“In a truly astounding statistic, Forbes revealed that the top 15 donors to the Kamala Harris campaign were all Jewish”

Posted on January 1, 2025 by ArchitectGuy

COMMENTARY
The Jewish Vote in 2024: Trump did better. But not much better
Jay P. Lefkowitz
January 2025

…Even after Hamas’s murder of approximately 1,200 people on October 7, 2023, the Democratic Party has continued to distance itself from Israel. A study by the Brookings Institute found that notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, President Biden’s strong statements in support of Israel at the start of the war, 44 percent of Democrats running for Congress in 2024 did not even mention Israel in their campaign materials. Seven percent of Democratic candidates even declared that Israel is committing genocide and/or that the United States must stop supporting Israel in the war. READ MORE

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He told police he chose AIPAC as his target because of its “political influence” and location, saying he was frustrated with the “status quo”

Posted on January 1, 2025 by ArchitectGuy

THE HILL
FBI says it thwarted apparent plot against AIPAC
Julia Shapero
January 1, 2025

The FBI thwarted an apparent plot to harm employees at a Florida office of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), according to court documents filed Monday. Law enforcement arrested Forrest Kendall Pemberton after he allegedly traveled to Plantation, Fla., in search of AIPAC’s office with several firearms, including an AR-15 rifle. Pemberton told police he went to the site, a former AIPAC office, to “scout” out the location before returning with the firearms, according to an affidavit signed by FBI special agent Taylor Nicklin. He was intercepted in a ride-share vehicle carrying the guns on Dec. 25, the first night of Hanukkah. READ MORE

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Except for Israel: “There’s never been a war in the history of war … where any nation has been asked, ‘But what’s your civilian-to-combat ratio?’ Because that’s just not how the law of war works”

Posted on December 30, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
The Gray Lady’s latest anti-Israel hit job
Ruthie Blum
December 30, 2024

It’s hard to imagine The New York Times stooping any lower than usual in its coverage of Israel’s defensive war in Gaza. Yet the Gray Lady seems to have managed to outdo itself on this score once again. Its latest hit job took the form of a lengthy news feature on Thursday, titled “Israel Loosened Its Rules to Bomb Hamas Fighters, Killing Many More Civilians.” The article, marked by as many bylines as anonymous sources, attempted to lull readers with a neat trick: using the Israel Defense Forces’ self-imposed “purity of arms” doctrine, a stricter code of ethics than that of any other military in history, to highlight the Jewish state’s allegedly unacceptable behavior on the battlefield. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL Public support for conscripting ultra-Orthodox has surged throughout war Public support for doing away with sweeping army exemptions for military-age ultra-Orthodox men has risen sharply over the past year, according to a survey published Tuesday by the Israel Democracy Institute. Support for drafting eligible Haredim either en masse or incrementally, complete with economic penalties for those who do not comply, stood at 84.5 percent, compared to 67% in January 2024, the survey showed. Only 9% of the Israeli public supported exempting the ultra-Orthodox from mandatory military service.

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“Over the past decade or so, the warnings about smartphones have reached a fever pitch. Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma”revealed just how badly social media algorithms warp our brains, changing our behavior and beliefs”

Posted on December 27, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against
Smartphones in Schools
Olivia Reingold
December 30, 2024

…Part of the book’s power is its simplicity. Haidt spells out four “foundational rules” to inspire a “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” They are: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16, no phones at school, and more unsupervised play and independence for kids. Haidt has consistently repeated these talking points at talks around the country and on his Instagram page, where he has 341,000 followers. Even so, Haidt told me he is “astounded” by how quickly the movement has spread throughout America, even rippling across the pond to the UK. “The only other example of social change I’ve seen that has moved this quickly is the fall of the Iron Curtain,” he told me. When I asked him why it took so long, he called it a “collective action problem,” in which the general public resents the status quo, but individuals are too scared to challenge it. READ MORE

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“The new rulers of Syria have been sending out messages demanding that Israel return to the ceasefire line, and the US and other countries have also begun to exert pressure on the Netanyahu cabinet to retreat”

