WORLD NEWS OF JEWISH INTEREST
ISRAEL AT WAR​
Articles and abstracts "off the beaten track" that you might have missed
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Reliable sites for reliable information:
(avoid NYT, WPost, most NPR, most of CNN, HAARETZ)
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jewishpress.com Look for articles by Hana Levi Julian.
Isreal21c.org
MEMRI.org Middle East Media Research Institute
CAMERA camera.org Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Accuracy
HonestReporting First class media watchdog and whistleblower, declaring truth to power.
Consulate General of Israel to the Southeast
jewishcommunity@atlanta.mfa.gov.il
Jewish News Syndicate jns.org
Television: i24 Israel TV [AT&T 1223; Comcast 1118]
The Ettinger Report Former Ambassador to the United States. Concise, to-the-point insights and analyses of everything Israel.
Alma Research and Education Center briefings from the Lebanese border
Times of Israel - check here for daily briefing
AJC (American Jewish Committee) Click to sign up for their insightful reports
Naomi Ragen's daily diary of the war Passionate, beautifully written accounts by a distinguished author.
FAQ about the war in gaza.
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FOLLOW JERUSALEM JANE ON TELEGRAM
FOLLOW JERUSALEM JANE ON X (TWITTER)
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As you are surely aware, commerce in Israel has come to a near standstill. Some businesses are reaching out to us to purchase items from their stock or to future-order items not yet created for which you would receive a voucher with no expiration date. Cash flow is desperately needed, and each of us can help.
Here are sites with which Claire and I are quite familiar. /// rcdj
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LEV HAOLAM support Israel's entrepreneurs in Judea and Samaria whose businesses have been severely compromised by BDS.
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Yehoshua Wiseman - talented, gifted artist - painter of Judaic topics, including weekly parshiot; in Y'rushalayim (decades ago known to me as Josh, when he sat across the desk from me studying for his bar mitzvah in Pasadena, California.) RCDJ
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ORI GABRIELI In Y'rushalayim - Tallitot and Quality Art and Ritual Items.
"PLEASE CONTINUE TO ORDER. Our studio is currently open, but still in a reduced format and we are doing our best to keep our heads high and weave your beautiful tallitot.
"We hope that you will continue to show your support by ordering from us and helping us get through this difficult period of time and restore brighter days."
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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction
Blaise Pascal
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Washington Post Reprints Depraved Claim that Israel Steals Palestinian Organs JANUARY 10, 2024 12:30 PM
Camera click HERE for full article.
Antisemitism is skyrocketing. And one of the largest newspapers in the United States is helping fuel the fire.
The Washington Post prides itself on “courageous journalism” and speaking “truth to power,” but a recent report promoted an age-old antisemitic canard. The Dec. 26, 2023, dispatch, “The World Wants a Respite for Gaza. Israel Vows to Keep on Fighting,” regurgitated the claim that Jews steal organs of non-Jews.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has documented, such “blood libels and conspiracy theories have played a tragic role in Jewish history” and are responsible for inciting anti-Jewish violence. And now you can find them printed in the pages of The Washington Post.
“Palestinian officials,” the Post wrote, “said Tuesday that Israel had returned the bodies of 80 people it had held during the Gaza War via the Karem Shalom border crossing. The Hamas-run government media office said Israel had not identified the bodies or said where they had been taken from. They had been ‘mutilated,’ the media office said in a statement, and there were ‘clear’ indications that organs had been ‘stolen’ from the corpses.”
“The claims,” the Post added, “could not be independently verified.”
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Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), an Accomplice of Hamas?
The neutrality and independence of the international organization is called into question in Gaza.
by Alain Destexhe December 19, 2023 at 5:00 am
Click HERE to see this article.
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SHADOWS ARE GETTING LONG
It is a sure sign that the sun is setting when small people cast long shadows.
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Although campuses gone rogue and the horrors of gaza and islamic jihad in the Middle East are more than sufficient to give us grief, we still need to widen our gaze. Read THIS and then ... what? Write letters to the editor, congressional representatives, ... ?
If the West doesn't get its head out of the sand, this will inevitably spread. (Did you know that the US de-terroristed the houthis?)
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There are several very worthwhile "clickables" in the article.
Of the 39 comments at the end of the essay, most of them "get it".
"It can't happen here" - - right?
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DECEMBER 15, 2023 Commentary FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The False Narrative of ‘Indiscriminate Bombing’ by Seth Mandel
CNN has been excitedly promoting an “exclusive” story that about 40 percent of Israel’s airdropped munitions in Gaza have been “unguided,” due to the use of “dumb” bombs. This, the piece suggests, is what the White House was referring to when it accused Israel of “indiscriminate” attacks. A Washington Post story picking up on the CNN piece repeats the word “indiscriminate” like a mantra.
