Uncategorized
Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022
(JTA) — All year long, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports about the deaths of Jewish newsmakers in our community. To close out the year, we wanted to turn our attention to people who may not have been such household names but whose stories deserve to be remembered.
Here, with the help of readers who shared the names of people they are remembering, we recall 18 Jews who shaped their local communities and made a difference in the lives of those close to them. They include rabbis whose impact extended for decades, teachers who inspired generations of students and activists who were working to build a better world. May their memories be a blessing.
Harriet Bograd
A champion of emerging Jewish communities in far-flung places.
Harriet Bograd, center, her husband Ken Klein, left, and daughter Margie on a visit to the Sefwi Wiawso Jewish community in Ghana in an undated photo. (Courtesy Kulanu, Inc)
Harriet Bograd, who as president of the nonprofit Kulanu supported emerging Jewish communities in Africa, Asia and other places far beyond the usual centers of Jewish life, died on Sept. 17 in a Manhattan hospital. She was 79. A Yale-educated lawyer and a stalwart at the West End Synagogue, she was inspired by a visit in 2004 to a remote village in Ghana, where about two dozen families considered themselves Jewish. In the years to come, she and Kulanu would provide support to emerging Jewish communities in Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Pakistan, Guatemala, the Philippines and more. She once said of her work at Kulanu, “after the Holocaust and the decimation of Jewish communities in Arab lands, the idea [is] that we’re establishing Jewish communities that have their own richness and variety.”
Henry Berg-Brousseau
Transgender activist from Kentucky
Henry Berg-Brousseau (Courtesy Human Rights Campaign)
Henry Berg-Brousseau grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and studied history, political science and Jewish studies at George Washington University, where he was a founding member of an LGBTQ+ fraternity. He had recently gotten a major promotion at the Human Rights Campaign when he died by suicide in his Arlington, Virginia, home, on Dec. 16 at age 24. “Henry spent his life working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized. This grace, compassion and understanding was not always returned to him,” his mother, the Kentucky state legislator Karen Berg, wrote in a statement that criticized lawmakers who advance anti-LGBTQ views. She added, “He was doing work that was important to him to make the world a more accepting place. At 24 years old. he had finally found a community but that could not undo the brokenness that he already felt.”
Rabbi Simcha Krauss
Orthodox advocate for women’s rights
Rabbi Simcha Krauss speaks at a dinner hosted by Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi in his honor on Feb. 5, 2014. (Courtesy Yeshivat Eretz HaTzvi)
Rabbi Simcha Krauss, a leading figure of Modern Orthodox Judaism who was a forceful advocate for women’s rights within Orthodoxy, died Jan. 20 at 85. Krauss’s efforts, which included creating a rabbinical court to support “agunot” — women whose husbands refused to divorce them — frequently earned him scorn from traditionalists within Orthodoxy. But many others saw him as a “gentle giant” who wielded his years of study and experience to fight for women’s rights in Jewish law. Krauss was born in Romania and came to the United States in 1948. Coming from a long line of rabbis, Krauss studied at Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, and later studied with the Modern Orthodox luminary Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Krauss led the Young Israel of Hillcrest for 25 years. During his years in Queens, Krauss taught Talmud at Yeshiva University and began to get more involved in issues related to the role of women in Orthodoxy. He moved to Israel in 2005, and in 2014 came back to New York to found the International Beit Din, or religious court, to work on agunot cases. “Some say it is a modern revolution,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “I say that’s the way you should do it.”
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni
A survivor and scholar who teased out the many voices of the Talmud
Survivor and Talmud scholar Rabbi David Weiss Halivni was associated with Columbia University for 35 years. (Chaim Meyersdorf/Wikimedia Commons)
Rabbi David Weiss Halivni, the Talmud scholar and Columbia University professor, died June 29 at age 94. A Holocaust survivor and refugee raised in Sighet, Romania, he earned his doctorate and taught for many years at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, until leaving the institution in 1983 over its decision to ordain women rabbis. He later became dean of the rabbinical school of the Union for Traditional Judaism, a movement created by rabbis and scholars who similarly broke with the Conservative movement. In works like his multi-volume opus “Mekorot u’Mesorot,” or “Sources and Traditions,” he galvanized the world of Talmud study by treating Jewish text as a living, mutable conversation across generations, as opposed to a static document. Halivni’s approach to learning was the “corollary to loving the text so much that you just had to understand it to its fullest, whatever tools would enable you to do so,” wrote Rabbi Ethan Tucker in an appreciation.
