Uncategorized
Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague
PRAGUE (JTA) — Not long after she puts away her silver Shabbat candlesticks and home-baked challah, Yael Schoultz walks through a cavernous hallway, and up a set of gray concrete stairs. Past a door, she finds a group of heavily made-up women in red and black G-strings and spike heels, listlessly beckoning men for sex in return for cash.
Schoultz, 43, spotted about 30 women at the Prague brothel floating from room to room in various states of undress — negligees, see-through bras — with accents as varied as their lipstick shades. Some are smiling, some appear bored as they play games on their phones, others are trying to woo potential clients with a simple, “Come have a good time, come to my room.”
It’s a typical Saturday night post-Shabbat routine for Schoultz, an Orthodox Jewish South African who recently launched L’Chaim, an organization dedicated to helping sex workers in the Czech Republic.
Schoultz and her colleagues engage the women with friendly banter about health and the weather, careful not to interrupt those with customers. The L’Chaim volunteers collectively carry a few hundred free condoms along with high-end soaps and hand-crafted bracelets.
“The girls always ask for extras for their friends,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz, who has been visiting Czech brothels since she moved to Prague in 2011, is not a mere purveyor of gifts. Her goal is to establish a rapport with the women she meets so that they can leave the business of sex work if they so wish. And her Jewish faith is a core driver of Schoultz’s quest to provide a better life for the sex workers.
“Some of the women have been trafficked,” she explained, referring to the term governments and human rights advocates use to describe a contemporary form of slavery. “There are girls who were tied up for days and raped, even by the police. Some might seem to be in the brothel voluntarily, but not really, because they owe a lot of money on a debt and feel sex work is only way they can pay it back.”
Dressed in black from head to toe, in what a fashion magazine might describe as modest goth, Schoultz is a veteran of global anti-trafficking efforts. A few decades ago, while teaching English in South Korea, Schoultz volunteered for an organization that was trying to stop the trafficking of North Korean women to China. At the same time, she was getting a master’s in theology and wanted to move to Europe to get her doctorate, which was possible at Prague’s Charles University.
“When I got to the Czech Republic, I started looking for people who were working on the trafficking issue and found three women: a Catholic nun and two Protestant missionaries. All of them were in their 60s,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz asked if she could join them in their visits to brothels.
“I just went in and started talking to women, about really anything. Language wasn’t a barrier because most sex workers speak English,” she recalled. “But it was a bit weird walking into these places with a nun in full habit.”
After a few months Schoultz began to feel uncomfortable — not with the sex workers, but with her philanthropic colleagues’ proselytizing and “religious agenda.”
“I wasn’t interested in giving out Virgin Mary medallions,” she said.
Schoultz, who teaches English at an international school in Prague, started her own informal volunteer group to help sex workers in 2012, while also embarking on a deeply personal Jewish journey.
Although she believes her father has “Jewish ancestry,” Schoultz was brought up in a Protestant home. Still, she long maintained a deep interest and connection to Judaism which intensified when she pursued her studies in theology. For several years, she regularly attended Orthodox services at 13th-century Old New Synagogue and volunteered for the Prague Jewish Community’s social services department before completing an Orthodox conversion in 2020 with Israeli rabbi David Bohbot. She has now begun her master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the Ashkenazium in Budapest, a division of the secular Milton Friedman University operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
“From the beginning when I knew I wanted to make the conversion, Orthodox Judaism was something I agreed with theologically, it is where I felt most comfortable,” said Shoultz, who describes herself as Modern Orthodox.
Rabbi Dohbot praised Schoultz’s dedication. “This work she does is noble, and isn’t that what most big religions are based on? Showing love and respect for others?” he said.
Schoultz completed an Orthodox conversion to Judaism in 2020. (Courtesy of Schoultz)
Last year, Schoultz achieved another transitional milestone: obtaining Czech government recognition of L’Chaim as a registered nonprofit.
Although L’Chaim is a secular organization, Schoultz sees her work through the lens of tikkun olam, the rabbinical command to repair the world.
“I feel like as a Jewish person, you’re supposed to bring light to the world,” said Schoultz. “And the sex industry is very dark, because even if you choose to be a sex worker, it’s not a job that anybody really enjoys as the customers are often drunk or abusive.”
“It might sound strange, but I feel very connected to Hashem when I am in the brothel, because he is there for me, and for these women too,” she added, using the preferred Orthodox Hebrew term for god.
