Day: October 17, 2023

President Joe Biden has announced that he’s traveling to Israel on Wednesday, in a clear sign of American leadership on the world stage. It’s how you ensure America’s interests abroad at a time when its ally Israel is under attack, and it’s how you exert pressure on a corrupt leader like Netanyahu.

Meanwhile House Republicans are busy hurling personal insults at each other through the media, as they continue to squabble over their own side’s lack of leadership. Then there’s Donald Trump, who’s slurring his words, whining about how wars are “boring,” and at one point on Monday tried and failed to read the word “Christmas” off the teleprompter.

So here we are, with the study in contrast more vivid than ever. President Biden is leading the way. Trump and his Republican cohorts are a joke. What more really needs to be said?

The post Joe Biden stands up as Donald Trump falls down appeared first on Palmer Report.

This article originally appeared in J. The Jewish News of Northern California, and was reprinted here with permission.

Graffiti calling for violence against Israelis and praising the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist operation that killed over a thousand civilians hit San Francisco and Berkeley in recent days, heightening tensions locally following the Hamas massacre in southern Israel and the subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza.

On Saturday, hours after the start of a massive pro-Palestinian rally and march with thousands of demonstrators in downtown San Francisco, a police officer noticed graffiti spray-painted “on several buildings,” a statement from SFPD spokesperson Gonee Sepulveda said. The graffiti “appeared to be prejudice based” and “targeting people of Jewish descent,” according to the statement, which also said the vandalism was spotted near the 600 block of Market Street at 3:07 p.m.

Images published on social media Saturday night showed violent messages in red spray paint on street-facing windows and building exteriors downtown. The graffiti read “Death 2 Israel,” “Death to Zionism” and “Kill a settler.”

This is ok in SF today (Market St) pic.twitter.com/54XpoYbR3H

— Iris Gelles (@GellesIris) October 15, 2023

Rafi Brinner, a security expert with the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, wrote in a “threat outlook” advisory email on Monday morning that local and federal agencies are monitoring potential threats to the Jewish community. Brinner said that the violence in Israel has “ratcheted up our community’s threat perceptions” and contributed to a sense of fear and anxiety. However, he added, “there is no broad reason why [Jewish community] organizations should not remain open and active, with appropriate security protocols and measures in place.”

S.F. Mayor London Breed published a photo of the “Death 2 Israel” graffiti along with a statement condemning what she called “disgusting calls to violence” and noting that police are investigating. Breed said the public works department worked overnight to clean up the graffiti.

I support peaceful protests but on Saturday protestors vandalized buildings with disgusting calls to violence. @SFPD continues to investigate this situation, and I’m grateful for the @sfpublicworks crews that worked overnight to immediately clean up this hateful graffiti. pic.twitter.com/sk20U2YeDi

— London Breed (@LondonBreed) October 16, 2023

The “All Out for Gaza” protest in S.F., co-organized by the Berkeley-based Middle East Children’s Alliance, began at noon and included a march from the Embarcadero up Market Street, according to media reports and social media posts. The Middle East Children’s Alliance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from J.

S.F. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins denounced what she called the “clearly antisemitic graffiti” in a thread on X on Monday, saying it “has no place in SF” and adding that “these types of acts have the potential to lead to retaliation or an escalation in hateful conduct.”

A day earlier, Jenkins found herself in hot water with pro-Palestinian groups after posting on X a criticism of the demonstration itself, calling it a “pro-Hamas rally.” Jenkins deleted that post and an accompanying thread after complaints from “members of the Muslim and Arab community,” she posted Monday.

Among those outraged by Jenkins’ tweet were members of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), a San Francisco activist group. Lara Kiswani of AROC called Jenkins’ statement “unhinged” in a statement released Monday.

“We are shocked and appalled by DA Jenkin’s hateful, libelous, and dangerous attacks on San Francisco residents, especially in this moment,” Kiswani said. “This is a clear incitement to violence against an already vulnerable community.”

