Peter Myers: Live by the Law: Kill Gazans. Franklin Graham: Don’t Hate God’s Chosen People
(1) Live by the (Jewish) Law: Kill Gazans
(2) Rabbi Eliyahu Mali says kill Gazans, including Women & Children
(3) Trump tells Israel to Finish the Job; vows to suppress Campus Protests
(4) Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Congress – NYT
(5) Ban Israel from the Olympics
(6) Franklin Graham: Don’t Hate God’s Chosen People
(7) House votes to Sanction ICC over Gaza
(1) Live by the (Jewish) Law: Kill Gazans
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/live-law-die-cross-israel
Live by the Law or Die on the Cross
Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any other
BY
JEREMY ENGLAND
MAY 29, 2024
When my parents moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974, they were young idealists trying to foment Marxist revolution.
Having kids and getting a mortgage mellowed their radical views substantially, but I still grew up marinating in progressive ideas. One such idea was that nationalism was a great evil that had caused Germans to hate and murder all of my mother’s aunts and uncles in Poland. Another idea was that private schools should not exist, a noble notion which lasted until we realized I was going to finish the math offerings at our small-town New Hampshire public high school before starting ninth grade. That’s how I ended up at Phillips Exeter.
Had you visited during my senior year you would have seen me acing written exams on the Sabbath, filling blackboards with German verb conjugations, and cracking claws with gusto at the annual lobster dinner. A Jew? Of course! But I would have told you that that just meant I leaned left politically, played Brahms on the violin, and enjoyed making clever arguments about what is right and wrong.
In 1999, I moved to Cambridge as a Harvard freshman. I had been there throughout my childhood, when we had made periodic family pilgrimages to Harvard Square, where we browsed in bookstores, sampled ethnic foods, and generally paid homage at the red brick, high temple of academic meritocracy. When I started as a student there, it felt like I was fulfilling my purpose, which was to develop my talents as fully as I could, with details to be sorted out later as to how best to use them. Subsequently, my studies carried me through Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Stanford for my Ph.D., and Princeton for a postdoctoral lectureship, so that I returned to Massachusetts in 2011—this time, to MIT as a physics professor. While there, I made a bit of a splash with some theoretical work on thermodynamics and the spontaneous origin of life.
As for how to argue about what is right and wrong, that is something my elite academic surroundings were always eager to dictate to me, especially when it came to international relations. At Exeter in the 1990s, we had school assemblies about how the fighting in the Balkans had gone on between groups of identical people who had shot at each other pointlessly over differing tastes in cigarette brands. One MLK Day, a PLO apparatchik masquerading as a journalist came to tell us lurid tales about the Israeli Air Force dropping napalm on fleeing Arab children. I got in a heated, yet fumbling dispute with her about it, and was puzzled afterward as to why I had cared at all. At Harvard, the authorities made sure I read Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and otherwise the place was utterly awash in specimens of starry-eyed Clintonian social “science” about how economic growth through global trade would automatically bring an end to all war and oppression. I made it to Hillel for Yom Kippur two out of four years.
It was at Oxford, after having one too many chats over a glass of port with a fellow Oxonian who seemed way too interested in the Jewish influence on the American political process, that something shifted in me. The place was so fully blanketed by the fumes of post-colonial theory that Zionism (and its inherent criminality) was a constant subject, which made me wonder more deeply about it all.
I started doing wild things, like learning history and facts and even visiting the region. Somewhat inevitably, I also ended up familiarizing myself with the standard arsenal of arguments for Zionism made by people at universities: Israel is fighting on the front lines to defend the West from barbarian zealots! Israel kicks Jewish extremists out of their illegal settlements and puts Arab citizens on its Supreme Court! Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is entirely both bomb shelter and gay bar! These points captivated me, but there was always something about them that felt off.
I now know what it is.
During the last 20 years, anti-colonialist doctrine more fully replaced critical thinking throughout most of the academy, and it would be easy to attribute the fever pitch of present anti-Israel sentiment on campuses solely to that shift. And to be clear, it’s indeed obvious that many students today at Ivy League schools are badly informed and cannot craft good arguments with whatever information they do manage to come by. And, yes, all of the curricular and pedagogical rot compels them to join the mob pouring its wrath on the Jewish state.
But, as is often the case with politics organized against Jews, the poor quality of the accusations lures well-meaning people into contesting false details while implicitly accepting the enemy’s vocabulary and criteria for judgment. In answering the question of why it feels like pro-Israel voices are losing in the public square, I now think that some of the blame also rests with all the smart pro-Israel arguments—including those I once got so good at slinging myself.
Forget, for a moment, how monstrously wicked Hamas may be, and focus instead on testing each of the common claims and counterclaims made about Israel.
