What Happened Today: June 15, 2023
FBI recruits teen into ISIS; Vegan falls for cheesesteak CEO; Harvard horror show
The Big Story
What was originally reported as a big terrorist bust for the FBI last week has turned out to be the arrest of an 18-year-old with cognitive development issues who had developed a relationship online with an FBI informant posing as a member of the Islamic State. The 18-year-old, Mateo Ventura, of Wakefield, Massachusetts, spent two years talking to an FBI informant who posed as an ISIS member and sending the informant small donations in the form of gaming gift cards on applications such as Google Play, Steam, and the Playstation Network. The “donations” to “ISIS,” which totaled $1,670, are what led to Mateo being charged with “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” “He was born prematurely. He had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him, and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” Ventura’s father, Paul, told The Intercept. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”
When Ventura was 16 and snooping around terror-connected websites, an FBI informant struck up a relationship with him online, encouraging him to donate and to fulfill his stated goal of making hijra to join the Islamic State, according to The Intercept. At the time, the FBI came to Ventura’s house and took Mateo’s computer, telling his father that he’d been on sites he shouldn’t be and that he needed counseling. But according to Paul Ventura, the FBI didn’t tell him which sites or follow up, even as its informant continued talking to his son for two years.
When it came time to take that journey to his Islamic extremist brothers in arms, Mateo made up excuses and ultimately ratted on his FBI informant, who he thought was ISIS, to the FBI. Nonetheless, he faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. This echoes a number of other cases that verge on entrapment, including the 2016 case of another cognitively challenged teen being led in the direction of violence by an FBI informant, only to be arrested after his 18th birthday on charges of “plotting to support the Taliban as well as the militant group the Islamic State and commit acts of terrorism in the local community.”
Read More: https://theintercept.com/2023/06/15/fbi-undercover-isis-teenager-terrorist/
In the Back Pages: A Message from Tablet’s Editor in Chief, Alana Newhouse
The Rest
→ In the ongoing judicial crisis in Israel—in which the Bibi Netanyahu-led ruling coalition wants to overhaul the judicial system and reduce the influence of Israel’s Supreme Court—yesterday marked a significant moment as Knesset members voted to elect two of their own to the Judicial Selection Committee that appoints judges. Traditionally, one MK from the coalition and one from the opposition are promoted to the committee, but some of Netanyahu’s coalition partners wanted two of their own included, essentially taking over the judge-selection process. (This is akin to the U.S. tradition of the ruling president appointing judges sympathetic to his politics, with the help of a majority in the Senate.) Rather than risk another round of massive nationwide protests, Netanyahu tried to buy time by instructing his coalition members to vote against their own candidate, Tally Gotliv, as well as opposition candidate Karine Elharrar, but this majorly backfired when Gotliv was voted down and enough of Netanyahu’s supporters voted for Elharrar to get her on the committee. Now some hard-liners are calling for a total overhaul, bypassing the established process to give the Likud-led coalition another path to judicial control, which would most likely bring the country back to the tense days of earlier this year, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis were in the streets.
→ Horseshoe crabs, the strange scorpion like creatures of the United States’ East Coast, are filled with blue blood. No, they don’t have homes in Kennebunkport—they have literal blue blood with the incredible property of clotting when exposed to bacterial toxins. For this reason, their blood is used to test the purity of vaccines, drugs, and even medical devices that are going to be put inside people. For decades, the need for this magical blood has been increasing, and a cottage industry has blown up around the creatures, with fishermen gathering up the crabs and selling them to companies that tie them up and extract their blood while they’re still alive, then return them to the ocean. An estimated 15% die in the process. Besides the obvious ethical questions this raises, the industry has taken a toll on horseshoe crab breeding, which has downstream effects on the migratory birds that rely on the eggs of the crab for food on their long journey north. A synthetic version of the blood has been developed that supposedly works just as well, and will perhaps destroy the business that has built up around sucking the blood out of crabs.
