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Who would have expected that the BRICS nations could rise as the potential rival of the G7 countries, the World Bank and the IMF combined? But that once seemingly distant possibility now has real prospects which could change the political equilibrium of world politics

Urges that sanctions be imposed on only high-valued diamonds of one carat and above

West will continue to promote chaos in Georgian internal political scenario until it gets its objective of heading the country to war.

Rabbi Leo Dee, who lost his wife and two daughters in terrorist shooting attack, castigates CNN for comparing Israeli self-defense to Arab terror.

By World Israel News Staff

Rabbi Leo Dee, the bereaved father and husband who lost his wife and two daughters in a terror attack in the Jordan Valley earlier this month, excoriated CNN for drawing a moral equivalence between the murder of his wife and daughters on one hand and Israel’s acts of self-defense against Arab terrorists on the other.

Rabbi Dee accused CNN of engaging in “terror journalism” and perpetuating a false equivalency between Israel and its attackers.

Last week in an interview with CNN, Rabbi Dee recounted the murder of his wife, Lucy, 48, and daughters Maia, 20, and Rina, 15.

However, when the segment ended, CNN reporter Christina Macfarlane implied that Palestinian Arabs were also suffering from the conflict, prompting Rabbi Dee to speak out against the false equivalency, slamming CNN in an interview with the London-based Jewish Chronicle.

He argued that there is no equivalent on the Israeli side and accused anti-Israel media outlets of “terror journalism.”

Despite the tragedy, Rabbi Dee stressed that he believes that “most Palestinian Arabs are good people” and that his family had received messages of condolence from Palestinians.

Rabbi Dee also condemned the UK government’s initial response, which failed to explicitly mention Palestinians or terrorism. However, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly later sent a letter to Rabbi Dee condemning the act of terrorism and reaffirming the UK’s commitment to ending the cycle of violence.

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After being fired from CNN, Don Lemon pushes back on accusations, says he has no regrets, plans to spend the summer ‘on the beach and on the boat.’

By World Israel News Staff

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who was fired from his job at the news network earlier this week amid allegations of “diva-like” and misogynistic behavior, played the victim at the Time 100 Gala in New York, while hinting he is not rushing to find a new position.

The Baton Rouge native, who reportedly made $7 million a year at CNN and is expected to walk away with a $25 million payout, described himself as a “survivor” during an interview with Extra on the red carpet.

Despite the sudden and unceremonious axing, Lemon boasted about having the luxury of taking time off and spending “the summer on the beach and on the boat, and with my family.”

The embattled TV personality narrowly avoided an embarrassing run-in with his former co-anchor and former boss at the Time 100 event. Event organizers seated them at separate tables for dinner.

Licht denied that Lemon’s firing and Tucker Carlson’s departure at Fox were deliberately set for the same time on Monday morning. Lemon broke the news of his unemployment on Twitter, hinting at “larger issues at play.”

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Republican presidential hopeful and former governor and US Ambassador to the UN predicts President Biden’s demise before the end of his second term.

By World Israel News Staff

On Wednesday, Republican presidential hopeful and former South Carolina Governor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley predicted that President Joe Biden is likely to pass away within the next five years.

Haley also suggested that if the 80-year-old incumbent were to win re-election next year, his supporters would have to rely on Vice President Kamala Harris.

During an interview on Fox News, Haley stated, “He announced that he’s running again in 2024, and I think that we can all be very clear and say with a matter of fact that if you vote for Joe Biden you really are counting on a President Harris, because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old is not something that I think is likely.”

The White House responded bluntly to Haley’s comments, with Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates telling NBC News that although the administration does not typically respond directly to campaign remarks, he had “honestly, forgot she was running.”

Haley’s campaign centers around a “new generation” of leadership, and she has proposed that politicians over the age of 75 be required to take a mental competency test. First Lady Jill Biden criticized this suggestion, calling it “ridiculous.”

At 51, Haley has highlighted the generational gap between herself and the two most recent presidents – the 80-year-old Joe Biden and 76-year-old Donald Trump.

