Latest update October 30th, 2019 9:38 PM
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Trump Accuses US Jews Who Vote for Democrats of Being ‘Very Disloyal’ to Israel by Ben Cohen
US President Donald Trump, Aug. 21, 2019. Photo: Reuters.
US President Donald Trump on Wednesday offered some clarification but no remorse for his earlier comments accusing American Jews who vote for the Democratic Party of showing “total ignorance” and “disloyalty.”
Speaking to reporters on the White House South Lawn, the president was asked to specify to whom or what American Jews were being disloyal. “In my opinion, you vote for a Democrat, you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people and very disloyal to Israel,” Trump said. On Tuesday, Trump had asserted that Jews who voted for Democratic candidates were showing “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.”
After several days of verbal sparring with progressive Democratic Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib (MI) and Ilhan Omar (MN) — whose planned political tour of the West Bank last week was called off by the Israeli authorities shortly after a tweet from Trump urging the cancellation of the visit — Trump on Wednesday repeated his accusation that the Democratic Party as a whole was now hostile to Israel.
“In my opinion, the Democrats have gone very far away from Israel, I cannot understand how they can do that,” Trump said. “They don’t want to fund Israel. They want to take away foreign aid to Israel. They want to do a lot of bad things to Israel.”
The parents of the late Lt. Hadar Goldin — an IDF soldier who fell in battle in the Gaza Strip…
On a day when he also accused Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of being “nasty” and derided Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as akin to “a golfer who can’t putt,” Trump was in similarly combative mood over the negative reaction to his comments about Jews and the Democratic Party. Among his early posts on Twitter was a note of thanks to Wayne Allyn Root, a populist right-wing commentator, for his “very nice words” about Trump’s supposedly messianic status in Israel.
“President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world…” Trump quoted Root as saying.
“The Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel,” the quote from Root continued. “They love him like he is the second coming of God.”
Trump went on to approvingly include Root’s frustrated assessment of the political mood of American Jews: “But American Jews don’t know him or like him. They don’t even know what they’re doing or saying anymore. It makes no sense!”
In the 2016 US presidential election, a solid 71 percent of US Jews voted for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton — a figure entirely consistent with American Jewish voting patterns and party loyalties for the past century.
“We’ve woken up in a situation where a guy who wants us to believe that he’s our friend legitimizes the credibility of the most pernicious, hideous, constant antisemitic stereotype in our history: ‘You can’t trust the Jews,’” Abraham Foxman — the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — told The Algemeiner on Wednesday. “It’s outrageous, it’s dangerous, and I don’t know who can get him to understand.”
When it came to Trump’s depiction of American Jews as a politically-hostile bloc, Foxman observed that “a part of antisemitism is seeing Jews not as individuals, but as stereotypes.”
He continued: “Any construct that he [Trump] sets up is by definition a bigoted one, because it’s looking at the subjects as ‘Jews,’ and not as individuals.”
Many US Jewish organizations responded to Trump by pointing out that Jews did not constitute a homogenous voting bloc, and that Israel had traditionally been a bipartisan issue that united Republicans and Democrats in support.
“America is better with a two-party system,” Rabbi Marvin Hier — dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) — told The Algemeiner. “The greatest danger for Jews is if we have only one party.”
In a statement released earlier on Wednesday, the SWC pointed out that it was “Democratic President Jimmy Carter who presided over the Camp David Accords and Republican President Ronald Reagan who helped open the gates of freedom for Soviet Jewry.
The statement went on to include Trump in the pantheon of pro-Israel American presidents. “It was Democratic President Harry Truman that made the historic decision that the US would recognize the State of Israel and Republican President Donald Trump who moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem,” the SWC said.
Hier — who recited the traditional Jewish blessing at Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 — told The Algemeiner bluntly, “Without a two-party system, we’re finished.”
He added: “People should not have to think alike. A democracy needs different points of view, and people are free to adopt different points of view.”
The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) continued its defense of Trump on Wednesday, saying that in portraying the Democratic Party as an adversary of Israel, the president had merely been “pointing out the obvious.”
“We take the President seriously, not literally,” the RJC declared on Twitter. “President Trump is pointing out the obvious: for those who care about Israel, the position of many elected Democrats has become anti-Israel.”
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Healthcare Israel: Innovation, technology, expertise to the world “We are a government agency with a start-up soul.
By ALAN ROSENBAUM
“We are a government agency with a start-up soul,” says Hagai Dror, managing director of HealthCare Israel, one of the three winners of the 2019 InnoDip Award for innovative diplomacy. The award, established by the Abba Eban Institute for International Diplomacy at the IDC Herzliya, will be presented at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference on Thursday, November 21 in Jerusalem.
Healthcare Israel was created by Israel’s Ministry of Health in 2016 to deliver life-saving and cost-saving healthcare innovation, technology and expertise to the world, and promotes cooperation and Israeli health system exports through collaborations between government, the health system and the healthcare industry. It has leveraged Israel’s existing diplomatic ecosystem to reach out and create new kinds of international cooperation projects and business deals specifically in the healthcare space.