→ On Monday, a Camden, New Jersey, jury ordered Starbucks to pay former employee Shannon Phillips $25.6 million after finding that the coffee company had fired her because she was white. The ruling relates to events that began in 2018 after two young Black men were arrested at a Center City Philadelphia Starbucks. When it turned out that the men had not committed any crime and were arrested for refusing to leave after asking to use the bathroom without making a purchase, it sparked a national outcry that pushed Starbucks into corporate damage control mode. In a move to shore up its battered image, the company fired its white regional operations director, Phillips, who had no connection to calling the police on the men who were arrested but did have 13 years of “exceptional” performance, on the grounds that she had defended a white manager from the location in question whom the company had accused of paying Black employees less than their white colleagues. A convoluted reason to fire someone, but that’s how it goes when corporations search for scapegoats to placate online mobs.
→ Public health watchdog U.S. Right to Know has published three FOIA-acquired State Department cables that paint an incriminating picture of the connection between the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the People’s Liberation Army, the integration of civilian and military research, and the knowledge the Chinese government had about an out-of-control pandemic well before it shared that knowledge with the rest of the world. While the contents of the cables will remain redacted until 2046, the titles speak for themselves: PLA Contractor Involved in the Construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology; WIV Personnel with Possible PLA Ties; Cyber Evidence of PLA Shadow Labs at WIV; MCF Strategy Conscripts Civilian Institutes into Military Tech Research; Initial Outbreak Could Have Been Contained in China if Beijing Had Not Covered It Up. What these cables also point to, of course, is that the State Department knew a lot about the risky actions being taken in Wuhan and likely knew very early on that something nasty was circulating in China.
→ What happens when the owner of a vegan hamburger chain meets the owner of a very not-vegan cheesesteak company? They fall in love and get married. Aisha Cole, owner of chain Slutty Vegan, told The New York Times she “never would have talked to anybody that has a cheesesteak restaurant” before she met her charming husband, Derrick Hayes, owner of Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks in Atlanta. They initially met because Cole offered to help Hayes after his store windows were smashed during the 2020 riots, and while he declined her help, he did want to meet her. The rest is history. They were married June 10 at Atlanta’s St. Regis with a menu of herb-roasted shrimp, cheese-stuffed chicken and salmon, pan-roasted maitake mushrooms with truffles, and vegan Roman gnocchi. Singer-songwriter and Pastor Montell Jordan opened the ceremony by saying, “Sade would say this is no ordinary love.”
→ Quote of the Day:
What I see in my family often hurts me. I never get invited to anything. Nobody sees me. We all grew apart. I felt unappreciated. … That’s why I wanted to give them a life lesson and show them that you shouldn’t wait until someone is dead to meet up with them.
That’s Belgian TikToker, 45-year-old David Baerten, who staged his own funeral over the weekend in Liege, which was convincing enough to draw dozens of friends and family. Just when they thought they’d never be seeing David again, he landed in a helicopter, saying, “Cheers to you all, welcome to my funeral.”
→ In a continuing and tragic pattern, another vessel carrying hundreds of migrants from Africa to Italy capsized off the coast of Greece on Tuesday. So far 78 people have been confirmed dead, but authorities are concerned the death toll could shoot much higher. While there is some suggestion the Greek Coast Guard should have had enough evidence to intervene, the Greek minister in charge of civil protection, Evangelos Tournas, has replied that the boat repeatedly refused aid and that “the Coast Guard cannot intervene with a vessel which doesn’t accept the intervention in international waters.” According to Mohamed Abdi Marwan, a Syrian who had five relatives aboard the ship, “Those smugglers were supposed to only have 500 on the boat, and now we hear there were 750.” The United Nations estimates 21,000 deaths or disappearances in the central Mediterranean since 2014.
