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The latest World Happiness Report shows Israel moving up 5 positions to number 4.

By Jacob Sivak, Algemeiner

In 2017, when I first became aware of the World Happiness Report, I read that Israel was ranked the 11th happiest country in the world in a survey of more than 150 countries.

The report, a creation of the United Nations, is published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network using data collected from citizens of each country by Gallup. Each report is a comprehensive document compiled by a team of experts.

The report, issued yearly from 2012, takes into account gross domestic product (GDP), social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. The results are based on self-reported evaluations by those surveyed, and each year’s numbers are calculated as averages of three years, the current year and two previous ones. The numbers represent all citizens, including, in Israel’s case, two million Arab citizens.

In the 2022 rankings, Israel moved up to number 9, with the northern European countries dominating the list. Finland ranked number one.

But the big surprise is the latest report, for 2023. In it, Israel moved up 5 positions to number 4, behind Finland (number one for the sixth year in a row), Denmark, and Iceland. Canada was number 13 and the US number 15.

Virtually every Israeli news service, as well as Jewish ones in the Diaspora, reported this startling result.

The most compelling interpretation was given by Miriam Shaviv in The Jewish Chronicle. She asks how residents of a country subject to wars, existential threats, terrorist attacks, and internal tensions, can be so happy?

The answer lies in the exceptional level of social support, characterized by strong family and community ties, experienced by Israelis: “Even secular Israelis will have Friday night dinner together regularly and come together to celebrate festivals, Independence Day, births, bar and bat mitzvahs and huge weddings.”

Shaviv points out that the latest report is based on data collected before the recent judicial review protests engulfed Israel. While it is possible that the rankings will go down, she doubts it. To her, the protests are indicative of the strength of Israel’s social fabric, and the demonstrations have only re-enforced the sense of solidarity and kinship among its citizens.

A number of mainstream media outlets have reported the latest Happiness Report results, but there has been little or no notice of the substantial jump in ranking for Israel. The New York Times recently published an article on Finland’s consistent number one happiness position, but nothing about Israel.

News stories predicting doom and gloom for the Zionist enterprise are not uncommon. Just look at the titles of recent articles published in The New York Times by Thomas Friedman and Isabel Kirshner. Are these merely examples of good critical journalism, or is there more to it? What is it that makes bad news about Israel so engrossing, while good news is not welcome?

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.

The post Opinion: Why are Israelis so happy, and why isn’t it newsworthy? appeared first on World Israel News.

“Cybewell’s monitoring technology noticed a specific uptick in antisemitic narratives criticizing the Eurovision as being rigged by the Jews or specifically picking on Noa Kirel.”

By Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner

Among the five major social media platforms, Twitter was a “clear leader” in hosting the most antisemitic content surrounding the Eurovision Song Contest and Israeli pop singer Noa Kirel’s participation in the singing competition, the founder and executive director of the world’s first live database of online antisemitism told The Algemeiner in a recent interview.

The Israeli non-profit organization CyberWell uses artificial intelligence as well as open source intelligence tools that are catered to tracking online antisemitism on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Youtube and Instagram. Its interactive database that reports and monitors online antisemitism, which is available for public viewing on its website, focuses on English and Arabic content.

CyberWell examined social media posts from the start of the Eurovision semi-finals in Liverpool, England, last month through the finals on May 13, where Kirel came in third place. It scouted independent posts as well as comments on non-antisemitic posts that talked about the Eurovision or showed support for Israel in the competition.

On May 17, CyberWell released an analysis report with its findings, which revealed that Twitter hosted the most antisemitic rhetoric — over 90 percent — about Kirel and the Eurovision competition in comparison to the other major social media platforms. Kirel was not only targeted with antisemitic hate speech, but many of the online posts includes antisemitic conspiracy theories and tropes about Jewish control of Eurovision as well as the demonization of Jews.

On one post about Eurovision uploaded by the official Arabic Twitter of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, commentators repeated the Houthi slogan: “God is the greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.” In another Twitter post, Kirel was called a “neo Nazi” and the user also wrote, “#israhell has NO place where civilised [sic] people gather #shameful #StandWithPalestine.”

