“No Jews, no news,” Torres quipped.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

New York Congressman Ritchie Torres criticized anti-Israel protesters for continuing to focus on Gaza while ignoring the massacre of Alawite minorities by the Syrian government.

“The new regime in Syria is massacring the Alawite minority population, leaving a death toll of more than 1,000. These mass atrocities have been met with deafening silence from all the anti-Israel agitators who spent the last year and a half engaged in human rights theater,” Torres wrote on X.

“No Jews, no news,” he added.

The Syrian government announced it would open an investigation into the killings of Alawites.

The Alawites appealed to Israel to intervene militarily against the new government.

Leaders of the Alawite community, which had strongly backed former president Bashar Assad, penned a letter to Israeli leaders, calling for the IDF to intervene in Syria on their behalf against the new regime.

Alawite leaders sent letters to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, requesting that Israel take military action to protect the Alawite community.

“Save us from the brutal regime, we will receive you with songs and flowers,” the letter reads in part, while urging the Israeli media to “shed light on the massacres” in Latakia.

In the letter, the Alawite leaders lament that after “the fall of the Assad regime and the assumption of power in Syria by an extremist Islamic group,” their community has been targeted by the new regime with acts of “killing, kidnapping, displacement, and intimidation as a method of ruling and domination.”

The letter’s signatories requested that the Israeli military “move its planes and forces to protect us,” that the Israeli navy be deployed off Syria’s Mediterranean coast, and that Israel’s government “raise the issue of crimes against the Alawites at the international level.”

“We say to the Jewish state, we extend our hands to you and will be your best and most loyal friends, so that you can rid us of this extremist Islamic rule that will serve as a place for training and preparing groups from which they will launch their fight against you.”

The post NY congressman Torres asks: ‘Where are the protests against Syria?’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Al-Julani said the IDF’s ground incursions into Syria ‘threaten unjustified escalation in the region.’

By World Israel News Staff

Although Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani has made conciliatory remarks about not wanting conflict with neighboring countries, including Israel, there is some indication that he is envisioning “a Greater Syria,” according to Israel HaYom columnist Dr. Yehuda Balanga.

Balanga believes that al-Julani may be aiming for a “Greater Syria” that includes Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel.

His peaceful talk may just be an attempt to put his Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham group in a positive light as it grabs the spotlight.

Some of al-Julani’s statements have given hope that the new Syrian government may seek good relations with Israel.

Regarding Israel, al-Julani said the current situation “does not allow for entering new conflicts. The priority at this stage is reconstruction and stability, not getting dragged into conflicts that could lead to further destruction.”

The world may be prepared to see Al-Julani, formerly a member of ISIS and Al-Qaeda with a $10 million US bounty on his head, as a reformed “man of peace.” However, al-Julani has made other statements taking a less charitable view of Israel. For example, he said that Israel’s claims about Syria “no longer justify its recent violations” and  that the IDF’s ground incursions into Syria “threaten unjustified escalation in the region.”

Al-Julani criticized the Israeli “aggression” and claimed it violated the 1974 ceasefire agreement. He called for “firm and immediate measures” to get Israel out of Syria, which implies that Syria would be in conflict with Israel if the IDF does not withdraw from its positions and continues to target Syria’s military infrastructure.

Does al-Julani’s group really think that “Greater Syria” will one day rule its neighbors, including Israel?

No one can be sure, but hearing Syrian rebels screaming that their next stop is Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem may be a sign of troubling times to come.

The post Does Syrian rebel leader envision a ‘Greater Syria’ that includes Israel? appeared first on World Israel News.

Despite having a career dedicated to the Israel-Arab conflict Martin Indyk can’t manage to get even the most basic facts correct.

By Moshe Phillips

Martin Indyk has spent his entire professional life immersed in the Arab-Israeli conflict, holding prominent positions in advocacy groups, think tanks, and the State Department. So how is it that he still can’t get the most basic facts about the conflict right?

In the March-April 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs, Indyk makes the case for why it would be great to have a sovereign Palestinian state as soon as possible. Yet again and again throughout the essay, he makes glaring errors in referring to key aspects of the history and nature of the Arab war against Israel.

For someone who served as ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State (among other positions), Indyk is either surprisingly ignorant or surprisingly careless about his area of presumed expertise. Either possibility is alarming.

Let’s start with Indyk’s “history” of the idea of creating a Palestinian state. He wants to show that the proposal has deep roots. It’s not just something that he and his State Department friends cooked up last week; it has a tradition. Because, presumably, something with a long history is less scary than something which seems new and radical. He writes: “The two-state solution dates back to at least 1937, when a British commission suggested a partition of the British mandate territory…”

Indyk is off by fifteen years. The two-state solution began in 1922, not 1937. And what happened in 1922 was not just some British proposal—the British actually implemented it. They physically partitioned the Palestine Mandate territory, giving the 78% east of the Jordan River to the Arabs, leaving only 22% on the western side for the Jews.

Too bad the British didn’t just honestly call the eastern part of Palestine “East Palestine.” That would have spared us all a lot of rhetorical confusion over the years. Instead, they chose to call it “Trans-Jordan.” Not because the people living there were ethnically “Trans-Jordanian.”

