ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hatred and Indifference in Modern Australia Examining Australia’s leadership vacuum in the wake of the Melbourne synagogue firebombing. Claire Lehmann

Posted By on December 9th, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/12/08/hatred-and-indifference-in-modern-australia-antisemitism-synagogue-ripponlea/

Two days after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis, I was sitting at my desk in the Sydney Central Business District. Zoe, my colleague, stood up from her desk with a worried look. Holding her phone, she told me that the New South Wales Board of Deputies had received a police warning: the safety of Jews in the city could not be guaranteed. The message she had just received was encouraging them to leave.

That message, combined with the knowledge of an upcoming pro-Palestinian protest in the city, made me feel something that I’d never felt before as an Australian citizen. I felt queasy as I remembered other times when Jews had felt safe in their own cities—then suddenly no longer.

It was during that moment of fear that I realised what antisemitism really was. Not being Jewish myself, I had never had a personal connection with the Holocaust. My knowledge of antisemitism was purely theoretical and abstract. It was a phenomenon I had read about in books, seen in films and documentaries, but it hit me that day like a slap to the face. I realised that antisemitism is two things: active, vicious hatred and cool institutional indifference towards that hate. And it was that institutional indifference that made me feel afraid.

The vicious hate manifested that night when a mob congregated on the steps of the Opera House chanting “where’s the Jews,” “fuck the Jews,” and “fuck Israel.” But what unnerved me was the indifference of authorities who had permitted this celebratory march from Sydney Town Hall in the first place. This was compounded when only one person was arrested at that rally where flags were burned—and that was a bystander carrying an Israeli flag.

Since that day, Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has followed the model of indifference shown by the NSW Police. He says “antisemitism has no place in Australia,” while anti-Israel protesters freely demonstrate in front of synagogues. He takes no responsibility for surging attacks on Jews while simultaneously undermining the world’s only Jewish state. While Albanese might not be personally antisemitic, his intentional paralysis speaks of something more damning.

ANTI-SEMITISM, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why young British Jews are leaving for Israel The vicious intolerance sweeping Europe is now impossible to ignore. Neil Davenport

Posted By on December 9th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/08/why-young-british-jews-are-leaving-for-israel/

For most British teenagers in their final year of A-levels, thoughts are now turning to choosing universities, attending open days and organising accommodation. But for a growing number of young British Jews, these familiar rites of passage are being replaced by more urgent concerns: joining the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) or volunteering in Israel.

The change in the priorities of young British Jews shows how much their world has changed since 7 October last year. First, Hamas’s brutal slaughter of civilians in Israel provided a horrifying wake-up call. And then the subsequent surge in anti-Semitism in Britain and Europe made it clear that many supposedly tolerant institutions are anything but.

‘I had always intended to join the IDF’, 17-year-old Thalia Cohen tells me. ‘But the events of 7 October solidified my decision. I want to help Israel defend itself and make sure something like that never happens again.’

Orli Miller completed her sixth-form studies this year. Visiting British university campuses since 7 October has transformed her view of the UK. ‘I visited one of the universities I’d applied to, and I was deeply unsettled by what I saw’, she recalls:

‘Posters of hostages taken by Hamas had been torn down. I realised this wasn’t an environment where I’d feel comfortable or supported. As a Zionist, I knew I’d be much happier in Israel, where I can align my actions with my beliefs without fear of judgement.’

Orli initially applied to serve in the IDF but was turned down on medical grounds. But rather than return to a university campus in the UK riddled with anti-Semitism, she chose to sign up for Sherut Leumi, Israel’s alternative national-service programme. Participants get to work in a wide range of areas, including healthcare, nursing homes and in disadvantaged communities.

ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Why the media keep underestimating Israel Israel’s military successes are a repudiation of the pundit class’s worldview. Michael Murphy

Posted By on December 9th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/07/why-the-media-keep-underestimating-israel/

As a boy in Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War, future historian Sebastian Haffner devoured daily army bulletins. At just seven years old, he was already a ‘fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior’, meticulously tallying troop strengths. He was confident that the Kaiser’s army would soon triumph.