One of the tweets highlighted in CyberWell’s analysis report that Twitter has yet to remove.

“We can identify upticks in online antisemitic discourse and what we saw in the Eurovision was consistent with what we also saw during the World Cup in 2022, which is that major cultural sporting and concert events are leveraged to spread online antisemitism by certain corners of the internet and specifically hateful users online,” CyberWell founder and executive director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor said. “Cybewell’s monitoring technology noticed a specific uptick in antisemitic narratives criticizing the Eurovision as being rigged by the Jews or specifically picking on Noa Kirel.”

Montemayor added that on Twitter alone, CyberWell found hundreds of posts that publicized antisemitic hate speech about Kirel and the Eurovision, making the social media platform the host of the “most prominent antisemitic Eurovision narrative.”

In April, Twitter announced a new “enforcement philosophy” called “Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach” in which it would limit the reach of tweets that violate its policies by making the content less discoverable. However, Montemayor said that CyberWell was able to sample certain tweets spreading antisemitic narratives about the Eurovision that reached the highest levels of engagement on Twitter and the posts were viewed over 5,000 times — a clear violation of Twitter’s new “philosophy.”

All of the data and content collected and flagged by CyberWell are reported to the social media platforms. All 30 examples of the Eurovision-linked antisemitic posts included in CyberWell’s analysis report were reported to the respective platforms but none of them have been removed.

“There have been a lot of changes at Twitter recently and some of those changes are very consistent with a clear surge in antisemitic content and hate speech on Twitter,” Montemayor explained. “That would include our findings from 2022 that 90 percent of the violent antisemitic content that we found — [like] calling to harm Jews – was found on Twitter.”

“Similarly, in a recent CyberWell report taking an overall look at Holocaust denial and distortion online, it was easiest to find Holocaust denial on Twitter,” she later added.

Montemayor linked many changes at Twitter — both good and bad — to Elon Musk’s acquisition in October 2022. The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Inc. purchased the social media platform for an estimated $44 billion and became its new owner and CEO.

“Musk reinstated extreme antisemitic accounts, including prolific neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, as part of his takeover of the platform,” Montemayor said. “Twitter has a significant antisemitism problem that has been exacerbated since Musk’s takeover. The changes both in policy and practice that we’ve seen at Twitter – we’ve seen very clear trends of antisemitic content being hosted on Twitter quite a bit,” she told The Algemeiner before adding that on the flip side, “we have also seen indications of higher rates of removal of that antisemitic content since Musk took over.”

Twitter has in fact responded to different high level alerts that CyberWell has shared with it regarding antisemitic rhetoric on its platform. Montemayor said that when there was a spike in online antisemitism following rapper Ye’s antisemitic tirade in October 2022, CyberWell flagged hashtags that were being used to spread antisemitism during that time and within 24 hours, Twitter took action by suppressing almost all the hashtags shared with its hate speech compliance team.

According to CyberWell’s analysis that was shared with The Algemeiner, Twitter had a removal rate of 26 percent in 2022 before Musk took over and after his takeover that number was 30 percent. The removal rate for Twitter in 2023 is 44 percent, which is higher than Facebook’s (10 percent) but lower than that of Instagram (50 percent) and YouTube (45 percent).

Twitter has been the center of controversy many times in the past since Musk’s takeover for attracting neo-Nazis and extremists to its platform. Musk himself has been accused of promoting antisemitism for his own activity on Twitter, including a post in which he compared the Jewish financier George Soros with a Jewish villain in the Marvel Comics. A day after that exact tweet, he shared with his over 141 million Twitter followers posts from a far-right account that spews conspiracy theories.

The post Twitter a ‘clear winner’ in online antisemitism over Israeli Singer Noa Kirel appeared first on World Israel News.

The discussions aim to preserve the current ceasefire agreement with Israel and address the dispute between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

By World Israel News Staff

Terror chiefs belonging to the Gaza-based Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) factions are heading to Cairo for talks with Egyptian intelligence officials amid reports that of warming relations between Egypt and the terror groups’ main sponsor, Iran.