They were no different from the Arabs living on the western side of the Jordan. They called it “Trans-Jordan” because that means “other side of the Jordan.” The name was geographically convenient. Many years later, the country’s king changed the name to “Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,” so that his particular tribe’s name would be enshrined as part of the country’s name. It was what we call a land-grab.

Could Indyk really not know how, when and why Jordan was created? Not likely. More likely is that he was being deliberately disingenuous when he skipped 1922 and went straight to 1937.

Another blatant error by Indyk in his Foreign Affairs article concerns the crucial issue of Palestinian Arab refugees. After the UN’s 1947 resolution, he writes, “The ensuing war led to the founding of the state of Israel; millions of Palestinians, meanwhile, became refugees, and their national aspirations languished.”

How many falsehoods can an alleged “expert” pack into one sentence? First, the war of 1948 was not just “an ensuing war,” as if both sides were culpable. It was unprovoked Arab aggression. Israel did not invade any Arab countries; five Arab armies invaded Israel.

Second, “millions” of Palestinian Arabs did not become refugees. Mainstream historians and demographers estimate that about 1.3-million Arabs lived in the Palestinian Mandate in 1947, and between 600,000 and 700,000 of them left their homes to get out of the way of the invading Arab armies. Not “millions.”

Third, their “national aspirations” did not “languish.” Their aspiration was to annihilate Israel, and they acted on it every day. There were constant Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks throughout the 1950s and continuing ever since. In 1964, they established the PLO. They have fought endlessly for their “national aspirations,” that is, to replace Israel with “Palestine”—by murdering Jews.

When Indyk gets to 1967, he does it again. He writes that the Six Day War “placed millions of Palestinians under direct Israeli control.” Wrong again. In 1967, there were about 400,000 Arabs living in Gaza, and another 900,000 living in Judea-Samaria. Not “millions.”

I understand why Indyk inflates the numbers. The larger the number, the worse Israel looks. But changing history to score political points is just wrong.

Martin Indyk wants us to trust him. He wants Israel and world Jewry to believe that based on his vast experience, he knows best how to bring about Middle East peace. But looking at his new Foreign Affairs article, so chock full of bias, exaggerations, and omissions of key historical facts—all to Israel’s detriment—I would say that he has not yet earned the Jewish people’s trust.

Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press.

The post The former US ambassador to Israel who can’t get basic facts right appeared first on World Israel News.

‘If the Palestinians are a people deserving of a state, they are also responsible for their actions – including voting Hamas into power.’

The post WATCH: Israel’s war on Hamas is a battle of good versus evil appeared first on World Israel News.

5-year-old Ido Avigal, who died by Gaza rocket fire in 2021, had his photo misappropriated by Ahmad Tibi who purported that he was a Palestinian child killed by Israeli fire.

By World Israel News Staff

Arab Israeli MK Ahmad Tibi has come under fire for publishing a photograph of a Jewish Israeli child – who was killed by rocket fire from Gaza terrorists – among the faces of Palestinian children allegedly killed by the IDF.

In a since-removed post shared in response to a tweet by Israel Hayom journalist Yehuda Schlesinger, Tibi depicted 36 children, one of whom was Ido Avigal. Avigal, aged 5, died in May 2021 during a rocket attack launched from the Gaza Strip on a residential area in Israel.

Avigal’s mother took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to request that her son’s picture be removed from the montage.

“Hey Ahmad, what’s up, you read me?” she wrote on X. “It’s totally cool to take all sorts of kids, put them in one photo, and tell the world that the IDF killed them, but is there a chance that you could remove the photo of my child from there? I am pretty sure Hamas killed him, and also wounded my daughter, and my nephews, as well as myself. But I’m not a child, so whatever. Ah, yeah. They did actually fire at a home.”

Schlesinger’s original post on X asserted that the IDF “does not bomb homes with children [inside].” It came after an interview aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which Shira Eting, a former combat helicopter pilot who is active in the Brothers and Sisters in Arms protest group, spoke about the absolute trust pilots must have in the decision-makers ordering strikes that might potentially harm children. The comment was part of a broader discussion on the Israeli government’s plans for judicial reform.

Tibi, who is in the Hadash-Ta’al party, accompanied the montage with the comment, “Except for these times” in a bid to counter Schlesinger’s claim.

Avigal died during Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021, in which more than 4,000 rockets were aimed at civilian population centers in Israel.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called Tibi a “terrorist” in a harsh rebuke.

“Ahmad Tibi the terrorist, are you not ashamed to use the photo of an innocent Jewish child who was murdered by your friends in Hamas? It is a disgrace that you are in the Knesset.”

The post Arab MK includes picture of Israeli boy killed by Gaza rocket fire in post about Palestinian children killed by IDF appeared first on World Israel News.

Iran, the 2nd anniversary of the Abraham accords, Jared Kushner’s latest book, and much more in this ILTV exclusive interview with Jason Greenblatt, former White House envoy to the Middle East, author of “In the Path of Abraham” and host of podcast “The Diplomat” on Newsweek.

