Huckabee visits Lubavitcher Rebbe’s grave ahead of Israel posting
The former Arkansas governor, a staunch supporter of Israel,
visited the site in Queens together with his wife, Janet.
Former
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee with Rabbinical Council for Peace leaders
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee visited
the grave of the late Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in
New York on Sunday, just days before the confirmation hearings for his
appointment as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.
Hucakbee, a staunchsupporter
of Israel, visited the site in Queens together with his wife, Janet.
The Huckabees were escorted by Dr. Joseph Frager and his wife Karen of
the New York-based Israel Heritage Foundation, who also hosted the
Huckabees for a reception after the visit.
U.S. Senate hearings on Huckabee’s nomination for U.S. envoy to Israel are scheduled to takeplace on Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
The 69-year-old conservative evangelical
pastor, TV host and two-time Republican presidential candidate has
visited the Holy Land scores of times and led thousands of participants
on solidarity tours over the past half-century since his first trip to
Israel right out of high school, just before the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
A long-time champion
of Israel’s cause, he has been a staunch supporter of Israel’s rights
to the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, the relocation of the
U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and has worked to fight the BDS movement.
The grave of the late Lubavitcher Rabbi has become a popular spiritual and political pilgrimage site.
Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump
visited the site during the last month of his presidential campaign on
the one-year anniversary of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre in
southern Israel.
Argentinian President Javier Milei, who studied with a rabbi who he later appointed as his ambassador to Israel, has also visited the site several times since his election.
Jew-hatred becomes the framework through which entire civilizations
justify their failures. It's how societies self-destruct.
Want
some blood with your coffee? 'With our stones, from our blood,
revolution until victory' is not just a slogan but a declaration of
martyrdom and destruction. Positioned at the doorway of Timeless Coffee
on Piedmont Avenue, Oakland, CA, it creates yet another space where the
historical scapegoating of Jews is the price of entry
Jew-hatred is not just a personal prejudice. It is a structural failure of society.
A society that believes Jews are the ones controlling the banks
will never build a stable economy. A society that believes Jews
manipulate the media will never develop free thought. A society that
believes Jews are constantly orchestrating wars will never grasp the
true dynamics of peace. A society that believes Jews are the ultimate
enemy will never escape its own self-destruction.
This is not just a theory. It is a consistent, verifiable pattern.
Nazi Germany funneled its economic anxieties into Jew-hatred;
collapsing into financial ruin and total destruction. Stalinist Russia
purged its Jewish intellectuals and leaders, leaving a legacy of
dysfunction and paranoia. The Arab world expelled its Jewish communities
and then descended into disunity and dictatorship. And now in our
current age, the American alt-left and alt-right peddle Jew-hatred
through selectivity and misinformation, ensuring their movements remain
trapped in delusion rather than engaging with reality.
Jew-hatred becomes the framework through which entire
civilizations justify their failures. This is how it gains its
intensity, its irrationality, and the ability to reshape itself to
survive across generations.
Wherever the obsession with Jewish control takes hold, it does
not just harm Jews. It cripples entire civilizations, as they rewrite
the past, present, and future to accommodate the lie. This is why Arab
nationalists teach that Jews never pursued sovereignty over Israel,
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is why disaffected
Americans ignore Jewish refugees from Islamic lands, while recasting
Palestinian Arabs as extraordinary victims. It is why even the
Holocaust, meticulously documented, is now being twisted to describe
today’s Jews as, ultimately, aggressors rather than survivors.
What starts as a conspiracy becomes the foundation of a political worldview. The lie becomes the system.
A society that views Jews as economic masters will never take
responsibility for its own economic growth. The belief that Jews
manipulate global finance allows corrupt leaders to deflect blame for
their failures. They purge their most educated citizens, restrict trade,
and justify failed policies by blaming imaginary Jewish plots. They
view the Jewish state as the source of all suffering — which means they
never have to address corruption, dictatorship, or sectarianism in their
own societies.
It is not an accident that Arab states expelled over ninety nine
percent of their Jewish citizens in the 20th century and then underwent
stunning economic and technological decline. It is not an accident that
countries that embrace Jew-hatred today — from the Islamic Republic of
Iran to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela — are collapsing while
those that establish ties with the State of Israel, like the United Arab
Republic, are thriving.
Jew-hatred is not just a moral failing. It is poison. A movement
that blames Jews for global problems will never create anything.
A society that commits itself to destroying Jews, in whole or in part, inevitably commits itself to its own destruction.
Nazi Germany could have built a European empire. Instead, it
devoted much of its war effort to exterminating Jews — even when it came
at the cost of military losses. Critical resources were diverted from
the war effort to maintain death camps, and pillars of the economy were
sacrificed to Jew-hatred, hastening the Axis’ defeat due to technology
developed by the very Jews it exiled.
