“Trump administration officials, and now apparently Lindsay Graham, are actively working to put together plans for a new Iran Deal”

DAILY BEAST
Team Trump Turns to Lindsey Graham to Cut an Iran Deal
by Erin Banco and Asawin Suebsaeng
August 1, 2019

President Donald Trump wants a new deal with Iran to replace the nuclear agreement he pulled out of, and he’s turning to one of his most hawkish confidants to help do it. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is working in close coordination with senior Trump administration officials who focus on Middle East policy to find an alternative to the Obama administration’s Iran deal, four people with knowledge of the efforts tell The Daily Beast. READ MORE

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J Street-supported congresswoman conjectures why Republicans focus on antisemitism

FREE BEACON
Slotkin (D): GOP Only Opposes Anti-Semitism for Money
by Nic Rowan
July 31, 2019

Freshman representative Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich) said at a Jewish Democratic summer conference that Republicans only oppose anti-Semitism because they want money from Jewish donors. “There has been a lot of discussion for the past 9 months or so, 8 months, about, anti-Semitism,” she told an audience in Michigan on Sunday. “We have, what I believe is a full-on attempt by the Republican Party to grab a different community [Democrat Jews] and bring them into the fold…READ MORE

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Rep Cummings (D-MD) “established fellowship that seeks to bridge gaps between African-Americans and Jews in his Baltimore district”

JTA
Elijah Cummings started a program that brings African-American teens to Israel
by Josefin Dolsten
August 1, 2019

Eight years ago Aaliyah Cuthrell knew little about the Jewish community, beyond what she had seen on a visit to her local Jewish community center to use the pool. Things look different now for the 24-year-old. As a high school junior, she joined a prestigious two-year program for African-American teens in Baltimore. The program, founded by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., seeks to strengthen ties between the African-American and Jewish communities in his Baltimore district. As part of her fellowship in 2011-2013, Cuthrell met with Jewish teens, attended seminars on topics such as anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and spent close to a month living in a youth village in Israel’s north. READ MORE

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Democrats have “handed Trump an easy win and yoked themselves to a genuine bigot” (and antisemite)

NEW YORK TIMES
Why Are Democrats Defending Al Sharpton?
by Professor Glenn C. Loury
July 31, 2019

But 48 hours later, I feel differently. That’s thanks to the leading Democratic candidates for president, who have rushed to Mr. Sharpton’s defense, extolling his supposed virtues as a civil-rights paragon while denouncing Mr. Trump’s attack as racist. In doing so, they have, yet again, taken Mr. Trump’s bait, handing him another easy victory while yoking themselves to a genuine bigot…The problem for Democrats is that Al Sharpton actually is, as Mr. Trump put it on Twitter, “a con man. READ MORE

WASHINGTON POST Al Sharpton is not a lifelong fighter for justice Democrats have rushed to his side this week. But he’s never reckoned with his past anti-Semitic rhetoric

HEARD AT THE WATER COOLER Calling Al Sharpton a “Reverend” is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a chef.

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Arrow-3 success in Alaska “held up by both Israel and the United States as a sign of the strength of their alliance”

REUTERS
Israel says Arrow-3 missile shield passes U.S. trials, warns Iran
by Dan Williams
July 28, 2019

Israel’s U.S.-backed Arrow-3 ballistic missile shield has passed a series of live interception tests over Alaska, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday, casting the achievement as a warning to Iran. Jointly manufactured by U.S. firm Boeing Co, Arrow-3 is billed as capable of shooting down incoming missiles in space, an altitude that would destroy any non-conventional warheads safely. It passed its first full interception test over the Mediterranean Sea in 2015 and was deployed in Israel in 2017.  READ MORE

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Ukraine’s president actor-turned-politician: “Mr Zelensky is Jewish – the only Jewish head of state in the world today (outside Israel, of course) and his election comes at a time of rising antisemitism almost everywhere”

WASHINGTON TIMES
Life imitates art in Ukraine
by Clifford May
July 31, 2019

…Just over a year ago, Volodymyr Zelensky was a comic actor. His popularity soared thanks to a TV show called “Servant of the People” in which he played a history teacher who lives with his parents and rides his bike to work. One day, his rant against Ukrainian politics and politicians, surreptitiously recorded, goes viral on social media. The result: He’s elected president of the Ukraine with 67 percent of the vote. In real life, Mr. Zelensky went on to organize a political party which he named, naturally, “Servant of the People.” The result: Earlier this year, he was elected president of the Ukraine with 73 percent of the vote. READ MORE