The post WATCH: Trump Mideast envoy Greenblatt gives forecast for Israel and US appeared first on World Israel News.

“Haters can spin anti-Zionism anyway they want; the reality is it results in hate and violence aimed at Jews everywhere.”

By Faygie Holt, JNS.org

A Canadian Parliament minister took to social media this week to recount an incident of antisemitism at her daughter’s graduation ceremony, held on the grounds of a Toronto area amusement park.

In her posting, Ya’ara Saks, MP for York Centre in Toronto, wrote: “I debated whether to share this because it was so hard, but I think it’s important to state that this happens nearly every day: Yesterday, I went to my daughter’s graduation at Wonderland. … Many of the parents there were visibly Jewish (kipot, modest dress, sheitels). As families were walking, a group of young people passed and yelled out ‘stop killing Palestinians.’

“These parents are Canadians, living here. This wasn’t a public event nor had it anything to do with the conflict; it was a high school graduation,” wrote the MP. “They’re just visibly Jewish. This is so wrong. It’s collectively blaming Jews for a foreign conflict. It’s hate, it’s antisemitism, it’s dangerous, and it needs to stop.”

“As leaders, as communities, we must address this. Hate allowed to fester only grows. We need to build bridges across communities, and we must do it now,” wrote Saks, who also serves as the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development.

“We need to educate about what and how hate spreads. We need to stand up and call it out to make sure that those young people know what they did was wrong and won’t be tolerated in any quarter,” she added.

Responding in a tweet, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, wrote: “This behavior is utterly unacceptable. We must work together to create the Canada in which all Canadians of good will aspire to live.”

Marvin Rotrand, national director of B’nai Brith Canada’s League for Human Rights, told JNS: “The ­­haters can spin anti-Zionism anyway they want, but the reality is it results in hate and violence aimed at Jews everywhere in the world. There is always an underlying threat of violence.”

‘We offer our support to MP Saks and her family, and indeed all those at this school graduation who are victims of this antisemitic act. We can never allow Jew-hatred to be normalized in Canada,” he added.

The post Canadian MP laments anti-Israel taunts at daughter’s high school graduation appeared first on World Israel News.

Deputy Minister Matan Kahana apologizes to Arab MK Ahmad Tibi for saying he would send Arabs on an express train to live better lives in Switzerland.

By World Israel News Staff

A senior coalition member sparked outrage from Arab and leftwing MKs after he was caught on camera saying that if there was a button he could press to transfer all the Arabs in the Holy Land to Switzerland to “live a wonderful, wonderful life,” he would do so.

Deputy Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana’s remarks prompted MK Ahmed Tibi to threaten that he, too, would “press the button” to make Kahana disappear from the government.

Kahana later issued an apology, saying his comments were badly phrased.

Speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on Monday to a group of high school students in the town of Efrat, Kahana said that he doesn’t believe peace is possible, at least not in the near future.

“If there was a button you could press that would make all the Arabs disappear, that would send them on an express train to Switzerland — may they live wonderful, wonderful lives there, I wish them all the best in the world, in Switzerland — I would press that button,” he said in a recording that was aired by the Kan public broadcaster.

“But what can you do, there’s no such button,” he continued. “Therefore it seems like we were both destined to exist here on this land in some form.”

Kahana , who recently failed to be reinstated as religious affairs minister, also said that the leftwing notion that there would be peace if Israel reverted to pre-1967 lines and gave up on Jewish communities in Judea and Samria is “nonsense.”

“The Arabs will never give up Beit Gamliel and they will never give up on Sheikh Munis — Tel Aviv University,” he said, referring to a Palestinian village that was evacuated in 1948 in what is today’s suburb of Ramat Aviv.

“For 2,000 years, we dreamed, we prayed, we wrote songs and waited for the moment to come back to our state,” the Yamina MK said.

“But the Arabs are telling themselves a different story, we know it’s nonsense and not true,” Kahana said. “They are telling themselves that they are the ones who always lived here and that we came and expelled them.”

His remarks were denounced by several lawmakers, including from the Islamist Ra’am party, which sits in the coalition with Yamina.

“Matan Kahana, we are here because this is our homeland,” Ra’am MK Walid Taha said. “You, and anyone who thinks like you, will continue to be embroiled in frustration because we simply won’t disappear.”

MK Ahmad Tibi, from the majority Arab Joint List party in the opposition, tweeted, “There is a button that will make you disappear from the government and from the Knesset. I will press it soon.”

The threat was an apparent reference to the power that Tibi holds in deciding the fate of the shaky coalition. Tibi recently held talks with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid regarding a vote in favor of the coalition in exchange for advancing measures addressing the needs of the Arab sector.

Kahana acknowledged on Tuesday morning that his remarks had included “poor choice of words.”

After he was criticized, Kahana apologized to Tibi in a phone call, but the Arab MK demanded that he publicly apologize. Kahana agreed and wrote a tweet saying: “In a conversation I held last night with students, I reiterated the obvious idea that neither we nor the Arabs are going anywhere, and that’s why we need to find a way to live here together. The current government is an important step in that direction. My word flow included some bad phrasing.”

