Netanyahu Is Visiting Washington Despite Mamdani

 Nadene Goldfoot                                            

Sen Graham meets with Israeli PM Netanyahu in 2016:  (Great meeting with Israeli PM Netanyahu yesterday discussing how to strengthen the US-Israel relationship on 30 March 2016).

Prime Minister Netanyahu will be heading to Washington to attend the funeral of the late Senator Lyndsey Graham on Tuesday,July 28, 2026 after which he will meet with President Trump in the White House.

 With the Iran war on hold for the time being, can you guess what they'll be discussing?

Mamdani says "New York City can't arrest Netanyahu," with a change in his tune to " but the federal government should."  "It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant," he said in a video posted on X. "The federal government however does and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant," he added, referring to the International Criminal Court." 

One of the reasons given for the pause in strikes by the U.S. against Iran is a shortage of interceptor missiles. 

Pentagon warnings over dwindling Patriot and THAAD stocks have exposed a deeper Western production crisis; former Israeli general Eran Ortal explains how interception policy may change and why Israel could also feel the impact. 

U.S. interceptor missiles form a layered defense network, relying on key systems like the MIM-104 Patriot, THAAD, and Navy Standard Missiles. These weapons protect troops and allies from incoming threats, though high operational demand has strained national stockpiles.

Patriot (PAC-3): Land-based system targeting short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and aircraft. 

THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense): Mobile land-based batteries designed to destroy short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles during their final descent using kinetic force.

Stockpile Constraints: Heavy utilization in active conflicts across the Middle East and Europe has heavily depleted existing Pentagon inventories. 

Cost Reduction Efforts: Manufacturers like Lockheed Martin are developing lower-cost alternatives, such as the PAC-3 ACE, to increase missile depth and lower per-intercept costs.

Looking Back: Anti-Semitism in Portland, Oregon In the 2000-2010's

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

Willamette River with several of many bridges over it and Mt. Hood

Anti-Semitism in Portland during the 2000s involved localized institutional resistance, regional white supremacist organizing, and community friction. Key events included political debates over Holocaust memorial placement and underground neo-Nazi activity.

At this period in Israel:  Between 2000 and 2010, Israel experienced profound political shifts and major military conflicts, marked intensely by the Second Intifada, the 2005 Gaza withdrawal, and the 2006 Lebanon War.

The prominent neo-Nazi leaders in the United States during the 2000–2010 decade were William Luther Pierce and Jeff Schoep. The movement was decentralized, but these figures headed the largest and most active organizations of that period. William Luther Pierce III was an American neo-Nazi political activist. For more than 30 years, he was one of the highest-profile individuals of the white nationalist movement. A physicist by profession, he authored  novels. 

White Supremacist Groups: The Pacific Northwest and outer Portland metro areas experienced active organizing by groups like Volksfront, a virulent neo-Nazi skinhead organization founded in Oregon in the 1990s that maintained an active presence and recruitment footprint into the 2000s.                                           



Bob Horenstein has served as Director of Community Relations of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland since 1994. In this role, Horenstein has directed the Federation’s efforts to safeguard the social safety net, promote civil rights, combat hate and bigotry and strengthen the local community’s ties to Israel. He is also a freelance writer, having been published in the Oregonian, Jerusalem Post and The Forward, and is a regular contributor to the Jerusalem Report, an English-language bimonthly Israeli magazine. I attended meetings with him about Israel that he led.  


Countercultural Fascism: Sociologists and local watchdogs documented how fringe political elements blended into local countercultures, creating an environment where extremist ideologies could indirectly find soft apologists or go under-monitored. 


Portland countercultures and subcultures from 2000 to 2010 centered on DIY punk houses, early proto-hipster artisanal movements, and radical environmentalism. These groups embraced cheap warehouse living, craft microbreweries, and anti-corporate activism.


DIY punk houses are shared living spaces and underground music venues operated on a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethic of mutual aid, communal living, and anti-commercialism. These alternative spaces function as homes for local subcultures and host grassroots concerts in spaces like basements, living rooms, and backyards.  All this going on in Portland, the city of Roses, and who knew?  


Holocaust Memorial Debate: In the early 2000s, Portland’s Jewish community faced arduous pushback and administrative friction when attempting to build the Oregon Holocaust Memorial, with local groups contesting its proposed placement. 


