John Brennan "the hypocrite" disputes Israel’s right to defend itself

 The former CIA director who drew up the US 'kill list' criticizing the assassination of Iran's Fakhridazeh? You've got to be kidding.

It has been over a week since the lynchpin of the Iranian nuclear project, Mohsen Fakhridazeh, was killed in what appears to be an immaculately planned and flawlessly executed strike by elusive and yet to be identified assailants. Nonetheless, analysis of what took place and speculation of what might take place as a result, are still at the focus of considerable media attention.

The prime suspect?

While no state or organization has claimed responsibility/credit for the action, and despite the fact that a good number of interested parties had reason to approve of his sudden demise, suspicion fell chiefly on the secret intelligence service of Israel, the Mossad.

Depressingly, but not unexpectedly, international condemnation was both swift and widespread.

Thus, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, issued a disapproving statement, calling the killing “a criminal act [that] runs counter to the principle of respect for human rights the EU stands for.”

In similar critical vein, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab expressed concern over “the situation in Iran and the wider region [where] we do want to see de-escalation of tensions.” Although he admitted that “We’re still waiting to see the full facts…of what’s happened in Iran,” he nevertheless stressed the need to “stick to the rule of international humanitarian law which is very clear against targeting civilians.”

Significantly, as Ron Jontof-Hutter deftly points out, both Borrell and Raab seem either woefully misinformed or willfully misleading in describing Fakhrizadeh as a “civilian/official.” After all, it is widely known that he was a brigadier general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, not only an elite and highly privileged arm of Iran’s military, but also designated a terrorist organization by the US in April 2019.

Hostile & hypocritical?

But perhaps the most alarming and annoying reaction came from John Brennan, who served as the Director of the CIA under the Obama administration (2013-17). In a series of tweets immediately after the attack, Brennan decried the killing of Fakhrizadeh in the strongest of terms.

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Time to call in a special counsel on Hunter and Joe Biden

by Michael Goodwin

Now that the election is over and it is safe for the media to cover the Hunter Biden scandal they ignored when The Post broke the story in October, things in Washington are getting back to normal. FBI and Justice Department officials are once again leaking like sieves to their favorite reporters.

The New York Times knew before the election that Joe Biden was the “big guy” in line for a secret 10 percent stake in a deal with a Chinese energy conglomerate, but the paper withheld the information from readers. Yet now that Hunter Biden admits he’s under a criminal tax probe, the Gray Lady begins to stir.

In a Friday piece about the perils of the probe for Hunter’s father, the Times writes that “the inquiry originally focused on possible money laundering but did not gather enough evidence for a prosecution, according to people close to the case.”

Yada yada yada, the real question is, what else did the Times know and when did it know it? And why did it keep silent before Election Day?

Try to imagine Donald Trump and his family getting the same deference.

“People familiar with the matter” are also telling The Wall Street Journal that Attorney General Bill Barr kept two separate probes into Hunter Biden quiet during the final weeks of the campaign.

Perhaps it wasn’t Barr — perhaps it was the leakers who stayed silent to protect Biden. Or maybe the leakers leaked but the media didn’t want to hurt their candidate, so they waited until after the election.

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Brooklyn woman, 47, is sexually assaulted and robbed 0n Ave N and E 33rd in Marine Park

 

Police in New York City are hunting for a man who has been accused of following a woman to her apartment in Brooklyn in broad daylight, tying her up while pretending he was armed with a gun and sexually assaulting her. 

The attack took pace at around 12.40pm on Thursday in the area of Avenue N and East 33rd Street in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn.

According to police, the assailant followed the woman up to her apartment, pushed an object resembling a gun into her back and ordered her to open the door.

Once inside, the intruder punched the victim in the face, restrained her using zip ties and duct tape, and sexually assaulted her, reported CBS New York.

Before fleeing, the suspect ransacked the woman’s apartment in search of valuables, and got away with her cellphone and and an unspecified sum of cash.

When police responded to the scene, they found the woman with her hands and feet still bound.

The woman was later taken to NYC Health & Hospital/Coney Island, where she was listed in stable condition.

The victim's boyfriend told WABC she is in shock.

The perpetrator was last seen driving westbound along Kings Highway in a 2012 grey Mitsubishi Outlander SUV.

The NYPD has released surveillance video, showing the wanted man dressed in a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt and jeans with shiny kneepads, a black hat and a matching face covering.

He was described as a man with a medium build and light complexion.

Anyone with information on the suspect’s whereabouts is being asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or visit www.nypdcrimestoppers.com.

