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Israel would do better to pay attention to the security of its actual citizens rather than to a career terrorist supporter who for a time used Israel as her base, says journalist.

By Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine

Elizabeth Tsurkov was kidnapped in Baghdad by Kata’ib Hezbollah: an Iraqi Shiite militia that has attacked Americans and answers to Iran. Even though the leftist activist had entered Iraq using her primary Russian passport, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that Israel was doing what it could to get her out.

Israel would do better to pay attention to the security of its actual citizens rather than to a career terrorist supporter who for a time used Israel as her base.

Tsurkov has been described as a “scholar” doing “fieldwork”. That might put people in mind of an archaeologist or an anthropologist, in reality she is a political activist who put out a steady stream of editorials, articles and tweets: many of which attacked Israel and supported terrorists.

In recent articles like “How Israel’s Occupation Came Home” and “Israel knows it will get away with the attack on Shireen Abu Aqleh’s funeral,” Tsurkov blasted Israel. In the wake of a massive wave of Islamic terrorist violence, she shamelessly complained that, “Israeli mainstream media quickly reverted to its habit of focusing on Jewish victims of violence.”

Elizabeth Tsurkov had spent a decade spreading vile smears of Israel, accusing the Jewish State of genocide and apartheid. She was interviewed by the worst anti-Israel activists like Peter Beinart, Matt Duss and Lara Friedman, and her tweets were picked up by pro-Hamas outlets.

Tsurkov’s despicable career was built in no small part on trafficking in attacks on Israel. After three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 2014, Tsurkov authored a New York Times post titled, “Israel Is Helping Hamas” in which she sneered that, “one cannot stir a hornet’s nest and claim self-defense when the hornets start biting. This is how the latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas commenced.”

Then she complained that “when militant groups fired rockets from Gaza, Israel began Operation Protective Edge, even though no Israelis had been harmed by the missiles.”

While Elizabeth Tsurkov isn’t the only Hamas apologist out there, she was employed by an activist group tied closely to the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership in America.

Media coverage has implied that Tsurkov’s kidnapping had something to do with her secondary Israeli side of her dual citizenship with Russia. The real reason that Tsurkov was kidnapped had nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the focus of her work on Syria.

Tsurkov was harshly critical of the Shiite Assad regime in Syria, backed by Iran, and very interested in the various Sunni militias operating in Syria. It’s not surprising that a Shiite militia in Iraq snapped her up, the only surprise is that it took them so long to get around to it.

The media has been predictably incurious about who was employing her and why.

Stories have mentioned that she “is a fellow at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy” based out of Washington D.C. without clarifying what that is. The New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy was founded by Ahmed Alwani, an Iraqi immigrant businessman operating out of Virginia, who serves as the vice president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

The original tagline of the IIIT was “towards Islamization of Knowledge.” Ahmed is the son of Taha Jabir Alwani: described as a founding figure of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

Kyle Shideler, the Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy, has called IIT “one of the earliest founded U.S. Muslim Brotherhood organizations, which was linked to a post-9/11 federal investigation into terrorism fundraising, and which has supplied much of the ideological material for U.S. Islamist groups since its founding in the early 1980s.”

Not only wasn’t Elizabeth Tsurkov working for Israel, as some have alleged; she was working for a group tied to the parent organization of Hamas, which is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Syrian Civil War was initially viewed as an extension of the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamist coups that had temporarily brought them to power in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and across the region. The Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in America put every effort into campaigning for American intervention against Assad, and then later bemoaning the rise of ISIS, Al Qaeda and hostile Sunni Islamist groups that were trying to carve up Syria for themselves.

That is the context within which Tsurkov’s ill-fated expedition needs to be seen. She was not kidnapped because she had a secondary Israeli citizenship (to which she was so loyal that she never gave up her primary Russian citizenship) or because she may be of Jewish ancestry, but because she was an activist in a Sunni-Shiite power struggle in Syria on behalf of the Sunnis.

In 2016, Tsurkov published an interview with the spokesman for Jaysh al-Islam, or the Army of Islam, which had a sizable contingent of Muslim Brotherhood Jihadists, titled, “Rebels at the Gates of Damascus.” How did she get access to a spokesman for a major Jihadist group?