We see the same pattern in the Arab Republic of Egypt, where
Jewish properties exist as ghostly reminders of a community that existed
just a few decades ago. And we see the Islamic Republic of Iran, once
one of the most advanced Islamic nations, squander tens of billions of
dollars into the Syrian Arab Republic just to knock on the Jewish
state’s borders.
Jew-hatred does not just fail its hosts. It actively destroys them from the inside.
When Nazi Germany fell, it was not just a military loss. It was a
total ideological collapse. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it did not
just lose the Cold War. It also destroyed the credibility of decades of
propaganda. When Arab states began normalizing ties with Israel, it was
not just about diplomacy. It was a recognition that the decades-long
obsession with Jewish destruction had led nowhere.
The question is: who learns from history, and who repeats it?
Jew-hatred is suicidal. Societies that reject it thrive. Societies that embrace it wither.
For centuries, Jews were expected to silently accept our own
oppression, as victims, collaborators, or bystanders. And every few
generations, our efforts at self-determination, self-armament, and
self-representation nearly flipped the equation. The Zionist movement
finally pushed these efforts past the point of no return.
Jewish resilience shatters every prediction of our demise. Jewish
sovereignty defies every attempt at our destruction. Jewish survival
exposes every failure of those who bet against us.
Suddenly, we are not subjects of history — we are our own
narrators, backed by force. We are not a footnote — we are our own
story, backed by truth.
There are currently trials testing the use of mRNA vaccines
in cancer treatment, not to mention influenza and AIDS, with especially
promising results so far for glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, two of
the deadliest forms. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer
is just above 10 percent; in two recent studies,
funded in part by the N.I.H., mRNA vaccines prompted an immunological
response in half of participants; among those, none experienced a
relapse within 18 months, and three-quarters were still cancer-free
three years later.
The Entire Future of American Public Health Is at Risk
The
scariest thing about measles is probably not the related deaths, of
which there have been two already this winter, the first in the United
States in a decade. It may not even be the one-in-10,000 risk of
irreversible lifelong paralysis, known as subacute sclerosing
panencephalitis. Instead, it’s the much more common effect the virus can
have on what’s called immunological memory — creating an immune amnesia
that can devastate your ability to fight off future infections.
During
the pandemic, when some worried Americans panicked over signs that
Covid could damage immune response, they were mocked by minimizers for
believing the novel virus was effectively airborne AIDS. The hyperbole
applies more appropriately to measles: Before mass vaccination, the
rapaciously infectious virus so ravaged the immune systems of children
that despite its relatively low direct mortality rate, the virus could
have been implicated in as many as half of all childhood deaths from infectious diseases, including pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis.
In the United States of our grandparents and our great-grandparents, 90 percent
of children got measles, it’s now believed, killing 6,000 Americans on
average each year around the turn of the 20th century and about 500 each
year by midcentury, after better diets and antibiotics for
complications came into the mix. In undernourished and immunologically
naïve populations, the disease can be considerably deadlier, and measles
eradication programs believed to be responsible for 60 percent of
global improvements in childhood survival from vaccination over the last
50 years. One hundred million lives were saved worldwide by those
vaccines, The Lancet calculated last year — two million lives, on average, every year.
That is an awful lot of lives for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new secretary of health and human services, to dismiss
with a wave of his hand, instead choosing to sit down at Steak ’n Shake
to celebrate the company’s new beef-tallow fries — recalling that, in
his childhood, “everybody got measles,” and implying that immunity from
those infections was preferable to the kind you get from a shot.
If
that debate sounds familiar, it should, since arguments about natural
versus vaccine immunity helped give shape to debate about whether the
public-health establishment was overly cautious about Covid, too. As we
exit what Siddhartha Mukherjee recently called
America’s “privatized pandemic,” the country is feeling its way toward a
new anti-establishment equilibrium — and anointing a new class of
health leaders distinguished by their vocal skepticism and distrust.
In
the aftermath of the pandemic, we’ve talked a lot about the loss of
public trust in science, but the collapse of trust in government,
especially among the young,
might be even more worrisome. (The pandemic really did a number on us.)
One result is that many more Americans now seem to believe they should
be in charge not just of choices about their own health but also of the
entire health information ecosystem that informs those choices, as well. Many regard well-being as something you can mold on your own at the gym
or perhaps buy at the supermarket, in the supplement aisle — so long as
you did your own research (at least listened to a good podcast) and
brought your own list.
What is on that
list isn’t necessarily important, as long as it runs against the
establishment grain. Mehmet Oz is about to be confirmed as the head of
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for instance, though
only 21 percent
of the health recommendations he offered on his television program were
judged by a group of researchers to have even “believable” evidence to
support them. Kennedy stated that “there is no vaccine that is safe and
effective” (he later claimed that the quote was “misused”)
and has responded to the Texas measles outbreak not by urging everyone
to get vaccinated but by shipping vitamin A. He has also praised
steroids and cod liver oil — neither of which are part of routine
treatment protocols, and neither of which have produced persuasive
research suggesting they should be integrated into those protocols.
