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ISIS Comes to Gaza by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Recent reports leave no doubt as to cooperation between Hamas and ISIS groups in Sinai. These reports, the Egyptians and Palestinian Authority argue, provide further evidence that the Gaza Strip remains a major base for various jihadi terror groups that pose a real threat.

The report said that terrorists wanted by the Egyptian authorities were admitted to the Gaza Strip hospital in return for weapons given to Hamas by the Islamic State in the Sinai.

Mahmoud Abbas and the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) can continue to talk all they want about a Palestinian state that would be established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. But when ISIS-inspired groups are active in Gaza and there are no signs that the Hamas regime is weakening, it is rather difficult to imagine a Palestinian state.

The jihadi groups clearly seek to create an Islamic emirate combining the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Abbas might thank Israel for its presence in the West Bank — a presence that allows him and his government to be something other than infidel cannon fodder for the jihadis.

Hamas denies it up and down. Nonetheless, there are growing signs that the Islamist movement, which is based in the Gaza Strip, is continuing to cooperate with other jihadi terror groups that are affiliated with Islamic State (ISIS), especially those that have been operating in the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai in recent years.

This cooperation, according to Palestinian Authority security sources, is the main reason behind the ongoing tensions between the Egyptian authorities and Hamas. These tensions have prompted the Egyptians to keep the Rafah border crossing mostly closed since 2013, trapping tens of thousands of Palestinians inside the Gaza Strip.

In 2015, the Egyptians opened the Rafah terminal for a total of twenty-one days to allow humanitarian cases and those holding foreign nationalities to leave or enter the Gaza Strip.

This year so far, Rafah has been open for a total of twenty-eight days. Sources in the Gaza Strip say there are about 30,000 humanitarian cases that need to leave immediately. They include dozens of university students who haven’t been able to go back to their universities abroad and some 4,000 patients in need of urgent medical treatment.

Surprisingly, last week the Egyptians opened the Rafah terminal for five days in a row, allowing more than 4,500 Palestinians to leave and enter the Gaza Strip. The unusual gesture came on the eve of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr. However, the terminal was closed again at the beginning of the feast on July 6.

The renewed closure of the Rafah terminal coincided with reports that efforts to end the tensions between Hamas and Egypt hit a snag. According to the reports, the Egyptian authorities decided to cancel a planned visit to Cairo by senior Hamas officials. The decision to cancel the visit, the reports said, came in the wake of the dissatisfaction of the Egyptians with the way Hamas has been handling security along the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The closure of the border crossing came as a blow to Hamas’s efforts to patch up its differences with Egypt and pave the way for easing severe travel restrictions imposed by Cairo on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

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ISRAEL’S GENERALLY BAD LEADERS BY RUTH KING

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Generals renowned for strategy and bravery in war often make very poor national leaders. I speak here not of tin pot dictators and “generalisimos” whose chests are festooned with medals and ribbons, but of Israeli generals. As Martin Sherman, Israel’s superb commentator, wrote in The Jerusalem Post over a year ago in “Goofy Generals Galore”: “Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise and ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have–almost invariably—been disastrously wrong.”

Moshe Dayan was commander of the Jerusalem front in Israel’s War of Independence and Chief of Staff during the 1956 Suez War. In 1967, while Minister of Defense, he became the symbol of the IDF. Probably the most famous photograph of the 1967 war, is that of Dayan praying at the just-liberated Western Wall. His downfall came when he was blamed for the intelligence failures prior to the 1973 war. Inexplicably in 1977 Menachem Begin restored him to public life by making him Foreign Minister. Dayan played a critical role in implementing the infamous Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. As lead negotiator, he held secret meetings with officials in India, Iran, England and Morocco and prodded a reluctant Begin to accept all Sadat’s demands. The resulting peace agreement gave Israel nothing but promises, which were flouted by Egypt before the ink was dry. In return Israel surrendered the entire Sinai and agreed to give ‘autonomy” to the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria. As Henry Kissinger later commented, “autonomy” was the embryo of partition and independence.

