Israel’s original retaliatory plan against Iran included a much wider counterstrike on military targets, including near Tehran, The New York Times reported on Monday, citing three Israeli officials. “Such a broad and damaging attack would have been far harder for Iran to overlook, increasing the chances of a forceful Iranian counterattack,” the paper said. As has been widely reported, Israel shelved plans for an immediate response to Iran’s unprecedented direct attack on April 13-14 when it became clear that Israel had thwarted most of the Iranian missiles and drones with the help of a US-led coalition, and after a phone call that night between US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. READ MORE
For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa. Or imagine that a gay student was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security. There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians. Just remember the righteous—and rightful—outrage over the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” READ MORE
GATESTONE Many Culprits Behind Rise of Antisemitism, Including the MediaThere is the influence of DEI which has too often placed Jews at the top of a racial hierarchy, ignoring the fact that Jews have always been, and remain, dramatically more discriminated against than any other group, including those groups at the supposed bottom of the DEI hierarchy of intersectionality: Indigenous, Blacks, Muslims and the LGBTQIA+.
CANARY MISSION Columbia University’s Antisemitic EcosystemColumbia University has created an “ecosystem” of antisemitism for many years. A key component contributing to this toxic atmosphere are the professors hired by the university. Post-Oct. 7 and in violation of university policy, dozens of faculty members have led the charge against Israel, calling for the destruction of the only Jewish state in the world and slandering Israel’s actions against the genocidal terror group Hamas. Sixty-eight professors at Columbia are currently profiled on Canary Mission for their antisemitism.
Antisemitic incidents in Illinois, which included harassment, vandalism and assault, nearly doubled last year amid tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League. According to the new data released Tuesday, the ADL — a national nonprofit that tracks antisemitism and white supremacy across the country — said 8,873 antisemitic incidents were reported in the United States in 2023. The number marks a 140 percent increase from the 3,698 incidents recorded in 2022 and is the highest number on record since the ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979. READ MORE
…A century ago, the Jews of Germany were the most assimilated in Europe. They had prospered under the Kaiser, and seemed set to do even better in the Weimar Republic. They were industrialists, intellectuals, scientists, artists… A quarter of the thousand richest men in Prussia were Jews. As we heard on a pertinent Tale for Our Time, if you were an ambitious Jew born in the Bukovina or points east, you dreamed of Berlin and Vienna. And then…What Germany was to the Jews of a century ago, America is today. New York is the world’s most Jewish city, and Brooklyn is famously the most Jewish place on earth, with more Jews than either Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. As in Germany, Jews are the businessmen, brain surgeons, physicists, film producers. I take it as read that the day is fast-approaching when London, Paris, Toronto, Copenhagen will be Jew-free. But New York? READ MORE
On Tuesday, the State Department published its 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. What should have been a non-political document completed the betrayal of Israel that the Biden administration began on March 25, when it refrained from having the U.S. veto a UN resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, the impact of which would enable the leadership of Hamas to survive and launch more attacks on Jews and Jewish babies…Not only does the report include Israel among the most barbaric human rights abusers – China, Putin’s Russia, the Taliban, and Iran, the would-be exterminators of the Jewish state — but “Israel was mentioned before the Biden administration’s State Department addressed ‘ongoing and brutal human rights abuses in Iran’ or ‘the Taliban’s systemic mistreatment of and discrimination against Afghanistan’s women and girls.’” READ MORE
An Israeli missile strike targeted a site in Iran early Friday morning, according to ABC News. The report came shortly after local sources reported explosions in Isfahan in central Iran, in the As-Suwayda Governorate of southern Syria, and in the Baghdad area and Babil Governorate of Iraq early Friday morning. Videos from Isfahan appeared to show Iranian air defenses activated in the skies over the area. The Iranian semi-official Fars News Agency reported that an explosion was heard in Qahjavarestan, east of Isfahan and near the Isfahan International Airport. Fars stressed that the cause of the explosion was unknown as of yet. READ MORE
THE JC US poised to back Rafah operation in exchange for Israel dropping major Iran strikeThe United States has agreed to back an Israeli operation in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah in exchange for Israel forgoing a major strike on Iran, unnamed Egyptian officials have told the Qatari Al-Araby Al-Jadeed news outlet. The development comes after Israel’s Kan public broadcaster reported on Wednesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had backtracked on a pre-approved military response to Iran’s massive drone and missile attack due to pressure by Joe Biden. The US president reportedly told Netanyahu during a phone call on Saturday that Washington would not participate in nor support an Israeli retaliatory attack.