→ See, we told you that the Ivy League had turned into a zombie institution with nothing left to offer America. And, well, news of the morgue at Harvard Medical School kind of seals the coffin on that one. From 2018 to 2023, the Harvard Medical School morgue manager, Cedric Lodge, sold body parts to the highest bidder—including brain, skin, and bones—taking them home and shipping them to his buyers. Along with his five accomplices, Lodge faces charges of conspiracy and transporting stolen goods across state lines, with a potential penalty of up to 15 years in prison. George Daley, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University, and Edward Hundert, the dean for Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, said in a statement, “We are appalled to learn that something so disturbing could happen on our campus—a community dedicated to healing and serving others.” Don’t send your kids to Harvard; it’s creepy, Communist, and overpriced.
1. Planned Parenthood of Illinois has seen a 54% increase in patients seeking abortion since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
2. Between April and May, egg prices dropped 13.8%.
3. Nielsen’s U.S. data shows sales of Bud Light are down 27% for the week ending June 3.
4. A reported 69% of Americans believe athletes should only be allowed to compete against those of the same biological sex.
5. In Iowa, 84% of farmland is owned debt-free.
6. Recent polling shows about 51% of Americans supported the Black Lives Matter movement in April 2023, down from the peak of 67% in June 2020.
7. A poll shows 60% of Americans believe that business owners should not be made to provide services that signal support for LGBT issues they personally oppose.
8. In FY 2022, only 0.4% of defendants in federal cases were acquitted.
9. About 2% of U.S. parents think that children should never be introduced to “moderately spicy foods” by their parents.
10. Roughly 18% of Americans believe that the creator of an AI program should own the right to any art that AI generates.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Horrible and Enlightening Life of Jean Améry by David Mikics
In an age of easy antisemitism, the Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivor’s work remains bitter, resentful, and hauntingly pro-Zionist
The Gangster Who Defended the Unions—With a Lead Pipe by Allan Levine
‘My heart lay with the workers,’ said ‘Dopey Benny’ Fein, expert organizer and ‘shtarker’ of the Lower East Side
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A Message from Tablet’s Editor in Chief, Alana Newhouse
Build With Us
In a synagogue somewhere on Long Island, there are two seats adorned with plaques bearing my parents’ names. I haven’t been there in decades, but, even during the years when I was in that building often, we never sat in those chairs. That wasn’t the point of them, or of the name plates on the yarzheit wall, or of being a member at all. “You’re not buying the seat,” I remember my mother explaining to a younger woman who was new there, as my parents once were. “You’re buying the whole place.”
When we got older, my friends and I would joke around about this. Once, when I moved into a new apartment, one of them bought me a blender as a housewarming gift, and festooned it with a plaque that said: “Food processor donated in honor of Marilyn and Edward Gorenstein.”
I miss the world that gave rise to that joke.
Even before the dislocations of COVID-19, we saw the fraying and dissolution of countless organizations that once lent structure and purpose to our lives. To think of the mid-20th century Jewish world is to evoke images of flourishing synagogues, Hadassah chapters, Jewish federations, Israeli dance classes, and mahjongg nights. We see a similar development in the world of journalism. Magazines and newspapers were once real sources of identity. We don’t feel that sense of allegiance anymore. We don’t read magazines. We click on links.
We want to help change that. We want to be more than just a web address and an email in your inbox. We want to be a place that offers community and connection, a place where you can come to discuss what’s on your mind with like-minded people—or even un-like-minded ones.
That’s where our new membership program comes in. Become a founding member of Tablet and get access to events, fireside chats, Tablet merch, and more. We’re about to launch a members-only series called Keeping Tabs, creating an opportunity each month to discuss the American and Jewish futures with editors, writers, and special guests.
We’ve already built something for readers; now we want to build something with you. Tell us what you want to see talked about, who you want to hear from, what spaces you want opened up, and we’ll do our best to make it happen—together. Think of it as a seat at the table, or, as my mother would have it, the keys to the whole place.
Yours,
Alana Newhouse