Moris Albahari
A remnant of a Ladino-speaking past
Moris Albahari, shown in a documentary about his story called “Saved by Language,” was a pillar of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. (Courtesy of Brian Kirschen)
Moris Albahari was 11 when the Ustaša, Bosnia’s Nazi collaborator force, came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac, the country’s equivalent of Auschwitz. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and David was able to help his son escape from the train. Because Moris knew Ladino, the Jewish language that is mixture of medieval Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages, he was able to speak with the Italian soldier who saved him. Ladino would save him several more times before the end of the war, but afterwards, with most of Sarajevo’s Jews dead or forever dispersed, he spoke the language largely at home. At one point the director of Sarajevo’s airport, Albahari was a leader within Bosnia’s Jewish community. “It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevok,” said Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino in Israel. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members.”
Rachel Brodie
A “master Jewish educator” whose influence was vast
Rachel Brodie (Courtesy of J. The Jewish News of Northern California)
Rachel Brodie was unassuming and humble yet through her work as an educator had a vast influence on the Jewish community in the Bay Area of California, where she lived, and beyond. Brodie was the co-founder Jewish Milestones, an educational resource for Jewish lifecycle ceremonies that launched in 2004 as The Ritualist. She also served as “chief Jewish officer” at the Jewish community Center of San Francisco, a position created just for her, from 2011 to 2016. “To be in Rachel’s presence was to be illuminated by her wit, her laughter, and her fierce and tender heart,” wrote the founders of the Jewish Studio Project in Berkeley, where she had been a senior educator. “To learn with her was to be stimulated, delighted, and transformed.” Brodie, 55, died on April 11 after falling at her home in Berkeley.
Rabbi Steven Sager
“Leader, mentor, poet” in North Carolina and beyond
Rabbi Steven Sager at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, in 2017. (Courtesy Anna Carson DeWitt)
When Rabbi Steven Sager died May 15 at 71 after an extended battle with pancreatic cancer, he was mourned not only by his family and his congregants at Beth El Synagogue in Durham, North Carolina, from which he retired in 2011 after 32 years, but by a rabbinic and Hebrew poetry community spanning the globe. “Steve was a beautiful and deep human being,” the Israeli poet Rivka Miriam wrote. “I generally do not believe in translation, especially translation of poetry. It seems to me that every language has an inner secret that cannot be transposed into another vessel. Yet, when Steve translated my poems I had a different feeling — I felt he entered an inner layer, one that lies beneath any language, a layer carrying a hidden code.”
Nate Geller
Devoted to building stronger Jewish communities
Nate Geller, at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey. A colleague’s daughter made the “Nate” sign, which he took home and hung on his mantel. (Courtesy)
Nate Geller died on Jan. 24 at age 63, after a struggle with leukemia that he faced with characteristic humility, faith and optimism. His death was a blow to his colleagues at 70 Faces Media (JTA’s parent company); to his synagogue community in Teaneck, New Jersey; and to the Jewish communal world to which he had dedicated his life since graduating from the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University in 1983. In the hours after his death, chat rooms and email boxes filled up with loving tributes to Nate, remarkable for their consistency: Friends and colleagues remarked on his gentleness, his passion for Jewish learning, his commitment to Israel, his willingness not just to hear but to listen when a colleague kvelled or kvetched. Most of all, they remembered his devotion to his family: his wife Lyn Light Geller, herself a gentle and passionate force among “Jewish professionals,” his grown children Aliza, Ariana and Koby, Koby’s wife Talia, and their kids, Annaelle and Judah. Said one colleague and fellow congregant, “There is an enormous Nate-shaped void in the world now.”
