RSS
6 Jewish things to know about Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate who has suggested ending aid to Israel
(JTA) – Ahead of the first Republican presidential debate, the candidate with the least political experience is making some of the biggest headlines — in part due to his views on Israel.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old biotech entrepreneur who has never held elected office, is seeing growing support for his long-shot candidacy. A recent poll placed him neck-and-neck in second place with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the crowded GOP field, and the RealClearPolitics polling average places him in third.
Both candidates still lag far behind former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner. But Ramaswamy’s rising numbers mean he will share the center of Wednesday night’s debate stage on Fox News, and a recent memo from a pro-DeSantis Super PAC called on the governor to “take a sledgehammer” to Ramaswamy at the debate. DeSantis and the other hopefuls are expected to attack Ramaswamy’s many unconventional views, including a call to eventually end United States aid to Israel.
The Ohio-born businessman, whose net worth is estimated at more than $600 million, has based his campaign largely around tackling “wokeness,” a term that has become shorthand for conservative criticism of progressive values. But he’s also made headlines for more outré proposals, such as a pledge to eliminate the FBI and Department of Education, a call to require civics tests for young voters and a desire to learn “the truth about 9/11.”
Among his policies is a call to phase out U.S. aid to Israel by 2028, which separates him from the largely pro-Israel Republican establishment. Ramaswamy has also drawn attention for criticizing a bill signed by DeSantis that penalizes antisemitic harassment and has called to repeal a law banning religious discrimination in employment.
Before he became a presidential candidate, he was involved in a Jewish society at Yale University and benefited from a fellowship named after the brother of George Soros, the progressive Jewish megadonor.
Here’s what to know about Vivek Ramaswamy and the Jews.
He has floated ending U.S. aid to Israel.
In June, while campaigning in New Hampshire, Ramaswamy suggested that he would be open to ending aid to Israel as “part of a broader disengagement with the Middle East.” He later walked back those comments. But last week, he told actor and podcaster Russell Brand that he does, in fact, want to end U.S. aid to Israel in 2028, the year when the current U.S. commitment to provide $3.8 billion annually to Israel expires.
Ramaswamy said that decision would come as Israel receives recognition from more countries in the Middle East. Israel has signed normalization deals with several states in the region in recent years, a framework called the Abraham Accords, and is now pursuing a treaty with Saudi Arabia. Ramaswamy told the Jewish News Syndicate that he’d also like to spearhead Israeli accords with Indonesia and Oman.
“Come 2028, that additional aid won’t be necessary in order to still have the kind of stability that we’d actually have in the Middle East by having Israel more integrated in with its partners,” he said on a show Brand hosts on the video platform Rumble.
In advocating an end to the aid package, Ramaswamy has perhaps unintentionally aligned himself with the progressive left, whose members have increasingly supported conditioning or halting aid to Israel due to its treatment of Palestinians. Recently, New York Times columnist Nick Kristof argued that the aid dollars would be better spent helping poorer countries. And some voices on the right have also called for ending aid to Israel, arguing that it makes Israel beholden to the United States.
But those views are not shared by Ramaswamy’s most prominent Republican rivals. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has criticized his position on aid to Israel, while DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence have made support for Israel a cornerstone of their campaigns.
The Republican Jewish Coalition has also implored Ramaswamy to change course. Matt Brooks, the group’s CEO, wrote in an open letter that “it makes much more sense to keep Israel in the family of countries with an interest in buying and using American capabilities” — which the aid package requires.
On other Israel-related policies, Ramaswamy is more in line with his party’s mainstream. Alongside supporting the Abraham Accords, he praised Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and has attacked U.S. funding for programs benefiting Palestinians.
He says ‘donors’ are behind legislation combating antisemitism.
While Ramaswamy has called antisemitism “a symptom of something that is broken in our society,” he has spoken harshly about a law DeSantis enacted that penalizes antisemitic acts in Florida.
