‘Many dozens’ were gathered at home of Monsey rabbi on 7th night of holiday when attacker entered; stabber later made beeline for nearby synagogue but was locked out

By TOI STAFF and AGENCIES

Authorities and first responders gather in front of a residence in Monsey, NY, Sunday, December 29, 2019, following a stabbing late Saturday during a Hanukkah celebration. (AP Photo/Allyse Pulliam)

The rabbi in upstate New York had just concluded the Hanukkah candle-lighting in his home where dozens of Hasidim had gathered, when a masked man entered with a machete, stabbing five people before making a beeline to an adjacent synagogue where congregants had barricaded themselves inside, eyewitnesses said Sunday.

The attack left at least two people in critical condition and reignited fears of anti-Semitism in the insular ultra-Orthodox community, just a month after another stabbing attack and amid what officials have described as a spate of anti-Jewish assaults in the New York region.
Read more…

No one said that Russian immigrants are a financial burden, the way Liberman does about the observant Jews who have ensured Judaism’s survival through the ages.

By Leonie Ben-Simon,INN

The people in Israel are paying a cost in shekels caused by Avigdor Liberman and his YIsrael Beyteinu party that must be taken into account by every Israeli citizen who calculates which way he intends to vote in a few weeks time.

First and foremost he is the one person who is most responsible for the cost of the third election.  That money could have been used to build hospitals, schools and assist the poor elderly, including many elderly Russian immigrants. Billions of shekels have been and will be wasted, apart from the failure to form a stable government with the ability to tackle economic (and other myriad) challenges. There are also costs involved to business and working people when election days are held.
Read more…

It’s not about having higher I.Q.s.

By Bret Stephens, NYT

Albert Einstein at home in Princeton, N.J.Getty Images

An eminent Lithuanian rabbi is annoyed that his yeshiva students devote their lunch breaks to playing soccer instead of discussing Torah. The students, intent on convincing their rav of the game’s beauty, invite him to watch a professional match. At halftime, they ask what he thinks.

“I have solved your problem,” the rabbi says.

“How?”

“Give one ball to each side, and they will have nothing to fight over.”
Read more…

Offense is the best defence

By Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, JPOST

[..]
In January 2015, the Palestinians signed the Rome Statute; that April, they applied to join the ICC so that they could file complaints against Israel for committing war crimes. Israel immediately scrambled and embarked upon an intensive backstage campaign, trying in every way to persuade ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that the tribunal has no authority to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Israel is not a signatory to the treaty – and the Palestinians, despite it being questionable whether they are permitted to sign the treaty, are not a state.

Israel correctly argued that she has an independent, strong and active judiciary, is investigating every incident small and large, and does not hesitate to prosecute and frequently convict whenever there is even the shadow of a violation of law. As such, the ICC has no authority to act as a super-review court for the Israeli justice system and has no need to duplicate Israel’s own jurisdiction.
Read more…

Next up for Netanyahu: appointing four new ministers, a strategic decision on whether to seek immunity and then the March election, where even greater dangers may lurk

By Yossi Verter, HAARETZ

Illustration.Amos Biderman

There were two reasons behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on having the Likud leadership primary take place the day it did, on Thursday (December 26). First of all, by midnight next Tuesday, New Year’s eve, the prime minister must resign from the four additional ministerial posts he holds (in the health, agriculture, labor and social affairs, and Diaspora affairs ministries) and appoint successors; and secondly, two days after that, at the very latest, he has to decide whether to ask the Knesset to grant him immunity from prosecution. He preferred, correctly from his point of view, to have the primary hurdle behind him.

The prime minister’s mentor, the late Moshe Arens, used to say: When you appoint one person from a list of 10, you create nine enemies and one ingrate. Netanyahu knows what’s best for him. As long as the appointments hung over the heads of the MKs like dog-training treats, he had the candidates’ commitment and sweeping support – whether it was willing or it was because of a promise he made to them.
Read more…

By Abe Greenwald, COMMENTARY

In November, President Donald Trump was asked by Fox News for his opinion on the pro-democracy, anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong. “We have to stand with Hong Kong,” he said of the demonstrators who had adopted the American National Anthem as their own song of liberty. “But I’m also standing with President Xi.”

How could Trump stand simultaneously with oppressed and oppressor? Perhaps by following the example of his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

In the summer of 2009, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest the faux-democratic reelection of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The American president steered clear of commenting for a notably long period of time, even while Iranian protestors called out for his encouragement. Finally, Obama, a more polished equivocator than Trump, weighed in with these words for those in Iran’s Green Movement: “The world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was.” Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, soon declared of Ahmadinejad, “He’s the elected leader.”
Read more…

By Matthew Continetti, COMMENTARY

History doesn’t follow a schedule. The events that define an era often happen before or after the onset of a new decade. It’s been said that the Sixties didn’t begin on January 1, 1960, but on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. They didn’t end on January 1, 1970, but on August 9, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned as president.

Keep this in mind as you look at retrospectives of the 2010s. The calendar decade may be drawing to a close, but the tendencies, ideas, movements, sentiments, and personalities associated with the past 10 years may not be quite ready to leave the stage. The underlying causes of national populism have not disappeared. Our times continue to be shaped by immigration, terrorism, and the cultural distance between voters without college degrees and the credentialed elites who govern them. It would be a mistake to follow the advice of the Bloomberg editor who wrote in a recent headline, “Populism Will Probably Just Go Away Soon, So Relax.” On the contrary: The populist epoch may be only beginning.
Read more…

It’s showtime. Let the fools’ carnival of unfeasible candidates elevate the designated Democratic piñata for this successful if edgy president to hammer through the election campaign.

