Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, April 08, 2026

04/07 Links Pt2: Iron Dome and the ‘America First’ Left; David Schwimmer: Wireless ‘Disgraced Itself’ by Booking Kanye, Calls Rapper a ‘Hate-Mongering Bigot’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Iron Dome and the ‘America First’ Left

The problem is that it isn’t true that Iron Dome is none of our concern. The America First left is thus living a lie—the very same lie that America First rightists tell themselves. The Horseshoe Theory strikes again.

There are two kinds of benefits that Iron Dome funding brings to America: direct and indirect. An example of an indirect benefit: It is an immensely cost-effective way to prevent escalation in the Middle East, since it allows Israel to absorb rocket attacks that would otherwise necessitate an overwhelming military response. And preventing escalation in the Middle East saves American lives.

One theory behind funding Iron Dome, then, is: It is good to save American lives.

But the indirectness of that particular benefit opens space for naysayers to claim otherwise (though it would be surprising if they actually believed such claims). So if that were where the argument ended, AOC and Khanna and others could claim some kind of “both sides” stalemate in which two legitimate but unprovable claims must coexist.

But it does not end there. In fact, it begins there.

As one Congressional Research Service report on Iron Dome explains succinctly: “In March 2014, the United States and Israeli governments signed a coproduction agreement to enable components of the Iron Dome system to be manufactured in the United States, while also providing the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) with full access to what had been proprietary Iron Dome technology.”

Let’s take the first part first, because it’s so simple even an anti-Zionist could understand it. For about a decade, Raytheon’s plant in Arizona was the critical core of Iron Dome parts production in America. In November 2025, a new plant in Arkansas came online, moving even more of the process from Israel to America. Now, the manufacture of missile components for Iron Dome interceptors is mostly an American process. In other words, just like much of what is called “aid” to Israel, the money is spent on the U.S. economy and in fortifying American manufacturing. Along with the new Arkansas facility, Reuters reports, Raytheon received a $1.25 billion contract to supply Israel.

American jobs, American money, American manufacturing—if these are unimportant to Iron Dome’s critics, they should say so. Ignoring them entirely is an act of profound bad faith.

Meanwhile, access to the missile-defense technology is its own return-on-investment, since the U.S. gets to see data from the tech’s deployment in wartime scenarios. So: Iran fires missiles at Israel, and the U.S. sees what works and what doesn’t without its own civilians being the live targets.

Which is why, in the end, opposition to Iron Dome in the U.S. generally takes an ideological, and not a mathematical or practical, primary basis. One cannot argue that there are no benefits to the U.S.; one can only argue that those benefits—investment in the U.S. economy, job creation, a steady boost to domestic manufacturing, and of course lives saved—aren’t meaningful.

From first intercept to 10,000 combat intercepts: Iron Dome turns 15-analysis

On April 7, 2011 at 6.20PM I was in the southern city of Sderot when the incoming siren blared. Hamas had fired a Grad missile towards the city of Ashkelon. Running to the safe room, I heard a sound that was different than a rocket slamming into the ground-it was the first interception by the now famous Iron Dome missile defense system.

Air defense soldiers gave the call sign “Alpha”- the signal for a successful first intercept of a rocket toward Israel. That interception, 15 years ago today, has changed the face of active defense around the world- especially here in Israel where it fundamentally redefined Israel’s defensive doctrine and its ability to counter rocket threats.

The system has logged more than 10,000 combat intercepts and sustained success rates exceeding 90%.

“Over the past 15 years, the system has changed the face of the battlefield and shielded Israel’s civilians from relentless threats coming from multiple adversaries. Iron Dome is a first-order strategic asset and a central pillar of Israel’s national defense doctrine,” said Prof. Yuval Steinitz, Chairman, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Hilla Haddad Chmelnik was on the Iron Dome’s development team during her service in the Israel Air Force and recalled her first encounter with the system.

“I met Iron Dome a year before it became operational. It was in advanced development of the first interceptor batteries. I was in the Air Force, at the test range, and Rafael and MAFAT came to the Air Force to make it operational with an acceptance test. We had to think: how do we check the system and make sure it works well?”

The primary contractor for the development of the Iron Dome is Rafael Advanced Defense System. The MMR radar is developed by ELTA, a subsidiary of the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and the command and control system is developed by mPrest.

Its development was completed in roughly two and a half years, an exceptional engineering feat by any international standard.

“It immediately became a different kind of project, a sort of paperless project, because it was developed so fast. It was extraordinary because it required a whole new way of thinking about how an interception system works. It changed the way we test systems,” she told Defense & Tech by The Jerusalem Post.

The first test of the system took place in February 2011 and two months later the first interception took place.

“The interception happened an hour before my wedding in Herzliya,” Haddad Chmelnik recalled. “It was a double celebration. It was amazing.”

Strategies to stop antizionist abuse

The most effective and powerful analogies are always the simplest and easiest to picture.

