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Trump Under Fire After Claiming Jewish Democratic Party Voters ‘Hate Their Religion, Hate Israel’
Former US President Donald Trump is seen at a campaign event in South Carolina. Photo: Reuters/Sam Wolfe
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump encountered a firestorm of criticism on Tuesday after he claimed that American Jews who vote for the Democratic Party “hate” both their religion and the State of Israel.
Deploying the inflammatory rhetoric that is his trademark, Trump made the comments during an appearance on a show anchored by Sebastian Gorka, who served as a White House aide during the former president’s single term in office between 2016-20, on the far right “America First” network. The timing of the interview coincided with growing tensions between President Joe Biden’s administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s conduct in its current war against Hamas in Gaza, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer urging Israelis to demand an election to remove Netanyahu in a speech last week.
After Gorka effusively praised Trump as “the most pro-Israel, most philosemitic president since the rebirth of Israel in 1948,” citing the decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as evidence for his claim, he asked why the Democrats “so hate” Netanyahu.
“I actually think they hate Israel,” Trump responded, drawing an enthused “yes” from Gorka.
“Any Jewish person that votes for the Democrats hates their religion, they hate everything about Israel and they should be ashamed of themselves, because Israel will be destroyed,” Trump continued. “You have Iran now making a nuclear weapon, none of that would have happened with me, that’s a big thing.”
Trunp then stated that during his term in office, Iran was “stone cold broke” due to US and international sanctions. He added that “there was no terrorism, because they [the Iranian regime] didn’t have money to fund Hamas and Hezbollah.”
The assertion that there was “no terrorism” directed against Israel during Trump’s presidency does not stand up to scrutiny. State Department reports issued during each of his four years in the White House uniformly noted that Israel faced consistent threats from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, ISIS and other terrorist organizations, and listed numerous terrorist incidents from stabbings of Israeli civilians to missile launches against Israeli population centers.
The report for 2018 included details of the weekly “return marches” staged by Palestinians along Israel’s security fence on its border with Gaza, noting that these “drew tens of thousands of people. Armed terrorists breached the security fence, launched incendiary devices into Israel, and threw stones and other objects at IDF soldiers. Additionally, sniper attacks injured IDF forces and resulted in the death of at least one IDF soldier. Since April, militants sent hundreds of incendiary devices into southern Israel by kite and balloon, resulting in more than 7,000 acres burned, including a forest preserve and numerous farmed fields.”
Trump’s latest remarks drew an angry response from several US Jewish organizations, including the charge of “antisemitism” — one with which the former president is familiar both from his time in office and afterwards. He attracted strong opprobrium for a Nov. 2022 dinner he hosted with antisemitic rapper Kanye West and the American Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, and again in Sept. 2023, when Trump used the occasion of Rosh Hashanah to attack “liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives” on social media.
“Accusing Jews of hating their religion because they might vote for a particular party is defamatory and patently false,” Anti-Defamation League (ADL) CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “Serious leaders who care about the historic US-Israel alliance should focus on strengthening, rather than unraveling, bipartisan support for the State of Israel.”
“Another day, another depraved antisemitic screed from Donald Trump, who has repeatedly vilified the overwhelming majority of American Jews,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, separately declared.
The White House also condemned the remarks, referring to the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel in a statement.
“As antisemitic crimes and acts of hate have increased across the world — among them the deadliest attack committed against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — leaders have an obligation to call hate what it is and bring Americans together against it,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said. “There is no justification for spreading toxic, false stereotypes that threaten fellow citizens.”
US Jews have historically voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Democratic Party. In 2016, Trump won just 24 percent of the Jewish vote, rising to 30 percent in his failed 2020 bid for re-election. However, several past Republican candidates fared equally or better with American Jewish voters, among them Ronald Reagan, who won 39 percent in 1980, George H.W. Bush, who won 35 percent in 1988, and Mitt Romney, who won 30 percent in 2012.
Monday’s comments during the interview with Gorka came at the close of a difficult day for Trump’s presidential campaign after his lawyers conceded defeat in their attempts to raise a bond of almost half a billion dollars in his ongoing civil fraud case in New York. The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, brought Trump to trial last year, accusing him of fraudulently inflating the value of his assets to obtain favorable loan terms. In total, Trump presently faces four separate criminal prosecutions.
The post Trump Under Fire After Claiming Jewish Democratic Party Voters ‘Hate Their Religion, Hate Israel’ 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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