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The 44-day Azeri-Turkish war against the Armenian people of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) was supposed to have been halted in November 2020 by a trilateral ceasefire agreement between Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. Nonetheless, Azeri aggression and violations against the Armenian people have not subsided.

While systematically refusing to comply with international law, Azerbaijan has continued to violate the borders of the Republic of Armenia by killing or kidnapping Armenian soldiers. On March 22, Armenian soldier Arshak Sargsyan was killed by Azerbaijani fire near the Yeraskh village on the Armenia-Azerbaijan (Nakhichevan) border.

Azerbaijan is also illegally blocking the only access road to the people of Artsakh. Furthermore, the torturing and murdering of Armenian prisoners of war (POWs) continue. One such Armenian hostage is Vicken Euljekjian, a 44-year-old Armenian-Lebanese man who has been jailed by Azerbaijan since November 2020.

Vicken and his friend, Maral Najarian, are both ethnic Armenians with dual citizenships of Armenia and Lebanon. They were arrested on November 10, 2020, near the Armenian city of Shushi in Artsakh, currently occupied by Azerbaijan. The arrests reportedly happened 10 hours after the ceasefire agreement. Soon after, they were transferred along with other Armenian hostages to a prison in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. Although Maral was released after four months, Vicken was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment following sham trials without adequate legal representation. 

Currently, Vicken is spending his sentence in solitary confinement in one of the world’s most notorious prisons. Given the risk to his physical and mental health, his family is highly concerned. According to a news report from June 1, 2021, Vicken was transferred from the prison to a hospital.

Vicken had worked as a taxi driver before the war. Azerbaijan accused him of “being a terrorist and a mercenary, as well as having illegally entered Azerbaijan”. Najarian risked similar accusations before being released and repatriated in March 2021.

Vicken was found guilty after a short trial that was condemned by Armenia’s government and human rights groups as a travesty of justice. Liparit Drmeyan, an aide to Armenia’s representative to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), said Vicken did not have access to lawyers that were chosen by him. Two years after Maral’s release, the number of Armenian POWs held in Azerbaijan remains unclear. What is clear, though, is that Vicken and other POWs continue to be abused by Azeri authorities. 

Garo Ghazarian, an attorney and Chairman of the “Center for Law and Justice — Tatoyan Foundation USA” which is based in Los Angeles, has been monitoring the situation of the Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan. Ghazarian told this author that there are at least 33 prisoners in Azeri jails. “There is no question that Azerbaijan is violating the ‘Trilateral Statement’ of 2020; their mistreatment of the Armenian POWs violates the Geneva Convention,” he added. This author spoke with Linda Iman Ahmad Arous, Vicken’s wife, who lives in Lebanon and is anxiously waiting for her husband’s return.  

Vicken and Linda have 2 children: Serge (23) and Christine (20).  Linda said her husband owned a restaurant in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He also owned a house in Shushi, a historically Armenian city in Artsakh that was captured by Azerbaijan during the 44-day Azeri war. Linda told this author: “On November 10, 2020, he was going to Shushi with a friend of ours, Maral, who also owns a house there. He was arrested at a checkpoint by the Azerbaijani army.”

Linda has very limited communication with her imprisoned husband:

“Vicken calls me once a month when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visits him. Azeri authorities do not allow us to speak Arabic, and this makes it difficult for us to communicate because I do not speak Armenian. And Vicken can’t speak at ease on the phone. All he says to me is ‘get me out of here quickly, I can’t take it anymore.’ I only see a 50 second video of him. He looks so different, tired, and scared. I don’t know anything about his current health, but he suffers from a heart condition and a disc in his back. 

“Maral, who was detained with him, told me that he was tortured to say that he was receiving money [from Armenia], and they forced Maral to testify about him under pressure to say that he is a terrorist suspect. I have a full legal confession that Maral made here in Lebanon.”

Linda shared with this author the legal document which included a summary of a witness interview that Sheila Paylan, an international human rights lawyer and former legal advisor to the United Nations, made with Maral on June 18, 2021. In the interview, Maral said that when she and Vicken were arrested by Azeri forces, they took their telephones, wallets, passports, IDs and everything else they had. They also beat Vicken:

“We were then separated, and in the first eight days of our detention I was interrogated twice… I saw Vicken three times. The last day I saw Vicken was on November 18, my birthday. They called him, we sat together for a little bit, fifteen minutes, and on the next day they sent us to jail. I never saw him again.

