Sen Bernie Sanders: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He should not be invited to address a joint meeting of Congress. I certainly will not attend.”

Posted on June 3, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

ALGEMEINER
Netanyahu Address to US Congress, ICC Arrest Warrants Lay Bare Democrat Divides Over Israel
Corey Walker
June 3, 2024

A dramatic variance in responses from US Democratic lawmakers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming address to a joint session of Congress and efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to seek his arrest are exposing potential fractures within America’s primary left-wing party over its support for the Jewish state. A slew of Democratic lawmakers are seething over Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ (D-NY) decision to sign an invitation for Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress. Likewise, some Democrats are jubilant over ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s decision to seek an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over his handling of the Israel-Hamas war — an act that seemingly placed the Israeli leader on the same moral level of Hamas terrorists Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, whose arrests the ICC is also seeking. READ MORE

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Will the film “Israelism” help turn a generation against Israel ?

Posted on June 3, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JTA
‘Israelism,’ the progressive Jewish documentary roiling college campuses, gets digital release with Watermelon Pictures
Andrew Lapin
June 5, 2024

They wanted to capture a growing Jewish generational divide over Israel. The Jewish makers of “Israelism” accomplished that — and then some. Over the last seven months, the documentary critiquing the American Jewish relationship to Israel has become something closer to a foundational text for the campus pro-Palestinian movement. It’s been screened at more than 100 colleges, including several encampments. It has toured overseas and won support from an array of Jewish groups on the left, from the liberal J Street to avowed anti-Zionists. Fights over campus screenings have spilled over into public view, fueling the film’s accusations that the institutional Jewish community is incapable of weathering any criticism of Israel. This week, following some previous small windows of online availability, “Israelism” is getting a full digital release. A movie made to prompt a difficult Jewish conversation is now being distributed by Watermelon Pictures, a Palestinian-owned company…READ MORE

I’m embedding this trailer to help explain the problem with this film. It appears to follow a predictable narrative selectively removing facts and context in order to dishonestly frame the Arab-Israel conflict. The premise: The Palestinians are peace-yearning hapless victims lacking agency and the Israelis are cruel violent oppressors who have stolen the Palestinian’s land. Said differently, propaganda to demonize Zionists and diminish support for Israel.

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish | Tagged , | 1 Comment

“Queers for Palestine” is the equivalent of “Chickens for Kentucky Fried Chicken”

Posted on June 1, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
‘Queers for Palestine,’ Like ‘Minks for Fur Coats,’ Support Those Who Want to Slaughter Them
Bassam Tawil
June 3, 2024

…”When it comes to Queers for Palestine, what’s richly ironic is that many LGBTQ Palestinians seek asylum in Israel – the same country these stateside protesters are rallying against,” noted Billy Binion, associate editor at Reason, where he writes about criminal justice and government accountability. “Queers for Palestine is another manifestation of how our society is really becoming stupid,” said prominent author and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali….”Queers for Palestine” should talk to “Queers in Palestine” to find out about the suffering of the Palestinian LGBTQ community. “Queers for Palestine” should be advocating for the rights of their colleagues in the West Bank and Gaza Strip instead of staging demonstrations against Israel, the only country in the Middle East where LGBTQ people feel secure. READ MORE

Do Queers for Palestine understand what they’re supporting?

FRONT PAGE MAG The Hamas Role in the Worst Massacre of Gay People in America On the anniversary of the Pulse massacre, “Queers for Palestine” rally for their own killers. The terrorist attack at a gay nightclub is commemorated every year in the gay community without a single reference to the fact that Omar was a Muslim terrorist killing for Islam.