“Unguided munitions,” CNN tells us, “are typically less precise and can pose a greater threat to civilians, especially in such a densely populated area like Gaza.”
“Typically,” you say? So there are ways to use these bombs that are not, in fact, “less precise,” yes? What might be an example of such a case?
Twelve paragraphs later we find out—plot twist!—that Israel’s current war in Gaza is one such case. Which is to say, the subject of the story is a prime example of when the thesis of the story isn’t true.
The CNN piece thus reveals itself to be a “dumb bomb.”
Here is CNN debunking itself: “A US official told CNN that the US believes that the Israeli military is using the dumb bombs in conjunction with a tactic called ‘dive bombing,’ or dropping a bomb while diving steeply in a fighter jet, which the official said makes the bombs more precise because it gets it closer to its target. The official said the US believes that an unguided munition dropped via dive-bombing is similarly precise to a guided munition.”
Ah. Well, glad we settled that. Unfortunately, other outlets picked up the story before they read that paragraph. It’s almost as if, instead of educating its readers, CNN was preying on their lack of knowledge.
When asked about the president’s own comment that some Israeli attacks were “indiscriminate,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said Biden was referring to “global opinion, which also matters.” Indeed it does, and this story itself is a great example of the feedback loop that manufactures such “global opinion.”
Think about it: the original article notes that the U.S. doesn’t consider the “dumb bombs” indiscriminate because the Israelis use different maneuvers to make the accuracy of those bombs comparable to guided munitions. But the “world” thinks Israel is bombing indiscriminately. Now, where would the world get that idea? From articles like this one, which falsely paint a picture of indiscriminate bombing. World leaders then prevail upon Biden to increase the pressure on Israel to avoid civilian casualties and better target their bombing campaigns, which Biden already knows Israel is doing. So Biden sends his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, to Jerusalem to deliver a message: wrap it up.
Sullivan, according to Kirby, “did talk about the possible transitioning from what we would call high-intensity operations—which is what we’re seeing them do now—to lower intensity operations sometime in the near future.”
The “high-intensity operations” constitute the current phase of the war. The world is losing patience because it thinks Israel is indiscriminately bombing Gaza—stop me if you’ve heard this one.
According to the administration, this isn’t as restrictive and micro-managing as it sounds, because the president doesn’t want to put a hard time limit on this phase of the war. That would telegraph to Hamas precisely what to expect. And the president wants Israel to finish its mission of destroying Hamas. Quickly but carefully.
If the administration wants Israel to wrap up this phase quickly, the IDF will have to rely on air-to-surface munitions. That’s okay, because Israel is carrying out these attacks in a more guided manner and one which the U.S. is comfortable with. The only problem, you see, is that the world doesn’t agree. The world thinks these “dumb bombs” can only be used in unguided ways, therefore rendering the attacks “indiscriminate.” Now, if only we could figure out where they’re getting it from.
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Commentary preview January 2024 ry
What ‘Free Palestine’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ Have in Common
An oppressor–oppressed narrative is trapping the world in a state of false consciousness by Wilfred Reilly
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The second I saw the first rowdy pro-Hamas march in a big American city, I felt an incredible sense of déjà vu. For what is the “Free Palestine” movement in America more than a recapitulation of Black Lives Matter and other forms of black American activism over the past decade? In both cases, left-wing partisans who see human interactions in terms of oppressor/oppressed dynamics are claiming their group faces serious problems because of external abuse—and denying that their group has played any role in the controversies involving them. In both cases, whatever truth there may be in the initial complaint, the matters that trigger these movements are far more complex and have almost entirely internal causes. And, in both cases, shameless self-billed “local leaders” and other hucksters prevent any discussion of how to fix these real problems.
Some level of sympathy for the groups in question is entirely understandable. Black Americans, of course, were slaves in the United States for almost a century, from 1776 to 1865. Large areas of the South remained racially segregated for decades longer, until 1954’s Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. The U.S. Civil Rights Act, which rendered most forms of racial discrimination illegal, did not become law until 10 years after that. And so on: Over the course of American history, at least 3,445 blacks (and almost 1,500 whites) were lynched by angry mobs—often hanged publicly or burnt alive. It is difficult to read through a substantive text on black American history without feeling some sadness about our nation’s past, as well as great respect for my race’s successful struggle for equality.