Hedi Fried
A voice for Holocaust remembrance in Sweden
Holocaust survivor Hedi Fried stands between Sweden’s culture minister and handball player Linnea Claeson during a counterprotest against a neo-Nazi demonstration in Stockholm, Aug. 25, 2018. (Pontus Lundahl/AFP via Getty Images)
Born in 1924 in Sighet, in what was then Hungary and is now Romania, Hedi Fried survived Auschwitz and settled in Sweden, where she became a psychologist and advocate for Holocaust survivors. She created Cafe 84, a salon for survivors in Stockholm, and spoke widely about her experiences during the Holocaust, gathering some of the most common exchanges in “Questions I Am Asked About the Holocaust,” published in English in 2019. “Your solidarity was boundless and no question too difficult to answer. You were brave, generous, dedicated and extremely wise,” Christina Gamstorp, the director of Stockholm’s Jewish museum, wrote in a remembrance. “Now your voice has fallen silent but not your message. It lives on in everyone who met you, in your texts, books, films and your belief that man is still good — and that it is possible to build a society free from antisemitism and racism, which threaten our entire existence.” Fried, who had three children, died in November at 98.
Rabbi Sy Dresner
The “most arrested rabbi in America”
Rabbi Martin Freedman, right, and Rabbi Israel Dresner,center, are taken to the Tallahassee city building where they were charged with unlawful assembly after they and 10 other “Freedom Riders” were arrested attempting to eat at the Tallahassee airport in June 1961. (Getty Photos)
Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner, who demonstrated with Martin Luther King Jr. and was sometimes called the “most arrested rabbi in America,” died Jan. 13. He was 92. A Freedom Rider in the 1960s, Dresner built a career as a social justice-oriented Reform rabbi who was active in the fight against the Vietnam War and was a vocal opponent of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dresner was born on the Lower East Side in 1929 to an Orthodox family and grew up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a delicatessen. He attended yeshivas as a child but went on to become a Reform rabbi after serving in the Korean War and working on a kibbutz in Israel. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria,” he said after an arrest in 1964 outside a segregated motel in St. Augustine, Florida. “We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.”
Eli Evans
‘Poet laureate of Southern Jews’
Eli Evans, seen here in a picture from a trip to Israel in the 1970s, was “equally at home in New York.” (Courtesy Josh Evans)
Born in 1936 in Durham, North Carolina, where his father would become the first Jewish mayor and his mother the founder of Hadassah’s first chapter in the South, Eli Evans remained tied to his native home despite spending his adult life in New York City, where he was a prominent grant-maker whose giving fueled the creation of “Sesame Street” in both the United States and Israel. He wrote several memoirs about Southern Jews and also included the South in his philanthropy, which he pursued at multiple foundations according to an activist philosophy that helped launch the Children’s Defense Fund, seeded the South with Black lawyers who became local civil rights leaders and built ties between Israeli and Egyptian scientists after their countries made peace in 1979. “Eli was a Southern gentleman who interacted with the Jewish establishment and strengthened American Jewish life, without losing his Southern Jewish soul,” said Brandeis University professor of American Jewish history Jonathan Sarna. “It was a privilege to have known him.” Evans died July 26 in Manhattan of complications of COVID-19, after a period of declining health.
Sheryl Grossman
A lifelong advocate for people with disabilities
Sheryl Grossman was a Jewish disability activist. (Screenshot from 2021 JDAIM Interview Series at Towson University)
Sheryl Grossman stood small, at just 4’3″ and 48 pounds, but in the world of Jewish disability advocacy she loomed large, as both the founder of a Facebook group for people living with Bloom’s Syndrome and as a board member of Yad Hachazakah, the Jewish Disability Empowerment Center. She died March 28 at age 46, the result of a Bloom’s Syndrome-linked cancer. “I don’t think anyone will ever know just how much work Sheryl did during the pandemic to help Jewish communities support their most vulnerable neighbors who were in the hospital or isolated at home with COVID,” said Shoshana Finkel, a law student who met Grossman when she was an intern at the American Association of People with Disabilities. “She didn’t feel the need to share her accomplishments; that was never what the work was about for her.”
