LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Candace Owens, a prominent figure at the Daily Wire, recently expressed support for an ancient conspiracy theory alleging that Jewish religious leaders engage in the ritualistic consumption of Christian blood.
Owens, who has been increasingly critical of Israel and the Jewish community, has sparked controversy with her remarks.
In a public spat with fellow commentator Ben Shapiro, Owens made remarks interpreted as antisemitic. She declared, "You cannot serve both God and money," a statement widely viewed as an antisemitic shot at Shapiro.
Owens has further stoked tensions by attributing the rise in antisemitism to "political Jews" and suggesting a conspiracy involving a "small ring" of Jewish individuals in Hollywood and Washington, DC.
She concluded, "All of us Black, Spanish, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, all Americans should want answers because this appears to be something that is quite sinister."
BBC News is plunging new depths when it comes to its reporting of the Israel-Hamas war. In doing so, it is bringing shame on a publicly-funded organisation.
When challenged on this at a House of Lords committee, Ms Turness’s response was very revealing. First, she dismissed the reporting because it was “positioned in a hostile media outlet” – The Telegraph. This is a remarkable thing to say. It suggests that the BBC’s approach is to ignore legitimate criticism if it does not like where it comes from.
The idea that you can dismiss evidence of journalistic malpractice because it is in a newspaper you don’t like reveals institutional arrogance and political bias. It enables the BBC to remain immune to criticism rather than act to remedy the problems with its reporting of the war.
Even worse were the BBC News CEO’s claims of transparency. Ms Turness told the Committee that the BBC is “very clear about where it sources” its reporting from and that the BBC had been “transparent in our account and in our journalism”.
DIN: Personally the entire staff of DIN is against "Hostage Negotiations" even on a regular Sunday! "Hostage Negotiations" is not going to end this war it will only prolong it! But the fact that Deri wanted Israel to wait till after Shabbos shows you the total disconnect between Chareidim and the rest of the Jewish people. I will bet that if the hostages were "Shomer Shabbat" he would have told the government to NEVER stop negotiating. Besides, Deri's statement is a huge Chillul Hashem!
Shas Party leader Aryeh Deri sparked controversy over the weekend by reportedly asking members of the War Cabinet to delay the departure of an Israeli delegation for hostage negotiations in Qatar until after Shabbos.
In response, opposition and Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid tweeted a link to a Hebrew media report of Deri’s alleged demand along with the caption: “If this isn’t pikuach nefesh, then what is?”
For his part, Yisrael Beiteinu Party chief Avigdor Liberman tweeted: “Deri, what is more pikuach nefesh than returning the kidnapped?”
Liberman included a quote from Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De’ah 252:3: “Every moment that one delays unnecessarily the ransoming of a captive, it is as if he were to shed blood.”
The backlash prompted a vehement denial from Deri, who accused his opponents of trying to score political points at the expense of the captives held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Former Shas lawmaker Chaim Amsalem told JNS that if the negotiations have a realistic chance of succeeding, then “violating Shabbos can be done and should be done by the highest religious authorities. Delaying it is a very serious offense.
“Once those involved confirm the urgency of the situation, we must enforce halachah,” said Amsalem, while qualifying that he could not himself make a determination on this specific issue because he is not privy to the details of the talks.
“Just like how a rabbi can’t assess whether a person is fit to fast on Yom Kippur [and only a doctor can],” he noted.
JNS spoke with several rabbis who all stressed the importance of erring on the side of caution—namely, life—when determining when pikuach nefesh applies.
The famed composer and director of the London School of Jewish Song, Yigal Calek, is in need of rachamei Shomayim. His name for Tehillim is Yigal Yisrael ben Blima Gittel.
During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Yigal led London School of Jewish Song. The Israel-born mechanech had a flamboyant style and exceptional ear for music that propelled his young proteges into stardom across the Jewish world.
Curiously, although Yigal is undoubtedly an innovator, he is also deeply traditional. Thus, while his songs have always been very much in tune with modernity and the zeitgeist, they are nonetheless firmly embedded in the music of the Jewish yesteryear.
