies, organizations, and/or governments that are active or complicit in human rights violations, such as the Israeli Defense Forces.”

Another employee group called “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” tweeted a long chain of posts denouncing the company’s participation in the Nimbus Project. Among other things, they wrote, “We stand in solidarity with Palestinians who went on a historic general strike to protest Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza. Amazon and Google recently signed a $1B deal supporting Israel’s military. Amazon is complicit in state killings and human rights abuses.

“Amazon’s workers didn’t sign up to work on projects that support militaries and policing forces. We didn’t sign up to be complicit in state killings and human rights abuses in the U.S., Israel, and around the world,” they concluded.

The workers’ protests in both companies are deadly serious. In 2018, Google employees discovered that the company was working with the Pentagon to develop an artificial intelligence system to improve the accuracy of U.S. military drones. Some 4,000 Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers signed a petition to Pichai demanding that Google end its involvement in the project. As they put it, “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war.”

Google management caved to the pressure and cancelled the contract with the Defense Department.

In January, Amazon cancelled its cloud service contract with the social media platform Parler, which was identified with Republicans. Amazon justified move by claiming that Parler contained “violent content.” The fact that violent content is also contained on other social media platforms – including Amazon itself – was neither here nor there.

Notable as well is the fact that Amazon’s CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is a close friend of musician Brian Eno. Like Roger Waters, Eno is a prominent proponent of the anti-Semitic BDS campaign that seeks to boycott Israel and demonize and silence its Jewish supporters worldwide.

The senior officials at the Finance Ministry, the national Cyber Authority and the Ministry of Defense who granted Google and Amazon the government and IDF cloud contracts may simply not understand the dire implications for Israel’s national security posed by the antagonistic positions of some Google and Amazon employees.

In a press conference this week, the heads of the Finance Ministry actually presented these statements as testaments to the credibility of the contracts. The fact that the leaders of Google and Amazon signed the deal with Israel despite the hatred their employees express towards the Jewish state is proof of the companies’ commitment to the project, they insisted.

The Finance Ministry added that there is no cause for concern because the contracts require that Google and Amazon set up subsidiary firms in Israel to actually manage the clouds. As Israeli registered companies, the subsidiaries will be bound to the requirements of Israeli law. And as such, they will have no option of sabotaging the work or otherwise breaching the contract no matter how anti-Israel the Google and Amazon employees outside of Israel may be.

The problem with this argument is that the subsidiaries in Israel will be wholly owned by their mother corporations. All of their equipment will be owned by Google and Amazon in the U.S. If the mother corporations decide to pull the plug on the Nimbus contract, the local subsidiaries will be powerless to maintain them.

The same Google management that blew off the artificial intelligence project with the Pentagon three years ago to satisfy their workers should be expected to repeat their actions in the future. If their employees unite to demand that Google abrogate the Nimbus contract, management can be expected to absorb a few hundred million dollars in losses to keep their workers happy.

The polarization of opinion on Israel that we are witnessing in American politics between Republicans who support Israel and Democrats who oppose Israel, is an expression of a much larger division within American society. The heartbreaking but undeniable fact is that today you can’t talk about “America” as a single political entity.

Today there are two Americas, and they cannot abide by one another. One America – traditional America – loves Israel and America. The other America – the New America – hates Israel and doesn’t think much of America, either.

Traditional America believes that the U.S. brought the promise of liberty to the world and that even though it is far from perfect, the United States is the greatest country in human history. In the eyes of the citizens of Traditional America, Israel is a kindred nation and the U.S.’s best friend and most valued ally in the Middle East.

New America, in contrast, believes that America was born in the sin of slavery. New Americans insist America will remain evil and an object of scorn at home and abroad so long it refuses to exchange its values of liberty, capitalism, equal opportunity and patriotism with the values of racialism and equity, socialism, equality of outcomes, and globalization. For New Americans, just as the U.S. was born in the sin of white supremacy so Israel was born in the sin of Zionism. In New America, Israel will have no right to exist so long as it clings to its Jewish national identity, refusing to become a “state of all its citizens.”

New America’s power isn’t limited to its control over the White House and Congress. It also controls much of corporate America. Under the slogan, “Stakeholder Capitalism,” corporate conglomerates whose leaders are New Americans use their economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America. We saw stakeholder capitalism at work in March following the Georgia statehouse’s passage of a law requiring voters to present identification at polling places. Major League Baseball, Coca Cola, Delta and American Airlines among others announced that they would boycott the state, denying jobs to thousands of Georgians in retaliation.

Silicon Valley is the Ground Zero of Stakeholder Capitalism. Its denizens are the loudest and most powerful proponents of using technological and economic power to advance the political and cultural agendas of New America.

Microsoft and Oracle are appealing the Nimbus tender award. They are basing their appeals on what they describe as technical and other flaws in the tender process. Israel should view their appeals as an opportunity to reverse course.