The post Send Arabs on trains to Switzerland? Israeli MK pushes Tibi’s buttons appeared first on World Israel News.

The Jewish community needs to take a long, hard look at the role that many Jewish academics play in influencing Jewish college students to side with the Palestinians over Israel.

By Moshe Phillips

We hear a lot about Jewish college students who have become pro-Palestinian. We know about polls showing that younger American Jews are much less connected to Israel than their parents.

How can this trend be explained? Why do so many Jewish 18-year-olds begin their university studies with the pro-Israel sentiments they learned at home, then emerge four years later more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than to Israel?

At least part of the answer to this question can be found in a recent essay by a retiring professor of Israeli and Middle Eastern history at the University of Pennsylvania.

For more than 30 years, Ian Lustick taught about Israel to many members of the large Jewish student body at Penn. The total number of Jewish students who took his courses was at least in the many hundreds, perhaps in the thousands.

He lectured to them every day. He assigned their readings. He answered their questions. He organized discussion groups and symposia and summer trips to Israel. When it came to Israel and the Arabs, Ian Lustick was their authority figure.

Reflecting on his recent retirement (in the latest issue of the Penn Jewish Studies newsletter), Ian Lustick explained what he set out to do in his academic career, and how he did it.

When Lustick was a student at Brandeis University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he writes, he spent an “impactful” semester at the Brandeis program in Israel, known as the Jacob Hiatt Institute.

We have a glimpse of that “impact” from an article he wrote at the time (in 1972) for a student newspaper, “The Jewish Radical.” There Lustick urged American Jews to give less money to Israel and instead “channel” some of it to a Hiatt Institute fund to help Palestinian Arabs.

He wrote that the “degeneracy” of unnamed “Zionists” had “prevented the Palestinians from disturbing their consciences.” He declared that world Jewry bears “moral responsibility, if not culpability, for the suffering of millions of Palestinian Arabs.”

‘Unsettling discoveries’

Returning from Israel to the Brandeis campus, Lustick found that the demands being made by “the movement for Black Studies” on campus “resonated with me.” He was referring to the eleven-day takeover of a Brandeis building in 1969 by student militants demanding the creation of an Afro-American Studies department.

At the time, not many American universities had Jewish Studies departments. Apparently, the militants’ takeover inspired Lustick to realize that through Jewish studies programs, he could influence large numbers of young Jews regarding what he called “real problems” such as “discrimination by Israel against Palestinian Arabs.”

He recalled proudly that at Brandeis, he and his friends undertook “more sophisticated forms of engagement with Israel than those prevailing at the time.” He says those activities helped create the environment which led to “the founding of Jewish Studies programs around the country, including at Penn,” where he ended up teaching for more than three decades.

In his classes at Penn, Lustick writes, he promoted “an intellectually rigorous approach to the study of Israel and Zionism.” He says his “best teaching” was when he helped students who were “struggling” with the “unsettling discoveries” they made about “Israel-Palestinian relations.”

Let’s take a closer look at what he has written and said about Israel over the years, to understand what he was undoubtedly saying to his students in class to inspire those “unsettling discoveries” about Israel.

Comparing Israel to the Nzais

In 1988, Lustick wrote a book called “For the Land and the Lord.” It was so hostile to Israel that even the left-wing magazine The Reconstructionist complained that “Lustick’s sermonizing reeks of them can’t and dual-standard so frequently applied and misapplied by the West to the Middle East.”

In a 1993 article, Lustick wrote that support for “united Jerusalem” is “a carefully cultivated fetish.” In 1997, he denounced Jewish construction in Jerusalem as “confiscatory, discriminatory and aggressive settlement activities in the Jerusalem area.” At the height of Palestinian Arab terrorism against Israel, in 2002, Lustick wrote that Palestinian Arab violence was “probably a necessity” in order to convince Israel to make more concessions.

Lustick has also compared Israel to the Nazis. He has written that Israeli soldiers who serve in the territories, “in the aftermath of the Holocaust,” are comparable to soldiers in the past who were infamously “following orders” (2002). He has demanded that Israel apologize to the Palestinian Arabs for committing “injustices” against them, just as Germany apologized to the Jewish people after the Holocaust (2006).

In a 2013 op-ed in the New York Times, Lustick compared Israel to apartheid South Africa, demanded that Israel surrender its nuclear weapons, and called on Israelis to give up “statist Zionism” and agree to live in “one state” with the Palestinian Arabs.

In his most recent book, published in 2019, Lustick claimed that Israel carries out “the continuous mass shooting of Palestinian civilians [in Gaza]…murder[ing] and maim[ing] so many men, women and children trying to escape from the ghetto within which they have been concentrated.”

Influenced by Jewish authority figures

This, then, is what Ian Lustick has been teaching Jewish students at Penn for more than 30 years: that degenerate, racist, Nazi-like Israelis are slaughtering Arabs and preventing peace, and therefore the Jewish State should be replaced.

