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Hundreds of thousands of right-wing voters expected to demonstrate in support of current coalition, judicial reform at large Jerusalem protest.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Right-wing politicians and activists are preparing for a massive demonstration in support of potential reforms to Israel’s judicial system, with hundreds of thousands of people expected to join the rally in Jerusalem on Thursday evening.

Called the “March of the Million,” protest organizers, including the Tkuma 23 and Chotam organizations, are urging members of the public who voted for the current right-wing coalition and support reforms to the legal system to attend the demonstration.

Buses will transport people from the northern and southern peripheral regions, as well as municipalities in the center of the country, to the protest in Jerusalem.

The demonstration comes after left-wing protesters have repeatedly held large rallies across the country for months, many of which saw critical thoroughfares, such as Ayalon Highway, blocked for hours at a time, public transportation including trains and buses prevented from running, and daily life seriously disrupted throughout the Jewish State.

Major roads in Israel’s capital city will be blocked starting at 3 p.m. ahead of the right-wing protest.

Prominent politicians, including Justice Minister Yariv Levin (Likud), who is a key architect of the overhaul, Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich of Religious Zionism, and Energy and Infrastructure Minister Israel Katz (Likud) are expected to speak at the protest.

In a video promoting the demonstration released on Wednesday, Levin addresses right-wing voters and says “I need you. We need everyone to come to Jerusalem tomorrow in droves to make sure a clear voice is heard in favor of the reform, in favor of real democracy, in favor of justice.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be attending the demonstration.

Notably, a well-respected Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) newspaper called upon members of the community to avoid joining the protests.

“We are in favor of legal reform and against the dictatorial takeover of peoples’ lives by liberal terrorism. But members of the Haredi community should stay away,” read an article in Yated Ne’eman, which is affiliated with the Degel HaTorah faction within United Torah Judaism, a party in the current coalition. The Degel HaTorah faction holds ambivalent views about Zionism and is reluctant to identify with the State of Israel.

“Those who go to right-wing demonstrations are not part of our audience, period. Those who go to right-wing demonstrations are not one of us.”

The post Judicial reform supporters prepare for ‘million man’ pro-overhaul rally in Jerusalem appeared first on World Israel News.

Most of the American stockpile that unofficially serves as Israeli backup has gone to Ukraine.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Israel’s emergency ammunition supply is running low due to the war in Ukraine and could become an area of concern in case of a multi-front crisis, Israel Hayom reported Thursday.

Jerusalem depends on what are officially American stockpiles that are based in the country for possible use in a Middle East conflict and enjoy diplomatic immunity. This is because there has been a decades-long silent understanding that in case of real need, the IDF could dip into this supply.

It is a historic concern for the army, dating back to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the country was invaded by both Egypt and Syria and had to beg Washington to send military supplies quickly because it was running out. President Nixon agreed and a month-long airlift brought in artillery, ammunition, spare parts and even tanks in what was called Operation Nickel Grass.

It was first reported in January that the U.S. was steadily shipping out some 300,000 of its Israeli-stored artillery shells to Kyiv because American companies were not revving up fast enough to stream to Ukraine all that it needed in its fight against the Russian invasion. Washington also tapped its pre-positioned supplies in South Korea to fulfill its commitment to Kyiv’s defense.

Senior Israeli officials said at the time that Washington had promised to replenish the supplies, but an American defense official has now told Israel Hayom that “it is still not clear when the reserves will be restocked.”

This could become a problem for the Jewish state, a former Israeli cabinet minister told the Hebrew daily.

“These are Israel’s reserve stockpiles for times of war,” the minister said. “The move has had a bigger implication in light of the threats on Israel in multiple theaters.”

The most obvious tactical threats come from Hamas in Israel’s southwest and Hezbollah to its north. Although the two terror organizations have not challenged Israel simultaneously in the past, there are signs of closer cooperation between them.

After Hamas launched 44 rockets over the Gazan border on April 5 and the IAF bombed its sites in retaliation, Hamas fired 34 more rockets at Israel the next day from Hezbollah-controlled territory in Lebanon. A Palestinian militia then took credit for launching six rockets at Israel from Syria two days after that. A meeting also took place that same day in Beirut between the most senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.

While in all these incidents, the Iron Dome anti-missile system took care of any projectiles heading for Israeli population centers, the possibility of a coordinated, three-prong attack cannot be easily dismissed.

This is especially so considering that Israel’s ultimate strategic threat, Iran, is financing both Hamas and Hezbollah, the latter of which is already part of the Lebanese government and has many troops in Syria, helping to prop up the Assad regime. Iranian forces are directly in charge of many military sites themselves in Syria as well. If Tehran’s mullahs ever decide to seriously engage its hated “Zionist enemy,” it has many strings that it can pull, and Israel knows it.

