Esther Horgen, mother of six, went out for a walk on Sunday and never returned

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

CBN NEWS
Israeli Troops Reinforced after Murder of Woman in Suspected Terror Attack
by Julie Stahl
December 22, 2020

Security forces are still searching for the killer of Esther Horgen, who was murdered in an apparent Palestinian terror attack on Sunday. Horgen, 52, a mother of six, was buried on Tuesday, after her body was found a day earlier with signs of violence, in a forest near her home in the northern West Bank (biblical Samaria) settlement of Tal Menashe…Without a direct connection to the murder, the Israel Defense Forces nevertheless released a statement on Tuesday saying that according to its assessment of the situation, it had decided to “reinforce the Judea and Samaria Division in order to enhance the defense of communities and routes in the region.” READ MORE

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Mystery surrounds capture of Iranian dissident journalist #RuhollahZam, hanged last week for “spreading corruption on Earth”

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
Who betrayed Iranian journalist Ruhollah Zam?
by Jonathan Spyer
December 17, 2020

…Ruhollah Zam, who had been in captivity since October 2019, was the founder and director of a popular Telegram channel and forum called Amad News, which carried up-to-the-minute information on the demonstrations and protests that swept Iran in 2017 and 2018. The channel, which had 1.4 million followers, provided details regarding upcoming protests, and about officials who were challenging the regime. The reach and influence of Amad News appears to have led to the regime’s decision to target and eliminate Zam. The journalist had lived in Paris since 2011. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), according to the available evidence, put in motion a complex sting operation to lure Zam to Iraq, from where he was kidnapped and taken to Iran…READ MORE

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“Even if a peace agreement is not officially announced, relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are at their peak, especially given the Iranian threat and concerns over other radical Islamic elements in the region”

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
The Saudi dilemma
by Shahar Klaiman
December 20, 2020

The peace deal with Morocco is the fourth accord between Israel and an Arab state to sideline the Palestinian issue. While the leaders of Abu Dhabi, Manama and Khartoum had all pledged their continued commitment to the Palestinians’ statehood aspirations, at the end of the day, none of them opted to place Ramallah’s interests ahead of their own. As with the peace deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, here, too, the United States, which brokered the accords, hinted that Saudi Arabia could very well be the next Arab power to normalize ties with Israel. The move may prove inevitable, but Riyadh’s path to peace with the Jewish state is anything but smooth. READ MORE

TIME MAG Saudi Arabia Is Scrubbing Hate Speech from School Books. Why That’s a Win for the Trump Administration The Kingdom’s latest batch of textbooks has for the first time removed sections calling for non-believers to be punished by death, and predicting an apocalyptic final battle in which Muslims will kill all Jews, according to a report released Tuesday by a Jerusalem-based think tank that analyzes global curricula for extremist and intolerant views. The “trend line is cause for optimism,” says Marcus Sheff, CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education.

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i24 features Lawfare’s Brooke Goldstein on Belgium kashrut ruling

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

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John le Carré remains a product of his time and an enigma. Was he on the side of the Jewish people — or their enemies?

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
The “antisemitism” of John le Carré
by Melanie Phillips
December 18, 2020

John le Carré, the acclaimed grandmaster of the spy novel who died last weekend at the age of 89, was dogged for years by allegations of antisemitism. The plot of his 1983 novel The Little Drummer Girl, which involves the Mossad recruiting an English actress with radical sympathies to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist faction, presents Israel and the Palestinian cause as morally equivalent. But the media watchdog CAMERA UK, which has criticised The Guardian for identifying le Carré’s Palestinian sympathies as the source of the antisemitism charge, notes correctly that the accusation was more broadly based. READ MORE

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“A Bitter James Baker, Who Failed on the Western Sahara, Urges Biden To Rescind the Deal”

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

NEW YORK SUN
Moroccan Envoy Marks Hanukkah With Israel
by Benny Avni
December 18, 2020

As the Moroccan ambassador to the United Nations, Omar Hilale, lit candles Thursday alongside his Israeli counterpart, Gilad Erdan, some in Washington tsk-tsk’d about the Western Sahara. Like the Israeli-Palestinian territorial disputes, the fight over the desert tract of African land has for decades been a favorite plaything for Washington peace processors and their Turtle Bay counterparts. The more intense the diplomatic activity, the more entangled the Gordian Knot has become. Until, that is, the famous disrupter, Donald Trump, came with a diplomatic axe. As part of Morocco’s joining the Abraham Accords — Mr. Trump’s campaign to widen the number of Arab countries at full peace and diplomatic relations with Israel — America agreed to recognize Rabat’s sovereignty over Western Sahara. READ MORE

WALL STREET JOURNAL Eugene Kontorovich: The Middle East’s Dual ‘Occupations’  Many expected the Trump administration to recognize Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank before Inauguration Day. Instead, last week it recognized Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara as part of a U.S.-brokered peace deal between Jerusalem and Rabat. The new U.S. position on Morocco’s borders has a sound basis in international law and diplomatic practice, and it makes the case even stronger for doing the same with Israel and the West Bank.