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What DEI really stands for: “Discrimination, Exclusion and Indoctrination”

Posted on May 31, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

CITY JOURNAL
Didn’t Earn It: For more and more Americans, these words spell out the real meaning of DEI
John Tierney
June 4, 2024

George Orwell despaired at the linguistic atrocities of propagandists, but he did offer one bit of hope in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.” While lamenting that “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” he noted that some abuses of the language were vulnerable to “jeers” from a few critics. “Silly words and expressions have often disappeared,” he wrote, “not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority.” So perhaps a jeering minority will rid us of today’s most egregiously indefensible phrase: “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” It’s a textbook example of doublespeak, the term inspired by Orwell’s 1984 dystopia in which the Newspeak language enables citizens to engage in “doublethink”—simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs. The words in DEI sound like admirable goals, but the officials mouthing them are working to do just the opposite, as Florida governor Ron DeSantis observed when he banned DEI initiatives at public universities. READ MORE

CITY JOURNAL How DEI Inspires Jew Hatred After DEI took hold at Penn, anti-Semitic fervor on campus intensified. At first glance, DEI seems to have little connection to the Jewish people or the Jewish state. It is more often associated with efforts to recruit more minority students by lowering admissions standards, creating racially discriminatory scholarships, and setting racial quotas. While I witnessed all that and more before my retirement from Penn in 2021, I also came to see that subscribing to DEI almost inevitably resulted in attacking Jews.

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Glick: “Since Oct. 7, it has become clear that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi has been playing Israel for a fool”

Posted on May 30, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Egypt must pay a price for its sponsorship of Hamas
Caroline Glick
May 23, 2024

Israelis have long viewed Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as an ally in the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran. Sisi, after all, led the Egyptian military in overthrowing Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government of then-president Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Since the Hamas regime in Gaza played a key role in ousting former President Hosni Mubarak from power and assisting Muslim Brotherhood terrorists from escaping Egyptian prisons in the Sinai in 2011 and 2012, el-Sisi also shared Israel’s negative view of Hamas. He stood with Israel during the Hamas war against Israel in 2014. But over the past several years, Sisi’s position has changed. And since Oct. 7, Egypt’s role in Hamas’s build-up of its forces and military capabilities has come into sharp relief. Indeed, as the months have passed, the conclusion has become unavoidable that far from acting as a restraint on Hamas’s military and economic power as it did a decade ago, Egypt in recent years, and still today is a major state sponsor of Hamas. READ MORE

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Israeli opposition to the introduction of the PA into Gaza post-Hamas is understandable, but in the absence of better alternatives, the American whim should be considered positively.

Posted on May 30, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JERUSALEM INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGY AND SECURITY
Let the Palestinian Authority into Gaza
Professor Efraim Inbar
May 26, 2024

While Israel has announced that it will not remain in the Gaza Strip come the end of the war, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not give in to pressure from groups that wish to see Israel re-settle the territory, Jerusalem must nevertheless beware of being sucked into a prolonged stay in Gaza and the subsequent need to take responsibility for the welfare of its residents. Israel would thus be well advised to find a body to rule Gaza the “day after” the IDF’s withdrawal, or it will find itself facing a political vacuum that generates favorable ground for the return of Hamas or other hostile actors. The US and the international community see the destruction of Hamas’ military power as an opportunity for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to take the reins in Gaza after it was forcibly expelled by Hamas in 2007. Prime Minister Netanyahu disagrees. READ MORE

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Top UN court: Israel should halt its offensive in Rafah (but it doesn’t have a way to enforce its ruling)

Posted on May 28, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

THE HILL
Graham: International Court of Justice ‘can go to hell’ over Israel ruling
Alexander Bolton
May 24, 2024

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said the United Nations’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) “can go to hell” after it ordered Israel to immediately halt its military assault of Rafah, a densely populated area in southern Gaza. “As far as I’m concerned, the ICJ can go to hell. It is long past time to stand up to these so-called international justice organizations associated with the UN,” Graham said in a post on the social platform X. “The ICJ’s ruling that Israel should stop operations that are necessary to destroy four battalions of Hamas killers and terrorists – who use Palestinians as human shields – is ridiculous. This will and should be ignored by Israel,” Graham said. READ MORE

TIMES OF ISRAEL Irwin Cotler: ICC prosecutor weaponized international law in ‘incomprehensible’ way  Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister and attorney general, has strongly criticized the decision by International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan to seek arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant…In a recent in-depth interview with The Times of Israel, Cotler said he did not believe Khan’s charges — that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians in Gaza and of “willful killing” of civilians during the ongoing war with Hamas — were well-founded and upbraided the prosecutor for abandoning a path of cooperation with Israel and instead embarking on a “preemptive, preclusive and prejudicial” process.