So I ask, which is more likely: that Jewish college students are being seduced by Muslim campus groups, or that they are being gradually influenced by Jewish authority figures such as Ian Lustick, who are in a position to shape their views every day in class?

I’m not accusing Lustick or like-minded Jewish professors of being bad Jews or self-haters or traitors. They are entitled to their opinions. And freedom of speech on our college campuses ensures their right to teach whatever they want. But parents also have a right to know who is teaching their kids about Israel, and to decide if they are comfortable with a particular professor’s perspective.

This is not just a matter of concern to individual parents; it also has important implications for our community as a whole.

The Jewish community needs to take a long, hard look at the role that many Jewish academics have played, and are continuing to play, in influencing Jewish college students to side with the Palestinian Arabs over Israel.

Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs. He was a U.S. delegate to the 38th World Zionist Congress in 2020.

The post This is who’s teaching our kids about Israel – opinion appeared first on World Israel News.

“Huda’s Salon” infuriates enemies of the Jewish state by demeaning the Palestinian struggle against the “Israeli occupation,” disrespecting Islam.

By World Israel News Staff

A Palestinian film titled “Huda’s Salon” enraged Palestinians over alleged attempts to distort the image of the Palestinian people and scenes described as “pornographic,” Ynet reported. 

The psychological thriller received positive feedback at the Toronto Film Festival last year but has caused an uproar in the Middle East. Audiences are accusing the filmmakers of insulting the Palestinian struggle against the “Israeli occupation” and dishonoring Islam by showcasing nude content

The film’s protagonist “Reem,” played by actress Maisa Abd Elhadi from Nazareth, is drugged and photographed with a stranger in full nude by another Palestinian woman. The woman, Huda, then blackmails Reem into becoming an informant for the Israeli Secret Service (Shin Bet).

The Palestinian filmmaker, Hany Abu-Assaid, appears to criticize not only Israel, but also the Palestinian Authority and the prevailing gender inequality in Palestinian society.

“[Arab women] understand exactly how vulnerable they are in a society where some of the men are misogynistic and will prefer to punish the victim rather than to lose their authority,” Abu-Assaid was quoted as saying in an interview with film-review site Hammer to Nail.

An estimated 29% of Palestinian women are victims of gender-based violence, and in the Gaza Strip alone this number increases to 38%, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) 2019 Violence Survey.

The PCBS also recorded 149 cases of femicide (intentional hate crime against women) from 2015 to 2020 in the Palestinian Authority, with the highest percentage reaching 25% in 2020.

PA TV aired an episode in 2017 instructing male viewers how to “use beatings and violence to solve their marital problems” in accordance with the Quran, according to Palestinian Media Watch.

While some viewers commend the filmmaker on raising awareness of sexual harassment and opening a dialogue surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many in the Arab world have called to boycott the project.

In an attempt to dissociate themselves from the film, the Palestinian Culture Ministry wrote in a statement that “the film violates the image of the Palestinian people and it is against its principles,” Ynet reported. 

Palestinian Authority Sharia Judge and Advisor of Religious Affairs Mahmoud al-Habbash called the movie “filth” and wants its creators and associates punished, according to Al-Shabab radio. 

“We have raised a case to prosecute those who offended the homeland, honor and religion,” al-Habbash was quoted as saying in an exclusive radio interview. “Everyone who committed or contributed to [this film] should also be held accountable,” he added.

Hamas also weighed in. ”The film infringes on the struggle of the Palestinian people. This misrepresentation deals with the issue of contacting the occupation in a wrong and offensive way, the facts are missing,” the Gaza-based terror group stated, according to Ynet.

“We call upon the officials and civil society to boycott it,” the statement said. 

Director Abu-Assaid said that the film is based on true events during which the Israeli Secret Service would use what he described as unethical means to turn Palestinian women into informants. Its purpose, the director said, is to inspire questions concerning Palestinian societal norms, reported Hammer to Nail.

“The great challenge of the film was not to outright say who is the victim and who is the offender. It is not impossible that the one you consider the offender may be the victim herself,” said Abu Assaid, as quoted by Ynet. 

Huda’s character is quoted in the movie as saying: “It’s easier to occupy a society that’s already oppressing itself,” the character Huda says in the film.

The post Palestinians enraged over ‘pornographic’ film that exposes shocking flaws in Palestinian society appeared first on World Israel News.

The ADL’s pathological refusal to state the truth about Amnesty indicates that in the campaign against the existence of the State of Israel, the ADL is not on the side of the Jews.

By Caroline Glick, Israel Hayom via JNS.org

One of the more curious responses to Amnesty International’s Israel Apartheid report last week came from the Anti-Defamation League.

On Monday, the heads of Amnesty held a press conference in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. In it they presented the main “findings” of the “investigation” they conducted regarding the status of Israel’s existence.

It turns out that after years of “careful study,” Amnesty’s entirely professional “researchers” determined that Israel has no right to exist.

The Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews after 2,000 years of homeless wandering, is a type of apartheid. Israel’s Jewish identity is apartheid, they said.