The
MAHA movement rallies itself under the banner of reform, and it does
raise undeniably important questions about why the richest country in
the world is so much less healthy than its peers. But what it really
heralds is a new age of public-health libertarianism, which is to say, a
pretty explicit war on all the things that make health a “public” good,
sustained by mutual aid, in the first place. At least, it marks the
direction of change: away from solidaristic responsibilities and toward
something both more suspicious and more solipsistic, by which
individuals draw down biomedical capital accrued over many decades
without feeling any real need to replenish the well.
Many
MAHA priorities are worthwhile, at least in theory: chronic disease,
obesity, diet and exercise and environmental contamination of various
forms (ineffective but habit-forming pharmaceuticals, too). But in
substituting individual behavior, diet and the your-body-is-a-temple
model of human flourishing for germ theory, aerosol spread and what are
often called the social determinants of health, the country’s new health
leadership team is committing that cardinal American error: seeing
individuals as perfectly autonomous and inviolable units, and defining
everything outside individual control as either an irrelevant
consideration or a violation of bodily autonomy.
In
2019, few Americans outside the anti-vaccine fringe would have told you
that the country’s public-health apparatus was an overweening safetyist
menace — or objected to the running of that apparatus, which hummed
along in the background like white noise. All it took to wipe our memory
of that relatively comfortable old status quo was a global pandemic
that infected and killed at generational scale. Which does make you
wonder how much the backlash even concerns the old systems, however
imperfect they might have been, and how much it represents a simple
objection to the turmoil of the pandemic itself.
Life
is full of risk, as those most outraged about pandemic policies will
often remind you, and we plot our way through it by way of choices
defined by trade-offs — that is all true.
But
the backlash does not merely concern Covid policies. Last week, the
nomination of Dave Weldon to be the director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention was withdrawn, presumably because his anti-vax
history made him unacceptable in the midst of a measles outbreak. But
the same week the National Institutes of Health froze funding for
research into vaccine hesitancy, implying that the agency was no longer
worried about falling immunization rates or what could be done to
reassure parents about risks. It is reportedly considering dramatically rolling back funding for H.I.V. prevention, and perhaps eliminating an in-house think tank
devoted to reducing medical error and elevating standards of care. In
just its first weeks under President Trump, the N.I.H. doled out a
billion dollars less for research than last year — even though, by some
estimates, every dollar spent is estimated to produce five dollars in
social gains, and even though nearly all of the more than 350 drugs
approved between 2010 and 2019 can trace their development to federal
funding. The F.D.A. canceled the routine meeting of an advisory council
devoted to formulating the next flu vaccine, in the midst of the worst
flu season in more than a decade, with perhaps as many as 120,000 American influenza deaths since October.
As
the United States watches the worrying spread of bird flu across the
country, we aren’t even vaccinating our poultry, though 166 million
commercial birds have died since the outbreak began, spiking egg prices
and leaving Americans in front of empty grocery shelves with a
foreboding sense of pandemic 2.0. (Kennedy has proposed simply letting
H5N1 rip through the country’s bird population unimpeded,
an idea floated by the new agriculture secretary as well.) At Johns
Hopkins — where, until recently, the soon-to-be head of the F.D.A.,
Marty Makary, has held an endowed chair at the School of Medicine — $800
million in cuts to the United States Agency for International
Development have forced the firing of more than 2,000. Johns Hopkins is
not unique. Around the country, scientists are racing to delete
the term “mRNA” from their grant proposals, worrying that any hint of a
reference to the miraculous Covid vaccines that Trump raced to market
the first time around will imperil funding for the countless promising
possible future applications of the technology, some of them potentially
even more miraculous.
How
miraculous? There are currently trials testing the use of mRNA vaccines
in cancer treatment, not to mention influenza and AIDS, with especially
promising results so far for glioblastoma and pancreatic cancer, two of
the deadliest forms. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer
is just above 10 percent; in two recent studies,
funded in part by the N.I.H., mRNA vaccines prompted an immunological
response in half of participants; among those, none experienced a
relapse within 18 months, and three-quarters were still cancer-free
three years later.
The truth is, we don’t know whether those results will hold up or scale. That, of course, is what research is for.
Police grill Shas minister for alleged funneling of taxpayer money to party paper
Officers interrogate Haim Biton, arrest four
others in connection to alleged transfer of public funds to pay
employees’ salaries while minister headed Shas school network
Shas
minister Haim Biton attends an Education, Culture, and Sports Committee
meeting at the Knesset
Police summoned Shas minister Haim Biton for questioning Monday
on suspicion of using public funds earmarked for educational purposes to
finance a private newspaper affiliated with the ultra-Orthodox party.
A police spokesman said that officers in the Lahav 433 fraud
investigations unit detained another four suspects as part of a
months-long covert investigation, since made public, into the alleged
use of budget funds to prop up the children’s supplement of a privately
owned party newspaper. The investigation is ongoing.