Detractors say Israel is an apartheid state. Yet, since Muslim Arab citizens here vote in elections, enjoy equal civil rights, and hold public office, is this not simply a smear whose sole intention is to lay the ground for dismantling the Jewish state?
Islamist leaders frequently congratulate Muslims who kill Jews in Israel as “the defenders of Al-Aqsa” because of the widely held suspicion that the Jews are about to take over the Temple Mount. But isn’t this propaganda prima-facie absurd, since the current situation at the holy site is one where Israeli police are formally charged with preventing Jews from praying there?
Anti-Zionists, jihadists, and other disinterested humanitarians accuse Israel of killing innocent Arab children indiscriminately, but fact-checkers are quick to produce data on exceptionally good combatant-to-civilian kill ratios and to remind us that the IAF warns residents in Gaza neighborhoods before dropping bombs.
Game, set, and match. Right?
Not quite. Each of these volleys is returnable for the same kind of reason.
The Law of Return in Israel establishes an explicit preference for admitting new immigrants who are Jewish, based on parentage or religious observance. Each year, the increasing number of Jews who ascend the Temple Mount to pray portends major changes there in favor of the normalization of Judaic worship. The war aims Israel has set guarantee it will cause the deaths of many people the state scrupulously labels as innocent. How many innocent deaths are too many?
What is so complicated here is that the accusations are, at one level, untruthful and unfair, and an Israel-loving Jew—one also educated in the halcyon days before critical thinking was defenestrated from atop the ivory tower—cannot resist a public dissection of all the manipulation and inaccuracy.
In each case, though, the point of the accusation is less to sell a lie than it is to bait the hook with an expendable one so that anyone who bites has to agree on what would constitute a crime.
Consider, for example, if Israel were shown to be an apartheid state, a usurper of religious sites, or a bomber of more innocents than permitted by U.N. observers. Even rigorous and right-thinking Ivy League Zionists educated in the twilight of the 20th century would be forced to agree then that the modern State of Israel had lost its right to exist, no? It is debatable whether this maneuver has always been the strategy of anti-Zionists, or whether it just works out this way; certainly, plenty of people who hate Jews just love to peddle outlandish delusions without seeking to entrap anyone. In any case, the typical Western Jew advocating for Israel is usually quite defenseless the moment a shrewder anti-Zionist steps into the debate, having already conceded at the outset that Israel will only be exonerated if it ever gets a fair trial—and by “fair,” these people always mean one judged by Western, and therefore Christian, standards.
Christianity no longer gets top billing in the Western marketplace of ideas, but its legacy is everywhere you look, no matter how secular the setting. In the formation of a religious community that embraced all of humanity as equivalent, and all souls/persons/moral agents within its ultimate dominion, the Christian project rejected the hereditary priesthood and national chosenness of the Jews. Thomas Jefferson’s deistic “all men are created equal” (by God) filtered through the centuries to a point where the preference for Jews shown by the Law of Return sounds plainly illegal to an American ear.
Nor is chosenness the only point of divergence. Speaking in terms of religious archetypes, a Jew and a Christian can come to vastly different conclusions about what the right thing to do is in a given situation, particularly where something as ugly as war is involved. What would Jesus do if a Hamas fighter held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while firing? Hard to say for sure, but anyone who argues that a properly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Christianity. The image of the Crucifixion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accepting corporeal defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spiritual victory in the world of tomorrow. You will not hear Jesus mentioned when Western leaders speak on how important it is that Israel adhere to international laws of war, but the concept of the innocent civilian enshrined in these laws grew practically out of wars fought within Christendom during the last several hundred years.
More importantly, the very idea of the innocent civilian makes sense in an explicitly Christian context: “Render unto Caesar” plus the idea of a universal community of faith that transcends nationality means the conscience of the individual is paramount, and a person cannot so easily be classed as a targetable enemy “just because” of his membership in some nation waging war.
The contrast with the Jewish perspective here is sharp.
One particular Talmudic-era commentary comes to mind. Everyone knows that Pharaoh and his army were on horses as they chased Moses and the Israelites seaward. But it took the genius of Shimon ben Yochai, the sage, to ask where the horses came from. A plague of hail had killed off all the livestock in Egypt, other than that which belonged to upright individuals who held the Lord in awe. What this means, then, is that Pharaoh got his horses from the upright individuals. Ben Yochai concludes: [In times of war], it is correct to kill even the righteous among your enemy (Mekhilta 14:7).
This is a wince-inducingly Judaic—and very unchristian—position.