And during an empowering 90-minute presentation at Sydney’s Dover Heights Synagogue late last month on how to identify, and fight back against, the dangerous tsunami of antizionism that’s enabling the spread of hatred against Jews, Josh Dabelstein – the Australian chapter coordinator of the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) – delivered an absolute beauty.

At the event organised by the Zionist Council of NSW, Dabelstein, who has a unique and deep knowledge of antizionism because he was once an antizionist himself, relayed to the audience of more than 100 this most potent of paragraphs:

“If we think about the highway to Jew hate, one lane is antijudaism, the middle lane is antisemitism and the other lane is antizionism. We [society and the law] blocked those first two lanes. That doesn’t mean that there are still people swerving all over the road. Some people do just hate Jews, right? But the one lane that allows them through today and emboldens them, provides them a permission structure and allows society to really spread all of this stuff, is antizionism.”

To understand why Dabelstein considers antizionism the single greatest threat facing Jews in the Diaspora today, it helps to understand how MAAZ frames the history of Jew hatred as a whole. At his Dover Heights shule address, he explained how those “three lanes on a highway” are related, but also quite distinct, with each associated with different “permission structures”, meaning they utilise a system of language, beliefs and authorities that makes the harm that the protagonists cause feel justified and allows people to adopt positions they once would have vehemently rejected.

Antijudaism, the oldest form, targeted Jews through religion – which is now illegal. Antisemitism targets Jews through race and ethnicity – which is also now illegal.

But antizionism – the dominant form today – targets Jews through demonising the Jewish state – disguising the hate as political criticism, or for social justice. Josh Dabelstein speaking at the event, presented by the Zionist Council of NSW.

In each case, he argued, the hatred operates not by engaging honestly with its stated target – Judaism, Semitism or Zionism – but by inventing a phantom proxy and loading it with libels.

“They take all the things that they hate and they shove them in that word.”

In the antizionist era, today’s libels – genocide, apartheid, colonialism – are directed at the Jewish state, are repeated ad nauseam and, Dabelstein said, “are elevated to fact status through pseudo-academia and institutional adoption.”

The conspiracy theories have shifted accordingly: Israel’s President Isaac Herzog is likened to Hitler during his recent Australian visit; and stigmatising Jews is now “simply achieved through misusing the word Zionist”.

What makes all forms of Jew hatred dangerous, Dabelstein said, is precisely that each presents as fashionable in the context they arise, before eventually being revealed as violent systems that produce violent ends.

While antizionism presents itself as anti-colonial, anti-racist and humanitarian, the violence it invites is moralised the same way it was in medieval and Nazi Europe.

04/07 Links Pt1: Trump: US To Enter Two-Week Ceasefire if Islamic Republic Allows opening of the Strait of Hormuz,’; 1 attacker killed in gun battle with police outside Israeli consulate in Istanbul

From Ian:

Three Things the Consensus Gets Wrong About the Iran War

First, the war has not, despite what many claim, trashed America’s alliances. NATO was battered by Donald Trump well before the war began, and not least by his egregious threats to wrest Greenland from Denmark. No doubt, some of our European allies have bristled at this war and in some cases refused to assist with it. Not all, though: German bases are important for the air bridge to the Middle East. In a moment of candor during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last June, Chancellor Friedrich Merz allowed that the fight against Iran was “dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” He understood, in other words, that Iran poses a challenge to European security that Europe chooses not to address on its own. “We are also victims of this regime,” he said.

More to the point: The United States is actually working very closely with a group of allies, just not the Europeans. Israel, of course, is actively engaged in the war, employing an air force twice as large and more than twice as capable of conducting this kind of campaign than the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force. The Gulf states are providing basing, and some Asian nations have been quietly supportive. Several hundred Ukrainian drone experts, who have behind them the most advanced military industry of its kind anywhere, are sharing what they’ve learned. If the Trump administration could only see Ukraine as a powerful partner rather than a charity case, even more could be done. A new partnership, joining Gulf finance with Ukrainian military technology, appears to be emerging from this war, to the advantage of the United States.

Second, the common claim that the war is a boon for Russia and China is exaggerated. Will it provide a short-term boost for Russian oil earnings? Probably, although it will be offset by the spectacular success the Ukrainians are having in hitting its petrochemical industry and its ability to export. Russia has profoundly deformed its backward economy, and now appears to be getting the worst of it on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the prospect that Ukrainian military innovation might be powered by Saudi and Emirati money cannot be a happy one for Moscow.

China, for its part, might indeed be licking its chops at the idea of the United States depleting its stocks of expensive interceptor missiles in this war. If governments choose to attack because they think they know exactly how many exotic munitions their opponents have in their warehouses, then China might well invade Taiwan. But, by and large, that is not how governments decide to launch global wars. Rather, they look at a host of considerations, including the nature of their opponents. In this case, the Chinese will see a president quite willing to wage an unpopular war and employ extreme violence. That president possesses a remarkably capable armed force, and is willing to spend the money ($1.5 trillion in the latest budget) to build an even larger and considerably more modernized one. Sober Chinese analysts, moreover, will have some appreciation of how the United States and its armed forces have a history of innovating and adapting when the pressure is on.