The Shiite media supportive of the Assad regime dug and found that Tsurkov had a secondary Israeli citizenship and accused Jaysh al-Islam of being a bunch of Zionists. The spokesman resigned and Tsurkov, if she had any sense, would have left the region.

Instead she used Syria to build up her career. By 2018, she was listed as a consultant to George Soros’ International Crisis Group for her “interviews with rebel commanders, foot-soldiers, activists, community leaders and civilians in southwestern Syria.” Then, similarly, with the Atlantic Council, the European Institute for Peace, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Freedom House and finally New Lines, advocating for the Sunni Arabs in Syria.

Radicalized by the Israeli Left

Elizabeth Tsurkov’s kidnapping is not an Israeli problem or a Jewish one, it’s a Sunni Arab one. The Muslim Brotherhood is welcome to negotiate her release, not that they are likely to bother being that she is an infidel woman and therefore they place a low value on her life, but Israel shouldn’t. The last thing Israel or the free world needs is more terrorist apologists.

After a career of bashing Israel and excusing Islamic terrorists, Tsurkov is now in the hands of Islamic terrorists. It may prove to be an educational experience for the terror apologist.

Tsurkov has traveled the familiar path of other leftist activists like James Foley and Kayla Mueller, who rushed to the Middle East to side with Sunni Arab Islamists over America and Israel, only to end up a hostage. They may be victims, but they’re far from innocent. And their leftist politics have cost the lives of innocent people while aiding Islamic terrorists.

The same is true of Tsurkov who followed the familiar academic radicalization pipeline in Israel, working for open borders migrant groups in Israel, and then pro-terror anti-Israel activism, getting political science degrees in America and advocating for the Sunni Jihadists in Syria.

When the New York Times reported on poor living conditions at a camp for ISIS families in Syria, Tsurkov was quoted as complaining that “living in conditions that are difficult and being surrounded by people who are highly radical — is that conducive to deradicalisation?”

Elizabeth Tsurkov was radicalized by the Israeli Left. Her sympathy for Islamic terrorists led her to devalue the lives of Israelis and other non-Muslim targets of Islamic terrorism. The only tragedy is that none of her former allies and supporters will learn any lessons from her plight.

The post Was kidnapped scholar doing fieldwork in Iraq a ‘career terrorist supporter’? appeared first on World Israel News.

At a time when volunteer fire departments across the U.S. are struggling to recruit members, there’s a department located in a county with a large ultra-Orthodox community that is bucking the trend.

The post WATCH: Fire department in US city recruits ultra-Orthodox Jewish volunteers appeared first on World Israel News.

The past year has seen huge strikes. But the first steps taken by people new to workplace organising are big, too

The findings carry implications beyond Israel and shed new insight on global efforts to address the pandemic’s continuing consequences.

By Pesach Benson, TPS

Israeli researchers have uncovered a significant discrepancy in the effect of long-term COVID on the country’s different ethnic groups.

The study, conducted by a team of researchers from Bar-Ilan University, highlighted an 11% disparity between Arabs and Druze on one hand, and Jews, suggesting that certain populations may be more susceptible to long-term symptoms and a diminished quality of life. The findings were recently published in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Public Health.

Many people who were infected and then cured of the coronavirus have reported ongoing health problems such as persistent fatigue, heart palpitations, chest pains, brain fog, changes in smell and taste, joint and muscle pains – and for women, changes in their menstrual cycle, among other symptoms. More severe cases can impact the heart, lungs, kidneys, skin or brain.

More than half of Israelis who caught COVID reported feeling at least one symptom of long-term COVID one year after their sickness, according to an Israeli Health Ministry survey released in April 2023.

“By comprehending how the virus affects different communities, we can strive to develop targeted interventions and support systems that alleviate the long-term impact on quality of life,” said Prof. Michael Edelstein, the study’s lead author.

Well-being was assessed using the EQ-5D quality of life instrument measuring five dimensions: mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort, and anxiety/depression.

The researchers followed up with individuals who had previously contracted the SARS-CoV-2 virus as part of a comprehensive cohort study.

The disparity persisted, even after taking into account socio-economic differences.

“We embarked on this study to investigate the long-term effects of COVID-19 on minority groups in Israel given existing health inequalities in the country,” Edelstein said. “While pre-COVID quality of life among Jews, Arabs, and Druze in our study was initially comparable, at the 12-month mark after infection the Arab and Druze participants reported a quality of life 11% lower than their Jewish counterparts.”

