Category: Uncategorized

Putin’s grand plans hinge on an India-China thaw. Can he convince Xi to ease tensions with India?

The Islamic regime has issued the exact same warning several times in previous years, with news headlines citing Iran’s warning that it would demolish Haif and Tel Aviv if Israel attacks.

By JNS and World Israel News Staff

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi on Tuesday threatened to “destroy Haifa and Tel Aviv” in response to the “smallest action” taken by Israel against the regime in Tehran, the Iranian government’s semi-official Mehrs news agency reported.

The remarks were made at a ceremony marking the Islamic Republic’s National Army Day, an event that annually falls on April 18, which this year coincides with Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Raeisi strongly warns #Israeli regime against taking even the slightest action against #Iran, saying Iran will react to such a move with “destruction of Haifa and Tel Aviv.”https://t.co/laflMTlPYG

— Mehr News Agency (@MehrnewsCom) April 18, 2023

The regime in Tehran routinely threatens Israel. In December of last year, Iran’s state-controlled IRIB TV2 aired a video threatening to “raze Tel Aviv” in response to an Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.

In December 2018 and June 2021, for example, several sites reported that Iran warned it would destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa.

Speaking at the state opening ceremony for Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day 2023 at Yad Vashem on Monday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cautioned that past victories don’t guarantee future ones, citing the “relentless battle against those who seek to kill us.” He said Israel must not allow a nuclear Iran, and must fight its terrorist proxies.

The Israel Security Agency revealed on Monday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force and its Lebanese terrorist proxy Hezbollah tried to recruit residents of Judea and Samaria to commit terrorist attacks.

The post Iran’s president threatens to ‘destroy Haifa and Tel Aviv’ – again appeared first on World Israel News.

The entire government is in breach of the ministerial code, meaning there may be more undeclared ministers’ interests

The 15-year-old walked up to the religious Jewish men’s car and shot them at close range.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A 15-year-old Palestinian was captured early Wednesday morning, less than a day after wounding two Jewish men in Jerusalem, one moderately and one lightly.

Based on information provided by Shabak intelligence, the IDF and the National Counter Terror Unit (Yamam) arrested Ibrahim Zemar in a brief raid of his home in the Askar refugee camp near Shechem (Nablus). He did not resist arrest and admitted to the attack.

The teen, who had crossed illegally from Judea and Samaria, approached his victims’ car when they were stopped in traffic at an intersection in the Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood. After hitting them from nearly point-blank range, he disappeared, and a large manhunt ensued.

A few hours after the incident, Ynet reported, Zemar uploaded to Facebook a video clip of the attack, which helped the security forces find him.

Both victims are Breslov Hasidim who prayed daily in a synagogue in the neighborhood. Menashe, the son of the moderately wounded man, Rabbi Moshe Yosef Hess, told Ynet that his father continued to go even though the family had warned him numerous times that the road was unsafe.

“He prayed for years in the same place,” said Menashe. “He is not one of those people who pay attention to the security warnings. Maybe in more tense times he would travel by car and less so on foot. I can say that I don’t dare to use this route.”

Shimon HaTzadik is on the edge of eastern Jerusalem and has been a flashpoint over recent years, with Arabs attacking Jews numerous times. It was especially volatile in 2021, when the courts ordered the eviction of several Arab families from Jewish-owned properties because they had refused to pay even a symbolic rent for years.

His father had not understood at first what had happened, the younger Hess said, thinking initially that stones were being thrown at the car. “After that he started to feel terrible pain and he realized that they had been shot.”

“You can see in the video clip that the terrorist stopped shooting because his gun jammed, so in my opinion a miracle happened,” he added.

A homemade “Carlo” submachine gun was found near the scene. These weapons, while deadly, are assembled illegally in Arab workshops and are very unreliable.

“The driver who was traveling with my father was more lightly injured, because he simply realized that if he stayed in the traffic that was there, which the terrorist took advantage of, it could have ended much worse,” Hess said. He managed to get around the traffic jam and drive to a place where the emergency medical services could evacuate them to a hospital.

Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai praised the security forces’ quick work.

“Let every terrorist know that the long hand of the security system will reach wherever he escapes to and wherever he hides,” he said.

Shabtai added that the Jerusalem police and border guards successfully prevented several terrorists from carrying out their deadly plans in recent weeks, adding they “foiled eight terrorist attacks during Ramadan.”

The post Teen terrorist caught after wounding two in Jerusalem appeared first on World Israel News.

After repeal of Disengagement Law, authorities decline to prosecute visitors to Homesh for violating now-defunct policy barring Jews from the area.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Criminal indictments filed against settlers from Homesh for returning to the site of the evacuated Samarian community were recently dropped by the district court in Petah Tikvah, following the repeal of the 2006 Disengagement Law.

Rabbi Elishama Cohen, the head of the Homesh yeshiva, which was the site of repeated clashes and forced evacuation by the Israeli army, and other defendants were recently informed that the prosecution would not be moving forward with the charges against them, according Ynet reported.

Police and prosecutors argued that Cohen and other frequent visitors to Homesh were violating the Disengagement Law by simply being present at the site of the destroyed community.

But after the repeal of the policy, prosecuting Cohen and the others for the alleged offenses no longer made sense from a legal perspective.

Public Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s office said in a statement that the lawmaker welcomes the “court’s decision to cancel the indictments” and added that Jews should be “free to move about anywhere in the country.”

“The indictment should not have been filed in the first place, and it is good that the court rejected it,” said Yossi Dagan, head of the Samaria Regional Council, in a statement.

“There is nothing more valuable than breaking the racist law that discriminates and prohibits Jews from being in the [Judea and Samaria] region of Israel,” he said.

But the future of Homesh, along with other dismantled Jewish communities in the area including Sa-Nur, Ganim, and Kadim, remains uncertain, despite the end of the law barring Jews from living in those communities.

News of the cancellation of the law sparked international criticism, including Biden administration officials summoning the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. for a dressing-down over the repeal.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stressed that while the law had been officially repealed, there are no plans to allow for rebuilding of the dismantled communities, raising questions about the significance of canceling the policy.

“The decision by the Knesset to nullify parts of the Disengagement has brought an end to the law which discriminates against Jews living in parts of northern Samaria, a part of our historic homeland,” Netanyahu said in a media statement.

“With that, the government has no intention of establishing new communities in these areas,” he added.

The post Indictments dropped against Homesh settlers, but fate of evacuated communities still unclear appeared first on World Israel News.

“All of this progressive woke hysterics is counterproductive. I moved from the United States because of idiocy like this,” Jewish civil rights attorney tells World Israel News.

By World Israel News Staff

An Israeli minister’s tweet on Tuesday calling for unity among Jewish people on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) was slammed by left-wing critics for allegedly being similar to a Nazi-era slogan.

“One nation! One flag! One country! We will remember and not forget,” Education Minister Yoav Kisch wrote on Twitter underneath a photo of himself and Israeli students at the March of the Living, an annual event in Poland commemorating victims of the Holocaust.

But some left-wing activists interpreted Kisch’s tweet as bearing resemblance to the Nazi slogan “one nation, one Reich, one leader.”

עם אחד!
דגל אחד!
מדינה אחת!
נזכור ולא נשכח. pic.twitter.com/0nnMFspGPG

— יואב קיש Yoav Kisch (@YoavKisch) April 18, 2023

Although Hebrew-language news site Walla reported that Kisch’s tweet had sparked a backlash, the response appeared to be limited to far-left activists on Twitter.

No Israeli lawmakers from the opposition parties criticized Kisch’s tweet; nor did the heads of prominent NGOs or Holocaust memorial organizations.

Civil rights attorney Brooke Goldstein, founder of the End Jew Hatred movement, told World Israel News that the left-wing criticism of Kisch’s comments were nonsensical.

“This is absolute insanity. There is nothing wrong with declaring, with pride, that the Jewish nation is one nation, with one flag,” Goldstein said.