The same is true when it comes to sympathy for the Palestinian cause. With the British division of the imperial provinces of Transjordan and Mandatory Palestine into Jewish-majority Israel and Arab-majority Jordan following World War II, and the war that broke out between Israel and surrounding Arab powers, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs left or were driven off their family lands. More than 750,000 of these people and their descendants (up to 5.9 million by some quirky estimates) remain technical “refugees” today, living in such areas of resettlement as the Gaza Strip’s giant Jabalia “refugee camp.” An entire UN Department exists to meet their needs.
Many or most of those Palestinians initially left their lands because Arab generals who commanded forces then invading Israel told them to do so to give hostile armies a better shot at striking into and destroying the nascent Jewish state. By now, nearly eight decades later, several Gaza and West Bank refugee settlements are sizeable cities full of multistory buildings.
But the narrative of Palestinian displacement is an understandably upsetting one for many people even now.
And both communities, black and Palestinian, face significant problems, which are tempting to blame on historical oppression and defeat. In the United States, for example, the rate of serious violent crime among African Americans is currently 2.4 times the rate among white Americans. The median black score on the pre-college SAT exam stands at 941, versus roughly 1100 for non-Hispanic whites (itself hardly a stellar score: Asian-American kids and Jewish students now bring home almost a 1250). A sizable income gap persists between the races: The average black male between 30 and 39 earns $51,000 annually, versus a median income of $71,000 for white men of the same age.
The problems for Palestinians are even simpler and more brutal to sum up. Annual per capita GDP inside the densely populated Gaza Strip (officially) stands at just $5,600. The place is literally run by criminals: The elected, and rather popular, governing party is the terrorist group Hamas. What could the cause of such structural failures be? One obvious default is the idea that the blame belongs to oppression. The government of Israel, in the Palestinian case, must surely be blocking humanitarian assistance and business development to Gaza and other Palestinian regions, and preventing the construction of infrastructure there.
In both cases, the idea that oppression is the primary cause of the failure of civil society is forwarded, aggressively and constantly, by persuasive demagogues. The argument that the sole cause of all performance gaps between large racial groups is “racism”—and not, say, culture, regional or religious effects, stochastic random chance, genetic factors, or even the effects of past history—is the core theme of Ibram Kendi’s bestselling pseudo-scholarship. One of America’s leading attorneys, Ben Crump, published a bestselling book arguing that black Americans are experiencing a “genocide” and that rebellion against this state of abuse explains much crime.
Much the same sort of thing is frequently said about Palestine. Almost immediately on the heels of the horrific terrorist attacks of October 7—during which some young women were raped so often and savagely that their pelvises broke—34 of the leading student institutions at a small but prominent college called Harvard signed a formal letter assigning all blame for the attacks, and for conditions in Palestine, to the Israeli “occupation” regime. One of these organizations, rather remarkably, was Amnesty International.
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The only problem with these arguments, to put this in the highly technical language of professional wonkery, is that they are stupid and wrong. The key weakness of the contention that black community issues such as high crime are due to contemporary racism (or, for that matter, to genetics) is that most of them did not exist to anywhere near the same extent in the past, despite the fact that the makeup of the black population was largely identical and the ethnic conflict with whites was far worse. As I have documented, the black murder rate roughly doubled during the recent “Black Lives Matter” era alone: It currently stands at an astounding 32/100,000 per year, which is higher than the Caucasian suicide rate.
This tragic final average merely reflects the end-point of a long and disturbing trend. As writers such as Mona Charen have documented, American and particularly black American crime rates began to surge following the liberalization of “blue city” justice systems in the 1960s and 1970s. Astonishingly, murders increased from roughly 8,000 to 24,530 between the years 1963 and 1993, and serious aggravated assaults increased from 174,210 to 1,135,610. While U.S. crime did decline significantly during the post-Giuliani-and-Bratton 2000s, homicides have climbed back to more than 20,000 annually during the past several years. More than half of all recent murder victims have been black, something hardly characteristic even of the Jim Crow era. If we choose to add fatherlessness to this analysis, the African-American out-of-wedlock birth rate stood at just 11 percent in 1938—in contrast to 69 percent today (alongside a rate of 36 percent for whites). Racism is the cause? Not likely.
Same for the Palestinians. In the bluntest possible logical terms, most of the problems of, specifically, Gaza cannot be laid at the feet of Israel…because Israel has not occupied or ruled the Gaza Strip since 2005. Far more of them, in fact, can be laid at the feet of Hamas, the terrorist group that has been in charge of the area since 2007. Among many other objectively insane actions, Hamas’s leaders ordered or allowed the destruction of the great majority of the infrastructure left behind by some 10,000 departing Jews, who fled the region following an Israeli pullback (thus, of course, being “forced to abandon their family lands”)—including the once-legendary floral greenhouses of the Strip.
