Day: October 10, 2023

Hamas’ attack on Israel on Saturday has so far led to the deaths of more than 900 Israelis — more than 100 have been abducted. American Jews have been organizing vigils, support circles and fundraisers to aid Israelis hurt in the attacks, but also to share their own fears as the war continues. 

Here is a sampling of events and resources.

TUESDAY, OCT. 10

New York

Solidarity rally organized by the UJA-Federation of New York, 5 p.m. at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza in Manhattan.

Tri-Municipal Vigil for the State of Israel at 5:30 p.m. in Mamaroneck. 

New Jersey

Solidarity rally organized by the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, the ADL and other groups. 6:30 p.m. at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades. There will be a security checkpoint and no bags will be permitted. 

Georgia

Solidarity gathering organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta at 7:15 p.m. Registration is required.

California

Vigil for Israel organized by the Jewish Federation of San Diego at 7 p.m. at the Lawrence Family JCC.

 Florida

Israel solidarity gathering, at 6 p.m. at Congregation B’nai Israel in Boca Raton, Florida. Limited seating, registration and government identification required. Join here on zoom.

Israel solidarity rally at 6 p.m. at the Holocaust Memorial Miami Beach.

Washington, D.C.

Vigil for Israel, sponsored by the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, the ADL and other groups. 7 p.m. at Congregation Adas Israel, in-person and livestream. 

Connecticut

Community solidarity gathering at Temple Beth El in Stamford at 6 p.m., in-person and online.

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 11

Florida

Israel solidarity gathering, at 7 p.m. at Temple Torat Emet in Boynton Beach, Florida. Registration and photo ID are required, and no bags are allowed. 

Colorado

Community vigil organized by the Boulder JCC, the ADL and other groups at 6 p.m. at Congregation Har HaShem 

SUPPORT

Jewish Social Service Agency is hosting two virtual community support circles on October 11 at 7 p.m. and on October 13 at 12 p.m. Registration is required.

Hillel International offers guidance for vigils and prayers, prompts and proverbs for self-care.

The post Vigils, rallies, fundraisers and support groups: How Jewish Americans are responding to Hamas’ attack on Israel appeared first on The Forward.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be traveling on Wednesday to meet with senior Israeli leaders, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Tuesday, in a solidarity visit with Israel following an unprecedented Hamas attack that killed more than 1,000 Israelis over the weekend.

“It will be a message of solidarity and support,” Miller said in a briefing. “He, of course, wants to hear from the leaders of Israel, hear from them directly about the situation they’re facing … about what they need and how we can best support them.”

Miller said Blinken would be arriving in Israel on Thursday. When asked if the top U.S. diplomat would be heading to other countries after Israel, Miller said the State Department may have further announcements on the topic later on Tuesday.

Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Saturday, killing hundreds of Israelis and seizing dozens of hostages. Israel’s embassy in Washington said the death toll from Hamas’ weekend attacks had surpassed 1,000.

Israel subsequently battered Palestinians with air strikes in Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 830 Palestinians were killed and up to 4,250 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the blockaded enclave since Saturday. The United Nations said more than 180,000 Gazans had been made homeless.

President Joe Biden said on Tuesday U.S. law enforcement agencies were taking steps to disrupt any domestic threat that may emerge after Palestinian Islamist group Hamas’ weekend attack on Israel that left hundreds dead.

The FBI said earlier it was “closely monitoring unfolding events” but added it “does not have specific and credible intelligence indicating a threat to the United States stemming from the Hamas attacks in Israel.”

Biden said police departments in the U.S. had “stepped up security around centers of Jewish life.”

“There is no place for hate in America, not against Jews, not against Muslims, not against anybody,” Biden said.

Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel on Saturday killing hundreds of Israelis and seizing dozens of hostages. Israel’s embassy in Washington said the death toll from Hamas’ weekend attacks had surpassed 1,000.

Israel subsequently battered Palestinians with air strikes in Gaza. Gaza’s Health Ministry said at least 830 Palestinians were killed and up to 4,250 wounded in Israeli air strikes on the blockaded enclave since Saturday. The United Nations said more than 180,000 Gazans had been made homeless.

“We will not hesitate to adjust our security posture, as appropriate, to protect the American people,” the FBI said earlier, adding it was coordinating with counterparts in the region as well as other international partners.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Biden described Hamas’ attack as an “act of sheer evil.”

“There are moments in this life … when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world. The people of Israel lived through one such moment this weekend,” Biden said.

When Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg pleaded guilty to financial fraud crimes, it didn’t just send him to prison. It also meant that Weisselberg was required to testify against Donald Trump and others when it came to those same crimes. After all, once you’ve been convicted, the Fifth Amendment goes out the window. You can’t argue that you’re afraid of incriminating yourself on things you’ve already been convicted on.

Accordingly, even though Weisselberg never cut any sort of cooperation deal, he still ended up having to testify today at Trump’s New York civil fraud trial. This was always pretty much inevitable, given that if Weisselberg had refused to testify, he’d have gone to prison for obstruction.

Sure enough, Weisselberg admitted on the stand today that Donald Trump knowingly made false claims about the size of his Trump Tower apartment, along with other lies, on financial statements. These lies are crimes because Trump used these lies to secure loans and such.

Weisselberg is also claiming that he can’t recall certain details of how things went down. That’ll get a lot of media attention, but it misses the point. It’s not about what Weisselberg didn’t say today. It’s about what Weisselberg did say. Weisselberg’s testimony today is a huge blow to Trump, as it’ll help ensure that the judge hands out massive financial penalties at the end of this trial.

The post Allen Weisselberg just took the stand and gave damning testimony against Donald Trump in civil fraud trial appeared first on Palmer Report.

Sixty years after the FBI marked Martin Luther King Jr. as America’s “most dangerous Negro,” the FBI incorporates the preacher in its new agent training, pledging to honor King by upholding the civil rights of all citizens. While this appears to signal a critical shift in the institution’s culture, nothing could be further from the truth. The same practices—treating communities of color as suspicious and potentially un-American, surveilling anti-racist movements while standing aside during escalating white supremacist violence—have continued.

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While the FBI had been surveilling King and the civil rights movement for years, the official sign-off for electronic surveillance on King began on Oct. 10, 1963. Attorney General Robert Kennedy granted FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his bureau such legal permission on the premise that King was a communist threat. But, the FBI knew that wasn’t true because it had just conducted a thorough investigation of communist influence in the civil rights movement, finding none.

Rather, it was the March on Washington that alarmed the Kennedy Administration—they had installed a kill switch in the microphone and 150 FBI agents were on hand that day. And the reach and power of King’s address worried the Bureau and the Kennedy administration. King had stressed how the U.S. had given Black people a “bad check,” decried the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality,” and made clear that “America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.” The FBI concluded that King was “demagogic” and leading America into a “racial revolution.” They marked him “the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation…from the standpoint…of national security.”

Read More: FBI Letter to Martin Luther King Jr. Reveals Ugly Truths From Hoover’s Era

The FBI decided King needed to be stopped, and did not allow the lack of evidence concerning a communist conspiracy to get in the way. “Facts by themselves are not too meaningful,” the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division noted. “They are somewhat like stones tossed in a heap as contrasted to the same stones put in the form of a sound edifice.” 

And so, the FBI constructed its own heap of stones installing wiretaps and microphones on King’s home and wherever the non-violent preacher went, including hotel rooms, the Atlanta and New York offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the homes of friends with whom he occasionally resided. The FBI then distributed its “counter-intelligence” to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Nearly weekly for the four and half years between the beginning surveillance and King’s assassination in 1968, Hoover directly apprised President Lyndon B. Johnson of the information gleaned. In more than 250 memos, Hoover sent the president political intel, accounts of King and his advisors criticizing Johnson, and even personal information.

The FBI had plenty of partners outside of the White House as well. Congressmen, leading journalists, and ministers were illegally supplied with data obtained from the Bureau’s technical surveillance on King. It contained private information, not evidence of criminal activity. Congressmen and ministers used the counter-intelligence in their speeches, sermons, and publications to discredit King, smearing him as un-American and an “extremist.” Journalists refused to publish the salacious material, but never exposed the Bureau’s extraordinary monitoring of the civil rights leader.

In contrast to the way the FBI surveilled and targeted the Black freedom movement despite no evidence of any wrongdoing, the Bureau regularly cast white racist violence as outside of its jurisdiction—even when agents had prior knowledge from KKK informants. In 1961, through its Klan informants, the Bureau had advance warning that Freedom Riders were going to be attacked when their bus reached Birmingham; they did nothing and many of the Freedom Riders had to be hospitalized because of the brutal attack they endured. In 1963, the FBI withheld evidence gathered by informants and surveillance identifying the perpetrators of the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. In 1965, Gary Thomas Rowe, a paid informant was in the car whose occupants killed white Detroiter Viola Liuzzo following King’s Selma to Montgomery March but the FBI scuttled the investigation, trying to smear Liuzzo instead to protect Rowe.

