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.

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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.

Self-Hating Jew Peter Beinart Speaking in Israel gets Wacked by the Right as well as the left!

Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart drew a volley of criticism on Tuesday from the boycott Israel movement as well as a right-wing Israeli group over an appearance at Tel Aviv University.

Beinart, who is an outspoken critic of Israel and a journalism professor at the City University of New York, spoke Tuesday evening in Tel Aviv with Yoav Fromer, a senior faculty member at TAU’s English department, in an event titled “Trump, Israel and the Future of American Democracy.”

A founding member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, publicly called on Beinart to cancel his visit after saying it had privately urged him to do so. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is the BDS movement’s cultural arm and a leading advocate for boycotts of Israeli academic institutions.

“Palestinians condemn Peter Beinart’s event at complicit Tel Aviv University in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” PACBI said in a post on X. “Whitewashing genocide can never be reconciled with any claim to humanism or moral consistency.”

In a press release, PACBI accused the university of being “deeply complicit in enabling and trying to whitewash Israel’s US-armed and funded genocide as well as its decades old regime of settler-colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.”                                                                                                                                                                                                         Beinart declined to comment to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. But he responded to the criticism on social media, where said he supports a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as well as a right of return for Palestinians and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank — all principles of the BDS movement to which he has long subscribed.

At the same time, he said, while he supports “many forms of boycott, divestment and sanction against Israel and Israeli institutions,” he believes there is “value in speaking to Israelis about Israel’s crimes” by speaking at universities.

Trump needs to hit the reset button if the GOP wants to win the 2026 midterms

 by Michael Goodwin NYP

As far as President Trump is concerned, T.S. Eliot got it all wrong.

April is not the cruelest month, November is. 

As he barrels toward the end of his first year back in the White House, the president is beset by slumping poll numbers and a pileup of problems, some of which are self-inflicted. 

Even a gaggle of normally obedient Republicans in Congress are growing restless, and his call for gerrymandering House district lines in red states to pad the GOP advantage in the midterms is in danger of producing the opposite outcome. 

The sheer volume of mounting trouble reflects Trump’s supreme self-confidence, grand vision and his “let’s do it now” management style.

On any given day, the combination results in too many balls in the air competing for his attention. 

The big picture suggests he needs a reset, and maybe a rest.