The purchase of private land by Jews in sovereign Israel and in Judea and Samaria is apartheid. The use of government land by Jews is apartheid. Enforcement of the laws of the state on non-Jews—you guessed it—is apartheid in the eyes of Amnesty’s hard-nosed, totally unbiased “investigators.”

Amnesty concluded as well that since Israel is an apartheid state that has no right to exist, it is guilty of crimes against humanity and (it almost goes without saying), of war crimes.

Unlike the wretched, cruel, greedy and avaricious Jews, the Palestinians are as pure as the driven snow. The word “terror” only appears three times in Amnesty’s 210-page tome, and is never mentioned as a means to explain any defensive action Israel has undertaken.

As was to be expected, Amnesty used its new “Jews are criminals” report to renew its call for Israel and its citizens to be tried for war crimes before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The “human rights” group also rode its blood libel wave to renew its call for economic sanctions and an arms embargo against Israel.

Amnesty capped its bloodlust off with a call for Israel’s destruction through the immigration of millions of hostile, foreign-born Arabs allegedly descended from Arabs who left Israel during the 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent Jewish state.

Amnesty’s report was roundly condemned as antisemitic propaganda by Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Jewish groups in the United States and worldwide.

You don’t need to be an antisemitism researcher (or a Jew) to recognize that Amnesty’s report flowed from the same hate-infested swamp as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The ADL defended Amnesty

And this brings us to the ADL’s response. The Anti-Defamation League, which has an annual budget of around $100 million, is supposed to be the leading Jewish organization in the Diaspora in the fight against Jew-hatred. But Amnesty’s declaration of war against the Jewish state placed the ADL in a bind. Just a bit over a year ago, the ADL defended Amnesty.

In October 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced his plan to list Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam as antisemitic organizations due to their efforts to advance the antisemitic boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel.

Pompeo’s plan was in keeping with the Trump administration’s overall policy for fighting antisemitism.

In December 2019, then-President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that provided civil rights protection to Jewish students persecuted by BDS campaigns on their campuses.

Given the central role Amnesty and other phony human rights groups play in the political war for the destruction of the largest Jewish community in the world, Pompeo’s planned move was not just reasonable, it was imperative. But rather than applaud him for his resolve, the ADL attacked Pompeo and his plan.

When word broke that Pompeo was about to designate the three groups as antisemitic, the ADL released a statement aimed at undermining and blocking his move.

The statement declared: “We oppose broadly applying the antisemitism label to these human rights organizations; doing so is neither accurate nor helpful to the fight against antisemitism. Rather, this move would politicize the fight against antisemitism.”

A month later Pompeo made it the official policy of the State Department to treat organizations that support BDS as antisemitic groups. But by that time, Trump had lost his reelection bid and the wind had come out of the sails.

Pompeo’s statement did not mention which specific groups were antisemitic. So, thanks in large part to the ADL, Amnesty and its antisemitic comrades dodged the bullet.

On the surface, the ADL’s condemnation of the Amnesty report could have been written by the Zionist Organization of America. But a close look at the ADL’s response makes clear that the organization, which is supposed to lead the struggle against antisemitism, hasn’t changed its position since it defended Amnesty from Pompeo’s charge of antisemitism.

When the Anti-Defamation League refuses to fight defamation

The ADL criticized much about Amnesty’s report, but engaged in circus-level contortionism to avoid stating the plain truth: Amnesty’s report was antisemitic.

As the ADL put it, Amnesty’s report was “an effort to demonize Israel and undermine its legitimacy as a Jewish and democratic state. In an environment of rising anti-Jewish hate, this type of report is not only inaccurate but also irresponsible and likely will lead to intensified antisemitism around the world.”

So the report wasn’t antisemitic per se, but simply irresponsible. Amnesty didn’t factor in how its blood libels might be interpreted by people who (unlike Amnesty) actually hate Jews.

The ADL statement maintained its line—that Amnesty was irresponsible, not bigoted against Jews—through to the end. The statement concluded, “Amnesty International’s rhetoric is irresponsible. These are not simply abstract words but the kind of spurious charges that, time and again, have placed Jews in danger around the world.”

There are two explanations that pop to mind regarding why an organization that is supposed to be dedicated to fighting Jew-hatred would dismiss as “irresponsible rhetoric” a call for the annihilation of the largest Jewish community in the world by a massively powerful international organization.

The first way to explain the ADL’s behavior is that this was an attempted cover-up. The fact is that the ADL facilitated the Amnesty report, as well as similar reports published by Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem last year. All three reports libeled and demonized Israel as an “apartheid state.”

When the ADL torpedoed Pompeo’s plan to designate Amnesty, HRW and Oxfam as antisemitic organizations, it gave them carte blanche to escalate their antisemitic campaigns.

Had the ADL put aside its progressive politics and hatred for Trump for just a moment to support rather than undermine Pompeo, it is highly likely that these groups would have reconsidered their plans to escalate their war against the Jews.

The cost-benefit analysis of siding with terrorists and Nazi-like Jew-haters from Ramallah to Tehran would likely have looked very different once the U.S. State Department designated these antisemitic groups as antisemitic groups.