Ben Yochai witnessed the Roman annihilation of Judea. He understood that the way your enemy fights a war affects the definition of the righteous way to fight back. In other words, his recommendation was calibrated to the assumption that if the Jews are fighting a war, then their own future survival (and flourishing) is a nonnegotiable goal of the war. Thus, a Jew living by the Torah and confronted with an enemy armed with a human shield must ask: What does God want me to do now, given what I face? And how might I figure that out by studying the Torah?
As Abraham learns when arguing with God about Sodom, the ultimate decision about who lives and who perishes in calamity is the Creator’s choice, and while you can plead with God to spare the righteous, you must also have the moral humility to trust that He knows what He’s doing. As for you and what you can do: The Torah commands you to accept that the world’s Creator put you in the circumstances you are in, and that He only wants from you that you should do the most correct thing possible according to the Law, given the circumstances. And among the constraints and instructions given by the Torah is a specific one: “Choose life.” Accepting one’s own death because the other options are ugly and seem heartless is not on the menu.
In the current war in Gaza, a basic Judaic question therefore arises and must not be ignored: What is the bare minimum we must do in order to prevent our own mass murder?
The Jews do not venerate the image of a more-divine-than-usual human who achieved an abstract victory for all of humanity by dying horribly. And because we do not, we cannot accept the Western exhortation to be suicidally gentle with our enemies in order to receive a Christian burial on their “moral high ground.”
There are many things about the Jewish state, both as it currently is and as the Torah imagines it could be, that meet the loftiest ideals of the liberal, crypto-Christian West. Jews by and large love living in the liberal, secular West because our culture has great intuitive affection for freedom of speech and conscience, as well as the need for each unique individual to be given the freedom to discover his God-given purpose.
But as a reflection of the oneness of the God described therein, the Torah is obstinately balanced when it comes to simple principles. It insists on justice, but makes room for mercy. It cherishes human life, but acknowledges deadly violence can be correct. It sees all people as created in the image of God, but it commands the nation of Israel to play a unique priestly role, through example rather than through world-dominating force, in leading the world to greater knowledge and service of God.
Put into practice in 2024, this means that Israel must stop pretending it is a nation like any other, begging to be judged fairly by whatever standards the current hegemon has decreed we all agree upon. We need to look for standards from within our tradition to set a moral example for the whole world, while making it more practically possible to defend our homeland.
Instead of bragging about the extra danger our soldiers experience for the sake of sparing enemy noncombatants, we should reject the premise that we Jews bear any responsibility for protecting the human shields employed by our enemy.
Instead of threatening Jews with arrest for praying on the Temple Mount, we should take a hint from the “Al-Aqsa” moniker our attackers gave to their day of savage invasion and let kohanim up there on the hill to slaughter lambs for Passover.
And above all—given that land is nearly all that matters to this death-worshipping foe—instead of repeatedly withdrawing troops from areas we have just taken over so we can deny having unchristian territorial ambitions, we should conquer, annex, and resettle parts of Gaza so that Jews and friendly gentiles both can live there safely.
If our own, unsurpassably subtle ethical tradition guides us to these policies, then it is only our lingering ideological subjugation to the Western tradition that makes them seem scandalous. Like the Jew among nations, Israel constantly struggles with its half-successful attempt to blend in with the crowd and pretend to be a member like any other, and it is time to put an end to this paralyzing charade. We did not stick to our Law through 3,000 years of human civilization to continue national life as the perpetual defendant. It is our job to know that Law, to teach what we know—and, most of all, to live by it.
Jeremy England lives near Tel Aviv, where he works in industry as a machine-learning researcher. He is also a visiting professor of physics at Bar-Ilan University.
(2) Rabbi Eliyahu Mali says kill Gazans, including Women & Children
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/jewish-rabbi-encourages-killing-gazans-even-children/3159767
Jewish rabbi encourages killing Gazans, even children
‘Not every soul shall live,’ says head of Shirat Moshe religious school in Jaffa
Anadolu Staff |09.03.2024 – Update : 09.03.2024
ISTANBUL
An Israeli rabbi urged the killing of women and children in the Gaza Strip and said he considered it a response to the teachings of halakha, or Jewish law.
It came from Eliyahu Mali in a video that was widely circulated Thursday on social media.
Mali heads the Shirat Moshe religious school in Jaffa in central Israel, where students serve in the army.
“In our mitzvah (holy) war, in our situation in Gaza, according to what the law says, ‘Not every soul shall live,’ and the logic of this is very clear: if you do not kill them, they will kill you,” said Mali.
He claimed that those described as “vandals” in today’s war are “the children of the previous war whom we kept alive, and in reality, it is the women who produce terrorists.”
“This means that this rule (do not keep alive every soul) is very clear in its concept, either you or them,” he said. “Whoever comes to kill you, kill him first.”