“All of this progressive woke hysterics is counterproductive. I moved from the United States because of idiocy like this. Let’s not infect our great country.”

In Israel, Yom HaShoah is typically a day of national unity, in which citizens unite across political and cultural barriers to mourn the victims of the genocide. However, this year’s Yom HaShoah was marked by incidents of stark politicization.

An El Al pilot on a New York-bound flight chose to compare potential reforms to Israel’s judicial system to events in Nazi-era Germany and insinuated that a Holocaust-like atrocity could occur in Israel should the court overhaul take place.

Also on Tuesday, Yom Hashoah, Likud MK Boaz Bismuth was harassed during a memorial event in a Tel Aviv synagogue by anti-government protesters. Despite some attendees asking the demonstrators to respect the sanctity of the event, the heckling continued until Bismuth was forced to leave the premises, fearing the event would turn violent.

The post ‘Progressive hysteria’ – Israeli minister’s tweet compared to Nazi slogan appeared first on World Israel News.

US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Sabbath observance case with major impact for religious Jews, experts say.

By Andrew Bernard, The Algemeiner

The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments in Groff v. DeJoy, a religious accommodation in the workplace lawsuit with significant ramifications for observant Jews, experts told The Algemeiner.

Gerald Groff, an evangelical Christian who observes a Sunday Sabbath during which he is not permitted to work according to his beliefs, sued his former employer, Louis DeJoy, the US Postmaster General, after Groff was forced to quit his job when the post office forced him to work on Sunday.

Groff was required to work on Sundays after the USPS signed a contract with Amazon that included Sunday deliveries. He launched his religious discrimination suit after two years of ad-hoc accommodations failed to meet his religious needs.

Under the existing standard in the 1977 case TWA v. Hardison, employers need only show that they are suffering a small, “de minimis cost”, like providing overtime pay for weekend shifts or having to reduce operations during a holiday, before any religious accommodation of an employee becomes an “undue hardship” that they are not legally required to meet. Groff’s lawyers argued that that standard should be overturned.

Nathan Diament, Executive Director for Public Policy at the Orthodox Union and one of the co-authors of an amicus brief in the case, told The Algemeiner that should Hardison be overturned, the impact would extend far beyond Evangelical Sunday Sabbatarians.

“Just think about Passover over the last two weeks,” Diament said. “If you were an observant Jew, the days of Passover fell on Thursday and Friday, and then on Wednesday and Thursday the following week. A lot of employers are accommodating, but if you’re working in a job where you don’t have an accommodating employer, and generally you’re assigned to work on specific days, on specific shifts, having four holidays where you can’t work in a two-week period is really challenging.”

The Orthodox Union, which filed its amicus brief jointly with the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, was joined in its support of Groff by other Jewish groups including the American Jewish Committee, the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, and The Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, as well as Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Sikh, and Islamic groups.

Kenneth Marcus, founder of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and another of the amici for Groff, said that despite the sympathies of the conservative majority on the court for religious liberty claims, today’s oral arguments sent mixed signals about how the court might ultimately rule.

“On the one hand, it is great to see that there is significant opposition to the awful de minimis rule, under which employers have been able to escape responsibility for protecting their religious employees if reasonable accommodations would cost any amount of money,” Marcus said. “The de minimis standard, which we have long opposed, seems to have very little support anymore, and I think we can anticipate that its days are numbered. That’s very good news for anyone who cares about religious freedoms.

“On the other hand, it was disappointing to see so little support on the court for the strong new standard of religious freedom that many of us had hoped for and expected. Some of the conservative justices were more skeptical of Mr. Groff’s position than many would have anticipated and that may not bode well for religious freedom.”

During the arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, representing the government, had an extended discussion about “common ground” between the parties and whether the court needed to issue an expansive ruling to resolve the question.

“I would just wonder whether the Court needs to get into that today,” Gorsuch asked. “If there is so much common ground here between the parties and Hardison that… some courts have taken this ‘de minimis’ language and run with it and say ‘anything more than a trifling will get the employer out of any concerns here’, and that’s wrong and we all agree that’s wrong, why can’t we just say that and be done with it and be silent as to the rest of it?”

