Breaking news: COVID: Latest test guidelines for travelers and Mayor Huldai Promises Curbs on Police as Jaffa Jews Suffer Hundreds of Anti-Semitic Attacks By David Israel and An Antisemitic Hate, Wave Grows in Los Angeles By Daniel Greenfield and What's My Line? - Woody Allen; Allen Ludden [panel] (Sep 26, 1965) and The Last, Overlooked but Still Active Front of World War II By Melanie Phillips
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
Travelers who wish to leave or enter Israel will now have to pay for their coronavirus PCR test, the Health Ministry said on Thursday, as a first group of tourists landed in the country for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.In order to travel to Israel, authorities required that all passengers – including those who are vaccinated or recovered – present a negative test before boarding, and take another one upon arrival.
Regarding outbound passengers, those vaccinated and recovered are not required by Israel to undergo a test before leaving, but often, airlines or regulations at travelers' destination do demand that a negative test is shown, so they have no choice and must test if they want to fly.At the moment, Check2Fly offers the tests for some NIS135 to receive results within four hours and NIS 45 for results within 14 hours. However, nothing has prevented people from getting tested at their health fund for free.But the Health Ministry has now announced that starting from June 1, everyone who arrives in Israel will have to pay for their own test, NIS 80 when booked in advance and NIS 100 without booking.
From June 10 the testing complex at Ben-Gurion Airport will be operated by the Femi Premium group and those who do not comply will face a NIS 3,500 fine.
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Last, Overlooked but Still Active Front of World War II By Melanie Phillips
Analysis
Photo Credit: Bundesarchiv via Wikimediaa Commons.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini salute the Bosnian Waffen SS in November 1943
Our current convulsions, with the Jewish people under murderous and venomous attack both in Israel and the Diaspora, are far more momentous than many may realize.
Israel, where a ceasefire to the conflict in Gaza has been announced, remained under fire from the rocket barrages aimed at killing Israeli civilians in the final hours before it was due to take effect. Tensions over attacks by Israeli Arabs on Israeli Jews, with some ugly retaliation by Jewish extremists, remain high.
But the violence is not confined to the Middle East. There has been a huge upsurge in attacks on Diaspora Jews in Britain, Europe and America.
On the streets of European cities, demonstrators have been screaming for the destruction of Israel and chanting that the "army of Mohammed" has returned to slaughter the Jews.
Israelis living in Los Angeles say that while they were dining at a restaurant in the city, dozens of people waving Palestinian flags badly beat them after chillingly asking "who is Jewish?"
Britain's Jewish defense organization, the Community Security Trust, reports at least a five-fold increase in anti-Semitic incidents over the course of the Gaza war.
The most dramatic example was a four-hour motorcade festooned with Palestinian flags whose occupants drove around Jewish areas of North London screaming abuse. One of these thugs used a megaphone to scream: "F*** the Jews, f*** their daughters, f*** their mothers, rape their daughters and free Palestine."
These appalling events are not the result of just another conflict between Israel and the Palestinians provoking a predictable anti-Israel reaction. What's happening now is that the Palestinian war against Israel has been reframed as a war against the Jews.
Diaspora Jews are being physically and verbally attacked, their children intimidated and their synagogues vandalized.
Most of this is being perpetrated by Muslims. But it is being reinforced by extreme hostility to Israel from Western "progressives." These self-professed "anti-racists" tell themselves that they are on the side of the angels. But while they may be genuinely horrified by the attacks on Jewish people in their cities, they refuse to acknowledge that their own stance on Israel is profoundly anti-Jew.
It's not just the twisted reporting, distortions and blood libels straight from the Hamas propaganda playbook that have been transmitted round the clock by the BBC, Sky UK, the Guardian, TheNew York Times and much of the rest of the mainstream media. Worse still is the intensity of the perverse and unjustified passions with which Israel is demonized.
It's the spitting outrage that not enough Israelis are dying to justify military action to stop thousands of incoming rockets.
It's the furious and contemptuous dismissal of the fact that the Israel Defense Forces uniquely warn of impending rocket strikes against civilian targets in order to save civilian life.