The bulletins, however, were rose-tinted, designed to bolster morale rather than inform. As the front deteriorated, they increasingly resembled a fantasy league, with regiments holding favourable positions only on paper. When defeat finally came, it shocked the nation. Haffner likened the feeling to ‘someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank’ only to discover ‘a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune’.

Today, this experience is all too familiar. Like Germans deceived by rosy war bulletins, educated people are often blindsided by major events, misled by wishful thinking disguised as analysis. From Brexit to the rise and resurgence of Donald Trump, big events are routinely confounding mainstream predictions. Errors are inevitable when discussing the future, but something is amiss when they consistently tilt in the same direction.

Brexit was dismissed as unlikely to happen because few in the media class wanted it to happen. Similarly, before the recent US presidential election, MP turned commentator Rory Stewart proclaimed that Kamala Harris would ‘win comfortably’. Americans, Stewart supposed, surely wouldn’t vote for Trump again. Yet they did – across demographics and states, in greater numbers than before.

It should raise eyebrows that predictive errors so often reflect the broadly liberal worldview of those making them. This worldview esteems international law over sovereign parliaments and has a narrow view of democracy. When voters defy this orthodoxy, their choices are dismissed as mere ‘populism’. However comforting these assumptions may be, they collapse time and again under the weight of reality.

Most recently, Israel has confounded expectations in its war against Hamas. The IDF has ground Hamas into the rubble of Gaza, killing most of its leaders. It has wreaked sufficient devastation on Hezbollah to produce a ceasefire agreement, albeit a shaky one. Commentators warned solemnly of ‘escalation ladders’ and a ‘wider regional war’, predicting that Iran would not stand idly by as its proxies were degraded. Yet apart from a few token missile strikes, that is precisely what has happened.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Farewell, America. Hello, Victoria’s Swamp Roger Franklin

Posted By on December 9th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/america/farewell-america-hello-victorias-swamp/

“It almost catches in the throat to admit the prospect of life once more in Melbourne is a downer. But here I am, booked in 48 hours to leave a country where the things of which conservatives dreamed but never hoped to see are being fulfilled by a Trump administration committed to refurbishing free speech and property rights, the twin pillars on which Western democracy rests and depends.

Instead, it will be Jew-haters on parade, a politicised police force, courts packed with Labor mates and an opposition more passionate about its intramural party feuds and lawsuits than rescuing Victoria from debt, corruption and incompetence.:

It would be an exaggeration, although only a small one, to say the US bathes right now in the sunny optimism of another ‘morning in America’ like the one Ronald Reagan brought to a country sick half to death of Jimmy Carter, but by several handy measures the Second Age of Trump is certainly off to a spirited start. Republicans are dancing, literally, as are quarterbacks and prize fighters, and from the stunned Left there have been no outbreaks worth noting of the reflex to riot and protest. They’re whipped and they know it, those aggrieved intersectionalists, so unsettled by the loss of House, Senate and Oval Office that the instinct to fill the streets with public nuisances is for the moment in abeyance. But they know what’s coming. Trump’s proposed cabinet of slashers, heretics, critics, crusaders, protectionists, free-market libertarians and assorted silicon smarties is a proclamation of intent to gore the Left’s most sacred cows, a restoration of the First Amendment’s right to free speech high on that to-do list.

All of which makes it very hard to be leaving the United States, especially when the destination is Melbourne, where my US election year ends next week at Tullamarine. It’s a dismal thought. Years ago, my friend Imre Salusinszky warned that the Australia of memory and imagination might not match the fact of a society changed deeply over the decades I had spent in New York. It was hard to believe. Whenever I’d flown home, the holidaying visitor to an overgrown country town by the Yarra, everything was as it should be — the easiness of life under a big blue sky, the footy, great food,  cheap golf, magpies instead of sirens, zinc creme and the Boxing Day Test. But Imre was proven right when I ignored his caution and came home for good. Things had changed and not for the better. A welter of Labor victories, broken only by the limp and hapless Baillieu years, saddled the state with debt and an authoritarian nannyism that grew more assertive and obnoxious year by year. But it was the Covid madness that did it for me, put pay to any last delusion that Victoria, its once lovely capital and the state’s most vital institutions were not in some way rotting before our eyes.

ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Trump Lays Down the Law on Jew-Hatred in Universities Repercussions on the way. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on December 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-lays-down-the-law-on-jew-hatred-in-universities/

In Trump’s first term, Jews were declared to be a minority group protected by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. And now, just weeks away from beginning his second term, Trump has laid down the law, in a speech he just gave at a rally against antisemitism in Washington. American universities that fail to combat antisemitism on their campuses should expect severe repercussions, including the loss of accreditation and of federal research contracts. More on Trump’s determination to stamp out campus antisemitism can be found here: “Trump to universities: Stamp out antisemitism or lose accreditation,” by Mathilda Heller, Jerusalem Post, November 14, 2024:

All American universities must end campus antisemitism or they will lose accreditation, President-elect Donald Trump promised during a rally against antisemitism in Washington.

To “defeat antisemitism and defend Jewish citizens in America,” Trump said he would inform every college president that if they do not “end antisemitic propaganda,” they would lose accreditation and federal support.

He did not say they “may lose” accreditation. Trump said they will lose accreditation, and their share of the billions of dollars in federal support that universities receive. A double blow to their finances and reputation.

“We will not subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers, and we’re not going to do it – certainly [not] on American soil,” he said.

Trump added that once in the Oval Office, he would inform all educational institutions that if they permit violence or harassment against Jewish students, they will be “held accountable for violations of the civil rights law.”

“It’s very important – Jewish Americans must have equal protection under the law, and they’re going to get it,” he said. “At the same time, my administration will move swiftly to restore safety for Jewish students [on campuses] and Jewish people on American streets.”…

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

We’ll Always Have Paris But before too long, we may have to pay the jizya to visit there. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 9th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/well-always-have-paris/

What is happening in Europe these days is a world-historical societal transformation, but few have noticed or realized the implications of what they are seeing. Even many of those who are in the midst of this transformation, and are suffering its worst effects, don’t understand, or refuse to understand, what is happening.

An X user summed up an all-too-common perspective in a poston Monday: “This is a real conversation I had with a French girl: ‘How many people in Paris are French?’ ‘Not many now’ ‘Is that a problem?’ ‘No’ ‘Is Paris more dangerous than it was 20 years ago’ ‘Yes’ ‘So what has changed?’ ‘There’s more immigrants now’ ‘So the immigrants are violent?’ ‘Nooooooooo’ Europe is f*cking finished.”

Yes, and the fault lies wholly and solely with the socialist internationalist left, which has inundated Paris, as well as all of France and Western Europe, with Muslim migrants, without ever considering the implications of bringing in a large number of people among whom are many who believe that they are “the best of people” (Qur’an 3:110) in the lands of the “most vile of created beings” (Qur’an 98:6), and thus have no obligation to follow the laws or customs of their new land.

Journalist Christopher Tomlinson noted in the National Pulse in September that Trump has taken note of what has happening: “‘Look what’s happened in London, look what’s happening in Paris,’ Trump said to the crowd while endorsing a plan that could see large-scale deportations of illegals that have come into the United States under the Biden-Harris regime. Trump correctly asserts that mass migration, particularly illegal migration, has radically transformed both of these once-gleaming international destinations.”

Indeed. “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick told Ilsa, but no, we won’t always, any more than we will always have Constantinople or Saigon. We don’t even have Paris now. The Paris of today is worlds away from the city of artists and romantics that it once was. Every day’s news brings new reminders of that. Remix News reported in October that “two Latvian tourists were sexually assaulted in Paris by a group of seven men on the Champ de Mars, near the Eiffel Tower on Saturday night leading to the arrests of four foreign nationals. Two Algerian and two Egyptian males were arrested at the scene, while three others fled.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

GOOD NEWS FROM ISRAEL FROM MICHAEL ORDMAN

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

 www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

Many of Israel’s positive achievements are truly “towering”.  Its Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems have intercepted more hostile aerial attacks than all other global defense systems combined over the last 50 years. Michael Ordman

This defense technology, known as SDI- Strategi Defense Initiative was initially named “Star Wars” by skeptics and detractors in 1983 when President Ronald Reagan delivered a nationwide address committing to deploy research and development of missile defense systems. The then Democrat Congress was decidedly against the project. Edward Teller Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and chemical engineer was enthusiastic about SDI’s development, but it was Lieut. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, who propelled and championed the technology.