And finally, there are people who argue that Iran has been turned into a great power by this war. But being subjected to tens of thousands of precision air strikes; having your senior leadership assassinated, your air defenses almost entirely destroyed, your navy virtually annihilated; and losing crucial parts of your industrial infrastructure do not make you stronger. Can Iran keep the Strait of Hormuz closed? For now, yes. Perpetually? That is harder to believe. Ukraine has been able to keep its grain corridor in the Black Sea open despite Russian attacks; the U.S. Navy, ill-prepared as it was for the mine-clearing mission that it should have anticipated, is no doubt working full-time on solving what is essentially a tactical problem, albeit one with strategic implications.

Iran’s leaders and their sympathizers may declare that survival means that Iran wins this war, but that is, on the face of it, preposterous. The regime has profoundly alienated its neighbors by lashing out at them, brought the two most powerful air forces in the Middle East into intimate cooperation against it, and suffered new blows to its already impoverished economy. Is Iran’s new leadership—the members of whom have not fallen to Israeli bombs, that is—inclined to take an even harder line than its predecessors? Possibly. But the pictures published this week of the niece and grandniece of Qassem Soleimani—the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force killed in Trump’s first term—who have been living the good life in the United States, should trigger the thought that the elite leadership of Iran might be less pure and hard than one might think. And even committed ideologues have their breaking point; Heinrich Himmler was as hard-core as they come, yet attempted open negotiations with Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services in 1945.

There is so much that we do not know—including which targets have been hit, what damage has been done, and to what effect. But when we see things like the extraordinary rescue of the aircrew of the F-15E shot down over Iran, we need to remember that the military organizations pounding Iran are extremely formidable. That does not guarantee success. But it should make us, at the very least, thoughtful about where this war may go.

Seth Mandel: Unfrozen

Iran’s ability to open and close the strait at will is similar to its attacks on regional energy infrastructure, its demonstration of missile-firing capabilities that threaten Europe, and its use of cluster munitions against Israeli civilians. All three made the West adjust its war aims to prevent Iran from being able to hold the region and near-abroad hostage in the future. To this list we can add a pre-existing goal—the destruction of Iran’s nuclear weapons program—and the recent fixation on the Strait of Hormuz, which seems to have overtaken the others (except for the nuclear threat) in Trump’s mind.

There are two ways of looking at this, and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The first is that Trump backed himself into this corner by showing his sensitivity to oil prices without having put into place a strategy to preempt Iran’s ability to flip that switch. The second is that Trump’s fixation on the strait is a post-hoc realization that Iran must be divested from its leverage over the shipping lanes.

A cease-fire without a mechanism for enforcing the opening of the strait would make it what Trump seems to really want to avoid: a frozen conflict.

Take Gaza. The cease-fire between Israel and the remnants of Hamas may turn into its own new status quo, which would be less than ideal. But it is far superior to the state of the frozen conflict that was in place on October 7, 2023. If the Israel-Hamas war ends here, then Gaza’s genocidal and barbaric government has paid a permanent price for its aggression.

Likewise, Trump has been surprisingly hawkish on Lebanon, at times more so than Israel, regarding Hezbollah. As it currently stands, either Lebanon will disarm Hezbollah or much of “Hezbollahland” in South Lebanon will remain open space. Israel has proposed the following deal: If Israelis can return to their homes in the north without fear of quickly being displaced again by rocket storms from Lebanon, then the residents of South Lebanon will be welcome to return to their own homes. Lebanon has thus far rejected these terms. Trump, at the moment, is backing Israel’s position—in part, surely, because Israel has proposed a permanent peace rather than a return to the frozen conflict.

Trump’s penchant for finality can be seen in his approach to Venezuela as well. The decision to greenlight the capture of Nicolas Maduro was a bold one, but it was not done in the name of Venezuelan democracy. It was an attempt to permanently alter the relationship between Washington and Caracas. If the remnants of the Maduro regime are willing to play ball with Trump, they’ll stick around. That’ll mean the end of what Trump saw as the Venezuelan tail wagging the American dog.

This template cannot be applied at will—there will be no “Venezuelan option” in Iran, and lord knows what Trump even thinks he is accomplishing in the Russia-Ukraine war. It isn’t a doctrine, or an -ism. But the president does seem to have a preference for avoiding the “pause” button if a status quo can be radically and permanently changed in America’s favor.

Jonathan Tobin: Unlike Israel, many of America’s NATO allies aren’t really allies

Other countries will cheer or jeer from the sidelines, but Israel not only has a powerful military but is willing to use it, along with its unmatched intelligence capabilities and operations, to fight a war alongside America. And it is doing so with the knowledge that Trump could end the war before the Jewish state has achieved the objectives that Netanyahu has set.