Since that point, Hamas has systematically looted the potentially rich lands under its control—at one point rather literally beating plowshares into swords by using miles of state-of-the-art sewer pipe sent by the international aid community to make rocket-launcher tubes. Gaza and the other component region of recognized Palestine (the West Bank) have in fact received many billions of dollars in recent humanitarian aid, because of the sympathetic nature of some Palestinian claims, and much of this lucre has simply vanished or been stolen. Quite a bit of it, to judge from viral retrospectives of what Gaza City looked like before the Israel–Hamas war, was diverted into luxury villas for Hamas commanders and their dependents—some of whom could give even BLM lessons on mansion purchase and maintenance.
More seriously—although the theft of billions from poor people is serious enough—legitimately unpleasant realities of day-to-day Palestinian life such as Israeli checkpoint monitoring of the Gaza and West Bank borders are also caused almost entirely by the behavior of the Palestinian governments. Tens of thousands of rocket attacks against the Jewish state have taken place just since 2001. There is actually a professional website that keeps precise track of how long Israel “has been rocket free” at any given time: The clock sat at 56 minutes and 21 seconds when I last checked in.
Obviously, no nation could ethically, or would logically, leave itself trusting and defenseless in the face of such a constant military-level threat. However—to indulge in a bit of cliché—it is a safe bet that, were the Palestinian regimes ever to genuinely stop attacking Israel, for a trust-building period of a few years, and sue for peace, a peace would soon follow. A true Palestinian state likely would as well. It happened with Egypt, Israel’s foremost enemy during its first 30 years of existence, and it would happen with the Palestinians as well. It has become popular to forget this, but Israel has placed serious who-gets-what packages on the table at least seven times during statehood negotiations. In my read, the primary barrier to at least four of those becoming reality was the plain irascibility of Palestinian leadership.
In both the Palestinian and black American cases, the critical final point is this: Achieving what is presumably every sane person’s end-game goal—actual improvements in the lot of currently troubled communities—will require total rejection of trendy oppressor v. oppressed narratives and demand a hard focus on what the actual problems in each case are. In reality, most issues in modern black America have far less to do with contemporary racism—Nigerian Americans do not experience them, and such issues did not exist when racism was more intense—than with excuse-making about crime and a distinctly disengaged attitude toward school and study. And, in reality, the farther-away issues of Palestinians have far less to do with “unchanging, unprovoked Israeli oppression” than with rule by bloodthirsty terrorist kleptocrats who literally refuse to make peace.
In neither case will resolving these issues be easy even once we recognize and bluntly name them. However, doing so will remain eternally impossible if we do not.
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This Is Not a Time for Celebration
by John Podhoretz Commentary Magazine November 22, 2023
The release of 50-plus hostages over the course of four or five days is a positive development in the sense that their restraint and possible literal torture will be at an end. But for many of these children and the parents who will accompany them, the trauma will not be over. Some will learn of relatives dead, and will be dealing emotionally and physically with what happened during their captivity.
According to Israel’s Channel 12, the soldiers who will be bringing them out have been instructed not to answer the question, “Where are mommy and daddy,” only to reassure them that they are now safe. Those soldiers are also being told to ask if the children are hot or cold and whether they want or need to be carried, or want their hands held. Read that without tears springing to your eyes and tell me you’re still human.
Then there’s the fact of the 180-190 hostages who will continue to be kept by the demons in Gaza as bargaining chips, and it needs to be said: This is not a time to celebrate. Nothing “good” will be happening over the next couple of days. And I suspect Israeli public opinion, which is the only thing that matters now, will not greet the release of these children and women by thinking, as so many parlous American Jewish leftists will, “Oh good, now we can make sure the ‘ceasefire’ remains and Israel will be halted in its forward movement to destroy Hamas.”
Oh, no, you moral bottom-dwellers: Israel is more likely to come out of this more hardened, more determined, and less inclined toward any kind of conciliation. They will, instead, demand of their government that it win this war with dispatch, and then they will turn their attention to the domestic failings that have brought it on. And what we in America think about it will be of no moment to them—except inasmuch as they will take strength from our support, our prayers, our continuing struggle against the people here in America who wish them and the Jewish people harm, and our love.
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Alan Dershowitz: Palestinians Share Hamas Guilt
At the end of the Second World War, many Germans who actively supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis acted as if they actually had nothing to do with genocide inflicted on the Jews.
They pretended that Hitler and a few handfuls of Nazis had suddenly come down from Mars and had taken over the bodies and souls of ordinary, innocent and decent German people.
In his masterful book, "Hitler’s Willing Executioners," Daniel Goldhagen destroyed that myth and proved conclusively that Hitler and the Nazis had widespread support among ordinary Germans, and that many, if not most, of them were aware of Hitler’s final solution.
