“Communications networks go dark right after start of Tehran protests urged on by exiled crown prince; protesters chant ‘death to the dictator’ and ‘death to the Islamic Republic’”

Posted on January 8, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Internet, phone lines cut across Iran as thousands rally in Tehran; death toll at 45
January 8, 2026

Thousands of people in Iran’s capital shouted from their homes and rallied in the street Thursday night after a call by the country’s exiled crown prince for a mass demonstration, witnesses said, a new escalation in the protests that have spread nationwide across the Islamic Republic. Internet access and telephone lines in Iran cut out immediately after the protests began. The protest represented the first test of whether the Iranian public could be swayed by Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose fatally ill father fled Iran just before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Demonstrations have included cries in support of the Shah, something that could bring a death sentence in the past but now underlines the anger fueling the protests that began over Iran’s ailing economy. READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA Iranian Crown Prince thanks Trump, slams regime for Internet blackout Reza Pahlavi condemns Iran for cutting communications amid mass protests and thanks President Trump for warning Tehran, urging world leaders to help restore access and support demonstrators.

I24NEWS ‘Netanyahu is most popular figure in Iran,’ says Iranian protester as unrest continues As Iran faces its most intense wave of protests since 2022, a surprising phenomenon is emerging on the streets: open admiration for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and appeals to Israel for help in challenging the Islamic Republic. “Benjamin Netanyahu is today the most popular political figure in Iran,” a Tehran resident and regime opponent told Israeli public radio KAN Reshet Bet this week, speaking under a pseudonym for security reasons.

JPOST Iran’s Khamenei has escape plan to flee to Moscow if regime falls amid protests The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly has an “escape plan” that involves fleeing to Russia if the current nationwide protests continue to intensify, British newspaper The Times reported on Sunday. The plan, called “Plan B” by the British report, would include 86-year-old Khamenei and 20 close people, including family and aides. It will also involve a way of taking his vast asset network, which, according to a 2013 Reuters investigation cited by The Times, is valued at about $95 billion…

ISRAEL HAYOM Iranian’s leadership reportedly seeking French visas as regime ‘trembling’ In interview with Le Figaro, reporter Emmanuel Razavi claims the ayatollahs have grown concerned over the “true revolution”, and some senior officials have already begun laying the groundwork by exploring an exit route to France.

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“Hamas isn’t hiding its brutality. The hospitals of Al-Shifa, Al-Aqsa and Nasser are not simply medical centers. Hamas has repurposed Gaza’s main hospitals as interrogation sites, cages, gulags for perceived ‘dissidents'”

Posted on January 8, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
Trump’s Slow, Faltering ‘Peace’ Plan Enabling Hamas to Torture and Murder Palestinians
Khaled Abu Toameh
January 8, 2026

While the US and other countries are talking about the need to move to the second phase of President Donald J. Trump’s 20-point peace plan, the Iran-backed Hamas terror group is continuing to reassert its control over parts of the Gaza Strip that are no longer under Israeli control. Hamas, in addition to rearming and regrouping, has stepped up its crackdown on Palestinians suspected of “collaboration” with Israel. Hamas’s goal is to intimidate and deter the residents of the Gaza Strip and remind them that the terror group has no plans to end its rule or lay down its weapons. As far as Hamas is concerned, any Palestinian who believes in Israel’s right to exist and opposes terrorism is a traitor who should be punished by death. READ MORE

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“Without Israeli experience, technology, and collaboration, the U.S. will be less safe”

Posted on January 8, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
The U.S. Needs Israeli Innovation for Our Defense
Michael Doran
December 23, 2025

…For decades, the U.S.–Israel partnership has delivered significant returns: providing the United States with world-leading defense innovation and access to intelligence from across the Middle East. President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome is the latest—and most consequential—expression of that same partnership. Announced by executive order at the end of January, Trump’s signature homeland defense initiative is a layered architecture designed to protect the American heartland from ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, and emerging aerial threats. Golden Dome is not a theoretical exercise. Its purpose is to ensure American survivability under attack. In building such a system, the United States is drawing directly on Israeli technology, Israeli expertise, and Israeli combat experience. Israel contributes to the Golden Dome in three decisive ways. READ MORE

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Families of Bondi Beach massacre: “We need to know why clear warning signs were ignored, how antisemitic hatred and Islamic extremism were allowed to dangerously grow unchecked, and what changes must be made”

