“There’s nowhere like Israel in the world,” Jehezkel told reporters. “I’m very happy to be here, and I couldn’t wait to arrive.”

Posted on January 16, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

ASSOCIATED PRESS
Soccer player returns to warm welcome in Israel following detention in Turkey
Suzan Fraser
January 15, 2024

Israeli soccer player Sagiv Jehezkel returned to Israel on Monday evening to a cheering crowd, hours after he was briefly detained in Turkey for allegedly inciting hatred after he expressed solidarity with hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza during a top-flight league game. Jehezkel landed in Israel in a small plane and was draped in an Israeli flag upon disembarking. Dozens of fans mobbed him as he left the airport, cheering, singing, and waving flags. “There’s nowhere like Israel in the world,” Jehezkel told reporters. “I’m very happy to be here, and I couldn’t wait to arrive.” The Antalyaspor player was released from custody following questioning by police and court officials, a Turkish official said. READ MORE

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

Iranian espionage operation included fake social media pages urging users to photograph homes of top officials and rallies for release of hostages, tried to gather intel via fake surveys

Posted on January 16, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Shin Bet unveils Iranian plot to trick Israelis into giving info on defense officials
Emanuel Fabian
January 15, 2024

…According to the Shin Bet, Iranian operatives, using fake online profiles, tasked Israelis with photographing the residences of Israeli defense officials and other officials who appear frequently in the media and speak out publicly against Iran. Using fictitious social media pages and websites, the Iranian operatives also initiated gatherings near the homes of the families of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas and had bouquets of flowers and messages sent to their homes, the Shin Bet said. The agency said that the Iranian operatives had taken advantage of the protests in support of the hostages by having Israelis hang signs relating to the issue that had been written by them, as well as asking them to photograph the demonstrators. READ MORE

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

Fetterman says he’ll continue standing with Israel even as a growing number of fellow Democrats call for a ceasefire in the war against Hamas

Posted on January 16, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
‘Sit this one out,’ Fetterman tells South Africa, of Israel genocide accusation
Andrew Bernard
January 11, 2024

South Africa, which brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a U.N. body in The Hague, should “sit this one out,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said on Wednesday at an Orthodox Union lunch on Capitol Hill. The Pennsylvania Democrat, who has developed a reputation as one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, said that Hamas’s terror attack on Israel on Oct. 7 cannot be compared to Israeli self-defense and critics of the Jewish state should not accuse the latter of asymmetrical response. READ MORE

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

‘Wildly inaccurate’ narrative of White colonizers finds willing audience among generations weaned on woke ideology

Posted on January 15, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
More ‘Anti-Zionist’ Insanity Your Kid Will Learn at NYU
David Mikics
January 8, 2024

…Like all racism, the left’s neo-racist essentialism relies on imaginary slots that can be manipulated at will—the power of the postcolonial theorist is that he or she decides who gets to be a person of color and who is condemned to whiteness, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Muslims, members of history’s most successful group of conquerors, are of course permanently oppressed; the victims of Muslim empires are of course oppressors. In Thakkar’s telling, the plasticity of the Jews means that they are uniquely suitable to move—or be moved—from victim to persecutor status in the blink of an eye. Even when they are murdered and kidnapped, it is somehow their fault…READ MORE

FOX NEWS Racist claims of ‘White Israel’ stoke hatred, endanger Jews and deny multiracial reality, say experts Enemies of Israel are pouring gas on the tinderbox of antisemitism with a fictitious narrative of White colonizers victimizing people of color in Palestine, experts told Fox News Digital. Pro-Hamas protesters this week took their racially charged grievances to the perimeter of the White House and into the Capitol rotunda. “The reality is that in Israel you will see Jews who look Black, brown, Asian, African and everything in between,” Dan Feferman, a former national security adviser to the Israel Defense Ministry…

Posted in Israel & Middle East | Leave a comment

The New York Times’ most effective anti-Israel scribe is not a raving, knuckle-dragging “river to the sea” enthusiast. Rather, it is Thomas Friedman.

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

MIDDLE EAST FORUM
Tom Friedman’s Soft Jihad Against Israel
A.J. Caschetta/Investigative Project on Terrorism
January 11, 2024

…The fact that in 2009 [Tom] Friedman believed that Israel should not only tolerate but negotiate peace with Hamas shows that he failed to understand Hamas in 2009. Ten years later, he still didn’t understand Hamas, as his March 25, 2019 column boldly announced that, “Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel.” Interestingly enough, he regularly claims that a Netanyahu government is an existential threat to Israel…The October 7 Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians opened the eyes of many a Palestinian sympathizer, awakening them to the horrors of their team. But not Thomas Friedman. READ MORE

Posted in Israel & Middle East | 1 Comment

None of these “celebrity” virtue-signalers evidenced any concern about the Hamas massacre and kidnapping of Israelis on October 7. Their hypocrisy and antisemitism are now on full display

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Wallace Shawn, Cynthia Nixon lead actors backing genocide charges against Israel
January 13, 2024

Several leading actors, musicians and writers, including Cynthia Nixon, Susan Sarandon and Wallace Shawn, have expressed their support for South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. The 29 celebrities gave their backing in a series of videos that was started Friday by the Palestine Festival of Literature in which they read out sections of the charges in a show of support for the case. The first video, which was published on Friday, included participants from nine countries with various positions in the entertainment industry. READ MORE

This video courtesy of Palestine Festival of Literature

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

“Slandering Israel and Jews is a time-honored method of diverting attention from the depredations of others”

Posted on January 13, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FUTURE OF JEWISH
21 Things Israel Should Really Tell the World Court
Joshua Hoffman
January 13, 2024

Israel, is it true that your decision to respond to the terror attacks on October 7th has included actions of genocidal intent against the Palestinians in Gaza?