While Haley served under Trump as ambassador, she will face off against her former boss in next year’s Republican primaries.

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Fed up with the months of anti-government demonstrations where protesters, led by the opposition, claim to be fighting for democracy, at least 600,000 Israelis rallied in Jerusalem Thursday night, chanting “We demand judicial reform,” “We want a Jewish state,” and “64 mandates” – referring to the November 2022 election won by the Right.

A significant number of non-religious protesters held signs saying, “I am secular. I demand judicial reform.”

In first video below, the crowd is saying in Hebrew, “The nation demands judicial reform.”

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signs bill cracking down on antisemitism into law during visit to Jerusalem.

By Andrew Bernard, The Algemeiner

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday signed a bill described by one of its co-sponsors as “the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States.”

DeSantis signed the bill, HB 269, from Jerusalem’s Museum of Tolerance as part of an international trade mission that has included visits to Japan, South Korea and Israel, and that will conclude in the United Kingdom.

Described as a counter to “public nuisances,” the bill specifically prohibits certain forms of littering, harassment or intimidation based on religious heritage, the projection of images onto buildings without the owner’s permission, and the malicious disruption of a school or religious assembly.

Many of these “nuisances” are used as tactics by the so-called “Goyim Defense League” of neo-Nazis and other hate groups that have conducted campaigns of antisemitic leaflet littering, used projectors to superimpose antisemitic messages on buildings, and hung neo-Nazi banners on highway overpasses.

Speaking at press conference before the signing on Thursday, DeSantis emphasized the difference between protected speech under the First Amendment and the bigoted harassment that HB 269 is intended to counter.

“In the United States, you have a constitutionally protected right to say whatever you want, no matter how distasteful it is, no matter how hateful it is,” DeSantis said. “But you don’t have a right to threaten people, you don’t have a right to harass people, you don’t have a right to intimidate somebody, particularly on the basis of somebody’s religious affiliation.”

One of the co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. Randy Fine (R), told The Algemeiner in March that he was spurred to action by the outbreak of antisemitic activity in Florida.

“Nazis are not welcome in Florida,” he said. “The behavior they’re using to terrorize, intimidate, and assault Jewish Floridians is going to come to an end.”

Fine, who traveled to Israel for the signing, wrote on Twitter Thursday that HB 269 was “the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States.”

“To Florida’s Nazi thugs, I have news: attack Jews on their property and you’re going to prison,” he said.

Kenneth L. Marcus, the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which provided constitutional and legal analysis to Florida’s Jewish community in support of the bill, welcomed the signing of the legislation on Thursday.

“We are now seeing a resurgence of right-wing hate crimes in the streets, just as we are seeing left-wing antisemitism growing on the campuses,” Marcus said. “All forms of antisemitism must be fought, through all available legal means, and we are pleased that this legislation will provide us with important additional tools to do so in Florida, as we continue to fight this scourge throughout the country.”

Antisemitic incidents in the United States increased 36 percent in 2022, according to an annual audit issued by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in March.

The ADL recorded 3,697 incidents — ten per day — across the US, the highest ever since the group began track them in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double digits and occurred most frequently in New York, California, New Jersey, Florida, and Texas, which accounted for 54 percent of the ADL’s data. New York had the most, with 580 incidents. One incident resulted in a fatality.

 

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Ratings for Fox News’ flagship timeslot plummets 56% following removal of Tucker Carlson, with MSNBC topping Fox after trailing for years.

By The Associated Press

Hundreds of thousands of Fox News viewers are reacting to Tucker Carlson’s firing by abandoning the network in his old time slot — at least temporarily.

Fox drew 1.33 million viewers for substitute host Brian Kilmeade in the 8 p.m. Eastern hour on Wednesday night, putting the network second to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in a competition Carlson used to dominate, the Nielsen company said.

