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‘Today, I won’t condemn’: Some Netanyahu allies are declining to decry Sunday’s West Bank settler riot
(JTA) — The day after hundreds of settlers rioted in the Palestinian West Bank village of Huwara, torching houses, shops and cars, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned their actions from the floor of parliament, declaring, “We won’t accept a reality where all do as they wish — igniting houses, torching cars, intentionally injuring innocents.”
Other lawmakers in Netanyahu’s coalition denounced the riot while expressing understanding for the settlers who rioted. But earlier on Monday, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s own Likud party, Tali Gottlieb, stood up at the same dais and struck a different note.
“They asked me: ‘Don’t you condemn what happened in Huwara?’ I said to them, ‘Not today,’” Gottlieb declared as Netanyahu looked on from the floor of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. “Tomorrow, but not today.”
Gottlieb attributed her delay in decrying the settler violence to her focus on the two Israeli victims of a shooting attack earlier on Sunday, when a gunman from Huwara killed two brothers driving on a thoroughfare that runs through the town. The settler riot in Huwara was a response to the attack. A Palestinian was killed in a town to Huwara’s south amid the riot, and dozens were injured.
“So today, I won’t condemn,” Gottlieb said subsequently in her speech. “Today, I am just sending a unifying message to the people of Israel.”
Gottlieb was not the only member of Knesset to stop short of condemning the riot. While many lawmakers in Netanyahu’s government have criticized the rampage and declared that it doesn’t represent Israel’s values, a number of his partners have shown sympathy for the rioters or even endorsed their actions. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, recently put in charge of settlers’ civilian affairs, indicated a measure of understanding for the riot, even as he came out against vigilantism.
The small but significant measure of support for the rioters comes as Israel’s government, which includes far-right parties, contends with a growing wave of violence in the West Bank and Israel. Terror attacks have killed more than a dozen Israelis, most of them civilians, while Israeli raids have killed dozens of Palestinian militants and a number of civilians. But if Sunday’s riot indicates that some settlers feel emboldened to settle scores on their own, the response to their actions shows that they have support from a few members of the sitting government and its allies.
“A closed, burnt Huwara — that’s what I want to see,” said Zvika Fogel, a lawmaker from the far-right Otzma Yehudit party and a member of Netanyahu’s coalition, according to the Times of Israel. “That’s the only way to achieve deterrence. After a murder like yesterday’s, we need burning villages when the IDF doesn’t act.”
The chair of Fogel’s party, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, gave a speech from the site of an illegal West Bank settlement outpost in which he called for the Israeli military to “cease the policy of containment” and said “the enemy needs to be cut down.” He evinced sympathy for the rioters even as he condemned their actions.
“I understand the difficult feelings, but this is not the way,” he said. “We do not take the law into our own hands. The government of Israel, the state of Israel, the security forces, they are the ones who need to cut down our enemies.”
Yishai Fleischer, a pro-settler activist who has served as Ben-Gvir’s spokesman, also sympathized with the rioters while criticizing their actions. “Vigilante behavior is generally wrong and is certainly illegal,” he tweeted. “However, years of Israel’s abandonment of policing and looking away from the jihadism, illegal weapons, and no-go zones, that have grown within us – have led to wanton Arab terrorism – and now to a human reaction.”
Another advocate for the settlements, Smotrich, condemned vigilantism alongside other Israeli leaders, writing on Twitter, “It is forbidden to take the law into one’s hands and create dangerous anarchy that will likely go out of control and cost human life.”
But screenshots show that he liked a since-deleted tweet from a regional settlement official declaring that Huwara “needs to be wiped out today.”
Later in the day, another Twitter user wrote a viral series of tweets both condemning the riot and endorsing “collective punishment of the family and surroundings of the terrorist.” The tweets also appeared to compare the riot with the weekly nonviolent mass protests in Tel Aviv of Israel’s proposed judicial reform.
Smotrich shared the tweets along with the message: “The whole thread.”
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The post ‘Today, I won’t condemn’: Some Netanyahu allies are declining to decry Sunday’s West Bank settler riot appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
The post VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
The post Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
The post ‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons appeared first on The Forward.
