‘Fire everywhere’: Shock as firebomb rips through synagogue ‘jewel’ in Melbourne’s south-east By Cassandra Morgan and Chip Le Grand December 6, 2024 The arson squad is investigating a suspected firebombing at one of Australia’s busiest synagogues in the heart of Melbourne’s Jewish community. Congregants fled the Adass Israel synagogue after a blaze ripped through the building in Ripponlea, in inner south-east Melbourne, about 4.10am on Friday. “I thought maybe I’ll be able to open the doors and go inside, but when I touched the door, I burnt my hand,” he said. “Then I decided it [was] too dangerous. I went out.” Witnesses report seeing two suspects in dark clothing at the scene at the time of the attack. Arson and explosives squad detective inspector Chris Murray on Friday morning told media the police “will do everything we can to bring these individuals before the courts”. He also sought to reassure the local Jewish community, telling them police were “going to do our best to make sure that they can return, as they should, to their local synagogues, doing what is absolutely Australian – that is to be able to worship without fear”. The scene at dawn.Credit: Nine News Synagogue board member Benjamin Klein said he had spoken to witnesses who were inside at the time of the attack. They reported windows being smashed and Molotov cocktails being thrown in. “They heard banging on the door and the window, and some liquids came through which were lit. The whole thing took off pretty quickly,” Klein said. “For this to happen to a synagogue thousands of kilometres away from anywhere else in the world, a peaceful neighbourhood, a peaceful community – it is quite horrendous.” Members of the congregation usually begin arriving to pray about 2am or 3am each day. Congregants comforted each other outside the synagogue on Friday morning.Credit: Simon Schluter “This synagogue is the busiest synagogue in Australia, so it’s a very, very active synagogue. We’re open 20 [to] 22 hours a day,” Klein said. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement vociferously condemning the attack. “I unequivocally condemn the attack on a Melbourne synagogue early this morning. “I have zero tolerance for antisemitism. It has absolutely no place in Australia … The people involved must be caught and face the full force of the law. “This deliberate, unlawful attack goes against everything we are as Australians and everything we have worked so hard to build as a nation.” Local Liberal state MP David Southwick, who is Jewish, spoke of the “deep angst” the fire had caused to the Jewish community. “This morning’s fire has devastated Melbourne’s Jewish community and caused deep angst,” he said. “Amidst the worst levels of antisemitism in living memory, the community needs clear answers as soon as possible. “I fully support Victoria Police to find those responsible and bring them to justice.” Fire has torn through Adass Israel synagogue in Ripponlea.Credit: Simon Schluter Fire Rescue Victoria and Victoria Police are treating the fire as suspicious. Klein said this was the second time the synagogue had been targeted by arsonists. In 1995, Adass Israel was severely damaged by a deliberately lit fire. “My grandfather was the president at the time,” Klein said. “He was a Holocaust survivor and I will never forget him standing among the smoke and ash and just crying. Sixty firefighters fought the blaze in Ripponlea.Credit: Simon Schluter “It is the jewel of the crown of the Jewish community.” The damage inside is believed to be significant. One congregation member estimated there would be millions of dollars’ worth of holy books and Torah scrolls inside. “They are handwritten with ink, with parchment. It takes a year minimum to write, written by a trained rabbi scholar. There’d be dozens here,” the man said. Another member pointed inside the synagogue to where the Torah scrolls are kept: “Right behind that gold lectern, and that’s exactly where the fire was.” The man said the synagogue was an “obvious target”. “The feeling is re-living the war years, once all over again,” he said. “We really just want peace. We’re doing our own thing, we’re all business people or [studying] or [learning religious texts], and we keep to ourselves.” Children came to the synagogue every morning and would be devastated and traumatised by the fire, the man said. “Most of us are all first-generation, second-generation [descendants of Holocaust] survivors, so this brings back memories,” he said. The fire has significantly damaged holy books inside.Credit: Nine News Dozens of congregants gathered outside the synagogue on Friday morning alongside neighbours, police and firefighters, who pumped water from trucks into the building. Klein said the congregation and community were in shock and the alleged arsonists’ motivation was unclear. “It’s hard to know. We’ve been on very high alert. We’ve had security patrols, we’ve had increased cameras, we’ve had a lot of increased security the last few months,” he said. A handful of congregants were inside the synagoge at the time.Credit: 9News “We all think about what happens overseas, and it’s possible, and we are just hoping it’s not that. But we are very shaken up. “Obviously, the synagogue is the jewel of the crown, and it’s a large synagogue and a large community. To see a bomb or a firebomb or fire rip through a synagogue, [we’re] quite nervous.” Sixty firefighters and 17 firetrucks had the fire under control just before 5am. The level crossing at Glen Eira Road was also blocked early on Friday morning and public transport was disrupted. A community advice warning was issued for smoke in surrounding suburbs.