Posted on December 26, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JEWISH PRESS
Israel Establishing Extensive Military and Civilian Control in Southern Syria
David Israel
December 26, 2024

Israel is establishing extensive military and civilian control in southern Syria, the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported Wednesday. According to the report, the IDF has taken control of the buffer zone in southern Syria, including cities, towns, and strategic hills, and reached the suburbs of Daraa and taken control of the Yarmouk Basin and the freshwater sources in the area. Since the fall of the Assad regime, Al-Akhbar noted, Israeli forces have entered deep into Syrian territory and taken control of large areas along the buffer zone, more than 20 kilometers deep in some areas, including taking control of the strategic Mount Hermon peak. This is while UN peacekeeping forces are absent from the scene, and the new government in Damascus is distancing itself from what is happening in the south, claiming that the country cannot bear more wars. READ MORE

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“Israel has roared back to crush Hamas and defang Hezbollah, leaving the Assad regime in Syria to crumble and all their masters in Iran to fret, without air defenses, over Bibi’s next move”

Posted on December 26, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

WALL STREET JOURNAL
The Inside Story of Israel’s Comeback Victory
Elliot Kaufman
December 21, 2024

…“Hezbollah doesn’t want to continue the fight right now,” Mr. Netanyahu says. Neither do the Iranians. “They were dumbfounded when we took out their critical air defenses” after their second missile attack on Israel, he says. Israel also damaged Iran’s ballistic-missile production, “which means they now have to calculate how much ammo they have, because it’ll take them several years to resuscitate it—assuming we don’t hit it again.” Each attack had a multiplier effect. “We knocked down Hezbollah, which was supposed to protect Iran. And Iran didn’t protect Hezbollah either. And neither of them protected [Syria’s Bashar al] Assad. So, we just split that whole axis right down the middle.” READ MORE

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Former agents from Israel’s Mossad detail how they built and sold explosive pagers to Hezbollah terrorists

Posted on December 26, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JPOST
60 Minutes confirms that walkie-talkie sabotage of Hezbollah was initiated over a decade ago
Yonah Jeremy Bob
December 24, 2024

A 60 Minutes broadcast on Sunday evening confirmed many of the details behind the beeper and walkie-talkie sabotage attack against Hezbollah: the operation began over a decade ago, with the Mossad initially weaponizing walkie-talkies sold to the Iranian-backed proxy terrorist group. The beeper and walkie-talkie attack sent Hezbollah reeling and was credited for giving Israel an extra opening for a bombing campaign that brought the Lebanese terrorist group to its knees…Several top Israeli sources believe that if the walkie-talkie program had been used in October 2023, it could actually have killed around 15,000 Hezbollah terrorists, dwarfing even the impressive results that came after a year of fighting. READ MORE

CBS 60 Minutes Former agents from Israel’s Mossad detail how they built and sold explosive pagers to Hezbollah terrorists On Sept. 17, after Israel and the terrorist organization Hezbollah had been in an escalating war for nearly a year, the Israeli spy agency Mossad launched one of the most daring and sophisticated deceptions in the history of counter-intelligence: the pager plot, a modern take on the Trojan horse. Mossad created a bomb in a pocket – and tricked Hezbollah fighters into unwittingly wearing these devices on their bodies. Click here to view the episode

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In Gaza: about 5,000 naturally occurring deaths, including cancer fatalities, have been opportunistically added to the tally of “victims”

Posted on December 24, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

NATIONAL POST
Exposing Hamas’s phony casualty statistics
Jesse Kline
December 23, 2024

…The idea that most of the dead in the Israel-Hamas war are women and children is often heard in western media, which has been uncritically regurgitating Hamas talking points since the start of the war, furthering the narrative that Israel is using disproportionate force and perhaps even committing a “genocide.” Could this possibly be true? Not according to a new report written by Andrew Fox, a former British army officer and senior lecturer at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, for the Henry Jackson Society, a U.K.-based think-tank, which adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that Hamas is intentionally inflating casualty counts, particularly among women and children, as part of its propaganda war against the Jewish state. READ MORE

HENRY JACKSON SOCIETY Questionable Counting: Analyzing the death toll from the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza The reporting of these figures has been analysed by a group of international scholars, who meticulously analysed reports of Gaza war fatalities from February 2024 through May 2024. They examined 1,378 articles from major English-language newspapers and media outlets, specifically The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, the BBC, Reuters, The Associated Press and the Australian ABC. Over that four-month period, 84% of those publications failed to make the critical distinction in total numbers between combatant deaths and civilian deaths.