Moving forward, the research team intends to further investigate the role of vaccines in mitigating the long-term effects of COVID-19. Additionally, they plan to explore the pandemic’s economic consequences on employment and income among the study participants.

The post Israeli study finds longterm COVID affects ethnic groups differently appeared first on World Israel News.

“Blaming Israel for these ruthless Palestinian acts only incentivizes the terrorists to continue using populated areas for their arms and weapons,” Erdan said. 

By World Israel News Staff

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan slammed UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for his remarks against this week’s IDF counterterrorism raid in Jenin. Guterres’s remarks were “shameful, farfetched, and completely detached from reality,” he said.

During a press briefing at UN Headquarters in New York City on Thursday, the UN chief said that the “Israeli airstrikes and ground operations in a crowded refugee camp were the worst violence in the West Bank in many years, with a significant impact on civilians.”

Notably, Jenin is not a refugee camp; rather, it is a bustling city of 15,000 residents and a hotbed of terror.

“The use of airstrikes is inconsistent with the conduct of law enforcement operations,” Guterres declared. “As the occupying power,” Israel “has a responsibility to ensure that the civilian population is protected against all acts of violence.”

He also claimed that Israel denied the wounded access to medical care and humanitarian aid.

“I strongly condemn all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror,” Guterres stated.

Asked whether this condemnation applied to Israel, he replied: “It applies to all use of excessive force, and obviously in this situation, there was an excessive force used by Israeli forces.”

Erdan responded in a tweet that the IDF attack “focused solely on combating the murderous Palestinian terror targeting innocent Israeli civilians. Sadly, Palestinians had to leave their homes temporarily as Palestinian terrorists turned them, along with hospitals and schools, into arms caches and command centers for their terror activity.

“Blaming Israel for these ruthless Palestinian acts only incentivizes the terrorists to continue using populated areas for their arms and weapons,” he stated.

“Time after time, the UN Secretary-General disregards brutal Palestinian terror and neglects to condemn the cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians. Yet when discussing defensive Israeli actions aimed at dismantling terror infrastructure, the SG is quick to issue extensive condemnations of Israel detached from the truth.

“I call on the SG to retract his words and clearly condemn the Palestinian terror against civilians and for using other Palestinians as ‘human shields,’ rather than denouncing the democratic State of Israel for defending itself in the face of terror.”

The Secretary-General’s remarks against Israel were shameful, farfetched, and completely detached from reality. The recent Israeli counter-terror activity in Jenin focused solely on combating the murderous Palestinian terror targeting innocent Israeli civilians.

Sadly,… https://t.co/R9DKFOe30z

— Ambassador Gilad Erdan גלעד ארדן (@giladerdan1) July 6, 2023

Over 50 terror attacks have been launched at Israel from Jenin in recent months. There were minors among the terrorists eliminated by the IDF in the raid who were trained by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, financed by Iran, to engage in acts of terror.

The post Israeli envoy demands UN chief retract ‘shameful’ condemnation of IDF counterterrorism raid appeared first on World Israel News.

Depending on who you ask, Henry Kissinger is either the genius diplomat who won the Cold War or a war criminal long overdue for indictment by the Hague. Given Kissinger’s place in history, it’s worth reviewing how his early ideas and interests foreshadowed the man he would eventually become. Pursuant to this end, there exists perhaps no better window into the mind of young Kissinger than his undergraduate honors thesis at Harvard, a text which warrants far more attention than it has received.

Kissinger’s primary area of focus is the tension between the lived individual experience of free will and the determinism of the historical process:

“Is history the self-realization of the spirit of freedom, as Hegel held? Or does it represent the growth and decline of organic cultures, their essence a mystery, their moving force longing, and their manifestation power, as Spengler argued? Is there a deeper purpose in all this emergence and decay of civilizations, a realization of salvation by faith, as Toynbee implies? Does history amount to no more than eternal recurrence, the stage for the man who surpasses himself of Nietzsche, or does it reveal the drama of a divine plan, gradually unfolding and culmination in universal peace, as Kant asserts?”