Biden administration, progressive justices – on whose side?

The exchange was one of many that saw justices from both the left and right testing positions seemingly at odds with their ideological priors.

“It was jarring to see both the Biden administration and the Democratic-appointed justices argue so forcefully against a basic civil right, namely the right to religious freedom.” Marcus said.

“That’s not something one would have expected a generation ago, but it increasingly reflects the polarization of support for religious freedom. It was surprising to hear progressive justices express so much concern for profit-making motivations of corporations in the context of wanting to protect them against demands from religious minority employees. One would never hear that if the minority employees were racial or ethnic minorities.”

While the outcome of the case remains unknown, the OU’s Diament was confident that the changes would be positive.

“We would like as broad a decision as we can get,” he said. “But the bottom line will be whatever decision the court puts out – unless it just totally rejects the appeal and sides with the government – any change here is going to be significant and welcome.”

The court’s decision is expected to be announced before the conclusion of its term at the end of June.

The post Outcome of precedent-setting case for rights of religious Christian will strongly impact American Jews appeared first on World Israel News.

More Unanswered Red Flags Regarding Jack Texeira and the Pentagon Leaks

By Larry Johnson, April 18, 2023

Several former military and intelligence professionals have contacted me and voiced similar doubts about the pat story being circulated regarding National Guard …

The post Selected Articles: More Unanswered Red Flags Regarding Jack Texeira and the Pentagon Leaks appeared first on Global Research.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China and the controversial interviews he gave after it have rattled many in the West. During that visit, Macron seemed totally taken in by the faux shows of adulation put on for his benefit by the Chinese Communist Party. He came away from the trip promoting a reciprocal dynamic between France and China, one based on “peace, stability, and prosperity.” Macron discussed several important geopolitical issues with Xi Jinping, including Ukraine and Taiwan; in the first case, he hoped Xi could lead a peace process, and in the second, he claimed that Taiwan was not a key European strategic interest. Immediately upon Macron’s departure from China, Beijing put the lie to its benign posture by conducting a multi-day military exercise in which it fully encircled and simulated strikes on Taiwan.

One of the primary takeaways from Macron’s visit and his subsequent interviews is his promotion of strategic autonomy. In his post-visit interview, Macron stated that he had already “won the ideological battle on [European] strategic autonomy,” and that the concept was enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese. The concept of “strategic autonomy” is the French President’s geopolitical catchphrase; he has been pushing the idea alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for years now. In short, Macron hopes to elevate the EU – led by France, now the only nuclear-armed member after Brexit – into a geostrategic power that can operate independently in the international arena without undue outside influence. He sees France as the indispensable nation in ensuring that the EU is not a “vassal” of the United States, instead becoming a third bloc in the Great Power competition between the U.S. and China.

This search for strategic autonomy is not a novelty in French geopolitics but has been around for the past two centuries. In part, it is a response to the destruction of France as the primary European power after Waterloo, but it also has deeper roots in the French vision of itself as a truly unique nation. Since 1815, this quest has been quixotic at best, mostly either backfiring spectacularly or playing into the hands of the nation’s strategic rivals.

Before Napoleon’s final defeat, France was one of the most strategically autonomous countries in all of Europe, charting its own path and exerting power since at least the 17th century. It intervened against its fellow Catholic powers in the Thirty Years’ War; Louis XIV sought to forcibly reorient the map of Europe towards Versailles; his successor carried out the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 in which France totally remade the European alliance structure; the French Revolutionaries wished to annihilate monarchy and reshape European politics in a Jacobin mold; Napoleon I succeeded in nearly all those ambitions, marching to Moscow before fate caught up with him. This strategic autonomy was a point of national pride, and its loss was devastating to French morale. Ever since, the nation has strived to recapture this glory, despite being overshadowed by other powers. The attempts at reclaiming this national inheritance have been less than successful.