Contrary to the largely antisemitic myth that the world’s most powerful man in charge of a superpower was dragged into a war by the prime minister of a country the size of New Jersey with a mere 10 million people, this war was America’s idea. And it is being fought to protect America’s interests as well as Israel’s. Stopping nuclear and missile threats—and the world’s largest state sponsor of terror—isn’t a favor to Israel. It’s vital for the security of the Middle East, which affects the economies of all, as has been shown in Iran’s stranglehold of the Strait of Hormuz and international shipping.

A clear look at the events of the last two months doesn’t just show Israel’s value as an ally, even though there is no pact of alliance between Washington and Jerusalem as there is with America’s 31 NATO allies, which the United States is obligated to defend under that treaty’s Article V provision. It has also done invaluable damage to what remains of American support for the belief that the alliance is vital to the country’s defense.

Israel has friendly relations with other countries, including some in Europe. And it has strong security ties with key regional nations like Saudi Arabia, even though they remain under the table rather than out in the open. But it has only one genuine ally. There are no plausible alternatives, even when Washington is run by those who are lukewarm or worse about the relationship, as under the administrations led by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

NATO may yet be revived at some point in the future. Even now, it still serves some use, if only to help ensure that Russia’s troublemaking can be contained. But the stark truth of 2026 is that it has largely become a vestige of the past that has outlived much of its usefulness.

At the same time, the idea that Washington’s affection for Israel is a hindrance to the pursuit of U.S. national interests or makes it difficult for it to make friends in the Middle East has been conclusively exploded by recent events.

It is the alliance with Israel that is the one irreplaceable asset for American foreign policy and security needs in the region. And one is hard-pressed to think of another such reliable ally elsewhere with both the military assets—and the willingness to use them in a difficult fight— and common values of democracy. It’s high time that American pundits and politicians, whether seduced by antisemitic tropes and arguments or wallowing in hatred for Trump, stop speaking of Israel as an American problem and start acknowledging this reality.

The Great Zionist Pistachio Conspiracy Theory that a rich Jewish family told the US to bomb Iranian pistachio warehouses

Drop Site News posted this week:

Iran was once the world's leading pistachio producer. Today, USDA data show the U.S., led by California, accounts for roughly 65% of global output, while Iran's share has fallen to about 18%. In the first week of the war, reports and geolocated satellite imagery indicated strikes in and around Rafsanjan, the heart of Iran's pistachio sector, including apparent damage to pistachio warehouse facilities near the airport. The Resnick family, owners of The Wonderful Company and dominant players in California's pistachio industry, have used political influence to secure vast water rights in drought-stricken regions, at the expense of local communities.

The 2025 documentary Pistachio Wars examines their longstanding backing of pro-Israel lobbying groups, arguing that hawkish policies toward Iran align with their commercial interests, as weakening a key global competitor benefits their bottom line.

The implication is clear: a rich Jewish family lobbied for hawkish Iran policy to benefit their pistachio empire, and the U.S. decided to target Iran's pistachio heartland at their behest.

This is absurd from multiple angles. U.S. sanctions on Iranian pistachios date to the 1980s — before the Resnick family built their agricultural empire. The sanctions didn't protect Resnick dominance. They created the market conditions that made Resnick dominance possible. Iranian pistachios haven't been a serious competitive threat in the U.S. for decades.

So the theory requires us to believe that the United States, in the middle of a campaign targeting nuclear sites, IRGC assets, and ballistic missile infrastructure, prioritized targeting a nut warehouse whose financial threat was neutralized forty years ago.

Let's say the warehouse really was filled with nuts. The bulk of Iran's pistachio industry is controlled by proxies of the Supreme Leader and the IRGC. Bonyad Mostazafan — which the U.S. Treasury has described as an immense conglomerate used by Khamenei to enrich his office and reward political allies — claims to own 95–96% of the pistachio collection terminals in Kerman province. IRGC-owned economic infrastructure is a legitimate military target under international law. No need to talk about rich Jews.

This is how conspiracy theories work. They start with real ingredients — the Resnicks do lobby, a warehouse in Rafsanjan was struck, the sanctions did benefit California producers — and connect them into a chain that feels tight when counter-evidence is waved away. Coherence substitutes for truth, and the absurdity that the U.S. military would prioritize the desires of a pistachio empire over other legitimate targets seems to make perfect sense when the audience is primed to believe antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Which is, in the end, what this is.

Pistachio Wars, the 2025 documentary that laid the groundwork for this framing, was made by Watermelon Pictures, a Palestinian-owned film company whose output is nearly all about Palestinians or Arabs. But this conspiracy theory has nothing to do with supporting Palestinians — it is entirely about associating a wealthy Jewish family with power and corruption. Of all the billionaire lobbying operations that shape American foreign policy — Saudi Arabia, Big Oil, the defense industry, Cuban exile groups — the Palestinian documentary filmmakers found it urgent to "expose" one Jewish family's nut business.