Police did not name the minister under investigation, but media
outlets identified him as Biton, a minister within the Education
Ministry who formerly served as the head of Shas’s Ma’ayan Hachinuch
Hatorani school network from 2017 to 2021.
Officers investigated the five suspects for alleged fraud, breach of
trust, falsification of corporate documents and money laundering.
The police probe began in October 2024, when Attorney General Gali
Baharav-Miara gave officers the go-ahead to begin investigating Biton
and others associated with the HaDerech newspaper, a Shas party
mouthpiece, following multiple appeals to the chief prosecutor by the
Movement for Quality Government in Israel, an anti-corruption advocacy
group.
State funding meant to go to Shas’s Maayan Hachinuch Hatorani school
network was allegedly funneled to HaDerech via various backdoor methods
from 2018 to 2019, during Biton’s tenure as head of the network. The
newspaper allegedly used this taxpayer money to pay editorial and
journalistic salaries.
Police said that during their arrest of the four suspects, they also
conducted searches and seized documents related to the crimes.
The
situation is nauseating. It might feel like a fait accompli, but it
does not have to be. This can change. But for that to happen, the middle
class – those who pay the majority of taxes and serve in the reserves –
must take a stand. We must say, “No more.” We cannot continue to
shoulder this burden alone. We must refuse to support politicians who
sustain this travesty.
Change
is possible, but it requires action. Silence will not work. The middle
class must mobilize, protest, and demand accountability from elected
officials. We must challenge the notion that maintaining power justifies
subsidizing those who undermine the state. We must insist that the
rules apply to everyone.
The IDF needs soldiers but Israel is paying yeshivas to dodge the draft
This might have been possible
to tolerate before October 7 but definitely not now, at a time when the
IDF is missing over 10,000 soldiers to fulfill the missions it already
has.
MK MOSHE GAFNI, chairman of the Knesset Finance
Committee, leads a committee meeting last week. ‘Why would a country
willingly fund institutions that seek its downfall? The sad answer is
politics. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs the haredim in his
coalition,’ says the writer.
Who needs enemies when we have one another? That was the question
I found myself grappling with on Wednesday after seeing a video of what
appeared to be more than 1,000 ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students dancing and chanting: “We do not believe in the regime of the heretics, and we will not appear in their IDF draft centers.”
The
chant, which rhymes in Hebrew, is chilling. The video, widely available
online, captures the fervor of the moment: hundreds of young men
jumping up and down as the head of their yeshiva, Shalom Ber Sorotzkin,
runs across a platform at the center of the hall – it was his son’s
wedding – singing along and urging his students to join him.
On any day, such a display would be deeply disturbing. Here are about 1,000 ultra-Orthodox men, dodging the IDF draft
while openly disparaging the very state that allows them to do so,
provides them with welfare services, and offers them a quality of life
they would struggle to find elsewhere.
But
there is more. These men dancing are Sorotzkin’s students at the
yeshiva he runs called Ateret Shlomo. Last year, the yeshiva received
NIS 18m. from Israeli taxpayers; in 2023, it received NIS 25m., and in
2022, another NIS 18m. Overall, it has received something like NIS 100m.
in the last five years.
Yesh
Atid MK Elazar Stern recounted on Wednesday how he had attended a
meeting of the Knesset Finance Committee the night before. The committee
was debating the state budget, which is moving toward a plenum vote
later this month.
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, head of the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva delivers a
special torah lesson at the mixed-gender prayer section at the Western
Wall in Jerusalem Old City, January 3, 2018, ahead of a Court hearing at
the supreme court regarding the Western Wall layout
The committee’s chair, MK Moshe
Gafni, was absent since he was at the Sorotzkin wedding. Yet, that did
not stop the members from approving scandalous funding proposals for
haredi yeshivas and educational institutions, including Ateret Shlomo –
the very institution whose students were calling the state a “regime of
heretics.”
This
is the kind of scenario you can’t make up. Israeli taxpayers are
literally funding those working to dismantle the country. Who needs
Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran when we are financing a fifth column from
within?
Consider
the state budget, which must pass by the end of the month. It includes
NIS 1.27 billion designated for yeshivas like Ateret Shlomo. If that
isn’t bad enough, an additional NIS 36m. is being allocated – I kid you
not – to NGOs that help yeshiva students avoid army service. Again, the
state is weakening itself from within.
And
this is not an isolated incident. Just last month, Dov Landau, a
powerful rabbi within the ultra-Orthodox world and head of the Slobodka
Yeshiva, issued a directive to members of United Torah Judaism, the
political party for which he serves as a spiritual guide, not to
participate in Zionist institutions such as the Jewish Agency for Israel
or Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund.
“Zionism
is rooted in heresy… and rebellion against divine sovereignty. There is
no allowance to participate with them, serve in their institutions, or
vote in their elections,” Landau declared.
How much has his yeshiva received from the state? More than NIS 50m. since 2015.