The first figure who tried to reclaim the glory of France on the international stage was the founder of the Second French Empire, Napoleon III. He was the nephew of the Corsican military genius and styled his regime as a conscious continuation of his uncle’s. Unfortunately for France, Napoleon III was a low-quality knockoff of the genuine article. His imperial policy, which reflected the emperor’s famously mercurial temperament, was replete with massive blunders and overestimation of French power. The Empire claimed the exclusive right to protect Christian sites in the Holy Land – and thus the prime place in Christendom – something already claimed by Russia. This led to the Crimean War, a conflict in which France needed British assistance to eke out a pyrrhic victory. Napoleon also invaded Mexico, founding a short-lived imperial state under the aegis of Maximilian I, an heir to the Habsburg dynasty. French involvement in Mexico ended in total failure, with the collapse of the state and execution of Maximilian just a few years later.

After Mexico, Napoleon kept his aims closer to home but did not change his aggressive policy. He attempted to control the succession to the Spanish Crown, arguing for military intervention if his favored candidate was not appointed. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck used this approach to his advantage, goading Napoleon into starting the Franco-Prussian War. In that conflict, Napoleon himself was captured on the battlefield of Sedan, France lost Alsace and Lorraine for nearly half a century, and Paris was taken over by communist revolutionaries. The push for a strategically autonomous France ended in a German march through the streets of the French capital.

The French Third Republic, the government which replaced the Second Empire, repudiated much of Napoleon III’s governance but kept his goal of reviving the strategic autonomy which died at Waterloo. This renewed French confidence and esprit de corps would rationally be directed at its neighbor Germany, which had just defeated it and annexed its sovereign territory. Bismarck knew this and played the Republic just as well as he had the Empire. The German chancellor promoted French colonialist politicians like Jules Ferry, so as to direct the French desire for prestige and expansion overseas. This had the side benefit of entangling France with Britain, freeing up Germany to consolidate its power. The French got the worse of this trade, failing to gain the colonial empire it desired and losing out on regional primacy to the British in two main imperial theaters: Africa and the Indo-Pacific. Eventually, the Third Republic gave up the ghost and assented to an entente with the British that solidified France’s second-place world status. This time, the trade worked out for France, as in exchange for strategic autonomy it received the aid of the world’s dominant power when Germany invaded in 1914.

In the post-World War II era, the desire for strategic autonomy resurfaced. The nation, led by the iconoclastic Charles de Gaulle, saw a chance to shape its own destiny and regain its freedom of action on the global stage. De Gaulle was loath to accept the reality of American hegemony in the post-war West and the fact that the world was dividing into hard blocs. Much of his foreign policy can be understood through this lens, especially his push for a French nuclear weapons program and his desire to have military autonomy outside of the US-led NATO structure. Many French actions fit this paradigm: the military gambit turned fiasco at Suez in 1956, France’s doubling down on Indochina and subsequent ejection from the country, and, most notably, de Gaulle’s withdrawal of France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966. These attempts at strategic autonomy were not successful in terms of French interests – it lost its empire and its major influence in NATO, while boosting Soviet interests across the world.

Now, President Macron is taking up the torch of strategic autonomy and is already looking far more like Napoleon III than Napoleon I. His trip to China has lent this comparison even more credibility, with Xi playing the Bismarck to Macron’s Napoleon III. France’s desire for autonomy has led it to adopt a posture that plays directly into the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. By undermining the unified determination of the West to counter unprovoked Chinese aggression on Taiwan, he is hastening the attempt at conquest which he seeks to avoid. Deterrence relies on resolve and unity of purpose; Macron has seriously damaged both.

Since 1815, France has repeatedly failed to achieve the strategic autonomy it desires. It is beyond time to leave the past behind. Macron must choose whether France will be a powerful player in a Western bloc led by the U.S. or whether it will continue its doomed attempt at role-playing as a Great Power. One of those choices advances French interests, but it may be a bitter pill to swallow for French national pride. C’est la vie.

The post <strong>Tilting at the Windmill of Strategic Autonomy</strong> appeared first on Providence.