#Betar US

[unsolicited-opinions]

I unreservedly condemn Betar US.

Terrorism, racism, and bigotry are wrong and repulsive, whether promoted by Islamists or fringe right wing Jews.

I do not claim them and I wouldn't piss on their heads if their hair was on fire.

This isn't advocacy for the Jewish people, this throws gasoline on a fire which is already far too hot.

The ADL and Shai Davidai are 100% right about these shitheads.

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

The right-wing StopAntisemitism group thinks that children’s YouTube educator Ms. Rachel should be investigated by Attorney General Pam Bondi for “pro-Hamas propaganda.” The New York Post reports that the organization sent a letter to Bondi complaining about social media posts from the YouTube star, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, about Palestinian children killed by Israel during its brutal massacre of Gaza since 2023. “Her posts have largely ignored the suffering of Israeli victims, hostages, and Jewish children, while she consistently amplifies misinformation from Hamas and other anti-Israel sources,” StopAntisemitism director Liora Rez wrote in the letter. Rez also claimed that with “vast sums of foreign funds” being “directed toward propagandizing our young people on college campuses, we suspect there is a similar dynamic in the online influencer space.” “We urge you and your office to investigate whether or not Ms. Rachel is being remunerated to disseminate Hamas-aligned propaganda to her millions of followers, as this may violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA),” Rez wrote to Bondi.

[...] The letter seems to be fitting into a pattern of pro-Israel organizations, such as Canary Mission and Betar, targeting critics of Israel’s military actions, as well as supporters of Palestinian self-determination. Betar says it has provided lists of noncitizen protesters to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies, recommending deportation.

The pro-Israel Apartheid smear merchant group StopAntisemitism calls on “AG” Pam Bondi to conduct a bogus investigation into Ms. Rachel (Rachel Accurso) over her pro-Palestinian support.

[aqlstar]

I need the idiots at Betar USA to stop chanting death to Arabs if for no other reason then because you are distracting the pro-Palestinian college groups from their regularly scheduled content.

You are making them interrupt their evil Disney villain monologues about destroying all of western civilization in order to repost the single video of yidden behaving very badly.

Stop interrupting these groups while they are digging their own graves. Sit down and don’t give them anything to complain about so they can go back to ranting about how much they love Islamist terror attacks in India.

[fairuzfan]

Betar usa's Twitter is so... like they're actually offering money publicly to kill Palestinians in the US

[political-us]

[good-old-gossip]

Hundreds of pro-Palestine people attended a demonstration organised by the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation-Awda (Pal-Awda) on Tuesday in New York City’s borough of Brooklyn to protest against a real estate event advertising land for sale in occupied Palestine, with protests turning violent.

The protests against the land “expo” by Pal-Awda and many pro-Palestinian supporters turned into fighting between the pro-Palestinian side and far-right Zionist groups that organised a counter-protest.

Betar USA, the US franchise of the right-wing youth Zionist movement, organised a counterdemonstration across the street from the pro-Palestinian protesters.

A statement by Pal-Awda said the pro-Palestinian attendees were “spat on, kicked, harassed, maced, physically struck and punched by Zionists.

One counter-protestor held a lighter to a Qur’an, another made sexual gestures with the Qur’an, and others mocked the [Muslim] call for prayer”.

Various media reports said that a protester affiliated with the Betar group was seen carrying the yellow flag of the Jewish Defence League, a far-right extremist group that has been banned as a terrorist organisation in a number of countries. S

everal members of Betar waved Israeli and American flags and held signs saying “Bring Them Home,” referring to the Israeli captives in Gaza.

As the protest progressed, several members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community from the neighbourhood joined Betar’s protest and added chants in Yiddish.

A 42-year-old pro-Palestinian protester from Brooklyn was arrested and charged with third-degree assault for punching a 61-year-old pro-Israel protester in the face, according to the New York Police Department.

The “real estate” event was organised by the Getter Group, an Israeli real estate company based in Boro Park, Brooklyn, according to Pal-Awda’s statement.

The Getter Group repeatedly promoted the event on their website and social media channels, referring to it as an “Israel real estate expo”.

The group’s website advertises properties “available” in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

[athena5898]

(MPN) Zionist group Betar threatens UN official on her London visit

Betar, a group that proudly identifies as "loud, aggressive, and unapologetically Zionist," has threatened to blow up UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese during her visit to London tomorrow.

Betar has a known history of violent harassment.

(This is a call back to when Israel used pagers to blow up civilians)

[marvelsmostwanted]

Huge story: “Pro-Israel groups that have used social media and surveillance to create blacklists of campus activists are claiming credit for providing the Trump administration a roadmap for locating international students to detain and deport.”

Their lists named Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student who was kidnapped off the street by ICE - who had no link to pro-Palestinian protests beyond signing an op-ed in her school newspaper - and Mahmoud Kahlil, the Columbia student and organizer who was kidnapped by ICE.

These lists also include people who did nothing violent and only expressed their opinions - people who have now been illegally arrested for no justifiable reason.

This is a clear and heinous violation of the First Amendment and free speech. Free speech is legal in the United States. It is a constitutional right of all individuals who live, work, and learn here. Absolutely disgusted by these groups trying to take that away because they didn’t like what these people said.

And also - do these groups seriously think Trump isn’t coming for them next once they grant him the power to disappear people he doesn’t like off the street?

Fight him, not students you disagree with. Trump is the real threat and if you fail to see that, it’s at your own peril.

The organizations named are:

• Betar US - considered an extremist group by the ADL

• Canary Mission - linked to Megamot Shalom, and Israeli non-profit against divestment

• The Middle East Forum

• Accuracy in Media

[unsolicited-opinions]

Worth repeating:

F@#& Betar US.

[mariacallous]

The U.S. State Department plans to use artificial intelligence to detect students from abroad who support Hamas, with the goal of canceling their visas and deporting them.

That’s according to a report Thursday from Axios, which cited unnamed department officials who said they planned to use AI to surveil the social media of students on visas. The plan is called “Catch and Revoke,” a callback to the “catch and release” approach to managing illegal immigration that Republicans have decried.

Separately, Fox News reported that the department has already revoked the visa of one student who participated in campus demonstrations against Israel amid the war in Gaza, that began which Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The student and campus were not identified.

And the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee told NPR this week that it had heard from at least a dozen students, including some from Gaza, who were unable to reenter the country after winter break because their visas were canceled without explanation.

Together, the developments signal that the Trump administration is moving aggressively to carry out President Donald Trump’s promise not to allow international students who support terrorism to remain in the country.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in a fact sheet that accompanied the executive order, repeating a pledge he made during his presidential campaign. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

The executive order was billed as an effort to fight antisemitism and it has divided Jewish groups. Some say it reflects a dangerous erosion of civil liberties, while others have offered cautious support with the caveat that civil rights protections should be applied. Others yet have embraced the order and offered to help. The far-right group Betar US, which launched in response to the protests, says it has submitted the names of dozens of students it believes should be deported to the White House.

Thousands of students were arrested at campus pro-Palestinian protests and encampments last year. It is not known how many were on visas, though State Department officials are reportedly working to ascertain that information. The department says the Biden administration did not revoke any visas following those arrests.

The State Department has not detailed what kinds of demonstrations or social media posts would, in its view, constitute support for Hamas. Demonstrations on some campuses — including at Barnard College in New York City this week — have included open support and admiration for Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist group. The demonstrations have also featured many students offering vocal support for the Palestinians and intense criticism of Israel without open support for Hamas.

Civil rights advocates say they are concerned that the Trump administration will penalize pro-Palestinian students who have not violated any laws or expressed support for Hamas. They also are expressing concern about the use of AI, a new technology that has advanced even since Oct. 7, to surveil students.

Advocates for and against the administration’s efforts both say they expect them to wind up in court. For now, though, the crackdown is already creating a chill on college campuses, according to the NPR report, which found that some foreign students are increasingly hesitant about participating in any pro-Palestinian events, even when they are not demonstrations against Israel.

[dragoneyes613]

Romania was already fervently antisemitic even before Hitler’s rise to power. The new government elected in 1937 not only sanctioned official antisemitic laws, but also acquiesced to widespread antisemitic violence in the country, particularly during the interwar period, and antisemitism on the eve of WWII was about as rampant in Romania as in Germany. On September 6, 1940, King Carol abdicated, and the passionate antisemite Ion Antonescu, who had been minister of defense in the previous government, came to power. His police were organized with the help of the Nazis and the S.S. and an ensuing period of antisemitic terrorism began with the confiscation of Jewish-owned shops and went on to arresting and torturing Jewish leaders and the mass murder of Jews.