Posted on January 7, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

COMMENTARY
The Question of Jewish Armed Self-Defense
Seth Mandel
January 6, 2026

In the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, Hugh Hewitt asked me during a segment on his show whether I thought Jews should arm themselves. I responded that Jews in America are indeed, in increasing numbers, following Vladimir Jabotinsky’s exhortation to “learn to shoot,” though in Australia that choice is foreclosed by the country’s famously restrictive firearm regulations. The freedom to make that choice is what’s most important, because it is a sign of a political system that values individual rights and requires a degree of humility on the part of the state. Australia’s national government, currently led by the cold, feckless Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, exudes neither humility nor a respect for individual citizens. The result is not just atrocities like Bondi Beach but the flagrant mishandling of its aftermath and the robotic adherence to the status quo that produced the tragedy in the first place. READ MORE

DAILY MAIL Anthony Albanese is slammed as disturbing detail emerges in resurfaced footage of PM at a pro-Palestine rally Anthony Albanese has been slammed over old footage of him attending a pro-Palestinian protest while flags belonging to terror groups were being waved near him. Grainy footage, which first resurfaced two years ago, showed the future Prime Minister condemning the actions of the Israeli military during a protest at Martin Place in Sydney’s CBD back in 2000. It showed him standing in the crowd, where a Hezbollah flag was seen being waved metres away. He also addressed attendees with a megaphone to condemn Israel’s actions. 

YOUTUBE Image surfaces of Anthony Albanese meeting with late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat “Sources who knew Albanese at the time told me he was starry-eyed and fawning at the prospect of meeting Yasser Arafat,” she said.  “As I mentioned, the group did not meet with the then Israeli Prime Minister or Israeli President – at the time, Albanese was an activist for the Palestinian cause.” 

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“If Mamdani’s bigotry and obsessive hate of Israel don’t seem to bother most New Yorkers and even many Jews, then it illustrates how prejudice has become mainstreamed”

Posted on January 7, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
What normalizing antisemitism looks like
Jonathan Tobin
January 8, 2026

What does it look like when you normalize antisemitism rather than making it something that only exists on the margins of society? In the more than two years since the Hamas-led Palestinian attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, American Jews have seen hatred directed against them steadily portrayed as not just a reasonable argument but the work of idealists who oppose a mythical “genocide” perpetrated by “white” oppressors and their supporters. We are now at the point where the views of those who feel that one Jewish state on the planet is one too many—while encouraging terrorism and even contemplating the genocide of Israelis—are considered acceptable public discourse. And many non-Jews and even a sizable minority of Jews in New York City think anyone aware of this should just stop complaining about it. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from a new poll of New Yorkers that fully demonstrates that Jews are officially being marginalized while antisemites have moved into the mainstream. READ MORE

ALGEMEINER When Standards Disappear: What the Mamdani Reversals Reveal About Jewish Political Vulnerability When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office, he pledged to “protect our Jewish neighbors.” Within hours of taking power and very deliberately, he reversed two policies that many Jewish New Yorkers had reasonably understood as core safeguards: New York City’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, and restrictions barring city officials from participating in boycotts or divestment campaigns against Israel.

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“ADL will have to give up on its previous tactics of forming useless alliances and adopting counterproductive universalist causes that, at best, gain the Jews nothing”

Posted on January 7, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

NO DELUSIONS, NO DESPAIR
The ADL must transform
Benjamin Kerstein
January 7, 2025

…So, the question is: What will the ADL do now? A very large number of Jews are asking this question. Indeed, they ask me this question all the time, particularly since the publication of my book on Jewish self-defense. Beneath the question lies a seething anger: Where is the ADL? they ask. Why aren’t they protecting us? Why aren’t they fighting? Why aren’t they there for us? Where are they? These are all reasonable queries. After all, in the end, the ADL has one job, which is to protect American Jews from antisemitism. In this task, it has manifestly failed. The evidence is everywhere. The antisemitic Islamist-progressive Red-Green Alliance is rising to the heights of national politics. An open antisemite has been elected mayor of New York. “Protesters” still hold their antisemitic hate rallies on a regular basis, including outside synagogues. Jews continue to be harassed and assaulted. Several murders of both Jews and non-Jews have been committed by progressive and Muslim antisemites. READ MORE

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“Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation supports anti-Israel groups despite Zionism being the number-one protection against another Holocaust”

Posted on January 5, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FUTURE OF JEWISH
Using Holocaust Money to Demonize Israel
Daniel Greenfield
January 5, 2025

…Since 2020, the [Spielberg’s] Righteous Persons Foundation has provided $2.4 million to anti-Israel groups while spending only $125,000 on Holocaust projects. During a time of surging antisemitism, he has provided a fraction of the funds to groups fighting antisemitism than he has to the groups defending antisemites and denouncing Israel for defending itself against Jihadist genocide. Steven Spielberg is entitled to spend his money however he wants, but the audiences that helped make “Schindler’s List” a hit were under the impression that the profits would be used to help Holocaust survivors and, in Spielberg’s words, to “try to teach the facts of the past to prevent another Holocaust in the future.” Instead he’s funding groups enabling another Holocaust. READ MORE

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CAMERA warns against news reports which seek to erase or sanitize the phrase by erasing the violent history of the Palestinian intifadas in which hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians were brutally murdered.