In light of New America’s hostility towards Israel generally, and given the proven power of Google and Amazon employees and their expressed antagonism towards Israel, the Finance Ministry should reconsider the tender award. Technical considerations aside, the decision to grant Google and Amazon exclusive control over the State of Israel’s computer data did not give sufficient weight to all the relevant variables.

 

Eve Dov Ber

You gotta read Eve Barlow. What a writer!

At the Table, "The Social Media Pogrom."

My latest for @tabletmag

The Social Media Pogromhttps://t.co/Qp8Vj1NHu6

— Eve Barlow (@Eve_Barlow) May 26, 2021

I don’t know who crafted the first tweet that simply said “Eve Fartlow,” but whoever it was—bot or human—started a fire. Over the past two weeks, Twitter has been littered with the words “Eve Fartlow.” Every time I tweet, this title is the response I attract, and it is pelted at me irrespective of what I write. Hundreds of trolls, some with blue ticks and some without, just start responding to me “Eve Fartlow” (some people have recently switched it to “Eve Shartlow” but “Eve Fartlow” seems to be the one that sticks). If we donated a JNF tree to Israel for every time someone tweeted “Eve Fartlow,” there’d be no Negev left.

Tensions in the Middle East erupted this past month, so you may be thinking, “Why’s this dumb Zionist liar playing the victim? She should ‘cope’ (still not sure what this means). She’s complaining to me from her Los Angeles apartment about people spelling her name in a dumb way online. She’s not wading through rubble. She’s not running from rocket fire. She’s not surrounded by senseless violence. Let’s ratio her!”

You’re right. I have not been living in a bomb shelter. I have not had my house cave in. So I have asked myself the same thing, because neither have all the people (or bots?) tweeting my name incorrectly, doing everything they can to discredit the messaging I’m trying to relay to my followers to challenge the way this conflict has been narrated by mainstream media and social media influencers. I challenge it because the truth matters. The truth protects lives.

Due to the juvenile nature of this “Eve Fartlow” attack, which sounds like it was invented by a 3-year-old high on Pop-Tarts, I wondered if the bombardment of “Eve Fartlow” tweets was engineered to drive me insane. Perhaps it was a form of digital waterboarding aimed at forcing me to surrender, delete all my accounts, log out of all my devices, and commit digital suicide. “Eve Fartlow” is not my name, regardless of how many thousands of times it’s echoed back at me by trolls online. But unfortunately for the troll army, Eve Barlow isn’t really my name either. Barlow has been my family’s name for three generations, but before that our name was Berelovitch. We changed it when my family fled czarist Russia during the Eastern European pogroms in the late 19th century. And before Barlow was Berelovitch it was Dov Ber. That name is my connection to the Levant. That name is my indigenous link to Israel. You want to talk about ethnic cleansing? Ask your Jewish friends the stories of their surnames.

“Eve Fartlow” is an intimidation tactic; a playground jibe meant to drown out my voice online. My words must be silenced as quickly as possible by the hammer-and-sickle emoji comrades who love humanity so much, they want anyone who threatens their concept of utopia to kill themselves. It’s all peace, love, and openness until someone wants to have a conversation.

Two weeks ago, as Westerners began educating themselves about Sheikh Jarrah and the Iron Dome through stick figures with biased speech bubbles on the Diet Prada and Refinery29 Instagram feeds, something else started happening on social media. I coined it the world’s first social media pogrom. The activity that Jews—Zionist Jews in particular—experienced all over the web was bizarre at best and invalidating, abusive, and dehumanizing at worst. Zionist Jews weren’t just being unfollowed for advocating for themselves and their brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, we were also losing access to direct message and comment abilities, having posts removed for violating community guidelines (while blatant antisemitism online almost never receives the same treatment), and having our accounts threatened with temporary suspension or closure.

The cherry on top, of course, was that we were simultaneously fighting off a barrage of thousands upon thousands of troll comments and hateful direct messages, which frequently included homophobic, misogynistic, and extremely violent language. Some people even generously took the time to record voice messages. I received a few of those, including one from a woman with a British accent calling for my family to burn in hell. She sang it. Or she tried to.

The seeds of this pogrom have been sown for a while. Online, there are different degrees of erasure and exclusion. First comes the unfollow, which hurts, especially from those we consider friends, those we love and cherish, whose memories are still fresh. Sometimes an unfollow is the result of pressure from other online users who dox people they disagree with. Sometimes an unfollow is a decision taken with complete autonomy, someone deciding to simply delete a person from their timeline rather than ask for clarification or, God forbid, pursue a fair-minded discussion.

If you’re a Zionist, you are not deemed worthy of dialogue. Most people who think this couldn’t give you a working definition of Zionism. They just know which labels are accepted by the intersectional world, and which labels are not. Anti-Zionism good. Zionism bad. Except Zionism is a globally recognized concept, whereas anti-Zionism doesn’t seem to have an agreed-upon definition. It exists only as a knee-jerk rejection of a belief in the State of Israel and anyone’s justification of its existence, regardless of how reasoned, empathetic, or fair-minded that justification might be.