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Hangman who sent the Beasts of Belsen to hell: Gripping portrait of the cigar-smoking book-keeper who executed 13 of the most depraved Nazis

 

Albert Pierrepoint (left) was the third in the dynasty to take up the lethal profession. His father Henry was a Northamptonshire butcher who, as a young man, used to practise the best way to tie a noose. Nazi murderers Josef Kramer and Irma Grese, pictured, were hanged at Hameln, Germany, by Albert Pierrepoint. They were two of 13 Belsen guards, put to death on December 13, 1945. Inset: Defendants at Belsen War Crimes Trial in Luneberg, Germany.

The family name was synonymous with Death. It was notorious across Britain. Everyone knew the hangmen, the country’s official executioners, were called Pierrepoint.

And 75 years ago this weekend, it was a Pierrepoint who was summoned to Germany, to mete out justice to 13 of the most evil and depraved Nazis to be captured at the end of WWII— concentration camp commandant Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, and his psychopathic cadre of guards.

This was perhaps the most macabre meeting of the war . . . between a cigar-smoking grocer’s book-keeper from Manchester and part-time Angel of Death, and a fanatical SS officer with an insatiable appetite for murder.

Albert Pierrepoint was accustomed to working in the shadows. On his very first job as an assistant hangman, aged 27, he accompanied his uncle Thomas to Dublin, to hang a murderer at Mountjoy Prison, in 1932. His uncle emphasised the importance of travelling incognito, especially in the Irish Republic where the British were widely despised.

All his equipment was carried in the capacious pockets of his coat and jacket, to avoid becoming conspicuous by taking a bag through the prison gates. Also in Thomas Pierrepoint’s pocket was a loaded revolver. He insisted ‘Our Albert’ must carry one, too.

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Top House Democrats urge Biden to go back into Iran deal without preconditions

Brad Sherman Jewish Back-Stabber

 Influential U.S. House of Representatives Democrats, including one who has for years been close to the center-right pro-Israel community, are backing president-elect Joe Biden’s plan to reenter the Iran nuclear deal — without any new conditions on the country.

In a letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that began circulating Wednesday afternoon, the lawmakers support Biden’s vision in direct contradiction to the urgings of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, others in the center-right pro-Israel community and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Those groups want Biden to at least renegotiate components of the deal, if not forge a new deal, before rejoining the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which relieved sanctions on Iran in exchange for restrictions, monitored by outside observers, on the country’s nuclear program.

“We strongly endorse your call for Iran to return to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States to rejoin the agreement, and subsequent follow-on negotiations,” says the letter. It is being circulated by three Democrats who galvanized their colleagues to support the deal in 2015: Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, David Price of North Carolina and Barbara Lee of California.

The intended effect of the letter, which the lawmakers hope will draw the support of most of the Democratic caucus, is to reassure Biden that he can leap back into the deal without fear of pushback, at least in the House.

Already signed on are several House members with pro-Israel records, including Brad Sherman of California, a Democrat who has longstanding ties to the center-right pro-Israel community and who helped found The Israel Project in the early 2000s. Also circulating the letter are Abigail Spanberger, a hawkish Democrat from Virginia; Gregory Meeks of New York, the incoming chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; and Joaquin Castro, a Texas progressive.

Sherman and Castro vied with Meeks to chair the Foreign Affairs Committee. Having the three sign onto the letter signals that support for reentry traverses intra-party divisions.

Biden announced last week that he was ready to enter the deal without preconditions as a means of containing Iran’s accelerated nuclear push, which was triggered by President Donald Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the deal and the intensive sanctions that he imposed. Iran’s economy is in dire straits as a result, but the sanctions have not hindered Iran’s nuclear program. Neither Iran or the United States is now in compliance with the deal, and under Biden’s terms — welcomed by Iran’s government — both nations would have to return to compliance.

Biden said he was ready, after reentering the deal, to negotiate elements missing from the deal that troubled Israel and Sunni Arab nations, including Iran’s missile program. The original deal did not address non-nuclear weaponry at all.

The center-right pro-Israel community, particularly AIPAC, has clamored for Biden to amend the deal before reentering or replace it with another more comprehensive deal.

“Use leverage achieved via sanctions to #FixTheFlaws and reach a broad deal with Iran,” AIPAC said Wednesday in a tweet.

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The table used to stop Monsey attacker is turned into a menorah stand

 

When a masked man entered a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York, on the seventh night of Hanukkah last year, Joseph Gluck thought quickly. He picked up a coffee table and threw it at the attacker, who subsequently followed Gluck outside the house before trying to enter a synagogue next door. The door was locked and the intruder fled.