Schoultz’s co-volunteers, who are mostly not Jewish, are aware of her commitment to the faith.
“After Yael started getting serious about Judaism, she found her path, she was more complete and found her purpose,” said Natalia Synelnykova, who worked with Schoultz to launch L’Chaim. “Everyone would say that their friends are unique, but I have rarely met someone who is so human-centered as Yael, and that is definitely linked to how she sees Judaism.”
Schoultz named her new organization L’Chaim — to life, in Hebrew — as a message to those she seeks to help.
“We want the women in the brothels to have a life because a lot of them feel like they don’t have any life, like they’re barely making it,” she said.
There are about 100 brothels in Prague, according to media reports, and roughly 13,0000 sex workers in the Czech Republic, of which about half are thought to be single mothers. Although sex work is legal, pimping is not, so the brothels operate in a murky legal area that legislators have been trying to address for decades.
Once a hotspot for human trafficking, today the Czech Republic has a relatively low rate of human sex slavery according to government statistics. But Schoultz said the numbers are misleading.
“No one really knows how many trafficked women there are in the country,” she said.
A U.S. State Department report praised the Czech Republic’s efforts to limit trafficking but also noted that the country is more focused on prosecutions of criminals rather than on helping victims. Their stories stay with Schoultz.
“I meet many Nigerian women who may not be locked up in a room, but they are locked up by Juju,” she said, referring to a form of “black magic” that some Nigerian traffickers reportedly use to scare women into prostitution.
She also counsels “Romanian girls who are initially romanced by men that turn out to be traffickers.” A man will have many women he calls “wives,” and each one has a baby with him, “The women give him all their money to support the baby who he keeps as a form of collateral in Romania,” Schoultz said.
(Shoultz turned down JTA’s request for contacts of sex workers she has helped, noting that this would violate L’Chaim’s promise of confidentiality).
The Czech Republic’s leading anti-trafficking organization, La Strada, takes a different orientation towards sex work than L’Chaim, focusing on it more as a legitimate profession that should be organized and regulated.
“We believe women are fully able to decide for themselves if they want to be sex workers and our goal is to provide safety for those who do so, to help them organize, fight stigma and have the rights of all other workers,” said Marketa Hronkova, La Strada’s director. La Strada defines trafficking strictly as those who are physically coerced or blackmailed into providing labor.
Hronkova said there are many sex workers who choose their profession willingly and that it is patronizing and often damaging when those who say they want to help focus exclusively on “pushing women to exit a path they have chosen, as if they have no minds of their own.”
The alternative to sex work, for a single mother, can often put her in an even worse financial situation, she noted. “Our goal is to make sex work safe, not to get women to stop doing it,” said Hromkova.
Concerning L’Chaim, she said as long as its aim was listening to women, and not making them feel ashamed, it could be helpful. La Strada already cooperates with another Czech organization, Pleasure Without Risk, which maintains a neutral stance towards sex work and provides women with access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases as well as counseling.
L’Chaim’s goal, Schoultz explained, is to identify who might be trafficked and provide them with the confidence and practical resources to rebuild their lives. But since getting access to the women requires earning the trust of brothel owners and managers, L’Chaim doesn’t advertise itself as an anti-trafficking group.
“We show up as providing support to women in prostitution, that gets us in the door,” she reflected. L’Chaim has about a dozen volunteers.
It can take Schoultz six months of relationship building before she finds out what brought the client into sex work.
“We start by talking about her kids, talking about her dogs,” said Schoultz “and eventually their stories come out, many involving abuse, trauma and mental health problems.”
She estimated that at the 13 or so brothels she regularly visits in Prague and Brno, at least half the sex workers were not there on a fully voluntary basis.
In the future, Schoultz hopes to create trafficking awareness campaigns and help the customers of sex workers recognize the signs that a woman is working against her will.
The brothel owners are not always pleasant to deal with, Scholtz acknowledged.
“At one place an owner came behind me and kissed my neck on the back of my neck. It was really creepy,” she said.
And despite her modest dress, or tznius, in keeping with her Orthodox values, she said she was pursued by a brothel customer to participate in “group sex.” She fended him off calmly by explaining that she “offered services, but not those kinds of services.”
—
The post Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The one crucial domain in which Iran outwitted Israel
Last summer, a 21-year-old far-left activist named Calla Walsh traveled to Iran for its International Memorial for the Media Martyrs of the Struggle Against the Zionist Regime.