In June, he tweeted that DeSantis’ signing of the law, which criminalizes the distribution of antisemitic flyers on private property, was done “at his donors’ request.” After blowback from the conservative commentariat over his characterization of the law, he tweeted again about it — this time taking aim at “the censorship czars at Twitter” for appending a note to the tweet, which he partially blamed on “DeSantis megadonor David Sacks,” who is Jewish.
In a subsequent interview with Jewish Insider, Ramaswamy said the DeSantis bill didn’t pass his own “litmus test” because he saw it as “a viewpoint discrimination law.” He added that “bad speech” has to be countered with “free speech and open debate.” He pointed to a famous Supreme Court case permitting neo-Nazis to march in the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, as an example of a bigotry-related issue that was “decided correctly.”
“I stand fiercely against bigotry and hatred and harassing speech,” he added.
He was in a Jewish leadership society at Yale.
Ramaswamy told JNS that he was one of the “key members” of Shabtai, a Jewish alternative to the “secret societies” at Yale University, where he attended law school. He said the society’s co-founder and rabbinical adviser, Rabbi Shmully Hecht, is a mentor of his.
Shabtai was founded at Yale in 1996 and receives extensive financial support from Israeli-American tech mogul Benny Shabtai, a major backer of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Though founded on Jewish values, the society has a diverse membership. It also counts Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who himself ran for president in 2020, among its alumni.
Ramaswamy describes his time with Shabtai as formative, and the group has touted him as an alum. Hecht did not respond to a request for comment.
Volodymyr Zelensky is pictured at a welcoming ceremony in Kyiv, Ukraine, Nov. 26, 2022. (Philip Reynaers / Pool / Photonews via Getty Images)
He claims Ukraine’s Jewish president is mistreating Jews.
While Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky has earned admirers across the Western world for his conduct in his country’s war against Russia, Ramaswamy isn’t impressed.
The candidate told Jewish Insider that Zelensky — whose Jewish identity has been targeted by Russian propaganda — has himself mistreated Jews in Ukraine. Ramaswamy did not offer evidence to support that claim, which echoes claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin made to justify his invasion of Ukraine last year.
“I would just say that there are open questions about his treatment of religious minorities, including but not limited to Jews in Ukraine, that I think should be among the reasons we should stop short of holding him out as some sort of hero,” the candidate said. He did not provide examples when asked, though he said that Zelensky’s merging of all Ukrainian TV channels into a single station last year and his dissolution of political parties with ties to Russia would “create the risk for” antisemitism.
Ramaswamy is not the only Republican to criticize U.S. support for Ukraine, a stance that Trump and DeSantis have also questioned. He told Jewish Insider that he sees “protecting Israel” as one of the United States’ “far higher priorities.”
He wants to repeal a civil rights-era law forbidding religious discrimination in employment.
“Reverse racism is racism,” Ramaswamy recently stated in a list of “truths” he said were fundamental to his campaign. To that end, he has promised to repeal Executive Order 11246, a more-than-50-year-old law forbidding federal contractors from engaging in employment discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion or national origin. “Time to restore colorblind meritocracy once and for all,” Ramaswamy wrote in the New York Post.
Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as part of his flurry of civil rights legislation, the order has long been associated with affirmative action, a longtime bugbear of the right. But the order has also been drawn on by Jewish groups to protest employer discrimination against Jews. In 1966, the American Jewish Committee cited it to protest commercial banks that it said were virtually excluding all qualified Jews from working for them.
He reportedly paid a Wikipedia editor to remove a Soros family connection.
In 2011, Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, received a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans — funding to help immigrants and first-generation Americans earn college degrees. The fellowship is named for the brother of progressive Jewish megadonor George Soros, a frequent target of leading Republicans who features in a range of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Shortly before he announced his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy reportedly paid a Wikipedia editor to scrub his fellowship from his entry on the site. He has since gone on to criticize Soros and his family from the campaign trail.