Yigal Allon was a respected general who served as Prime Minister for three weeks in 1969 when Levi Eshkol died suddenly. Shortly after the 1967 war his Allon Plan proposed the first post war surrender: it proposed partitioning the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, creating a Druze state in the Golan Heights, and returning most of the Sinai to Arab control. It was immediately rejected by King Hussein and ridiculed by the other Arab states, but it laid bare Israel’s willingness to divide the area, laying the ground for successive American sponsored “peace processes.”

The next general to become Prime Minister was Yitzhak Rabin who served twice, from 1974 to 1955 and again from July 1992 to November 1995 when he was assassinated. While during his first tenure he oversaw the hugely successful Entebbe rescue, during his second term he signed off on the Oslo agreement which was followed by a large and bloody siege of terrorism and continues to have catastrophic consequences for Israel. He shared a Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat for his disastrous actions.

Lt. General Ehud Barak is the most highly decorated soldier in Israel’s history and was Chief of Staff from 1991 to 1995. In 1999 he won against Netanyahu and became Israel’s tenth Prime Minister. He promptly resumed negotiations with the PLO and stated: “Every attempt to keep hold of the West Bank and Gaza leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”

This was mild compared to his recent statements. As David Hornik one of Israel’s best commentators points out: “In a speech on June 16, 2016 Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” threats to Israel, declaring “Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….”

Barak went on to give his own outrageous mis-characterization of the current situation:

“Only a blind person or a sheep, an ignoramus or someone jaded, can’t see the erosion of democracy and the ‘budding fascism.…’ If it looks like budding fascism, walks like budding fascism and quacks like budding fascism, that’s the situation…. In capitals around the world—in London and Washington, in Berlin and Paris, in Moscow and Beijing—no leader believes a word coming out of Netanyahu’s mouth or his government’s.”

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Dr. Jihad: Muslim doctors and the global jihad By Carol Brown

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Where Trump goes, so do protestors. The GOP convention in Cleveland will be a flash point for many of them.

One group will be from the Stand Together Against Trump PAC which was formed by local physicians who want to protest Trump’s position on Muslim immigration. The PAC has eight leaders including six doctors, four of whom are Muslim. The founder, Dr. Bryan Hambley, said the group finds the “rhetoric” of banning Muslims from the United States “shocking.”

The upcoming protest at the GOP convention will not be Hambley’s first. He was escorted out of a protest in March after removing his sweatshirt to reveal a t-shirt that read: “Muslim doctors save lives in Cleveland.”

With all this talk of Muslim doctors saving lives, I thought I’d highlight a few examples where they strayed a long way (to put it mildly) from their oath of “first do no harm.”

Last month an international search began when medical school graduate Mohamed Maleeh Masha vanished from Flint, Michigan. Authorities believe he is now in Syria providing medical care to wounded ISIS jihadists, tending to dozens if not hundreds each day. Masha is also likely making propaganda videos since upper-class professionals like doctors are sought after for this job with the hope they’ll convince other professionals in the West to join the cause.

In Masha’s case, as with others, there are the usual questions being raised about how he became “radicalized” (aka devout; hint: the Quran) with a hypothesis being floated that he “may have become more invested in the Islamic faith before fleeing to join ISIS.” (Including the word “may” is probably unnecessary, but other than that the link between Islam and terror is a welcome change from the usual battery of lies.)

Masha is the latest in a string of Muslim physician terrorists. Several years ago in Florida, Dr. Rafiq Sabi was sentenced to 25 years in prison for providing material support to terrorists. The trial judge stated that part of what contributed to the near maximum sentence was Sabir’s lack of contrition coupled with his “deeply held views regarding militant fundamentalist Islam.” (Hmm. There’s that link again, though the words “militant” and “fundamentalist” are superfluous.)

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U.S. Transfers Yemeni Detainee From Guantanamo to Italy Announcement follows disappearance of transferred detainee in Latin America By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

The U.S. military said Sunday it transferred a Yemeni detainee to Italy from the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The transfer of Fayiz Ahmad Yahia Suleiman to Italy was announced as a search is under way in Latin America for former Syrian detainee Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was resettled in Uruguay in 2014 along with five other prisoners. He was reported missing by Uruguayan officials last week and appears to have fled the country.