As Newt Gingrich said of General Graham in his eulogy:

  “Your leadership helped President Reagan launch the Strategic Defense Initiative, which has brought us ever closer to ending the threat of nuclear annihilation.”…..“This nation owes Dan Graham a great deal. And one day soon, we will have a system to protect us against some fanatic or deranged leader who wants to blow up part of America to make a point.”

Today fanatic and deranged leaders want to blow up Israel, and the fruits and legacy of Daniel Graham’s efforts thwart hat genocidal plan.

His memory is a blessing.  Rsk

 

POSITIVE NEWS IN A WAR
 
Billionaire survivor gives message of hope. (TY WIN) 94-year-old Holocaust survivor Sir Frank Lowy gave a powerful and emotional Thanksgiving Day speech to ex-hostages and their friends. The Israeli-Australian multibillionaire drew from his life experiences to give them strength and resilience. (see here previously). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlYNiYrirLk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lowy
 
The most interceptions in 50 years. According to the CEO of Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, “David’s Sling and Iron Dome systems have intercepted more targets than all the other air defense systems worldwide combined over the past 50 years”. He also reassured everyone, there is no shortage of interceptors.
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hujfzh9fx
 
From MSG to Sheba hospital. (TY WIN) Ishay Ribo performed to thousands at Madison Square Gardens (see here previously). But he is just as at home playing to the wounded and their families in hospitals, or traveling to numerous military bases, and even funerals to use his talent for good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2avqYHVlp0
 
Therapeutic farm for treating trauma. Before Oct 7 2023, Sivan Shefer founded “Dialog with Animals”, just 4 miles from Gaza, training dogs and their handlers to treat people with disabilities. She now runs “Dialog for Life” – one of 15 initiatives of the Restart NGO, designed to help wounded IDF soldiers restart their lives.
https://www.israel21c.org/israelis-from-shattered-communities-turn-to-innovation/
https://restartglobal.org/en/home/   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXYFcjs20m8 (self-explanatory video)
 
Respite in San Diego. (TY Nevet / ADL) The San Diego Jewish Academy (SDJA) has just welcomed 95 students from the Israeli region of Sha’ar Hanegev, which suffered severely from the Oct 7 2023 Hamas onslaught. The Israelis receive respite and the San Diego students build connections to Israel.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2024/11/18/san-diego-jewish-academy-welcomes-95-students-from-war-torn-shaar-hanegev-in-israel/   https://www.jewishinsandiego.org/shaarhanegev
 
Christians support olive harvest. NGOs Genesis 1-2-3 Foundation and NewPersia.org have brought a group of American Christians to Israel as part of the “Root and Branch” initiative, which brings Christians and Jews together to rebuild livelihoods in Israel. They are currently involved in harvesting olives from century-old trees.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/watch-christians-unite-to-support-israeli-olive-harvest-during-wartime/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZedArbJ2T1g

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Falling Out of Love with Obama: What changed? The public’s disenchantment with Barack Obama stems from Donald Trump’s success and growing rejection of woke policies, unchecked immigration, and systemic repression. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/08/312542/

I always found the literary critic Harold Bloom (1930-2019) distinctly curate’s-eggish. You ask, “How is your egg this morning, curate?” “Good in parts,” comes the reply. But Bloom made one observation that stuck with me. Lots of literature, Bloom wrote somewhere, deals with the phenomenon of falling in love. But equally poignant is the story of falling out of love.

Bloom was thinking primarily of personal romance. However, the emotional dialectic he limned works itself out on the larger stage of political life as well. There is a certain mystery about both sides of the process. The public’s enthusiasms are as fickle as they are extravagant. What explains the infatuation with figures like Barack Obama? In retrospect, it is possible to offer more or less plausible explanations. Obama’s race, his smooth, non-confrontational manner, and his ability to dress up radical policy proposals in an emollient jelly of seeming common sense all help explain his political success.