Israel: To borrow a now-infamous line from our friends who run some of America’s most prestigious universities, it is a context-dependent decision.

What does that mean?

Israel: The International Court of Justice has never judged a country responsible for genocide. Not Cambodia. Not Rwanda. Not Syria. Not China. Not Sudan. It has never censured the desire for genocide either. This is only expressed against Israel. READ MORE

NEW YORK TIMES Bret Stephens: The Genocide Charge Against Israel Is a Moral Obscenity In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity. But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.

JEWISH POLICY CENTER Shoshana Bryen: The Real Genocides the World Ignores According to legal scholars Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany, the definition of genocide is “well settled” and “commonly agreed.” There is a consensus that “genocide involves killing members of a national or ethnic group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction in whole or in part.” Despite the baseless accusations against Israel at the International Court of Justice, this is not happening in Gaza. Nonetheless, the ICJ blood libel is an object lesson in how the international anti-Israel mob works.

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

“Liberal Jews ignored DEI promoters, and CRT advocates, as they advanced a radical agenda to fundamentally undermine American values”

Posted on January 12, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
As Liberal Jews feel abandoned by the Left
Adam Milstein
January 10, 2024

…Liberal Jews failed to recognize how CRT and DEI initiatives, and intersectional theory would be weaponized against them. And today, we see how Jewish students are maliciously portrayed as wanton oppressors and colonialist abettors. American universities who fully adopted these doctrines are now hotbeds of antisemitism due to embedded leftist orthodoxy. So, where do liberal Jews go from here? The “October 8th Jew” as Bret Stephens coined it, recognizes their home as a centrist. The October 8th Jew knows that the extreme left, like the extreme right before it, is no political home. The October 8th Jew is united in the mission to fight enemies of America, who always come first for the Jews. “Never again” must be backed by action and Jewish unity. READ MORE

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

Israel, on Thursday, will for the first time in its history find itself in the dock in the International Court of Justice in The Hague — charged with genocide.

Posted on January 11, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
South Africa acting as Hamas’s legal arm, Israel says after ICJ hearing
January 11, 2024

The Israel Foreign Ministry accused South Africa on Thursday of acting as the “legal arm of the Hamas terrorist organization,” as two days of preliminary hearings kicked off at the U.N.’s top court in The Hague. “Today, we were witness to one of the greatest shows of hypocrisy in history, compounded by a series of false and baseless claims,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lior Haiat said in a statement shared on X…The Israeli rebuke came after lawyers for South Africa demanded that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order an immediate end to the Israel Defense Forces’ operation against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. “Israel has transgressed article two of the [Genocide] Convention, committing acts that fall within the definition of genocide…READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL ‘We should be worried’: Israel faces peril at The Hague in Gaza ‘genocide’ case  Although the idea that Israel is committing genocide in the war in Gaza, meaning intentionally murdering Palestinian civilians, might seem outlandish to some, the allegations are extremely serious and even an interim ruling against Israel could have a severe impact on its international status and global reputation, with potentially dire diplomatic and political consequences. A ruling against Israel could even affect the ongoing conduct of the war against the Hamas terror group’s regime in Gaza. 

REALITY CHECK Here’s where it gets cleverly sinister: South Africa isn’t even trying to win – just bringing the case allows them to request an order for an emergency ceasefire. A ceasefire that would come into place while Israeli hostages are still in captivity and undergoing torture, while Hamas is still in power and saying they plan to carry out more massacres.

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

PA calls for unity with Hamas: “Our arms and hearts are open” to Hamas

Posted on January 11, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

PALESTINIAN MEDIA WATCH
PA goal: Unity with Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror organizations
Nan Jacques Zilberdik
January 7, 2024

While many question what will happen and who will rule the Gaza Strip after Israel has destroyed Hamas’ terror infrastructure, the PA’s Fatah leaders are confident that the PA /Fatah will unite with Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror organizations and together will rule Gaza. Some PA and Fatah leaders have been adamant about joining forces with the terror organizations. Jibril Rajoub, a top PA official and Fatah Central Committee Secretary, speaking in the name of Mahmoud Abbas, the PA leadership, and the PLO Executive Committee, has repeatedly stressed the PA’s goal of uniting with Hamas and Islamic Jihad – which he whitewashes as “political Islam” – against Israel…READ MORE

GATESTONE Amir Taheri: Gaza War: It isn’t Over Until it is Over The usual suspects in the Middle East peacemaking industry are already beginning to recycle their old and discredited ideas. President Joe Biden, sounding like a dummy for the ventriloquist Barack Obama, is talking of “a two-state solution: one for the Israelis and one for the Palestinians.”

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments