Douglas Murray speaks clearly & succinctly. "Hamas gleefully committed atrocities" Britain should enforce laws against Pro-terrorism marchers in the streets of London. "Israel is safer right now for Jews than central London." Israel is held to an impossible standard. #NoCeasefire
There is something particularly damning about searching your timeline and discovering that throughout the nearly two years the October 7 hostages were being held in Hamas' underground dungeons, you never once demanded that the Red Cross be granted access to them. Not once.
Yet now, with the eyes of the world on you, in the middle of a firestorm over your uncorroborated outlandish allegations of dog rape and under intense personal and professional scrutiny, you suddenly find your voice to call for Red Cross access. The same redcross that utterly failed the hostages repeatedly. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Your selective outrage is a profound moral indictment. It is as revealing as it is disgraceful. You would be doing yourself and your profession a favor by resigning in disgrace you feckless liar.
@lynd_ron@CptAllenHistory Actually, it was UN Resolution 181 that formed the state of Israel. They, the UN, too would have created the state of Palestine, but Arab leaders did not want that.
On This Day — July 12, 1948
When Israeli forces entered Lydda and Ramle during Operation Dani, they discovered the grim reality behind the Arab battle cry that had echoed across the war: “Itbah al Yahoud!” — “Slaughter the Jews!”
Bodies of Jewish civilians and captured soldiers — men, women, and children — were found executed. There were almost no survivors among those taken prisoner by Arab forces in the area. Prisoners were routinely murdered on the spot, regardless of age or gender. This was the consistent pattern of Arab irregulars and local militias: no mercy to Jewish prisoners throughout the fighting.
The same reality had played out earlier in the war. In Safed, after attacking the Jewish quarter, the Arab regional commander cabled his superiors: “Our morale is very high, the young people are enthusiastic, we’re going to massacre them.”
By July 1948, the Jewish Yishuv had seen enough. They were fighting for survival against an enemy whose leadership — from the Mufti Amin al-Husseini to the Arab Higher Committee and Arab League — had rejected any Jewish state in any part of the Land from the moment the UN voted to partition Palestine in November 1947. Arab forces answered the partition vote with immediate terror: ambushes on roads and convoys, attacks on Jewish civilians, and a deliberate strategy of taking no prisoners.
Lydda and Ramle had served as key Arab strongpoints, blocking vital supply lines to Jerusalem and launching attacks on Jewish traffic and settlements. The Jewish population in parts of the country was on the verge of strangulation and starvation.
Operation Dani (part of the broader Plan Dalet) was the Haganah’s military response: a series of operations to break deadly encirclements, reopen supply routes, and prevent annihilation in the face of invading Arab armies. As historian Henry Laurens has noted, it was fundamentally a military operational plan — not a political blueprint for mass expulsion. The real ethnic cleansing intent came from the Arab side, whose war cry was literally “Slaughter the Jews!”
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The next day, five Arab armies invaded with the explicit goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map before it could even breathe. They failed.
That failure is what Arabs originally called the “Nakba” — the catastrophe of their humiliating inability to destroy the wildly outnumbered and outgunned Jews. There would never have been a single refugee had the Arabs accepted the UN partition plan or chosen not to launch a war of annihilation.
Some histories record only one side’s suffering. The full record shows a war in which the Arabs fought to eliminate the Jews entirely — and the Jews fought simply to survive.
The British handling of the Exodus was a direct extension of the 1939 White Paper policy, which illegally closed Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine specifically to avoid angering Arab leaders like the Mufti.
Amin al-Husseini had already met Hitler in 1941 and broadcast calls for the extermination of Jews across the Middle East, yet Britain continued prioritizing the avoidance of Arab unrest over rescuing Holocaust survivors — even after the war.
On This Day — July 11, 1947
The ship of Holocaust refugees that refused to be broken.
On this day, the Exodus 1947 — a battered American steamship renamed by the Haganah — sailed from Sète, France, carrying 4,515 Jewish refugees, including 655 children and several babies born during the voyage. Nearly all were Holocaust survivors who had already endured the camps and displaced persons hell.
Their destination: the British-blockaded coast of Mandatory Palestine.
The fate of the Exodus exposed the cruelty of Britain’s policy in preventing Holocaust refugees from entering their only homeland. As soon as it left French waters, British destroyers shadowed it like predators.
On July 18, just miles off the coast but still in international waters, the Royal Navy rammed the Exodus repeatedly, boarded it by force, and unleashed tear gas and clubs. A brutal hand-to-hand fight erupted on deck. American volunteer Bill Bernstein was clubbed to death trying to protect passengers. Two more Jews were shot and killed. Dozens were wounded. The ship’s commander eventually surrendered to prevent a massacre.