Addressing the crowd in Tehran, Walsh said: “We all have a duty, when we go back to the countries we came from, to share the truth we saw here and to struggle against Zionism and imperialism.”
“Glory to all the martyrs. Glory to the axis of resistance,” she added, also saying “Death to America. Death to Israel.”
Not every leftist American activist is jetting to Tehran to spout propaganda. But the language that Walsh — who supported Sen. Ed Markey’s 2020 campaign, which I worked on — used should be familiar to anyone tracking anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
What may be less familiar: It’s language that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been key to spreading.
In the current war and in recent years, Israel has proven far more capable in degrading the Islamic Republic as a military actor than in undercutting the influence of the ayatollahs’ ideas, in which anti-Zionism, antisemitism and anti-imperialism are melded into a single ideology. This framework becomes all the more potent when Israel’s government hands its critics ammunition: Settlement expansion, the killing of Palestinian civilians and a rightward lurch have combined to make caricatures of Zionism feel, to many, like a good enough approximation of the truth.
But what the ayatollahs demonstrated better than anyone is that criticism of Israel rooted in anti-imperialism is often just a vehicle for antisemitism.
The bait and switch
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s hardline founder, pitched the Iranian revolution as one of social justice.
In 1963, Khomeini declared that the “great aim of Islam” was “to prevent oppression, arbitrary rule, and the violation of the law” — abuses heavily associated with Iran’s repressive government under the Shah. He spoke to the Iranian public in terms with clear parallels to the liberal canon of the American founders, promising citizens a “government that will assure their happiness and allow them to live lives worthy of human beings.”
As Abbas Milani, with whom I studied at Stanford University, recently wrote in The New York Times, this was a bait-and-switch: a liberal mirage used as a tactic to consolidate support for the revolution. Khomeini cast those principles aside the moment he entered power.
But even before the revolution, Khomeini’s pronouncements about Jews foreshadowed the illiberal oppression that was to come.
“We see today that the Jews (may God curse them) have meddled with the text of the Qu’ran,” Khomeini declared in a series of lectures on Islamic governance in 1970. “We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world.”
“Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that — God forbid! — they may one day achieve their goal, and the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day.”
Khomeini’s Jew-hatred appeared to be a genuine ideological commitment, rather than just a political maneuver. In 1977, on the eve of the revolution, he said that “The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and still they are not satisfied.”
Anti-Judaism to anti-Zionism
Israel became the central focus of Khomeini’s conspiratorial belief in Jewish subversion. As such, his objections to Israel often emphasized its Jewish nature rather than its policies.
In 1970, Khomeini lambasted the Shah for extending “his recognition to a government of unbelievers — of Jews, at that — thereby affronting Islam, the Qur’an, the Muslim governments, and all the Muslim people.” (The Shah never formally recognized Israel, but did have unofficial representation in Tel Aviv. One Iranian official at the time described it as “relations of love without a marriage contract.”)
In 1971, Khomeini called attention to “Israel, that stubborn enemy of Islam and the Quran, which a few years ago attempted to corrupt the text of the Quran.” Replace “Israel” with “Jews” and that statement is all but identical to his earlier accusation that Jews had altered a holy text.
From theology, Khomeini turned to pathology. Eight years after the revolution, he spoke of Israel as a “prevalent, festering, and cancerous Zionist tumor.” Israel must be destroyed, he said, to keep Muslim countries “safe from the evil of this unclean enemy” and the “unclean presence of the Zionists” — taking issue not with Israeli political actions but with the cleanliness of its people, a classic antisemitic trope.
Khomeini referred to imperialism, too, as a cancer. In a 1972 letter to students in North America, he wrote that “Israel was born out of the collusion and agreement of the imperialist states.” Khomeini had previously referred to Jews as the “servants of imperialism,” and framed Islam as “the school of those who struggle against imperialism.”
Colonialism’s pernicious legacy and antisemitic tropes of Jewish domination made it easy for Khomeini to package opposition to colonial rule with opposition to Israel. Muslims, Khomeini said, needed to “stop colonialism and Zionism” on the basis of “human duty, brotherhood, and rational and Islamic standards.”
Khomeini’s vision was clear: resistance to imperialism, opposition to Israel and hatred of Jews were all the same cause.
Khamenei exports revolution
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989, committed himself to spreading that vision. His English-language account on X amassed more than two million followers, and issued pronouncements such as “the long-lasting virus of Zionism will be uprooted thanks to the determination and faith of the youth.” In 2022, he spoke of “Zionist capitalists” as “a plague for the whole world.”
