What Happened Today: April 8, 2022
Behind Israel’s terror wave; Attack on US forces in Syria; Spies inside the Secret Service
The Big Story
Three Israeli civilians were killed Thursday night, gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist on Dizengoff Street, one of the busiest commercial strips in Tel Aviv. That makes 14 Israelis killed since March 22, in four separate attacks—the deadliest terror wave in Israel in two decades. The crucial question now for Israel’s security establishment is whether these are copycat incidents reflective of a grassroots “uprising”—a possibility that, for various reasons, seems unlikely—or if there is an entity coordinating them. So far, the perpetrators of the four attacks have had loose affiliations with Palestinian terrorist groups and the Islamic State, but much remains unknown about the planning and funding behind them. What is known, however, is that Iran has been the main sponsor of Palestinian terrorist groups for many years and has been essential to keeping their otherwise moribund operations afloat.
Thursday night’s brazen shooting was carried out by a 28-year-old Palestinian, Ra’ad Fathi Hazem, who was from the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and who entered Israel illegally through a break in the country’s security fence, according to Israeli officials. Hazem was killed Friday morning by Israeli security forces after an intensive manhunt. The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, initially reported that Hazem had “no known organizational affiliation, previous arrests, or security background,” but by Friday, the terror organization al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (AMB) claimed that Hazem was a senior member of the group. The AMB is affiliated with Fatah, the political party that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—who condemned the attacks while also condemning Israeli violence—belongs to, and which is virtually synonymous with the Palestinian Authority. Hazem’s father has been identified as a former senior officer in the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. But the AMB affiliation raises as many questions as it answers because the group has been weak and poorly funded for years. In 2015, the AMB directly requested assistance from Iran—which already provided the primary financial support to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operating in Gaza—to fund its operations. In February of this year, Israeli security forces shot and killed three Palestinians in Nablus, who were allegedly members of a terrorist squad that had shot at Israeli soldiers and civilians in the area. The three men were members of the AMB.
In The Back Pages: Liel Leibovitz on a New Threat Endangering Muslims—and Other Minorities
The Rest
→ As many as four Americans were injured Thursday in northeastern Syria after two rounds of indirect fire struck the base where they were stationed along with U.S. allies in the region. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but it appears to have been carried out by a group connected to the United States’ peace-loving Iranian allies whom the Biden administration is bribing and cajoling into signing a new “Iran deal.” Iranian-backed militia groups have admitted to carrying out earlier attacks in the region targeting U.S. forces and their allies.
*Think the United States is working to sanction Russia? Well, that’s odd, because a new Iran deal will provide a huge windfall for Putin. Just this past Wednesday, according to a report in the Washington Free Beacon, Iran and Russia held a trade conference in Moscow.
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-soldiers-injured-in-syria-after-shelling-attack-11649326303
→ Dozens of people were killed Friday in a rocket attack on a railway station in Eastern Ukraine that was full of civilians, including children, attempting to flee the region, according to Ukrainian authorities. Figures on the toll of the attack vary, but according to Reuters, as of Friday night in Ukraine there were 39 people dead and 87 wounded.
→ And speaking, yet again, of Iran, two men with suspected ties to Iranian intelligence have been arrested by federal agents and accused of infiltrating the Secret Service by posing as members of the U.S. Homeland Security Agency. Court filings document how the two men, Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Ali, 35, “compromised” members of the Secret Service assigned to “key security missions” by lavishing them with free gifts—including a rent-free penthouse apartment. The two men reportedly claimed they had connections to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, but law enforcement is now investigating their ties to Iranian intelligence, including to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Ali “obtained two 90-day visas from Iran and traveled there twice, not long before the charged activity began,” according to the court documents.
→ After a period of questioning on the Senate floor, during which Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at times acquitted herself well and at other times provided a valuable insight into the prevailing political culture of the Democratic establishment (see under: “woman, definition of”), she was confirmed as the United States’ 116th Supreme Court justice on Thursday, in a 53-47 vote in the Senate.
→ About a decade late and many millions of dollars short, The New York Times has a new policy calling for reporters to “meaningfully reduce” the amount of time they spend on Twitter, the social media platform of choice for journalists, activists, and state intelligence operatives. In a leaked memo, the Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet refers to the new policy as a “reset” and insists that it’s “absolutely not a ban”—please don’t attack me for this on Twitter, you can almost hear Baquet saying.
→ Hurting from its $232 billion valuation loss in February—the largest decline of any company ever—Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is looking to relaunch its much-maligned and legally dubious currency in the hopes of finding fresh territory in which to “move fast and break things,” as its founding mantra went. (Hilariously, this motto was changed in 2014 to “Move fast with stable infrastructure.”) Having depleted the resource-rich landscape of our attention spans, Meta now needs some new space to grow. By releasing virtual coins and tokens on its apps, Meta hopes to avoid the regulatory pitfalls that tripped up its efforts to create its own blockchain-based cryptocurrency last year. Instead, the “Zuck Bucks,” as Meta employees call them—how cool!—would be centrally backed and controlled by the company. Meta is also pondering a new system of content moderation, where users could distribute “social tokens” or “reputational tokens” as a way of downgrading or elevating content or users. This, Meta insiders say, might enable the company to cut costs by letting go of the people currently doing that work—overseas contract workers who sift scenes of rape, incest, child molestation, and murder from Meta’s platforms for as little as $1.50 an hour.