JNS David M. Litman Fact-checking the ICJ: Omissions and deceptions Unsurprisingly, the International Court of Justice played along with the cynical attempt by Hamas’s ally South Africa to halt the Israeli military operation launched to destroy the terrorist organization after its horrific Oct. 7 massacre. Equally unsurprising is that the ICJ justified its ruling by relying on a thin, distorted and inaccurate set of “facts.” In its May 24 ruling, the court relied on a handful of dubious, generalized and misleading claims made by various United Nations figures.

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“Everywhere we visited in Israel, locals thanked us for coming and asked us to tell other Americans to come visit, even if it’s just to spend their dollars to help out the economy”

Posted on May 28, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

DANS DEALS
Despite Tourism To Israel Being Down 80%, It Will Soon Be More Difficult And Expensive To Visit
May 27, 2024

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s tourist economy is hurting. I visited Israel after Purim and was taken aback by the eerie emptiness of the normal throngs of tourists everywhere from the airport to city centers. Renting a car in Israel is usually a lengthy process, but there was nobody else in line renting a car. Hotels were running at small fractions of normal occupancy and their restaurants were closed. Storefronts in many areas were closed and sitting empty…There are endless volunteer activities that you can find on Facebook groups like this. Chabad of Katamon also does incredible work with volunteer opportunities from making sandwiches to missions to the Gaza Envelope cities and BBQs for soldiers, which you can learn more about via their Whatsapp group. Colel Chabad’s Pantry Packers is another amazing activity where kids and adults of all ages will have fun while helping out. READ MORE

REUTERS Israel launches ETA system for visa-exempt countries Israel said on Tuesday it was moving to an electronic travel authorisation system for visitors from visa-exempt countries starting in August, joining Britain, the United States, Canada and other countries that have such systems. Visitors from non-visa countries will need the ETA to stay for up to 90 days in Israel having previously been able to visit the country without it. Entry will continue to be determined by a border control officer, it said, as in other countries with a similar system.

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Israel’s Palestinian partners in peace: “My father raped her, then I did and then my cousin did and then we left. But my father killed the woman after we finished raping her”

Posted on May 27, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

JNS
Hamas barbarism in living color
Ruthie Blum
May 26, 2024

The footage screened on a digital billboard in New York City’s Times Square on Friday isn’t for the faint-hearted. Still, viewing it is a must for anyone who doesn’t believe, or has forgotten, the atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 The clip was released on Wednesday by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum. It was filmed by a group of Palestinian terrorists armed with deadly weapons and body cameras—the latter to document their genocidal attack…Two interrogation videos that the IDF revealed on Thursday, after they’d been obtained and reported by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, served as an apt companion to the above. They show father-and-son terrorists—both captured in March by Israeli troops in Gaza—confessing to the rape, murder and abduction of Kibbutz Nir Oz residents on Oct. 7…READ MORE

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“The notion that the US has normalized terrorist acts is not hyperbole, nor is it alarmist; it is a categorically true statement and, contrary to popular belief, was evident pre-October 7”

Posted on May 27, 2024 by ArchitectGuy

INSIDE THE MIND
Decades of Denial: How Islamists Won the War against Western Values
Amelia Adams
May 13, 2024

In the wake of pro hama-sorry, pro
“resistance” rallies and encampments, it seems that everyone’s jaws are on the floor. People just cannot believe that US college students are aligning themselves with terrorist regimes. Boomers scratch their heads while younger Jews, who have been sounding the alarm on this for years, roll their eyes, for they understand that the United States has slowly become completely desensitized to terrorism…I discovered that what sounded like a Fox News conspiracy theory was actually a decades long open secret made up of three components: 1. Support for terrorism is alive and well in the US. 2. The “worry for Palestine” was never about Palestine. 3. This issue is truly about Western civilization. READ MORE

WASHINGTON TIMES Clifford May Europe’s Hamasniks: U.N., Norway, Spain, Ireland and others back the terrorists These developments should serve as a reminder – not that you needed one – of what the U.N. and many other international organizations have become: clubs for tyrants, terrorists, and antisemites, their fellow travelers and assorted useful idiots, all of them emboldened by billions of dollars provided by America and its allies.

Posted in Islam, Israel & Middle East, Jewish, Politics | Leave a comment