NONE
OF this makes sense. Why would a country willingly fund institutions
that seek its downfall? The sad answer: politics. Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu needs the haredim in his coalition.
He
needs their votes to pass the budget, or else the government will
collapse, triggering elections he might lose. If the price for their
support is over a billion shekels funneled to institutions that openly
call the government a “regime of heretics,” then so be it.
The problem is that Israel can no longer
afford this arrangement. The economy is slowing, the deficit is growing,
and taxes are rising. Yet instead of integrating the least productive
sector of society – the haredim – into the workforce and military, we
are bankrolling a way of life that is unsustainable.
We need the manpower
Beyond
the economic implications, the wedding video raises another urgent
issue: manpower. The number of men seen dancing could easily fill two to
three IDF battalions, units that are desperately needed. The missions
facing the IDF are increasing, yet there is a dire shortage of soldiers.
Reservists
who have already served for hundreds of days over the past 18 months
are being called up again in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, these young
men chant that they will not even show up at the draft center.
The
situation is nauseating. It might feel like a fait accompli, but it
does not have to be. This can change. But for that to happen, the middle
class – those who pay the majority of taxes and serve in the reserves –
must take a stand. We must say, “No more.” We cannot continue to
shoulder this burden alone. We must refuse to support politicians who
sustain this travesty.
Change
is possible, but it requires action. Silence will not work. The middle
class must mobilize, protest, and demand accountability from elected
officials. We must challenge the notion that maintaining power justifies
subsidizing those who undermine the state. We must insist that the
rules apply to everyone.
There
is no justification for a system that allows an entire sector to remain
outside the workforce, outside the military, and outside the national
effort, all while benefiting from the very state they curse. Israel was
built on the idea of shared responsibility. If we want to preserve this
country for future generations, we need to restore that principle.
At
a time when the country is facing growing security challenges – in the
South, the North, and beyond – there is no time to waste. This might
have been possible to tolerate before October 7 but definitely not now,
at a time when the IDF is missing over 10,000 soldiers to fulfill the
missions it already has.
What
will happen, for example, if something were to change in Jordan or
Egypt and Israel would need to deploy more troops along those borders?
Where would they come from?
Israelis
must wake up. We must demand that our leaders stop funding those who
oppose the state. We must insist that every citizen contribute to the
national effort. If we fail to do so, we are not just funding our own
destruction – we are accelerating it.
Remembering Eitan Rosenzweig Hy"d: The world class artist who loved learning
His
most impressive work, done before he turned 18, graces the Bible Lands
Museum. The eclectic selections on his bookshelves show, as his father
said, that 'everything interested him,' especially Torah. But he wanted
to defend his beloved country...
THE ARMY IS NOT FOR REAL JEWS - BUT WE NEED THE GOYIM'S MONEY
Right now, however — today! — your first priority needs to be
ensuring that Netanyahu is more afraid of you and your president than he
is of his coalition partners — the far-right Jewish supremacists and
the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox. That he and they recognize that freeing
the hostages will not signify the end of the battle against Hamas and,
in fact, will make the battle less complex, since there will no longer
be no-go areas where the IDF cannot venture for fear of killing our own.
That Hamas will have nowhere to hide.
Steve Witkoff, Israel looks to you
To drag us out of this unforgivable limbo, in
which Hamas is rearming and no hostages are going free, your first task
is ensuring that Netanyahu is more afraid of you and your president than
he is of his coalition partners
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) meets with US President Donald
Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff in his office in Jerusalem
You have thrown yourself into your role as Middle East envoy with
clarity and compassion. The Israeli public, and most especially the
families of the 59 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza, now look to you
to ensure they are brought home, and fast, before more of the 24 we
believe are still living join the 35 we know are not.
Our people look to you because our prime minister is hesitant, his judgment clouded by his political interests. Most Israelis want him to resign
— he presided over the October 7, 2023, catastrophe, but refuses to
internalize that the buck stops with him. Most Israelis are adamant that
we need a powerful state commission of inquiry to establish the fullest
picture of what went so terribly wrong, how our political and military
leaders let down their guard and enabled Hamas to carry out its
massacre, but he refuses to sanction that kind of probe because he knows
its conclusions would be politically terminal for him. Half of Israelis
believe that your boss, President Donald Trump, cares more about the hostages than he does. As you know, many released hostages and the families of hostages strongly share that assessment.
Almost two months ago, you helped finalize our deal with Hamas that,
in its first phase, ensured the release of 33 hostages — 25 living and
eight dead — and that was intended to continue to a second phase, in
which the rest of the living hostages would be released in return for
another vast quantity of mass-murdering Palestinian terrorists, the full
withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza, and a permanent end to the war.