“Whoever comes to kill you with this concept does not only include the young man aged 16, 18, 20, or 30 who is now pointing a weapon at you, but also the future generation (the children of Gaza), and those who produce the future generation (women of Gaza), because there is really no difference,” he said.
The leader of the opposition Labor Party, Merav Michaeli, condemned the rabbi’s comments.
“Using halakha does not give any rabbi permission to present Judaism or Israel as bloodthirsty and vengeful,” Michaeli wrote Friday on X.
“This statement directly affects the security of the state of Israel, and like other statements distorted in the name of halakha, our enemy will use it in fighting on the international stage,” she said.
“I demand the army and the Ministry of Defense to stop cooperating with the religious school (Shirat Moshe in Jaffa) until the rabbi is dismissed. The Israeli army must not allow such dangerous moral corruption within its ranks.”
The Israeli Defamation League wrote on X: “We strongly condemn the words of Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, the head of Shirat Moshe religious school in Jaffa, who calls for killing all inhabitants of Gaza, including women and children.”
It added: “The indiscriminate call to harm the innocent is a serious ethical injustice, which damages the actions of the army in Gaza during the war and distorts the image of the State of Israel in the world.”
More than 30,800 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 73,000 injured in Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.
Palestinian groups estimate that thousands of Palestinians have been detained by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7.
Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on the seaside enclave, leaving its population, particularly residents of northern Gaza, on the verge of starvation.
The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
*Writing by Rania Abu Shamala
(3) Trump tells Israel to Finish the Job; vows to suppress Campus Protests
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64479
Trump Says Israel Needs to ‘Finish The Job’ in Gaza, Pledges to Restore Israel Lobby’s Power Over Congress
Chris Menahan
Jun. 06, 2024
Former President Donald Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday that Israel needs to “finish the job” in Gaza and pledged to restore the Israel Lobby’s power over Congress if elected.
He also said that unnamed people are telling him the October 7th attack “never happened” and compared them to “Holocaust deniers.”
Trump says Israel needs to finish bombarding Gaza more quickly. He says unnamed people are telling him the Oct. 7 attack never happened, just like Holocaust Deniers. He laments that the Israel Lobby is not powerful enough, and even Chuck Schumer has become “like a Palestinian” <https://t.co/yFu8nkCepG>pic.twitter.com/yFu8nkCepG
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) <https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1798559483154854225?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>June 6, 2024
Partial transcript via <https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/06/05/trump_chuck_schumer_has_become_like_a_palestinian.html>RealClearPolitics:
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: You say declining nation… so let me go back to the foreign policy… on the issue of the war in Europe and war in the Middle East and we have the Iranian’s according to reports, even the IAEA, may be very close to nuclear weapons. That should scare everybody because they are crazy enough that they would use them. And a precarious situation, more dangerous than it most point.
TRUMP: Most dangerous time in the history of our country.
HANNITY: I would agree. So my question to you is if you are elected and you are the next president, the 47th president how do you begin the process of restoring world order? Now, one other thing, I never thought in my lifetime I would listen to a president of our country, the leader the free world literally tell the country that was attacked by radical Islamic terrorists that we’ll support your defense but we won’t support you fighting back after the Iranians fired weapons into their country. To me that was a surrender in the war on terror, we’re trying to lecture Israel. “You can’t go to Rafah, you can’t do this.” Excuse me. How would we act if we lost by population extrapolated out 40,000 Americans in a day.
TRUMP: So number one, they have to finish the job. Israel has to finish that job. They have to finish it quickly, strongly, and they have to get back to life again because it’s taking too long.
HANNITY: So you go in, you win, you finish.
TRUMP: Gotta win, gotta win. The attack on October 7th, and it’s getting more and more demeaned, they’re demeaning it. I have people telling me they don’t think the attack ever happened. And take a look, you watch the news reports — you watch these people on television and just like you have Holocaust deniers also, they say the Holocaust never happened. It’s the exact same people. They’re saying it never happened. AOC plus 3, you know. Israel was the most powerful lobby in the country 15 years ago. Today, between Tlaib and AOC and all of these people, what they’re doing, Israel, they don’t the backing that they once had.
HANNITY: You’ll give it to them?
TRUMP: Yeah, I’m good. I’m good. But they don’t have the backing. Even Schumer, he’s become like a Palestinian. Chuck Schumer, Jewish, always strong for Israel. He’s become like a Palestinian.
Trump made similar comments in 2021 when he said that <https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trump-israel-literally-owned-congress-decade-ago>Israel “literally owned Congress” and lamented that their grip was supposedly slipping.
