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
What country other than Israel would be told by the so-called civilised world that it must not respond to an onslaught of more than 300 cruise and ballistic missiles and armed drones fired at the entire country? If a minute fraction of such an attack were to be mounted against America or Britain, they would declare themselves at war and destroy the enemy before it could attack them again. It’s only Israel that is not to be allowed to defend itself in the same way. After Sunday night’s attack, in which Iran stopped hiding behind its proxies and revealed itself openly for the first time as the actual enemy of Israel and the free world, Israel reportedly intended to attack Iran but was stopped by US President Joe Biden in a phone call with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. READ MORE
The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical report, the ministry notes that it considers an individual record to be incomplete if it is missing any of the following key data points: identity number, full name, date of birth, or date of death. The health ministry also released a report on April 3 that acknowledged the presence of incomplete data but did not define what it meant by “incomplete.” In that earlier report, the ministry acknowledged the incompleteness of 12,263 records…“The sudden shifts in the ministry’s reporting methods suggest it is scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work. READ MORE
CAMERA BLOG CNN article errs and misleads on Gaza humanitarian aidA CNN graphic, and the preceding text, suggests that the daily average number of trucks bringing food into Gaza now is less than half of what it was before October 7. In fact, the truth is precisely the opposite. Substantially more trucks are bringing food into Gaza today than were a year ago.
ArchitectGuy on Israel 