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Netanyahu speaks with and praises Elon Musk, who has recently drawn criticism from multiple Israeli ministries
(JTA) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he spoke by phone with Elon Musk on Sunday, calling the businessman and Twitter CEO “a person whose intelligence and contribution to humanity I greatly appreciate.”
The tech mogul, currently the world’s richest individual despite notching steep losses at Twitter, has drawn controversy for his tweets about the Holocaust survivor and liberal megadonor George Soros and about Israeli data on COVID-19. The U.S. antisemitism envoy, Deborah Lipstadt, decried the Soros tweets as trafficking in antisemitic tropes, while Israel’s health ministry called him out for sharing “fake news” about the country’s COVID record.
Netanyahu did not mention those recent statements in his account of their “long conversation,” instead noting that the two had discussed artificial intelligence, an area Musk is reportedly preparing to enter.
“He expressed his view that Israel could become a significant global player in the field,” said Netanyahu, who added that he planned to convene a team to bring more AI into Israeli society. He added, “Just as we turned Israel into a global cyber power, we will also do so in artificial intelligence.”
Musk himself has not addressed his phone call with Netanyahu. On Monday he planned to host a live event with Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has compared COVID-19 vaccines to “Hitler’s Germany.” Musk, too, has implied that the vaccines — which Netanyahu eagerly made Israel the first country to offer widely — are not needed, last week joining a Twitter conversation questioning Israeli data about the number of healthy Israelis who have died as a result of COVID-19.
Israel’s Health Ministry responded to him, saying, “Fake news is dangerous.” It was the second Israeli ministry to criticize Musk’s recent remarks, even as others in the government have praised him.
After Musk suggested that Soros “hates humanity” and “reminds me of Magneto,” the “X-Men” villain who is also a Holocaust survivor, Jewish groups including the Anti-Defamation League condemned his comments. Israel’s foreign ministry said he was encouraging antisemitism on the social media platform.
But the country’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, disavowed his own ministry’s critique. Also rushing to Musk’s defense was Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of Diaspora affairs who is charged with combating antisemitism.
A member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, Chikli praised Musk, tweeting that “the vast majority of Israeli citizens see Elon Musk as an amazing entrepreneur and a role model,” and added that criticizing Soros was “quite the opposite” of antisemitism. He later told The Atlantic that he had not been responding to Musk’s actual tweets about Soros, and refused to say whether he believed they were antisemitic.
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BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage
(JTA) — The head of BBC and its top news executive have quit amid allegations that the network misled viewers in coverage of President Donald Trump and the Gaza war.
The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the broadcaster, who accused it of anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias. The memo was published in the right-leaning British newspaper The Telegraph last week.
Prescott accused the BBC of selectively splicing footage of Trump’s speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, in an episode of its documentary show “Panorama.” He said the show patched together sections of the remarks to suggest that Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
These words came from two parts of the speech spoken almost an hour apart, omitting a part in which Trump said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” After Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, in which he said the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol.
Prescott’s memo accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimize Israeli suffering” to “paint Israel as the aggressor” in Gaza. The BBC previously faced backlash over failing to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official, along with using a contributor who said on social media that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did.” The network was also criticized for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
The BBC has been scrutinized from all political sides over its coverage of Israel and Gaza. Presenter David Yelland called the resignations of Davie and Turness a “coup” by members of the BBC Board who had “systematically undermined” Davie’s team.
Some insiders have raised concerns about Prescott’s friendship with Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who played a key role in Prescott’s appointment as BBC adviser, according to The Guardian. Gibb was the director of communications for former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May between 2017 and 2019.
Both Trump and the Israeli government applauded the resignations in social media statements.
Israel’s foreign ministry said Davie’s resignation “underscores the deep-seated bias that has long characterised the BBC’s coverage of Israel” but said the problem was not limited to the broadcaster.
“Far too many news outlets are promoting politics disguised as facts, amplifying Hamas’s fake campaigns,” it tweeted. “The time has come for real accountability to restore integrity, fair and factual journalism.”
The chair of the BBC Board, Samir Shah, is expected to apologize for the editing of Trump’s speech on Monday, in a move meant to blunt potential damage to the U.K.-U.S. relationship.
The post BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage appeared first on The Forward.