I’m a music journalist, and I understand that artists can be sensitive, conflict-avoidant, and prone to anxiety triggers. But I noticed that whenever I tweeted about the Jewish right to self-determine in Israel, I’d lose followers, and sometimes it would be because other Jews who hate Zionists and claim that we’re the bane of their existence because we’re preventing them from assimilating and being like everyone else would pile on the blue checks and tell them they can’t possibly follow me. I’m a monster. Clearly I keep vials of Palestinian baby blood in my freezer. So people unfollowed me. People I know. People I’ve worked with. People with whom I got along very well. Editors unfollowed me in droves, as did the publications I worked for, as did PRs, as did college graduates whom I’ve personally mentored because I believe in paying it forward.

I assume this came from a concern for optics. The mainstream media is skewed entirely against Israel and is disgusted by anyone who asks for sober criticism instead of a consequence-free festival of Israel hatred. I understand how their bias persists. The oldest hatred in the world was resurrected by a new ideology and the coolest cast of woke anti-Zionist pilgrims. Poor Gal Gadot is not one such pilgrim, and instead became an example of what reaction you get if you veer from the intersectional script. Gadot had the audacity to be an Israeli and a former IDF soldier who publicly advocated for peace between her homeland and her neighbors. And she was annihilated online for it. How dare she try to talk about her own “lived experience?” How dare she be an Israeli offering an olive branch?

Meanwhile, when you have Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Dua Lipa, the Hadids, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Halsey, Snoop Dogg, Manchester United, and the BLM movement, among many other influencers, including Jews like Sarah Silverman and Natalie Portman, throwing their full support behind a reductive, inflammatory, and dangerous case against Israel, it’s very appealing to join in. Considering that Halsey alone has more followers than there are Jews alive, the combined strength of their platforms is an excellent way to drown out the online voice of Zionists with the chutzpah to defend themselves and survive in this conflict, both in Israel and in the diaspora.

The Tower of Babel that is Twitter is a place where disparate conversations cannot coexist, where oppositions cannot find common ground, and where dissenters must be monitored and policed by potentially millions of watchful users. When I tweeted a list of influencers sharing such disinformation, Linda Sarsour—notable Palestinian American activist, former chair of the Women’s March, and prolific antisemite who has quote-tweeted me a few times this year to encourage her followers to attack—did so again, this time adding a thank you note for keeping a list of “humanitarians on the right side of history.”

When I swiftly blocked her for my own protection, she posted a picture of her block by me and tweeted that she was “honored.” Her intentions here are obvious: She was sending a bat signal out to go beat this Jew; permission for an online lynching. And if such joyous pile-ons can happen over keyboards, it’s not hard to imagine it happening offscreen.

Lo and behold, it turns out that vehement online anti-Zionism inspires people to engage in antisemitic violence offline, endangering Jews as a result. In the streets of major cities around the world, Jews have been targeted with fireworks, with fists, and with human spit. Who knew this could happen? Well, we did, and we tried to make noise about it.

Explosives were thrown into a crowd of Jews in New York’s Diamond District. Jews were attacked outside a bagel store in midtown Manhattan. Jews in a New York restaurant had bottles thrown at them. A Jewish man was hospitalized after he was beaten on the street in New York. Jews were brutally assaulted in Toronto. An Orthodox man fled from a car trying to mow him down in an LA parking lot. Down the street, Jews were beaten up outside a sushi restaurant by a mob who asked if they were Jews. In London, cars drove through Jewish neighborhoods as their drivers screamed “Fuck the Jews! Rape their daughters!” Jewish synagogues in Skokie, Tucson, and Salt Lake City were vandalized. Delis have been destroyed. A demonstration in Vienna featuring people shouting “Shove your Holocaust up your ass” was met with resounding applause. In the U.K., there have been 116 reported incidents of antisemitism in 10 days—a 600% increase.

But online, the more I tweeted during the 11 days of violence in the Middle East, the louder the dissent grew, and the crazier the opposition. The counterargument essentially amounted to “This Jew is LYING.” Which makes sense, given how effective the mainstream media is at presenting only one side of a story, and given the patterns of history in which the Jews have always been framed as arbiters of lies! Even upon posting a note about an uplifting conversation I had in an Uber with an Armenian driver who advocated for the truth above all else and respect for fellow humans regardless of opinion, the note was dragged across the web as a lie. Why would I lie about an interaction with a stranger? Meanwhile, while I was being dragged as a fraudster, one tweeter used an app called TweetGen to fabricate a fake tweet by me. Apparently, in 2015, I quoted lyrics of a rap song I’ve never heard before, which included the “N-word.” This tweet didn’t sound like me, wasn’t written by me, and never existed in the first place. It was created as further “proof” that I’m a “racist.”

Still more.

Dennis Prager: 'It's Always F*** the Jews' (VIDEO)

He's on point, yet again.

Dennis Prager, at Fox News: