The Rise and Fall of the Gaza Converts

 

In the months after October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and the war in Gaza began, a wave of young Americans—mostly progressive women—embraced Islam.

 Taking to TikTok and Instagram, they called themselves “reverts,” the Muslim term for converts who have returned to the faith of humanity’s origin. For a generation raised on social media activism, the apparent religious conviction of Gazans under bombardment looked like the purest form of authenticity.

Two years later, many of those same converts are quiet on the subject of Gaza—and, facing pushback from within the Muslim community, many have gone quiet on social media altogether. 

The enthusiasm that once filled TikTok with teary testimonies, hijab tutorials, and verses from the Qur’an has ebbed. The algorithm has moved on, and the women who found God through Gaza have had to learn what faith looks like when the cameras turn elsewhere. The fervor has thinned into a few scattered believers contending with backlash, burnout, and the realities of a faith that doesn’t behave like an online fandom.

Like many converts, these young women were initially full of zeal and excited to share it. But the “reverts” of TikTok have learned the downside of posting through their faith journeys.

New York Magazine’s glosses over Miss Palestine’s terror ties in glowing profile

 A glowing piece by a New York Magazine site highlighting Miss Palestine Nadeen Ayoub’s life and background claiming she’s “seen some things” made a glaring omission —never mentioning her marriage and child with the son of a convicted terrorist who Hamas wants released from Israeli prison.

Ayoub, who competed in the Miss Universe pageant on Friday, was featured in a glam article by The Cut for being the first-ever woman to hold the Miss Palestine title, heralding her for her dedication to humanitarian work — painting her as a voice for unity, hope, and a people “more than their suffering.”

But the glossed-up, glowing profile titled “The First Miss Palestine Has Seen Some Things” glaringly left out a segment of her life — anything that happened between graduating college and 2022.

It was during that time that she married Sharaf Barghouti — the son of the infamous Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti serving five life sentences in Israel for orchestrating terror attacks that killed five people in 2001 and 2002 — and later had a son they named after the convicted terrorist, according to an exhaustive investigation by The Post.

Old social-media snapshots and rambling family posts — many of when have since been scrubbed from the internet — show Ayoub calling Sharaf her “fiance” ahead of their 2016 wedding.

In posts from 2019, family members congratulated she and her husband on the birth of their son, wishing he would grow up to be like his terrorist grandfather.

“May he be raised with your dignity my dears and hopefully he will be like Mr. Marwan the great,” one person wrote.

She also taught fitness classes at a gym in Ramallah called “IQ Fitness,” owned by another of Marwan Barghouti’s sons. In at least one Instagram post, the gym referred to her as “Nadeen Barghouti.”

But none of that made it into the glowing profile, which instead the glamor of her pageant participation — noting the “30 gowns she brought for the competition”; her garnering of support from celebrity Bella Hadid and sponsors like Huda Beauty and behind-the-scenes gossip about other beauty queens.

“Miss Canada and Miss Kyrgyzstan want her to win for Palestine. But sometimes it’s like “Mean Girls, Ayoub says” the outlet wrote. “Miss Iraq keeps stirring the pot, trying to get Ayoub to sympathize with Shiraz. ‘Like, hello, you’re Iraq,’ Ayoub says. ‘Do you not remember what happened to you?’”

It also throws under the bus Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz, who received death threats after Ayoub posted an unofficial video that appeared to have been edited to make a momentary glance in Miss Palestine’s direction look as if the woman representing the Jewish state as a look of disgust at the controversial beauty queen.

The Viral ‘Prison Rape’ That Never Happened

 

On July 29, 2024, a Military Police team raided the Sde Teiman holding facility, where fighters from Hamas’ elite Nukhba unit—which spearheaded the Oct. 7 massacres—were being held. Their targets were not the terrorists.

 Instead, they had arrived to arrest a group of IDF reservists serving there on guard duty. Their faces covered in masks, 40 Israeli Military Police officers disarmed and arrested 10 members of Force 100, which was in charge of security incidents at the jail.

The raid quickly got out of hand. 

When other members of Force 100 learned of the arrest of their colleagues, they confronted the arresting officers—compelling them to use force. The whole strange affair was recorded on multiple cellphones and posted in real time on social media. By nightfall of the same day, the press in Israel and around the world would learn the cause of the raid: The arrested reservists were suspected—falsely, it would turn out—of raping a detained Palestinian terrorist.

Thus began a public scandal that would become one of the major stains on Israel’s reputation worldwide. Where the United Nations, foreign-funded information operations, and the biases of the international press may have all been to blame for weaponizing a series of medieval libels against Israel during the Gaza war—like Israeli snipers supposedly targeting babies or starving children or using the “cover” of war against Hamas to commit “genocide” or targeting Christians by “burning a church” in the West Bank (a grass fire outside an ancient archeological site) or “deliberately targeting” a Catholic church in Gaza whose outer courtyard wall was struck by an errant tank shell—the source for this fake atrocity story was different: The IDF itself.

