The bad guy was killed. The good guys were saved. But the reaction to the hostage-taking in Colleyville, Texas, should alarm American Jews.

Posted on January 14, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

COMMON SENSE
Being Jewish in an Unraveling America
by Bari Weiss
January 17, 2022

Last week, I met a rabbi in Los Angeles. We talked about surfing where to get the best pizza in the city and her kids and politics. At the end of the evening, she was making plans with a colleague, and they extended an invitation. Would I want to go to the shooting range with them next weekend? I thought about the rabbi with her guns a lot over this Shabbat, as Jews who had gathered for services at Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, were taken hostage by a man named Malik Faisal Akram. After nearly 11 hours, thanks to earthly miracles of law enforcement and perhaps heavenly ones as well, they were freed unharmed. Akram, who had predicted his own death in his rantings captured on Facebook livestream, was dead. READ MORE

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“While the PA says that it is strongly opposed to the idea of Israel being a Jewish state, it has no problem defining itself as “Arab” and “Islamic”

Posted on January 14, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
Arab Racism and the ‘Jewish State’
by Khaled Abu Toameh
January 13, 2022

Palestinians and other Arabs are furious because Mansour Abbas — an Arab member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and head of the United List Party — announced that he recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. Abbas is being denounced as a “traitor” and “Zionist” by many Palestinians and Arabs who define their countries and political systems as “Arab” or “Islamic.” They claim that the idea of a Jewish state is “racist” but seem not to feel the same way about openly Islamic states: The Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. If the Palestinians, as well as Arab and Islamic countries, are labelling Israel as racist because it wants to define itself as a Jewish state, then they too are racists because they insist on defining themselves as “Arabs” and “Muslims.” READ MORE

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Watch Daniel Rosenberg, a British Jewish podcast host, excoriate his friends and countrymen for being “content” with antisemitism under the guise of pity for Palestinians

Posted on January 14, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

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#LosAngeles: Four months after new cultural center’s splashy opening, big donors and showbiz veterans wonder why many of Hollywood’s “founding fathers” are absent from its exhibits

Posted on January 14, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

ROLLING STONE
‘Where Are the Jews?’: Scandal Erupts at the Academy Museum
by Tatiana Siegel
January 13, 2022

…Though eyebrows were raised by the fact that the A-list revelers mingled maskless inside the 33,000-square-foot space on Wilshire Boulevard at a time when celebrities were publicly chastising those who ignored Covid precautions, a much bigger controversy was brewing. Donors and influential Academy members, many of whom already had received private tours, were outraged that Hollywood’s origin story — wherein a group of mostly Jewish émigrés fled persecution in their home countries to create what would become a multibillion-dollar, American-led industry — was conspicuously absent. READ MORE

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Biden: If you oppose my plan to nationalize elections—seizing control from the states—you’re a knuckle-dragging, “Bull Connor” racist

Posted on January 14, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

SPECTATOR WORLD
The little president who cried racism
by Charles Lipson
January 15, 2022

President Biden’s wisdom and penetrating intelligence sometimes escape him. So far, they have stayed away for fifty years and show no signs of returning. They are often accompanied by wild exaggerations, invented personal stories and hyperbolic attacks on opponents. Examples are not hard to find, and the public is catching on. The latest fulmination came during a campaign-style rally in Atlanta on Tuesday, aimed at supporting his bill to nationalize election laws. Since that bill contravenes America’s long, constitutionally enshrined tradition that state legislatures control voting rules (as long as they don’t violate individual civil rights), the bill will fail in the Senate, blocked by the filibuster. READ MORE

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“The fact that the White House messaging is focused on assigning blame is a harbinger of bad news from the talks in Vienna”

Posted on January 7, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
White House’s Trump blame game is a bad sign for Iran talks
by Lahav Harkov
January 13, 2022

When asked how the indirect negotiations between the US and Iran to restore the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal were going, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki avoided answering the actual question, and instead launched into a revisionist history lesson blaming former president Donald Trump for Iran’s aggression. There are many good-faith criticisms of Trump’s decision to be made, but many of the things Psaki said were simply false. Plus, the fact that the White House messaging is focused on assigning blame is a harbinger of bad news from the talks in Vienna. READ MORE

JERUSALEM POST Is Biden team right that Trump caused Iran proxy wars? The Iran nuclear deal of 2015 never actually slowed the Islamic Republic’s terror activities in the Middle East, but actually expanded them.