Dara Goldman
A professor of Spanish and Jewish studies in her prime
Dara Goldman was a professor of Spanish and Jewish studies at the University of Illinois. (Courtesy U of I)
Dara Goldman was preparing for graduation at the University of Illinois, where she was a professor of Spanish and chair of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society, and for the American Jewish Historical Society conference, when she died May 13 of a heart attack. She was 51. A graduate of Columbia and Emory universities, Goldman produced scholarship so diverse that she was affiliated with eight units within the University of Illinois; most recently, she was researching Jewish cultural production in Cuba, where she brought resources for the Jewish community during her research trips, and co-edited a volume on 21st-century Jewish writing. “With her characteristic wit, she would often joke that she was a Jewish woman who took a wrong turn at diaspora,” said a remembrance published by the university. “But jokes aside, she could be at the same time a Jewish woman from New Jersey and an adopted daughter of Puerto Rico and Cuba, two cultures that she knew intimately and loved very deeply. … The echoes of her inimitable, hearty laughter will resonate within our halls for a long time.”
Yaakov Shalev
A beloved family man whose story was Israel’s
Yaakov Shalev, seated third from right, helped organize Iraqi Jews’ exodus to Israel. (Courtesy Asaf Shalev)
“When I arrived for a visit with family in Israel in my early twenties, my septum piercing outraged nearly everyone at our Shabbat morning gathering. Even my younger cousins badgered me to remove it. It took my elderly grandfather, Yaakov Shalev, to quiet everyone down and declare that I am his same beloved grandson, with or without the piercing.
“Calm, open-minded, steadfast, Saba Yaakov, as we called him, passed away peacefully in February at age 92 in Holon, with his five children at his side. He spent his last few hours listening to the melodies of his youth in Baghdad, the music of giants such as Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, and Fairuz.
“Saba Yaakov helped organize the exodus of Iraqi Jewry to Israel in 1950 and then enlisted in the Israeli military as an airplane mechanic. He taught himself how to build houses and became a successful contractor in the 1960s. But he soon decided the stress was too much and opened a shop in south Tel Aviv where he fabricated canvases for Israeli artists and framed their paintings. He kept the shop running for more than 40 years, going to work every day until he was in his eighties.” — Asaf Elia-Shalev, JTA reporter
Trude Feldman
A journalist who specialized in Yom Kippur interviews
Trude Feldman interviews Jimmy Carter in the White House in 1978. (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library)
The daughter of a rabbinical family, Trude Feldman launched her career covering the 1961 trial of Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she put her training as a Hebrew teacher to use by teaching the language to the Nazi’s lawyer. (She also taught Hebrew to famed converts Sammy Davis Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor, and to Paul Newman on the set of “Exodus.”) But it was in her coverage of American presidents that Feldman truly made her mark, becoming famous for scoring presidential exit interviews and Yom Kippur interviews, which she would pitch as an opportunity for redemption. That’s what got her the first interview with Bill Clinton after he copped in 1998 to yes, having sex with that woman. The mainstream media mocked her for her softballs — “Saturday Night Live” once did so in a sketch — but those close to her understood their value. “The joke, however, was on everyone else,” her nephew, Rabbi Daniel Feldman, wrote in a remembrance. “Paired with her signature persistence, her style more often elicited not puff but profundity, more sincerity than sugar. The unique access she earned — baffling to some, understood to the astute, acknowledged by all — yielded memorable results.”
Harlene Winnick Appelman
A revolutionary leader in Jewish education
Harlene Winnick Appelman in an undated photo provided by the Covenant Foundation.