“During my third interrogation, which must have been sometime in February 2021, the interrogator told me that ‘Vicken has confessed to everything and has said that he had gone to fight for money as a mercenary, and if you do not confess the same thing, then you will be just as guilty and accused as Vicken.’”

In Maral’s testimony in Lebanon, she said she had been forced to say that Vicken was “a mercenary and had been hired to fight for Armenia for 2500 dollars”. They recorded her saying this, and every time she said something they disapproved of, they stopped the recording and made her say the exact things she was compelled to say. 

“This went on for hours,” Maral said. “I asked them ‘why are you doing this?’ and they said ‘we want the tape in which you speak to be uniform and uncut, for there to be no interruptions.’

“Then they forced me to sign a declaration that everything I said in the video was true and that I said entirely what I wanted to say willingly. But what I said in the video, which they used against Vicken in his trial, was not really true. I just said whatever they wanted me to say because I felt like I had no other option. I was terrified, alone and helpless. I felt intimidated. I absolutely had to do what they told me to do. The few times that I tried to explain or testify the way I wanted to, they would shout ‘no’! This is the way you must say it!’ So I did. 

“Neither Vicken nor I were terrorists. They are saying that he is a terrorist, a murderer, a criminal, but he is none of those things at all. He does not deserve to be punished like this. Please help him.”

The British Armenian Humanitarian Group, who started an online petition to help release the Armenian POWs, reports:

“Azerbaijan continues to hold unlawfully Armenian civilian hostages and POWs captured during the 44-day war, in gross violation of The Third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of POWs. More hostages were taken in 2021 and 2022 after the military aggressions on the sovereign territory of the Republic of Armenia. Azerbaijan claims there are only 33 Armenian captives, but human rights lawyers working with families of captives reckon the number is close to 118 unless all other Armenian hostages have been murdered in captivity…

“In summer 2021, 68 of those hostages were sentenced unlawfully to long imprisonments under false accusations and without access to fair legal representation.  

“In May 2021, further two Armenian POWs – Ishkhan Sargsyan and Vladimir Rafaelyan – were captured by Azerbaijani forces near the lake Sev following the Azerbaijani aggression on the Republic of Armenia. One year ago, in March 2022, these two young servicemen, Ishkhan and Vladimir, were sentenced to 19- and 18-years imprisonment by the Baku courts.

“Meanwhile, in the course of 2021 and 2022 half of those Armenian hostages sentenced during Baku sham trials, were returned to Armenia following high-level interventions from the USA, France and the EU.”

Armenian hostages illegally held by Azerbaijan are being ill-treated and even tortured by Azerbaijan whilst the “civilized world” remains silent, watching idly as they give Azerbaijan further military aid, and establish new oil deals and commercial agreements.

Meanwhile, Linda and her children are counting the days before they are reunited with Vicken.

“I love Vicken with all my heart,” Linda said. “I will not be silent until he comes back home. The world has forgotten these prisoners for the past three years. Prisons in Baku are notorious places of torment for Armenians. I can hear Vicken’s screams ever since Maral told me what she saw. Maral said the last time she saw Vicken in Baku, his hands were deformed, and the bones of his hands were visible. This shows how he was tortured. I and our whole family wait every day for the news of his return. Every day, I see him in my dreams entering the door of our home.”

Vicken and his wife, Linda.

The post <strong>Azerbaijan Continues Torture of Armenian Hostages</strong> appeared first on Providence.

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Trent Lehrkamp, a 19-year-old from Brunswick, Georgia, experienced a horrific hazing incident involving minors last week.

Reports indicate that Lehrkamp was forced to drink vodka and take mushrooms before he was tied to a chair, sprayed with urine, and covered with spray paint.

After the incident, he was dropped off at a local hospital, where he ended up on a ventilator in the ICU, where he remains and is now in stable condition. He continues to battle a lung infection.

A GoFundMe page states, “He spent Tuesday night with a group of people who he thought were his friends. They picked him up from his house, and he expected to have a casual night with his friends. Trent wouldn’t know until it was too late that these were not friends, but vile and abusive perpetrators who would go on to torture, humiliate, and assault him in inhumane, terrifying ways for hours.”

The Glynn County Police Department has since responded to the incident and found that some of the teenagers involved were from Glynn Academy High School. According to reports, Lehrkamp is on the autism spectrum.

