FDD’s Mark Dubowitz: “There’s nothing ‘moderate’ about the Iranian foreign minister, who is now threatening our think tank”

Posted on August 30, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

WALL STREET JOURNAL
Stop Indulging Javad Zarif
by Mark Dubowitz and Reuel Marc Gerecht
Aug. 29, 2019

…The Islamic Republic isn’t the first dictatorship to try to intimidate think tanks and scholars. And Mr. Zarif is hardly an all-powerful figure at home. We suspect his decision to threaten FDD was to show some revolutionary rectitude to those in the ruling elite who aren’t enamored of him. Many are angered by his failure to understand the American political system, which knocked down President Obama’s nuclear deal. Mr. Zarif and President Hassan Rouhani had sold that accord as a victory: In exchange for short-term, limited nuclear constraints, the West would lift sanctions and Tehran would gain immediate access to tens of billions of dollars in hard currency and longer-term access to global markets worth hundreds of billions. READ MORE SUBSCRIPTION CONTENT

THE ATLANTIC Iran’s Enemy du Jour: A Guy Who Runs a Think Tank The Islamic Republic has focused its ire on a D.C. research outfit that employs a few dozen people. How did the Foundation for Defense of Democracies get so famous in Tehran?

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Why are non-Orthodox Jews ignoring the increasing violence against Orthodox Jews?

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

FORWARD
No One Cares About Attacks Against The Orthodox Because You’ve Been Dehumanizing Us For Decades
by Eli Steinberg
August 29, 2019

You’ve all heard the story: A Haredi Jew violently assaulted in broad daylight somewhere in New York City. It happens so often now, with what is almost a chilling regularity, it’s virtually impossible to miss. According to the NYPD, anti-Semitic hate crimes have skyrocketed in the past year; the 145 complaints so far in 2019 alone are sharply up from 88 in that same time frame a year earlier — a year which itself saw a 22% increase from 2017. As Tablet Magazine’s Armin Rosen put it so pithily, “Everyone Knows.” And yet, as Forward Life editor Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt pointed out yesterday, nobody cares. READ MORE

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“With the title “Our Boys” many people were teased into thinking that this would be the story of three innocent Israeli victims”

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

AISH
“Our Boys”: The HBO Series Uses a Jewish Tragedy to Condemn Israeli Society
by Rabbi Benjamin Blech
August 27, 2019
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Whoever had any part in producing the new HBO 10 part series teasingly titled “Our Boys” should be profoundly ashamed – and whoever is misled into believing that they will have an opportunity to see a fair re-creation of the events in 2014 that began with the kidnapping and murders of three Israeli teenagers leading up to the Gaza war of that horrible summer deserves a fair warning: This is perhaps one of the most outrageous and deceitful distortions of a historically significant moment in the story of Israel’s struggle with barbaric acts of terrorism. READ MORE

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IfNotNow activist asks Democrat Congressman Brad Schneider (IL-10) how his Israel positions differ from Trump’s

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
IfNotNow activist hurls dual-loyalty charge at Democratic Jewish congressman
August 28, 2019

An activist with the anti-Israel group IfNotNow accused Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) of dual loyalty during a town hall last week with constituents. The organization posted on Twitter a video of an audience member named Nathan, according to the video’s subtitles, telling the Jewish congressman, “I have family in Israel, as I’m sure that you do, so your Israel policy is of particular concern to me. When Donald Trump opposed BDS, moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, signed the Taylor Force Act into law, withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, and recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, you celebrated every single one of these moves.” READ MORE

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PBS lies to further its Palestinians-as-peaceful-protesters-Israelis-as-brutal-oppressors narrative

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

CAMERA BLOG
‪PBS NewsHour Propaganda Piece Attacks Israel with Bogus Exploding Bullets Charge
by Ricki Hollander
August 29, 2019

PBS Newshour has once again grossly deceived its audience, with a propaganda piece that could have come directly from Hamas’ playbook. Coming more than a year after the start of the terror organization’s “Great March of Return,” the report twists those violent riots into an indictment of Israel’s military response. The Aug. 20th special report by special correspondent Jane Ferguson, entitled “Gazans suffer life-shattering injuries when border protests turn violent,” focuses on Palestinian rioters who were injured or lost limbs during the riots, amplifying Hamas propaganda claims about criminal Israeli soldiers targeting innocent, peaceful Palestinian youth and – its central claim – using exploding bullets to maximize the damage inflicted upon their Palestinian victims. READ MORE

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“Bret Stephens, it seems, was offended by my lack of decorum online”