Born in upstate New York, Harlene Appelman’s career in Jewish education took off in 1982 when she became the director of family life education at Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Southfield, Michigan, a Detroit suburb. There, she pioneered interactive Jewish learning, bringing children out of dry frontal settings into a more tactile experience of Judaism. After joining the board of the Covenant Foundation, which funds and promotes Jewish education, in 1994, she became its director in 2005 and held that role until 2021, allowing her to influence a generation of Jewish educators. Many of them mourned her death at 75 on Aug. 18; the cause was cancer. “I am one of an entire congregation of Jewish educational leaders who Harlene mentored, supported, prodded and constructively critiqued, promoted, and made feel special,” wrote Rabbi Shira Koch Epstein, in an online remembrance. “I hope that in her memory, I will find ever new ways to help more Jewish rabbis and educators feel seen, heard, capable, and motivated.” This month, the Covenant Foundation initiated a new prize, in Jewish family education, in Appelman’s honor.
Tom Tugend
An indefatigable journalist
Tom Tugend in his Los Angeles home, Aug. 3, 2021. (Jacob Gurvis)
Tom Tugend was 13 when he and his family left their home in Berlin in 1939. He was 97 when he died Dec. 7 in Los Angeles, where he had lived for most of his life. In the intervening decades, he fought in the U.S. Army and the Israel Defense Forces; covered Jewish news for a wide array of publications, including JTA; and enjoyed 66 years of marriage during which he and his wife raised three daughters. “His authenticity came through to anyone who knew him,” said one of them, the journalist Alina Tugend. “He was a hero to many people.”
Judah Samet
A two-time survivor of antisemitic terror
Judah Samet stands next to his portrait, part of Luigi Toscano’s “Lest We Forget” project at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019. (Photo by Hector Corante, courtesy of Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh)
Judah Samet became a national face of Pittsburgh’s 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting because he survived: He had been running late that day, so was not inside the building when 11 of his fellow congregants were murdered. Months later, he was President Donald Trump’s guest to the State of the Union address. The experience was both very different Samet’s childhood in Hungary, where he was born in February 1938, and in some ways similar. As a young child, Samet was forced by the Nazis from his home and shipped with his family first to a labor camp in Austria and then to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After a stop in Israel, he moved to Pittsburgh in the 1950s, ultimately joining his father-in-law’s jewelry business there and remaining a committed community member until his death at 84 on Sept. 27.
—
The post Rabbis, teachers, survivors: 18 Jews whose deaths diminished our communities in 2022 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The BBC Used Mike Huckabee’s Interview to Attempt to Defame Israel
Mike Huckabee looks on as Donald Trump reacts during a campaign event at the Drexelbrook Catering and Event Center, in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, US, Oct. 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
On February 22, the BBC News website published a report by Maia Davies titled “US ambassador’s Israel comments condemned by Arab and Muslim nations.”
The report is made up of three elements, the first of which is a presentation of what that headline calls the “US ambassador’s Israel comments.”
Davies begins by telling BBC audiences that: [emphasis added]
Arab and Muslim governments have condemned remarks made by the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel would be justified in taking over a vast stretch of the Middle East on Biblical grounds.
In an interview with conservative US commentator Tucker Carlson, Huckabee was asked whether Israel had a right to an area which the host said was, according to the Bible, “essentially the entire Middle East”.
The ambassador said “it would be fine if it took it all”. But he added Israel was not seeking to do so, rather it is “asking to at least take the land that they now occupy” and protect its people.
Davies later adds:
In the interview, released on Friday, Carlson pressed the ambassador on his interpretation of a Bible verse which the host claimed suggested Israel had a right to the land between the River Nile in Egypt and the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq.
Huckabee said “it would be a big piece of land” but stressed that “I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today”.
He later added: “They’re not asking to go back to take all of that, but they are asking to at least take the land that they now occupy, they now live in, they now own legitimately, and it is a safe haven for them.”
He also said his earlier remark that Israel could take it “all” had been somewhat “hyperbolic”.
The relevant section of that “interview” can be found here.
BBC audiences were not informed that — as was noted by Lahav Harkov — Carlson put out an edited clip on social media.
The Tucker Carlson Network posted a clip of the video in which Carlson expostulated at length about Genesis 15:18, in which God tells Avram, “to your descendants I will give this land, from the River of Egypt to the great river Euphrates.” The Biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judea never included all of the land promised in Genesis, even at its historically largest size.