The post Israel’s emergency ammunition supply running low – report appeared first on World Israel News.

The day itself mourns the creation of modern-day Israel through a U.N.-backed plan in 1947 that Palestinian Arabs never accepted.

By Mike Wagenheim, JNS

One of many United Nations bodies dedicated to the Palestinians announced last weekend an upcoming U.N. commemoration of “Nakba Day,” the supposed “catastrophe” that marked the birth of the State of Israel in 1948.

Palestinian and their supporters mark this annually on May 15, one day after Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948.

The day purportedly memorializes the displacement of Palestinian Arabs. During the course of fighting beginning in November 1947, when U.N. member states voted to partition the land, and lasting until the summer of 1949, many Arabs in the area fled during hostilities or heeded instructions from Arab leaders to leave their homes as five Arab armies tried to annihilate the nascent Jewish state at birth.

Pursuant to a U.N. General Assembly resolution passed in December, the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) announced that a Nakba Day event will be held inside the halls of the United Nations for the first time.

“Commemorations … will bring to life the Palestinian journey and will aim at creating an immersive experience of the Nakba through live music, photos, videos and personal testimonies,” CEIRPP stated in a weekend release.

The resolution itself was sponsored by Egypt, Jordan, Senegal, Tunisia, Yemen and the Palestinians; it passed by a vote of 90 in favor, 30 against and 47 abstentions.

Israel, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States were among the countries that voted against.

While CEIRPP falls under the purview of the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) of the Secretariat, which reports to the U.N. secretary-general, the U.N. chief himself deflected this weekend’s announcement.

When directly asked, the spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres responded that “this is an event decided upon by the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which is a member state body. The Secretary-General is not involved in its decision-making.”

His spokesman said he is not aware of any plans for Guterres to participate in the commemoration.

When asked where Guterres stands on the appropriateness of U.N. member states mourning the U.N.-backed formation of a fellow member state, the spokesman told JNS that “the secretary-general’s message on the Israel-Palestine issue has been constant and remains the same regardless of the fora.”

That message, added the spokesman, is to “end the occupation and realize a two-state solution.”

“What is needed is the political will and courage to make the difficult choices for peace that ends the occupation and ensures two states—Israel and an independent, viable and sovereign Palestinian state—living side by side within secure and recognized borders, with Jerusalem as the capital of both states,” said the spokesman. “A peace in which Palestinians and Israelis alike enjoy equal measures of democracy, opportunity and dignity in their lives. A peace, in short, that is just, comprehensive and lasting.”

Abbas: ‘At the top of our priorities’

The United Nations established the partition plan that would have divided then-Mandatory British Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states with international oversight of Jerusalem. Jewish leaders accepted the plan. Palestinian Arabs rejected it then, and have turned down repeated offers of statehood since.

While the Palestinians hold non-member observer status at the United Nations, their influence is outsized.

While Nakba Day is officially added to the U.N. calendar, Nov. 29 already exists as the U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. It is the only day the United Nations sets aside in the cause of one group of people, and its related events at U.N. headquarters around the world are generally used in large part to bash Israel.

The U.N. delegates a special rapporteur to the Palestinians—one with an open-ended mandate that presupposes Israel’s human-rights violations. Special rapporteurs for all other purposes have mandates of limited duration with objective fact-finding missions. The current special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, has a history of blatant antisemitism and falsified information on her application for the position to hide her past biases against Israel.

The ongoing U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict likewise has a unique unending mandate, and is populated by multiple commission members with a history of antisemitism and extensive documented anti-Israel bias.

Besides CEIRPP, which was created in 1975, an additional U.N. special committee and an entire division of the U.N. Secretariat are devoted exclusively to the Palestinian cause. The Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, created in 1968, and the DPR, in existence since 1979, cost the international body millions of dollars a year, including the creation and publication of anti-Israel materials.

No other group of people is afforded this type of status at the United Nations.

The DPR and CEIRPP organize meetings and conferences in coordination with anti-Israel non-governmental organizations, often promoting BDS and the Palestinian “right of return,” which would see an end to Jewish sovereignty in Israel.

In 2004, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution creating yet another Palestinian-specific body, the U.N. Register of Damages (UNRoD). The agency was created to help Palestinians file claims against Israel for purported damages incurred during Israel’s construction of the security barrier, intended to stop a wave of Palestinian suicide bombers during the Second Intifada that took place from 2000 to 2005.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has a mandate that uniquely provides refugee status to every Palestinian child—even those born in Palestinian-controlled areas and those with citizenship in other countries—in perpetuity and funds their benefits.

No detailed plans have yet been announced for the U.N. Nakba Day.