However, the Struma, a small iron-hulled ship only 148.4 feet long, had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered luxury yacht. Restructured with an undependable second-hand diesel engine, it was carrying cattle on the Danube River under the Panamanian flag in the 1930s when the Mossad LeAliyah Bet first considered using it as a refugee ship. That plan was abandoned when the Germans entered Bulgaria, but the manifestly unseaworthy vessel was ultimately commissioned by the Revisionist Zionist organizations in Romania, particularly Betar, to carry 769 passengers fleeing Axis-allied Romania to Eretz Yisrael under the British Mandate during World War II.

The Russian submarine Shch 213

Originally designed for about 150 passengers, the Struma was retrofitted to carry almost 800 people, such that its sleeping quarters lacked space for the passengers to even sit up. The ancient engine had been recovered from a wreck on the bottom of the Danube River and the vessel was little more than a pile of junk. As such, it could not have come as a monumental surprise that when the Struma set sail from the port of Constanta on the Black Sea on December 12, 1941 – as the last vessel to leave Europe to escape the Holocaust – her diesel engine died several times before her arrival in Istanbul, including a failure on the very day she set sail. A tugboat had to tow her out of Constanta and, since the waters off the coast were mined, a Romanian ship shepherded her clear of the minefield before abandoning her to her fate, as she drifted overnight while the crew tried, but failed, to start her engine.

The Struma broadcasted distress signals but, when the Romania tugboat returned the next day, its crew refused to repair her engines without payment. After a superficial examination of the engine, the mechanic declared that he was prepared to fix it for three million leu, an extortionate and unimaginable sum, particularly given that most the refugees on board had been robbed blind by customs officers and spent their last penny buying their way out of Romania and paying an exorbitant fee just to secure passage on the Struma.

He finally agreed to accept 250 gold wedding rings and other family heirlooms in lieu of cash but, on December 15, 1941, only three days later, the engine died again near the shores of Turkey, so the Struma was towed into the quarantine section of Istanbul harbor – where she sat anchored and isolated for more than two months. There, the refugees learned for the first time that a reprehensible fraud had been perpetrated upon them and that the immigration certificates into Eretz Yisrael that had been promised to them never actually existed.

In a particularly heinous act which earned him everlasting infamy – and which led the Jews to refer to him as “Haman” – Sir Harold MacMichael, the British High Commissioner of Palestine, not only refused entry to the Struma, but also urged the Turks not to permit the Jewish refugees to disembark. Consistent with their hateful White Paper (1939), the British remained determined to eliminate Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael; the Romanians did not want to take the Jews back; and the Turks, still neutral at the time, carefully walked the line so as not to risk alienating any country – particularly since most of the passengers bore Romanian, Hungarian, or Bulgarian passports, all countries hostile to Great Britain during the war whom the British claimed might be Nazi agents. The entire world left “the floating coffin” to sit rotting in the water during one of the coldest winters in decades and with its starving and freezing passengers abandoned. The situation became even worse for the Jewish refugees aboard the Struma, sailing under a Panamanian flag, when Panama declared war against Germany in January 1942.

When the Turkish deadline for some international resolution of the “Struma problem” passed with no action being taken, Turkish Prime Minister Refik Saydam sent a small party of police to board the ship on February 23, 1942, but the refugees repelled them. A force of some 80 police followed soon thereafter and, surrounding the ship with motorboats, forcefully overcame passenger resistance, boarded the Struma, and attached her to a tug, which towed her through the Bosporus and out into the Black Sea, where the Turkish authorities abandoned the ship without food, water, or fuel. As the vessel was being towed, passengers enthusiastically began singing Hatikvah and signs were hung over the sides and visible on the banks of the water that read “Save Us.”

On the morning of February 24, 1942, the Russian commander of the submarine Shch-213, who had standing orders from Stalin to sink all neutral ships in the Black Sea to prevent supplies from reaching Germany, torpedoed the Struma. The ship – which had no life vests and was equipped with only two small decrepit lifeboats – quickly sunk, killing 768 men, women and children, making it the largest exclusively civilian naval disaster of World War II. More than 100 passengers actually survived the original bombing, as they clung to pieces of wreckage in the icy water, but no rescue came and all but one of them died from drowning or hypothermia. The lone survivor was 19-year-old David Stoliar, who hung on in the frozen waters for over 24 hours before a Turkish fishing boat appeared and picked him up. Unbelievably, after a week in an Istanbul hospital, he was transferred to a Turkish jail and was held for 71 days for being in Turkey “illegally.”