Without antisemitism, there would be no Watermelon Pictures. Without antisemitism, no one would imagine the U.S. military is bombing Iran to enrich a Jewish nut family. The "pro-Palestinian" label is cover. The product is the same old thing.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

CNN Arabic on Monday published an interview with Houthi leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi saying that the Houthis will stay out of the war unless things escalate.

The interesting part is that Yemen's Saba news agency published its own version of the interview, and while some parts line up, every crazy thing he said about Jews was ignored by CNN:

CNN Correspondent: Will the armed forces, led by Ansar Allah, begin targeting ships linked to Israel in the Red Sea, specifically Bab al-Mandab? And are Ansar Allah aware of the potential economic pressure this could have on countries in the region, such as Egypt?

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi: The Jews are leading the world toward destruction and are using America to achieve their goals. America should have considered its interests in the region and ceased the aggressive approach that Zionism is pushing it toward.

...

CNN Correspondent: To what extent can Ansar Allah continue to support Iran in this war?

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi: Yemen, along with Iran and the free people of the world, is confronting the Zionist plan because it is aggressive, destructive, and catastrophic for the peoples of our nation. It is the beginning of the downfall of existing civilizations, including American civilization. The Jews who destroyed the civilization of Prophet Solomon and abandoned it, following the magic recited by the devils, still harbor the same destructive and divisive mentality among peoples and nations, just as they separate a man and his wife with their sorcery.

Yes, the Quran mentions that Jews in Solomon's time used sorcery to separate husbands and wives.

CNN could point out the hate and insanity that the Houthi leaders show towards Jews - but it chooses not to. Instead, it treats them with deference and respect as national leaders.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/06 Links Pt2: The Jewish Passion for Freedom and Human Rights Was Hijacked by the West; Why Israeli Youth Remain Positive during War

From Ian:

Gerald M. Steinberg: The Jewish Passion for Freedom and Human Rights Was Hijacked by the West

Freedom and human rights are universal values, and Jews have often been at the forefront of these struggles, playing central roles in the creation of the modern human rights movement, forged in the shadow of the Holocaust. They built strong institutions tasked with implementing these principles. But now these institutions and their leaders have betrayed the moral force behind their creation. They stand for and reinforce hate and demonization directed at Israel.

Rene Cassin, a Jewish jurist from France, was a principal drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term "genocide") was a principal author of the Genocide Convention.

Peter Benenson, a journalist from a prominent Jewish and Zionist family in Britain, founded Amnesty International, turning it into a political superpower. Robert L. Bernstein, the head of Random House publishers, built Helsinki Watch to report on Soviet compliance with the human rights components of the U.S.-Soviet detente known as the Helsinki Accords. The organization expanded into Human Rights Watch. Bernard Kouchner, a French Jew, helped found Doctors Without Borders.

When the founders of all three institutions retired, their legacy and moral principles were abandoned. The new leaders were anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israel ideologues for whom the rhetoric of human rights was a convenient political weapon. They went from false claims against Israel of "war crimes" to the poisonous accusation of "genocide" - a heinous form of Holocaust inversion. In 2009, Bernstein began to denounce the organization he created - Human Rights Watch - for turning Israel into a pariah state.

The hostile takeover of the principles of freedom and human rights, and the institutions that claim to embody them, has done tremendous damage, not only to the Jewish people but also to the moral values themselves.

A Jew Among Jews By Abe Greenwald

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During Passover, the Free Press published a beautiful piece by Olivia Reingold titled “I Am an October 8 Jew.” In it, she describes how, after October 7, she began to reclaim the Jewish heritage she had all but abandoned as a child. Eventually, Reingold would find herself moved to tears during a recent Shabbat service, “a day that used to mean nothing to me, except more time to scroll online or work.”

I can’t say that I’m an October 8 Jew, as I was devoted to the cause well before then. But something about my Judaism has also changed since October 7.

I’ve long been a passionate Zionist, and I’ve felt that I owe everything to God. While I am a devoted believer, however, I’m a very negligent observer. Having come fully to embrace my Judaism only in adulthood, I’ve done slightly more than the bare minimum to maintain a personal sense of Jewish tradition.

Beginning a few decades ago, I went about kosher eating in my own way (and I’ve got my biblical justifications for it). I wrap tefillin in phases, the way others might go to the gym, slack off, and then resume. I pore over the Hebrew Bible regularly but in no regimented fashion. I tread lightly and humbly into the Talmud.

All of which is to say, I have cobbled together my own version of observance and continue to fine-tune it. Many Jews do the same.

Judaism, as I came to it, was about my relationship with my God, my place in history, and my inheritance. A lot of “my” was involved in this, but somehow “my people” barely came up.