Papa Biden is a liar, and American justice is a lie The overwrought brouhaha over President Biden’s predictable volte-face to pardon his wayward son is missing a larger and obvious point. Andrew Mitrovica Al Jazeera columnist 5 Dec 2024US President Joe Biden greets his son Hunter Biden at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago, Illinois, US on August 19, 2024 [Craig Hudson/File Photo/Reuters] Papa Joe Biden is a blatant liar and the embodiment of a perverse lie that sustains America’s phantom democracy. Only the familiar stable of wind-up partisans who appear on US cable news networks and silly naifs who cling to the fantastical idea that America is a shining-city-on-a-hill model of liberty, equality, and fraternity would deny the essential truth of that blunt opening sentence. That is why the overwrought brouhaha over Papa Biden’s predictable volte-face to pardon his wayward son after insisting that he would not exercise his prerogative to wave a presidential wand and erase Hunter’s criminal convictions, strikes me as missing a larger and obvious point. All presidents lie. It is the American way. It always has been. It always will be. Indeed, there are two defining qualities that every American president must possess in order to fulfill their duties and responsibilities. They must be able to lie with an almost pathological ease and they must be content to order others to kill without pause or a scintilla of remorse. Presidents lie about war. They lie about peace. They lie about negotiating “truces”. They lie about “intelligence” produced by spy services whose business is deceit. They lie about bridging the schism between rich and poor. They lie about protecting “innocents” at home and abroad. They lie about preventing the planet from burning into extinction. They lie about pardons. They lie when they place their hand on a bible and swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”. The biggest lie of all is when they reassure “the American people” – again and again – that they will, without fail, tell the truth. Which raises a necessary question: Why do they lie? They lie to convince the gullible that presidents are “peacemakers” who oppose war rather than fuel conflict with money and arms. They lie to obscure the fact that, as president, their principal obligation is to serve the parochial interests of the few at the debilitating expense of the many. They lie to promote a myth that America is a symbol of hope and freedom in order to deny the historical record that US president after president has been the unrepentant architect of loss and suffering on an almost incomprehensible scale across this ever-turbulent world. Biden’s eager complicity in the genocide being perpetrated with such ferocious and lethal efficiency in the desolate remnants of Gaza and the occupied West Bank is more convincing evidence of America’s defining and anti-human past, present and, no doubt, future. America’s 46th president has passed the litmus test that every president must pass. Biden has proven throughout his septic tenure as president that he has, all along, had the right stuff all right to be commander-in-chief. And, like many other presidents who preceded him and are, of course, destined to follow him, Biden will have a shrine – euphemistically known as a presidential library – built in his honour to celebrate his facility to lie and kill. So, the duelling camps on what constitutes the “right” and “left” in America who, on one hyperbolic side, are excoriating Biden for his hypocritical assault on the “rule of law” and, on the other sentimental wing, are defending the president’s understandable act of love, are both guilty not only of naivete, but a glaring double standard which confirms their profoundly unserious natures. Biden’s detractors wail like colicky babies that he has reneged on a solemn pledge not to grant his second, troubled son clemency because they were convinced of this president’s once-uncompromising fidelity to the “norms” that gird the American democratic “experiment”. This may come, I suspect, as a revelation to these starry-eyed chumps, but the pampered and powerful elites in Washington, DC and beyond – who dictate the terms and conditions of the American “experiment” – have never had to abide by any of your fictive “norms”. There are an exculpatory set of rules for the governors and a decidedly different set of incriminating rules for the governed. Exhibit A: Not one of the grinning nest of Wall Street plutocrats who engineered the sub-prime mortgage racket that triggered the near collapse of the rigged US economy and caused such grief and hardship among “Main Street” America were held to even a perfunctory measure of account. Instead, they were handed golden, life-time-do-not-go-to-Rikers tickets and bailed out by the legion of “blue-collar” American taxpayers whom they damaged, often beyond repair. Not surprisingly, they were abetted on this rule-of-law defacing score by a succession of compliant presidents. In happy league with their grateful Wall Street patrons and donors, not one sitting president has ever been charged, let alone convicted and jailed, like millions of their much less fortunate “fellow citizens”. God-fearing, law-abiding, Boy Scouts all. I suggest the “I’m