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World Leaders Mark Hanukkah as Antisemitism Spikes Worldwide Amid Gaza War

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal, chairman of the Chabad Jewish Education Center, light a giant menorah to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah at Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, Germany, Dec. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

World leaders on Thursday observed the first night of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, expressing solidarity with their Jewish communities amid a global surge in antisemitism since Hamas’ mass slaughter of Jews during its Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel.

Olaf Scholz became the first German chancellor to light the massive menorah in front of Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate.

“I wish that the candle of Hanukkah will shine far beyond this square and much longer than just for the eight days of Hanukkah,” Scholz, wearing a kippa, said in the center of Germany’s capital.

Hanukkah, also known as the Jewish festival of lights, marks the re-dedication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in the 2nd century BCE, after a small group of Jewish fighters liberated the land from oppressive foreign forces.

“It stands for hope and optimism,” Scholz said of Hanukkah. “We especially need both in these days after the Hamas terror attack on Israel.”

Germany has registered at least 29 antisemitic incidents per day since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in southern Israel — a four-fold increase on the previous year, according to data published late last month by Rias, a federally-funded body monitoring antisemitic incidents. Rias counted a total of 994 antisemitic incidents since the Hamas onslaught. Germany is home to a Jewish community of approximately 118,000.

“I am happy that many citizens are supporting the Jewish community in word and deed and showing compassion and solidarity with our Jewish neighbors, friends and colleagues,” the German chancellor said. “That is why I’m also happy to be here today.”

Scholz added that Jews were an “inextricable part” of German society and called it “unacceptable” that they “have to be afraid to practice their religion, their culture.”

Historic event in Germany.

German chancellor Olaf Scholz just presided over the lighting of the giant Menorah — the largest in Europe — in front of Berlin’s landmark Brandenburg Gate. #Hanukkah pic.twitter.com/A3aV6q7ZZ0

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) December 7, 2023

Outside of Germany, antisemitism has also spiked to record levels around the world, including in the US, since Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas murdered 1,200 people on Oct. 7 and kidnapped 240 others. Copious documentation of the terrorists’ brutality, including torture and rampant sexual violence, has shocked the world.

The terror attacks and the Israel-Hamas war that they launched in Gaza have led to an eruption of antisemitic incidents worldwide — from arson attacks on synagogues in Armenia to mobs hunting Jews in Dagestan, Russia. Calls for Israel’s destruction and the intimidation and harassment of Jews have also become increasingly common across the West.

In such an environment, several world leaders took the first night of Hanukkah to show support for Jewish communities.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, held a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony with a group of rabbis. He shared video of the gathering on his social media accounts.

“The sacred Hanukkah lights, lit these days, remind us once again that light always prevails over evil. And of the value of life, which is worth fighting for,” Zelensky wrote on X/Twitter. “My best wishes to the Jewish community on Hanukkah!”

The sacred Hanukkah lights, lit these days, remind us once again that light always prevails over evil. And of the value of life, which is worth fighting for. My best wishes to the Jewish community on Hanukkah! pic.twitter.com/ghoawSdy7b

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) December 7, 2023

In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese extended greetings to the Jewish community.

“May you find comfort and hope as you honor the traditions that have sustained you for generations, and may the lights of Chanukah shine brightly through darkness,” he wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted on social media the “incredibly difficult” last two months for Jewish people, since the Oct. 7 massacre, and the “disturbing rise in antisemitism” that ensued.

“I want to make it clear: our government stands with you. We will never accept any form of antisemitism or hatred and we will always speak up for Israel’s right to exist, and right to defend itself,” he said. “I hope that the lessons of Hanukkah and the glowing light of the menorah bring you hope during this difficult time.”

“The story of Hanukkah is a reminder that light shines brighter than darkness, and right always prevails over wrong,” the Canadian premier added. “It’s always a reminder of the resilience of the Jewish people, who’ve persevered through periods of unfathomable difficulty before, and Canada will continue to stand with Israel and Jewish communities around the world as we persevere through this as well.”

To Jewish Canadians across the country: As you gather around the Hanukkiah for the first night of Hanukkah, I want you to know that we stand with you – and I hope you can find comfort and strength as you celebrate your traditions. Chag Hanukkah Sameach. https://t.co/zoVwOJOR84 pic.twitter.com/WwQzrNGjuu

— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) December 7, 2023

Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte said in a social media message that the miracle of Hanukkah — when the Jews who rededicated the Holy Temple only had a one-day supply of oil to light the menorah and it somehow lasted for eight days — “reminds us that nothing is impossible.”

“This is especially important at a time when there is so much hatred, cruelty, and growing antisemitism in the world,” she said. “I truly believe that the miracle of Hanukkah, faith, and wisdom will help us to overcome all obstacles.”

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave his “warmest greetings to our Jewish friends in India and around the world on the occasion of Hanukkah.” In his social media post, he also tagged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while writing, “May this festival bring peace, hope, and brightness in everybody’s lives.”

While the White House and US President Joe Biden have yet to post a Hanukkah message as of this writing, newly minted US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew posted that he spent the first night of the festival with families of the hostages seized by Hamas on Oct. 7.

“On this first night of Hanukkah, I joined the families of the hostages and together we lit a candle for each of the [remaining] 138 hostages,” he wrote. “Amid this tragic war, we are reminded that light in the end triumphs over darkness. We will not stop working until all hostages are back home.”

On this first night of Hanukkah, I joined the families of the hostages and together we lit a candle for each of the 138 hostages. Amid this tragic war, we are reminded that light in the end triumphs over darkness. We will not stop working until all hostages are back home. pic.twitter.com/p5TxEf0usH

— Ambassador Jack Lew (@USAmbIsrael) December 7, 2023

The official X/Twitter account for the state of Israel also posted a message marking the start of the festival of lights.

“Hanukkah is all about the resilience of the Jewish people. It’s about the victory of light over darkness,” the post read. “This Hanukkah is a difficult one, but Jewish history has taught us one thing. We will prevail. As we light the first candle tonight, we pray for the return of our hostages and the safety of our men and women in uniform.”

The post World Leaders Mark Hanukkah as Antisemitism Spikes Worldwide Amid Gaza War first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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