The discussions aim to preserve the current ceasefire agreement with Israel and address the dispute between Hamas and the ruling Fatah faction led by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, according to The Jerusalem Post. Several attempts to reconcile Hamas and Fatah have failed in the past.

The upcoming talks mark the first of their kind since the recent round of fighting between Israel and PIJ in Operation Shield and Arrow.

Egypt played a crucial role in brokering the ceasefire after the five-day flare-up, with assistance from Qatar and the United Nations.

The Hamas delegation will include officials from the Gaza Strip and Qatar. It is unclear whether PIJ Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhaleh, based in Lebanon, will participate in the talks. Other Palestinian officials, including de facto Hamas Prime Minister Issam al-Da’alis and PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, also visited Cairo this week for discussions with Egyptian officials on various topics including economic development and increased trade.

The Palestinians “need Egypt today more than ever,” Shtayyeh said.

The Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat said in a report this week that Cairo has “welcomed recurring indications from Iran to strengthen its relations with Egypt.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al-Said this week that Tehran welcomes an upgrade in ties with Egypt.

The post Hamas, PIJ leaders meet in Cairo amid warming ties with Iran appeared first on World Israel News.

Families and teenagers who were brainwashed by Islamic State ideologies undergo rehabilitation and taught skills to hold down normal jobs.

The post WATCH: Syrian youth radicalized by Islamic State undergo rehab appeared first on World Israel News.

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The CUNY commencement speech was “a diatribe of nonsense and hatred” that the university should never have allowed to go ahead.

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

Congressman Mike Lawler (R-NY) on Thursday introduced legislation to cut off federal loans and grants for colleges that host antisemitic events after a City University of New York (CUNY) law graduate’s 13-minute commencement speech denouncing Zionism and supporting convicted Hamas-affiliated terrorism financiers.

Lawler told The Algemeiner in an interview that he first started considering the bill during his election campaign in response to UC Berkeley’s ban on Zionist speakers, but was further spurred to action after the CUNY commencement speech.

“I am of the mindset that people certainly have the right to say what they want to say, but you don’t have the right to hate speech,” Lawler said. “And the federal government should not be using taxpayer dollars to support it… But this most recent incident at CUNY really just made it all the more important to get this legislation filed. Taxpayer money should not be used to support this type of rhetoric or conduct — people who support the BDS movement, which is antisemitic.”

Lawler added that his legislation would strip universities and college institutions of “any federal dollars that support what they’re doing.”

CUNY’s chancellor and board of trustees in a statement on Tuesday condemned Fatima Mohammed’s commencement address as hate speech.

“The remarks by a student-selected speaker at the CUNY Law School graduation, unfortunately, fall into the category of hate speech as they were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation,” their statement said. “The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York condemns such hate speech.”

In her speech on May 12, Mohammed called for “the rage that fills this auditorium” to be “the fuel for the fight against capitalism, racism, imperialism, and Zionism,” described the New York Police Department as “fascist”, said that law itself was a “manifestation of white supremacy” and accused Israel of “indiscriminately” bombing worshippers and “murdering the old [and] the young.” She also expressed her support for the Holy Land Foundation, whose founders were convicted of financing the terrorist organization Hamas, and described them as “Palestinian political prisoners” held in the US.

Lawler said he found the speech to be “repugnant and disgraceful.”

“You know, I spoke at my college graduation,” Lawler said. “I was the valedictorian of my class. And my message was hopeful, it was optimistic, it was focused on the future, and what all of my fellow graduates could do to contribute to the betterment of society. What she did was fuel a diatribe of nonsense and hatred. And it’s unfortunate CUNY allowed that to occur.”

Lawler’s legislation, titled the “Stop Anti-Semitism on College Campuses Act” would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit institutions of higher education from participating in student loan and grant programs if they ​​”authorize, facilitate, provide funding for, or otherwise support any event promoting Anti-Semitism on campus.”

The act further defines antisemitism according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition.