Local Indifference: Community leaders noted a broader regional callousness or lack of institutional support regarding marginalized religious and ethnic groups during this period. 
Specific major violent anti-Jewish attacks in Portland from 2000 to 2010 are not widely documented in public archives as having occurred directly within city limits, though regional hate crimes occurred nearby in Oregon, such as the 2002/2004 attacks on Temple Beth Israel in Eugene. In October 2004, white supremacists threw rocks etched with swastikas through the stained glass windows of Eugene's Temple Beth Israel during services, a prominent regional hate crime from that exact timeframe that federal authorities later prosecuted.
 During this decade, local and national groups like the Anti-Defamation League tracked occasional bias incidents, vandalism, and harassment in Oregon, though overall reported numbers were lower than the multi-decade highs recorded in subsequent years.
While public records and historical overviews note systemic issues and high-profile fatal police encounters during this period (such as the deaths of Kendra James in 2003 and Aaron Campbell in 2010), widespread or prominent civilian-on-civilian racially motivated physical attacks specific to the years 2000–2010 are not broadly indexed as major standalone historical events in mainstream local archives. Notable violent white supremacist hate crimes in Portland's history heavily cluster in the late 1980s and 1990s (such as the 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw) rather than the 2000–2010 decade.
Portland’s music scene from 2000 to 2010 was a vibrant, national epicenter for indie rock, DIY house shows, and genre-defying experimentation, defined by breakthrough local acts, a flourishing all-ages venue ecosystem, and a wave of prominent musicians relocating to the city,
Resource:
https://www.ojmche.org/events/uncovering-the-hidden-history-of-jews-and-antisemitism-in-or/

Looking Back: Anti-Semitism In The 90s In Portland, Oregon

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

                Portland's Motto:  KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD

The 1990s (already 36 years ago)  were a decade that was virtually unprecedented in the history of the American radical right. Standoffs with law enforcement officials at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and near Waco, Texas, helped to ignite the modern militia movement, while the 1995 truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City showed the world just how deadly convinced antigovernment zealots could be.

Portland was weird in the 1990s because it was a cheap, gritty, working-class haven that attracted artists, slackers, and counterculture misfits who could easily live on very little money. It functioned as an eccentric refuge before corporate gentrification and tech booms reshaped the Pacific Northwest. 

During the 1990s, Portland, Oregon faced a serious wave of anti-Semitism driven by active white supremacist groups, underground neo-Nazi networks, and violent hate incidents. In the 1990s, the Black community in Portland faced severe systemic racism, displacement through gentrification, and fallout from violent white supremacist activity along with the Jews.

During the 1990s, Portland's Jewish population grew from an estimated 17,500 to roughly 25,000 residents. This growth was heavily shaped by a significant influx of Jewish emigrants leaving Soviet Russia. Russian-speaking and Soviet immigrants who came to Portland in the 1990s were not all Jewish; while about 1,000 Jewish individuals arrived during that wave, the vast majority were actually evangelical Christians, including Pentecostals and Baptists escaping religious restrictions.

In 1990, the Black population of Portland was 33,530, making up roughly 7.7% of the city's total population of 437,319.Housing and Lending Discrimination: Local banks heavily redlined Northeast Portland's historic Albina district, denying home loans to Black residents while investing in white neighborhoods.

White Supremacist Cells: The Pacific Northwest and Oregon region harbored underground extremist groups, such as the Knights of the New Order, which stockpiled stolen military weapons and explosives with explicit plans to attack Jewish-owned businesses, media outlets, and community centers. They had psalms and hymns that drew on Christian tradition but supplicated Christ to redeem the Aryan race and wipe out the lower races.

Their symbol was a yellow flag with a swastika and four fleurs-de-lys. The golden background symbolized eternity, the lilies racial purity, and the red swastika the rising Aryan hero

Skinhead Subculture: Following the violent 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw by racist skinheads in Portland, white nationalist and neo-Nazi organizing remained prominent through the early and mid-1990s, creating a tense environment for minority and Jewish residents. 
Clandestine Plots: Unlike the public street marches seen in prior decades, much of the 1990s far-right extremist activity in the region operated quietly beneath the surface, focusing on weapon stockpiling and targeted terror campaigns. 
Aryan Nations: A neo-Nazi and Christian Identity organization based in Idaho led by Richard Butler, which held annual World Congress gatherings before facing crippling civil lawsuits and decline at the end of the decade. 
National Alliance: A leading neo-Nazi organization led by William Luther Pierce (author of The Turner Diaries), which focused heavily on political propaganda and recruitment during this period.
Racist Skinhead Crews: Loose street-level networks like the Confederate Hammerskins that engaged in violent hate crimes and cross-over with white power music scenes. 
Militia and Patriot Movements: While distinct in official rhetoric, the anti-government militia movement of the 1990s—spurred by standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco—heavily overlapped with white supremacist and 


sovereign citizen ideologies.

Portland in the 1990s was a gritty, highly affordable, and distinctively counter-cultural working-class city. Defined by the grunge music boom, iconic underground venues like Satyricon, pioneering craft breweries, and an easygoing "retire at 25" ethos, it served as the raw, anti-establishment haven famously spoofed in Portlandia.  With Mudhoney, Nirvana, and Soundgarden at the helm, grunge music exploded in the early 90s – and the world didn’t know what hit it,

   Comedy series of Portlandia:  The satirical sketch comedy show, co-created and co-starred by Jewish musician and writer Carrie Brownstein, focused instead on mocking progressive and hipster culture in Portland, Oregon.

Community Response to Anti-Semitism

Civil Action: Local civil rights organizations, community watch groups, and anti-racist action networks heavily monitored and exposed regional neo-Nazi activities to counter the rising tide of bigotry.
Local Vigilance: The regional Jewish community and allies increased security awareness and cooperative defense strategies alongside local watchdogs to counter the persistent threat of far-right violence in Oregon..