After the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel , Khamenei addressed American campus protesters, telling them: “You have now formed a branch of the Resistance Front.” He invoked, in that address, “the global Zionist elite” that “owns most U.S. and European media corporations.” He repeatedly refused to call Israel by its name, referring to it instead as the “Zionist regime” or “Zionist entity.”
That wasn’t the first time he explicitly appealed to Western, left-leaning youth. A 2015 letter he issued after Islamist gunmen attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris explicitly addressed “the youth in Europe and North America.” The letter referenced slavery and colonialism, and encouraged young Westerners to study Islam for themselves rather than let it be defined by the West, who “hypocritically introduce their own recruited terrorists as representatives of Islam.” Khamenei notably did not condemn the act of terror itself.
The letter did not specifically engage with issues surrounding Israel, but it marked a notable moment in Khamenei’s efforts to establish connections with young Westerners. And, alarmingly, the considerable energy he and the Islamic Republic spent in translating their ideology to Western, English-speaking, progressive audiences worked.
The echo chamber
Calla Walsh’s pronouncements in Tehran were extreme. But they still pointed to an escalating tenor of activist discourse that is increasingly shaping the public’s attitudes toward Israel.
Democratic Socialists of America chapters across the country have passed resolutions defining Zionism as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project,” with some insisting on the need to oppose it “by any means necessary.”
On TikTok, video after video uses Khamenei’s framing of Israel as a “Zionist entity,” from a clip saying that “the American public has woken up to the Zionist entity known as Israel” to another decrying “the cowardly Arabs who normalize relations with the Zionist entity.” A coordinator of the sham charity Samidoun, which conducted fundraising for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in North America and Europe, stated in October 2022 that “we all have a right and a duty to resist the murderous Zionist entity.”
Most of the echoes between activists and the ayatollahs represent rhetorical alignment, rather than literal coordination. But that alignment has had profound consequences for how the world thinks about Israel, and about Jews.
The road ahead
We do not know how this military campaign ends. But no matter what happens, the ideology of the ayatollahs has already outlasted Khamenei.
Even the reactions to his death prove it: Some leftist organizers have put together vigils for the slain dictator. One coalition of activist groups in New York wrote that “we stand with Ayatollah Khamenei because he stood for us” and lauded him for speaking “about the shared struggle of oppressed people.”
The confluence of anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism didn’t originate solely with the ayatollahs. Many other forces, including some academic theorists at American institutions such as Edward Said and Judith Butler, played a role.
And many protesters opposing Israel, or the current war, may have no idea that some of the rhetoric they use has ties to the oppressive regime in Tehran. The genuine horror of the war in Gaza, ongoing crackdowns in the West Bank, the sense that the U.S. has enabled these abuses, and a wariness of American adventurism in the Middle East can do a lot to explain public opinion.
But the rhetorical ties are there all the same. And while this war may determine crucial aspects of the future of the Middle East, it will not undo the damage the ayatollahs’ ideas have already wrought.
Khomeini insisted he distinguished between Jews and Zionists, even as he cursed Jews in one breath and condemned Zionists in the next. When today’s activists make that same claim, we should ask whether the distinction they draw is any more meaningful than his was.
The post The one crucial domain in which Iran outwitted Israel appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘This isn’t the Gov. Newsom that we know’: One week after apartheid remark, calls to reconsider remain unheeded
One week after California Gov. Gavin Newsom caused a stir by using the term “apartheid” to describe Israel, Jewish leaders in the state and beyond — have tried in vain to get him to walk back his statement.
Those seeking answers include allies of the term-limited governor, a likely presidential candidate, who have defended his record and even the comment itself.
Newsom said March 3 on a podcast that Israel had been talked about “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” and suggested that a time may come when the U.S. should reconsider its military aid to Israel.
Some Jewish leaders have said the apartheid comment had been taken out of context, and representatives of Jewish groups who met with the governor’s staff following Newsom’s remark called the conversation constructive. But Newsom has not backtracked in public appearances since then, leaving those leaders split on whether a serious contender for the 2028 Democratic nomination — long seen as a champion of Jewish causes — is plotting a new course on the national stage.
Newsom’s clarification two days later — noting that he was referencing a Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times about the direction Israel was headed — offered them little succor.
