Pelosi awards freshman congresswoman BDS supporter with seat on House Foreign Affairs; Women’s March leader Mallory opines on Farrakhan, Israel

WASHINGTON EXAMINER
House Democrats reward an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist with a place on the Foreign Affairs Committee
by Tiana Lowe
January 17, 2019

Lost in the incomprehensible word salad of the freewheeling, Trumpian, and mathematically illiterate performance of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., on CNN today was the more ominous fact that the Democratic Party rewarded her, an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, with a place on the prestigious House Foreign Affairs Committee. Omar, who replaced accused domestic abuser Keith Ellison in Congress, is no run-of-the-mill Democrat. She openly supports the boycott, divest, and sanction movement against Israel. She cozied up to Farrakhan fan Linda Sarsour on the day she entered Congress. But most damning is a tweet from 2012, in which she invokes a classic anti-Semitic trope… READ MORE

WASHINGTON TIMES Women’s March leader spars with PBS over Israel’s ‘right to exist’: ‘I’m done talking about this’ Women’s March national co-chair Tamika Mallory refused to say whether Israel has a “right to exist” during an interview that’s set to air on PBS Friday night. Speaking to “Firing Line” host Margaret Hoover, Ms. Mallory argued that Palestinians are “native to the land” and are being “brutally oppressed” by the Israeli government.

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“Forward” pulls the plug on print, no doubt not unrelated to their “radical-feminist editorial policy that also upped the ante on anti-Orthodox and anti-Israel diatribes”

JEWISH PRESS
Forward’s ‘Savior’ Loses Readership, Goes Strictly Digital, Fires Half the Staff
by David Israel
January 17, 2019

The Forward is ending both its English and Yiddish print editions, laying off Editor-in-Chief Jane Eisner and 40% of her staff, and will continue to do business strictly online, the NY Post reported Wednesday. The Post cited a source that said, “They’ve been losing money for years but lately the losses have been more than $5 million a year”…Apparently, the sharp turn the newspaper has taken a few short years ago, towards a radical-feminist editorial policy that also upped the ante on anti-Orthodox and anti-Israel diatribes, just didn’t attract enough readers, who can easily and cheaply find this stuff in the NY Times. READ MORE

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“Jews are 0.2% of the world population, but 23% of Nobel Prize winners. We Koreans want to learn the Jews’ secrets”

ARUTZ SHEVA
Talmud-inspired learning craze sweeps South Korea
by Tim Alper
January 15, 2019

“Koreans don’t have to emulate Jewish belief systems,” educational researcher Seol Dong-ju said, “but we do need to copy the way Jews teach their children.” The result is dozens of private chavruta-themed academies, with busy branches in major cities throughout the country, catering to everyone from toddlers to adults. Some make use of Korean-language Talmudic texts, while others follow entirely secular curricula. Kim Jung-wan, who directs one such academy — the Havruta Culture Association — explains that South Korea’s Jewish education quest is over 40 years old. READ MORE

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“Although terrorist attacks are severe, the attempt by one civilization to subjugate the other is occurring on a broader ideological and religious plane”

GATESTONE
The Peaceful Takeover of Europe
by Jan Keller
January 16, 2019

…According to a report released by Institut Montaigne in September 2016, the Muslim population of France is divided as follows: Nearly half consider the laws of the state — as opposed to Islamic law — as binding. This sector does not wish to live separately from French society. Around a quarter of the Muslim sector is extremely devout, yet willing to tolerate other religions. The remainder puts the laws of Islam over the laws of the Republic, and creates a parallel society. This last group seems to be increasingly radicalized and dominated by the younger generation — those born in France. In this sense, no two distinct civilizations are pitted against each other. READ MORE

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“The Palestinians were integral to both the Islamic Revolution and to the formation of the Khomeinist regime”

TABLET MAGAZINE
Arafat and the Ayatollahs
by Tony Badran
January 16, 2019

When Yasser Arafat arrived in Tehran on Feb. 17, 1979, the first “foreign leader” invited to visit Iran mere days after the victory of the revolution, he declared he was coming to his “own home.” There was some truth in Arafat’s flowery words. Having developed and nurtured a decade’s worth of relationships with all the major forces, from Marxists to Islamists, which had toppled the shah, he had good reason to feel like the victory of the revolution was in some part his own. READ MORE