It's the virulent satisfaction with which every single military action Israel takes against the Palestinians, purely to save Israeli lives, is seized upon as proof of its moral depravity.
Even though horror and outrage have been expressed over the millions slaughtered in Syria or China's persecution of the Uyghurs, those atrocities don't arouse the same obsessive and visceral passions as Israel's defense of its people's lives. It's impossible to avoid the conclusion that the explanation for this otherwise inexplicable perversity towards the Jewish state is a desire to denounce Jews simply because they are Jews.
For what is shockingly clear from this unique pathology is that there's a profound need in the West for the Jews to be proved bad people. Among the Israel-haters is a breathless eagerness for the moment when they can shout "gotcha" and then put the Jews into the public pillory.
The causes of this are undoubtedly complex. But the main reason is surely that they can't tolerate the idea that the "chosen people"—a term they misrepresent as "privileged," despite the Jews' belief that they were chosen instead for an onerous set of duties—may be morally superior to them.
So if they can't be like the Jews, they'll make sure the Jews are pulled down off their supposed moral pedestal to be just like them—or worse.
To any rational, decent individual, this may seem incredible. But the signature characteristic of anti-Semitism, which makes it unlike any other racism or bigotry, is that it is unhinged.
For a Jew, it's impossible not to hear in all this the unmistakable echoes of previous horrors—the medieval blood libel against the Jews that incited their slaughter, the centuries of Christian pogroms against the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust. While the Nazi comparison is repeatedly misused, on this occasion, it is all too justified. Indeed, it is not too fanciful to view what we are witnessing as the last, overlooked but still active front of the Second World War.
The anti-Jewish animus in both the Muslim world and the liberal West has deep roots in both Nazism and the Holocaust.
With the West demoralized after the Holocaust took place in the epicenter of European high culture, left-wing thinkers urged a total repudiation of the nation-state and core Western values as fundamentally unjust and discriminatory. This led, in turn, to the dogma that Israel was a colonial and illegitimate enterprise, Zionism was racism, and the Jews had no right to self-determination.
In the Muslim world, although Jew-hatred is rooted in Islamic theology this was given rocket fuel in the early part of the last century by the emergence of Islamism, or politicized Islam, whose foundational thinkers drew upon both communism and Nazism.
In the 1930s, Arab nationalism in Syria and Iraq modeled itself on Italian and German fascism. After the rebirth of Israel in 1948, Egypt and the Arab League recruited former Nazi intelligence officers and SS generals to help destroy the Jewish state.
The most notorious Arab Nazi was the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who became Hitler's ally and was pledged to eradicate the Jews of the entire Middle East if Hitler won the war. And al-Husseini's most devoted acolyte today is the current leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
In World War II, the allies fought an attempt to conquer and destroy Western civilization and exterminate the Jews.
Today, the Palestinians of both Hamas and Abbas's Fatah constantly churn out Nazi-style, murderous incitement against the Jewish people. And the Iranian regime, which funds and arms Hamas, has been at war against the West for four decades and regularly announces its genocidal intentions towards the Jews.
So today's war against Western civilization and the Jews amounts to infernal unfinished business. But unlike the Second World War, when those in the free world on the side of the fascists were regarded as traitors, such people today march on the streets of London and elsewhere arm in arm with those pledged to Islamic holy war against the Jews and the rest of the "infidel" world.
In the United States, President Joe Biden told Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that America expects an immediate and "significant de-escalation" on the path to a ceasefire. This while the rockets from Gaza were still flying against Israel. The demand was as unconscionable as it would have been to tell the British to de-escalate during the Blitz.
Worse yet, after Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) confronted Biden over the Gaza war and echoed an earlier speech in which she accused Israel of "racism" and running an "apartheid system," Biden said of Tlaib: "God thank you for being a fighter."
The heirs to the Nazis are still intent upon the same terrible aims. The difference now is that those fighting for civilization are being undermined by an enormous fifth column—and even the leader of the free world itself has become a useful idiot for the other side.