Our prime minister, who signed off on this deal and conveyed it to
your predecessors last May, subsequently sought to amend it and chose
for months not to push for its implementation, manufacturing pretexts
such as the claim that Israel would never be allowed to resume fighting
Hamas if it agreed to a full halt, and that Israel’s very existence depends
on the IDF’s presence along the Gaza-Egypt border. And then, after you
helped make certain that the first, 42-day phase went ahead, he refused
to honor the deal’s provision to begin negotiating phase two.
Why the prime ministerial hesitancy? Because Netanyahu fears that,
were he to accept phase two’s commitment to ending the war, his
coalition would collapse and he would lose power. He’s wrong on both
counts. His endlessly threatening
far-right coalition partner, Bezalel Smotrich, loudly insisting on a
return to the war and no phase two, will not easily bring down the
government — he knows his voters would never forgive him. And the
opposition will provide a parliamentary safety net for Netanyahu so long as he takes the necessary steps to get all the hostages home.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (left)
and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attend a vote in the Knesset
plenum
Netanyahu also fears that one or both of the ultra-Orthodox parties
will doom his government if he does not pass legislation enshrining
their community’s indefensible exemption from military service — an
always outrageous inequality that has become corrosive in a nation
defending itself on multiple war fronts with insufficient troops and a
colossal burden on the reservists. But here, too, he is mistake.
The ultra-Orthodox extortionists
know full well that there is no possible potential alternative
coalition that would be more accommodating to their demands, more
susceptible to their political blackmail. But as he has done since he
established this government — the most out-of-touch and fatally
incompetent in our country’s history — when he gave immense power and
authority to the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu,
terrified of losing his majority, continues to act like a supplicant to
those who need him more than he needs them.
Netanyahu might change his stance on the hostages and the direction
of the war at the end of this month, once he has got the 2025 state
budget voted into law and avoided the automatic collapse of his
government that a failure to do so by March 31 would trigger. But that
deadline is almost three weeks away, and, until then, he has plunged
Israel and, most specifically, the hostages into an unforgivable limbo.
We know, first hand now, from heroic survivors of captivity such as Eli Sharabi,
that every day is potentially the last for hostages who are chained,
starved, tortured and abused in the Hamas tunnels. And yet, every day
for almost two weeks and counting, Hamas is enjoying the benefits of the
ongoing ceasefire — reorganizing, recruiting and rearming, with the
sole, relentless goal of killing more of us — while under no obligation
to release any hostages. As my colleague Biranit Goren noted
two days ago, Netanyahu has publicly insisted throughout the war that
intensive, sustained military pressure is vital to both destroy Hamas
and enable the release of the hostages. Yet he has chosen to abort both
of those processes — to lift the military pressure and delay the freeing
of the hostages.
Your colleague Adam Boehler demonstrated in his lamentable series of
television interviews on Sunday that he understands less than almost
anybody what Hamas stands for and aims for — his declared strategy was
“to identify with the human elements of those people and then build from
there”?!? — and was radically unsuited
for the high-stakes, ultra-sensitive direct talks with Hamas with which
he was tasked. It’s not much of a compliment to say you most certainly
know better.
Gazans, including young children, and
Hamas gunmen gather shortly before the release of three Israeli hostages
in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip on February 22, 2025
And therefore, an Israel surrounded by depraved, cynical, cunning,
dead-serious genocidal enemies, and simultaneously ill-led by
self-interested politicians who are again, with every lesson unlearned,
gearing up to tear the country apart with a resumption of
ultra-contentious legislation that aims to defang our judiciary — well,
our Israel looks to you, Mr. Witkoff.
Do in Qatar today
what you have already proved once that you can do — finalize the terms
of a deal, the best deal you can, to get the hostages out of hell. Hamas
claims to be committed to the framework that was agreed to in your
presence in January, but you know that it will breach the ceasefire, and
thus give Israel every legitimacy to resume the effort to destroy its
military capabilities once the hostages are returned. Come the day, you
can also coordinate a regional process to prevent genocidal terrorists
again ruling Gaza — though exporting Gazans en masse to Egypt and
Jordan, as you probably realize, is not the best idea.
Right now, however — today! — your first priority needs to be
ensuring that Netanyahu is more afraid of you and your president than he
is of his coalition partners — the far-right Jewish supremacists and
the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox. That he and they recognize that freeing
the hostages will not signify the end of the battle against Hamas and,
in fact, will make the battle less complex, since there will no longer
be no-go areas where the IDF cannot venture for fear of killing our own.
That Hamas will have nowhere to hide. That the Israeli leadership that
failed to protect its citizenry on October 7 will at least have saved
all the lives that were left to save, brought home the dead for burial,
and enabled the start of our national healing.
And that the White House, as Trump made explicit a week ago after hosting eight released hostages in the Oval Office and hearing their horror stories from captivity, will keep “sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job.”