In response, there has been a large amount of shock and outrage. A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to raise money for his medical bills and legal fees.

This incident emphasizes the importance of ensuring students feel safe at school and that those involved should be held accountable.

Rep. Morgan Luttrell, R-Texas, reacts to photos released by the Taliban of U.S. military equipment seized following the Afghanistan withdrawal as House Republicans continue the search for answers on the botched evacuation.

The post ‘DISTURBING’: Taliban shows off seized US military equipment appeared first on World Israel News.

“Israeli leaders have a long history, tradition of visiting Washington, and Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely take a visit at some point. But there’s nothing currently planned.”

By JNS

There is no plan for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to visit Washington, Olivia Dalton, White House principal deputy press secretary, told reporters during a gaggle on Air Force One en route this afternoon to Durham, N.C.

“Israeli leaders have a long history, tradition of visiting Washington, and Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely take a visit at some point. But there’s nothing currently planned,” said Dalton, according to a White House transcript.

In response to another question, the White House spokeswoman said, “We welcomed the decision to delay the implementation of the judicial reform plan. We thought that gives important space and time for compromise and dialogue. And as we’ve said all along, we believe that’s incredibly important.”

Another question focused on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s plan to visit Israel in April, right before the Knesset reopens its debate on judicial reform.

“Is there a concern at all that this issue, Israeli democracy, will become a partisan matter here in the United States? And what are you doing to ensure that your response remains bipartisan?” the reporter asked.

“I—I can—I’m not sure that—that, you know—I think you saw the president spoke to Prime Minister Netanyahu just last week. They have—they have been in touch many times. We are in regular touch with the Israeli government,” Dalton said, per the White House readout.

“They know our strong views about the importance of democracy to the U.S.-Israeli partnership. They know where we stand on—on this issue,” she added. “And I think that’s—that’s where I’m going to leave it. I don’t think I have any comment on speculating on whether the governor of Florida is traveling to Israel and what that might mean.”

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No amount of technological innovation will ever hold a candle to the very special brain that is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s.

Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author Thomas L. Friedman speaking in New York City, 2018. (Sean Zanni / Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

Over the years, many a lesser writer has had the audacity to lampoon New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize–winner Thomas L. Friedman and his peerless prose. Like too many cooks trying to break the camel’s back, they have chuckled at his propensity for convoluted imagery and mixed metaphor. His Swiftian style has been written off as boring, repetitive, and boring. Countless more pedestrian practitioners of the op-ed form have mocked his incessant reliance on anecdote and conversations with fictionalized, salt-of-the-earth types they have never deigned to consult themselves. The same ersatz wordsmiths have somehow missed the incandescent brilliance of flourishes like: “The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been — but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned,” which somehow manage to reinvent the laws of space and time.

These second-rate scribblers have all buttered their bread and will now have to lie in it. And, tempting as it might be to score cheap points by mocking the great man, I will not be joining in. Friedman’s March 21 op-ed proves beyond any doubt that he has attained a mastery of the craft that no other being, whether man or machine, could ever match. The opus, a sprawling free jazz riff about artificial intelligence and The Wizard of Oz, may well, in fact, be the most perfectly Friedmanesque Friedman column ever written.

Entitled “Our Promethean Moment,” a headline that reads like it was written by an algorithm asked to generate titles for hypothetical Friedman columns, the piece is a tour de force execution of the author’s signature Big Idea™: that profound, revolutionary, and vaguely defined things are occurring at an ever accelerating pace that will require transcending the old formulas — for the era of ChatGPT. Like many entries in the Friedman catalog, it begins by quoting a conversation (in this case, with Microsoft executive Craig Mundie):

“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”

Having spent a few paragraphs marveling at ChatGPT’s capabilities, our intrepid columnist proceeds to explain that we have entered what he deems a “Promethean moment” not unlike the tornado at the beginning of The Wizard of Oz. This moment, Friedman writes, both encompasses and promises to change, well, absolutely everything:

“[It is] one of those moments in history when certain new tools, ways of thinking or energy sources are introduced that are such a departure and advance on what existed before that you can’t just change one thing, you have to change everything. That is, how you create, how you compete, how you collaborate, how you work, how you learn, how you govern and, yes, how you cheat, commit crimes and fight wars.”