The Yishuv mourned the drowned refugees and felt anger towards the British, due to their policy of closing the gates of Palestine to Jewish refugees. Following the sinking of the Struma the Jewish National Council (the Vaad HaLeumi) declared a day of mourning, and an internal curfew. Shown here is a flyer distributed throughout Eretz Yisrael in the wake of the sinking of the Struma:

With the frightening news we have received of the sinking of the Struma and the refugees on it, the National Committee has decided to declare a general work stoppage and internal curfew throughout the land, today, Thursday, the 9th of Adar [February 26,1942]: All agriculture, industry, and trade work – from noon; and all transportation from 1:00 p.m. The following workers shall continue to work: army camps, health services, electric company, post office, telegraph, and train system. The Jews shall be confined to their homes and shall not go out to the street from 1:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. No work until midnight. On this day, the Yishuv expresses its heavy mourning for the hundreds of sacrifices of our immigrant brothers who drowned at sea, and our strong bitterness at the hardening of the heart and disinterest from the higher Jewish institutions in Jerusalem and London, who were warned of the expected dangers to those Jewish refugees who successfully escaped from the claws of the Nazis; and (expresses) our strong demand to all the nations with whom the Jewish nation together stands in the war against the evil government of Hitler and his partners, to recognize their duty to extend a saving hand to the escapees and to facilitate the reception of the refugees into the Jewish Yishuv.

The Yishuv’s Petition

We are calling upon the people of Britain, their elected officials, and their government:

Provide refuge to Israel’s migrants and its refugees in their national home and their homeland.

Let the fate of those fleeing Nazi persecution not be like the fate of the people of the “Salvador” and the “Struma” – drowning at sea.

The story of the disaster must be investigated before a parliamentary committee.

Liberty must be declared for the people of the “Darien” and homecoming and redemption be provided to all the survivors.

My voice, along with the voice of my brothers, that are calling for refuge.

The Rock of Refuge

For months, the sinking of the Struma became a rallying cry for Jews worldwide and it generated protests, a general strike in Eretz Yisrael, death threats against British officials, and responses by Turkey and Britain that voiced regrets but denied responsibility. The British government eventually decided to grant an exception and to permit Stoliar to make aliyah – over the strenuous objections of the loathsome MacMichael, who argued that permitting the entry of the sole survivor of the Struma would somehow open the “floodgates” to Jewish immigration. In a public response to the tragedy, MacMichael stated: “The fate of these people was tragic, but the fact remains that they were nationals of a country at war with Britain, proceeding direct from enemy territory. Palestine was under no obligations towards them.” MacMichael had also been responsible for the deaths of 260 people on the Patria, who were killed by a mine in Haifa harbor after he denied them entry. The Struma sinking, along with the Patria disaster which had preceded it, became a rallying point for the Irgun and LEHI Jewish underground movements, encouraging their violent revolt against the British presence in Eretz Yisrael.

Stoliar (1922-2014) was born in Kishinev, Romania, to Yaakov, a textile manufacturer, and Bella (née Leichiman); the two divorced when he was ten. He moved with his mother to France and returned to Romania in 1937 at age 15 to live with his father. After graduating from high school, he studied for a year at the Polytechnic Institute before being expelled because he was Jewish. In the summer of 1941, the Romanian authorities sent him and other young Jewish men to a forced labor camp at Poligon on the outskirts of Bucharest and, after several months at hard labor, his father paid a bribe to secure his release and purchased a ticket for him to sail on the Struma to Eretz Yisrael.

On January 21, 1941, the Iron Guard had launched a pogrom against Bucharest Jews, looting and burning Jewish homes and synagogues and some 200 Jews were rounded up, tortured, and murdered in a slaughterhouse; others were hanged like cattle from the slaughterhouse iron hooks, tagged with signs reading “kosher meat,” and were chopped up while still alive. The sole survivor remaining after the Romanian mass murder of at least 13,266 Jews was Rav Zvi Gutman, the Rabbi of Bucharest. On the day that Stoliar left Bucharest for passage aboard the Struma, his father took him to visit Rav Gutman, who cried when he was asked for a beracha. As Stoliar tells the story (his testimony is preserved in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem):

He blessed me to the effect that I would reach Eretz Yisrael safely. I was very moved by this encounter. When I left the provisional synagogue that the Rabbi had established, I didn’t say a word to my father, but we both felt that we had fulfilled a sacred duty to G-d… Something within me changed. Courage filled me, and my belief that I would indeed reach Eretz Yisrael strengthened.