By Conrad Black, AMERICAN GREATNESS

The NeverTrump campaign has sputtered to a ludicrous and pitiful end with this year. Having dragged its media lackeys and the dwindling curiosity of the country through an absurd burlesque of a “solemn, sad,” impeachment process—without alleging any actual illegalities—the NeverTrump campaign has rushed through in a procedural Star Chamber because of the “urgency” of removing the president before the country reelects him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will not send the articles of impeachment to the Senate until Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) promises to go to court and oblige administration witnesses to testify, a step the trained Democratic seals of the House declined to take because of the urgency of trial and removal of the president.

Finally, the revelation appears to have been noticed by the speaker, just ahead of the arrival of Santa Claus, that the Democrats have no case against the president, are slipping in the polls, and that the last stand of the argument that a moral imperative makes Trump clearly unfit to serve in the great office to which he was elected, has crumbled.
Read more…

Christians are often persecuted in Muslim nations. It hit a peak in the last century but it’s ongoing in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

by Clifford D. May, ISRAEL HAYOM

Grinch that I am, in the days leading up to Christmas I immersed myself in The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924.

The authors of this recently published, extensively researched, 500-page tome are Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, historians at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. “We embarked on this project in quest of the truth about what happened to the Ottoman Armenians during World War I,” they explain. What they found was “incontrovertible” proof of Turkey’s 1915-1916 genocide.

Two weeks ago, the US Senate voted unanimously in favor of a resolution, co-sponsored by Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), to “commemorate the Armenian genocide through official recognition and remembrance.”
Read more…

For a decade, Israel’s decisions on crucial issues has been influenced by the specter of The Hague. Since caution hasn’t worked, Israel should adopt other tactics before it is too late.

By Ariel Kahanah, ISRAEL HAYOM

Dr. Alan Baker, who used to serve as legal counsel to the Foreign Ministry, remembers Benjamin Netanyahu’s enthusiasm. The year was 2002 – the Second Intifada was wreaking havoc in the streets and the IDF was operating in Arab enclaves in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. Netanyahu was at the time foreign minister in Ariel Sharon’s government, and Baker was one of a group of Israeli and Jewish legal scholars who were pushing to establish the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Read more…

By Rusty Weiss And Jeff Dunetz, THE LID

So says DiGenova. Here’s Why.

By Elizabeth Vaughan, RED STATE

T. Belman.  This article was published in Hebrew in issue # 1 of the journal “National Resilience, Politics and Society” published by the University of Ariel. I posted a Google translation of same.

M. Nisan. Palestinian integration into Jordan as a historical phenomenon of significant political importance, showing why Palestinians are rejected not because they are foreign to Jordan but precisely because they have a very strong affinity for it. The Jordanian kingdom fears closer and closer to it than the foreigner: For her, the Palestinian threat has not weakened through the ages, but has taken on various forms of settlement, involvement and integration, including the possibility that the final stage of his complex relationship with the government – the Palestinians will even take over the kingdom.

The article’s future conclusions are primarily related to policy decisions on this bloody issue: A Palestinian state east of the Jordan River should be established, which will attract the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, develop as a prosperous state and avoid the current Palestinian preoccupation with terrorism.

The Jordanian-Palestinian Relationship

Dr. Mordechai Nisan, Hebrew University of Jerusalem il.ac.huji.mail@nisan.Mordechai
Read more…

By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, BESADecember 26, 2019

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The phenomenon of a growing reluctance to go to war and commit ground troops to combat can be seen around the world, not only in Israel. Citizens are increasingly demanding clarity on the purpose of the wars their armies are expected to fight.

“In the Netanyahu era,” argued a recent article in the monthly Hebrew magazine Liberal, “we are unable to launch a real war in Gaza. The leadership has no way to sell its cost to the public.”

Read more…

How will Israel know when Iran will cross the threshold for nuclear weapons, and will it act?

by Dr. Eric R. Mandel, MEPIN

One casualty of Israel’s electoral deadlock is the absence of a budget for the Israeli military.

The current five-year plan, Gideon, negotiated by former defense minister Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon almost five years ago is ending without a new military plan to replace it. Although the IDF can continue to act against imminent threats, it is dangerous to hamper long-range planning.

So I decided to speak with Israel’s former defense minister, who presided over the last five-year plan when things in the government were more normal, to see how he analyzes Israel’s current security challenges. His perspective should be seen not only through his years of military service culminating as the IDF chief of staff, but as a leader of Israel’s Blue and White Party that may lead the next coalition government. I thought it would be instructive to ask Ya’alon to comment on some of the topics I discuss in Washington with foreign policy experts and members of Congress.
Read more…

by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser, ALGEMEINER

Antisemitic graffiti scrawled on “The Rock” at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. Photo: Twitter screenshot.

On Tuesday, December 10, 2019, in a premeditated attack, two shooters opened fire inside a kosher deli in Jersey City, New Jersey and murdered four people. The killers included a former member of a notoriously antisemitic group and, reportedly, a follower of Louis Farrakhan.

It’s becoming obvious to most Jews that we are living in a state of siege. Practically every Jewish institution in America now needs significant security. College campuses have become hostile territory for Jewish students. Jews are murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, and Jersey City, beaten on the streets of Brooklyn, bullied and harassed in the universities, defamed by The New York Times and CNN, and now maligned in the US Congress.
Read more…