Soon after, we learn that the proverbial tornado poised to sweep creation, competition, collaboration, work, learning, governance, cheating, crime, and warfare into the future is not, in fact, a single technology at all but rather a process called a “technology super-cycle” that is at the same time driving other processes, the sum total of which constitute a new era that is also (somewhat confusingly) a moment and an age:

“We know the key Promethean eras of the last 600 years: the invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution, the agricultural revolution combined with the industrial revolution, the nuclear power revolution, personal computing and the internet and . . . now this moment. Only this Promethean moment is not driven by a single invention, like a printing press or a steam engine, but rather by a technology super-cycle. It is our ability to sense, digitize, process, learn, share and act, all increasingly with the help of A.I. That loop is being put into everything — from your car to your fridge to your smartphone to fighter jets — and it’s driving more and more processes every day. It’s why I call our Promethean era ‘The Age of Acceleration, Amplification and Democratization.’ Never have more humans had access to more cheap tools that amplify their power at a steadily accelerating rate — while being diffused into the personal and working lives of more and more people all at once. And it’s happening faster than most anyone anticipated.”

Having been swept away from Kansas into a new land — or rather moment/era/age — we are just as quickly returned to the subject of ChatGPT and informed that it is actually a “meta technology” (a classic Friedman move is affixing intensifiers to every concept) that is like an ordinary technology, only better.

Before we have even a second to catch our breath, the author throws yet another neologism into the whirlwind: this time, by arguing that our Promethean era of meta technologies requires the development of what he calls “complex adaptive coalitions” where “business, government, social entrepreneurs, educators, competing superpowers and moral philosophers all come together to define how we get the best and cushion the worst of A.I.” The column then concludes with typical Friedmanite liturgy about the need for a “very different governing model” that goes beyond “traditional left-right politics.”

As ever, Friedman sounds anxious about the rapidly accelerating pace of people, technology, and stuff. But, in truth, he needn’t worry in the slightest. No computer program, no matter how powerful or sophisticated, will ever replicate his unrivaled ability to convert impenetrable neoliberal horseshit into prose, columns, and books.

May AI become the steam engine of meta technologies. May America become Uber, but for democracy. May the Cloud become the new Silk Road of Global Trade. May Saudi Arabia become the start-up nation of our dreams. May Tom Friedman always be with us, like a modern Delphic oracle pronouncing on everything, and therefore nothing, like no one else ever could.

With the ongoing financial crisis, it’s a perfect time to look to the Bank of North Dakota. It is the only state-owned bank in the continental US and was formed in 1919 by a left-wing farmer movement to free working people from the grip of private finance.

Counting room of the Bank of North Dakota, c. 1920. (Wikimedia Commons)

Who are banks for?

As crisis stalks the financial system, that question is again a pressing one. And the history of how previous generations answered it points us to an unlikely place: North Dakota, where, in 1919, an upstart farmer movement called the Nonpartisan League (NPL) established the United States’ most successful state-owned bank.

The politics of banking was a widely discussed subject among working people in the early twentieth century. Financial panics throughout the 1800s had taught farmers and laborers to see banks and bankers as enemies of both a stable economy and ordinary people’s prosperity. Despite financiers’ fierce resistance, popular movements successfully pushed for postal savings, credit unions, and farm credit. Political opposition to banking as usual thrived in large cities and remote rural precincts alike.

During the 1910s, hard-pressed wheat farmers in North Dakota faced predatory practices in the grain economy. Few imagined that the state’s farmers — including Ukrainians, Germans, Irish, Icelanders, Norwegians, Danes, Hungarians, Estonians, Dutch, Swedes, Czechs, Syrians, Germans from Russia, and African Americans and other native-born Americans — could transcend their differences and improve their situation.

But for all their ethnic and religious differences, small farmers faced similar conditions. They shipped grain to Minneapolis for processing and saw little of the profit that their wheat produced. Crop values, controlled by milling and trading companies, were low. Transportation costs, set by railroad companies, were high. Mortgages from local bankers — held in trust by big-city banks — were larded with exorbitant interest rates.

Nor could farmers look to their state government for succor. Dominated by out-of-state corporations, North Dakota was reduced to a kind of colonial hinterland of the Twin Cities. As one failed farmer put it: “There are only two ways of making a living in North Dakota. One way is to dig the wealth out of the ground. And the other way is to dig it out of the hide of the fellow who digs it out of the ground.”

