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Israeli Survivors of Oct. 7 Massacre Detained, Mistreated by British Officials at UK Airport, Jewish Leaders Say
Two UK Border Force officers accused of discriminating against two Israeli survivors of Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughter across southern Israel. Photo: Screenshot from X/Twitter
Two Jewish, Israeli nationals who survived Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel were detained and subjected to discrimination while being processed at Manchester Airport in the United Kingdom on Sunday, a local Jewish civil rights group has charged.
The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester & Region (JRC) on Monday sent a letter alleging that two Israeli men who had traveled to the UK to discuss narrowly escaping Hamas’ attack on the Re’im Music Festival — where Palestinian terrorists para-glided into the venue, murdered more than 300 young people, and kidnapped dozens of others on Oct. 7. — were singled out by multiple British Border Force officers upon presenting their Israeli passports and explaining why they were there. According to the letter, the officers forced the Israelis to submit to two hours of “detention and interrogation,” as well as abusive comments.
“The only reason for their detention and interrogation was because they are Israeli. We are in possession of a video which shows a male officer speaking in aggressive terms to the two males,” JRC alleged in the letter. “They were detained for two hours. When finally released, the same Border Police Officer said, ‘they had to make sure that you are not going to do what you are doing in Gaza over here.’”
JRC condemned the officers’ “discriminatory treatment” of the men, describing it as antisemitic “abuse” warranting an investigation by the British government and the Manchester Airport Group as a “matter of urgency.”
“We unequivocally condemn the fact that Israeli nationals were detained and subjected to abuse by a Border Police Officer,” the letter stated. “The comment upon their release proves that this individual was motivated by antisemitic intent.”
On Tuesday, a Manchester Airport communications officer told The Algemeiner that it is not the employer of the two Border Force officers in question but said that the allegations “are serious.” The airport has urged the British Home Office, which oversees the Border Force, to “ensure they are looked into,” an action which Home Secretary James Cleverly vowed to take.
“We are investigating this,” Cleverly, a Conservative Party Member of Parliament, said in a statement commenting on the incident on X/Twitter. “We do not tolerate antisemitism or any form of discrimination. This incident will be handled in line with our disciplinary procedures.”
The alleged abuse of the two Israeli men came amid a historic surge in hate crimes targeting the Jewish community around the world, including paroxysms of antisemitic sentiment and violence, following the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7.
Indignities to which diaspora Jews have been subjected range from last week’s cancelling of the Hamilton Film Festival, which was set to take place next month, to the mobbing of Jewish college students in the US and the stabbing of a 50-year-old Jewish man in Zurich, Switzerland. The UK Jewish community is already reeling from another outrage reported earlier this month, the alleged abuse of a 9-year-old Orthodox Jewish boy by Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital nurses, clad in pro-Palestinian “badges and stickers,” who forced him to undergo a blood transfusion on the floor.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitic incidents in the UK have occurred in unprecedented numbers since Oct. 7. In 2023 alone, there were upwards of 4,000, and in London, a city home to Europe’s largest concentration of Orthodox Jews, there were 1,177, an average of just over three per day. In one brutal case, two Black females mercilessly battered a Jewish woman, pounding her with punches and then kicking her while she lay on the ground unconscious. Aware of the damage they wrought on the defenseless woman, the assailants, still standing over her body, speculated that she was “dead.” Not 10 days later, someone graffitied a bus stop outside a Jewish girls school, spray painting a blue Star of David and defacing it with a large “X,” spray painted in black.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Israeli Survivors of Oct. 7 Massacre Detained, Mistreated by British Officials at UK Airport, Jewish Leaders Say first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site
FILE PHOTO: The atomic symbol and the Iranian flag are seen in this illustration, July 21, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
JNS.org – The Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month destroyed a secret nuclear weapons research facility in Parchin, 19 miles southeast of Tehran, Axios reported on Friday.
The clandestine site held sophisticated equipment used for testing explosives needed to detonate nuclear devices, the report read, citing three US officials, one current Israeli official and one former Israeli official.
The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security acquired high-resolution satellite imagery of the facility, which showed that it was completely destroyed in Israel’s Oct. 26 attack.
Israeli and US intelligence agencies began noticing activity in the Taleghan 2 facility in the Parchin military complex in early 2024, which had been largely inactive since 2003, when the Islamic Republic froze its military nuclear program, according to Axios.
One unnamed US official quoted in the report said: “[The Iranians] conducted scientific activity that could lay the ground for the production of a nuclear weapon. It was a top secret thing. A small part of the Iranian government knew about this, but most of the Iranian government didn’t.”
Although President Joe Biden asked Jerusalem not to target Tehran’s nuclear facilities, the site in Parchin was chosen as a target because it was not part of Iran’s declared nuclear program.