NEWSWEEK Ilan Berman: The Israel-Morocco Deal Is a Triumph for Trump—and Biden, Too For all of its import, the December 10 announcement by the Kingdom of Morocco that it was normalizing ties with Israel can hardly be said to have been a surprise. Contacts between the two countries span decades, and Rabat and Jerusalem have long boasted a vibrant (if informal) partnership built around cultural bonds, trade ties and political alignment.

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“California voters overwhelmingly rejected Proposition 16, which would have allowed the State to openly discriminate in favor of the “aggrieved” groups liberals pander to — which of course works to the detriment of people that are more qualified”

Posted on December 20, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

SPECTATOR
The Man Who Convinced California Voters to Reject Racial Quotas
by Pat Nolan
December 17, 2020

As Biden has frantically juggled potential nominees to placate each of the plethora of aggrieved special-interest groups that make up the modern Democratic Party, I must admit to having enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude. The far-left Democrats apparently believe that it is good politics to use a quota system in selecting his presumptive cabinet. I think they are flat-out wrong, both morally and politically. Leaving aside the immorality of their policies and just the politics of their issues, I suggest the Democrats take another look at the election results, because down-ballot results across the country show that voters soundly and consistently rejected candidates and issues pushed by the socialist orthodoxy of the national Democratic party. READ MORE

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“It’s a small shot for a person and a huge step toward the health of us all”

Posted on December 17, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM POST
Netanyahu, Edelstein kick off Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign
by Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman
December 19, 2020

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Health Minister Yuli Edelstein received the first doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine in Israel at an event that was live-streamed across Israel as part of the campaign to encourage the public to get the jab…The leaders were inoculated at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer by the prime minister’s doctor, Dr. Zvi Herman Berkowitz…”This is a very big day for the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said before receiving the vaccine. “We have been experiencing for almost a year the worst pandemic that humanity has known in the last 100 years and this is the beginning of the exit.”READ MORE

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“The Atlanta clergyman often sounds more like a transnational leftist than an American politician”

Posted on December 17, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

WALL STREET JOURNAL
What Raphael Warnock Believes About Israel
by Barton Swaim
December 16, 2020

The Middle East poses a problem for the Democrats. Theirs was traditionally the pro-Israel party and still commands the support of a substantial majority of Jewish voters. But left-liberal orthodoxy demands that all right-thinking people take the side of the Palestinians against the Israeli government and hold Jerusalem to a double standard: If any other nation takes an aggressive stance against terrorist insurrectionists or other internal threats, the results may be tragic but are kept in perspective. If Israel does so, it has committed a moral outrage and broken international law. READ MORE

BALTIMORE JEWISH LIFE Rabbis Denounce Rev. Raphael Warnock’s Antisemitic Rhetoric, Dismiss “Whitewash” From Partisan Group The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), representing over 1500 traditional rabbis in matters of public policy, today released a letter sent to the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) and the Warnock for Senate campaign on Monday, denouncing anti-Semitic rhetoric from Georgia senatorial candidate Reverend Raphael Warnock and challenging JDCA’s partisan “whitewash” of his language. The JCDA characterized serious concerns about Warnock’s comments as “baseless claims and attacks.”

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Paris: “3 days of terror, many victims, 5 years of waiting, 4 months of trial … suffering, forgetting, other attacks, more deaths, and then, a feeling after being heard: justice, finally!”

Posted on December 17, 2020 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
French Court Convicts 14 Accomplices of Islamist Terrorists Behind 2015 Massacres at Magazine, Kosher Market in Paris
by Ben Cohen
December 16, 2020

The harrowing trial of 14 accomplices in the January 2015 Islamist terror attacks in Paris came to an end on Wednesday, with a series of prison sentences ranging from four to 30 years handed down by the court in the French capital. The trial spanned the three days of terror that enveloped Paris between Jan. 7-9 2015. Twelve people were massacred at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, while a policewoman was murdered the following day by their comrade, Amedy Coulibaly. The next day, a heavily-armed Coulibaly seized the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in eastern Paris where he murdered four Jewish hostages. All three terrorists were killed in separate shoot-outs with French police. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL ‘F**k the Jews’: French family said attacked after playing Hebrew songs in car Initial reports in the French media said the incident happened at 8:40 p.m. and that the perpetrators screamed anti-Semitic insults, including “fuck the Jews,” rocked the car back and forth and hurled bottles at it, the RTL broadcaster reported. Prior to the assault, music with songs in Hebrew was heard in the family’s car, Le Parisien reported.

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