“It’s out of step,” said David Bocarsly, executive director of Jewish California, a group that represents more than 30 Jewish community organizations in the state. “This isn’t the Governor Newsom that we know.”
Newsom’s office did not respond to an inquiry.
‘Sort of an apartheid state’
Newsom made the remark in a live taping of Pod Save America, a podcast hosted by former Obama administration staffers Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor. The duo, who are among the Democratic mainstream’s most vocal Israel critics, asked Newsom whether he thought the time had come to reevaluate American military support for the country.
In an extended response, Newsom brought up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The issue of Bibi is interesting, because he’s got his own domestic issues,” Newsom said. “He’s trying to stay out of jail. He’s got an election coming up. He’s potentially on the ropes. He’s got folks, the hard line, that want to annex the West—the West Bank. I mean, Friedman and others are talking about it appropriately as a sort of an apartheid state.”
As to whether the United States should consider rethinking military support for Israel down the road, Newsom replied, “I don’t think you have a choice but that consideration.”
Newsom’s use of the term and apparent willingness to break from pro-Israel orthodoxy sent heads spinning. Jewish Insider described the interview as a “hard left” shift. A column in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles assailed Newsom for “finger in the wind politics.” And secular outlets like Politico and The Guardian reported that Newsom had likened Israel to an apartheid state.
Even organizations that have historically enjoyed a collaborative relationship with Newsom publicly condemned the remarks. Jewish California, whose member groups include the state’s local Jewish federations, took to Instagram to call them “inflammatory.”
Newsom said in a subsequent live appearance March 5 that he was referencing Friedman’s recent assertion that Israel annexing the West Bank without giving Palestinians equal rights would create an apartheid system.
“I was specifically referring to a Tom Friedman column last week, where Tom used that word, ‘apartheid,’ as it relates to the direction Bibi is going, particularly on the annexation of the West Bank,” he said. “I’m very angry with what he is doing.”
The clarification wasn’t strong enough for the Jewish California coalition. Bocarsly told The Jewish News of Northern California last week the groups hoped to see a definitive public statement from the governor that he continues to support funding for Israel’s defense and that he “doesn’t believe that a thriving, pluralistic and democratic society, as it is in its current state, is an apartheid state.”
Tye Gregory, chief executive of the JCRC Bay Area — a Jewish California member group — added to the outlet that “we need to hear directly from the governor.”
The coalition left its conversation with Newsom officials believing such a statement was forthcoming, but Bocarsly said his optimism was fading.
“It’s been several days, and we haven’t seen the clarification that we had hoped,” Bocarsly said. “And we’re still waiting.”
A loaded word
Some international and Israeli human rights organizations say Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the treatment of Palestinians in the territory already constitutes apartheid.
The term was originally used to describe the system of institutionalized segregation in South Africa that granted the minority white population official higher status, denied nonwhites the right to vote and enforced a range of other forms of economic, political and social domination. Those applying the apartheid term to Israel point to the Israeli citizenship, voting rights, freedom of movement and legal protections granted in the West Bank to Israeli residents but not Palestinians in the territory.
But many Jews say that any charge of apartheid — whether referring to the present or a hypothetical future — oversimplifies the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is used as a cudgel to delegitimize the Jewish state, where within its boundaries Israeli Arabs can vote and travel freely.
Israel annexing the West Bank — a stated goal of far-right ministers in the Netanyahu coalition like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — would replace the premise of Palestinian sovereignty in the territory, which is officially governed by the Palestinian Authority, and enshrine the two-tier system. Such a step, Friedman wrote in a Feb. 17 column, would amount to apartheid.
“It’s been several days, and we haven’t seen the clarification that we had hoped. And we’re still waiting.”
David BocarslyExecutive Director, Jewish California
Bocarsly believed that Newsom’s reference to apartheid had been misinterpreted — even after the governor clarified his views — as describing Israel today, rather than a future scenario.
Nevertheless, he said, by invoking the term “apartheid” at all the governor had played into an effort among Israel’s detractors to make use of terms like “apartheid” and “genocide” to describe the Jewish state’s actions a litmus test for elected leaders.
Only a month earlier, Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener — then the co-chair of California Legislative Jewish Caucus — called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, after first declining to during a congressional candidate debate and getting jeers in response.
“For someone as close to our community as Gavin Newsom is, I think it was disappointing and painful for a lot of people to see that he was falling into this test,” Bocarsly said. “We want to know that when it comes down to it, that he is willing to avoid criticizing Israel in that way.”
