Because Senator Schumer knows what’s best for Israel, not her voters, suggesting Netanyahu should be voted out of office

Posted on March 14, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

AXIOS
Schumer’s anti-Netanyahu speech stuns Israel
Barak Ravid
March 14, 2024

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) speech calling for a new government in Israel landed like an earthquake Thursday, delivering a huge shock to the already tense U.S.-Israel relationship. In addition to being the most senior Jewish elected official in the country, Schumer has had one of the longest and closest relationships with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of any U.S. politician. Schumer’s speech stunned officials and observers in both Washington and Jerusalem because he has been — and still is — the Democratic Party’s most avid supporter of Israel in decades. His harsh remarks about Netanyahu create more political space for other Democratic members of Congress to publicly voice their criticism of the Israeli government amid the ongoing war in Gaza. READ MORE

JNS Netanyahu, Israeli right, Hamas, Abbas ‘the four obstacles to peace,’ Schumer says Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) identified Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “radical right-wing Israelis,” alongside Hamas and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, as “the four obstacles to peace” between Israelis and Palestinians. In a Thursday speech on the Senate floor that Schumer described as a “major address” on a possible two-state solution, the senator labeled Israeli cabinet members “bigots” and “extremists” and called for new elections in Israel…He implied that Washington should condition or cut off aid to Israel unless a new government is formed.

POLITICO Schumer calls for new government, ‘course corrections’ by Israel The Senate majority leader delivered his remarks in a floor speech designed to carry extra weight as the highest-ranking Jewish official in U.S. government. Schumer said if the Netanyahu government remains in power the U.S. would need to play “a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course” and that President Joe Biden’s administration should ensure U.S. assistance to Israel is “aligned with our broader goal of achieving long-term peace and stability in the region.”

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Mr Biden imagines Palestinians are eager for peace and Israel’s government is at odds with its people

Posted on March 14, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

WALL STREET JOURNAL
Biden’s Middle East Is a Fantasy World
Amit Segal
May 13, 2024

When Joe Biden and officials in his administration talk about the Israelis and the Palestinians, they describe two peoples that don’t exist in reality. According to the White House, the Palestinians aspire to peace, reject Hamas and are ready to make painful concessions. A week after Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Biden said in an interview on “60 Minutes”: “Hamas and the extreme elements of Hamas don’t represent all the Palestinian people.” National security adviser Jake Sullivan said: “The many, many Palestinians who have had nothing to do with the brutal terrorist organization Hamas—the vast majority of the population of Gaza—they deserve dignity. They deserve safety and security.” In reality, according to a November survey by Arab World for Research and Development, affiliated with Ramallah-based Birzeit University, 59% of Palestinians “extremely support” the Oct. 7 massacre, and another 16% “somewhat support” it. READ MORE

NATIONAL REVIEW Editorial Board: Biden Is Failing the Israel Test At the same time Biden is sending out these signals on aid to Israel, he has taken the risky move of ordering the U.S. military to build a pier off the coast of Gaza for delivering humanitarian aid, thus putting hundreds of American troops within a few miles of an Iranian proxy group. When asked about the risk of Hamas firing on American troops, Air Force Major General Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said, “I mean, that’s certainly a risk, again, but if Hamas truly does care about the Palestinian people, then again, one would hope that this international mission to deliver aid to people who need it would be able to happen unhindered.” Forgive us for not being too comforted by the idea that the Biden administration is risking the lives of American service members on the hope that Hamas cares about the well-being of civilians.

WASHINGTON TIMES Clifford May: State of the world more threatening than Biden understands He acknowledged that “Israel has a right to go after Hamas.” But going after Hamas is not the same as defeating Hamas. To leave Hamas with military and governing capabilities would mean capitulating to Hamas, as Mr. Biden capitulated to the Taliban. Americans were able to withdraw from Afghanistan. Israelis have nowhere to go. For them, this is an existential war. Some of those calling for Israel to cease firing don’t understand that. Others understand it only too wel… [Biden] suggested that Israel is not doing all it can to spare non-combatants when, in fact, Israel is doing more than any nation at war has ever done. 