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Hamas returns remains of hostage held for 11 years as attention deepens around postwar planning
(JTA) — Hamas returned the remains of Hadar Goldin, an Israeli soldier it murdered and kidnapped in 2014, to Israel on Sunday, bringing the number of hostages whose remains it still holds in Gaza to four.
All four were killed when Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The number has shrunk steadily in recent days as Hamas has repatriated the remains of half a dozen hostages, including Itay Chen, the final American-Israeli held in Gaza.
The repatriations have come as Hamas has faced steep pressure, including from U.S. President Donald Trump, to uphold its end of the ceasefire deal that ended fighting in Gaza last month. As part of the deal, Hamas agreed to return all living and deceased hostages immediately, but while 20 living hostages were freed at one time last month, the group has located and released deceased hostages more slowly, sometimes with snafus that have drawn allegations of ceasefire violations.
Now, with the central demand of the first phase nearly satisfied, attention is increasingly turning to what happens next in Gaza, which has effectively been partitioned between areas under Israeli control and areas under Hamas control.
Trump’s plan calls for Israel to fully withdraw over time, but the United States has so far fallen short of convening an “International Stabilization Force” that would run Gaza and allow for its reconstruction. Israel has rejected Turkish participation and on Monday, the United Arab Emirates announced that it had ruled out joining for now.
Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law who has played a key role in negotiations toward ending the war, is back in Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. No details of their meeting were immediately disclosed.
Trump, meanwhile, is meeting with a different foreign leader in Washington on Monday — Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa. Al-Sharaa, who seized power last year, has sought to project a moderate profile after rising to prominence as an Islamist leader and has permitted Jews and representatives of the Syrian Jewish diaspora to visit Syria, though the tiny number of local Jews remaining say they are not optimistic about a resurgence of their once-mighty community.
Trump has suggested that Syria could join the Abraham Accords, normalization deals with Israel that expanded last week to include Kazakhstan, but that possibility feels far off.
The post Hamas returns remains of hostage held for 11 years as attention deepens around postwar planning appeared first on The Forward.
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BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage
The head of BBC and its top news executive have quit amid allegations that the network misled viewers in coverage of President Donald Trump and the Gaza war.
The BBC’s director general Tim Davie and CEO of News Deborah Turness resigned on Sunday after a leaked report by Michael Prescott, a former standards adviser to the broadcaster, who accused it of anti-Trump and anti-Israel bias. The memo was published in the right-leaning British newspaper The Telegraph last week.
Prescott accused the BBC of selectively splicing footage of Trump’s speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, in an episode of its documentary show “Panorama.” He said the show patched together sections of the remarks to suggest that Trump said, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell.”
These words came from two parts of the speech spoken almost an hour apart, omitting a part in which Trump said he wanted supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” After Trump’s speech on Jan. 6, in which he said the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, his supporters violently stormed the United States Capitol.
Prescott’s memo accused BBC Arabic of choosing to “minimize Israeli suffering” to “paint Israel as the aggressor” in Gaza. The BBC previously faced backlash over failing to identify the narrator of a Gaza documentary as the son of a Hamas government official, along with using a contributor who said on social media that Jews should be burned “as Hitler did.” The network was also criticized for livestreaming a Glastonbury performance of the punk group Bob Vylan that included chants of “Death to the IDF.”
The BBC has been scrutinized from all political sides over its coverage of Israel and Gaza. Presenter David Yelland called the resignations of Davie and Turness a “coup” by members of the BBC Board who had “systematically undermined” Davie’s team.
Some insiders have raised concerns about Prescott’s friendship with Robbie Gibb, a member of the BBC board who played a key role in Prescott’s appointment as BBC adviser, according to The Guardian. Gibb was the director of communications for former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May between 2017 and 2019.
Both Trump and the Israeli government applauded the resignations in social media statements.
Israel’s foreign ministry said Davie’s resignation “underscores the deep-seated bias that has long characterised the BBC’s coverage of Israel” but said the problem was not limited to the broadcaster.
“Far too many news outlets are promoting politics disguised as facts, amplifying Hamas’s fake campaigns,” it tweeted. “The time has come for real accountability to restore integrity, fair and factual journalism.”
The chair of the BBC Board, Samir Shah, is expected to apologize for the editing of Trump’s speech on Monday, in a move meant to blunt potential damage to the U.K.-U.S. relationship.
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The post BBC execs resign amid scandal over Trump interview edit and Gaza war coverage appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.