“In regards to Iran, ignoring Republican opposition, Lapid said the US return to the 2015 nuclear agreement is a done deal”

Posted on June 17, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
New government, new threats
by Caroline Glick
June 18, 2021

…Although Naftali Bennett is prime minister, the real power in the government is Foreign Minister and Prime Minister-designate Yair Lapid. Lapid controls 75% of the coalition to Bennett’s 20%. The last five percent of the 61-seat coalition is controlled by Mansour Abbas, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Islamist Ra’am Party. In the ceremony at the Foreign Ministry marking Lapid’s entry into office, Israel’s effective leader laid out his priorities. His top three goals are to rebuild Israel’s ties with the Democrat Party; with the progressive US Jewish establishment; and with the European Union. READ MORE

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White progressives can never be woke enough: “It won’t much matter what Tom Hanks, movie star, does, because nothing will ever be enough”

Posted on June 17, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

FRONT PAGE MAG
Tom Hanks: Great Actor, White Supremacist
by Marc Tapson
June 17, 2021

…What he and other apologetic white Hollywood progressives are going to find out the hard way is that cultural Marxists like [Eric] Deggans view systemic racism in every American institution as a given; they see whiteness as an irredeemable condition; and they believe that the “hard work,” as they call it, of anti-racism is never-ending. No amount of self-abasement and cultural reparations by today’s white elites will ever heal our current racial divide (but of course, for the Marxist left, that’s the point: not to close the divide, but to perpetuate it and aggravate it). And the more that self-flagellating whites buy into this worldview and strive to cleanse themselves of guilt for racial sins they never committed, like slavery or Jim Crow laws, the deeper the chasm between black and white will grow. READ MORE

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“Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett thanks President Joe Biden for his recent support for Israel during the Gaza war”

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Biden congratulates Bennett, agrees to work closely on regional security, Iran
by Staff
June 13, 2021

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden on Sunday just hours after the Israeli leader was sworn into office. Biden offered his “warm congratulations” to Bennett and “highlighted his decades of steadfast support for the U.S.-Israel relationship and his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security,” according to a White House readout. The president also expressed a desire to deepen the cooperation between the two countries, agreeing “that they and their teams would consult closely on all matters related to regional security, including Iran.” READ MORE

JERUSALEM POST Israel’s newest prime minister, Naftali Bennett, begins premiership Benjamin Netanyahu’s record-breaking term as prime minister ended on Sunday night when the Knesset voted to approve the new government formed by Yamina leader Naftali Bennett and Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid. The new government passed at 8:55 with the support of 60 MKs, while 59 opposed it. Ra’am (United Arab List) MK Saeed Alharomi abstained. The MKs in the new coalition and their family members in the visitors’ gallery erupted in applause when the results were announced.

ISRAEL FROM THE INSIDE WITH DANIEL GORDIS The National Liberation Movement of the Jewish People Those of us who subjected ourselves to watching the Knesset proceedings live on Israeli TV, for hour after mercilessly horrifying hour, got a bit of a sense of what things must have sounded like in 586 BCE or 70 CE. It was much worse than painful. It was humiliating, infuriating, sad beyond words. I found myself saying to myself, “We’re going to lose this one, too. No question.”

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“Israel told its citizens they could stop wearing masks indoors on Tuesday”

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

REUTERS
Israel scraps indoor mask order as COVID-19 infections wane
June 15, 2021

srael told its citizens they could stop wearing masks indoors on Tuesday, ending one of its last main restrictions as new COVID-19 infections continued to wane even as vaccinations tapered off after a record rollout. Children headed to school and adults to work without masks for the first time in more than a year. Israelis have not had to wear masks outdoors since April. About 55% of Israel’s 9.3 million population are fully vaccinated – a turnout largely unchanged by this month’s expansion of eligibility to include 12- to 15-year-olds. Israel has this month logged either zero or one daily COVID-19 deaths, Health Ministry data show. READ MORE

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Social psychologist Len Saxe says time is ripe for young Jews to make Birthright trip: “For this generation coming off the loneliness and emotional challenges of COVID, the hunger to engage with peers makes this a propitious moment to go to Israel”

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
After a year away, Birthright participants return to Israel at critical time
by Deborah Fineblum
June 11, 2021

After more than a year of pandemic silence, Taglit-Birthright Israel participants have returned with all the gusto of young adults who have waited out the year of coronavirus restrictions with visions of Israel dancing in their heads. Take Conor Mullaney, who applied for a Birthright Israel trip months ago with little hope of going at the time. “I’d been looking forward to being in Israel for a very long time,” said Mullaney, a third-year finance student at the University of Maryland’s Global Campus who arrived on May 24 with the very first Birthright Israel group to set foot on Israeli soil since the pandemic shut the program down more than a year ago. READ MORE

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Reporters from CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets demand Israel be covered as ‘apartheid’ state

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

FOX NEWS
Anti-Israel journalists blasted as ‘propagandists’ for stunning letter
by David Rutz
June 10, 2021