Audiences flocked to the choir’s concerts in London, Paris, Yerushalayim, New York and Los Angeles – among countless other cities – and the albums became the musical backdrop for that generation.
That generation all hummed Yigal’s tunes, used them for tefillos, danced to them at weddings, and played the LPs until the scratches rendered the records unplayable.
Yigal, as is well known, has always been a demanding, exacting perfectionist. His rehearsals famously lasted for hours. Every note had to be perfect, every harmony flawlessly synchronized. But it was all worth it in the end. The results were stunning, and the audience appreciation gushing.
And so it continued for a few more years, until eventually Yigal disbanded his choir and turned to other things. From time to time he would reappear with a new group to belt out a few hits in a tribute medley at a variety concert, but that was it. The London School of Jewish Song was no more.
More recently, Yigal has suffered some very difficult health issues and word went around that he needed tefillos: Yigal Yisrael ben Blima Gitel. And so it was that a few of the old choir “boys” decided to arrange an evening of song and nostalgia to cheer his spirits. On the last night of Chanukah in 2021, the impromptu gathering took place – just a couple of dozen guys around a table at someone’s home in Golders Green. Most of them are already grandfathers, all of them were there to cheer up their childhood hero.
Despite five months of war with Hamas, Israel ranked fifth in the2024 World Happiness Report, which was released on Wednesday.
The annual report ranked the happiness of 143 countries based on life evaluation, positive emotions, and negative emotions, among other factors.
Anat Panti, a happiness policy researcher at Bar-Ilan University University in Ramat Gan, explained,
“Even this year, which was one of the most difficult in the country’s history, Israel is ranked in the top five of the international happiness index. The reason for this lies in the fact that life satisfaction, the index by which the level of happiness is measured, is a stable index over time and refers more to the characteristics of the country itself such as the strength of the economy, the degree of social involvement, and the health services in the country, than to fleeting feelings.”
Finland was ranked as the happiest country for the seventh consecutive year. Israel finished behind Denmark, Iceland and Sweden.
Afghanistan edged Lebanon as the least happy country.
“In order to give a more accurate picture of the state of happiness in all countries, the editors of the report refer to the average life satisfaction in the last three years when calculating the ranking. Therefore, Israel’s ranking in fifth place in the happiness report marks the stability in life satisfaction in Israel over the last few years, and not only in this one,” Panti explained.
“For example, even during the Corona period, which was traumatic all over the world, it was still possible to see that the top ten of the global happiness ranking includes more or less the same countries every year.”
The annual report is based on data from US market research company Gallup, and analyzed by international experts led by the University of Oxford.
In addition to self-assessed evaluations of life satisfaction, analysts also assess each country’s healthy life expectancy, freedom, GDP per capita, social support and more.
The Georgia criminal defense attorney who alleged an “improper” relationship between Fani Willis and Nathan Wade called out the Fulton County District Attorney over a speech she made claiming “Jesus” told her to prosecute Trump.
Ashleigh Merchant, who filed a bombshell motion alleging Willis’ relationship with Wade, whom she appointed special prosecutor on the case, appeared on Megyn Kelly’s show Tuesday where she told the host that she “still [hasn’t] gotten over the church remarks.”
“When someone says that Jesus himself told them to prosecute this case, how do you defend against that?… That’s insane. I’ve never dealt with that… Nobody says this. This doesn’t happen. People don’t take to the pulpit,” Merchant told Kelly.
Merchant filed the suit against Willis on behalf of her client, GOP political operative Mike Roman.
A New York City property owner recently ended up in handcuffs following a fiery standoff with a bunch of squatters she has been trying to boot from her family’s home, tense footage of the ordeal shows.
Adele Andaloro, 47, was recently nabbed after she changed the locks on the $1 million home in Flushing, Queens, that she says she inherited from her parents when they died, ABC’s Eyewitness News reported.
“It’s enraging,” the homeowner said of the squatter saga. “It’s not fair that I, as the homeowner, have to be going through this.”
Andaloro claims the ordeal erupted when she started the process of trying to sell the home last month but realized squatters had moved in — and brazenly replaced the entire front door and locks.