Read More: https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatment/
→ Food prices hit an all-time high in March, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, inspiring fears that we may be nearing a global food crisis. Inflation had been driving up the cost of food since last year, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused the sharpest monthly rise in food prices in 14 years, bringing costs to unprecedented levels. More than a quarter of the world’s wheat comes from Russia and Ukraine, and a considerable portion of the world’s grains and vegetable oils. Wheat prices have now gone up by 20% and vegetable oil by 23%—costs that will be most harmful to the 55 countries that are already categorized as suffering from food crises, 36 of which imported more than 10% of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine.
→ Two of the defendants accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer were acquitted Friday, while the jury failed to reach a verdict for the two men accused of being the ringleaders of the plot. However you look at it, the results are an embarrassment for the federal government because the situation was widely hyped as one of the biggest domestic terrorism cases of the Trump era. The Whitmer case was presented as proof that a legion of Trump-inspired extremists was plotting violent insurrections across the country, and the media largely went along with the government’s framing—but not The Scroll! We called bullshit a year ago—which conveniently left out the FBI’s role in facilitating the plot. As a BuzzFeed investigation put it last year, the FBI “had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.”
Liel Leibovitz on a New Threat Endangering Muslims—and Other Minorities
While leftist Jewish organizations spent part of this week defending hate-monger Linda Sarsour’s apparently inalienable right to rake in sponsorship money from a car insurance company, an actual threat to the safety of Muslims (and arguably all minorities) was revealed—to nary a peep. There’s no simpler way of saying this, except any person who considers him or herself a thinking person, let alone one concerned with justice or the rights of others, should read the below and scream about it from the rooftops.
Two researchers, poking around the popular Android app store, discovered that dozens of apps, including many marketed primarily to Muslims, clandestinely harvested users’ private data, including precise GPS location history, personal phone numbers, email addresses, passwords, records of communications, and even some WhatsApp chat history. Worse, the apps, downloaded on at least 60 million mobile devices around the world, can also track other devices connected to the same Wi-Fi networks as its users. Worst, according to The Wall Street Journal, “the Panamanian company that wrote the code, Measurement Systems S. de R.L., is linked through corporate records and web registrations to a Virginia defense contractor that does cyberintelligence, network-defense and intelligence-intercept work for U.S. national-security agencies.”
What the revelation teaches us is as simple as it is stark: Every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to the medicine we take to the information we share and consume, is now governed by a throbbing blob that erases any clear delineation between “government,” “corporate America,” “nonprofit organizations,” and other previous and distinguishable pillars of our civil society.
Not coincidentally, former president Barack Obama is giddy about this melding of state powers, surveillance technology, and big money. Speaking this week to his court stenographer, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama expressed concern about what he called “the demand for crazy” on the internet and advocated a heady brew of regulation and self-imposed industry standards to make sure that only approved information is made available to citizens. Which, on the scale of 1 to treason, is a much graver assault on the fundaments of American democracy than donning a Viking helmet and frolicking around a bunch of empty offices.
Responding to the latest revelations, Google said it had banned the offensive apps but declined to provide any information on precisely how many total apps contained the malware. Among those confirmed to be targeted, though, are Muslim prayer apps like Al-Moazin and Qibla Compass. Tellingly, none of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, habitually given to lobbing accusations of Islamophobia, had anything to say about the government-corporate complex tracking the movements, interactions, and communications of a religious minority. Jews, however, should: To the extent that there’s any real existential peril to Jewish life in this country, it comes not from sporadic attacks by isolated maniacs but from knowing that our captains of industry, our elected officials, and our public intellectuals are all cheering on a system designed to significantly curb the basic freedoms that have made America, and American Jewish life, possible in the first place.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One.
People, Jews and others, do not want to believe this, and not believing it, being sheep whoswallow any govt line/lie, is taking usa deeper and deeper into fascism. Also, your comment re Obama's thrill is right on target withthe values of President Barack Drone.
"What the revelation teaches us is as simple as it is stark: Every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to the medicine we take to the information we share and consume, is now governed by a throbbing blob that erases any clear delineation between “government,” “corporate America,” “nonprofit organizations,” and other previous and distinguishable pillars of our civil society.
"Not coincidentally, former president Barack Obama is giddy about this melding of state powers, surveillance technology, and big money. Speaking this week to his court stenographer, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama expressed concern about what he called “the demand for crazy” on the internet and advocated a heady brew of regulation and self-imposed industry standards to make sure that only approved information is made available to citizens. Which, on the scale of 1 to treason, is a much graver assault on the fundaments of American democracy than donning a Viking helmet and frolicking around a bunch of empty offices."
"...none of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, habitually given to lobbing accusations of Islamophobia, had anything to say about the government-corporate complex tracking the movements, interactions, and communications of a religious minority. Jews, however, should: To the extent that there’s any real existential peril to Jewish life in this country, it comes not from sporadic attacks by isolated maniacs but from knowing that our captains of industry, our elected officials, and our public intellectuals are all cheering on a system designed to significantly curb the basic freedoms that have made [the United states}, and American Jewish life, possible in the first place.
is there ever a Big Lie in which our govt does not have a hand: FBI, CIA, Biden's office, etc.