That’s down 56% from the 3.05 million viewers Carlson reached last Wednesday, Nielsen said. For all of 2022, Carlson averaged 3.03 million viewers, second only to Fox’s “The Five” as the most popular program on cable television.

Carlson offered his own alternative to Kilmeade on Wednesday, posting a two-minute monologue on Twitter at 8 p.m. By Thursday afternoon, that video had been viewed 62.7 million times, according to Twitter.

Kilmeade had 1.7 million viewers on Tuesday and 2.59 million on Monday, when he told people who hadn’t already heard the news that Carlson would no longer be there.

Carlson had 2.65 million viewers on Friday for what he didn’t know at the time would be his last show on Fox. He was fired on Monday with no explanation given publicly, although there are no shortage of theories — including a former employee’s lawsuit that cited a toxic work atmosphere at his show, offensive statements by Carlson that came out as part of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox.

The ratings slump echoes what happened at Fox following the 2020 election, when many viewers angered by the network’s crucial election night declaration that Joe Biden had won Arizona followed then-President Donald Trump’s advice to seek alternatives. That caused tremendous angst behind the scenes at Fox, which was illustrated in documents released as part of the Dominion case.

Asked for comment, Fox responded with a statement noting that Fox has been cable news’ most-watched network for 21 years with its team “trusted more by viewers than any other news source.”

In the wake of Carlson’s firing, viewing at the conservative network Newsmax has shot up for Eric Bolling, who hosts a show in the same 8 p.m. Eastern slot.

For example, Bolling had 510,000 viewers Wednesday night, compared to 168,000 on Wednesday a week ago, Nielsen said. On Tuesday, Bolling had 562,000 viewers, up from 122,000 the same day a week earlier.

The challenge for Newsmax will be making it last. Fox surged again following Biden’s inauguration as president, and Newsmax couldn’t keep up the momentum.

The post Fox News ratings tumble in Tucker Carlson slot after his firing appeared first on World Israel News.

3,000 years of Jewish history, not the Holocaust, inspired Israel’s soldiers to reclaim the Jewish historic homeland.

By TPS

Many see the creation of the modern-day State of Israel as part of a historical narrative, in which Israeli independence was a reaction to the Holocaust. “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State,” the provisional government of Israel declared on May 14, 1948.

But when the Tazpit Press Service interviewed nearly 30 veterans of the 1948 War of Independence in Israel from October 2022 to January 2023, all of the octogenarians, nonagenarians and centenarians said that 3,000 years of Jewish history — and not the Holocaust — drove them to help reclaim the Jewish historic homeland.

TPS found the interviewees by visiting nursing homes, kibbutzim and other sites in Israel and abroad, often asking to speak with the oldest people present. The roughly 30 who agreed to talk about their experiences spoke with TPS — the majority in English with some Yiddish — for more than 60 hours collectively.

The veterans spanned Israeli-born sabras who were active in the Jewish militias Irgun, Lehi and the Haganah, as well as foreign fighters who came to assist what would become the Israel Defense Forces in Machal units.

Both the native Israelis and the foreign volunteers knew a great deal about the Holocaust, and many had lost relatives and friends. They met survivors who recounted their experiences. But invariably, the veterans told TPS that they were motivated in their service by a long cultural and historical memory rather than World War II itself.

On Israel’s Independence Day, TPS shares a few of those stories.

The Haganah Messenger

TPS spent some eight hours at kibbutz Gan Shmuel with Itzik Mizrachi, 90, who shared his story, gave a tour of the kibbutz where he lives and invited TPS to lunch at its dining hall. The Jerusalem-born Mizrachi said he was a messenger in Haganah’s youth wing, Gadna.

During the outbreak of the war in May 1948, Itzik and his family were in the Mount Scopus area, and Arabs blocked them from taking roads to other safe areas. A mob mobilized to try to kill them, he said, but the patriarch of an Arab family, Abu Mustafa, who shared their home stood guard at the door and told the mob it would have to kill him first.

Soon thereafter, Haganah members came in an armored truck and told the family it had half an hour to gather its things and come to safety.