Carlson asks if Huckabee believes that Israel was promised to the Jewish people and they therefore have the right to take all of the land promised, which covers modern-day Jordan and parts of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
In the clip, which cuts Huckabee off mid-sentence, he says in a facetious tone of voice, “It would be fine if they took it all.”
The second half of the ambassador’s sentence, as heard in the interview, is: “but I don’t think that’s what we’re talking about here today.”
The second element to Davies’ report is the statement put out by various Arab countries and organizations, which she describes as follows:
Following the interview’s release, the UAE’s foreign ministry released the statement on behalf of various governments and other actors expressing “strong condemnation and profound concern” regarding the comments.
The statement said Huckabee had “indicated that it would be acceptable for Israel to exercise control over territories belonging to Arab states, including the occupied West Bank”.
It said the remarks violated international law and directly contradicted US President Donald Trump’s plan to end the war in Gaza, including efforts to create “a political horizon for a comprehensive settlement that ensures the Palestinian people have their own independent state”.
The statement continued: “The ministries reaffirmed that Israel has no sovereignty whatsoever over the Occupied Palestinian Territory or any other occupied Arab lands.”
“They reiterated their firm rejection of any attempts to annex the West Bank or separate it from the Gaza Strip, their strong opposition to the expansion of settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and their categorical rejection of any threat to the sovereignty of Arab states.”
The statement said it was signed by the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Lebanon, Syria and the State of Palestine, as well as the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Davies makes no effort to clarify to her readers that “the occupied West Bank” has never been included in “territories belonging to Arab states”; that it has never been “Palestinian” in the sense of belonging to a sovereign state; that it was part of the territory allocated to the creation of a Jewish homeland by the League of Nations; or that it was illegally occupied for 19 years by one of the signatories of the statement she promotes: Jordan.
Neither does she bother to point out that Huckabee’s responses to Carlson’s statements and questions concerning the principles underlying Christian Zionism have no bearing on the US “plan to end the war in Gaza.”
The third element of Davies’ report is the provision of supposed context, with readers told that:
Israel has built about 160 settlements housing 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for a hoped-for future state – during the 1967 Middle East war. An estimated 3.3 million Palestinians live alongside them.
Notably, Davies avoids explaining why what she described two paragraphs earlier as “the State of Palestine” is now “a hoped-for future state” and, in line with usual BBC practice, she again avoids the issue of the Jordanian occupation of the areas the corporation chooses to call “the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” as well as the attacks on Israel by Jordan and other Arab countries in June 1967.
Davies continues with the BBC’s usual partial presentation of “international law” together with an interpretation of a non-binding ICJ advisory opinion: “The settlements are illegal under international law – a position supported by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in 2024.”
Davies’ report closes with a new version of the BBC’s usual “frozen in time” portrayal of casualties resulting from the war that began as a result of the Hamas-led invasion of Israel — this time erasing Israeli casualties and hostages altogether:
Successive Israeli governments have allowed settlements to grow. However, expansion has risen sharply since Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing, pro-settler coalition, as well as the start of the Gaza war, triggered by Hamas’s deadly 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.
More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s subsequent military offensive, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
In addition to failing to provide readers with appropriate historical background, Davies refrained from properly explaining the context to the nine words that prompted the “condemnation” that is the topic of her report, including the fact that discussion of a Biblical passage has no contemporary relevance.
She also avoided providing information about other issues arising from that long conversation or the populist record of the person she describes as a “conservative US commentator.”
Obviously the prime aim of Davies’ reporting on this “much ado about nothing” story was to amplify the statement delegitimizing Israel that was put out by a collection of countries and organizations.
Hadar Sela is the co-editor of CAMERA UK – an affiliate of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), where a version of this article first appeared.
Uncategorized
Prince Harry & Meghan Visit Jordan NGO Employing Staff Who Posted Pro-Hamas Content
Britain’s Prince Harry, Megan, Duchess of Sussex, and Lady Sarah Chatto attend the National Service of Thanksgiving held at St Paul’s Cathedral, during Britain’s Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations, in London, Britain, June 3, 2022. Photo: Victoria Jones/Pool via REUTERS.
Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, arrived in Jordan this week on a surprise visit reportedly coordinated with World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The trip, announced under 24 hours in advance, included meetings in Amman with WHO representatives and participants from various humanitarian bodies, including the United Nations. The couple also visited the sprawling Za’atari Refugee Camp, home to tens of thousands of displaced Syrians.
But it was their final stop — a youth center operated by the Jordanian NGO Questscope — that raises serious questions.
The Questscope Connection
Questscope presents itself as a youth-focused humanitarian organization operating across Jordan.
However, a review of publicly available social media posts from several individuals identified as staff members reveals content that goes far beyond humanitarian advocacy.
HonestReporting has verified that the Facebook accounts in question belong to the individuals identified as Questscope staff.
Among the material shared:
- Images glorifying Hamas-affiliated militants
- Posts praising armed “resistance”
- Graphics celebrating rocket attacks launched from Gaza
- Repeated assertions that “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine”
- Imagery associated with organizations designated as terrorist groups by the United States and the United Kingdom
In one instance, a staff member shared an image of masked militants wearing Hamas headbands. In another, posts echoed messaging closely aligned with Hamas narratives during periods of escalation.
In October 2024, one staff member posted the phrase, “And in October, we came to have a deep-seated love.” The wording does not explicitly mention the October 7 massacre in Israel, yet in the current political climate — where October has become shorthand in some circles for the Hamas attack — the sentiment raises further concerns about the ideological framing at play.
Supporting Palestinian civilians is legitimate. Sharing content that glorifies Hamas is not.
Hamas is not a protest movement or a symbolic resistance brand. It is a US and UK-designated terrorist organization responsible for mass murder, hostage-taking, and the systematic targeting of civilians.
When individuals affiliated with a humanitarian NGO publicly amplify such material, the issue ceases to be political expression. It becomes extremist alignment.
A Humanitarian Visit – Or a Failure of Due Diligence?
Ahead of the trip, a source close to the Sussexes reportedly told British media that the visit was “not political” and should not be interpreted as taking sides.
That assertion now warrants scrutiny.
When global public figures publicly platform an organization whose staff have shared material aligned with a designated terrorist group, neutrality is no longer a shield. It becomes a question of vetting, and judgment.
Were Harry and Meghan aware of the social media histories of individuals connected to the NGO? Did their team conduct due diligence before lending royal prestige to the organization? If not, why not?
If they were aware, what message does that send?
Humanitarian engagement does not grant immunity from scrutiny. In a region where symbolism carries enormous weight and propaganda travels faster than fact, public association has consequences.
This is not about opposing aid. Humanitarian support for civilians is necessary and legitimate. It is about standards. When public figures who claim neutrality choose to elevate institutions whose staff have circulated material aligned with a terrorist organization, the burden of care rises — not falls.
At a time when antisemitism is surging globally and Hamas — a terrorist organization responsible for the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — continues to perpetrate violence, casual association is not neutral.
That tension becomes even more acute given Meghan’s longstanding public advocacy for women and girls. As patron of Smart Works, through initiatives supporting menstrual health in India, funding for Afghan women refugees, and projects focused on girls’ education and empowerment, she has positioned herself as a global champion of women’s rights and dignity.
Hamas’ October 7 atrocities included documented acts of sexual violence against women, as well as abuse of Israeli hostages in captivity. For a public figure whose brand is rooted in advancing women’s rights, even indirect association with messaging aligned with such an organization raises serious and unavoidable questions.
Advocacy cannot be selective. It cannot be unequivocal in some contexts and incurious in others.
If the Sussexes believe this visit was purely humanitarian, this revelation raises a number of questions: What vetting was conducted? What safeguards were in place? And what message do they believe this association sends?
Because humanitarian credibility depends not only on compassion — but on judgment.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
Uncategorized
In Iran, a Revolution Against a Revolution
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei attends a meeting with students in Tehran, Iran, Nov. 3, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Forty-seven years is but a fleeting moment in the life of an ancient civilization — but it is long enough for a revolution to confront its own reflection.