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

ESQUIRE
I Called Bret Stephens a Bedbug. Then He Tried to Squelch My Freedom of Speech. What a Day.
by David Karpf
August 27, 2019

Bret Stephens is above me in the status hierarchy. He knows this. I know this. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and has a regular op-ed column in the New York Times. I am just some professor. I’ve written two books, but unless you are professionally involved with digital politics, you probably have never heard of me. So I was surprised to receive an email from Bret Stephens last night. The subject line read “From Bret Stephens, New York Times.”…Stephens had found a tweet that I had written earlier that afternoon. READ MORE

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“The Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end only when Palestinians realize they cannot achieve their goal of eliminating the Jewish state of Israel”

Posted on August 29, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
To European Leaders: Jewish Flesh Is Cheap
by Guy Millière
August 30, 2019

…In 1967, a change of strategy took place. No one, the PLO decided, would speak of a “war for the destruction of Israel”. Instead, they would call it a “war of national liberation”. From then on, the PLO was presented as a “liberation movement”. Arabs who had left Israel in 1948-49 and remained in refugee camps were defined as the “Palestinian people”, and so the Palestinian people were invented. As PLO Executive Council member Zuheir Mohsen said in 1977: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. READ MORE

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“So it is war between Israel and Iran, prosecuted over the ruins of Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. But it won’t necessarily stay that way”

Posted on August 28, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Iran-Israel War Is Here
by Jonathan Spyer
Aug. 27, 2019

Israel and Iran are at war. Israeli strikes this week in southern Syria, western Iraq and eastern Lebanon—and possibly even Beirut—confirm it. This war is a very 21st-century affair. For now it involves only small circles among the Israeli and Iranian populations. Parts of the air force, intelligence services and probably special forces are active on the Israeli side. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its expeditionary Quds Force and proxy politico-military organizations in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are engaged on behalf of Iran. The war marks a hinge point in Middle Eastern geopolitics. READ MORE SUBSCRIPTION CONTENT

THE HILL Ilan Berman:The Israeli-Iranian cold war heats up Last month, Israeli fighter jets bombed a series of weapons depots north of Baghdad, Iraq, destroying facilities that were being used by the Iranian regime to ferry weapons to proxy forces in Syria. The event was a milestone, marking the first time the Jewish State is known to have carried out airstrikes on Iraqi soil since its destruction of Saddam Hussein’s fledgling nuclear program back in 1981. But it is also an important barometer of a broader Israeli campaign against Iran’s proxies and influence in the region — a national effort that is now picking up serious steam.

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“Any terrorist knows Israeli drones don’t look or operate like the two in Beirut, and any child knows the result would have been very different if Israel had really wanted to attack”

Posted on August 27, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Nasrallah is lying about Israeli drones in Beirut; Lebanon must urgently wise up
by Avi Issacharoff
August 27, 2019

…Perhaps, before Nasrallah and Hezbollah drag Lebanon into a major escalation or heaven forbid a war, the organization would like to explain what exactly Hezbollah’s two activists were up to in this mysterious villa outside Damascus. Were the two — Hassan Yousef Zabeeb and Yasser Ahmad Daher, who had been trained in Iran in operating drones — simply spending the last few days of summer vacation with their families around the pool before they headed back to their studies? Or were they, rather, planning and attempting to carry out attacks? And if the two were in fact there on some kind of military mission, does not Israel have complete legitimacy to protect itself from imminent attack? READ MORE

THE NEW ARAB Bahrain backs Israeli airstrikes on Iranian forces as ‘self-defence’ Bahrain’s foreign minister on Monday appeared to back alleged Israeli airstrikes on Iranian-backed militia forces in the Middle East, defending the military action as “self-defence”. Israel has reportedly struck targets in three different countries within the past two days, widening its military campaign against Iranian-backed forces. Late on Saturday, the Israeli army launched strikes in Syria to thwart what it said was an impending Iranian drone attack.

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Iran threatens Foundation for Defense of Democracies and CEO Mark Dubowitz

Posted on August 26, 2019 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Iran threatens influential Washington think tank over hawkish policy toward regime
August 26, 2019

Iran threatened the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) over the weekend for its hawkish stance toward the regime, which announced sanctions against the influential Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The warning against FDD and its chief executive officer, Mark Dubowitz, was announced on Iranian state media, which cited a law passed by the Iranian parliament titled “Countering America’s Human Rights Violation and Adventurous and Terrorist Actions.” “Accordingly, taking any actions by the judicial and security apparatuses against the FDD and their Iranian and non-Iranian accomplices will be considered legitimate as their actions are against the Iran’s national security and the interests of Iranian people and government,” reported the state-run Mehr news agency. READ MORE

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