FREE BEACON Iran and the Palestinians: Bonded Through Hate The relationship goes back decades, with the Palestinians playing an important role in the Iranian Revolution

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“Antisemitic blacks assumed that they could not be credibly charged with bigotry and were therefore free to say what they pleased about Jews”

NATIONAL REVIEW
The New, New Anti-Semitism
by Victor Davis Hanson
January 15, 2019

The new form of the old bias grew most rapidly on the 1960s campus and was fueled by a number of leftist catalysts. The novel romance of the Palestinians and corresponding demonization of Israel, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, gradually allowed former Jew-hatred to be cloaked by new rabid and often unhinged opposition to Israel. In particular, these anti-Semites fixated on Israel’s misdemeanors and exaggerated them while excusing and downplaying the felonies of abhorrent and rogue nations. Indeed, evidence of the new anti-Semitism was that the Left was neutral, and even favorable, to racist, authoritarian, deadly regimes of the then Third World while singling out democratic Israel for supposed humanitarian crimes. READ MORE

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Liberal Buzzfeed acknowledges reality of declining Democrat support for Israel

BUZZFEED
Israel Will Be The Great Foreign Policy Debate Of The Democratic Primary
by Emily Tamkin and Alexis Levinson
January 16, 2019

Some of the Democratic Party’s brightest new stars believe Israel is a rogue state that should be treated like apartheid South Africa. It’s the latest sign that, after 50 years, support for Israel is no longer a bipartisan cause — a dramatic change that will be felt in the wide-open Democratic presidential primary. The young progressives who have ascended to power within the Democratic Party over the last few years want to force what were once fringe views into the mainstream, and significantly change US policy toward Israel…IfNotNow will launch a “public push to get 2020 candidates to not attend AIPAC’S annual conference in MarchREAD MORE

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“Only Israel’s Iron Dome could meet US Army goal of implementing an interim missile defense capability by 2020”

I24 NEWS
US army eyes $373 million purchase of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system
January 16, 2019

The US army has asked Congress to approve $373 million to purchase two of Israel’s successful Iron Dome missile interception batteries, the American defense website Inside Defense reported Wednesday. If approved, the sale would mark the first time Israel has sold a complete weapons system to the US, which rarely purchases weapons from foreign countries both due to their technological superiority over most countries as well as for national security reasons. According to Inside Defense, the army is seeking to acquire the two Iron Dome batteries with 12 launchers, two radar systems, two battle management systems and 240 interception missiles by 2020…READ MORE

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“In the Israeli view, no peacemaker can bring the two sides together because there aren’t just two sides. There are many, many sides”

NEW YORK TIMES
There Is No ‘Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’: To understand why, you have to zoom out
by Matti Friedman
January 19, 2019

…If you see only an “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, then nothing that Israelis do makes sense…In this tightly cropped frame, Israelis are stronger, more prosperous and more numerous. The fears affecting big decisions, like what to do about the military occupation in the West Bank, seem unwarranted if Israel is indeed the far more powerful party. That’s not the way Israelis see it. Many here believe that an agreement signed by a Western-backed Palestinian leader in the West Bank won’t end the conflict, because it will wind up creating not a state but a power vacuum destined to be filled by intra-Muslim chaos, or Iranian proxies, or some combination of both. READ MORE

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“On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed reports that Syria airstrike was carried out by the Israeli Air Force on Friday, saying that Israel has carried out hundreds of attacks against Iranian and Hezbollah targets”

JERUSALEM POST
Satellite Images Show Demolish Iranian Site
by Anna Ahronheim
January 15, 2019

New satellite images of an Iranian weapons storehouse at the Damascus International Airport showed the complete destruction of the site following Israeli airstrikes on Friday. Released by the Israeli satellite company ImageSat International, one image taken before the strikes showed a structure that measured 20 by 50 meters and was later missing, leaving three craters where the compound once stood. According to ImageSat, the structure was likely used as a missile storehouse, including the Fajr-5, which can be launched from a mobile platform and has a reported range of 75 kilometers. READ MORE

JNS Israel is still doing America’s dirty work in Syria After years of pounding Iranian forces on the quiet, Israel’s security establishment feels the time is right to make it clear that it will continue to enforce certain red lines in Syria to ensure that the Islamist regime isn’t in position to launch a war on its northern front.

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