The fall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979 seemed to close a civilizational chapter, bringing to an end a form of rule long intertwined with Iran’s historical identity. Iran, one of the world’s longest continuous nation-states from antiquity to the modern era, had been governed by successive monarchies throughout its history.
Many dynasties and ruling houses held power in Iran for long stretches of history. They differed in their methods of governance and in their political codes, but they all shared a single unifying feature: the royal form of rule.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution marked the end of a longstanding historical period and established a republican regime in Iran. The revolution emerged from a range of social and political developments. These included rising Shia Islamist sentiment within parts of the population and expanding leftist political activism. Political liberty remained limited during this period. The outcome was the founding of a theocratic republic.
Since then, three generations have been raised under the ideological rhetoric of this regime. A government that seized power with promises of democracy and a fair life for all gradually extended its authority into nearly every aspect of citizens’ lives. Endless intrusions into personal matters and the imposition of a rigid social order have shaped daily existence, while economic and political crises have affected millions of Iranians.
Within the current governing structure, the suppression of Iranian national identity has become one of the defining characteristics of the theocratic system. In recent years, a visible shift has emerged among many young Iranians who openly express their rejection of this imposed lifestyle and signal a desire to move beyond the current authoritarian structure once and for all.
Amid deepening societal frustrations, numerous protests have erupted across the country over the past few years. Among them, the demonstrations following Mahsa Amini’s death and the protests of late December 2025 and early January 2026, now widely referred to as the Sun and Lion Revolution, stand out for their scale and intensity. These recent movements have been extensively energized by the participation of the country’s youth.
Signs of civil disobedience among young people are now widespread. Refusal to adhere to mandatory hijab regulations is increasingly visible in public spaces. Protesters invoke historical and epic figures from Iranian literature and traditions rather than the cultural ideals promoted by the regime. The revival of older national symbols reflects a broader attempt to reclaim an identity that many feel has been overshadowed.
At present, people of all ages, social classes, and professional backgrounds are involved in the uprising in different ways. This breadth of participation gives the Sun and Lion movement a popular mandate that many supporters regard as the foundation of a national revolution.
Some of the most frequently heard chants during the ongoing protests call for the return of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, whose father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ruled Iran prior to the 1979 revolution. The Crown Prince has stepped forward in response to these calls and has expressed readiness to help guide a transitional process in a post-Islamic Republic era.
The massive protests of January 8 and 9, 2026, which extended across cities throughout the country, became a defining moment. Millions of Iranians gathered in the streets. At the time of this writing, students at a college campus in Iran have been championing Pahlavi and the Sun and Lion flag. This is an act that carries particular weight given that university environments have long been associated with left-oriented activism and revolutionary discourse.
This development represents a significant turning point in the progression of anti-regime protests. Academic spaces that once served as strongholds of leftist ideologies are now directly calling for an end to the Islamic Republic. The shift highlights how profoundly political sentiments have evolved within Iranian society.
Occupying a central role in this movement, Generation Z appears largely unmoved by ideological narratives or rigid dogma. Its members seek the restoration of national identity and the opportunity for a better life shaped by practical realities rather than doctrinal prescriptions. That impulse has become a guiding force across wider segments of society.
It is therefore unsurprising that many of those who lost their lives during the violent crackdown of January 8 and 9 were young protesters demanding fundamental rights. Despite the severity of the crackdown, the continuation of demonstrations more than forty days after those tragic events illustrates the persistence of public resolve. It is emblematic of a broader unwillingness among many Iranians to retreat from their demands.
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 abolished monarchy as a political order in Iran. Now, after 47 years, that same revolutionary system faces citizens who openly call for the return of the monarchical framework that was once overthrown. The historical irony is striking. Once again, history reminds us that political systems grounded in contradiction often struggle to sustain themselves indefinitely.
Perhaps that is why this moment stands as a pivotal juncture. Seen in a longer perspective, it resembles the completion of a cycle, a revolution against a revolution.
Ali Karamifard is a PhD student in Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His research and writing focus on political systems, institutional change, and contemporary developments in the Middle East.