???????? “Israel literally owned Congress”
— Donald Trump <https://t.co/DAlbIMWsFd>pic.twitter.com/DAlbIMWsFd
— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) <https://twitter.com/KeithWoodsYT/status/1754330966590431645?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>February 5, 2024
“You know, the biggest change I’ve seen in Congress is– Israel literally owned Congress, you understand that?” Trump told 570 KVI’s Ari Hoffman.
“Ten years ago, 15 years ago and it was so powerful, it was so powerful and today it’s almost the opposite,” he continued. “You have between AOC and Omar — and these people that hate Israel, they hate it with a passion — they’re controlling Congress and Israel is not a force in Congress anymore.”
“I mean it’s just amazing, I’ve never seen such a change and we’re not talking about over a very long period of time but I think you know exactly what I what I’m saying they had such power Israel had such power and rightfully over Congress and now it doesn’t,” Trump said. “It’s incredible, actually.”
Haaretz reported earlier this week that <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64476>Israeli-American Miriam Adelson is planning to donate at least $100 million to Trump but wants his support for Israel annexing the West Bank in return.
Congress in April <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64404>voted overwhelmingly to give almost $100 billion to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan and ban TikTok for allowing criticism of Israel to go viral.
Congress also <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64419>passed a controversial FISA law to spy on Americans to “protect Israel” as well as <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64428>another controversial bill called the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” which aims to silence criticism of Israel as hate speech.
Just yesterday, AIPAC boasted that “67/67 AIPAC-endorsed Democrats have won their primary elections this cycle!”
Last night was another great night for pro-Israel Democrats!
7 more AIPAC-endorsed Democrats won their primaries!
67/67 AIPAC-endorsed Democrats have won their primary elections this cycle!
Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!<https://t.co/R0qDPofXq9>pic.twitter.com/R0qDPofXq9
— AIPAC (@AIPAC) <https://twitter.com/AIPAC/status/1798327849721725053?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>June 5, 2024
Trump told the Republican Jewish Coalition in 2016 while running for president, “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money.”
“You want to control your politicians,” Trump added.
He’s now <https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64467>collecting tens of millions of dollars from Israel First donors by promising to shut down pro-Palestine protests and pledging to restore Israel’s total control over our Congress.
What the hell does any of this have to do with “America First?”
WashPo: Trump Told Jewish Donors He’ll Crush Pro-Palestine Protests, Dep…
‘Former president Donald Trump promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, telling a roomful…
(4) Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Congress – NYT
Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ordered the operation, which used fake social media accounts urging U.S. lawmakers to fund Israel’s military, according to officials and documents about the effort.
By Sheera Frenkel
Reporting from Tel Aviv
June 5, 2024
Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.
The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.
The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.
The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.
The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, with President Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr. Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.
The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli government’s organizing a campaign to influence the U.S. government, social media experts said. While coordinated government-backed campaigns are not uncommon, they are typically difficult to prove. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and the United States are widely believed to back similar efforts around the world, but often mask their involvement by outsourcing the work to private companies or running them through a third country.
“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” said Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter. That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible.”
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied involvement in the campaign and said it had no connection to Stoic. Stoic didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The campaign didn’t have a widespread impact, Meta and OpenAI said last week. The fake accounts accumulated more than 40,000 followers across X, Facebook and Instagram, FakeReporter found. But many of those followers may have been bots and didn’t generate a large audience, Meta said.
The operation began just weeks into the war in October, according to Israeli officials and the documents on the effort. Dozens of Israeli tech start-ups received emails and WhatsApp messages that month inviting them to join urgent meetings to become “digital soldiers” for Israel during the war, according to messages viewed by The Times. Some of the emails and messages were sent from Israeli government officials, while others came from tech start-ups and incubators.
The first meeting was held in Tel Aviv in mid-October. It appeared to be an informal gathering where Israelis could volunteer their technical skills to help the country’s war effort, three attendees said. Members of several government ministries also took part, they said.
Participants were told that they could be “warriors for Israel” and that “digital campaigns” could be run on behalf of the country, according to recordings of the meetings.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs commissioned a campaign aimed at the United States, the Israeli officials said. A budget of about $2 million was set, according to one message viewed by The Times.
Stoic was hired to run the campaign. On its website and on LinkedIn, Stoic says it was founded in 2017 by a team of political and business strategists and calls itself a political marketing and business intelligence firm. Other companies may have been hired to run additional campaigns, one Israeli official said.
Many of the campaign’s fake accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook posed as fictional American students, concerned citizens and local constituents. The accounts shared articles and statistics that backed Israel’s position in the war.
The operation focused on more than a dozen members of Congress, many of whom are Black and Democrats, according to an analysis by FakeReporter. Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York who is outspoken about his pro-Israel views, was targeted in addition to Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Warnock.