Moreover, had Pompeo gone through with his plan, even if Amnesty et al. had stayed on course and published their apartheid slanders, the impact of those slanders would have been a weak flutter of the waves they are making today.

And the Jews—from Israel’s Foreign Ministry to the last Jewish group in the Diaspora—would have had far better ammunition in their efforts to discredit the tsunami of lies flowing out from these groups.

Given the ADL’s role in facilitating the massive escalation of the faux human rights’ communities’ war against the Jews, it makes sense that it has decided to pretend that nothing is happening.

Promoting antisemitism instead of fighting it

Another possible explanation for the ADL’s refusal to acknowledge that Amnesty International is an antisemitic organization and that its “Jews are Nazis” report is endemically antisemitic is that the ADL has abandoned its mission of fighting antisemitism and replaced it with a mission of advancing antisemitism—at least of the progressive variety.

Last week, Daniel Greenfield of Frontpage Magazine revealed that the ADL had hired an activist named Tema Smith to serve as its director of Jewish outreach.

Smith’s hire is newsworthy because Smith has a long record of anti-Israel, pro-terror and anti-Jewish postings on social media. In other words, she has a long record of antisemitic activism, which Greenfield documented.

Consider a few examples of Smith’s publishing history.

During the Hamas war against Israel in 2014, Smith posted and endorsed an article that justified Hamas’s abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers and its massive missile onslaught against Israeli population centers.

In 2020 she wrote, “Here’s the thing: Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism.”

On several occasions, Smith insisted that there is no black antisemitism and that it is racist for Jews to claim that there is. She said that Jewish opposition to the deeply antisemitic Critical Race Theory stems from Jewish racism.

As for Islamic Jew-haters, Smith has on several occasions defended the jihadist who brutally murdered 66-year-old Sarah Halimi, a retired nursery school teacher, in her Paris apartment, and then threw her out the window.

The ADL’s new Jewish outreach director even attacked the U.S. Holocaust Museum for its criticism of progressive superstar Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez after Cortez obscenely compared detention centers for illegal aliens along the border with Mexico to Nazi concentration camps.

In its squirming condemnation of the Amnesty report, the ADL noted rightly that by negating the Jews’ right to sovereignty within Israel’s 1949 armistice lines, Amnesty “not only delegitimizes the Israeli state enterprise and the Jewish right to self-determination in its historic homeland, but also undermines the vision of a mutually negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will provide security, dignity, and self-determination to both peoples.”

The post Fighting or promoting antisemitism? ADL reaction to Amnesty report shows where they stand appeared first on World Israel News.

The report ranked above the Uyghur crisis in China, and violence against women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

By World Israel News staff

A report on “Israeli apartheid” topped the Human Rights Watch (HRW) most read stories this year, the NGO announced this week.

The report, called A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, was released in April this year. It ranked above reports on the Uyghur crisis in China, and violence against women in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

Others on the list included ex-judicial killings in the Philippines, sexual violence toward women in India, and Ethiopia’s massacres in the Tigray region.

While other reports on the list covered current events, the report on Israel summarized Israel’s long conflict with the Palestinians, which was given labels such as “crimes against humanity” and “Systematic Oppression and Institutional Discrimination.” It outlined what it described as persecution against Palestinians and the areas which are “illegally occupied.”

“Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land,” the HRW report read.

“In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity.”

Fifteen points of recommendation were given to Israel, including a recommendation to cease building Jewish settlements in Judaea and Samaria, and to allow free travel to-and-from Gaza, which was listed despite overlooking the terror implications that would impose on Israel and the Middle East region

In comparison however, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was given only one recommendation: to “adopt an advocacy strategy centered on the immediate attainment of the full human rights of Palestinians.”

In addition, the Palestinian Authority was given only two, merely asking them to “cease all security coordination with the Israeli army” and “incorporate crimes against humanity, including the crimes of persecution and apartheid, into national criminal law.”

It should be noted that the PLO was recognized as a terrorist organization until 1993 and has written that ″Palestine… is an indivisible territorial unit″ in its charter.

The post Anti-Israel report ranks as top Human Rights Watch story this year appeared first on World Israel News.

The Yera’e organization, which presented the data, has been following the Jewish presence on the Temple Mount for the past seven years.

By Aryeh Savir/TPS

In the three months since the beginning of the Hebrew year of 5782 in Tishrei (beginning of September) more Jews ascended the Temple Mount than throughout the entire Hebrew year six years ago.

In all of the year Hebrew year of 5776 (2015-2016), 12,148 Jews ascended the Temple Mount. Since then, the number of Jews visiting the Temple Mount has been climbing, and from the beginning of the current Jewish year, 12,177 Jews have already ascended to pray on the Temple Mount.

“This is an amazing statistic that shows how much the return of Israel to the Temple Mount is intensifying,” Temple Mount activists stated Thursday.

The Yera’e organization, which presented the data, has been following the Jewish presence on the Temple Mount for the past seven years.

Yochai Sar’el, one of the organization’s volunteers, noted the great change that took place in the visits to the Temple Mount compared to 2016.