On Wednesday, Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai issued a letter to the residents of Jaffa that may as well have been sent by the mayor of Kishinev to the pogromists back in 1905. Here are the first three paragraphs, and it should be clear that Hizzoner may be addressing all the residents of Jaffa, but don't let this fool you, he means Arabs:
Dear Jaffa residents,
Recently, the police have employed enhanced forces in the city. Alongside the important and crucial law enforcement that many residents of Jaffa – Arabs and Jews – yearn for, there have been more than a few cases of extreme and exaggerated police enforcement that harmed innocent citizens.
I wish to clarify to each and every one of you that as Mayor of this city I object to any exaggerated exercise of force against the residents of our city.
As I write this, it is important to me that you understand that I say these same words in a clear voice to the police district commander, and share with him the reality on the ground as I'm hearing it from you.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai's letter to the residents of Jaffa, May 26, 2021.
Also this week, Rabbi Ezra Heiman, a manager of the Gar'in Torani and yeshiva in Jaffa, told a Wednesday emergency Knesset hearing: "We have been through hundreds of anti-Semitic acts in recent months and no indictment has been filed."
Rabbi Heiman quoted some of the dozens of messages he received from Jewish residents in Jaffa who had suffered anti-Semitic attacks, reciting catcalls they heard from Arabs such as "It's a pity they didn't finish you in the Holocaust," "We will slaughter you," "The blood of the Jews will wash the streets of Jaffa," and dozens of other horrific cries as well as praises to Hitler.
"It doesn't just end with curses and threats, but dozens of incidents of physical attacks, beatings, gas spraying, and more," Heiman told the hearing. "All the victims bore Jewish-identified characteristics, but so far not a single indictment has been filed. The prosecutor's office claims that there is no anti-Semitism in Israel."
The Tel Aviv prosecutor decided this week not to charge with hate crimes Arabs who beat up a Jewish man in Jaffa to within an inch of his life, because, as prosecution attorney Kinneret Kahan put it, "We are bound by evidence. The person who was attacked walked down the street without any Jewish characteristics. If he had walked with a kippah, Haredi clothing, the Israeli flag – the picture would have been completely different and likewise our approach."
So remember, Jewish boys and girls, when you walk the streets of Jaffa you must carry an Israeli flag, wear a yarmulke, and schlep a heavy volume of the gemorah from which you recite in a yeshivish singsong. Otherwise, anyone who punches your face is just violent, no hate involved.
"When police officers are not allowed to draw weapons against rioters – without a change in the police rules of engagement, nothing will change," Rabbi Heiman told the Knesset emergency hearing.
In 2019, hate crimes in LA County against black people fell 13%, hate crimes against gays fell 22%, and hate crimes against Mexicans fell 9%, while hate crimes against Jews rose 18%.
89% of anti-religious hate crimes targeted Jews, only 7% affected Muslims.
If you listened to the media, you would get the opposite impression with coverage that ignored antisemitism to focus on racism, homophobia and Islamophobia. A typical example of what they were ignoring was a Jewish Community Center getting a message "from a man with a Middle Eastern accent that said, 'I will kill every single Jew. F____ Jews. I will kill every single Jew.'"
Instead, California Democrats moved to impose the ethnic studies curriculum which would embed the teaching of BDS and antisemitic tropes into the educational system.
Jewish protests against this government-mandated antisemitism were ignored.
By 2020, the antisemitic wave had moved well beyond words.
During the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost), a Black Lives Matter LA hate march marched toward Pan Pacific Park which includes a Holocaust museum. The rally headed by Melina Abdullah, an anti-Israel activist allied with Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, passed near the Fairfax area and degenerated into a race riot that assaulted Jewish stores and synagogues.
At least one of the synagogues was defaced with graffiti reading, "Free Palestine!"
Aryeh Rosenfeld, an Orthodox Jewish small business owner in the area, described hearing screams of, "F___ Jews" during the riots and looting as he tried to protect his store.
"It's no coincidence that the riots here escalated in Fairfax, the icon of the Jewish community. I saw the Watts and the Rodney King riots. They never touched a synagogue or house of prayer. The graffiti showed blatant antisemitism. It's Kristallnacht all over again," Rabbi Shimon Raichik, a Chabad Rabbi in Los Angeles, wrote.