Mr. Suleiman, the Yemeni detainee, was approved for transfer six years ago. He had been in Guantanamo for 14 years and had never been charged with a crime. Mr. Suleiman had been suspected of fighting with al Qaeda in Afghanistan against U.S. and coalition forces and had a history of hunger striking, according to leaked military documents about the detainees.

The transfer of the Yemeni detainee brings the prison’s population down to 78, including 28 approved for transfer.

Defending the Obama administration’s policy last week in front of lawmakers, the State Department’s envoy for closing the Guantanamo detention center, Lee Wolosky, said transfers are made only after the U.S. secures assurances that the receiving country will provide “a security framework that we assess will substantially mitigate the threat a detainee may pose after transfer.”

Mr. Suleiman’s transfer was approved by six U.S. agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Defense Department notifies Congress of the moves 30 days in advance.

“The United States is grateful to the government of Italy for its humanitarian gesture and willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,” the Pentagon said in a statement. Italian officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

At a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week, Republicans reiterated their opposition to Mr. Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantanamo, citing Mr. Dhiab’s disappearance as evidence that some countries are ill-prepared to accommodate detainees. Both Republicans and Democrats said they were frustrated that Uruguay couldn’t account for Mr. Dhiab’s whereabouts. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Stuart Green:I’m Banning Laptops From My Classroom Students use computers to take notes, sure, but that’s not all. One spent classtime streaming a hockey game.

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Mr. Green is a professor at Rutgers Law School and the author of “Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age” (Harvard University Press, 2012).

For more than 20 years, I have taught college graduates, most in their mid-20s, the basics of criminal law and procedure. In all that time, at half a dozen law schools, I’ve had the daily opportunity to observe some of the miracles that modern technology has wrought in the legal academy: Computerized research. PowerPoint. No more handwritten blue books!

But now and then, carrying out my institutional duty to observe classes taught by younger colleagues, I move from the front of the classroom to the rear. What a revelation to see what the students are up to. While virtually all of them have open laptops and most are taking notes, many seem more intent on emailing and texting, posting on social media, reading news sites, shopping online, or looking at YouTube videos. I recently saw one student systematically checking out law-firm websites for summer-associate salaries. Another spent an entire class streaming an NHL hockey game.

If this is what the students are doing while I’m sitting behind them, observing the class, I can only imagine what they’re doing when I’m up front, lecturing.

Has the time come to ban laptops from my classes? The arguments for doing so seem pretty straightforward. As common sense suggests, and a March 2013 study by Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas J. Cepeda confirmed, students who are multitasking during class have less understanding and recall of what’s being discussed.

The study also found that “participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared with those who were not.” So the student with the game on his laptop is also making it harder for the student sitting behind him to focus.

My school has spent a fortune for classrooms with comfortable seating, quality lighting and good acoustics. Don’t we also owe students a physical environment in which they’re not bombarded with the laptop-generated equivalent of Times Square?

Even when multitasking is blocked, students who take notes on a computer tend to perform worse than students who take notes by hand, according to a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. They found that laptop users were basically creating a transcript of the lecture, while those taking notes by hand were synthesizing the information. This confirms my own experience when meeting with students who appear to have a nearly verbatim record of what I said in class but fail to grasp what I was trying to convey. It’s like making a cake recipe from scratch, measuring out all the ingredients perfectly, but forgetting to put the concoction in the oven. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Myths of Black Lives Matter The movement has won over Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. But what if its claims are fiction? By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Editor’s Note: Originally published Feb. 11, 2016

A television ad for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign now airing in South Carolina shows the candidate declaring that “too many encounters with law enforcement end tragically.” She later adds: “We have to face up to the hard truth of injustice and systemic racism.”

Her Democratic presidential rival, Bernie Sanders, met with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday. Mr. Sanders then tweeted that “As President, let me be very clear that no one will fight harder to end racism and reform our broken criminal justice system than I will.” And he appeared on the TV talk show “The View” saying, “It is not acceptable to see unarmed people being shot by police officers.”