October 7 changed me in this important respect. Before that day, I had never felt much of an ongoing obligation to my fellow Jews around the world. Of course, whenever I heard news of threatened or assaulted Jews, the bonds of history and faith would take hold. But they would once again recede. I didn’t think a great deal about how my actions or words affected the Jews of Australia, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere.

Betrayal of the Kurds shows why Jews depend on Israel

This is why Jews need the state of Israel. It is a lesson delivered by the Holocaust and by every atrocity and injustice meted out to the powerless ever since. Israel must hold. And its situation is precarious. It is tiny and vastly outnumbered by its enemies. Around 15km wide at its narrowest point, the country has no strategic depth, nowhere for it to retreat to in the event of a military defeat.

So Israel must fight to survive. It can never rest or become complacent. It must be powerful.

But it must also be smart. Tactical brilliance must be accompanied by the kind of strategic and political foresight that has been unforgivably absent for far too long.

And central to this is finding an accommodation, not just with Iran – when the pathologically murderous Islamic Republic is finally gone – but with another of the world’s stateless people: the Palestinians. Right now, there is no leadership – on either side – to make this possible. But Israel cannot abandon peace, not just because it is a moral imperative, but because it is a strategic one.

It is here that my mind returns to a line from, of all things, the TV series The Wire. Gang leader Avon Barksdale is standing by the hospital bed of a comatose friend, talking to his nephew D’Angelo Barksdale about the inescapable logic of “the game” – the brutal system in which they all live. “The thing is, you only gotta fuck up once. Be a little slow, be a little late, just once,” he says. “And how you ain’t gon’ never be slow? Never be late?”

From Rojava to Baltimore to Gaza and Tehran the point is the same: to survive in “the game” – be it drug dealing or the far more brutal world of geopolitics – being strong is unignorably necessary. But it is not sufficient. Avon knows that his only future is jail or death.

Thankfully, Israel’s options are broader. But it must internalise Avon’s words – because no one wins every war forever. At some point, you will be slow, you will be late. You must defeat your enemies. But you must also make peace with them – or you will never find peace yourself.

US Court of Appeals affirms $655.5 million judgement against PLO, Palestinian Authority

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has reinstated a $655.5 million judgement against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority for supporting terrorist attacks and making payments to the perpetrators.

In a March 30 decision, the three-judge panel reversed its previous decision to throw out the case following a 2025 Supreme Court decision in a similar suit and the passage of a 2019 federal law designed to enable the victims of terrorism to pursue civil court cases against the perpetrators.

The plaintiffs in the case, Waldman v. Palestine Liberation Org, are a group of U.S. citizens injured during terrorist attacks in Israel or the estates and survivors of victims killed in those attacks.

In 2004, they filed suit against the PLO and PA under the Anti-Terrorism Act. After a seven-week trial, a jury returned a verdict in their favor, and the district court judge entered a judgement against the Palestinian organizations for nearly $656 million.

In the succeeding two decades, the plaintiffs have largely been stymied on appeal, with the PA and PLO successfully arguing that the courts lacked jurisdiction.

In 2025, the Supreme Court decided in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization to reverse and remand the 2nd Circuit’s most recent decision to toss out the Waldman case and clarified the jurisdictional question.

The 2nd Circuit’s new decision granted the plaintiffs’ motion to affirm the district court’s original judgement in light of the Supreme Court decision.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the ruling on Monday.

“A major step in holding the Palestinian authority accountable for its long-lasting terror support—financially and legally,” it stated.

04/06 Links Pt1: Myths of the Iran War; 5 Men Now Running Iran; Iran rejects Pakistan-mediated truce deal; Russia provided Iran with list of Israeli energy targets

From Ian:

Myths of the Iran War

One myth related to the war is that if enriched uranium remains in Iran, the war has failed. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran possesses 441 kg. of uranium enriched up to 60%. Israel and the U.S. never intended to deploy thousands of troops deep inside Iran to seize nuclear facilities. Absent a comprehensive agreement to remove the uranium as part of a deal, the approach is to monitor suspected sites and, if necessary, act against them from the air.

In any case, Iran's enrichment facilities have been completely disabled, and it is doubtful they can be restored to operation anytime soon. Moreover, Iran has yet to achieve a breakthrough that would allow it to build an actual weapon system. Over the past year, many of the senior scientists involved in these efforts have been killed. Without the ability to develop a weapon, the uranium Iran possesses has no practical significance.

The claim that Trump was misled by Israel reflects a misunderstanding of U.S. decision-making culture. American presidents formulate policy based solely on their country's interests. The decisive consideration guiding the White House is what serves the American people. The notion that a U.S. president makes critical national security decisions based on assessments presented by Israeli leaders or Mossad officials runs counter to longstanding American practice.