This historical reality did not necessarily justify the deliberate killing of German civilians by Great Britain and the United States in Dresden and other German cities, but it made the civilian adult “victims” of these bombings somewhat less sympathetic, and it made it easier to blame their deaths on the Nazis who started the war with widespread civilian support, if not enthusiasm.
A similar mythology is already emerging around the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians. Government officials, the media, academics, and others pretend as if there is a sharp distinction between Hamas and the ordinary decent civilians of Gaza.
How many times have you heard the claim that the adult citizens of Gaza are not in any way responsible for the horrendous crimes of Hamas? Or that Israel is imposing "collective punishment" on the innocent civilians of Gaza?
The reality is far more nuanced and complex.
As in Nazi Germany, Hamas was elected by the citizens of Gaza in the last election, in 2006. Today, they would likely still be reelected by an overwhelming majority.
Indeed, support for Hamas has increased dramatically since the massacres of Oct. 7, which were wildly cheered by many civilians.
Recall the recording of the young terrorist who bragged to his father that he had just murdered 10 Jews "with my own hands," and the proud father congratulating his mass murdering son on his holy "accomplishment."
Is the father an innocent civilian who deserves our sympathy?
Hamas, itself, refuses to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
First, Hamas boasts that it has the widespread support of the vast majority of Gazans.
Second, it uses alleged civilians as human shields and declares them to be martyrs if they are then killed. At least some of these martyrs willingly served as shields for Hamas combatants.
Third, when the Hamas controlled health authorities release their phony statistics on deaths, they refuse to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
When they say that 11,000 Gazans have been killed, they hide the fact that many of them are either combatants or are complicit in Hamas crimes by willingly allowing their homes to be used for the storage and firing of rockets.
Hamas fully understands that the line between combatants and Gazan civilians is often an artificial one, and they use it as both a sword and a shield in the public relations war.
When Hamas deliberately attacked Israeli civilians, they knew full well that Israel would have to respond, that Hamas would use civilians as human shields, and that despite Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties, some Palestinians would become "collateral" damage — that is, be killed or wounded when Israel took military action necessary to prevent a recurrence of the massacres of Oct. 7.
Hamas is thus responsible — morally, legally, and politically — for the civilian deaths that were the predictable and indeed intended result of the Oct. 7 attack.
These civilian deaths were intended to shift the focus away from the Hamas barbarities and toward the collateral damage resulting from Israeli self-defense measures.
The adult civilians of Gaza who encouraged, supported, rewarded and cheered on the massacres of Israelis also bear some moral and political, if not strictly legal, responsibility.
This leaves the children.
It must first be determined what constitutes a "child" in the enumeration of Hamas?
That depends of course on the way children are used.
When it comes to recruiting child soldiers, Hamas considers 13, 14- and 15-year-olds as sufficiently mature to become terrorists.
But when it comes to publishing inflated figures about the dead, suddenly every 17-and-a-half-year-old mass murdering terrorist is counted among the poor "children" mercilessly killed by the bloodthirsty Israelis.
Also, every mass murdering woman, regardless of age, is separately listed, as if that suggest that their sex automatically makes them innocent civilians.
And the media and others willingly fall for these cynical bait-and-switches.
Let the Hamas authorities at least separate the terrorist combatants — including women and children — from the total numbers allegedly killed.
They should also separate out the Gazans who were killed by errant terrorist rockets, as well as civilians who were killed by Hamas trying to go south pursuant to Israeli safety instructions.
It is highly likely that a list of purely innocent civilians who deserve our sympathy —babies, very young children, non-supporters of Hamas — would be a fraction of the inflated numbers uncritically and often provocatively regurgitated by the media.
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Jerusalem Jane: God created me to defend Israel
Jane Kiel from Denmark is reaching tens of thousands of people all over the world with the truth about Israel.
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN Jerusalem Post FEBRUARY 25, 2022 08:05
Jane Kiel is just a simple Christian girl from a small town in Denmark, but her reach is ginormous.
With nothing but a small phone and a handful of social media pages, she is reaching tens of thousands of people all over the world with the truth about Israel.
Affectionally known as “Jerusalem Jane,” Kiel turns 50 in a few months. “Never would I have imagined to be single and living in Israel for nearly 10 years,” Kiel told Christian World. “What a roller coaster ride it has been: numerus injuries, surgeries, death threats, not seeing my family for years, sleepless nights, tears from yet another heinous terror or rocket attack I had to report about – so much trauma and so many broken hearts.
“But it will never just be a job,” she said. “It’s my life.”