Outrage as students at state-funded Haredi yeshiva sing anti-Zionist, anti-enlistment anthem
‘We don’t believe in the government of
infidels and we won’t show up at their [army] recruitment offices,’ sing
thousands of Ateret Shlomo young men at mass wedding
Unlike members of Neturei Karta, who reject any financial support from
the Israeli state, Ateret Shlomo, a large non-Hasidic chain of yeshivas,
schools and kindergartens, received a total of over NIS 51 million ($14
million) annually in government funds as of 2023.
I shall not today attempt further
to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that
shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could
never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.[3]
Trump, an E.V. Naysayer, Gives Tesla and Musk a White House Exhibition
President
Trump has spent years bashing electric vehicles. But with Elon Musk by
his side, he said he would buy a bright red one.
President Trump with Elon Musk, with a new Tesla vehicle on the South Grounds of the White House, on Tuesday.
President Trump hosted an exclusive car show at the White House on Tuesday afternoon.
The only company represented: Tesla. The only purpose: helping Elon Musk.
With
Tesla facing a backlash over Mr. Musk’s role in the Trump
administration, the president said he wanted to buy one of the company’s
electric vehicles. But Mr. Trump, always a salesman, did not just want
to purchase a car. He wanted to hawk it and help out his friend, who
also happens to be Tesla’s chief executive.
The
30-minute confab was part news conference, part car commercial as Mr.
Trump oscillated between answering questions — about the stock market,
Canadian tariffs and the war in Ukraine — and trying out five different
Tesla cars.
“The one I like is that
one,” Mr. Trump said, pointing at a bright red Model S, which costs
roughly $80,000. “And I want that same color.” (Mr. Musk, who was
standing beside the president, seemingly tried to sell him on a
Cybertruck, saying: “This is bulletproof.”)
It
was an extraordinary scene of a president using the backdrop of the
White House to boost sales for a friend and top donor. And it came as
Mr. Musk has signaled to Trump advisers in recent days
that he wants to put $100 million into groups controlled by the Trump
political operation, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The
event was made all the more surreal because Mr. Trump has for years
bashed electric vehicles. On Christmas Day in 2023, he posted on social
media that electric cars should “ROT IN HELL.”
He
has said the cars cost too much and cannot drive far enough without
needing to be charged. But the second point should not be a problem now
for Mr. Trump, who said on Tuesday that the Secret Service would not
allow him to drive the car.
“I haven’t
driven a car in a long time, and I love to drive cars,” he told
reporters. “But I’m going to have it at the White House, and I’m going
to let my staff use it.”
Mr. Trump said he would pay with a check and that he did not want a discount. (Of Course) (Cash the check Elon Before you give him the keys)
Most
presidents avoid promoting or endorsing products because executive
branch employees are prohibited from doing so on behalf of friends and
relatives. In Mr. Trump’s first term, one of his advisers, Kellyanne Conway, was reprimanded for violating those rules when she urged people to buy Ivanka Trump’s fashion products.
But
those rules do not apply to the president. Shares of Tesla rose
slightly on Tuesday, though they remain down overall since December.
“President
Trump made the personal decision to buy a Tesla, at a market rate,”
Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Mr. Trump said he simply wanted to help Mr. Musk, who’s leading his campaign to slash the federal work force.
“I
think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people,”
Mr. Trump said. “And I just want people to know that he can’t be
penalized for being a patriot.”
C.D.C. Will Investigate Debunked Link Between Vaccines and Autism
Dozens
of studies have failed to find evidence of a link. The decision to
re-examine the question comes as a measles outbreak, driven by low
vaccination rates, widens in Texas.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a
large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between
vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday.
Dozens of scientific studies
have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under
the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy
Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and
has vowed to revisit the data.
“As
President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of
autism in American children has skyrocketed. C.D.C. will leave no stone
unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew
Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services,
said in a statement Friday.
Mr. Nixon
did not offer details about the scope or methods of the project. News
of the study was first reported Friday morning by Reuters.
In pursuing the study, the C.D.C. is defying the wishes of the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Senator Bill Cassidy, who said this week
that further research into any supposed link between vaccines and
autism would be a waste of money and a distraction from research that
might shed light on the “true reason” for a rise in autism rates.
“It’s been exhaustively studied,” Mr. Cassidy, a doctor, said during the confirmation hearing
for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Trump’s nominee to lead the
National Institutes of Health. “The more we pretend like this is an
issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable
diseases.”
While Dr. Bhattacharya said
he is “convinced” from the existing research that there is no link
between vaccines and autism, he suggested more research might assuage
the fears of nervous parents. Mr. Kennedy’s backers, and allies of his
“Make America Healthy Again” movement, lauded the administration’s
decision.
“Both Trump and Kennedy
are keeping their word,” said Zen Honeycutt, founder of the nonprofit
Moms Across America. “We wish that the previous administration had made
health and the autism epidemic a priority.”
The
news of the planned C.D.C. study comes in the midst of a rapidly
spreading measles outbreak in West Texas, driven by low vaccination
rates, that has infected nearly 200 people
and killed two. Last year, about 82 percent of the kindergarten
population in the county most affected had received the measles vaccine,
far below the 95 percent needed to stave off outbreaks. According to
Texas health officials, 80 of those infected were unvaccinated and 113
had “unknown vaccination status.”