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Will Brexit crisis sink Boris Johnson and “bring to power Labour’s far-left, venomously anti-Israel leader Jeremy Corbyn”

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Is Boris Johnson good for the Jews?
by Melanie Phillips
July 27, 2019

…A rather more accurate assessment, although hardly less unsettling, may be that although he does have genuinely warm feelings towards Jews and the State of Israel, he is also (despite his Brexiteer credentials) a liberal universalist. That means he believes that everyone is a rational actor, which means he thinks everyone is susceptible to appeals to temporal self-interest, that murderous fanaticism is caused by material circumstances, and that therefore deals can and should be done with the devil. As a result of these illusions, despite his warm feelings he may not always act in the best interests of Israel or the Jewish people. READ MORE

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“It’s not European. And it doesn’t divide into right and left, religious and secular. Matti Friedman, author of a new book about Mizrahi spies, on why Israel baffles and infuriates”

TIMES OF ISRAEL
Nobody hijacked Israel. It’s just not what its pioneers thought they’d created
by David Horovitz
July 29, 2019

…I came from the West, with the European stories of Israel — the kibbutz, the Holocaust… The longer you’re here, the more you realize those stories don’t fully represent Israel. Half the country came from the Muslim world, and that informs everything about Israel — cuisine, behavior, music, religion, politics. Many Israelis think the basis of the country is the European Jewish world — Herzl and Ben-Gurion — and that the Jews of the Middle East then came and joined that story. I think it’s the opposite: Israel is part of the continuum of Judaism in the Muslim world, together with the remnants of European Jewry. READ MORE

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“The decision to “halt work” on all agreements with Israel was announced on Thursday night by PA President Mahmoud Abbas during an emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah”

JERUSALEM POST
Palestinians skeptical about Abbas’s move to ‘halt’ agreements with Israel
by Khaled Abu Toameh
July 28, 2019

A committee entrusted with carrying out the Palestinian leadership’s decision to end all agreements with Israel is expected to meet in the coming hours, PLO Executive Committee member Ahmed Majdalani said on Saturday. However, Palestinians expressed skepticism that the Palestinian Authority would proceed with its intention to suspend signed agreements with Israel. The committee itself has not yet even been formed. READ MORE

ELDER OF ZIYON Palestinian prime minister lies to @HRW’s Ken Roth about freedom of expression. He believes it. On Saturday, Director of Human Rights Watch Ken Roth met with Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh. While smiling, Shtayyeh informed Roth that the Palestinian Authority will no longer arrest people for political speech. Roth appreciated the “pledge.” For some reason, Roth – a supposed defender of human rights – didn’t seem to ask for the Palestinian leaders to drop the laws on their books that allow them to arrest anyone for anything they write online that might be considered offensive to the government.

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Bernie Sanders: US’s Mideast policy cannot just be ‘pro-Israel pro-Israel pro-Israel’”; AOC: Netanyahu is like Trump

ISRAEL HAYOM (by agreement with JNS)
Sanders says he would ‘absolutely’ consider cutting US military aid
by Staff
July 28, 2019

Vermont Senator and leading 2020 Democratic US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders would “absolutely” weigh withholding US military aid to Israel to pressure the Jewish state into making policy changes. Speaking with Jon Favreau on his Pod Save America podcast, Sanders, according to most polls the second-place Democratic candidate, agreed that the $3.8 billion US military aid package could be used as “leverage” against the Jewish state. “Our policy cannot just be pro-Israel, pro-Israel, pro-Israel,” Sanders said. “It has got to be pro-region, working with all of the people, all of the countries in that area.” READ MORE

ARUTZ SHEVA Rabbinical group slams Senators for supporting Al Sharpton “In their haste to condemn the President,” said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, Managing Director of the CJV, “two Senators [Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren], both of whom are candidates for the President’s job, described a man who instigated Antisemitic marches and even murder as spending ‘his life’ fighting for ‘justice’ and ‘to improve our nation.’ It is hard to imagine a person with any sensitivity towards the Jewish community making such a statement.”

JTA AOC has a lot to say about Israel, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Bernie Sanders
Ocasio-Cortez is critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — but framed it as a criticism of Israeli policy, not of Israel’s existence. She said that doesn’t mean she’s anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. She gave a shoutout to the leftist Jewish group IfNotNow, which opposes the occupation and is controversial in many parts of the Jewish community for not taking a stance — for or against — Zionism, the Israel boycott or the “question of statehood.”

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