Stoliar’s identity papers and belongings were punctiliously checked before he could join the other “illegal” immigrants on the train from Bucharest to the port of Constanța on the Black Sea. As he later described it:

Sometimes, the inspector would wickedly take something out of the backpack and turn to his friend, asking, “Perhaps you have some newspaper to wrap up these shoes? I just got them as a present.” People didn’t protest, and let themselves be humiliated… It wasn’t important. At that moment, they were leaving the firetrap of Satan, whose reach had spread over all of Europe… They boarded the trains… The cries of those parting from them – Write as soon as you arrive! Take care that you don’t catch cold on the ship! Be well! – were swallowed up in the rattling of the wheels. Almost 800 people were leaving the land of their birth, their homes, their childhood and adolescent dreams, to escape the chilling threat of death. The passengers underwent further inspections at Constanța. The security police checked their names in the joint passport, and they had to hand in their Romanian documents. Only one man, whose name had been removed by mistake from the list, was turned away. In vain he cried and begged them to let him travel, but the border personnel didn’t give in – he received his life back as a gift! The passengers’ luggage was examined again by the tax officers, who confiscated many items, and by clerks from the Romanian National Bank, who appropriated money and jewelry. The passengers were undressed, and painstakingly examined. There was a ban on taking precious metals out of Romania, and they were only allowed to take their wedding rings with them. The amount of money permitted to take out of the country was also confiscated.

As Stoliar describes the journey to Istanbul, the passengers were instructed to try to keep the vessel in balance and not to move, lest too many people on one side of the deck endanger the ship. As such, there was no way for them to wash themselves or to clean up, with the situation getting increasingly worse as time went on. When the ship reached Turkey, the authorities refused to permit the passengers to disembark, leaving them on board in dire conditions for ten weeks. According to Stoliar, the passengers began to get used to the misery, dirt, overcrowding, lack of food and the cold, and they would remove bugs from their shirts with a knife or razor because they no longer had any change of clothing. Thanks to Dr. Hora Löbel, whose pregnant wife stayed behind and planned to join him in Eretz Yisrael after their child was born, a group of thirty doctors and nurses was organized that provided all the sick passengers’ needs, as far as was possible in light of the lack of basic medical materials, but the diabetics’ plight became particularly dire because the Turkish authorities forbade anyone to bring insulin to them.

The Turks permitted nine passengers to disembark, eight of whom had entry permits to Eretz Yisrael and, after much pleading, one female passenger who started to severely hemorrhage was taken off the ship and brought to a hospital.

Describing his personal experience on the Struma, he says:

We were eight km from the Turkish coast… Shortly before 9:00 a.m. we heard the thunder of bombardment and saw flames coming from the Turkish coast, and a second later, everyone on deck saw a torpedo speeding towards us. A deafening explosion ripped through the ship… I only remember that a superhuman force lifted me into the air; after a few moments I fell back down and landed in the water. From the moment of impact, no more than a minute passed before the vessel disappeared without a trace. It was literally swallowed up by the waves in the blink of an eye… Just a few planks of wood floating on the surface remained of the Struma… There were a few dozen people in the water, men and women who tried to save themselves, but the screams and cries for help dissipated and vanished amidst the vast expanse of the sea… The waves were cold as ice, and my limbs lost all feeling… I managed to lay my hands on a large piece of driftwood and to climb up onto it… Not even four hours had passed before I comprehended that I was the only one who remained.

Spotting a floating piece of the ship some 40 yards away from him, he exerted the last vestiges of his strength to reach it. When night fell, he found the ship’s second officer, Bulgarian Lazar Ivanof Dikof, floating near him in the water, and he lifted him up onto the float:

[Lazar] says that the only way we can survive is really by us shouting all the time so that we don’t fall asleep, because if we fall asleep we will never wake up. So we were sitting back to back and yelling all night. And as the day came along, we were already exhausted of yelling. And then we stopped, and then I felt that he is not any longer on my back. I turned around and his head was in the water, like on his belly. In other words, he could not possibly breathe any longer. He was dead… but he was very close to me, but just a corpse.