Kiswani took issue with Jenkins’ association of the protest with Hamas, according to the San Francisco Standard. Despite that statement, AROC’s website holds the “Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence we’ve witnessed across historic Palestine.”

The protest Saturday came exactly one week after Hamas terrorists from Gaza infiltrated southern Israel, killing at least 1,400 people in Israel and injuring more than 3,400, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians. Another 199 people were taken hostage into Gaza, including babies and the elderly, the Israeli government has confirmed.

Meanwhile, Israel’s bombing campaign after Oct. 7 in Hamas-controlled Gaza is ongoing. In Gaza, at least 2,750 people have been killed and another 9,700 injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

In Berkeley, Ilana Pearlman said her 14-year-old son discovered jarring graffiti supporting Hamas violence on a billboard at University and San Pablo avenues on Friday afternoon as he walked home from school. The graffiti vandalized a billboard designed to challenge antisemitism by raising awareness of the Holocaust.

Pearlman later took a photo of the graffiti and reported the incident to the Berkeley Police Department.

Scrawled across the billboard in black spray paint were the words, written in all-caps: “Gaza is a concentration camp. Never again. Support Al Aqsa Flood.” A hammer and sickle, symbols associated with the Communist party, were spraypainted alongside the words “never again.”

“Al Aqsa Flood” refers to Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the name that Hamas designated for the Oct. 7 massacre. Oct. 7 has been widely reported as the single deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

The billboard, created by JewBelong, a New-Jersey based national nonprofit known for attention-grabbing pink billboards that seek to raise awareness about antisemitism, states: “We’re just 78 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jew hate is not an overreaction.”

“Antisemitism should have no place in our society,” Archie Gottesman, JewBelong’s co-founder, said in a press release about the vandalized billboard. “It’s deeply disturbing to see this kind of dangerous, hateful rhetoric in support of a terrorist attack,” she added.

Berkeley Police did not immediately respond to a J. request for comment.

Pearlman said she saw the obvious irony that a billboard referencing the Holocaust and exposing antisemitism was itself defaced with an antisemitic message.

“I really think it’s wrong to use words from the Holocaust like ‘never again’ to insinuate what’s happening is akin to a concentration camp or a gas chamber,” she told J.

Pearlman has reported antisemitic graffiti defacing Jewbelong billboards to police once before, when she saw “Free Palestine!” written in all-caps over a Jewbelong billboard in January. JewBelong claims this latest vandalism is the third time one of their billboards in Berkeley has been vandalized this year.

This latest defacement, Pearlman said, makes her worry about the safety of her children, ages 3, 6, and 14.

“Anyone who is writing something like this wants my children dead,” Pearlman said. “That’s the bottom line.”

Both graffiti incidents came less than a week after someone threw rocks through the glass doors of a synagogue and a cafe in Fresno. Police took a 30-year-old man into custody in connection to those incidents on Oct. 10. Orlando Ramirez has been charged in the cafe graffiti incident and is “person of interest” in the vandalism at Temple Beth Israel. Authorities reported finding a note at the cafe, Noah’s Ark Restaurant & Bakery, that said “All Jewish businesses will be targeted.”

The post ‘Disgusting calls to violence’ against Israel surface in Bay Area graffiti appeared first on The Forward.

JERUSALEM — I’ve been in Israel for only 24 hours, and I’ve quickly discovered that even after a week of weeping and worrying back home, I was not prepared to feel what it feels like here.

There is a cloud over this country, its people’s visages visibly darkened by grief for what has already happened, and with fear for what is yet to come. I have lived in Israel during many difficult and dangerous periods — through intifadas, wars, and the assassination of a prime minister — but there is nothing quite like the horror and the sorrow that grips the country right now.

It is also hard to shake the sense that things are about to get a lot worse.

Being here for a short time during this crisis helps me feel connected to the Israeli people and is pushing me to consider what responsibilities we bear right now from far away. The vast majority of North American Jews understood the magnitude of Hamas’ massacre and leaped to attention. We rallied with tears for our losses, and showed up with significant philanthropy to supply Israeli soldiers with their vast wartime needs and to support Israelis in the south whose lives and homes were destroyed in the rampage.