The story about R' Chaim Kanievski that Charedim Hide

 According to this account, R’ Chaim z”l was linked to a tragic outcome involving four children.

A woman from Bnei Brak struggled for years to conceive. After much hardship, tears, and medical intervention, she finally became pregnant with quadruplets. The doctors advised her to reduce the pregnancy by aborting one fetus, explaining that this would strengthen the chances of survival for the remaining three.

The woman recalls seeking guidance from Rav Chaim, who told her not to proceed with the abortion, assuring her that all four would be born healthy. Sadly, the opposite occurred: all four babies died, leaving her childless for the rest of her life.

Stories like this are rarely publicized; instead, the community tends to highlight only the successful outcomes.

The lesson is clear: people should place their trust in the Creator, rather than in human figures who, despite their stature, are fallible and limited in knowledge.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by הרב אברהם מרדכי גוטליב (@ravgotliv)

Suspect Who Shouted “Allahu Akbar” While Shooting National Guardsmen Identified

Suspect Who Shouted “Allahu Akbar” While Shooting National Guardsmen Identified as Illegal Migrant,

 Rahmanullah Lakanwal

Officials say Lakanwal entered the United States in 2021 during the Biden administration. Multiple reports indicate he arrived under “Operation Allies Welcome,” the federal resettlement program established after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. He was reportedly permitted entry on a visa and is believed to have overstayed that visa.

Journalist Julio Rojas reports that witnesses heard Lakanwal yell “Allahu akbar!” moments before he opened fire with a revolver at National Guard personnel stationed in the area, critically injuring two Guardsmen. Both victims remain hospitalized and are fighting for their lives.

Marc Klein Wins $10,000.00 a Week for life and the Schnorrers are Already Lining Up at his door

 

Jerusalem Municipality Tells Charedim "No Tickee No Washiee"

 The Jerusalem Municipality said Wednesday it will withdraw funding from a planned Hanukkah concert for the haredi community at the International Convention Center after organizers decided to eliminate the women’s section and make the event men-only, according to Arutz 7.

Council Member Julie Menin May be the next NYC Council Speaker

 Council Member Julie Menin said Wednesday she has locked down 36 commitments to become the next New York City Council speaker — well above the 26 needed when the Council convenes on Jan. 7.

 Menin, a longtime city official and a Jewish resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, would be the first Jewish woman to lead the Council.

 She represents a faction of Democrats that strongly opposed Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s rise, and pointedly did not endorse him, even after he won the primary.

IDF Honors David Ben-Gurion on 52nd Anniversary of His Passing

 

At a memorial marking 52 years since David Ben-Gurion’s passing, the IDF Chief of Staff called for courageous leadership that confronts failure, rebuilds strength, and carries the nation forward without excuses or evasions.

He praised the IDF as a “human mosaic” that draws its power from the people, pledging to keep fighting, improving, and leading the next generation with responsibility at the core.

AI opens a vast trove of medieval Jewish records from the Cairo Geniza

 Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.

The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century, but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.

Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been cataloged, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.

AI can help researchers access, analyze collection more quickly

By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers will now be able to access and analyze the whole collection far more quickly, cross-referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.

"We are constantly trying to improve the abilities of the machine to decipher ancient scripts," said Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers in the MiDRASH transcription project.

The project has already made significant progress and could open up the documents - written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish in a wide variety of handwritten scripts - to many different researchers, Stokl Ben Ezra added.

Transcriptions from more difficult manuscripts are reviewed by researchers for accuracy, helping to improve the AI training.

"The modern translation possibilities are incredibly advanced now, and interlacing all this becomes much more feasible, much more accessible to the normal and not scientific reader," he said.

Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel's digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.

One document transcribed by the project is a 16th-century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt, with his reply written in the margins telling of his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.

A Geniza is a synagogue's repository for significant documents that are ultimately intended for ritual burial, and the one found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in historic Cairo had a dry atmosphere ideal for the preservation of old paper.

Cairo surpassed Damascus and Baghdad in the Middle Ages as the greatest city of the Middle East, a center of global trade, learning, and science, and home to a thriving Jewish community, later expanded by refugees fleeing newly Christian Spain.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was physician to the family of Saladin, the famous Muslim sultan who ousted the crusaders from Jerusalem, worshipped at the Ben Ezra synagogue while living in Cairo.

As dynasties and empires rose and fell, the community quietly went about its daily life, its religious authorities filling the Geniza with the rabbinical arguments, civic records, and other detritus of administrative and intellectual business.

The Geniza's astonishing haul of records and papers, including some written by Maimonides himself, was discovered by scholars in the late 19th century, but, although it has been studied ever since, its enormous size means huge gaps remain.

"The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes," Stokl Ben Ezra said.