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally.

To judge from Black Lives Matter protesters and their media and political allies, you would think that killer cops pose the biggest threat to young black men today. But this perception, like almost everything else that many people think they know about fatal police shootings, is wrong.

The Washington Post has been gathering data on fatal police shootings over the past year and a half to correct acknowledged deficiencies in federal tallies. The emerging data should open many eyes.

For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.

The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.

Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that blacks make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighborhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Clinton’s Information Lockdown The private email server was only semiprivate: Putin likely has everything. By L. Gordon Crovitz

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Lyndon Johnson did his best to block the Freedom of Information Act, but public opinion forced him to make government records available. The question now is how FOIA, which LBJ signed 50 years ago this month, survives the precedent Hillary Clinton set with her basement server intended to keep her emails hidden from public view.

Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn’t become law: The president “hated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.”

LBJ relented and signed what he called “the damned thing” on July 4, 1966, but insisted on no fanfare. In the decades that followed, FOIA became an essential tool for government accountability.

No public official since LBJ has gone as far as Hillary Clinton to evade public-disclosure laws. In 2010 her adviser Huma Abedin recommended that she use a government email account, as the State Department required. “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” Mrs. Clinton responded in an email that has since come to light. She used a private email server for all her communications because this kept both official and personal communications off government servers, where they would have been subject to disclosure under FOIA.

FBI Director James Comey concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information in her emails didn’t meet the legal test for a crime because he couldn’t prove that she intended to disclose national secrets. But Mr. Comey testified to Congress last week that the FBI determined that Mrs. Clinton did violate the Federal Records Act, which makes his legal analysis of her intent incomplete. Her most relevant intention was to defy disclosure laws. Her actions had the incidental effect of mishandling confidential communications.

Mrs. Clinton stonewalled FOIA requests for years with her keep-no-records, produce-no-records strategy. In a deposition last month in a civil lawsuit challenging her personal email server, the State Department said its staffers in charge of records didn’t realize until 2014 that its former boss had used private email.

Appropriately enough, Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she used a private email server to keep her records secret only became public in a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s insistence that it couldn’t respond to FOIA requests because it couldn’t locate her emails on its .gov server.

The State Department’s inspector general in May ruled that Mrs. Clinton broke record-keeping laws such as those requiring compliance with FOIA requests, never got permission for her home server and ignored numerous security warnings. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Peter Smith: The Truth in Black and White

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

Statistics don’t lie and those for black crime in the US are damning. When agitators and promoters of racial animosity note that African-Americans are hugely over-represented in prison populations, what they never acknowledge is that they also commit far more crimes. No wonder police are nervous.
The police shootings of two black men (Philando Castile in Flacon Heights, Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) look problematic to say the least, judging by the video recordings that I have seen on TV. But all of the facts aren’t in so it is wise to suspend judgement. Clearly more evidence will emerge to throw greater light on the incidents.

I don’t want to comment directly on these cases nor on the demonstration in Dallas which they prompted; during which five police officers were shot and killed and seven others and two bystanders wounded. It now appears that the shooter acted alone. Micah Johnston was a 25-year-old army veteran turned ‘black terrorist’ (for want of a better description) intent, as he said, on shooting white police officers. My comment primarily goes to public safety in America but it has application to Australia and to all societies living under the rule of secular law.

The reaction of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Dallas when they became aware that shots were being fired is instructive. They scattered in all directions crying out in fear and panic. The police ran towards the danger. There are two lessons to draw I think.

The first is that untrained unarmed people are no match for a trained gunman. This is so obvious why say it? It’s worth saying because we civilians, but particularly progressives and those intent on feminising society, have to realise that power does come out of the barrel of a gun. A few ruthless bad guys with guns can subjugate and enslave many unarmed people (otherwise called ‘sheep’) without any difficulty at all.

Our safety (the safety of us sheep) in Australia is totally dependent on the police and defence forces. In America it is a little different because many millions of citizens have the capacity to defend themselves. I like the American model better because the resurgence of militant Islam is making the world a more threatening place, but that is by the way.