The Knesset plenum approved the Interior Minister's proposal to allow citizens to submit online requests for biometric passports, without needing to go to the Population and Immigration Authority.
On Tuesday the Knesset plenum accepted Interior Minister Moshe Arbel's proposal for passport reform, enabling the issuing of passports and identity cards (te’udot zehut) online.
The proposal was approved by a temporary order for six months and can be extended by another six months.
The new process will go into effect on April 31st and will allow any citizen over the age of 18, who has a biometric identification document and whose fingerprints have been stored in the biometric database, to submit a remote application and receive an identity card (te’udat zehut) which will be valid for up to five years.
The new procedure will not apply to those who have never issued biometric passports and IDs, nor to children under the age of 18.
In addition passports may be issued online only if they have expired within the previous six months or are valid for a year ahead, as well as for those who are in Israel at the time of submitting the application.
Interior Minister Arbel said, "This is a dramatic step initiated by the Interior Ministry and the Population and Immigration Authority, to meet the needs of citizens and provide a solution for a large sector of the population, who will not have to go to the official offices and will be able to order a passport or identity card (te’udat zehut) without leaving their home. We have set a goal to improve services to the citizens of Israel and I am pleased to take another step forward to achieve this national goal."
In an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Democrats Turn Against Israel,” its Editorial Board excoriates President Joe Biden for turning on Israel in order to “cater to the anti-Israel left without alienating the bulk of U.S. voters who would find it unconscionable to turn on the Israeli people in wartime.”
“The joke around Jerusalem is that while Mr. Biden once worked to help Israel after Oct. 7, he’s now working on the ‘two-state solution’: Michigan and Nevada. Israelis notice that the President rarely speaks of defeating Hamas anymore. Instead, he bashes Israel under the cover of bashing its Prime Minister.
What Henry Kissinger once said about Israel having no foreign policy, only domestic politics, Israelis are now saying about America. How else to explain Mr. Biden’s “red line” on Rafah, Hamas’s final stronghold?
Last Monday’s release of a U.S. intelligence assessment casting doubt on the political viability of Mr. Netanyahu’s wartime leadership and predicting “large protests” against him was highly unusual. That’s how the U.S. once treated enemy dictatorships, not allied democracies.
Mr. Biden has also endorsed Sen. Chuck Schumer’s extraordinary declaration last week that Israelis must depose the elected Mr. Netanyahu. Other Democrats are piling on.
Even more serious are delays in U.S. weapons transfers, leaked threats to cut off arms, and sotto voce Biden Administration efforts to discourage other countries from exporting weapons to Jerusalem. Ammunition supplies are a major concern, but Israel’s existential nerve has been touched, and it doesn’t need a timid Biden Administration to give it the green light on Rafah. Israel is now producing more of its own munitions, and the mood is that it will fight with its fingernails if it has to.
Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t treat the U.S. as an unapproachable black box, which spits out a presidential policy and that’s final. He knows U.S. public opinion can be influenced to constrain the President’s power. If Mr. Biden thinks he’s the only one with leverage here, in advance of a U.S. election, he’s wrong.
Behind this spat is the dawning of knowledge in Israel that perhaps the U.S. can’t be relied on. As a Thursday column in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper notes, “Even if the radical wing does not take over, it is already a permanent force that no Democratic Party leader can ignore.”
There is more hope in Israel for a Trump Administration, but also wariness. For now the Republicans who would abandon Ukraine still speak up for Israel. Will that always be true?
At present the U.S. doesn’t appear willing to help Ukraine stave off defeat or Israel clinch victory. The world is watching, and the key for the Middle East isn’t to see that Israel can compromise with the Palestinians, but that it can carry U.S. support all the way to victory against Iran-backed terrorism.”
A Newsweek article by John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, asserts that “Israel has taken more measures to avoid needless civilian harm than virtually any other nation that’s fought an urban war.”
Spencer added that “in fact, as someone who has served two tours in Iraq and studied urban warfare for over a decade, Israel has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“I say this not to put Israel on a pedestal or to diminish the human suffering of Gazans but rather to correct a number of misperceptions when it comes to urban warfare.