Read more: 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Survivors Recall a Day That Changed the Fight for Civil Rights: ‘I Will Never Stop Crying Thinking About It’

In April 1964, King publicly called attention to the FBI’s unwillingness to investigate white supremacist violence, telling a news reporter, “You can’t explain to a Negro how it is that a plane can be bombed, and its pieces scattered for miles and the crime can be solved,” King noted, “but [the FBI] can’t find out who bombed a church.” Hoover was furious, calling King a “notorious liar.” And the FBI’s campaign against King expanded even further.

In recent years, the FBI has claimed to acknowledge this “shameful history.” Former FBI director James Comey displayed the 1963 memo on his desk as a reminder of FBI overreach and had new agents visit the King Memorial on the National Mall, study King’s quotes, and write essays “about the intersections” of King’s philosophy and the values of the FBI. And an MLK quote—“The time is always right to do what is right”—is etched in stone at the FBI’s main training facility in Quantico, VA.

And yet, this kind of commemoration of King conveniently misses the point. The modern FBI has 15,000 paid informants, and in the 21st century an immense number have been focused within the Muslim community, surveilling mosques, Muslim student groups, chat rooms, and charity fundraisers. This is a dramatic increase from 1974 when investigations by the Senate Church Committee into COINTELPRO revealed the FBI had 1,500 paid informants.

At the same time, the FBI still has yet to make a serious commitment to stopping violent white supremacy, even though white supremacist violence has been deemed the nation’s top national security threat. The FBI had an “unusual number of informants” in the Proud Boys. They had been warned of the potential for violence on January 6th, 2021, but didn’t move to stop it.

Read More: Working for J. Edgar Hoover, I Saw His Worst Excesses and Best Intentions

The answer to the white-supremacist threat is not to give the FBI more power, something that the Federal Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2023, a bill with Democratic backing, would do.

An already powerful FBI and DOJ do not need more authority and resources to investigate and prevent white supremacist violence. They just need to make it a priority. During the Cold War, the “red scare” of communism enabled the FBI to gain power, which resulted in violations of the civil rights of King and many, many others in the civil rights movement. And after 9/11, faced with a new national security threat, the FBI convinced the country to give it more power, and used it to maintain almost constant surveillance of American Muslims.

Such authority has been and continues to be used to perpetuate the Bureau’s longstanding practice of surveilling communities of color and undermining anti-racist movements. As Black Lives Matter gained national attention following Ferguson, the FBI Counterterrorism Division created the label “Black Identity Extremists,” claiming that BLM groups posed a potential terrorist threat because of their potential responses to “perceived racism and injustice.” Recently, the FBI, along with local law enforcement, has turned its attention to Atlanta’s Stop Cop City movement, going as far as surveilling events by supporters in Chicago.

Sound familiar? It should; these are the same kinds of assumptions, practices, and alternative facts that undergirded the FBI’s campaign against King and the civil rights movement. To learn from Oct. 10, 1963, then, is not to give the FBI more power under the guise of new threats but to reckon with our national tendency, then and now, to fear and criminalize those who call this country to account for its racism and troubling law enforcement practices.

Lerone A. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., centennial professor and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University and the author of The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted White Christian Nationalism. Jeanne Theoharis is distinguished professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.

Without warning on Saturday, Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers attacked Israel by air, land and sea. Millions of Israelis in the country’s south awoke to the searing sound of incoming rockets and the inevitable thud of impact. Air raid sirens wailed as far north as Tel Aviv. Israel’s anti-rocket interceptors thundered in Jerusalem.

In an unprecedented escalation, armed Hamas fighters blew up parts of Israel’s highly fortified separation fence and strode into Israeli communities along the Gaza frontier, terrorizing residents and trading fire with Israeli soldiers.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies were scrambling to respond to the rapidly changing events. As the day wore on, the casualties quickly mounted.

Rescue Service Zaka, an Israeli group, said at least 200 people died in southern Israel and an additional 1,100 people were wounded.

At least 198 people in the Gaza Strip were killed and at least 1,610 wounded amid Israel’s retaliation.

Here are some key takeaways from the multi-pronged attack that has suddenly plunged Israel into war.