There are only two ways of making a living in North Dakota. One way is to dig the wealth out of the ground. And the other way is to dig it out of the hide of the fellow who digs it out of the ground.

First turning to cooperatives in the early 1900s, North Dakota’s agrarians soon realized that the political reach of out-of-state companies was too powerful. So, in 1915, farmers created something new: a co-op for electoral politics. Their membership-based, candidate-endorsing political organization, the Nonpartisan League, used the state’s direct primary election law to bypass political parties altogether. Members of the NPL simply supported candidates in any party who backed their populist platform.

While the NPL platform included a range of demands, one key plank was setting up public alternatives to big business: a state-run bank, a state-owned grain elevator, and a state-owned flour mill. The League drew on agrarians’ deep commitment to a moral economy, one in which fairness and an equal chance to succeed mattered most. Squeezed between the volatility of weather and markets, these farmers also distrusted the small-town bankers on whom they depended for credit. After all, access to credit determined land ownership, economic success, and even one’s standing in the community.

The NPL took off. In the 1916 state elections, the League shocked the nation by electing a governor, an attorney general, and gaining control of North Dakota’s House of Representatives. Organizers capitalized on the national attention, fanning out into Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington State, Colorado, and Nebraska as well as Saskatchewan and Alberta. The NPL signed up farmers by the hundreds.

Existing political parties and establishment politicians responded with force. The open persecution of NPL members in many states intensified after US entry into World War I. But defeats elsewhere could not keep the League from taking over North Dakota’s government in 1918.

A cover of the Nonpartisan League’s newspaper, Nonpartisan Leader, from 1919. (Wikimedia Commons)

In the 1919 legislative session, the NPL established state-owned industries and a public bank: the Bank of North Dakota. The former sidestepped predatory commodity traders and flour millers. The latter provided relief from “financial pirates.” The economic democracy desired by so many agrarians depended on creating these public options in the profit-dominated marketplace.

State banks were not new. In the nineteenth-century, seven states established such entities (though none survived into the 1910s). The NPL also drew from foreign examples of land banks and farm-loan associations as well as the closer-to-home Federal Reserve banking system. Nonetheless, a state bank created by a bottom-up movement to provide financial services for “the people,” as they put it, broke new ground.

Charged with “encouraging and promoting agriculture, commerce, and industry” in the public interest, the Bank of North Dakota launched in mid-1919. A shaky start — instigated by Wall Street, which refused to interact with the new public entity — led to legal challenges. One went all the way to the US Supreme Court. On June 1, 1920, the court ruled that North Dakota’s state bank was thoroughly constitutional.

Despite the legal victory, other hurdles soon emerged. Farmers across the state faced foreclosure during the post–World War I agricultural depression. Crop prices plummeted due to changes in global markets, triggering a rash of bank failures on the Northern Plains. Finally, funding the new state-owned flour mill and grain elevator — which financiers refused to support — put enormous stress on the state bank’s resources. Ultimately, it took a national campaign (which included appeals to organized labor) to save North Dakota’s state bank.

In 1921, satisfied by the establishment of state industries but troubled by the NPL’s mismanagement, North Dakota voters recalled the League governor and attorney general. The NPL’s enemies took over state government. Respecting the popularity of the League’s program, however, they doubled down on the state industries and state bank. Careful administration, as well as the flow of capital from out-of-state banks (which welcomed the state’s rejection of the League), gradually put the Bank of North Dakota on firmer ground.

During the Great Depression, millions of dollars in low-interest loans to the state’s farmers kept them afloat. After World War II, the Bank of North Dakota began turning over profits to the state’s general fund, often covering budget shortfalls.

In 1959, the bank ceased issuing farm loans. But 1967 saw the bank launch its wildly popular student loan program, which made low-cost credit for college available to North Dakotans. During the 1980s farm crisis, the state bank funded community development programs to bolster small-town economies. In 1997, disaster relief funds for communities facing destructive floods in the Red River Valley buoyed North Dakotans at an especially difficult moment.

Critics of the state bank, especially on the Right, persist. And in what is now a firmly Republican state, the Bank of North Dakota’s intensive support of private, for-profit banking pushes definitions of public interest to the limit. In 2016–17, the state bank went so far as to provide emergency loans to help pay for law enforcement’s massive show of force during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Yet as we watch the banking system stagger toward disaster once more, we should look to North Dakota and the democratic model that its century-old state bank provides. Banking for and by the people is not just desirable. It is proven.