Left alone and desperate, Stoliar tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists but, lucky for him, his fingers were too numb to release the blade from his jackknife. After some 24 hours in the freezing water, he was spotted by a Turkish boat – Stoliar maintains that they waited until they could be reasonably certain that all of the Struma passengers were dead and he specifically remembers that the sailors seemed amazed to find a survivor – and taken to a small fishing village, where he was wrapped in blankets. Following two days in which he teetered between life and death, he was interrogated by Turkish policemen, during the course of which he fainted and was taken to a hospital by ambulance:

I was in hospital for 14 days. On the first day, I was visited by Mr. Simon Brod, President of the Istanbul Jewish community, who had received special permission to come and see me. [Brod was deeply involved in locating Jewish refugees, rescuing and caring from them, and working to gain their entrance into Eretz Yisrael.] He visited me every day, sometimes twice a day… Two days later he came with a Jewish doctor, who immediately gave the order to bandage my fingers and toes with camphor dressings and to change them several times a day. Thanks to the prompt and dedicated treatment I received, my fingers and toes were spared gangrene and amputation.

Stoliar was incarcerated in a small cell, where he was held as a political prisoner for 48 days and interrogated daily until he was finally released on April 23, 1942, when Brod informed him that all his papers were ready, including the British permit; thus, of the 770 permits that would have had to be issued were it not for the disaster, one permit was issued. Stoliar departed the next day under Turkish guard for the Syrian border, and Brod helped to transport him to Eretz Yisrael, organizing a train to Aleppo, Syria and a car from there to Tel Aviv. A few months later, on September 1942, Stoliar’s mother, Bella, was deported from France to Auschwitz, where she was murdered.

Original Palestine emergency document issued in 1946 to Stoliar after his release from duty in the British Army during WWII.

In 1943, approximately a year after he reached Eretz Yisrael, Stoliar, who was fluent in eight languages, enlisted in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army and fought as part of the Eighth Army of the British Army on the North African front, serving in Egypt and Libya. In 1945, he married Adria Nachmias, a Jewess born in Alexandria (1924), in the synagogue in Cairo and, upon his release from the British army in 1946, he and his wife came to Israel, where he lived in Haifa, joined the Haganah, and fought in Israel’s War of Independence as a machine gunner on the northern front. After the war, he worked for the Esso oil company (now Exxon) and helped his father, who had survived the Holocaust, and his stepmother to make aliyah. Following Esso’s closing shop in Israel, he became vice president of the Japanese Mitsubishi Shoji, an import-export firm, living in Japan for 18 years and, after the death of his wife and his remarriage, they founded a shoe manufacturing company (that, in its early years, dominated a new show company called Nike) and opened a bakery and baking school in Oregon.

The story of the Struma has, sadly, been largely forgotten. MGM considered making a film about the story, but decided against it when Stoliar, the sole survivor, declined to participate. However, after years of silence, he told his story in an interview with the New York Times in 2000; he appeared in a 2001 documentary about the Struma by Canadian director Simcha Jacobovici; and reluctantly provided critical assistance to Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their reconstruction of the Struma tragedy in their book, Death on the Black Sea (2003). His second wife, Marda, reported that every time her husband reluctantly agreed to be interviewed about the Struma Affair, he would spend the following week plagued by nightmares that kept him screaming in his sleep.

Struma memorial in Israel: Ashdod.

Interest in the Struma was revived in 2000, when Greg Buxton, a Briton whose grandparents had died on board the ship, organized a successful search for the vessel, although others question whether this was actually the Struma. On September 3, 2000, a ceremony was held at the site to commemorate the tragedy, with attendees including 60 relatives of Struma victims, representatives of the Turkish Jewish community, the Israeli ambassador and prime minister’s envoy, and various British and American delegates. (Stoliar could not attend because he was suffering from cancer – although he fought hard against the disease and lived for another 14 years.) Not surprisingly, there were no delegates from the former Soviet Union. Today, there are several streets in Israel named for the Struma, as well as a synagogue in Beer Sheva which bears the ship’s name.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

The list of people the Trump regime seeks to disappear for daring to oppose the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza appears to grow daily. The most recent case came Monday with Trump’s henchmen arresting green card holder Mohsen Mahdawi and seeking to deport him for peacefully speaking out in support of the humanity of Palestinian Christians and Muslims. Mahdawi is just the latest in a series of people arrested by Trump’s regime seeking to silence any speech that challenges the regime’s blind support for Benjamin Netanyahu—a man charged with crimes against humanity by the International Court of Justice for his actions in the Gaza war. The message sent by Trump is clear: If you attack the U.S. Capitol and brutally beat up police officers on his behalf, you get a pardon. But if you speak out about the killing of Palestinian Christians and Muslims by the Netanyahu regime, you get deported.