FUTURE OF JEWISH Joshua Hoffman: The Gaza casualty numbers are unraveling entirely. And they are exposing the “genocide” blood libel against Israel precisely for what it is. As the fog of war begins to clear, the purported casualty statistics are unraveling entirely, exposing a web of deception that is as insidious as it is effective. Consider the brazen falsehoods embedded in these statistics: Adult men falsely counted as women, “Dead women” named Mohammed, Natural deaths misreported as war casualties.

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“Perhaps the pope believed that pointing a finger at the Jews will divert Muslim rage from the Vatican”

Posted on December 24, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Millions of Christians are under Islamist assault, so Pope Francis targets the Jews
Charles Jacobs and Uzay Bulut
December 23, 2024

Christians face persecution, discrimination, forced conversion and even mass murder for their faith in many parts of the Muslim world, yet Pope Francis, in his upcoming book called Hope, calls for an investigation to see if the Jews are committing a “genocide” against Palestinian Muslims in the Gaza Strip. The Jews are not committing genocide against Muslims in Gaza, whose population grew almost 3% last year. Muslims, however, are committing mass murder via jihad against Christians in Africa. Yet the pope cowers from defending his own flock. Africa has become the epicenter of radical Islamic terrorism. Murderous jihad attacks against Christians abound in Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Niger, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL Vatican nativity scene showing baby Jesus on a keffiyeh removed after backlash A seasonal nativity scene at the Vatican has been removed after backlash over its depiction of the baby Jesus lying on a keffiyeh, the traditional scarf used by Palestinians as a national symbol, Catholic media outlets reported Wednesday. The keffiyeh-draped cradle, which was displayed in the Paul VI Hall, was one of a series of nativity scenes collectively titled “Nativity of Bethlehem 2024,” designed by artists Johny Andonia and Faten Nastas Mitwasi, both Palestinians from Bethlehem, according to Vatican News.

FUTURE OF JEWISH Joshua Hoffman: An Open Letter to the Pope By amplifying selective narratives, the Vatican is distorting the realities of war and reinforcing dangerous biases that undermine efforts toward genuine peace.

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Zionism is the modern enactment of Hanukkah’s assertion of the right to Jewish independence, and the necessity of the Jewish state even for Jews outside

Posted on December 24, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

NATIONAL REVIEW
Happy Hanukkah, and Am Yisrael Chai
Jon Levin
December 25, 2024

The deep Zionism of the Hanukkah story resonates especially in this era of endemic anti-Zionism and antisemitism. Hanukkah celebrates Jews’ successful assertion of their right to live freely in their ancestral homeland with Jerusalem as its capital, and warns that without Israel, Jews cannot be truly free anywhere. That the holiday came to be celebrated as a mystical miracle instead of a military triumph illustrates how good treatment of Jews in a non-Jewish state is inherently contingent and insufficient, and only an independent Jewish state can guarantee Jewish wellbeing. READ MORE

TABLET MAG Christmas, the Greatest Jewish American Holiday In America, this promised land, Christmas is a Jewish holiday. Our Christmas soundtrack, which resounds from every mall, drugstore and grocery, was mostly composed by Jews. “Let It Snow,” “Silver Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Winter Wonderland,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Baby”—all are the work of Jewish songwriters. Hollywood, that Jewish American mecca, gave us Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life. The artificial Christmas tree was invented by a World War II bomber pilot named Si Spiegel, whose crew was made up of five Catholics, two Jews and one WASP.

FREE PRESS Eli Lake: Why These Christmas Songs Could Only Be Written in America It was Jewish Americans like Irving Berlin who drew on Yiddish and the rhythms and chords of traditional cantorial music to create our most beloved Christmas tunes

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