That coffee table turned defensive weapon has been turned into a dreidel-shaped menorah stand to memorialize Monsey’s own Hanukkah miracle. Emblazoned on its sides are the Hebrew words marked on dreidels typically in Israel — “A big miracle happened here.” (Most outside of Israel are engraved with “a big miracle happened there,” referring to the miracle of the Hanukkah story in which the oil in the Temple lasted for eight days.) In the case of the stand, the miracle is even closer to home.

Rabbi Yisroel Kahan, a leader in Monsey and a member of the Rockland County Human Rights Commission, posted a photo of the coffee table and the menorah stand to Twitter on Friday. That table, by the way, broke after Gluck’s heave at the intruder.

One guest at the Hanukkah celebration was severely injured in the attack and subsequently died of his injuries.

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Relics of a rebellion: A Hannukah visit to the home of the Maccabees

 

An area believed by some to be the burial place of the ancient Maccabees outside Modiin in central Israel.

December 7, 1909. It is the first day of Hanukkah, and pupils from pre-state Israel’s first Hebrew high school are on a field trip. Their teacher has taken them to the ancient village of Modiin – site of a famous 1st-century BCE town and home of the Maccabees. We can almost see the children standing in a small field among some hollowed-out slabs of rock as they listen to stories of incredible heroism and skill. Then imagine them looking around, indicating the stones, and solemnly declaring that this is where the famous Maccabee family was buried.

Jews from all over the world flock to the “Maccabean Graves.” So do runners in the annual Hanukkah marathon, who come here to light their torches before beginning the race to Jerusalem. Yet very few of them realize that the “Maccabean graves” tradition was born on a December afternoon at the beginning of the last century and not the result of an archaeological discovery.

Perhaps they really are the graves of the Maccabees? Experts dismiss the idea, contending that the graves are from a different era altogether. In fact, no one knows for sure where the famous family lies at rest.

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US Supreme Court dismisses Texas-led lawsuit seeking to overturn election

The US Supreme Court on Friday rejected a lawsuit backed by President Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, ending a desperate attempt to get legal issues rejected by state and federal judges before the nation’s highest court.

The court’s order was its second this week rebuffing Republican requests that it get involved in the 2020 election outcome and overturn the will of voters as expressed in an election regarded by both Republican and Democratic officials as free and fair. The justices turned away an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans on Tuesday.

Friday’s court decision effectively ends Trump’s attempt to overturn the election through the court system.

The Electoral College meets Monday to formally elect Biden as the next president.

Trump had called the lawsuit filed by Texas against Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin “the big one” that would end with the Supreme Court undoing Biden’s substantial Electoral College majority and allowing Trump to serve another four years in the White House.

In a brief order, the court said Texas does not have the legal right to sue those states because it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.”

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Yedidya Chaim 4 and Elyashiv Yungreiss 7 killed in car crash Near Latrun

 The accident occurred near the Latrun Junction, en route to Tel Aviv, when a car collided with a truck.

Two of the victims – both of them children – were initially reported to be in critical condition, though emergency medical teams later declared them dead at the scene. A third victim is in serious condition, while the fourth victim is currently listed in moderate condition.

The children have been identified as Yedidya Chaim and Elyashiv Yungreiss, who were five and seven years old and lived in Beit El. A third son, Yair, is in serious condition.

Emergency rescue teams were dispatched to the scene to treat the survivors and evacuate them to the hospital.

Motti Haroush, a senior United Hatzalah paramedic described the incident: “This was an accident involving a private vehicle and a truck which had parked on the shoulder of the highway. With the help of additional paramedics, we performed resuscitation techniques on two children, who unfortunately had to be declared dead.”

“We also provided first aid to the driver of the car, who was moderately injured, as well as to another child who was sitting in the car who is in moderate-to-serious condition.”

MDA paramedic Ilan Gur-Ari said: "When we reached the scene, we saw a car which had crashed into a truck. Four victims were lying outside of the car, including a boy about five years og age and a boy about seven years of age, who were unconscious, had no pulse, were not breathing, and severe multi-system injuries. After a medical examination, we were forced to pronounce them dead at the scene."

"A 14-year-old boy and the driver, a man about 25 years of age, suffered serious multi-system injuries, and giving them first aid treatment at the scene, we evacuated them to the hospital in serious condition."

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Tefillin Straps from China

רצועות מסין

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