The case of Columbia University student Mahdawi is especially appalling because this is a person who tried to build bridges between the Muslim and Jewish students on the Columbia campus and who had vocally condemned anti-Jewish hate. But that didn’t matter to the Trump regime nor to far right pro-Israel supremacist group Betar USA identified in the media as flagging Mahdawi’s name because he was a student leader of Gaza protests at Columbia. Mahdawi—who was raised in the West Bank—has lived in the United States as a green card holder for the past 10 years. He had joined with fellow students in 2023 to form the Palestinian Student Society at Columbia University to “celebrate Palestinian culture, history and identity.” And he was active in the early protests on the college campus tied to Gaza.

A practicing Buddhist who had served for two years as the head of Columbia University Buddhist Association, Mahdawi was profiled on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2023 in a segment on the Gaza war protests. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand in hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Mahdawi told CBS. The segment also detailed that during the protests he had spoken with Columbia University Jewish student groups and rabbis in an effort to find common humanity. And even before the encampments took place at Columbia in March 2024, Mahdawi took a step back from the protests to “focus on building bridges with Jewish and Israeli communities on campus.” Yet on Monday, when he arrived at a Citizenship and Immigration Services office for an appointment to take his citizenship test in Vermont, Trump’s henchmen were waiting for him. In a video posted on Twitter, two individuals, one of whom is in plainclothes and wearing mask, can be seen leading a handcuffed Mahdawi to an unmarked vehicle. Mahdawi though knew this could happen. That is why before heading to the immigration services office he alerted Vermont Senators Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch along with Vermont Rep. Becca Balint to make them aware of his situation. After the arrest, the three elected officials released a statement that read in part, “This is immoral, inhumane, and illegal. Mr. Mahdawi, a legal resident of the United States, must be afforded due process under the law and immediately released from detention.” Mahdawi was seeking to become a US citizen in the hopes –like so many other immigrants like my Palestinian father who was also from the West Bank—of making a better life for himself and his family in the United States. Now he’s in an ICE detention center. Thankfully, a judge issued a restraining order meaning he can’t be deported until a hearing takes place.

Mahdawi’s cases conjures up the case of his schoolmate, Mahmoud Khalil, also a green card holder being held in ICE facility as Trump seeks to deport him for vocally opposing the mass killing of Palestinian women, men and children by the Netanyahu military. The Trump regime seeks to deport Khalil citing a Cold War era law known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which states any noncitizen can be removed if the secretary of state deems their presence threatens U.S. foreign policy. That is far too much discretion to give to Trump’s morally bankrupt Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But these two cases are just the tip of the iceberg. Numerous other students who were involved in protests opposing Israeli military action in Gaza have had their visas revoked and with it their dreams of earning a degree from an American university. And on Monday, we learned that the Trump regime had lied about the basis to arrest Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk. As you may recall, the video of Öztürk being abducted off the streets of Massachusetts by masked, plain clothes agents made international headlines last month since it conjured up what we see in dictatorships.

Dean Obeidallah nails it here.

In the upside-down Trump world, J6 Insurrectionist terrorists = “freedom fighters”, while pro-Palestine protesters = “Hamas sympathizers” worthy of deportation.

[fairuzfan]

Betar is a legally classified charity in the US btw

[curioushabitforarivergod]

fyi my internet is still out so ive not really had a chance to edit stuff on docs (ie betaring stuff and having other ppl beta, etc.) im hoping to get it back some time this week but its an nbn issue, thanks au liberal party. if not, im housesitting from saturday and will have at least a week of internet then

im using data currently, but im not sure how much ive got left

[greco-roman-jewess]

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I just want to start by saying that I disagree with the people misgendering Abby under this video including Betar themselves.

Abby Stein is in my opinion not a person who should be centrally platformed in the way she is. There are parts of her personal experience that are valuable as a data point in discussion of transgender women and orthodoxy but she is clearly very bitter and has a lot of underlying religious trauma.

She is not the person you should pick to give you a guided tour of South Williamsburg(edit I think it was Burough Park?) (I have so many thoughts on the video Drew Binsky made with her I need to do a separate post)

Her book is not the book you should use when discussing formerly Orthodox Jews as a whole.

And you definitely shouldn’t listen when she wines about “the unjewish way our Palestinian brothers and sisters are being treated”