Some of the fake accounts responded to posts by Mr. Torres on X by commenting on antisemitism on college campuses and in major U.S. cities. In response to a Dec. 8 post on X by Mr. Torres about fire safety, one fake account replied, “Hamas is perpetrating the conflict,” referring to the Islamist militant group. The post included a hashtag that said Jews were being persecuted.
On Facebook, the fake accounts posted on Mr. Jeffries’s public page by asking if he had seen a report about the United Nations’ employing members of Hamas in Gaza.
Mr. Torres, Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Warnock didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The campaign also created three fake news sites with names like Non-Agenda and UnFold Magazine, which stole and rewrote material from outlets including CNN and The Wall Street Journal to promote Israel’s stance during the war, according to FakeReporter’s analysis. Fake accounts on Reddit then linked to the articles on the so-called news sites to help promote them.
The effort was sloppy. Profile pictures used in some accounts sometimes didn’t match the fictional personas they cultivated, and the language used in posts was stilted.
In at least two instances, accounts with profile photos of Black men posted about being a “middle-aged Jewish woman.” On 118 posts in which the fake accounts shared pro-Israel articles, the same sentence appeared: “I gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information.”
Last week, Meta and OpenAI published reports attributing the influence campaign to Stoic. Meta said it had removed 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Facebook pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one Facebook group tied to the operation. OpenAI said Stoic had created fictional personas and biographies meant to stand in for real people on social media services used in Israel, Canada and the United States to post anti-Islamic messages. Many of the posts remain on X.
X didn’t respond to a request for comment.
On its LinkedIn page, Stoic has promoted its ability to run campaigns backed by A.I. “As we look ahead, it’s clear that A.I.’s role in political campaigns is set for a transformative leap, reshaping the way campaigns are strategized, executed and evaluated,” it wrote.
By Friday, Stoic had removed those posts from LinkedIn.
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts everyday lives with a focus on social media companies, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram and WhatsApp. More about Sheera Frenkel
(5) Ban Israel from the Olympics
I think that Avaaz is a Soros outfit, and usually don’t agree with its line. But this one is different. – Peter M.
From: “Liliana Harrington – Avaaz” <avaaz@avaaz.org>
To: “peter@mailstar.net” <peter@mailstar.net>
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 00:09:42 -0400
Children who once dreamed of competing at the Olympics are buried under the rubble of their homes in Gaza – and people everywhere…
Dear friends,
Next month, the world will turn its eyes to the Olympics in Paris.
36,000 of those who could be watching with us from Gaza are dead. Children who once dreamed of competing have had their limbs torn from them.
And unless something changes, the Israeli government will still be bombing Gaza as athletes compete in its name: Israel has just announced its willingness to continue the war for seven more months.
As the world comes together for the Olympics, we have the chance to send a message that mass killing of civilians will not be tolerated by the global community. Pressure is building for a plan that would see Israeli athletes compete – just not under Israel’s flag.
The Olympic committee meets on June 12: let’s be one million voices demanding that Israel be banned until its government stops the assault on Palestinian lives!
<https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/olympics_ban_4_4/?bCyVgdb&v=159090&cl=21481049143&_checksum=e10026111bf8dfa1c72cb85685bd5f363e3fb61e83abc101b893c7c57aaa6542> International Olympic Committee: Ban Israel now
The October 7 massacre was an unspeakable horror and every day since the horrors have continued. The Olympics are a moment for the global community to come together in peace, and bans have sent a powerful message before to countries accused of committing atrocities.
The Olympic committee banned Russia just four days after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and they barred South Africa in 1964 as a way to demonstrate unified international disapproval for apartheid.
As with Russian athletes, a ban could still allow Israeli athletes to participate as neutrals, unaffiliated with a government whose leaders have now been charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Calls for a ban are growing: Protests have broken out outside the Olympics headquarters in Paris, lawmakers have petitioned for a ban, and Olympics experts are calling the IOC out for their double standards.
A colossal wave of support could be the final push that is needed to move the Olympic committee. Add your name now, and share with at least one friend.
<https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/olympics_ban_4_4/?bCyVgdb&v=159090&cl=21481049143&_checksum=e10026111bf8dfa1c72cb85685bd5f363e3fb61e83abc101b893c7c57aaa6542> International Olympic Committee: Ban Israel now
There is no peace or safety for Israelis or Palestinians down this path of blood and war. Our community has shown up by the millions to defend Palestinian and Israeli lives, and as the world comes together in peace for the Olympics, we have an opportunity to stand in solidarity with those suffering untold horrors in Gaza. Let’s push for accountability once more and honor the memories of those whose dreams have been destroyed.