shocked, shocked that the president lied” crowd take out a tissue and dab their embarrassing spigot of crocodile tears. As for The Washington Post columnist and his like-minded brethren on CNN and MSNBC who chafed at Papa Biden’s U-turn but gave him credit for saving his kid from an unpleasant fate since that’s what any father would do, apparently these maudlin apologists require reminding that poor, little Hunter is a 54-year-old married man who ought to be responsible for his illicit actions and his pop is the president of the United States. The scales of justice aren’t blind when your dad can lift the blindfold and take a good, long peek at the accused in the dock to find out whether they are related to you or not. Papa Biden should spare an ounce of his mercy for the deserving victims of the “miscarriages of justice” that are rife in America’s unsparing “judicial system”, which routinely imprisons the poor, minorities, non-violent offenders, and the innocent, who, in many outrageous cases, face the death penalty. Towards that – dare I say it – just end, Biden better carve out some time during his dwindling days in office to call the Innocence Project – a group of honourable volunteers who work hard to free the condemned – and seek its advice on who he should pardon next. That might temper the shameful stain on the “truth” and “justice” he has left behind. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Israel’s buffer zone, created by bombing Lebanon with white phosphorous Israel hit southern Lebanon 191 times with white phosphorus, is that tied to its dreams of a buffer zone? A shell that appears to be white phosphorus from Israeli artillery explodes over a house in al-Bustan, a Lebanese village along the border with Israel [File: Hussein Malla/AP Photo] By Justin Sal 5 Dec 2024 Beirut, Lebanon – Israel has intensively used white phosphorus on a strip in southern Lebanon that matches a zone its army has marked as a red “no go” zone on maps it distributes to Lebanese people, telling them not to return to their homes there. In March, Al Jazeera reported experts’ claims that Israel was trying to make the land uninhabitable through tactics, including the use of white phosphorus. More than 918 hectares (2,268 acres) have been hit in 191 attacks using the controversial munition since October 8, 2023, according to data collected by Lebanese researcher Ahmad Baydoun and environmental activist group Green Southerners. Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah have exchanged attacks since October 8, 2023, a disproportionate exchange – with at least four Israeli attacks for each one from the Lebanese side. How Israel uses white phosphorus White phosphorus munitions ignite when exposed to oxygen at temperatures above 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and rain down streaks of dense white smoke mixed with phosphorus oxides. The fiery fragments continue to burn – on vegetation, buildings, or right through human flesh – until they are fully oxidised or deprived of oxygen. Israel claims it uses white phosphorus munitions to create a smokescreen on the battlefield yet rights groups say it has deployed it over populated areas, not battlefields, in both Gaza and Lebanon – which violates international humanitarian law. “The use of white phosphorus in warzones relies on three pillars,” Hamze Attar, a Luxembourg-based defence analyst, told Al Jazeera. Those three pillars are: using it as a smoke screen to obscure troop advances; clearing fighters and military equipment from wide open spaces; and a rapid response or preemptive action before or after a rocket launch. Human Rights Watch found at least five cases as of June 2024 where the munitions “were unlawfully used over populated residential areas”. Screenshot provided by whitephosphorus.info, showing Israel’s white phosphorus use on Lebanon [whitphosphorus.info] Intense bombing in southern Lebanon “The most intense bombing and systematic eradication of the land cover was indeed in this border area,” Rami Zurayk, Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management chair at the American University of Beirut, said. Baydoun’s research confirmed that Israel has focused white phosphorus use across southern Lebanon, with a higher intensity in the early months of the conflict. The first two months of the attacks in 2023 – October (45 white phosphorus shells) and November (44) were the most intense, with 99 out of a total of 199 white phosphorus attacks. In September 2024, Israel again escalated, killing 3,150 people in a little more than two months. Independent conflict-monitoring organisation ACLED recorded 4,841 Israeli military actions in southern Lebanon from October 8, 2023, to November 27, 2024, and a further 8,209 in Nabatieh, both above and below the Litani. Last Wednesday, a ceasefire negotiated by France and the United States came into effect. Elated, thousands of displaced people were heading back to their villages in the south within hours. But a day after the ceasefire was announced, Israel released its map with the red “off limits” zone. “You are prohibited at this stage from returning to your homes from this line south until further notice,” the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Under the terms of the