“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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“Turkey’s rise disrupts Riyadh’s narrative depicting itself as the undisputed leader of the Sunni Muslim world, countering Shia Iran”

Posted on December 23, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

ATLANTIC COUNCIL
The Middle East’s shifting balance of power favors Turkey and Israel
Frederick Kempe
December 21, 2024

It’s hard to predict where the Middle East’s ongoing seismic shifts will leave the region following the collapse of the Syrian regime. What’s already clear, however, is that Israel and Turkey are the big winners, having gained in ways that were unimaginable even a few weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov writes that now those two US allies, whose relations have grown far worse since the war in Gaza began last year, are set on “a collision course” in Syria and beyond.  Assessing what Israel hopes to get out of the dramatic geopolitical realignment of the Middle East isn’t hard, as its national interests are well known and existential in nature. Its decisions are driven by its need for security, by its desire to maintain military and technological superiority, and by its enduring need to deter, contain, and counter Iran and its proxies. READ MORE

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Druze history is “a part of the still highly disputed story of why so many Arabs left the war zone of the First Arab-Israeli War (AKA Israel’s War of Independence) in 1948”

Posted on December 23, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

FUTURE OF JEWISH
The Big Druze News You Didn’t Hear About
Sally Prag
December 26, 2024

A few days ago, a number of Druze villages in the Syrian Golan Heights announced that they wanted Israel to annex the area of Syria in which they are located, so that they will be under Israeli rule and thus have their rights protected by Israel. This is big news. Yet it seems the story is being suppressed by Western media. And there’s great significance here…[In 1948] many Druze, concerned for the safety of their families, did leave, but not all. Some, like a small number of Muslim Arabs, decided to listen to the Jewish leaders and stay in their homes. When the war ended with Israel having claimed victory over areas previously designated to the Arabs for an Arab state within the original mandate, which they had declined on the grounds that they wanted the entirety of the mandate to remain Arab, those Arabs who had remained in their homes became Israeli citizens, while those who left became Palestinian refugees. READ MORE

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“Removing the Iranian regime, often described as the “mother of all terrorism” and the godfather of terrorist groups, would bring lasting security and prosperity to the Middle East and beyond”

Posted on December 22, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
Thank You, Israel, for Saving the World, Defending Freedom and Reshaping the Middle East
Majid Rafizadeh
December 21, 2024

…In just over a year, Israel has succeeded in reducing Iran’s regional influence, effectively dismantling or weakening the pillars of its strategy—the Syrian regime, Hezbollah, and Hamas. This achievement is unparalleled. It disrupted decades of Iran’s poisonous dominance in the region. Thanks to Israel’s strategic and calculated actions, Iran’s regime, which had survived Western sanctions and interventions since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, now faces unprecedented challenges to its survival, which cannot come to an end soon enough. Israel’s efforts to eradicate terrorism and destabilize its sources have largely been accomplished without substantial assistance from Western democracies. It is now time for the West to step up and support Israel and most of the Iranian people in addressing the root of the problem: the Iranian regime. READ MORE

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