Mizrachi, who remains in good health, and walks and drives on his own, told TPS that he is the seventh generation in his family to live in Israel, after his ancestors, Sephardic Jews, left Spain during the expulsion.

As a Haganah message runner, he studied KAPAP—an acronym for krav panim el panim, or close-quarter fighting—which the Haganah used to disguise its weapons training. Mizrachi later studied with Imi Lichtenfeld, founder of krav maga martial art. Mizrachi’s son Rhon is now one of the recognized experts in that form of combat.

Mizrachi told TPS that the Holocaust was only one chapter in Jewish history. “Why would we allow that moment alone to define us as Jews?” he said. “Long before the Holocaust, we said, ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ every year during the Passover seder [meal].”

The Holocaust was a motivator, but not the main one. “For generations, we yearned for our independence. There were many pogroms, massacres and expulsions in our history. We never let any of these define us either,” he said.

South African Zionism

“The South African Jewish community was very Zionist long before the Holocaust,” Ruth Stern, 97, a South African nurse who now lives in Jerusalem, told TPS.

The 800 South African volunteers in 1948 paled in number only to Americans (1,000). Due to the representation from these two nations in particular, English became the most spoken language among the “machalniks.” Most foreign volunteers, who were likelier to know Yiddish than Hebrew, first spoke in Yiddish with Israelis.

Stern, who went to Israel to volunteer over her parents’ objections — “Why can’t you be like your sisters and not go?” — said that she and her peers knew about the Holocaust and that many South African Jews of Lithuanian heritage lost relatives back home.

“The Holocaust wasn’t why I volunteered or why most other Jews did,” she insisted.

In 1948, she treated many patients who had survived the Holocaust before their injuries in the war. They experienced trauma on top of trauma, she said.

She accounted for her choice to go to Israel despite pressure from her parents with her spirit of adventurousness. It’s not every 2,000 years that one can see the Jewish state rebuilt, she said, adding that she didn’t want to wait another two millennia.

High-Flying Graphic Designer

Asked whether the Holocaust motivated him, the late Alex Zilony, who died at age 107 on March 3, replied: “No. What a question!”

Zilony, who was born in Poland and grew up in Israel, studied in the United Kingdom before becoming a Haganah pilot. He was one of the founders of the Israeli Air Force, and speaking from his home in Tel Aviv, he told TPS that he designed the IAF emblem, which remains in use today.

“We have wanted a state for over 3,000 years,” he said. “Maybe the possibility of building a state was higher after the Holocaust because we got many new immigrants and war veterans, but Jews had been migrating since the 1920s and even before this,” he said.

Zilony’s daughter, Ruth, who was present during the interview, was as surprised as TPS was at her father’s response. “This was not the answer I expected,” she said, highlighting generational differences in Israel today.

Despite the tendency of American South African and British volunteer pilots to pride themselves on the proclamation that they helped solidify a victory in 1948, Zilony was adamant that Israel would have prevailed without that help.

Stay Alive!

“They say three Jews, five opinions,” the late Tom Tugend told TPS in a phone call from his California home late last year. “This time, it was half a million of us, one opinion—stay alive! Pretty much the whole Diaspora or every Jew who could hold a gun sent someone to represent their community.”

Despite having fled Nazi Germany to the United States and later returned to Europe as a U.S. soldier, Tugend insisted that his desire to help create a Jewish state was a more significant motivator than the Holocaust.

Jews came from a variety of backgrounds, noted Tugend, from Jewish IRA (Irish Republican Army) arms smugglers to Indian Jews. Some, like Tugend, had served in the U.S. military, or in the British or French armies in World War II. Some were officers, while others lacked any military experience, he said, and a few even came from Kenya.

“The South Africans were among the most dedicated fighters,” he pointed out. “There was a Jewish Texan cowboy with a Southern accent. There was a Jew with a Scottish accent, and I recall one from Yorkshire whom nobody could understand! They all wanted to defend the new nation of Israel.”

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