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged | Leave a comment

What if Michael Rapaport hosted the Oscars

Posted on March 12, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FREE BEACON
I Refute His Oscar
John Podhoretz
March 11, 2024

…We just needed to wait until March 10, 2024, when uneducated but talented morons like Billie Eilish, who can’t decide whether she’s gay or straight or a vegan or a meat eater and sings like she’s attached to an oxygen tank, went to the Oscars bearing buttons expressing their support for a “ceasefire” in an area Billie couldn’t find on a map, if she’s ever seen a map. The design of said button, by the way, deliberately evokes a Palestinian terrorist who held up his blood-drenched hands after massacring two IDF reservists in Ramallah nearly 25 years ago…Not to mention you can refute your Jewishness all you like, [Jonathan] Glazer, but if a terrorist arrived at a Golders Green synagogue where your nephew was becoming bar mitzvah and decided to bomb the place, you’d be as dead as you would have been had you not “refuted” it.  READ MORE

NEW YORK POST You’ll be shocked at the true meaning of the pin worn by Billie Eilish and Mark Ruffalo The Hollywood left loves a good, old-fashioned Jew-lynching: Just ask Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish and Ava DuVernay.

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Memo to America: “A free society—including our own—is only as strong as the citizens willing to defend it”

Posted on March 12, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
The Holiday from History Is Over
Bari Weiss
March 12, 2024

…Many have never heard the name Cincinnatus in Israel, where the Romans are remembered more as the empire that destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, slaughtered and sold its inhabitants, and renamed the land Syria Palestina. But the Jewish people—who long outlived that empire and reconstituted the Jewish national home in the land the Romans had once conquered—are also democratic heirs to Cincinnatus.  On the morning of October 7, ordinary Israelis left their offices, closed their laptops, and abandoned their fields to pick up weapons, in many cases without waiting for instructions from the state or its army.  On that black morning, and in the weeks and months since, these men and women have displayed the kind of heroism most thought belonged to the mythic past, or the generation of 1948, when the armies of five invading Arab nations turned every kibbutz and moshav, and every town and village, into a battlefield. READ MORE

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Leave a comment

Without real action against Iran and its proxies, few if any in the region would feel safe signing on to the well-meant but ultimately delusional designs presented by Secretary of State Blinken in Munich

Posted on March 12, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM INSTITUTE FOR
STRATEGY + SECURITY
Hitching the cart before the horse: A grand regional bargain cannot be advanced unless Iran is dealt with first
Colonel (res) Dr Eran Lerman
February 26, 2024

…To the untrained eye, this may seem like a proposition that Israel should heartily endorse, resolving some of its most fundamental problems and offering a future of successful integration in the region. Yet even when setting aside the ideological objections to a Palestinian state, and skipping over the leaps of faith and what could be called “magical thinking” about a transformed PA and a Saudi willingness to shake hands openly with Israel’s leadership, there is still a basic flaw in this design which raises serious questions as to its validity…Unless a much more robust effort is made to clip Tehran’s wings and cut off its talons, there will be a totalitarian temptation for the Palestinians to latch on to Iran (as they did with Nazi Germany and then with the Soviet Union) rather than accept an American proposition requiring them to accept the legitimacy of Israel and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. READ MORE

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | 1 Comment

The day after: “The clan is the paradigm that we should emulate in each and every city in Judea and Samaria and the five districts of the Gaza Strip”

Posted on March 10, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

ARUTZ SHEVA
Dr Mordechai Kedar:’Only solution for Palestinians is clan government’
Yoni Kempinski
February 19, 2024