Another myth is that it is possible to decisively defeat Hamas, Iran, Hizbullah or the Houthis once and for all. There is no way to guarantee that even a clear military defeat will end an adversary's motivation to pursue its objectives, recognizing that capabilities can be rebuilt. Phrases such as "once and for all" amount to speculation.

Even after Israel's decisive victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, when its military defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan, within a few years, Egypt launched the War of Attrition and in 1973, together with Syria, carried out a large-scale surprise attack against Israel. So victories may have an expiration date. As we repeated at the Passover Seder, in every generation there are those who rise up to destroy us.

Winners and Losers in the Iran War

Iran, Israel, and the U.S. have not achieved the goals they set for themselves in their current war. On the Iranian side, the late Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had hoped that by adopting the "Samson option," he would provoke a brief regional war with limited damage to his Islamic Republic because he would step in and offer another of his "heroic flexibility" tricks before things got out of hand. His "heroic flexibility" was designed to come after the first wave of attacks by Israeli and American bombers targeting part of Iran's military infrastructure.

However, as he wasn't there to do his part, Israel and the U.S. had to go for a second wave of bombings and then a third - this time targeting Iran's industrial infrastructure on a scale not known since World War II. Its weapons industry has been decimated, and its vast nuclear project put back by years if not decades.

Worse still, Iran's unprovoked ballistic missile and drone attacks on neighboring countries in no way involved in this war may have done lasting damage to the largely tolerant, not to say benevolent, attitude that many of them had of Iran even under the mullahs.

The outside world has been divided between those who, because they hate Trump or Netanyahu or even America and Israel as a whole, designate the mullahs as victors, and those who, translating their hatred of the Iranian regime into a wish for Iran's destruction as a nation-state, declare Trump and Netanyahu as winners.

Anti-U.S. and anti-Israel circles exaggerate the effect of Tehran's tactic of inflicting economic pain on the world by playing fast and loose with oil exports via the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting overall trade in a chunk of the region. That in turn intensifies the effects of the mullahs' mischief-making.

The U.S. and Israel may lose the Iranian people as one of the few nations known for their positive view of both countries. The theme of "you came and destroyed our industrial, economic and scientific infrastructure, but left our torturers in place" is gaining currency among Iranians both at home and abroad.

There is little doubt that although the Khomeinist regime is badly mauled, the biggest loser in this war will be the Iranian people. The war has destroyed thousands of jobs in Iran. A people facing mass unemployment and shortages of food, water and medicine would not be immediately ready for another attempt at regime change.

Telegraph Editorial: Iran Is Not a War of Choice

The U.S. and its enemies have learned from the last two decades that nuclear deterrence works. The ability of the West to intervene in the defense of Ukraine has been hampered by the existence of Russia's nuclear arsenal.

North Korea watched Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi disassemble his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in 2003, subsequently allowing NATO aircraft to topple his regime as the people he had tormented rose up against him. North Korean state media stated that "powerful nuclear deterrence serves as the strongest treasured sword for frustrating outsiders' aggression."

This same logic has underlaid Israel's approach to regional proliferation for decades. The Begin doctrine laid out after Israel's 1981 airstrike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor set out precisely why Israel would strike the al-Kibar site in Syria in 2007; it also explained why it struck Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025.

By achieving the full suite of capabilities necessary for a functioning nuclear deterrent - capabilities that it seemed well on the road to attaining - the Iranian regime hoped to build a nuclear shield. A regime built on a fundamentalist belief system devoted to the destruction of the West was not pursuing these weapons as a pathway to moderation.

Instead, a nation sponsoring terrorist militias, launching drone and missile strikes at its neighbors, attempting to hold the global economy to ransom by shutting the flow of trade through the Strait of Hormuz, was seeking to become effectively untouchable militarily.

While the 2025 airstrikes set back Tehran's nuclear program, it was clear early this year that efforts to rebuild its capabilities were well underway. The history of Iran's nuclear ambitions is of diplomacy, time and again, falling short. Faced with the necessity of putting a permanent end to them, it is hard to argue that Israel or America had any other choice.

Susan Abulhawa's hilarious self-own - faking hate mail from a "zio"

Terrorist fangirl Susan Abulhawa writes on X that she received an email threat.

But this is not a screenshot of an email. It is a screenshot of a contact form on a website that the sender would need to have hit a send button for Susan to read it. The red asterisks tell the user that these are mandatory fields to fill out - Abulhawa wouldn't see it on her end if the form was really filled out by someone else.

In fact, it looks suspiciously like Susan wrote this entire vile email on her own website contact form, screenshotted it before hitting "Get in Touch," and then presented it as if it is what she received.

Which means not only that Abulhawa faked her own hate mail, but also that she does not receive hate mail of the type that is vile enough for her to prove that "zios" are as evil as she says.