In this respect, we mirrored the unique ability that Israeli Jews have and are displaying right now to set aside political differences, even in a time of extreme polarization, to stand in solidarity with our people.

I fear, however, that what is coming will be substantially harder for our community and especially for our leaders, and I fear that we will misunderstand our responsibility. If North American Jews cannot figure out how to stand with Israelis right now — to determine the right balance between solidarity and criticism amid a dangerous and polarizing war — I fear that we will pave the way for the deterioration of the long-term relationship between North American Jews and Israel to a point beyond repair.

The challenge we face is that the dominant moral instincts and biases that define liberal North American Jewry, including an abiding commitment to kindness, compassion, and peace, make it difficult to confront the sad and painful truth that Israel is fighting a just war based on a just cause, and that solidarity with both our fellow Jews and with our values means supporting this war against Hamas, as awful as it will be.

To argue for the moral necessity of war right now is not a betrayal of our core commitments. Instead, it makes our commitments coherent in an imperfect world.

It is precisely the commitment to compassion that helps us understand the villainy that Hamas is committing against both Israel and against the Palestinian people — and that strengthens our resolve to defeat it. Our commitment to compassion should not become an obstacle to seeing that eradicating Hamas is essential to the world we want to help create: a world in which the safety and security of both Jews and Palestinians between the river and the sea is intertwined and guaranteed for both.

I fear that we are already failing this test of Jewish solidarity. Rabbinic statements and sermons are emerging that demand an immediate ceasefire. These calls mistake arguments about values for arguments about tactics, conflating the important work of praying for peace with the political act of demanding it, and they reduce the appeal to Jewish values to specific (and pacifist) policy positions.

And even as policy positions, they fail to provide an alternative vision through which Israel can destroy Hamas. Such statements and sermons marshal our moral instincts in implying that the absence of war is always morally superior to war.

But “just wars” are not just because they are easy or victimless. Just wars are just because they are morally necessary, because pacifism in the face of an unfettered evil is an untenable moral position.

No sovereign nation can tolerate an invasion like Israel experienced last week; no sovereign nation should be expected to rely on prayers and hopes that it won’t happen again. Israel should no longer be expected, by her friends from afar, to tolerate Hamas’ terrorist infrastructure or its continued aggression as a proxy of Iran’s genocidal aims.  

The fact that this is a just war based on a just cause is no guarantee that it will be conducted justly. Even if it is, it will still likely be terrible and tragic, with many civilian casualties. Israel faces two interdependent challenges right now: It must win this war against Hamas, dismantling its capacity to indiscriminately murder Israelis and its death-grip on the Gaza population; and it must fight in adherence to the ethics of war.

Ethics of war is more than a phrase. It is a doctrine with clear criteria for military policy that guides decision-making and hampers the capacity of an army to act indiscriminately. It has its own vocabulary, which solidarity with Israelis demands that we learn and use responsibly.

The principle of proportionality, for instance, is often bandied about to describe the tactical advantage of Israel’s weapons and defenses over the homemade rockets Hamas sprays into Israel. But the term, in its proper context, describes a commitment to restrain military action in proportion to military aims.

We are not nearly conversant enough in this vocabulary, and that confusion leads compassionate people to mistake difficult choices in war with moral failures of warcraft. We are also at risk, in trying to draw this distinction, of misinformation and disinformation distorting the evidence before our eyes, and of the prevalence of an entirely different set of assumptions on parts of the left that have predetermined the illegality and immorality of any Israeli military action.

But if we fail at this distinction, we will irredeemably condemn the cause of Israel in our eyes and the eyes of our children.

 So if Israel then faces two challenges — to wage an ethical war, and to win it — then we, its supporters, have two responsibilities: to support Israel’s fighting of this war, and to use our voices responsibly in insisting that it fight it ethically.

