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IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi toured northern Israel on Saturday, less than a day after the Israel Defense Forces upped its alert in the northern command out of concern of an attack by the Hezbollah terrorist group. Hezbollah has been threatening a retaliation against Israel ever since one of its fighters was killed in an airstrike attributed to Israel on Monday night.
On Friday night Israeli attack helicopters struck several military targets in southern Syria belonging to the Syrian military, in response to munitions fired at Israel earlier in the day. Targets included “observation positions and intelligence-gathering tools inside Syrian posts,” the Israel Defense Forces said. The Iran-backed Hezbollah maintains a presence in the Syrian Golan Heights.
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COVID-19: Thousands of Israelis held several demonstrations across the country on Saturday, with the main protest taking place in Jerusalem outside the official residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The protests have been going on for the past few weeks, sparked by what critics see as a government failure to handle the coronavirus crisis after initially keeping the threat of the virus at bay. Corruption charges against Netanyahu have further fueled the demonstrations, together with domestic opposition to the possibility of annexation.
On Friday The New York Times ranked Israel sixth in the world in new daily cases per 1 million people, with a little under 200 a day at that ratio. The US was just above it at a little over 200 per million, followed by South Africa, Panama, Bahrain and Oman, which led the pack with some 300 cases a day per million residents.
Beginning on Friday the Israeli government shuttered businesses for the weekend to stem the spread of the virus.
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The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) praised the US Senate and House of Representatives for authorizing $3.8 billion in defense assistance for Israel. AIPAC thanked an array of Democrats and Republicans in Congress for shepherding through the funding this week as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, saying the money “will help Israel protect itself against continuing security threats.”
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Prominent Twitter users are calling for a 48 hour boycott of the social media platform starting Monday, July 27 at 9 a.m. GMT following the site’s refusal to take satisfactory action against antisemitism. Using the hashtag #NoSafeSpaceForJewHate and backed by a number of prominent users including writers, politicians and other celebrities, the new campaign is fueled by frustration felt by many Twitter users over the lack of action taken against antisemitism on the site, despite the platform’s claims of being against racism.
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Antisemitism Watch: A court in Hamburg on Thursday convicted a 93-year old German man of helping to murder 5,232 prisoners, many of them Jewish, at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and handed him a suspended two-year sentence. In one of the last cases against Nazi-era crimes, Bruno D was found guilty of being involved in killings between August 1944 and April 1945. He had been an SS guard in the Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, in what is today Poland,
Police are reviewing a string of antisemitic messages allegedly posted by the British grime rapper and producer Wiley on social media. The artist has received a seven-day Twitter ban and has been dropped by his management company as a result of the comments.
Rep. Ilhan Omar’s (D-Minn.) campaign recently sent out a mail piece ripping into her primary opponent, attorney Antone Melton-Meaux, for the large donations received from wealthy and moderate donors. The only donors to her opponent identified by name in the mailer are Jewish.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC )– controlled media outlet Fars News Agency published an antisemitic attack last week on the VeggieTales animated children’s movie “Esther: The Girl Who Became Queen.”
Recommended Reading
- Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust (Melanie Phillips)
- The crucial role Clark Clifford played in Israel’s establishment (Dov Lipman)
- How to jumpstart the economy and create jobs in the wake of COVID-19, according to six experts (Sivan Klingbail)
- Jesus was a Jew, not a Palestinian (Emanuel Miller)