Oswald Spengler, whose ideas on the cyclical growth and decay of civilizations were hugely influential following WWI, is the diplomat’s first interlocutor. Kissinger then critiques Arnold Toynbee, one of the most influential historians at that time. Finally, he closes with Kant, as his ideas on the gradual emergence of a divine plan though reason served as the most comprehensive metaphysical view of history in not only German, but Western thought.

For each section, Kissinger posits that the only way to evaluate these thinkers is to examine their metaphysical presuppositions to determine their overarching understanding of Man’s relation to history. It is only in the exegesis of Spengler and Toynbee, Kissinger argues, that a fuller view of Kant’s thought can provide a solution.

Kissinger clearly admires Spengler most, not only because he spends the most time on him, but also because Spengler’s evaluation is the most robust. Heavily influenced by Hegel, Spengler saw civilizations as autonomous organisms actualizing their immanence through their depth-experience. History is revealed through the manifestation of an inexorable destiny, its completion the consequence of the unconscious participation in its process of becoming. Each culture goes through its own process of youth, maturity and decline in both political and artistic history. For Kissinger, Spengler was a visionary, if a misguided one:

“Spengler’s vision encompassed an approach to history which-whatever our opinion of his conclusions, transcended the mere causal analysis of data and the shallow dogmatism of many progress theories… the conviction remains that Spengler has found poetry in life which rises above the barren systematization of its manifestations.”

Spengler was, for Kissinger, a revolutionary who provided a new way of viewing history. Instead of history as the product of advancements in technology, philosophy, institutions or culture, they are accidental manifestations of the larger, organic process of a civilization’s life-cycle. He thus flipped the philosophy of history on its head. Yet, however intelligent Spengler may be, he could never satisfy Kissinger because the all-encompassing destiny of a civilization left no room for individual free will.

Toynbee, then, took Spengler’s process and attempted to bring a more evidenced based approach it to complete it within a Christian eschatology. Toynbee saw himself as a British Empiricist, heavily influenced by the methodology of Hume and the logical positivists. He saw historical development not as the organic process of the lifecycle of a civilization, but as the successful adaptation to a problem facing a civilization, known as Challenge-and-Response. He went into great detail explaining the interactions of the relevant actors and how civilizational growth and decline is accounted for in a quasi-evolutionary process. Their ultimate failure constituting the realization of the final stage of integration in Christ’s return. For Toynbee:

“Civilizations were not organic beings whose destiny determines their history, but merely the fields of activity…[they] do not break down because of an inevitable fatality, but commit suicide…then out of the collapse of material hopes arises the vision of the ultimate meaning of human suffering, the real embodiment of historical existence the Kingdom of God, with Christ as King.”

Yet Kissinger ultimately finds Toynbee to be even less satisfying than Spengler because Toynbee’s presuppositions of a Christian end-to-history ultimately undercuts his empirical approach to its unfolding. The biological, evolutionary-empirical view is irreconcilable with the theological one.

Kant’s thought, finally, offers a solution to Kissinger’s underlying dilemma. Kant tried to combine and transcend the two predominant schools of thought in his time. Rationalism, personified by Spinoza, held that all action was merely necessity unfolding, and Empiricism, personified by Hume’s metaphysical skepticism, which rendered ultimate reality as unknowable. Spinoza’s negation of free will in history mirrored that of Spengler; whereas Toynbee tried to transcend Hume by his Christianity but ultimately failed. Thus, Kant’s reconciliation between Rationalism and Empiricism mirrored the antinomy between Spangler and Toynbee.

Kant achieved this by making a distinction between phenomenal (things apprehended by pure reason) and noumenal (things in themselves and objects of speculative reason) reality. Causal analysis became relegated to phenomenal reality, whereas Man’s experience of morality was opened in the field of the noumenal. Kant thus limited reason and made way for belief. The antinomy between necessity and freedom, between historically understood determinism and the experience of free will, was reconciled in the recognition of the limitations of pure reason and the expansion of the noumenal. Thus, the determinism of the historical process and Man’s experience of freedom were not incongruous but merely two sides of the same coin, one understood by the phenomenal and one by the noumenal.