Diaspora Jewish leaders must understand that moral credibility in criticism of this war will lie only with those who seek to hold Israel accountable based on the belief that the war is legitimate, necessary and just. There is room to dissent on strategy and tactics about whether Israel is fighting this necessary war the right way — and an obligation to criticize when there is demonstrated failure to abide by the ethics of war Israel itself has long agreed to.

And there will be plenty to dissent about, and much to criticize. In Israel now, as the country mobilizes, Israelis are simultaneously signing up for reserve military duty at record rates and expressing immense frustration with their politicians for the clear intelligence and strategic failures that led to this moment.

That dance is a powerful model for those of us who wish to identify with the struggle that Israel must wage against Hamas, and the necessity to hold the politicians and the generals accountable to being the best they are meant to be.

I also carry a commitment to some amount of bearing witness to the character of Israel’s soldiers when I confront the possibility of ethical failings in the military. I don’t trust elected officials, but I have family and friends who help constitute Israel’s civilian army. They are a powerful counterweight to systematic and structural critiques of Israeli military leadership and policy today.

 To be in Israel right now is to feel that you are walking in the valley of the shadow of death. All this death — the victims of Hamas’ wickedness, the impending deaths of the Hamas perpetrators and the inevitable killing of innocent civilians caught in their grip — will continue to haunt us. But we also must tell the story right now that is right and just, as painful as it will be to hear it and adhere to it.

To contact the author, email opinion@forward.com.

The post This war is just even though it’s brutal. Jewish leaders need to be ready to defend it appeared first on The Forward.

(NewsNation) — About two weeks after the historic ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, members of the House of Representatives are set to begin voting at noon Tuesday for who they want to be their next speaker.

While Republicans are set to try and elect Rep. Jim Jordan, there are at least a handful of GOP members who are holding out as they see the ally of former President Donald Trump as too extreme. The Ohio representative was more than 50 votes short of clinching the speaker title during an internal party vote last Friday.

Jordan needs almost the full majority of Republicans to back him, as Democrats will support their own nominee: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a representative from New York.

Republican Majority Leader Steve Scalise, the party’s first nominee to replace McCarthy, decided not to vie for the speakership after Jordan’s allies refused to vote for him.

Before the vote, Jordan wrote a letter to his fellow House GOP colleagues, asking for unity around him as speaker, saying Republicans can’t spend any more time fighting among each other.

“We may not always agree on every issue or every bill, and that’s alright. We don’t march in lockstep like our Democrat colleagues,” Jordan wrote. “The country and our conference cannot afford us attacking each other right now.”

McCarthy himself weighed in on the House speaker race on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

“My prediction → @Jim_Jordan will be the 56th Speaker of the House,” McCarthy wrote.

Trump agreed with this assessment of Jordan’s chances. He told reporters during a break in court proceedings in his fraud trial that Jordan is a “fantastic young man.”

“I think he’s going to be confirmed sometime soon,” Trump said.

It’s a critical time for Congress — since they’ve been without a permanent speaker, all House business has ground to a halt, and lawmakers were only narrowly able to avert a threatened government shutdown by voting to keep agencies open until Nov. 17.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-North Carolina) is currently acting as a temporary speaker.

NewsNation’s Courtney Han and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story is developing. Refresh for updates.

The Biden administration said on Tuesday it plans to halt shipments to China of more advanced artificial intelligence chips designed by Nvidia and others, part of a suite of measures aimed at stopping Beijing getting cutting-edge U.S. technologies to strengthen its military.

The rules restrict a broader swathe of advanced chips and chipmaking tools to a greater number of countries including Iran and Russia, and blacklist Chinese chip designers Moore Threads and Biren.

The new measures aim to hamper China’s military development by closing loopholes in regulations released last October and will probably be updated “at least annually,” Commerce Department Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters late on Monday.

The goal is to limit China’s access to “advanced semiconductors that could fuel breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and sophisticated computers that are critical to (Chinese) military applications,” she said, stressing the administration was not seeking to hurt Beijing economically.