Asked in an interview about the C.D.C.’s plans to re-examine whether autism is connected to vaccination, Xavier Becerra, health secretary to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.,said,
“All I’ll say is that C.D.C. can do many things. They can walk and chew
gum, but I would hope C.D.C. is being used to help us get a grip on
measles before another life needlessly dies, perishes.”
The rate of autism diagnoses in the United States is undeniably on the rise. About 1 in 36 children have one, according to data the C.D.C. collected recently from 11 states, compared with 1 in 150 children
in 2000. Researchers attribute most of the surge to increased awareness
of the disorder and changes in how it is classified by medical
professionals. But scientists say there are other factors, genetic and
environmental, that could be playing a role, too.
“There
are so many promising leads for the cause or causes of autism,” Dr.
Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an email Friday. “Vaccines
aren’t one of them. Given that there are limited resources from the
C.D.C., this is a sad day for children with autism.”
Like Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Trump has long espoused the idea
that vaccines are somehow linked to rising rates of autism; he first
raised the idea in 2007 and came back to it as a presidential candidate
in 2015.He has also said he would support
Mr. Kennedy re-examining the issue, most recently citing the rate of
autism diagnoses during his address to Congress on Tuesday.
“We’re
going to find out what it is, and there’s nobody better than Bobby and
all of the people that are working with you,” he said. “Bobby, good
luck. It’s a very important job.”
Mr.
Kennedy won Senate confirmation as health secretary by the narrowest of
margins. In the end, he prevailed largely by winning over Mr. Cassidy, a
Republican of Louisiana, who specialized in liver disease as a doctor
and strong supporter of vaccines. During the second day of the
confirmation hearings, Senator Cassidy expressed deep concern about Mr.
Kennedy’s past questioning of vaccines, and he cited a study of 1.2
million children had found no connection between vaccines and autism.
Mr. Kennedy shot back, saying a new study “showed the opposite.” A New York Times review
of that study found that it was financed, authored, and published by a
network of vaccine skeptics close to Mr. Kennedy. When the study was
rejected by various mainstream medical journals, Andrew Wakefield, the
author of a now-retracted 1998 study linking vaccines to autism, helped
it find a home in a journal published by several vaccine critics.
After his confirmation, Mr. Kennedy’s first speech to his staff
included a pledge to study the rise in chronic diseases in the United
States, including with a review of the vaccine schedule, or suite of
immunizations given to young children.
"Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was 7 years
old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her
often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one
morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her
bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured
pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I
noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she
couldn't do anything.
'Are you feeling all right?' I asked her.
'I feel all sleepy,' she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In 12 hours she was dead." -- Roald Dahlopens in a new tab or window on the death of his daughter to measles in the 1960s.
Many of us in the medical community worry that Kennedy's audacious
rhetoric on the national stage will further undermine public confidence
in vaccines. In fact, this trend was seen in Florida under Surgeon
General Joseph Ladapo, MD, PhD, who publicly questioned the necessity
and safety of vaccines. Childhood immunization rates in Florida have dropped precipitouslyopens in a new tab or window since Ladapo was appointed in 2021.
We cannot underestimate the power of people's attachment to their
ideologies -- to the point that they may even undermine science to
create outcomes that fit their ideology. For instance, Ladapo, a vocal
supporter of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 and apparent skepticopens in a new tab or window of COVID vaccine safety, allegedly altered dataopens in a new tab or window
from a state-driven study on the vaccine to inflate the risk of cardiac
complications for young men. A medical professional in a leadership
position allegedly engaged in scientific fraud to produce an outcome
that suited his beliefs. This is dangerous.
There are many instances of people prioritizing ideology over
evidence-based medicine to their detriment -- and even at their
children's expense.
In another instance, college professor Rita Swan, PhD,opens in a new tab or window
lost her toddler son to bacterial meningitis after she and her husband,
then devout Christian Scientists, declined to pursue immediate medical
intervention due to the influence of their church. Deeply regretful and
furious with the church, Swan became a prominent advocate against
religious restrictions on medical care. Swan later co-authored a seminal 1988 paperopens in a new tab or window
examining pediatric fatalities where parents deliberately withheld
medical care for religious reasons. The authors concluded that all but
three would have benefited from clinical intervention, and 140 of the
172 deaths resulted from illnesses with a >90% chance of survival
with medical treatment.
Is it reasonable or right to expect children to bear the consequences
of their parents' and politicians' devotion to ideology over medical
evidence?
Death
isn’t the only possible consequence. Measles can also cause permanent
blindness, deafness and intellectual disability. Before the vaccine
became available, about a thousand people every year had encephalitis because of the virus.
In
later comments, Mr. Kennedy suggested that severe symptoms mainly
affected people who were unhealthy before contracting measles.