This placed the mullah regime in a position where admitting a hit to the site would expose its efforts to resume activity forbidden by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Moreover, “The strike was a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government,” the report cited a US official as saying.
Last week, Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Iran for the first time since May.
He is expected to meet with his agency’s board of governors in Vienna this week for a vote on a resolution to censure Tehran for its lack of cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Speaking about the tensions between Israel and Iran, Grossi said during a news conference in Tehran on Thursday that the Islamic Republic’s “nuclear installations should not be attacked.”
Earlier in the week, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz suggested that Iran’s nuclear facilities may be targeted.
Iran is “more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel,” Katz said.
Israel’s two assaults against Iran’s air defense system this year have left the country vulnerable to future attacks, with all four of Tehran’s Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missile batteries destroyed, according to U.S. media.
On April 19, Israel took out one of the S-300 systems in response to Tehran’s first-ever direct attack against the Jewish state. On Oct. 26, in response to a second Iranian attack, Israel targeted 20 sites in Iran, destroying the remaining three.
“The majority of Iran’s air defense was taken out,” a senior Israeli official told Fox News.
The post Israel Destroyed Top Secret Iranian Nuclear Weapons Site first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat
Houthi-mobilized fighters ride atop a car in Sanaa, Yemen, Sept. 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
Yemen’s Houthi forces attacked “a vital target” in Israel’s Red Sea port city of Eilat with a number of drones, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said on Saturday.
The terrorist group has launched dozens of attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea region since November in solidarity with Hamas.
“These operations will not stop until the aggression stops, the siege on the Gaza Strip is lifted, and the aggression on Lebanon stops,” Saree added in a televised speech.
The Houthi attacks have upended global trade by forcing ship owners to reroute vessels away from the vital Suez Canal shortcut, and drawn retaliatory U.S. and British strikes since February.
The post Yemen’s Houthis Say They Attacked ‘Vital Target’ in Israel’s Eilat first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks
US Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Sept. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
JNS.org – Muslim leaders in the United Stated who called for supporting President-elect Donald Trump at the expense of Democrat runner Kamala Harris are deeply disappointed with the former president’s Cabinet nominees, Reuters reported on Thursday.
“It’s like he’s going on Zionist overdrive,” Abandon Harris campaign co-founder Hassan Abdel Salam, a former professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, said about Trump’s recently announced picks.
“We were always extremely skeptical. … Obviously we’re still waiting to see where the administration will go, but it does look like our community has been played,” Abdel Salam told Reuters.
Rabiul Chowdhury, a Philadelphia investor who chaired the Abandon Harris campaign in Pennsylvania and co-founded Muslims for Trump, was cited as saying: “Trump won because of us and we’re not happy with his secretary of state pick and others.”
Some political strategists believe that the Muslim vote for Trump, or the renunciation of Harris, helped tilt several swing states such as Michigan in the favor of the Republican candidate.
“It seems like this administration has been packed entirely with neoconservatives and extremely pro-Israel, pro-war people, which is a failure on the side of President Trump, to the pro-peace and anti-war movement,” said Rexhinaldo Nazarko, executive director of the American Muslim Engagement and Empowerment Network.
On Wednesday, Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) as his choice to be secretary of state.
Rubio is known for his staunch pro-Israel stance, including calling on Jerusalem earlier this year to destroy “every element” of Hamas and dubbing the Gaza-based terrorist organization as “vicious animals.”
Rubio joins a slew of pro-Israel officials Trump has tapped since he won the U.S. election, including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as his U.N. ambassador with a seat in the Cabinet.
Blaise Misztal, vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), told JNS that Trump’s focus so early in the transition process on Israel-related foreign policy picks is a mark of how his second administration will approach the region.
“That, in and of itself, signals that President Trump and his administration are going to take the region, the Middle East, the threats confronting Israel, seriously and take the U.S. friendship with Israel seriously,” Misztal said.
“The people that we’ve seen are known to be tremendously strong friends of Israel, first and foremost, but also very clear-eyed about the threats that the United States and Israel face together in the region.”
Before the election on Nov. 5, Trump promised Arab and Muslim voters he would restore stability in Lebanon and the Middle East, while criticizing the current administration’s regional policies during campaign stops targeting Muslim communities in Michigan.
Trump recently addressed Lebanese Americans, stating, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity and harmony with their neighbors, and this can only happen when there is peace and stability in the Middle East.”
Israel has been at war for more than a year on its southern and northern borders, ever since Hamas led a surprise attack on communities near the Gaza Strip border on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting 251 more into the Palestinian enclave. A day later, Hezbollah joined Hamas’s efforts by firing rockets into Israel’s north.
The post Muslims from ‘Abandon Harris’ Campaign Gutted by Pro-Israel Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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