Margaret Thatcher ‘untouched by anti-Semitism’
(JNS.org) Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, died at the age of 87 after suffering a stroke Monday. Thatcher represented the Conservative Party and in 1987 famously said, “There is no such thing as society.” The “Iron Lady,” as she was nicknamed, also forged close relations with Britain’s Jews.
In 1959, when Thatcher was a rising politician, she sided with local liberals in a fight against a golf club that was excluding Jewish members. Even earlier, during the Second World War, Thatcher’s family hosted an Austrian-Jewish teenager hiding in the UK from Nazi persecution.
As UK Prime Minister from 1975-90, Thatcher assembled many Jewish cabinet members such as Malcolm Rifkind, Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, and Nigel Lawson. “She was completely untouched by anti-Semitism. She took individuals on their own merits and recognized ability where she found it,” Lawson told London’s Jewish Chronicle.
“Baroness Thatcher was a giant who had a transformative impact on Britain. I first got to know her early on in my life when she was the local MP. She was loved and admired by many in the Jewish community who will miss her deeply. Few people in my lifetime have left such a personal imprint on British life,” said Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth Lord Jonathan Sacks.
Thatcher’s relationship with the Israeli government during her term was more strained. She described Menachem Begin, prime minister of Israel for two periods in the 1980s, as the “most difficult” man she had to work with.
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Syrian withdrawal from Golan alarms Israel
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) The Syrian government has reportedly withdrawn thousands of troops near the buffer zone between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights, leaving a power vacuum that Israel is concerned could be filled with jihadist forces ready to turn their guns on the Jewish state.
Syria has redeployed divisions in the Golan to the area around Damascus to battle anti-government forces near the Syrian capital, according to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian on Sunday.
The redeployment near the Golan border was the most significant in 40 years, Western diplomats told The Guardian. Israel is concerned that the jihadist groups hostile to both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Jewish state could move to fill the power vacuum in the Golan, creating a battlefront with Israel.
Four elite Syrian divisions made the Golan border Israel’s quietest for the past four decades, but tensions have simmered on the Golan Heights in the last few months. Last week, a mortar shell fired during fighting between Syrian rebels and loyalist troops landed in Israel. Errant explosives have landed several times in Israel-controlled Golan territory, and some cross-border incidents have prompted return fire from Israeli army patrols.
Israel is concerned that Assad’s weapons stockpiles, which include chemical weapons and advanced anti-aircraft missiles systems, could fall into the hands of either Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is loyal to Assad, has links to Iran, and is very hostile to Israel, or Sunni Islamist groups in Syria with links to international terrorist groups, which seek Assad’s ouster and are no friendlier to Israel.
On Sunday, an Israeli colonel told visiting Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird on a helicopter tour of the Golan that Israel is increasingly concerned about foreign, Sunni jihadists who have flocked to Syria to fight Assad, according to Canadian news outlet The Globe and Mail.
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Hackers claiming affiliation with ‘Anonymous’ launch mostly-failed attacks on Israel
(JNS.org) Anti-Israel hacker groups claiming to be associated with the international hacker group “Anonymous” launched attacks against Israeli websites over the weekend, but had little impact.
The attacks, called #OpIsrael on Twitter, were mainly denial-of-service attacks, which inundate websites and servers with traffic until it either slows down or crashes.
Cyberattacks against Israeli websites began on April 5 and were supposed to peak on Sunday, and while dozens of attempts to hack major websites were noted, the majority of them failed. Sources in Tehila, the Israeli e-government project, told Israel Hayom that the cyberattack was unable to completely down any of the Israeli government websites, although some, like the Israeli Education Ministry’s website, experienced some short-term accessing issues.
According to the Israeli Finance Ministry’s cyber monitoring unit, the cyberattack peaked at 7 p.m. Sunday (Israel time) when 600 websites registered hacking attempts. The hackers attacked several businesses and non-profit groups in Israel, including the Jerusalem Post and Yad Vashem sites. But by Sunday night nearly all of the sites the group says it targeted were operating normally.
Despite announcing the attacks under the Anonymous flag, it is unclear if the attacks were orchestrated by the loosely affiliated Anonymous hacker group or by hackers claiming to be part of the group. Some reports linked the hackers to groups in several Arab countries.
Meanwhile, pro-Israel hackers hit back. The main site of the hacking operation, www.opisrael.com, was hit by pro-Israel hackers called Israeli Elite Strike Force (EhIsR). EhIsR hackers defaced the website saying, “#opisrael are nothing!! Now is the time to know the truth about Israel.” Several pro-Israel videos were posted on the hacker website, including the Israel national anthem, Hatikvah, and lists of facts about Israel. EhIsR also disabled dozens of radical Islamist sites in Pakistan, Iran, Syria and other North African countries over the weekend.
“The Zionist hackers like EhIsR are responding not with hate but with reason. It’s a shame that for most of the world such an approach is unlikely to be affective,” wrote a blogger covering the #OpIsrael campaign for the Jerusalem Post.