With hope and determination,
Liliana, John, Alice, Miguel, and the rest of the Avaaz team
(6) Franklin Graham: Don’t Hate God’s Chosen People
Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham, and leader of the Evangelical novement in the USA. – Peter M.
Jun 1, 2024 | <https://www.franklingraham.com/category/news/>News
While I was preaching the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kraków, Poland, this spring, I visited the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, where 1.3 million people, mostly Jews, were held captive, tortured, raped and murdered almost 80 years ago. Multitudes were gassed to death with cyanide, and their bodies then put into ovens and incinerated. In total, the brutal Nazi regime slaughtered more than 6 million Jews across Europe during the Second World War.
Auschwitz made me wonder if mankind has learned a lesson. Could such virulent antisemitism ever erupt again?
It didn’t take too long to find out.
I had planned to visit some missionary friends in the Middle East following the Festival in Kraków, but those plans were interrupted when airspace in the region was closed in the aftermath of Iran’s April 14 attack on Israel. Iran, a terrorist state, launched more than 300 missiles and drones against Israel. Thanks to defensive assistance from the United States, U.K., and regional forces, most were shot down. Otherwise, many Jewish citizens might have perished—perhaps even more than the 1,200 who died last October when Israel was attacked by Hamas, Iran’s agents on Israel’s border.
After returning home, I was stunned to see the surge of raucous anti-Israel demonstrations across this nation. From coast to coast, loud protesters filled streets and took over college campuses, not only claiming to support Palestinians but also raging against Israel. The protesters seemed oblivious to the brutality of Hamas, which butchered men, women and children; decapitated babies; and ripped women’s wombs open in the Oct. 7 raid on Israel.
Incredibly, college campuses such as Columbia, NYU, Harvard, MIT and Yale—supposedly where America’s best and brightest are educated—were filled with hateful rants and deadly threats from pro-Hamas supporters. It was hard to fathom, given the fact that radical Islam rules the entire Gaza strip, where women are oppressed and demeaned. Do you suppose the young women who demonstrated so fervently for Hamas would actually want to live under their rule?
A poll of Generation Z voters—which encompasses today’s college students—found that nearly half believe Israel’s campaign against Hamas is unjust. One-third of Gen Z thinks Israel does not have the right to exist as a country.
Nowhere was the insanity more evident than at Columbia University in New York City, where hundreds of students camped out on the campus, shutting down the college while occupying a campus building. They shouted obscene and despicable rants, such as: “We are Hamas … Hamas makes us proud, kill another [Jewish] soldier now … Burn Tel-Aviv to the ground.”
Clearly, antisemitism—the hatred of Jewish people—has infected much of American culture, and remains as poisonous and prevalent as ever on the global stage. I have no idea if there will ever again be anything on the scale of Auschwitz. I certainly hope not, but we must be ever vigilant. The Bible gives a straightforward answer for those who have so fervently despised the Jews through the centuries.
Why does the world hate the Jewish people? I believe it is because God chose them out of all the nations on Earth as His special people in order to bring us a Savior. He didn’t choose the Scots or the Irish or any other people group. As a result, the devil and all his demons do everything they can to destroy the nation of Israel, to destroy the Jewish people.
“The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8).
Starting with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Old Testament is the continuing story of God’s dealing with His chosen, covenant people. From Genesis to Malachi, the Bible tells us of Almighty God’s blessing, discipline, chastisement, and unbreakable promises for the often stubborn, sometimes repentant Jewish people. It is the story of their obedience and disobedience, of their kings and prophets, their prosperity and their disgrace.
After thousands of years of Jewish history and 400 years of silence following the Prophet Malachi—the last book of the Old Testament—the New Testament is the story of the Gospel, the Good News of the sacrificial death, burial and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Jewish God-Man born to young Jewish parents in the Jewish town of Bethlehem, raised in the Jewish town of Nazareth, and crucified in the Jewish capital of Jerusalem.
The Gospel is for every age, and for every person of every nationality—Jew or Gentile—who comes to saving faith in the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Ethnicity makes no difference. Faith in the sacrificial, substitutionary, atoning work of the cross and Jesus’ glorious resurrection from the tomb is the only thing that matters. Those who receive the Son of God into their hearts through faith are now the true Israel. “But you are a chosen people … Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God” (1 Peter 2:9-10, NIV).
Sadly, most of the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day turned away from the Messiah. They, like every other unregenerate person, rejected the saving work of the Risen Savior, and refused to love “the Way, the Truth and the Life” in whom the world may be saved (John 14:6).
This is why we preach the Gospel to as many as we can and as often as we can, that spiritual blindness and deadness to God might be overcome through the preaching of the living Word of God and the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. We want to see thousands upon thousands enter into the eternal Kingdom of God by His mercy and saving grace. Many have done so already this year through our 10-city Southern Border Tour, and through our global Festivals, and the outreaches my son Will holds around the world. I’m scheduled to preach the Gospel this month in the United Kingdom (Birmingham and Glasgow) and in Naples, Italy, in September. Please be in prayer.