"The attack on our community last night was vicious and criminal. Fairfax is the center of the oldest Jewish community in Los Angeles," Councilman Paul Koretz said. "As we watched the fires and looting, what didn't get covered were the anti-Semitic hate crimes and incidents."
"We've been very deliberate in saying that the violence and pain and hurt that's experienced on a daily basis by black folks at the hands of a repressive system should also be visited upon, to a degree, to those who think that they can just retreat to white affluence," Melinda Abdullah, the BLM-LA co-founder, had warned.
Abdullah, a Farrakhan supporter, was also a major backer of the ethnic studies curriculum.
The Shavuot BLM Pogrom saw multiple Jewish synagogues and schools vandalized, and stores attacked and ransacked, with virtually no mention in the media or by Jewish organizations.
The ADL covered up the pogrom by falsely accusing me of engaging in "disinformation". It smeared FrontPage as "a right-wing conspiratorial and Islamophobic online magazine", dismissed the Orthodox Jews who had come face to face with BLM hate, and argued that calling the antisemitic attacks a pogrom "irresponsibly engenders fear and division".
This Shavuot it happened again.
As the Jewish State fought to protect itself against Hamas and PLO terrorists, dueling pro-Israel and pro-terrorist protests and car rallies were held in Los Angeles.
This time the perpetrators of the Shavuot violence were Muslims wearing keffiyahs and brandishing PLO terror flags in one of the pro-terrorist car rally pickup trucks. The location of the violent attacks caught on video was once again in the vicinity of Beverly Grove.
The Muslims reportedly harassed diners, shouting antisemitic slurs, and demanding to know if any of them were Jewish. They then assaulted a group of Persian Jews, whose families had fled Muslim repression in Iran, who, along with an Armenian friend, fought the Islamist thugs.
One of the victims had to be hospitalized.
Another video showed an Orthodox Jew being chased by pro-terrorist car rally pickup trucks flying PLO flags.
Similar pro-terrorist convoys had been linked to antisemitic attacks in the UK including one in which a mother carrying a 4-year-old girl were chased down the street in London.
Pro-terrorist rallies had already exploded into violence against Jews in Toronto, in New York City, and in Washington D.C. In Seattle, Antifa members burned an Israeli flag, chanted in support of the terrorist 'intifada' and assaulted a Jewish journalist. A Persian synagogue in Skokie, Illinois was vandalized by a man carrying a PLO terrorist flag. In Bal Harbour, Florida, a Jewish family was harassed by thugs in an SUV screaming, "Die Jew" and "Free Palestine".
Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, whose hate rally was linked to the previous Shavuot pogrom, posted material promoting the anti-Israel protest by the 'Palestinian Youth Movement'. The PYM protest apparently included the thugs involved in the antisemitic assault over Shavuot.
BLM-LA's Melina Abdullah posted a talk on Israel by Kwame Ture, the black nationalist racist, who had declared, "The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist, we must take a lesson from Hitler."
While all sorts of statues have been toppled and public figures canceled, Abdullah and Black Lives Matter Los Angeles will never be touched no matter how much hate they spew.
Or their proximity to antisemitic violence.
It may be a coincidence that the Jewish holiday of Shavuot in 2020 and 2021 has witnessed antisemitic attacks against Jews in Los Angeles. But it's more likely that it's not.
Too many Jewish organizations have failed to stand up to antisemitism.
The silence over the BLM Shavuot pogrom in 2020 helped lead to the violence in 2021.
When antisemitic hate and violence are met with silence, then more of the same will come. It doesn't matter whether it's Black Lives Matter, the Groypers or Hamas. Silence is complicity.
And the only thing worse than silence is actively standing with antisemitic movements.
That means defending those movements, covering up for them, and dismissing their hate. As alt-right vans drive around flying PLO flags and BLM backs Hamas, it's time to recognize the essentially holistic nature of antisemitism whether it involves Israel or Jews anywhere else.
Two years of antisemitic violence in Los Angeles around the same Jewish holiday ought to be a wake-up call about the dangers of covering up antisemitism because it's politically correct.