Unlike the luxury condominiums being financed by the Saudis for Muslim terrorists, the remaining Jews of Homesh live in makeshift tents.

By Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Magazine

A new settlement is going up in Israel.

Architectural schematics show luxury condominiums that would not be out of place in Miami or Santa Monica complete with balcony views, palm trees and sleek modern interiors with a fireplace, an indoor pool and a garden with a swing bench.

There’s just one catch: to live here you have to be a terrorist.

The Palestinian Authority’s latest expansion of its ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program, which rewards terrorists for attacking Israelis and all non-Muslims, is a luxurious village with unique residency requirements. To be eligible, you need to have spent at least five years in Israeli prison.

The terrorist village is scheduled to be built near the Israeli village of Ofra in Judea, which has suffered numerous terrorist attacks, including the shooting of a pregnant woman which killed her baby.

The terror settlement isn’t just backed by the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, but also by regional groups like the Arab Fund for Development and the Islamic Development Bank whose memberships encompass most of the region’s major Arab and Muslim nations.

The Islamic Development Bank, operating out of Saudi Arabia, has been a longtime funder of Islamic terrorism. Especially in Israel. Last week, Uzra Zeya, a Biden diplomat, met with members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to discuss “partnerships with the Islamic Development Bank”. No mention was made of its terror settlement.

However, in an ugly undiplomatic escalation, the Biden administration summoned the Israeli ambassador to berate him over the end of an apartheid law banning Jews from returning to their homes in villages like Homesh. A Biden State Department spokesman blasted the possibility that Jews would live once again in places like Homesh as “provocative and counterproductive.”

A village whose residency is limited to terrorists and whose board includes the family members of top Hamas and PFLP terrorists, is neither “provocative” nor “counterproductive,” but Jews returning to the ruins of their own destroyed village are dangerously provocative.

According to the Biden administration, “reducing violence is in all parties’ interests, including Israel’s. The U.S. strongly urges Israel to refrain from allowing the return of settlers to the area.” Jews living in a town causes violence, but building a village for terrorists is a pacifist enterprise.

“Advancing settlements is an obstacle to peace,” according to the Biden administration. Except when they’re Muslim terrorist settlements.

Unlike the luxury condominiums being financed by the Saudis for Muslim terrorists, the remaining Jews of Homesh live in makeshift tents. They’re not allowed to build permanent homes of any kind. Technically they’re not even allowed to stay there overnight and under pressure from local and foreign leftists, they keep being kicked out. Yet they keep returning.

In August 2005, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, later convicted and imprisoned over corruption allegations, forcibly expelled the 70 Jewish families living in the Israeli village of Homesh.

The ‘Disengagement’ coordinated with the Bush administration ethnically cleansed thousands of Jewish residents, destroyed their homes and bulldozed their synagogues under the expectation that a new era of peace would emerge when the PLO and Hamas had more territory to play with. Instead, Hamas and the PLO used their newfound gains to launch a new wave of terror.

The families expelled from their homes in Homesh returned to try and reclaim them. They raised the Israeli flag over the rubble, celebrated a wedding and conducted prayers. The Olmert government responded by cutting off food and water to them. (Had that been done to Muslim terrorists, there would have been international outrage.) Driven out, they still did not give up.

One of those who did not give up was Limor Har-Melech. Limor was seven months pregnant when PLO terrorists opened fire. Their car rolled over. Her husband Shalom, an ambulance driver, died. Seriously injured, the 24-year-old mother survived. So did her newborn daughter.

Limor, still carrying the scars of the attack on her face, married again, and now has 10 children and was elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Eighteen years (symbolizing ‘chai’ or life in Judaism) after she was expelled from her home, the bill she championed to revoke the ban on Jews returning to Homesh has passed. That bill was condemned by the Biden administration.

The State Department, which did not summon PLO envoys over the numerous terrorist attacks this year that killed one American, Elan Ganeles of Connecticut, and wounded another, David Stern, an ex-Marine who despite being shot in the head managed to fight off his attacker and get his family to safety, summoned the Israeli ambassador to berate him over Homesh.

At the heart of Homesh, its collection of ragged tents, is a Yeshiva, a religious school. Its students and teachers have been arrested for violating the law by studying and teaching there. The Supreme Court’s leftists recently demanded that the government show why it has failed to permanently evict them. In response the bill legalizing the Jewish presence in a town whose origins date back thousands of years was passed. And the Biden administration raged.