—
The post 6 Jewish things to know about Vivek Ramaswamy, the GOP candidate who has suggested ending aid to Israel appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks
Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While US President Joe Biden hailed the new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on Tuesday as a “courageous” step toward peace, security experts and residents of northern Israel voiced starkly contrasting sentiments, criticizing the agreement as falling far short of addressing the ongoing threats posed by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group.
“I applaud the courageous decision made by the leaders of Lebanon and Israel to end the violence. It reminds us that peace is possible,” Biden said one day before the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday.
He added that it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” vowing that Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”
But according to Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — the ceasefire deal, the details of which have not been made public, is nowhere close to establishing peace.
“Let’s not be mistaken. Ceasefire is not peace,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “There is a gap between the two and in order to bridge the gap, we need a thorough change in Lebanon and in the Iranian involvement in the region.”
According to Zehavi, the deal was problematic at the outset because it was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and has been criticized for its historical ineffectiveness. Zehavi highlighted the failures of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] troops in enforcing the resolution in the past, warning that the same could happen again.
As part of the deal, Israel has insisted on retaining the ability to enforce the resolution independently, but this approach carries risks, Zehavi said. “If we enforce the resolution, it means that there won’t be a ceasefire. If there isn’t a ceasefire, it means that Hezbollah will retaliate, and we will continue the ongoing fighting.”
Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the deal within hours of its signing, with operatives disguised as civilians entering restricted zones in southern Lebanon, including the villages of Kila, Mais a-Jabal, and Markaba, despite warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Another sticking point is the lack of safeguards preventing Hezbollah from rearming, leaving Israel reliant on Lebanese assurances. “After what happened on [last] Oct. 7, Israelis are not willing to enable Hezbollah to recover,” Zehavi asserted. “We cannot rely on just promises; we need to make sure that Hezbollah is not capable of threatening us and our families over here in the north.”
The international community, Zehavi argued, has a crucial role to play in pressuring Lebanon to sever its ties with Hezbollah. So long as Lebanon does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, she said, the Shi’ite Muslim group will continue to exert influence over the country and therefore pose a threat to neighboring Israel. Members of the group hold influential positions in the Lebanese government, including ministers who control border crossings and airports, facilitating the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon.
Zehavi also pointed to Iran’s declaration that it will help rebuild both Lebanon and Hezbollah, even while continuing to funnel weapons and financial aid into the terrorist group through smuggling routes.
“As long as the ayatollahs of Iran continue to nourish proxy militias in the Middle East against Israel, we are not going to see peace,” she said.
Other northern residents similarly argued that halting the fight against Hezbollah now would give the terrorist group an opportunity to rebuild its arsenal, strengthen its forces, and potentially replicate the scale of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel’s northern region.
“We never learn. Just like in 2006, and many other times, we stop at the brink of total victory, handing our enemies the opportunity to rebuild and return years later, stronger and deadlier than before,” said Moti Vanunu, a resident who was evacuated from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
Gabi Naaman, mayor of the battered northern city of Shlomi, expressed skepticism that the ceasefire would bring lasting security to Israel’s northern residents.
“Everything we’ve seen indicates that the next round is inevitable, whether it’s in a month, two months, or ten years,” he said.
Despite her reservations, Zehavi explained that Israel had no real alternative but to accept the ceasefire, citing the need to provide northern residents with a return to normalcy and to provide the opportunity to the IDF to resupply ammunition and allow soldiers time to recover. “We had to choose between two bad options,” she said.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in the north were forced to evacuate their homes amid unrelenting rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah, which began firing on Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre southern Israel from Gaza. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah across the Lebanon border until it ramped up its military efforts over the last two months, moving ground forces into southern Lebanon and destroying much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes.
While Zehavi viewed the timing of the campaign’s start in September — ahead of the challenges of fighting during the winter months — and not in May as a strategic error, she applauded the army’s achievements of the past two months.
In a poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Tuesday night, half of those surveyed felt there was no clear winner in the war against Hezbollah. Twenty percent of respondents believed the IDF emerged victorious in the war, while 19 percent thought Hezbollah prevailed. A further 11 percent were unsure who had the upper hand.
The post Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.