British forces towed the crippled vessel into Haifa. But instead of sending the refugees to detention camps in Cyprus like others, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin decided to make an example of them. They were transferred to three deportation ships and sent back to France.
What happened next was extraordinary.
In the scorching summer heat at Port-de-Bouc, the refugees refused to disembark for 24 days, enduring overcrowding, filth, and near-starvation in the ship holds. The French government refused to force them off. The standoff became an international scandal.
Eventually, the British sent them to Germany — the last place Holocaust survivors wanted to go.
The Exodus never reached the Land of Israel. But its story did. The images of British brutality against desperate Jews, the defiance of the passengers, and the sheer inhumanity of the policy helped turn global opinion and accelerate the end of the Mandate.
Some ships carry cargo.
The Exodus carried history and the cries of humanity.
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have identified a rare population of cells in the inner ear with a natural ability to regenerate sensory hair cells - the cells responsible for converting sound into signals sent to the brain. When these cells are damaged, hearing loss is permanent and currently irreversible, affecting over 1.5 billion people worldwide.
The Tel Aviv team discovered that a small subset of supporting cells, previously overlooked, are naturally primed to transform into new hair cells. "Even in tissues long considered incapable of regeneration, there is in fact a hidden regenerative capacity," said lead researcher Prof. Karen Avraham. Researchers believe future treatment could involve a local injection in the cochlea to activate this regenerative potential. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances. Israeli science, once again pushing the boundaries of what medicine can do. 🇮🇱🔬 @TelAvivUni
Francesca Albanese, special United Nations rapporteur for the Palestinians who has a long history of making anti-Israel comments, ought to read a book after her claim that Jews have been treated only in exemplary fashion in Arab lands since the Inquisition ended in the 19th century.
“Francesca Albanese can either read history books if she wished to—obviously she doesn’t—or she can meet people like my wife,” David Harris, executive vice chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, told JNS.
Harris, who was CEO of the American Jewish Committee from 1990 to 2022, is married to Giulietta Boukhobza, whose family comes from present-day Libya. That country is Judenrein, he told JNS, using the German for “Jew-free.”
“There is not a single Jew left in Libya. No trace. No plaque. No memorial. No monument. No museum. No school book reference. Nothing,” Harris said. “No citizenship. Any business venture required a majority Arab partner. No legal recourse. The list is a long one.”
After Libya became independent in 1951, new rules made it almost impossible for Jews to remain, and later, after the Six-Day War in 1967, “mobs came to the homes of Jews, including my wife’s family, to burn down and kill the Jews—very, very similar in a way to Oct. 7,” Harris told JNS.
At a June 19 gathering of current and former U.N. staffers, Albanese, whom the global body considers an independent “expert,” said that “Jews had been discriminated in Europe, not in West Asia, not in the Arab world, where they had been in fact welcomed once they were kicked out from Spain and other parts of Europe.”
Albanese’s comments, which took place during a webinar hosted by the anti-Israel group U.N. Staff For Gaza, have not been reported previously. She made the remarks as she compared the Holocaust and what she said is a “genocide” that Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians.
Making a comparison like that is antisemitic, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred.
Lyn Julius, a British journalist and co-founder of Harif, a U.K. charity that represents Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, told JNS that “there’s the great myth of peaceful coexistence of Jews in the Arab countries, which is a staple of Palestinian propaganda.”
“It allows them to delegitimize Israel because obviously, if everything was wonderful between Jews and Arabs in the Arab world, you don’t need Israel,” she said.
There is a well-documented concept in Arab lands of non-Muslims, including Jews, having dhimmi status, in which Islamic law grants protections to the non-Muslims, who subordinate themselves and pay a tax called jizya, according to Julius.
Jews and others had religious and cultural autonomy but faced strict social and legal restrictions, including dress codes, and sometimes suffered harsh persecution and restriction in ghettos, the journalist said.
Mike Wagenheim, Jewish News Syndicate
REPORT: Two visibly Jewish men from France were chased through the streets of Barcelona last week. A crowd of dozens, some on motorcycles, chased them to their hotel, shouting antisemitic statements and blocking their path.
This is part of a deeply alarming surge in antisemitism in Spain and around the globe.
“The President is right that his tariffs are at work—in destroying U.S. jobs and raising prices. The U.S. has lost some 75,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025, including 25,900 in motor vehicle and parts production.”@WSJ https://t.co/QVLG6tlJkV