Kiel is living in Israel on a journalist visa. She is a full-time video blogger, sharing her story with Christians around the world. She has remained independent, she said, in order to maintain her editorial voice. For some Christians, she told Christian World, she is the only unbiased new source to which they have access.”
Kiel’s story began decades ago with her grandparents, who before going to bed every night would pray for their children, grandchildren and for the people and State of Israel.
Her mother held a weekly prayer group on Mondays that Kiel attended. Rain, snow or shine, she said, the women in that group would get together to bless Israel - something they continue to do until today.
“My personal faith in God has followed me my whole life,” she told the website.
But when she became a teenager and began watching the nightly news, she discovered that the world did not feel the same way about Israel as she did. In fact, Kiel realized that the news reports contradicted what she had been taught in church and from the Bible about the Holy Land.
However, it was not until she was nearly 30 that she publicly advocated for Israel for the first time.
In 2001, former Palestinian Authority leader yasser arafat visited the Danish Parliament. When Kiel learned of the trip while watching the news, she said “I had a cup of coffee in my hand and nearly dropped it.” Kiel phoned her mother and said she wanted to attend the welcome ceremony and protest arafat’s state visit.
She and her mother traveled six hours by train carrying huge Israeli flags tied to broomsticks and set themselves up in the courtyard of the parliament where everyone could see.
She recalled that as Arafat’s motorcade approached “the heavens opened up and it started pouring. The atmosphere was so evil. The closer he came, the more the rain poured down. But we just stood there holding our flags.”
Kiel said she looked Arafat in the eyes as he passed.
“I know that he saw us,” she said.
Kiel took her first trip to Israel in 1999, a visit she said changed her life. “I knew I was never going to be the same again,” she told Christian World. “You leave a little piece of your heart in Israel and that piece keeps bringing people back.”
She managed to visit many times over the next decade until in 2007, Kiel was on a trip with her mother’s church group and she realized she wanted to move to the country. Kiel was traveling on a bus when she thought she heard God speak to her.
“I sat down in the back of the bus, and I was crying, but I did not know it until I felt the tears on my hands. I heard God say, ‘I will bring you back,’” Kiel recalled.
Soon after, she “stepped out in faith,” sold everything she had, bought a plane ticket and came to Israel. At first, she was on a tourist visa and had to return to Denmark every three months.
But eventually she qualified for a journalist work permit, the same one she has been renewing for around the last seven years.
In 2011, when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas appealed to the United Nations to recognize Palestine, Kiel decided she needed to speak out.
“I felt like here was my destiny, to tell the truth about Israel, what's really going on here, which you often don’t hear in mainstream media around the world,” she said.
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FOLLOW JERUSALEM JANE ON TELEGRAM
FOLLOW JERUSALEM JANE ON X (TWITTER)
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SH'MA YISRAEL....NO INTRODUCTION NEEDED. READ, SCROLL DOWN TO THE VIDEO.
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IT IS NOT THAT ISRAEL NEEDS AMERICA; AMERICA NEEDS ISRAEL!
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For intelligent ongoing coverage of the existential
battle between Good and Evil,
keep up with the HAMAS' WAR ON ISRAEL collection in TABLET MAGAZINE.
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IMPORTANT RE-CHARGE FOR YOUR "JEWISH BATTERIES":
Two inspiring and spiritually refocusing brief talks for all of us by Gila Sacks,
daughter of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, z"l.
Watch THIS ONE first,
then THIS ONE. - - hers is the final segment of a 2 hour conference. Move the time slider to 2:02:50]
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MI SHEBERACH for IDF - Recorded about a year ago, quite moving. Enjoy.
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FOR MILITARY TECHIES - CHECK THIS SOURCE.
THERE YOU'LL FIND THIS ARTICLE AND MANY OTHERS FOCUSED ON ISRAEL:
The 11-month lease of US Army Iron Domes to Israel could be extended “depending on factors on the ground".
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Have we de-magnetized our moral compass?! - This TBN video featuring Dr. Phil, posted after pro-hamas demonstrations erupted at colleges and universities, will help you package your thoughts for meaningful conversations. The first five minutes comprise his powerful message extracted by other sites; the remaining 50+ minutes is a discussion with hosts of Praise that you might find to be equally helpful.
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WHY WON'T THE JEWS JUST LET THEMSELVES BE KILLED?! Great analysis of the phenomenon of us.
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Finally, an awakening at my alma mater: Hatikvah at UCLA.
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18-year-old Canadian pianist Kevin Chen, winner of the 17th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv seven months ago, made a change to his program at Carnegie Hall (October 19).
In an act of solidarity he, unannounced, started his recital at the Carnegie Hall with Hatikvah.
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Mystery of the Jews - AISH 21 minutes
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History of interaction between gazans and the Jewish people, Rabbi Henry Abrams. 16 min.