An open letter from journalists representing mainstream and left-wing media outlets this week called on other journalists to cover Israel as a violent and oppressive “apartheid” state — all in the name of “objectivity” and better serving Palestinians. “For the sake of our readers and viewers — and the truth — we have a duty to change course immediately and end this decades-long journalistic malpractice. The evidence of Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians is overwhelming and must no longer be sanitized,” the signers wrote…The 645-word letter declared Israel guilty of “ethnic supremacy” and accused other journalists of ignoring a “total asymmetry in power” between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist organization in control of the Gaza Strip. READ MORE

YNET Dore Gold: The baseless charge that Israel is an apartheid state, again The latest conflict with Hamas terrorist organization has once again prompted accusations that Israel is an apartheid state, despite the numerous professional opinions to the contrary, as well as Israel’s attempts to find an amicable end to the conflict with the Palestinians

JERUSALEM POST Will every Israeli airstrike now be front page news? The airstrike on Tuesday received major coverage on CBS, NBC, CNN, and other channels.

https://twitter.com/adamelmahrek/status/1402629172208431107?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1402629172208431107%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fmedia%2Fpropagandists-palestine-journalists-israel

Posted in Israel & Middle East | 1 Comment

The Squad’s ideas “which are now mainstream in universities, are dividing the country by race, religion, and income and pitting those angry factions against each other”

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

REAL CLEAR POLITICS
Ilhan Omar and Contempt for America
by Charles Lipson
June 15, 2021

…The problem here goes well beyond Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee who was welcomed to American and now sits in Congress, seething with contempt for her adopted country, its tolerant values, and those of its allies. The Democrats are stuck with a whole Squad of like-minded representatives and thousands, perhaps millions, of young supporters eager to promote these socialist attacks on America. That’s not just a problem for the Democrats. That’s a problem for the country. Ordinary Americans are finally waking up to the danger. They see the pernicious impact of these ideas, which routinely condemn the police, demand they be defunded, support lax prosecutors (“Justice Democrats”), and say our prisons should be dismantled because they are the products of systemic racism. READ MORE

THE FEDERALIST Jonathan Tobin: If Ilhan Omar Were A Republican, She’d Be Treated Like Marjorie Taylor Greene Fear of being called racist and Islamophobic kept many Jewsish Democrats from condemning Ilhan Omar’s comparison of Israel and America to terrorist groups.

I24NEWS Hamas criticizes Rep. Omar for equating it with Israel In an unlikely twist to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s recent equation of democratic states such as the United States and Israel with the Taliban and Hamas, the latter group has taken the lawmaker to task following her comments regarding alleged war crimes. 

TIMES OF ISRAEL Democrats, GOP back off plans to rebuke Ilhan Omar, Marjorie Taylor Greene Amid concerns of political fallout, the rival parties retreat from efforts to punish the two lawmakers accused of antisemitism

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“In the hate business, antisemitism was always an easy sell and business is really good now”

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
Anti-Israel rhetoric has always been about the Jews
by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner
June 10, 2021

…Israel’s hardcore critics reserved never-before-seen toxicity in their venomous assaults for this go-round. Israel’s antagonists used terms such as “disproportionate use of force,” “illegal,” “immoral” and “ethnic cleansing” to redefine Israel’s right to self-defense as a crime. The pundits pressed into the Palestinian propaganda machine leveled the abhorrent accusations that Israel was an “apartheid” nation. Hamas, a terrorist army that sends young men and women to their doom as suicide bombers, was portrayed as the innocent victim, a protector of human rights. Any lie repeated often and loudly enough eventually gains traction, no matter how utterly ridiculous. It was a nuanced distortion of reality. READ MORE

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Dermer on Netanyahu: “He’s simply an Israeli patriot, but detractors called him an enemy of peace, even a Republican”

Posted on June 13, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Demonization of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Ron Dermer
June 11, 2021

Opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, have worked for more than a quarter-century to tarnish his image in the U.S. and around the world. In 1996, when Israelis first elected him to put a brake on a dangerous Oslo process, Mr. Netanyahu was depicted as an enemy of peace. For three years, his opponents insisted that if only Israel were rid of Mr. Netanyahu, it could make peace with Yasser Arafat. They were wrong. Ehud Barak defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999 and offered Arafat sweeping concessions at Camp David a year later. Instead of peace, Israel got scores of suicide bombings and the worst wave of Palestinian terrorism in its history—the so-called second intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered. READ MORE

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“Lapid railed at the dysfunction of the Netanyahu-Gantz government. Yet he and Bennett have set up one just as big and wasteful. What’s needed, paradoxically, is a bigger Knesset”

Posted on June 10, 2021 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Why the champions of change are forming one of Israel’s most bloated governments
by Haviv Rettig Gur
June 12, 2021

…The sheer size and bloat of the new unity government — 28 cabinet ministers and six deputy ministers — will make it the third-largest in Israel’s history. That’s third out of 36, second only to the outgoing government (35 cabinet ministers) and Netanyahu’s 2009-2013 government (30 ministers). “I have failed there,” [Yair] Lapid said bluntly at the Monday meeting. “I can’t defend it. I wanted a small government with a small number of ministers. This is not a good thing.”…The internet, as they say, never forgets. Footage of Lapid railing against [Netanyahu] government bloat and overlarge cabinet tables was dragged out in recent weeks to embarrass him. READ MORE

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