Where are the assurances?

Biden’s State Department claims that allowing Jews to live in Homesh “represents a clear contradiction of undertakings the Israeli Government made to the United States” to permanently expel Jews from their homes and destroy entire villages “in order to stabilize the situation and reduce frictions.” Eighteen years later, where is the stability or the lack of friction?

Where are the assurances made by the Clinton administration to the State of Israel that giving the PLO autonomy would end terrorism? Thirty years ago, Bill Clinton claimed that the PLO had accepted “Israel’s right to exist in peace and security” and “to renounce terrorism”.

The PLO’s idea of renouncing terrorism is spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year funding terrorism through Pay-to-Slay: including building a village just for terrorists. And the Biden administration has violated not only its commitments, but United States law, by continuing to fund the terrorists while failing to even offer the least objection to the terror village.

After the murder of Taylor Force, an Afghan war veteran studying in Israel, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act barring further foreign aid to the terrorists. The Biden administration has flagrantly violated the Taylor Force Act by sending over $1 billion to the terrorist-occupied areas.

Biden’s decision to fund the terrorists has led to a 900% increase in Israeli deaths.

Perhaps the Biden administration would consider “reducing friction” by ending its illegal funding of terrorism instead of by demanding that Israel ethnically cleanse Jews from parts of Israel.

The ‘tale of two settlements’ shows the bias and double standard of the Biden administration.

Given a choice between a terrorist village and a Jewish one, the Biden administration chose to condemn the Jewish village while continuing to fund the terrorists. Politicians and the media are outraged over the village of Homesh, but carefully avoid talking about the Jihad village.

Meanwhile, the Jews camped out in Homesh continue to live in tents, they dodge checkpoints and risk their lives walking circuitous routes to reach the high ground where the village once stood, and where they are determined it will stand again. While the Muslim terrorists will settle down in luxury condominiums, swimming laps in an indoor pool and enjoying the fruits of their murderous labors, the unsung heroes will go on risking their lives by defying them.

And defying their enablers in the Biden administration.

The post A tale of two settlements: A village for Muslim terrorists vs. a village for Israeli Jews appeared first on World Israel News.

“The Mossad, together with its partners in the community, is working relentlessly to thwart intended Iranian attacks around the world,” the agency said in a statement.

By Associated Press and World Israel News Staff

Greek police arrested two men of Pakistani origin accused of planning a mass-casualty attack against Israelis and Jews on behalf of Iran, authorities announced on Tuesday.

The suspects, aged 27 and 29, belong to a “wide Iranian network that operates from Iran and out of many countries,” according to the Mossad, Israel’s world-renowned intelligence agency.

The two suspects entered Greece illegally from neighboring Turkey and had been in the country for at least four months. As part of their investigation, police searched multiple sites in Athens as well as in southern Greece and on the western island of Zakynthos.

The arrests were made because a massive attack at a Jewish restaurant in Athens was believed to be imminent, police and government officials said. The two men in custody are scheduled to be questioned by a public prosecutor Friday.

“Their aim was not only to cause the loss of life of innocent citizens, but also to undermine the sense of security in the country, while hurting public institutions and threatening (Greece’s) international relations,” a police statement said.

“The affair that was uncovered today in Greece is a severe case that was successfully thwarted by the Greek security forces. It was an additional attempt by Iran to perpetrate terrorism against Israeli and Jewish targets abroad,” the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement on behalf of Mossad.

“After the start of the investigation of the suspects in Greece, the Mossad rendered intelligence assistance in unraveling the infrastructure, its work methods and the link to Iran. The investigation revealed that the infrastructure that operated in Greece is part of an extensive Iranian network run from Iran and spanning many countries.

“The Mossad, together with its partners in the community, is working relentlessly to thwart intended Iranian attacks around the world,” the statement concluded.

“The operation demonstrates that the country’s security authorities maintain a high state of readiness for all Greeks and all visitors to our country,” Public Order Minister Takis Theodorikakos said in a tweet.

“Terrorism is a common enemy, and the fight against it is our top priority,” Foreign Minister Eli Cohen wrote on Twitter. “I want to thank the Greek government and the Greek intelligence and security services for thwarting the terrorist attack against Jewish and Israeli targets.”

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