The second lesson is that delegating our safety to police officers, as we must in the course of ordinary life whether we are personally armed or not, carries risks. One risk is that some police officers will at times act outside their authority; and sometimes brutally. But a second risk is likely to be realised much more often. That is that police officers may ‘overreact’ to perceived danger. Like us civilians, they don’t want to be harmed and have the same adrenalin reaction to danger as do we all. They are not a race apart.

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Arizona Jihadist Charged With Plotting Attacks on Jewish Targets

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

An Arizona grand jury has indicted an accused Islamic State sympathizer on charges of plotting to stage an attack Phoenix-area Jews and other targets with bombs and other weapons, prosecutors said on Thursday.

The suspect, Mahin Khan, 18, of Tucson, was arrested on July 1 by FBI agents in an investigation that began with citizens alerting authorities to suspicious behavior, according to a statement from the Arizona attorney general’s office.

In a three-count indictment, Khan was charged with terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and conspiracy to commit misconduct involving weapons. He faces a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted with aggravating factors proven at trial, attorney general spokeswoman Mia Garcia said.

He was scheduled for arraignment on July 14, she said.

Prosecutors said the charges stemmed from an investigation by the FBI and state authorities of Khan’s repeated communications with an individual he believed was an Islamic State fighter.

In the communications, prosecutors said, Khan sought to “obtain weapons including pipe bombs or pressure cooker bombs” for an attack on a Motor Vehicle Division office in Maricopa County.

The identity of Khan’s alleged co-conspirator, or whether the person was an informant or undercover FBI agent, was not disclosed. Neither the FBI nor the state attorney general’s office would provide further details.

In a probable cause statement filed in the case earlier this week, the FBI said Khan described himself in an email as an “American Jihadist who supports” Islamic State, the militant group that has seized large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq and claimed responsibility for bomb and gun attacks in France, Belgium and Bangladesh.

The document cites an alleged email in which Khan asks a contact he believes to be Pakistani to furnish him with assault rifles and a pistol because he wants to “take out marines and jews.” It also accuses him of “identifying an Air Force recruitment center in Tucson as a potential target for a terrorist attack.”

The indictment makes no mention of the recruitment office.

Although the investigation was continuing, “there is not believed to be a further threat” from Khan or his alleged activities, prosecutors said.

He was being held without bond in the Maricopa County Jail, prosecutors said. Court documents filed by the government said that Khan, who has lived with his family in Tucson since 2011, had indicated he would flee to Syria or Pakistan if released

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Europe’s Continuing Fixation on Jews Must Not Grip the United States By Michael Oren

Posted By on July 11th, 2016

“The fiercest arguments we have in parliament are over Israel.” These words, spoken by the chairman of the Dutch Foreign Affairs Committee, startled me. But they failed to faze the other committee members from the both the left and right. On the contrary, they all readily agreed. In the end, only I displayed surprise.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Your country is in economic crisis, tens of thousands of refugees are massing on your borders, and the EU may be unraveling, and yet the issue that most occupies you is…Israel?”

My hosts unanimously nodded. However shocking, the conversation was by no means unusual. As chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee in Israel’s Knesset, I frequently meet with European legislators.

Whether Dutch or Belgian or German, they all report the same phenomenon. Israel—more than security, more than refugees, and the economy—sparks their bitterest debates. And each time I hear this, I find myself astonished. At stake, I realize, is not Israel’s identity but the Europeans’. For them, the Jewish State is exactly that, a state of Jews against whom the West is once again defining itself.

So it has been for more than two thousand years. The ancient Hellenic and Roman worlds, challenged theologically by a Judaism that rejected their polytheism and the divinity of kings, and threatened demographically by burgeoning Jewish populations, designated the Jews as the ultimate Other.

The first large-scale pogroms and expulsions took place in Rome and Alexandria well before the birth of Christianity. “How could one consider admitting such a people to citizenship or allowing them political rights?” Apion, a first century anti-Semite, wrote. “The Alexandrians were right in detesting the Jews.” By the early second century, Alexandria’s Jewish community, once a million-members strong, had all but vanished.