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Study: Global anti-Semitism up by 30% in 2012
(JNS.org) On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, a new study revealed that global anti-Semitism was up by 30% in 2012, Israel Hayom reported.
The study, conducted by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry, said that in the past year there was “an alarming rise in the number of terrorist attacks and attempted attacks against Jewish targets, and an escalation in violent incidents against Jews worldwide.”
The study reported 686 anti-Semitic incidents in 2012, compared to 526 incidents in 2011. Of the attacks in 2012, 273 were physical assaults against Jews, including 50 involving firearms.
The largest rise in attacks occurred in economically troubled Europe, specifically in France, Greece, Hungary and Ukraine. However, the U.S., Canada and Australia also saw a rise in attacks.
Many groups involved in attacks against Jews were associated with far-right parties or radical Islamist groups, both of which are growing in Europe.
“This situation in some countries in Europe—mostly Greece and Hungary—has gotten so perilous that Jews are afraid to walk down the street,” Aryeh Zuckerman, a consultant with the Kantor Center, told Israel Hayom.
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Turkish leaders make new demands of Israel before normalization
(JNS.org) Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu outlined further demands on Israel before Turkey would normalize relations with the country during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday.
“All of the embargoes [on Gaza] should be lifted once and for all,” Davutoglu said, the Wall Street Journal reported. “That diplomacy will continue in the future, and I hope and pray the processes will be completed.”
Israel maintains a naval blockade on Gaza, which is controlled by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, in order to prevent rockets and other military materials from entering the region and being used against Israeli civilians. The United Nations, in the 2010 Palmer report, has ruled that the Gaza naval blockade is legal under international law.
Last month, during U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for Israel’s actions during the 2010 Gaza Flotilla incident, which left eight Turkish nationals and one Turkish-American dead after those militants attacked Israeli soldiers aboard the Mavi Marmara.
U.S. officials are concerned that Turkey, by calling for increased demands on Israel, will delay or stall normalization between the two countries.
“It is not for the United States to set conditions or terms,” Kerry said, the Wall Street Journal reported. “We have said, and we say again: we would like to see the relationship…get back on track in its full measure.”
While Israel and Turkey enjoyed decades of close relations under Turkey’s secular rulers, Erdogan and his conservative Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) has increasingly been critical of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians since coming to power in 2003. This has included closer relations with the Gaza-based terror group Hamas. Erdogan has said he plans to visit Gaza in the upcoming weeks.
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Iraq ancient complex discovered near biblical Abraham’s home city
(JNS.org) British archeologists announced Thursday the discovery of a complex in the vicinity of the ancient city of Ur in southern Iraq from the period in history when the patriarch Abraham would have lived in the area, as described in the Bible.
The 4,000-year-old structure “is some sort of public building. It might be an administrative building, it might have religious connections or controlling goods to the city of Ur,” said Stuart Campbell of Manchester University’s Archaeology Department, the leader of the dig, according to The Associated Press.
Abraham is described in the Bible to have lived near a place called Ur. Therefore, many biblical scholars consider the ancient city his home. According to National Geographic, Ur most likely originated in the 5th millennium B.C. It was rediscovered in the 1920s and 1930s during an expedition. The new complex was discovered 12 miles from Ur.
“Because of the gap in archaeological work in this region, any new knowledge is important to archaeologists in this area—and this find has the potential to really move forward our understanding of the first city-states,” Campbell wrote in an email to the Huffington Post.
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Letter to Netanyahu by U.S. Jewish left-leaning activists challenged
(JNS.org) The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) has sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asking him to disregard advice in a Wednesday letter by American Jews that he take “confidence-building steps” for peace with the Palestinians.
The Wednesday letter was signed by 100 Jewish activists and leaders, primarily involved with left-wing organizations in the U.S. Their letter called on Netanyahu “to respond to President [Barack] Obama’s call for peace by taking concrete confidence-building steps designed to demonstrate Israel’s commitment to a ‘two-states for two peoples’ solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict” which “would challenge Palestinian leaders to take similarly constructive steps, including, most importantly, a prompt return to the negotiating table.”
The Israel Policy Forum sponsored that letter. Other signatories included former senior U.S. Defense Department official Dov Zakheim, former AIPAC executive director Tom Dine, Union for Reform Judaism President Rabbi Rick Jacobs, and others. The activists also urged Netanyahu to work closely with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
ECI, which was found by conservative commentator and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, responded with its own letter stating that the activists’ request was a veiled attempt to get Netanyahu’s government to make “painful territorial sacrifices.” ECI said the “one thing we never presume to do is instruct our friends in Israel on the level of danger to which they should expose themselves… Those issuing the demand will not experience the pain, or be compelled to sacrifice anything, should their advice prove foolish—as it has so many times in the past… From the safety of America, in the past they have recommended trusting Yasser Arafat, dividing Jerusalem, surrendering the Golan Heights to Syria, and withdrawing from territory that today is controlled by Iranian-backed terrorist groups.”
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