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#UN’s “Final Solution for Israel”: UN approves $4.2 million budget to establish a “Grand Inquisition” that will target and vilify Israel

Posted on January 7, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

WASHINGTON TIMES
The U.N.’s final solution to the Israel question: Its campaign of demonization and delegitimization escalates
by Clifford D. May
January 12, 2022

…For decades, the U.N. has been at the forefront of a campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel. That campaign is now set to sharply escalate. Last week, the U.N. approved a $4.2 million budget to establish a so-called Commission of Inquiry (COI) – essentially a Grand Inquisition that will target and vilify Israel. Under the auspices of Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a body dominated by such notorious human rights violators as China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Qatar, and Venezuela, an 18-member staff will be led by Navi Pillay, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, with “an appalling record on Israel,” in the considered judgment of Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch. The COI will be “dedicated to manufacturing charges and mounting a global chase to arrest and incarcerate Israeli Jews,” Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, wrote in a paper for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. READ MORE

From StandWithUs: Stop The UN’s Newest Effort To Harm Israel And The Jewish People Join people all over the world who are standing up for Israel, the Jewish people, human rights, and peace. Sign this Petition Against the UNHRC’s One-Sided “Commission of Inquiry” Targeting Israel. Click here to sign and learn more.

I join people across the globe who oppose the UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) open-ended “Commission of Inquiry” targeting Israel, the world’s only Jewish state and the Middle East’s only proven democracy. I reject the legitimacy of this “inquiry,” which is led by officials with long records of anti-Israel bias and a corrupt “human rights council” dominated by undemocratic regimes that violate human rights. I am outraged that the UNHRC is using dramatically more resources for this transparent effort to harm Israel, than to investigate horrific atrocities in Syria and other places around the world.

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“Addressing the IDF Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi, Eli said: “There was negligence here”

Posted on January 7, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
‘I Thought I Was in a Bad Dream’: Two IDF Officers Killed by Friendly Fire Laid to Rest
by Sharon Wrobel
January 13, 2022

The two Israeli officers killed on Wednesday night in a tragic friendly fire accident at a base in the Jordan Valley were laid to rest on Thursday. Maj. Itamar Elharar, 26, and Maj. Ofek Aharon, 28, both commanders in the IDF’s special forces Egoz unit, were killed by IDF fire due to a “mistaken identification,” the army said. Aharon’s father, Eli, wept at the side of his son’s grave and cried out: “You got Ofek healthy and sound and I got him in a coffin.” “You were humble, brave, and competitive — you were a warrior,” Eli Aharon was quoted as saying by Israeli news outlet Walla, wearing his son’s military coat and towel wrapped around his neck. READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA ‘Ofek, come back!’ A father’s tears at military funeral A thousand people attend funeral of Ofek Aharon, one of the 2 soldiers who were killed in a friendly-fire incident last night.

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Iran Deal Redux: “Israel’s response to the collapse of America’s diplomatic position has been to paper over the oceanic rift between the U.S. position and that of Israel”

Posted on January 7, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Our enemies keep their focus
by Caroline Glick
January 9, 2022

…To go by the reports of the negotiations, a deal means nothing less than complete U.S. capitulation to Iran’s demands. Last week, Britain’s Spectator published a report titled “Inside Joe Biden’s Disastrous Negotiations with Iran.” It described how the Western position has collapsed due to the radical pro-Iranian posture of the U.S. team led by Robert Malley. British and other negotiators characterized Malley as “the most dovish official we’ve ever seen.” One official said that Malley bent over backwards so far that “he now speaks to Tehran between his legs.” READ MORE

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A recently published book offers a new take on a pivotal battle and an intentional mistruth that changed the course of history forever

Posted on January 7, 2022 by ArchitectGuy

DANIEL GORDIS BLOG
“The Massacre That Never Was”
January 10, 2022

…A new book by Eliezer Tauber, a former dean at Bar Ilan University and an expert on the formation of Arab nationalism, has taken on the Deir Yassin story with painstaking attention to detail unmatched by any other study. Tauber’s conclusion is obvious from the title of the book. There was no massacre, he argues, but a hard-fought battle in which Palestinian combatants stationed themselves in residences and among family. Using both Arab and Jewish testimony from combatants on both sides and survivors of the “massacre” (testimony which often offered almost identical accounts), he was able to account for the circumstances of almost every Palestinian death in the village…READ MORE

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