West Bank settlements not illegal, Pompeo announces in historic shift
By YAAKOV KATZ
U.S. Ambassador Friedman to ‘Post’: New policy advances the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace • PM: Policy rights a historical wrong
In a historic reversal of US policy, the Trump administration announced on Monday that it does not view Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal. The policy change was announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington.
“After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate, this administration agrees with president Reagan,” Pompeo said in reference to Ronald Reagan’s position that settlements were not inherently illegal. “The establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.”
NY State assemblyman calls to protect free speech at Binghamton University By ILANIT CHERNICK
Leftist students verbally abused and ransacked tables belong to conservative students
Binghamton University’s downtown campus in New York.
A New York State assemblyman has slammed Binghamton University for the way it has handled a group of leftist students who verbally abused and ransacked tables belonging to the campus College Republicans group.
The conservative students were handing out flyers for an upcoming talk by well-known economist Dr. Arthur Laffer when the incident occurred on Thursday.
Tel Aviv’s Free Shabbat Public Transport Service to Start Friday
A view of the Yehudit Bridge and the Ayalon highway in Tel Aviv, Feb. 17, 2019. Photo
CTech – Tel Aviv will officially launch its free weekend transportation service this Friday, the city announced Tuesday. In collaboration with neighboring towns Givatayim, Ramat Hasharon, and Kiryat Ono, Tel Aviv will operate six routes covering over 300 kilometers. Minivans will pick up and drop off passengers at over 500 stops across the metropolitan area at a frequency of once every 30 minutes between 6 pm on Friday and 2 am on Saturday, and between 9 am and 5 pm on Saturday.
Tel Aviv has long awaited a solution for transportation during Shabbat and other Jewish holidays. The principle of the “status quo”—a guideline which dictates maintaining the common practice when it comes to the fundamentals of Jewish Orthodoxy, especially Shabbat observance—effectively prevents the state from offering public transportation services on Shabbat, but since Tel Aviv’s service is free, it does not currently fall under the legal definition of public transportation.
76-Year-Old Berlin Pensioner Beaten Up in Broad Daylight by Antisemitic Assailant
A police car in the German capital of
An elderly man has been viciously beaten up in broad daylight on a Berlin street by a youth who showered him with antisemitic abuse.
According to the BZ online news outlet, the 76-year-old pensioner was walking along the Berliner Strasse in the Pankow district of the German capital at 9 a.m. on Monday when his passage was blocked by a 16-year-old youth and four of his friends.
New Column!
SHMULEY BOTEACH : Slave nations: America and Israel in the age of technology
What good is the flourishing of a nation if it is constantly at political, partisan war?
‘WITHOUT PEACE, life becomes unlivable. We’re all unnaturally nervous because there is hardly any downtime.’
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Ardie Geldman : Palestinians are not Israelis
Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria is not “occupation,” at least not according to international law.
The American tourist was staring at me with “deer in the headlights” eyes. She did not comprehend what I had just said to her. I had said that Palestinians are not Israelis.
A minute earlier she had revealed to us – a group of about 15 of her peers, plus me, all gathered in my Efrat living room – the root cause of Palestinian terrorism. It was due, she announced, to Israel “treating Palestinians like second-class citizens and denying them the right to come to Jerusalem.” By this she was inferring that Palestinians are citizens of the State of Israel who are discriminated against and denied numerous right
RICHARD MINITER :Israel’s brain drain and how one plucky nonprofit is fighting it
Mass emigration of Israel’s most tech-savvy individuals starves start-ups of talented hires and puts a ceiling on their growth.
A ROBOT tries to make a heart. Who is behind those online profiles?
The Start-Up Nation is suffering from a brain drain that threatens its growth.
For every Israeli citizen with a university degree who returned from abroad in 2017, a corresponding 4.5 Israelis with degrees left the country that same year, a newly released report by the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research found. The trend has been under way for years and shows no signs of slowing down.
MAYA CARLIN : Is Iran losing the Middle East? Hezbollah is certainly the Islamic Republic of Iran’s most successful export.
Supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah ride in a vehicle decorated with Hezbollah and Lebanese flags and a picture of him, as part of a convoy in the southern village of Kfar Kila, Lebanon October 25, 2019
Could uprisings in Iraq and Lebanon, coupled with US sanctions, permanently impair Iran’s influence in the region?
In the past few weeks, frustrated and fed-up demonstrators have taken to the streets of Lebanon and Iraq to voice grievances against their governments. The perception of Iranian infiltration and influence certainly continues to impact this political shake-up in both regions.
Israel and Hamas against PIJ
Hamas is aware of the deep crisis but still sticks to its guns, literally, by insisting on holding and upgrading its arsenal instead of helping its own people
The recent clash in the Gaza Strip was not like earlier ones there because it was only between Israel and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Hamas was not really involved. This could be a model for the future in which Israel might strike the PIJ while Hamas again stays out of the fight.