Obama has occupied an enviable place in the magic circle of celebrity since his first election in 2008. It persisted through Donald Trump’s first term and for most of Joe Biden’s. There were signs that Obama’s star was fading during the later stages of Kamala Harris’s disastrous campaign. Trump’s resounding victory on November 5 crystallized the eclipse. Speaking at a “Democracy Forum” last week, Obama attempted to wheel out his old standby: that Republicans were in the habit of “weaponizing” the DOJ and other institutions in order to steal elections and cement their hold on political power. “One side tries to stack the deck and lock in a permanent grip on power,” he said, “ either by actively suppressing votes or politicizing the armed forces or using the judiciary criminal justice system to go after opponents.”

There was a time when Obama might have gotten away with such antics. Not anymore. His blatant act of projection was instantly called out and ridiculed. Quoting the remark, Miranda Divine spoke for the Zeitgeist when she observed that “It’s over for Obama. The spell is broken. Donald Trump vanquished him, Biden, Harris, the Bushes, and the Cheneys. All of them, with a spring in his step.” The commentator John Gibson offered a pithier précis of Obama’s comment: “Shorter: I accuse them of doing what we did, and they must be stopped.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syria: Enemies Masquerading as Friends by Amir Taheri

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21184/syria-enemies

[T]he use of the label “Levant” (Sham) puts a question mark in front of the “liberating force.” Using that medieval term instead of the word Syria, which jihadists have always regarded as alien because it was put in use under the French mandate, the group and its backers implicitly deny the existence of a Syrian nation-state.

Some in Turkish political circles regard the creation of “artificial states” after the fall of the Ottoman Empire as an act of revenge by Western powers against the Turkish caliphate, which for centuries had represented the Islamic challenge to Christendom’s goal of ruling the world.

In Erdogan’s view, that could reopen the Turkish claims, if not of sovereignty at least as having “special rights,” to parts of Iraq and Syria.

Denying the existence of a Syrian nation with full rights to statehood and territorial integrity poses a risk to the security and stability of the whole region.

Almost dormant for four years, last week the volcano of the Syrian uprising erupted with a vengeance. In four days, its lava covered the country’s second largest city Aleppo before moving towards central cities of Hama and Homs on its way to the capital Damascus.

The force that carried out the operation came under the label “Mission to Liberate the Levant” (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) but was quickly identified as a reincarnation of the Victory Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), which was the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.

Whoever redesigned that force as a “new and improved product” wanted to achieve three goals.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

2 Pearl Harbor survivors, ages 104 and 102, return to Hawaii to honor those killed in 1941 attack

Posted By on December 8th, 2024

https://www.startribune.com/100-year-old-pearl-harbor-survivor-recalls-confusion-and-chaos-during-japanese-bombing-83-years-ago/601192005

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Ira “Ike” Schab, a 104-year-old Pearl Harbor attack survivor, was so determined to stand and salute during a remembrance ceremony honoring those killed in the Japanese bombing that thrust the U.S. into World War II some 83 years ago that he spent six weeks in physical therapy to build the strength to do so.

On Saturday, Schab gingerly rose from his wheelchair and raised his right hand, returning a salute delivered by sailors on a destroyer and a submarine passing by in the harbor. His son and a daughter supported him from either side.

“I was honored to do it. I’m glad I was capable of standing up,” he said afterward. “I’m getting old, you know.”

Schab is one of only two servicemen who lived through the attack who made it to an annual observance hosted by the U.S. Navy and National Park Service on a grass field overlooking the harbor. A third survivor had been planning to join them but had to cancel because of health issues.

The Dec. 7, 1941, bombing killed more than 2,300 U.S. servicemen. Nearly half, or 1,177, were sailors and Marines on board the USS Arizona, which sank during the battle. The remains of more than 900 Arizona crew members are still entombed on the submerged vessel.

Dozens of survivors once joined the event but their attendance has declined as survivors have aged. Today there are only 16 still living, according to a list maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors. Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated there were some 87,000 military personnel on Oahu on the day of the attack.

Schab agreed when ceremony organizers asked him earlier this year to salute on behalf of all survivors and World War II veterans.

“He’s been working hard, because this is his goal,” said his daughter Kimberlee Heinrichs, who traveled to Hawaii with Schab from their Beaverton, Oregon, home. “He wanted to be able to stand for that.”

Schab was a sailor on the USS Dobbin at the time of the attack, serving as the tuba player in the ship’s band. He had showered and put on a clean uniform when he heard the call for a fire rescue party.