Lawler said it was clear that current legislation, including New York’s existing anti-BDS measures, were not enough to prevent hate speech from being given a platform at public educational institutions, which he said have become “breeding grounds” for anti-American sentiment, anti-Israel bias, and antisemitism.

“We’ve seen in New York and places across the country a dramatic rise in antisemitism and antisemitic hate crimes and a failure on the part of states like New York to do anything about it,” he said. “At the end of the day, money talks. A lot of these institutions rely heavily on the use of federal dollars. And if there is a consequence in terms of their ability to use these dollars, I do think a lot of them will think long and hard about the type of events that they allow to occur on their campuses.”

“There need to be consequences for people’s words, their actions, and the conduct of these institutions,” he added.

The bill currently has 8 co-sponsors, all Republicans, and Lawler said that he was pushing to get bipartisan support for the legislation.

The post After CUNY, Rep. Mike Lawler introduces bill cutting funding for colleges that host antisemitic events appeared first on World Israel News.

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There were other occupants in the vehicle who were not injured.

By World Israel News Staff

A three-year-old Palestinian and his father were shot and injured in a suspected terrorist attack at an IDF post in Judea and Samaria.

The two were in a car when terrorists fired at the post near the settlement of Neveh Tzuf in the Binyamin region.

There were other occupants in the vehicle who were not injured.

Paramedics arrived on the scene and restarted the boy’s heart. He was evacuated to the Tel Hashomer medical center by helicopter in critical condition. Meanwhile his father, 40, was taken by the Red Crescent for further treatment in a Palestinian hospital.

“We saw the man and baby lying on the sidewalk with gunshot wounds on their bodies. We immediately began medical treatment, including haemorrhage control and bandaging,” MDA senior EMT Gadi Amiton said.

“Together with the IDF Medical Teams that arrived in scene, we fought for [the toddler’s] life until his heart started beating again. We coordinated a meeting point with the helicopter that landed nearby and it transported the baby to hospital in serious, unstable condition.”

The post Palestinian toddler and his father shot by terrorists who misfired at IDF post appeared first on World Israel News.

The move to close the probes into Marivan and Fordo will have “extremely dangerous consequences.”

By World Israel News Staff

Israel on Thursday expressed outrage over the decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to close an investigation into an undeclared Iranian nuclear site, warning that could have “extremely dangerous consequences.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry accused the IAEA of succumbing to pressure from Tehran after the UN watchdog closed a probe around traces of man-made uranium found at the Marivan site, located southeast of Tehran.

The Foreign Ministry charged Iran with providing unreliable and technically implausible explanations for the presence of nuclear material at the site, accusing the regime of “continuing to lie to the IAEA and deceiv[ing] the international community,” according to a statement.

“The IAEA director-general [Rafael Mariano Grossi] yielding to Iranian political pressure is very disappointing, mainly because the information in the file implicitly points to blatant Iranian violations of the inspection agreements,” the statement went on.

The IAEA’s confidential quarterly report stated that concerns over secret nuclear activity at Marivan had been resolved, as the agency determined that another member state had operated a mine in the area in the 1960s and 1970s. Iran argued that the uranium traces could have originated from laboratory instruments and equipment used by miners, a possibility acknowledged by the IAEA. Marivan has been linked to Iran’s secret military nuclear program in the past, with allegations of high-explosive tests conducted there.

The closure of the investigation into uranium particles found at Iran’s Fordo facility, which were enriched to 83.7% — a stone’s throw from weapon’s grade — was also accepted by the IAEA based on Iran’s explanation of enrichment byproduct fluctuations.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant responded to the events at an IDF ceremony, saying “the dangers to Israel continue to grow more severe and it is becoming more likely that we will need to fulfill our obligations to defend the security of our country and the future of the Jewish nation.”

“The dangers facing the State of Israel are complex and only escalating and we may be required to fulfill our duty in order to protect the integrity of Israel and especially the future of the Jewish people,” Gallant said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “I hear all of the media references regarding Iran, so I have an unequivocal and clear message to Iran and to the international community. Israel will do all that it must to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

The post Israel: IAEA accepted Iran’s lies over nuclear site appeared first on World Israel News.