ceasefire, Israel must withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon in 60 days to make way for the Lebanese army which will deploy to the south. The Israeli army is still in this area. Bounded by the Litani River to the north, which is 6km (3.7 miles) from the border at its closest point and 28km (17 miles) at its furthest, and the Blue Line demarcation with Israel, this area is also to be cleared of Hezbollah and its military infrastructure. Public Works Studio, an urban planning and policymaking studio in Lebanon, also published online a series of maps that document Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, including where white phosphorus was used. “Most of the areas affected by phosphorus are included in the strip that Avichae mentioned is off-limits for southerners to return to,” a researcher at Public Works Studio, who requested anonymity, told Al Jazeera. Baydoun noted that the damage is extensive to this area Israel seemingly wants as a buffer zone. “This is beyond a scorched earth policy because the consequences are invisible and long-term, and nature cannot regenerate itself,” Baydoun said. “There needs to be … effort to decontaminate.” Buffer zone The southern area is now under Israeli control as the terms of the ceasefire, which stipulates Israel will withdraw its forces behind the Blue Line within 60 days, are put into place. “Nothing on earth will stop the residents of these [Lebanese] border villages from going back, so I think the Israelis are buying time and doing more damage and [searching] for Hezbollah infrastructure within this buffer zone,” Nicholas Blanford, a Lebanon expert with the Atlantic Council think tank said. “It is probably not a coincidence that the area where Israelis restricted people from entering conforms almost identically to their former occupation zone in the 1980s and 1990s,” Blanford told Al Jazeera. However, Blanford said, he did not believe the Israelis would stay in that zone beyond the 60 days, as any long-term occupation would lead to a renewed resistance from Hezbollah. Still, Israel’s goal of creating a buffer zone, including through the use of white phosphorus, may be achieved. It has already destroyed hundreds of hectares of land, including tens of thousands of olive trees, and has now reportedly moved on to demolishing buildings in those towns as well. Source: Al Jazeera
Another Hamas terrorist leader eliminated. Cleaning up the neighborhood. IDF, Shin Bet eliminate Hamas air force head Nachal Al-Najar Al-Najar had been responsible for planning the aerial infiltrations into Israel on October 7. https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-832297
I have been very consistent in my feedback from the very beginning of the Gaza war. A two-step solution is required which I have outlined numerous times: Step 1 is the complete elimination of Hamas as a governing and militant entity in Gaza. Until Step 1 is completed, step 2 cannot be started. Step 2 involves a permanent ceasefire, the reconstruction of Gaza, establishment of a governing entity in Gaza, and a path towards a two-state peace solution which includes the restoration of land in the West Bank taken from Palestinians. However until a more moderate government is voted into office in Israel than the current Netanyahu administration -- step 2 will not be achieved.
Israel grabs land in Syria’s Golan Heights, warns villagers to stay home Israeli forces also bomb weapons depots in southern Syria and the capital Damascus, Israeli media reports. An Israeli soldier stands on a tank near the ceasefire line between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights [Shir Torem/Reuters] Published On 8 Dec 2024 Israel has “seized” territory in Syrian-controlled areas of the Golan Heights, as its military warned Syrians living in five villages close to the Israeli-occupied portion of the strategic area to “stay home”. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he ordered Israeli forces to grab a buffer zone in the Golan Heights established by a 1974 ceasefire agreement with Syria, after a lightning advance by Syrian opposition forces ended Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Netanyahu said on Sunday that the decades-old agreement had collapsed and that Syrian soldiers had abandoned their positions, necessitating the Israeli takeover. “We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border,” he said. Israel captured a portion of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war and annexed it. The international community, except for the United States, views it as illegally occupied Syrian territory. After Netanyahu’s comments, the Israeli military issued an “urgent warning” to Syrians living in Ofaniya, Quneitra, al-Hamidiyah, Samdaniya al-Gharbiyya and al-Qahtaniyah – all close to the Israeli-occupied portion of the Golan Heights. “The fighting in your area is forcing the IDF [Israeli military] to act and we do not intend to harm you,” Colonel Avichay Adraee, the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesman, said on social media. Agricultural areas in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights were declared closed military zones and some schools shifted to online classes in anticipation of unrest. Al Jazeera