The United States and China are locked in a years-long technology war, but the sweeping curbs unveiled last year further escalated tensions between the superpowers.

In a statement following publication of the rules, top AI chip designer Nvidia (NVDA.O) said it complies with regulations and does not expect “a near-term meaningful impact” to its financial results.

The company has made chips such as the A800 and H800 that walked right up the line of the previous rules to continue selling to China, and AMD (AMD.O), also impacted by the rules, has said it plans a similar strategy.

Nvidia’s shares fell 6%, while shares in AMD and another rival AI chipmaker, Intel (INTC.O), slid 3.4% and 3.8% respectively.

Nvidia’s business has soared since the imposition of last year’s rules because its China-only chips are still better than alternatives. The Silicon Valley firm is currently selling almost every chip it can procure as worldwide demand outstrips supply, but would be hurt in the long term as Chinese chip firms seek to fill any voids left by U.S. companies.

Nvidia’s A800 and H800 chips will be hit by the new regulations, due to a change in chip parameters aimed at capturing a greater number of chips.

The rules will exempt most consumer chips used in laptops, smartphones and gaming, though some will be subject to licensing and notification requirements by U.S. officials.

“The fact is, China, even after the update of this rule, will import hundreds of billions of dollars of semiconductors from the United States,” Raimondo said, emphasizing that the goal of the measures was not to hammer U.S. companies.

The previous rules imposed a two-pronged test that measured both a chip’s computing performance and its ability to communicate with other chips, an important measure in AI supercomputers where thousands of chips are strung together to chew through huge amounts of data.

Nvidia and Intel created special chips for the Chinese market that retained the powerful computing capabilities but limited communications speeds to stay inside the previous rules.

The new rules impose limits on how much computing power a chip packs into a certain size, a measure designed to prevent workarounds using new “chiplet” technology that China has said will be central to its semiconductor industry’s future.

Biren and Moore Threads, whose U.S. suppliers will now face a tough licensing requirement before shipping products to them, are both Chinese startups founded by former Nvidia employees and aim to compete with the U.S. AI chip giant.

Biren said it firmly opposes its blacklisting and will appeal to the U.S. government to reexamine the decision. Moore Threads said it strongly disagrees with its addition to the trade blacklist.

The new measures also expand licensing requirements for exports of advanced chips to more than 40 additional countries that present risks of diversion to China and are subject to U.S. arms embargoes.

That measure appears to build on a letter received by Nvidia in August that it described as restricting shipments of its A100 and H100 chips beyond China to other regions including some countries in the Middle East.

Confirming a Reuters report, chips will be barred from being sent to units of firms located anywhere in the world if their parent companies are headquartered in China, Macau and other arms embargoed countries. The move is part of a bid to keep the chips from being illegally smuggled into China or remotely accessed by Chinese parent companies.

The Biden administration also hit 21 countries outside China with a licensing requirement for chipmaking tools.

It also added to the list of equipment restricted from going to that country to include some deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography systems, going beyond recent Dutch regulations to keep the Netherlands’ ASML from sending older DUV models and spare parts to some advanced Chinese chip factories, confirming another Reuters report.

DUV is less advanced chipmaking equipment than state-of-the art extreme ultraviolet equipment (EUV), which has already been withheld from China, but can make chips nearly as advanced at greater cost.

ASML said in a statement the new measures would likely have an impact on “the regional split of our system sales” over the medium to longterm, but that the company did not expect to see a “material impact” on its financial outlook for 2023 or the longer term.

Shares of rival U.S. equipment makers Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA dropped 3%, 2% and 3% respectively. Those companies, as well as the Chinese Embassy in Washington, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

U.S. officials said Chinese counterparts were warned the rules were coming by Raimondo, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, confirming a Reuters report.

The Semiconductor Industry Association said in a statement it was “evaluating the impact” of the new rules and urged the administration to work with allies. “Overly broad, unilateral controls risk harming the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem without advancing national security,” the group said.