Let’s remember, however, that God still has a special place in His heart for His covenant people, and that He promises to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel (Genesis 12:3). We know that He has promised to preserve a remnant of believing Jewish people, and that in the End Times many of His people will be gloriously saved, people representing all 12 Jewish tribes. In the meantime, let’s always be careful to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6).
Now more than ever. ©2024 BGEA
Unless otherwise specified, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version. The Scripture quotation marked NIV is taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version.
(7) House votes to Sanction ICC over Gaza
https://thehill.com/homenews/4703398-icc-santions-vote/
House votes to punish International Criminal Court
BY <https://thehill.com/author/mike-lillis/>MIKE LILLIS AND <https://thehill.com/author/mychael-schnell/>MYCHAEL SCHNELL – 06/04/24 4:44 PM ET
The House on Tuesday approved legislation aimed at penalizing the International Criminal Court (ICC) as it weighs whether to bring war crimes charges against Israeli leaders for their conduct in the war with Hamas.
The tally was 247-155 with every Republican voting in favor of the proposal. They were joined by 42 pro-Israel Democrats with a history of backing Tel Aviv even when doing so bucks their own leadership.
Leaders in both parties — including <https://thehill.com/people/joe-biden/>President Biden — have roundly condemned the ICC’s suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister <https://thehill.com/people/benjamin-netanyahu/>Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister have committed crimes against humanity in Gaza following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. But Biden had <https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4692718-white-house-international-court-sanctions/>opposed the sanctions central to the Republican legislation, causing an overwhelming majority of Democrats to follow suit when the bill hit the floor.
Without broad Democratic support, the legislation has no chance of moving through the Senate and onto Biden’s desk.
Still, supporters in both parties were furious with the ICC’s insinuation that the leaders of Israel, a close democratic ally, and Hamas, a terrorist group, had committed equivalent crimes. They said passing the bill, even if only through the House, would send an important message to the world that Washington stands firmly behind Israel’s right to self-defense.
“The idea that they would issue an arrest warrant for the prime minister of Israel, defense minister of Israel at the time where they’re fighting for their nation’s very existence against the evil of Hamas as a proxy of Iran is unconscionable to us,” Speaker <https://thehill.com/people/mike-johnson/>Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday. “And as I said a couple of weeks ago, the ICC has to be punished for this action.”
The bill’s Democratic opponents had different ideas. Virtually all of them support Israel and its right to a strong defense in a hostile region. But they’re also sharp critics of the conservative Netanyahu and his far-right coalition government, which has rebuffed Biden’s calls for a ceasefire, ignored the administration’s red line warnings about invading Rafah, and opposes the two-state solution championed by the White House.
Additionally, Israel’s military operations have killed more than 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza since Oct. 7, leading to accusations that Netanyahu has done far too little to limit civilian casualties — the same charge that led the ICC’s top prosecutor to recommend war crimes allegations against the Israelis.
“I stand in opposition of this resolution because we need the ICC. In the last 241 days, thousands, thousands have been victims of unimaginable atrocities, and Netanyahu’s violations of international law have threatened the peace of the world,” Rep. <https://thehill.com/people/delia-ramirez/>Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) said on the House floor Tuesday. “I’m determined to put an end to impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes.”
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), would impose travel and financial sanctions on ICC officials. It includes a provision that gives the president the unilateral authority to end the sanctions if the ICC stops engaging in efforts to investigate or arrest U.S. individuals or its allies, or if the court has permanently ended any investigation into protected individuals.
The bill is largely symbolic. The United States does not recognize the ICC, and does not consider Americans to fall under its jurisdiction. But some Democrats said they opposed the GOP bill because it posed a risk of sanctioning some U.S. allies who have ratified the ICC’s charter.
“It would sanction the leaders of some of our strongest allies: the U.K., Italy, Germany, Japan. That’s dangerous stuff,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), senior Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It could sanction some American companies who might supply software and technology to them [the court]. It’s so broad that it becomes very dangerous for us.”
Republican leadership staged a vote on the legislation — which only has GOP co-sponsors — after bipartisan talks over a sanctions bill fell apart. Rep. <https://thehill.com/people/michael-mccaul/>Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, had been talking to Democratic counterparts in the House and Senate about legislative ways to penalize the ICC.
McCaul said he wanted the final product to be bipartisan and have a strong chance of becoming law, emphasizing the importance of showing deterrence to the ICC judges as they weigh whether to grant the requested arrest warrants.