Halie Soifer, chief executive of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said Newsom’s initial comments had been taken out of context, and she was satisfied with his later clarification. Instead, she objected more to Newsom’s suggestion that the U.S. might eventually withhold military aid to Israel. The JDCA rejects withholding or conditioning such aid in its platform.
Still, while the “apartheid” phrase got the most attention, Soifer suggested it was just as revealing when — in the same podcast appearance — Newsom had described Israel’s rightward turn under Netanyahu as “heartbreaking.”
“It’s indicating his emotions are actually in this but also disagreement with the policies of the current Israeli government,” Soifer said. “And that is a view that polling has consistently shown is held by the vast majority of American Jewish voters.”
But she acknowledged that further backtracking would help, noting that she had listened to the section of the podcast multiple times to get a clear idea of his intent.
“I don’t think the average person is doing that,” Soifer said in an interview, “and he shouldn’t assume that either.”
The governor you know
The comments seemed to break with Newsom’s track record of verbal and legislative support for Jewish life both in the state and in Israel.
During his seven years in the governor’s office, he has funded the largest nonprofit security grant program in the nation, signed a landmark bill aimed at addressing antisemitism in public education and poured some $50 million into Holocaust survivor assistance programs. He also visited Israel to meet with Oct. 7 survivors less than two weeks after the attacks.
That made Newsom’s failure to hedge in a more fulsome way all the more confounding for his Jewish allies.
Gregg Solkovits, president of Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, a Democratic party club, thought the governor had been intentionally vague — and was intentionally waiting out the Jewish criticism — to “protect his left flank” as a future presidential candidate.
“He knows that in the upcoming election, there will be Bernie-supportive candidates who are going to be running for the nomination, and he will be attacked for being too pro-Israel, which he has been consistently,” Solkovits said. “Would I wish that he had not taken that approach entirely? Of course. I also understand he’s running for president.”
Soifer offered that Newsom might just be waiting for the right opportunity.
“He doesn’t actually legislate on this particular issue, so perhaps he feels he doesn’t need to clarify,” she said. “But I think it would be helpful for him to clarify that, especially if he’s seeking an opportunity at some point in the future to weigh in on such decisions.”
The post ‘This isn’t the Gov. Newsom that we know’: One week after apartheid remark, calls to reconsider remain unheeded appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Norway Police Apprehend 3 Suspects in US Embassy Bombing
Police vehicles outside the US embassy, after a loud bang was reported at the site, in Oslo, Norway, March 8, 2026. Photo: Javad Parsa/NTB/via REUTERS
Norwegian police said on Wednesday they had apprehended three brothers suspected of carrying out Sunday’s bombing at the US embassy in Oslo, in an attack investigators have branded an act of terrorism.
The powerful early-morning blast from an improvised explosive device (IED) damaged the entrance to the embassy‘s consular section but caused no injuries, Norwegian authorities have said.
The three suspects, all in their 20s, are Norwegian citizens with a family background from Iraq, police said.
“They are suspected of a terror bombing,” Police Attorney Christian Hatlo told reporters.
“We believe they detonated a powerful bomb at the U.S. embassy with the intention of taking lives or causing significant damage,” Hatlo said, adding that none of the suspects had so far been interrogated.
One of the men was believed to have planted the bomb while the two others were believed to have taken part in the plot, Hatlo said.
The brothers, who were not named, had not previously been subject to police investigations, he added.
A lawyer representing one of the three men said he had only briefly met with his client and that it was too early to say how the suspect would plead.
Lawyers representing the two others did not immediately respond to requests for comment when contacted by Reuters.
“Although it is early in the investigation, it is important that the police have achieved what they characterize as a breakthrough in the case,” Norway‘s Minister of Justice and Public Security Astri Aas-Hansen said in a statement.
Images of one of the suspects released by police on Monday showed a hooded person, whose face was not visible, wearing dark clothes and carrying a bag or rucksack.
Investigators on Monday said one hypothesis was that the incident was “an act of terrorism” linked to the war in the Middle East, but that other possible motives were also being explored.
Police are now investigating whether the bombing was done on behalf of a foreign state, Hatlo said, reiterating that they were also looking into other possible motives.
Europe has been on alert for possible attacks as the US and Israel conduct air strikes on Iran and Iran strikes Israel and US targets in the Middle East.
On Monday, a synagogue in the Belgian city of Liege was damaged by a blast that authorities called an antisemitic attack. It was not clear who was behind it.