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Documentary: Glimpse into the lives of Israel's Special Paratroop Commando Unit. 1 hour.
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For a chilling, sobering, extraordinary window into the reality and psychology of the war effort, from the point of view of soldiers and the Israeli population that loves and supports them, read the daily dispatches from American oleh Yoni Heilman, CEO of the Tamid Group.
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Sara Zoabi - proud Arab Israeli. This is a recent video of her in an extract from an Israeli cooking show. The family name, Zoabi, should be quite familiar to you. Here is another video as she addressed the K'nesset in 2017.
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Who is Dalia Al-Aqidi? Someone we ought to follow!
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Be sure to read this brilliant commentary by Yair Lapid
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For a comprehensive - possibly disturbing, but accurate - history of the Left's war against Israel, watch/listen to this incredible lecture by Nikos Sotirakopulous
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This handwritten note was found on a terrorist body. It is an order to kill Jews, with words of encouragement: encouragement to carry out a merciless massacre while receiving inspiration from leaders in Muslim history who became a symbol of jihad. The terrorists are encouraged to decapitate, remove hearts and livers, and repeat the massacres of historical Muslim leaders who massacred men, sold women and children into slavery, and looted cities.
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FROM MEMRI:
For a chilling wake-up call from Dearborn, Michigan, on October 27, click HERE.
To keep up with documentation of the atrocities of October 7, click HERE.
For October 7 atrocity denial, in a speech in Wachington DC, October 13, click HERE
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CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BORNBLUM SCHOOL ALUMNI IN INTERVIEWS WITH DANIEL WEISS, HEAD OF SCHOOL.
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"We have to be heard."
In this eye-opening episode of The Spark, I gathered four unique perspectives and Bornblum alumni from college campuses across the nation:
Seth Taub, a freshman at Susquehanna University; Alex Fogelman, a senior at Tulane University; Sarah Boxer, a second-year law student at Harvard Law School; and Isaac Ostrow, a Student Life Associate at Columbia Barnard Hillel.
Through candid conversations, they share their personal journeys and insights into how the Israel-Hamas war and the increase in anti-Semitism have affected them on campus. These voices explore the challenges of discussing these sensitive topics on campus, navigating the difference between free speech and hate speech, and the emotional toll on individuals and communities. They also discuss the importance of dialogue, education, and empathy in promoting peace and understanding among diverse student populations.
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A Short History of the National Lawyers Guild and How It Came to Support the Crimes of Hamas ALAN DERSHOWITZ OCT 27
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It began as a liberal organization that was taken over by the communists and supported the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Within a day of the massacre of Israeli babies, women, the elderly and others, the National Lawyers Guild issued a statement in support of the mass murderers. The Guild is a group of hard-left lawyers, students, and legal employees. It has branches in law schools throughout the country and has many members, especially among law students.
It began as a liberal organization before World War II and included many legal luminaries, including Jews. Quickly, though, it was taken over by the Communist Party, and it supported the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. As a result of its support for Hitler, many liberal members quit.
Committed Communists who always follow the party line remained members. Following World War II, the Guild again attracted some liberals who saw it as an alternative to the conservative American Bar Association. In the 1970s, it was taken over by radical leftists¸ including some members of the Communist Party. It was no longer a home for liberals.
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It is important to note that the lengthy statement by the Lawyer’s Guild in support of Hamas and in opposition to Israel was issued before Israel responded to the Hamas attack. It was posted on October 8, while bodies were still being recovered from the south of Israel.
The statement begins by emphasizing “the legitimacy of the right of the Palestinian people to resist the legal military occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing … as well as Israel’s perpetration of its atrocities.” It described the rapes, beheadings, murders and kidnappings committed by Hamas as “the recent military actions carried out by Palestinian resistance…”
The Guild’s statement urged the public to support resistance to Israel’s occupation “by all available means including armed struggle.” It criticized those who had condemned Hamas’ barbarity. It accused Israel of genocide and demanded that Hamas be removed from the United States list of foreign terrorist organizations.
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If there were groups of law students at any law school that advocated the lynching of African-Americans, the raping of women or the killing of gay and transgender people, the National Lawyers Guild would be the first to demand that the names of the students supporting such atrocities be made public. Now the shoe is on the other foot, and it is the Guild that is supporting such barbarity.
Publicizing the names and law schools of students who support Hamas violence against civilians is not “doxxing.” It does not disclose private information about their home addresses, their sexual preferences, or anything else other than their names. These students have identified themselves as members of the National Lawyers Guild. They are adults and are responsible for their actions and inactions.