“Commemorating the nakba must be at the top of our priorities in order to preserve our narrative, which we must adhere to and convey to the whole world,” the Palestinian WAFA news agency quoted Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas as saying after the CEIRPP announcement.

According to the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency, Abbas—a fomenter of Holocaust denial—instructed Palestinians to commemorate Nakba Day “to confront all lies and false narratives that attempt to distort history and facts.”

“What Palestinians everywhere are required to do is to commemorate this tragedy, because it is the first time that the global community does not deny the nakba,” said Abbas, who rejected a peace offer from then-Israeli premier Ehud Olmert in 2008—one that was largely seen as generous by the international community.

The Israeli mission to the United Nations has not yet commented.

The post For the first time, a UN body will host a ‘Nakba Day’ event appeared first on World Israel News.

Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani was a member of the Assembly of Experts, a group of 88 clerics that selects the country’s supreme leader.

By JNS

Ayatollah Abbas Ali Soleimani, a high-ranking Iranian cleric, was assassinated on Wednesday in the city of Babolsar in the northern province of Mazandaran.

He was a member of the Assembly of Experts, a group of 88 clerics that selects the country’s supreme leader, and a former representative who officiated at the provincial level on behalf of current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

Soleimani was reportedly shot dead in a bank. CCTV footage showed him sitting on a chair, apparently waiting his turn, when the assailant nonchalantly approached him and shot him in the head with what appeared to be a submachine gun.

The governor of Mazandaran, Mahmoud Hosseinipour Nouri, said the attacker was a local man and that “our information and documents indicate that this was not a security or terrorist act.”

The assassin’s motive remained unclear as of Thursday.

The post Top Iranian cleric gunned down in broad daylight appeared first on World Israel News.

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On Wednesday, Salt Lake City was rocked with tragedy when a teenage girl in the Poplar Grove neighborhood was fatally shot by her brother. At around 12:04 pm, police responded to the scene in the 1600 block of West Wright Circle (505 South) to find the girl seriously injured.

Emergency responders attempted life-saving measures but were unsuccessful, and the girl was pronounced dead at the scene.

The brother had left their home before the officers arrived. Still, members of the Police Community Response Team continued their pursuit, eventually arresting him on a Utah Transit Authority bus near 1455 West and 400 South.

Though the identities of the girl and her brother have not been disclosed, it is known that he is underage. He is predicted to be taken to the Salt Lake County Juvenile Detention Center.

The gun used in the shooting has been recovered, although no details were released. A few area schools, Edison Elementary and Parkview Elementary, went under “lockout” protocol in the beginning stages of the investigation.

This event underscores the enduring turmoil that comes with gun violence and the ever-growing need for firearm safety at home and around the world. It is a cry for all of us to recognize the transient nature of life and to cherish and protect our beloved family members. Our condolences go out to the victim’s family as they go through this sorrowful time.

Migrants and refugees in Tunisia were attacked after the president gave a racist speech. Grassroots movements upped their support in response

As recently detailed in Providence, since late November cases of alleged chemical assault using unknown poisonous gases have been endemic amongst Iranian schoolgirls, 5,000 of whom have now been hit or even hospitalized by vomiting, dizziness and fainting fits. 

Interpretations range from the idea elements within the hardline Shia regime are punishing female students for their prominent role in recent anti-government protests, in which they have removed their mandated hijabs and publicly extended middle-fingers to framed portraits of the ayatollah, to the more skeptical view it is all just an outbreak of mass hysteria. 

Gas Hysteria

Events strongly recall another such panic in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1983, when 1,000 Muslim schoolgirls fell similarly ill, something attributed by many Palestinians at the time to attacks by Jews. The outbreak began at Arrabah Girls’ School when a 17-year-old pupil underwent genuine breathing difficulties. Seeking explanation, fellow students apparently mistook the hydrogen sulfide-like smell from nearby well-used toilets for Israeli nerve-gas. Soon, other pupils (and a few adults) became hospitalized, and events hit the media, causing widespread international alarm.

Unfortunately, at the time a popular regional rumor, tapping into centuries of anti-Semitic slander about supposed Jewish poisoners, had it that Israel plotted to facilitate a ‘silent genocide’ in Palestine by quietly rendering all local Muslim women infertile by devious medical means – for instance, by pumping them full of invisible gas? 

Subsequent investigation by Israeli authorities concluded no poisonings had occurred, blaming mass hysteria for the panic. Yet the Arab League refused to accept this, before US, UN, Red Cross and WHO staff were dispatched to the West Bank, medically confirming initial Israeli findings. Most schoolgirls were not inventing their symptoms, just falling prey to the endemic paranoia of the period. At one point, 64 inhabitants of the Palestinian town of Jenin fell ill after a ‘Jewish’ car supposedly belched poison at them, this in fact just being normal smoke from a faulty engine. 