Kant would go on to apply the moral law understood in noumenal reality to international political considerations in his essay, On Perpetual Peace (1795). He argued that once the categorical imperative is realized, its moral sanction extends to the political realm. Thus, since republican constitutions institutionalize the categorical imperative (“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law”) and since man can never be treated as a mere means to ends, peace sought through the international cooperation of federated republics is Man’s highest task and noblest purpose. Kissinger respects how Kant’s political philosophy flows from his metaphysical and ethical propositions, but ultimately rejects it on methodological grounds, mirroring Kissinger’s own rejection of Wilsonian Idealism in his own time.

In reviewing the breadth of Kissinger’s thesis, I’m reminded of a story from Kissinger’s visit to China. When he asked Chinese politician Zhou Enlai his thoughts on the French Revolution, Enlai replied “It’s too soon to tell.” Kissinger came to believe the Chinese officials were geniuses who thought in terms of centuries. In fact, in his book On China, Kissinger spends the better part of the opening chapter explaining the Chinese board game of wei qi and how it is much more complicated than Chess, relaying how it represents the CCP thoughts on grand strategy and its more all-encompassing nature than Western grand strategy.

Sadly, the story is the product of a miscommunication by the translator. Enlai thought Kissinger was referring to the French student protests of 1968. Nevertheless, it says far more about Kissinger than the CCP. Kissinger thinks in terms of the grandest possible scale. His willingness to attribute such breadth to the Chinese Premier is a reflection of the magnitude of his own thoughts. The precociousness of Kissinger’s honors thesis itself is a testament to his ambition. The topic is grand, and Kissinger covers large swaths of Western thought within the span of just a few pages. In wrestling with such an enigmatic subject, he demonstrates his willingness to tackle some of the most perplexing topics of Western philosophy head on. He is a first-rate mind, whatever his ultimate place in history.

The post Young Henry Kissinger’s Philosophy of History appeared first on Providence.

On Thursday morning, the New York City Police found the body of Sheryl Myrick, the mother of a man found dead in a garbage bag on a street in Queens the day before.

The suspect Roscoe Danielson, 40, was taken into custody later that day concerning the murders of his mother and brother, Kyle Danielson.

According to reports, Myrick was discovered with stab wounds, a slit throat, and multiple gunshot wounds in an apartment on 104th Street in North Corona.

The body of Kyle Danielson had been discovered the day before in a white bag with a blanket on top, and the suspect had been seen on video dragging the body from the home. It is believed that Roscoe, who had several arrests in the past, killed his brother and mother during a disagreement. The details of the dispute are still being investigated.

Javier Membrero, a local witness, recounted to The NY Post his shock when he saw a strange sight on Wednesday. While walking to the store, he noticed a garbage bag with blood coming out of it. He decided to investigate further by tapping the bag with his foot, and upon feeling something that did not feel like garbage, he immediately called 911. He told the outlet, “When I touched it with my [foot], I thought, ‘That’s not garbage. That feels like a body.’ I called 911.”

Roscoe was found near the scene Wednesday night when police stopped him and discovered he had a gun and knife, police sources said. He was detained for questioning and was charged with multiple charges, including concealment of a human corpse, tampering with evidence, and criminal possession of stolen property.

Another incident of a young athlete collapsing on the field has come to light this week. A 17-year-old footballer, Robert Bush, from Selden, New York, suddenly collapsed during a training session earlier in the week.

According to Newsday, Bush had been on the field training for just a few minutes before he lost consciousness.

Bush is on life support following a cardiac event during conditioning drills at Newfield High School on Monday evening. His older brother, Steve Bush, informed Newsday that Robert had only been on the field for four minutes before suddenly bent over and passed out.

Despite CPR and defibrillation attempts by his coaches and medical teams who rushed him to Stony Brook University Hospital, the teen had gone without blood or oxygen to his brain for approximately 45 minutes.

Steve Bush further commented to the outlet that there is no more brain function. Although the cause of the collapse is unknown, the family believes it might be due to a hereditary condition that thickens the walls of the heart’s left ventricle, preventing it from getting or pumping enough blood.

Robert’s parents, Robert and Patricia, adopted him as a baby, and he has ten siblings ranging in age from 16 to 56 years old. Chris Bush, another brother, shared with the outlet that he had taught Robert how to play football and that Robert was always striving to get better because he was not naturally talented.

It is a tragedy for the family, as Steve Bush expressed in the interview that Robert was looking forward to having a life of marriage and having children, like his older siblings.

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