Publishing their names serves the interest of truth and transparency. And so, I intend to publish — on my website, my podcast, and in my op-eds — the names of any student who signed or supported the bigoted statement of the National Lawyers Guild.
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SO-CALLED INNOCENT GAZAN CIVILIANS
Read this article from Jewish Press; then read the article below.
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A mob of ordinary Palestinians spontaneously joined in what became the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust.
By Andrew Tobin, The Washington Free Beacon OCTOBER 25, 2023
As Hamas terrorists carried out a highly choreographed massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, they received a source of support that amplified the horror that took place that day. A mob of ordinary Palestinians spontaneously joined in what became the deadliest pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust, according to videos, eyewitness accounts, and the Israel Defense Forces.
Whereas the Hamas terrorists wore uniforms and carried military-grade weapons, the Gazans who followed them into the Jewish state were dressed as civilians and mostly unarmed, two officials from Israel’s devastated Gaza border region said. Young men with knives, overweight dads, and at least one elderly man on crutches were among those who exploited Hamas’s rampage to create a second wave of carnage that rivaled the barbarism of the professional terrorists.
The extent to which the Gazan public took part in Hamas’s campaign of terror has yet to be fully understood even in Israel. But for the communities near Israel’s Gaza border—home to many of the country’s remaining peaceniks—firsthand knowledge of what their Palestinian neighbors did has already hardened into a new consensus: Coexistence is dead, and Gaza must be crushed.
“The second wave of Arabs who came into the country were just as cruel as the terrorists of the first wave,” Gadi Yarkoni, the mayor of the Eshkol Regional Council, which encompasses most of the Gaza border communities, told the Free Beacon. “We saw that it was not only Hamas who came to slaughter us. It was all the residents of Gaza, including people who worked in our kibbutzim.”
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Even though Nirim suffered less than some of its neighbors, Meir said the attack—and particularly the role of ordinary Gazans—shattered his community’s faith in coexistence. Many of the kibbutzniks were longtime peace activists, and there was widespread support among them for a program that allowed thousands of Gazans to work in Israel.
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Several community members received text messages from Gazan workers, according to [mayor] Yarkoni, warning their former employers that they were coming to kill them.
“I am a man of peace,” Meir said. “I wanted us to live in peace—that we could drive to the ocean over there [in Gaza] and that we could do groceries in Rafah or Khan Yunis. I think even most right-wing Israelis at the end of the day pray for peace. The desire for peace is ingrained in all of us.”
“But today we understand that [the Palestinians] are educated differently. They are educated for something else. Just as we crave peace, they crave jihad,” he said. “They are raising monsters. And it is impossible to make peace with monsters.
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X/Twitter post from SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center
A message from SPLC Union officers and stewards: SPLC Union is and will always be rooted in the legacy of anti-oppression and decolonization led by Black and Indigenous leaders. With that in mind, SPLC Union stands strongly in solidarity with the Palestinian people. (1/4)
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“What we see in Gaza is the violent imperialist desecration of a people – the beginnings of a genocide,” the union’s officers and stewards wrote.
The SPLC Union also asserted Israel’s actions have “fueled aggression in our own country that resulted in “attacks against Muslims and Sikhs” and “outbursts of antisemitism.”
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TIMES OF ISRAEL WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 25, 2023
By LAZAR BERMAN Today, 3:58 pmUpdated at 5:32 pm 2
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, but is “mujahideen” defending their homeland.
Israel “can view Hamas as a terrorist organization, along with the West,” said Erdogan, speaking to a gathering of his AK Party faction in parliament. “The West owes you a lot. But Turkey does not owe you anything.”
“Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a group of mujahideen defending their lands,” he said to a standing ovation. “Mujahideen” is an Arabic term for those engaged in jihad, or holy war.
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Extracted From Yoram Ettinger Report, 10/16/2-23
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*Hamas was established in 1988, as a spin-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, as were ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Islamic Jihad, Boko Haram and scores of additional terror entities. The Muslim Brotherhood is the largest Sunni terror organization, haunting all pro-US Arab regimes, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Africa, Europe and the USA. Its strategic goal is to topple all national Muslim regimes, bring the Western “infidel” to submission, and establish a universal Muslim society.
*Hamas, just like the Muslim Brotherhood, considers Israel as “an infidel” entity in “the abode of Islam,” a US beachhead in the Middle East and a deterring ally of all pro-US Arab regimes.
*The 1988 Hamas charter highlights the Quran as its constitution, Jihad as its path, and martyrdom as its loftiest tactic. It urges the “believers” to kill Jews, as specified in Article 7 of the charter, quoting one of the Prophet Muhammad’s Hadiths (verbal teachings): “When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say: O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him….”