A Playground for Evil

The common symptoms of mild poisoning and of mass hysteria can be extremely similar, making them hard to distinguish. Sometimes, however, local religious, historical and political culture can influence hysteria epidemics in such a way that their symptoms can be immediately identified by medics as being purely psychological in nature – when schoolyard trees begin spawning armies of living skeletons in rural Uganda, for instance. 

In 2010, a fascinating paper entitled Demon Attack Disease appeared in the African Journal of Traumatic Stress, showing how many contemporary outbreaks of mass hysteria in Ugandan schools have occurred in areas where military violence has occurred in the nation’s recent unstable past. Consider events at the remote rural Layamo Agwata Primary School in the war-ravaged north of the country. Here, in February 2009, pupils ran amok, shouting, fighting, biting and beating each other with sticks, under hallucinatory assault from an army of demons. The headmistress, and many other attendant adults, were so afraid of being attacked by evil spirits themselves that they initially left the pupils to riot unchecked. 

The source of the problem here was not a physically unclean toilet, but a spiritually unclean tree on the school grounds. This hell-mouth was said to be a spawning-point for devils which would descend from its branches in human form, then rot away into zombie-like living skeletons. Attacking individual children, the revenants would then order them to bite another child; once that child had been bitten, their teeth-marks would mean he or she would not be subjected to any further undead assault. However, in return for protection, that pupil then had to chomp into the flesh of another pupil and so on ad infinitum, chain-letter-style. At the height of the crisis, 47 girls and 7 boys were affected.

Eventually, the school’s headmistress gathered enough courage to attack the haunted tree, chopping it down and setting fire to it. The District Education Officer (after running away in terror) ordered the school be closed down while village elders sacrificed goats and spread blood all over the grounds to appease the spirits, whilst Christians from the Catholic relief NGO Caritas Internationalis also came to pray for the school’s deliverance from Satan. Some more skeptical pupils and their families, concerned about passing looming exams, threatened to sue over this closure. 

Meanwhile, a psychiatrist from the local hospital clinically isolated the two index cases (those most socially influential pupils amongst whom the hysteria began) in the outbreak, noting they were both showing clear signs of suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But from what?

Skeletons in Uganda’s Closet

The skeleton key to the whole mystery was war, which always unleashes psychological demons of some kind. In 1991, Ugandan government forces in the National Resistance Army (NRA) launched a huge offensive against the region’s notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels who were then using Layamo Agwata Primary School as a base for operations, having ordered the teachers and pupils to stay away or be shot. During the battle, the school buildings were utterly destroyed and many persons killed. It was not until 1997 that the institution was finally rebuilt and lessons resumed. 

Unwisely, however, the classrooms were erected on the precise same site, which now featured two large unmarked mass graves full of bodies – some of which belonged to the children’s close relatives – just outside the premises. These acted as a constant reminder of the mass violence and deaths to the pupils, and acted as an ominous threat military bloodshed may return again in the future (the LRA still not being fully defeated). 

Local tradition stated that, unless corpses were buried immediately after they had died, with all due ceremony, their angry spirits would roam the area looking for revenge against the living, making the children even more nervous. Accordingly, the local psychiatrist recommended memorials to the dead be built over the mass graves and an annual ceremony of remembrance be held in which prayers should be said for the peace of their souls. These measures had a calming psychological effect and no more demons – whether literal or figurative – visited the school afterwards.  

Mind Over Matter?

Outside observers, not being steeped in local religious traditions of demon-lore, would instantly perceive events at Layamo Agwata Primary as being psychological in nature. Current narratives of gas-poisonings in Iranian schools, however, do not appear anything like so immediately absurd as tales of magical haunted trees. Yet some experts in the field, like New Zealand-based socio-medical historian Robert E. Bartholomew, claim to see through them nonetheless. For Bartholomew: 

“Nearly all [such outbreaks] involve young schoolgirls living under repressive conditions and with no means of [social] redress. In each of these episodes, when the first girls begin to fall sick, given the tense political climate, rumors of poisoning quickly spread … while the names and the places may change, the same patterns re-emerge, yet we continue to be fooled.”

Whether today’s purported poisonings in Iran ultimately prove physically real or not, then, the symptoms of psychological and physical distress provoked amongst their apparent victims certainly are: by endlessly and brutally repressing their own people, even helpless young schoolgirls, Tehran’s theocratic dictatorship makes them fall sick en masse anyway. 

Nerve-gas or none, Iran’s schoolgirls are still the victims of the ruling extremist clerics; they have poisoned not their bodies, but their minds.

The post <strong>Powers of the Air: Poison Gas, Demons and Childhood Mass Hysteria in War-Zones</strong> appeared first on Providence.

Councils had warned that election results might be challenged if people are turned away from polling stations