By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — The body of murder victim Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan was recovered Sunday in the United Arab Emirates, and that nation’s Interior Ministry announced the arrest of three suspects, giving no further details. Arutz Sheva (Israel’s Channel 7) reported: “It is believed that Kogan was attacked by three Uzbeks, who are suspected of having been hired by Iran. The three allegedly followed Kogan from his workplace, the kosher supermarket in Abu Dhabi … Kogan’s vehicle was found an hour and a half’s distance from Dubai.”
The office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Kogan’s murder as a “heinous antisemitic terror incident.” Ted Deutch, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, commented “The global Jewish community mourns Rabbi Zvi Kogan (z”l). May his memory be a blessing and may the perpetrators of this murder soon be brought to justice.” Jason Greenblatt, former White House envoy to the Middle East, commented, “The murder of Rabbi Zvi Kogan is a tragedy. Jews and Jewish life are under attack all over the world. Even in countries as safe and welcoming as the UAE, even in Abu Dhabi, one of the safest cities in the world, evil can sometimes penetrate.”
Kogan, a Moldovan Israeli who had served in the IDF, managed the Rimon Market, a kosher grocery store in Dubai, and disappeared on Thursday. His wife Rivky is the niece of Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, who was slain in 2008 by terrorists who attacked the Chabad house in Mumbai.
“The way to respond, the Lubavitcher Rebbe taught us, is by spreading light through Torah and mitzvot because our light dispels the darkness,” Rabbi Mendel & Mushka Katz, spiritual leaders of Chabad of Chula Vista, messaged. “Please take time to do a mitzvah today in Rabbi Kogan’s memory. To say a prayer, put on tefillin, give tzedakah, strengthen your children’s Jewish connection and education, and to strengthen and commit yourself to Jewish identity. Think of one way in which you can personally stand up to say: I am my brother’s keeper, and I will do something about it.”
Rabbi Rafi Andrusier, spiritual leader of Chabad of East County, commented, “Rabbi Kogan’s life was taken because he is a Jew and a representative of the Jewish People. We mourn his passing as well as the passing of every single one of the over 800 IDF soldiers, the holiest of our People, who stand between the Jewish People and those who seek our annihilation and we mourn the so many Jews of our Holy Land and throughout the world who are targeted because we are the Jewish people.”
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U.S. Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-California) responded on Meet the Press on Sunday to President-elect Donald Trump’s characterization of him as the “enemy within,” a “lunatic,” and “Adam Shifty Schiff.” He responded, “That’s dictator talk. That’s how autocrats talk. They want to make their political opposition an enemy – describe them in those terms. But look, I’m not concerned about myself. I’m going to do my job. I am not going to have his threats intimidate me from doing so. But anytime you have someone, particularly someone who’s going to become President of the United States, fawning over dictators, emulating their language, attacking the press, undermining our institutions, yeah we should be concerned about it because at the end of the day, it means that the American people will suffer.”
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Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) said Sunday on Face the Nation, “We’ve seen this pattern where President Biden makes demands of Prime Minister Netanyahu only to be ignored or slapped down entirely and then President Biden sends more bombs and more money. That is not an effective use of leverage. So, I do hope in these closing months the President will finally make more effective use of American leverage to at the very least, uphold American law, to insist that the Netanyahu government allows humanitarian aid into Gaza and they use our weapons in a manner consistent with the laws of war.”
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Former U.S. Rep. Max Rose (D-New York) said on MSNBC that while the Make America Great Again movement won the past election espousing anti-war rhetoric, its intention is to abandon Ukraine. “When we abandon Ukraine, that will send a message to each and every one of our allies that the United States does not stand with them, and it makes it more likely that young men and women in this country will be sent to war in the future.”
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Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told Fareed Zakaria of CNN that “the Trump program is a far larger stimulus to inflation than anything that President Biden enacted.” Summers said that Trump’s proposed policies will administer a “supply shock” to the country. “Across the board tariffs and massive tariffs on Chinese goods mean that everything we import, everything that competes with things that we import, everything that uses an import and imported good is going to be jacked up in prices. And these tariffs are not just going up a bit, these are far larger increases than President Trump imposed in the first term.”
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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) told Jen Psaki on MSNBC that Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi has been a Trump loyalist “including on election denialism … She has made false allegations about cheating in the 2020 presidential election, which still they adhere to, even though … we have 60 federal and state court decisions rejecting all of their fraudulent claims and she has played that role for Trump all along. … I think we have to be focused on what are they going to do with the Department of Justice. Are they going to convert this institution, which has been an implementer of law enforcement and has improved dramatically over time, into the President’s personal law firm and an instrument of vendetta and retribution?”
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Matt Krauschaar, Jewish Insider’s editor in chief, told Shannon Bream on Fox News that Elon Musk (and Vivek Ramaswamy) tasked by President-elect Trump to pare down the government bureaucracy, will have “a lot more challenges than his optimistic OpEd would suggest in the Wall Street Journal.”
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.