National/Globe News

Michael Cohen turned on Trump at urging of Holocaust survivor father

Michael Cohen’s decision to turn on one-time patron Donald Trump was partly motivated by a conversation with his father, a Holocaust survivor.
Maurice Cohen reportedly told his son that he did not survive the Nazi genocide to have the family name dragged through the mud by Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported.
On Tuesday, Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime attorney, testified in federal court that his former boss had directed him to pay off two women with whom Trump allegedly had extramarital affairs. Cohen’s assertion that Trump ordered the payments is seen as creating legal and political jeopardy for the president.
Cohen referenced his father’s wartime experiences in June when he quit a senior position on the Republican National Committee, citing his opposition to Trump’s immigration policies and invoking the Holocaust experience of his father.
“As the son of a Polish Holocaust survivor, the images and sounds of this family separation policy is heart wrenching,” Cohen wrote at the time. “While I strongly support measures that will secure our porous borders, children should never be used as bargaining chips.” Cohen was deputy chairman of the RNC’s Finance Committee.
Cohen reportedly felt betrayed by Trump, who had not reached out to him after federal authorities raided his properties for information related to the payoffs and stopped paying his legal bills.
Trump responded to Cohen’s testimony this week by tweeting that “if anyone is looking for a good lawyer, I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen!”

In Brooklyn, a Latina Jewish democratic socialist rallies for a State Senate seat

Julia Salazar, a Jewish Latina democratic socialist, is vying to win election to New York’s 18th State Senate District,
At a recent fundraiser, approximately 100 people have paid $25 or more to meet the candidate, a 27-year-old hoping to ride the progressive political wave that swept newcomer and fellow democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez past longtime Rep. Joe Crowley and almost surely to Washington, D.C., representing the state’s 14th Congressional District.
If Salazar succeeds in unseating another incumbent — Democratic State Sen. Martin Malavé Dilan, serving his eighth term in the 18th (formerly 17th) district — it will be a victory not only for her but for the nascent Jewish political group behind her.
The Jewish Vote, the fundraiser’s host, is the electoral outgrowth of the progressive Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, or JFREJ, which remains its sister organization and where Salazar, according to her campaign, works as a staff organizer.

Jerusalem municipality accused try to suppress Arab vote

The Jerusalem municipality plans to open only six polling stations in the predominantly Arab eastern part of the city for October’s mayoral election, sparking charges that officials are trying to keep the Arabs from voting.
Jewish neighborhoods, which represent most of the city’s voters, will have more than 180 stations, Haaretz reported Thursday.
According to the newspaper, approximately 1 percent of eligible Arabs voted in the last mayoral race, in 2013. Since Israel’s capture of eastern Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, the Arab residents there have boycotted local elections so as not to grant any legitimacy to Israel’s presence.
However, an expert cited in the report took issue with the city’s use of the boycott as a reason for not investing in polling stations in Arab neighborhoods, saying that “the fact that they don’t vote apparently serves as a good pretext for preventing them from voting. What this means is that you’re depriving the few who do want to vote of the right to do so.”
Polling stations will be opened in the mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Beit Safafa as well as in the Old City, Sheikh Jarrah and Jabal Mukkaber. Many of the inhabitants of eastern Jerusalem are permanent residents entitled to participate in local elections but do not hold citizenship and are ineligible to vote for the Knesset.
Earlier this month, The Times of Israel reported that Ramadan Dabash, a resident of the Sur Baher neighborhood, is running for mayor as head of the newly established Jerusalem for Jerusalemites party, which aims to represent the concerns of eastern Jerusalem residents.
“We are not telling anyone to become Israeli, change their religion, give up the Al-Aqsa mosque or join the Israeli army,” Dabash told the newspaper. “We are saying that we need to make sure we receive better services. We need to have a voice on the City Council to fight for our rights.”
There is a significant disparity in the municipal services offered in eastern and western Jerusalem.

Jeremy Corbyn said in 2013 that ‘Zionists’ don’t understand British culture

Video footage from 2013 has surfaced of British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who is battling allegations of anti-Semitism, implying that Zionists were unable to understand British ways of thinking despite growing up in the country.
In a clip of Corbyn’s speech published by The Daily Mail, Corbyn told attendees at a London conference that “Zionists … clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either. They needed two lessons, which we could perhaps help them with.”
The conference, which was promoted on the Hamas terror organization’s English language website, featured several controversial speakers, including one who had advocated boycotting Holocaust Memorial Day and another who blamed Israel for the 9/11 attacks.
Garda Kharmi, who also addressed the conference, was quoted by the Daily Mail as having said in a 2017 lecture that “the Jews were not wanted in Europe” and that they were “an unpopular, unloved people who were off-loaded into the [Middle East].”
Stephen Pollard, the editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper and a staunch Corbyn critic, tweeted that Corbyn “doubtless thinks he’s using the antisemite’s ‘get out of jail free card’ by saying Zionist rather than Jew. But it’s almost impossible to read this as anything other than a reference to Jews.

 

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