Posted on January 4, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

CAMERA BLOG
PRESS ADVISORY: CAMERA Reminds Media That ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Is a Call for Violence Against Jews Everywhere
December 22, 2025

A week after the ISIS-inspired Bondi Beach massacre, in which terrorists murdered 15 civilians at a Chanukah celebration, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) calls on international news outlets to clearly and forthrightly report on the meaning of the “Globalize the Intifada” chant, which incites attacks against Jews across the globe.  The phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” a staple at worldwide anti-Israel demonstrations over the last two years, invokes the Palestinian intifadas in which hundreds of Israeli civilians were murdered in suicide bombings, shootings and stabbings. It is therefore a call for the targeting of Jewish communities globally. In recognition of the threat posed by this slogan, the government of the Australian state of New South Wales has moved in recent days to ban this language. Similarly, on Dec. 17, police in Manchester and London outlawed the phrase from demonstrations in those cities. READ MORE

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“Mamdani and Carlson Decry the “Zionist” Invasion of Venezuela”

Posted on January 4, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

SPECTATOR AUSTRALIA
The hypocrisy of the Maduro fanclub
Brendan O’Neill
January 6, 2026

…The hypocrisy of the Maduro fanclub has really been brought home by the response of Hamas itself. It has slammed America’s ‘abduction’ of Maduro, calling it a ‘grave violation of international law’. Where to begin? These Nazi-lite kidnappers of more than 200 Jews really think they can lecture others about the immorality of cross-border abduction? These are hitherto untapped levels of cant. At least the US will treat Maduro with dignity, rather than starving and torturing him in an underground den. Iran, too, has condemned the ‘illegal’ kidnapping of Maduro. Listen, if you send proxy armies of anti-Semites to kidnap Jews, and lock up young women for the crime of yearning for freedom, nobody wants to hear your thoughts on ‘criminal aggression’. China is calling on the US to free Maduro. How about you free the Uyghur people first from the iron fist of your ruthless ‘re-education’?  READ MORE

NEW ZIONIST TIMES Anti-Zionism’s Odd Couple Embraces Maduro That didn’t take long. Hours after the bombing of Caracas and Maduro’s capture, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez claimed the operation had a “Zionist tint”. Some might think that Operation Southern Spear is a resounding victory for freedom, a devastating takedown of a key cog in the global narco-terrorism network. New York City Mayor Mamdani, who by now must be recognized as the leader of the Left (and the Democratic Socialists of America), is already mobilizing protests against yet another example of Israeli imperialism.

FUTURE OF JEWISH The Desperate Politics of Blaming Zionists From Venezuela to New York City, leaders scapegoat Zionism whenever failure strikes and success becomes a crime. It’s no surprise that, in moments of crisis, embattled regimes reach for a mythic antagonist — one powerful enough to explain failure, humiliation, or loss of control. For Venezuela’s leadership, “Zionism” has become that antagonist: a cipher for competence, coordination, Western power and, most dangerously, success.

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Former mayor, Eric Adams, said Weaver was, quote, ‘out of her f—ing mind.’ That was in response to a resurfaced tweet when she said homeownership was a “tool of White supremacy”

Posted on January 3, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

NEW YORK POST
Zohran Mamdani’s new NYC tenant advocate called to ‘seize private property,’ blasted homeownership as ‘white supremacy’
Carl Campanile
January 4, 2026

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly appointed tenant advocate called to “seize private property” and blasted homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy” in a series of pro-Communist social media posts. Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new director of the city Office to Protect Tenants, made the statements and urged her followers to elect more Communists in several lecturing posts on her now-deleted X account that were unearthed by internet sleuths. “Seize private property!” she said on June 13, 2018.“…“Private property including any kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy,” she said then. Weaver also pushed to “Elect more communists” in December 2017 — when a Harlem street corner was being renamed in honor of former Manhattan Rep. Vito Marcantonio, who was a Communist. READ MORE

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