“The visit has become much more comfortable. The policemen greet the visitors, the security is tight, Muslim harassers are removed from the complex, a large lobby welcomes the visitors when they come to the mountain, and on the Temple Mount itself, Shacharit and Mincha prayers and Torah lessons are held daily,” he said.

The organization believes that a new record number of visitors will be set this year and will probably surpass 40,000 worshipers a year, “an amount that has apparently not come to the Temple Mount since the destruction of the Temple” 2,000 years ago.

Jewish worshippers are enabled only limited access in time and space during their visits to the Temple Mount. However, in recent years, the trend of Jewish visits to Judaism’s holiest site has only increased.

The post Number of Israelis visiting Temple Mount skyrockets appeared first on World Israel News.

Arab-Israeli woman who was arrested in March 2020 for spying for Hezbollah will likely serve only 10 months in Israeli prison.

By Tobias Siegal, World Israel News

A 27-year-old Arab-Israeli who provided the Hezbollah terror organization with sensitive information about Israel was sentenced to 30 months in prison by the Lod District Court on Thursday morning.

In practice, she is expected to serve only 10 months.

Tayibe resident Mai-Bat Masarwa was arrested in March 2020, after roughly a year and a half of regularly providing photos of military bases, Israel’s northern border fence, Iron Dome batteries, the Haifa Port and other strategic locations to a Hezbollah operative.

According to her indictment, Masarwa was contacted by a Hezbollah operative identified as Ali from Lebanon through Facebook sometime during 2018. Following a brief introduction, Ali began asking Masarwa to carry out various actions throughout the country, including taking photos of strategic and military sites.

One unusual request mentioned in the indictment occurred in December of 2019, when the Hezbollah operative provided Masarwa with information about an upcoming lecture given by Israeli security analyst and journalist Yossi Melman on the topic of Hezbollah and Israel.

She was directed to attend the lecture and was even told to ask the lecturer “whether or not a war between Israel and Hezbollah was possible.”

According to the indictment, Masarwa followed the instructions she received and even recorded the question and the answer, which she later sent to Ali.

In other instances, she purchased binoculars and travelled long distances in order to get the required photos for Ali. Following a military confrontation between Hezbollah terrorists and IDF soldiers on Israel’s northern border, she was told to travel to Haifa and document the activity at the Rambam Hospital.

Masarwa’s sentencing of 30 months will include the time she spent as a detainee following her arrest. In practice, she is expected to serve 10 months in prison.

During the trial, prosecutor Shahaf Kleinman-Shimoni from the Central District Attorney’s Office, argued that Masarwa’s crimes justify a severe penalty due to their potential risk to Israel’s national security, asking for a sentence of 3.5 years.

“These are crimes that attempt to undermine the existence of the State of Israel. The potential of the damage caused to the state in aiding such an organization is of the highest level. The defendant was not passive in her actions, but rather, very active. She took initiative and drove to various locations, and when she was not able to [obtain what she was told to get], she went again the next day,” Kleinman-Shimoni argued.

“We must not accept the fact that a citizen who receives full rights from the state decides to undermine its existence. Being a citizen means being trusted by the state,” she stated. “The duration of the offense, expanding over a year and a half, constitutes another reason for a severe sentencing.”

The judge, however, seemed to disagree, explaining the relatively lenient sentence by noting the defendant’s young age and lack of a criminal record, as well as the harsh conditions of her arrest and the fact that the actual damage caused by her actions was “mild.”

Last month, a housekeeper employed at Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s private residence was arrested after sending pictures of Gantz’s house to Iranian hackers via Telegram and planning to infect the minister’s computer with spyware.

The post Hezbollah spy caught by Israel will serve 10 months in prison appeared first on World Israel News.

Jewish worshippers are enabled only limited access in time and space during their visits to the Temple Mount.

By Aryeh Savir/TPS

A new precedent-setting peek was recorded on Wednesday with the counting of 10,000 Jewish worshipers who visited the Temple Mount in less than three months, since the beginning of the Jewish year.

In recent weeks, the number of Jewish worshipers on the Temple Mount has increased between 50% and 80% compared to the same periods in previous years, according to the Yera’e organization, which monitors Jewish visits to the Temple Mount.

These numbers do not include the visits of Israelis in military, tourism, and educational settings. These numbers would increase the count by another 10%.

Elishama Sandman from the Year’e organization noted that this number of Jews visiting the Temple Mount is more than twice that of 2017 when 4,426 Jews ascended to the holy site in the same period.

Jewish worshippers are enabled only limited access in time and space during their visits to the Temple Mount. However, in recent years, the trend of Jewish visits to Judaism’s holiest site has only increased.

The post New record: 10,000 Jewish worshipers visit Temple Mount in 3 months appeared first on World Israel News.

Israel’s victory at the Jiu-Jitsu World Championship held in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday was overshadowed by a Kazakh opponent, who chose to kneel and disrespect the Israeli national anthem.

The post WATCH: Kazakh athlete disrespects Israeli anthem after losing to Israel appeared first on World Israel News.