The shock that Israelis felt on Saturday morning — on Simchat Torah, one of the most joyous days of the Jewish calendar — recalled the surprise of the the 1973 Mideast war. Practically 50 years earlier to the day, a full-scale Egyptian-Syrian attack on a Jewish holiday quickly turned into a disaster for an unprepared Israeli military.

Then, as now, Israelis had assumed that their intelligence services would be able to alert the army to any major attack or invasion well in advance. That colossal failure still haunts the legacy of then-Prime Minister Golda Meir and helped bring down the lengthy rule of the once-dominant Labor Party.

Now, the question of how the militants were able to stage such a huge and coordinated attack — which has already killed more Israelis than any single assault since the second Palestinian uprising two decades ago — without triggering Israeli intelligence concerns has already presented a major challenge to Netanyahu’s ultranationalist government.

The government’s supporters had expected Netanyahu and hard-line ministers with a history of anti-Arab rhetoric like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to take a particularly belligerent stance against the Palestinians and respond more forcefully to threats from militants in Gaza.

As political analysts lambast Netanyahu over the failure, and the casualty count climbs, Netanyahu risks losing control of both his government and the country.

Hamas claimed its fighters took several Israelis captive in the enclave, releasing gruesome videos of militants dragging bloodied soldiers across the ground and standing over dead bodies, some of them stripped to their underwear. It said senior Israeli military officers were among the captives.

The videos could not immediately be verified but matched geographic features of the area. Fears that Israelis had been kidnapped evoked the 2006 capture of soldier Gilad Shalit, whom Hamas-linked militants seized in a cross-border raid. Hamas held Shalit for five years until he was exchanged for over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

In a dramatic escalation unseen in decades, Hamas also sent paragliders flying into Israel, the Israeli military said. The brazen attack recalled a famous assault in the late 1980s when Palestinian militants crossed from Lebanon into northern Israel on hang-gliders and killed six Israeli soldiers.

The Israeli army belatedly confirmed that soldiers and civilians were taken hostage in Gaza, but refused to provide further details.

Hamas officials cited long-simmering sources of tension between Israel and the Palestinians, including the dispute around the sensitive Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, which is is sacred to both Muslims and Jews and remains at the emotional heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Competing claims over the site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, have spilled into violence before, including a bloody 11-day warbetween Israel and Hamas in 2021.

In recent years, Israeli religious nationalists — such as Ben-Gvir, the national security minister — have increased their visits to the compound. Last week, during the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli activists visited the site, prompting condemnation from Hamas and accusations that Jews were praying there in violation of the status quo agreement.

Hamas statements have also cited the expansion of Jewish settlements on lands that the Palestinians claim for a future state and Ben-Gvir’s efforts to toughen restrictions on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

More recently, tensions have escalated with violent Palestinian protests along the Gaza frontier. In negotiations with Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations, Hamas has pushed for Israeli concessions that could loosen the 17-year blockade on the enclave and help halt a worsening financial crisis that has sharpened public criticism of its rule.

Some political analysts have linked Hamas’ attack to current U.S.-brokered talks on normalization of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia. So far, reports of possible concessions to Palestinians in the negotiations have involved Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, not Gaza.

“We have always said that normalization will not achieve security, stability, or calm,” Bassem Naim, a senior Hamas official, told the AP.

The eruption of violence comes at a difficult time for Israel, which is facing the biggest protests in its history over Netanyahu’s proposal to weaken the Supreme Court while he is on trial for corruption.

The protest movement, which accuses Netanyahu of making a power grab, has bitterly divided Israeli society and unleashed turmoil within the Israeli military. Hundreds of reservists have threatened to stop volunteering to report for duty in protest at the judicial overhaul.

Reservists are the backbone of the country’s army, and protests within the army ranks have raised concerns about the military’s cohesion, operational readiness and power of deterrence as it confronts threats on multiple fronts. Netanyahu on Saturday called up “an extensive mobilization of reserve forces.”

Israel and Hamas have fought four wars and exchanged fire numerous times since the Islamic militant group seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority in 2007. Cease-fires have stopped major fighting in past rounds of conflict but have always proven shaky.

Each agreement in the past has offered a period of calm, but the deeper, underlying issues of the conflict are rarely addressed and set the stage for the next round of airstrikes and rockets.

With its increased leverage in this round, Hamas is likely to push harder for concessions on key issues, such as easing the blockade and winning the release of prisoners held by Israel.