The United States House of Representatives passed a resolution on Tuesday condemning the popular pro-Palestinian chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic. The motion passed by a vote of 377 to 44, and was the result of a bipartisan effort led by Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Jared Moskowitz of Florida, along with Republican Rep. Anthony D’Esposito from New York. The motion was opposed by 34 Democrats and one Republican. The resolution posits that the pro-Palestinian chant often heard at protests calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group is an “antisemitic call to arms with the goal of the eradication of the State of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.”READ MORE
JPOST US stops UN from recognizing a Palestinian state through membership The United States on Thursday effectively stopped the United Nations from recognizing a Palestinian stateby casting a veto in the Security Council to deny the Palestinian Authority full membership of the world body. The United States says an independent Palestinian state should be established through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and not through UN action. It vetoed a draft resolution that recommended to the 193-member UN General Assembly that “the State of Palestine be admitted to membership of the United Nations.” Britain and Switzerland abstained, while the remaining 12 council members voted yes.READ MORE
Oscar acceptance speeches are to culture what tax audits are to a small business: nasty, brutish, and somehow never short enough. And yet, when Jonathan Glazer took the stage at the 96th Academy Awards earlier this year to accept the statuette for Best International Film, he delivered the rare oration that was greater even than the movie he’d written and directed. In a few short and glorious sentences that have since launched a thousand think pieces, Jonathan Glazer told the truth. Let us—because it’s been a moment since this lion of cinema rose up and roared at Hollywood—recall Glazer’s fiery words. READ MORE
JNS Columbia University leaders grilled in House antisemitism hearing Columbia University’s president, its two board co-chairs and a co-chair of its antisemitism taskforce testified before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Wednesday about Jew-hatred on campus since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. Student groups and professors celebrated Hamas’s attack and have since held antisemitic and anti-Israel demonstrations at Columbia, which the U.S. Department of Education is investigating for potential civil-rights violations and which is the subject of a lawsuit alleging “virulently hostile” Jew-hatred. READ MORE
POLITICO ‘The Antisemitism Is Absolutely Disproportionate’The fractious, sometimes violent debate over the Israel-Hamas war on college campuses has not cooled, even as the conflict enters its sixth month. College administrators have struggled to figure out the right balance between some students’ rights to free speech and others’ rights to be protected from discrimination and harassment. That debate erupted at UC Berkeley this week when a dinner for graduating students held at the home of law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky devolved into a heated confrontation when a Muslim student disrupted the event to make a pro-Palestinian speech and was physically confronted by Chemerinsky’s wife, Catherine Fisk. A fierce fight about freedom of speech — and accusations of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bias — quickly followed. READ MORE
Following the Hamas-led massacre at the Nova Music Festival on October 7, about fifty survivors have committed suicide, revealed Guy Ben Shimon. Ben Shimon, a survivor of the massacre, spoke on Tuesday at a Parliamentary hearing for a State Audit Commission on the treatment of the survivors of October 7. “Few people know, but there have been almost 50 suicides among the Nova survivors. This number, which was true two months ago, may have increased since,” Ben Shimon said, emphasizing that many of his friends who escaped the massacre could not recover from what they had experienced.READ MORE
Saudi Arabia acknowledged that it had helped the newly forged regional military coalition — Israel, the United States, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and France — repel an Iranian attack against the Jewish state early Sunday morning, according to a story on KAN News. The story spoke of the Saudi involvement in the military defensive operation in which 99% of the Iranian drones and missiles were destroyed before hitting their targets. Many of the drones and missiles had to travel over Jordanian and Saudi airspace to reach Israel…That source also charged that Iran had instigated the Gaza war, through its proxy group Hamas, to thwart US efforts for a Saudi normalization deal. READ MORE
ArchitectGuy on Israel 