…According to Kedar’s plan, the Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria would be divided into seven emirates: the Arab city of Hebron, Jericho, Ramallah, Shechem (Nablus), Turkarem, Qalqilya, and Jenin. He says the Gaza Strip should divided into five administrative divisions. He explains: “The government in each and every one of these Emirates should be delegated to the local Clans just like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which are governed by clans. The clan government is the only paradigm that works in the Middle East, because the states which are conglomerates of clans, ethnic groups, religions, and sectarian groups, are failing states like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya. All of these are failing states because Europeans tried to establish states on ideas such as socialism, modernism, liberalism, and so on. The functioning countries, Kuwait, Qatar, and so forth are clannish countries, they are based on one clan, and this is why they are stable homogeneous, and therefore successful. READ MORE

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Theatre director at Deerfield High School on leave for pro-Palestine posts

Posted on March 10, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

PATCH
Antisemitism Allegations As Drama Teacher Disciplined For Social Media
Jonah Meadows
March 8, 2024

A social media post about the Israeli military shared by a beloved high school theatre director ignited a firestorm of controversy that resulted in disciplinary action, the teacher’s extended leave and the resignation of the Township High School District 113 board president…District 113 officials said they first received a complaint about a post on Kenyon’s personal Instagram account on Dec. 12 that featured a quote from Ibram Kendi…[post including] “What the Israeli military is doing in Gaza is not only a crime against humanity. It is a crime against history”…READ MORE

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , | Leave a comment

“Ostensibly, Larry Summers was ousted because of a remark he made about women, but the real reason many on campus believed was his strong defense of Israel”

Posted on March 9, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

CLARITY WITH MICHAEL OREN
Trials of the Ivy League
Michael Oren
March 5, 2024

The current wave of antisemitism sweeping many American campuses, most glaringly those of the Ivy League, is now national news. It is blatant, malicious, and woefully unchecked, even after the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and Penn. But it is hardly new. Neither is the cancel culture and the regime of microaggressions and intersectionality that has transformed some of the West’s finest universities into bastions of groupthink, Jew-hatred, and fear…Nearly twenty years ago—forty years after the 1960s—art at Harvard could only be viewed through a Communist lens and the mere suggestion that women and men might, in certain fields, display different levels of aptitude, could cost its president his job.  But the youth rebellion’s success was not merely confined to political correctness and the humanities. It had an immense impact on attitudes toward Israel. READ MORE

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Those We Have Lost

Posted on March 8, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Those We Have Lost
Stories of civilians and soldiers killed since Hamas’s onslaught on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Posted in Israel & Middle East, Jewish | Leave a comment

Hamas has said it can’t provide a list of the hostages who are still alive without a ceasefire

Posted on March 7, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Hamas leaves Cairo without deal, talks to resume next week
Tovah Lazaroff
March 7, 2024

Hostage talks are expected to resume in Cairo next week, as Israel and Hamas remain deadlocked on the terms of a deal for a six-week pause to the Gaza war in exchange for the release of some 40 captives. Hope for an agreement by the start of the holy month of Ramadan on Sunday night appeared slim on Thursday. Negotiators still hoped, however, to finalize terms for a deal before the emotions of that sensitive period led to an explosion that could complicate the execution of a deal…Hamas officials have said a permanent ceasefire must be in place before the hostages are freed, Israeli forces must leave Gaza and all Gazans must be able to return to homes they have fled…Israel has wanted to see a list of who would be included in the first deal out of the remaining 134 captives in Gaza. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL US to build pier off Gaza coast that will enable maritime aid shipments US President Joe Biden will announce in his Thursday State of the Union address that the US military will embark on an “emergency mission” to establish a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza, which will allow for the direct delivery of humanitarian assistance from the Mediterranean Sea, senior administration officials told reporters in a briefing. “We’re not waiting on the Israelis. This is a moment for American leadership, and we are building a coalition of countries to address this urgent need,” a senior official said, in the latest demonstration of the lack of US faith in Israel’s ability to prevent a humanitarian crisis while prosecuting the war against Hamas in Gaza.

Posted in Israel & Middle East | Leave a comment