Another point: if this was a real email that she hadn't botched showing, anyone could have made up any name or email address. Meaning that it is easy for someone to pretend to be someone they hate and fake out a vile email from them. Even if we take Abulhawa at her word, this would have resulted in her followers potentially harassing or threatening an innocent person whose name and email was used by someone else. her claiming to want to put this email out into the light is in fact the height of irresponsibility where she is making someone subject to real harassment. Usually people who make death threats are not stupid enough to use their real names.

(Indeed, there is someone with that name in the US, and for all we know Abulhawa wants to have her followers harass her.)

The only vile person here is Susan Abulhawa.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

What does Judaism look like without Zionism ? The @NYTimes unwittingly provides an answer

The New York Times is running a glowing review today of Molly Crabapple's new history of the Jewish Labor Bund, framed around a seductive question: what does Judaism look like without Zionism?

The answer the book implicitly offers — and the review enthusiastically endorses — is the Bund: secular, socialist, diasporist, proudly Jewish in culture while rejecting both religion and nationalism. It is seen as a left-wing dream team from history, conveniently available for appropriation in 2026.

But the review lets slip a detail that answers the titular question: "At a Bundist gathering, the pastries might be fried in pig fat, just to prove a point."

The reviewer calls this "proudly secular." No, it isn't. That's active hostility to Judaism performed as identity. There's a meaningful difference between not keeping kosher and deliberately serving treif to make a point: it is the difference between being irreligious and being anti-religious.

This is what Judaism looks like without Zionism. It is indistinguishable from garden variety Communism - anti-religious and antisemitic in the sense of being opposed to everything that makes Jews Jewish. The Bund broke with the Bolsheviks over organizational questions, not over the basic project of replacing Jewish religious life with revolutionary politics.

During Passover 100 years ago, in 1926, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote:

The Charkoff Yiddish communist paper "Der Stern" complained that while the government appeals to the population for economy, the Jews were spending many millions for matzos, rendered fat and wine.

This is not "proudly secular." Proud secularists don't feel the need to impose their secularity on those who do not share it. That is what most religions do, not secularists.

The Jewish Communists weren't "proudly secular" but but actively antisemitic.

While the book review says that the Bund "fought antisemites head-on," they did not defend religious Jews at all. On the contrary, they considered yeshiva students to be "parasites."

The idea of hijacking the Passover Seder came not from JVP or IfNotNow but from the Bund, whose version of "Echad Mi Yodeya" in a 1919 "Haggadah" included:

Who knows two? I know two: Humanity is split in two parts: poor and rich.
Who knows eight? I know eight: Already from the eighth day, a young boy suffers from religion.
Who knows ten? I know ten: Ten commandments became 613.
Who knows eleven? I know eleven: Only rabbis and lazybones can liken eleven brother-sellers to eleven stars.

The review quotes Bundist leader Henryk Erlich calling Zionism "a Siamese twin of antisemitism." Yet Judaism survives today largely because of Israel. It is within the "progressive" wing that there is hostility towards Judaism itself.

The Bund lost, as the review acknowledges — to the Nazis, to Stalin, and ultimately to history. What's worth noting is that the Jews who survived, and who built something afterward, mostly did so through the nationalism the Bund despised. The "hereness" the Bund preached turned out to matter most in a land Jews could actually defend.

Crabapple's book may be excellent history. But the Times framing it as a usable past for Jews who want an alternative to Zionism requires ignoring what the Bund actually thought about the Judaism it claimed to represent.

Judaism without Zionism is not Judaism, but worship of bagels and lox and dusty socialist Yiddish newspapers.

On Saturday night, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appeared on Israel's "Meet the Press" where he said that Israel is committing murder and ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity in the West Bank and warned that unless Israel stops it then officials will be paraded in front of the Hague.

This "warning" is very funny because a few days earlier, Olmert himself threatened to go to the ICC himself to prosecute his own people for supposed war crimes in the West Bank.

The interview was roundly ignored by Israeli media. Olmert is a disgraced politician, the only prime minister to serve time in prison, for his corruption conviction. Nearly all of the few comments on the Facebook page showing an excerpt of the interview were aimed at Channel 12 for giving him a platform to begin with.

But in the media of antisemites, this is major news.

It was featured in Al Jazeera, Turkey's Anadolu Agency, Egypt's Al Ahram, the Palestinian Amad News as well as the official Palestinian Authority Wafa news agency.

Olmert cannot be rehabilitated in Israel, so he instead is trying to become popular among those who hate Israel.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

04/05 Links: A War of Psychological Attrition; Iran Has Miscalculated Disastrously; The North Korea Lesson for Iran; Why Islamists and progressives have so much in common

From Ian:

A War of Psychological Attrition

In physical terms, the damage Iran is inflicting on the Americans, the Gulf states or Israel is minimal.

By contrast, Iran is sustaining extremely heavy blows. Its economy was already shattered before the campaign began. Its military capabilities are being stripped away hour by hour.

That means the pace at which it is harming Israel and other countries in the region is negligible compared with what it had planned.

Unlike Iran, those countries are, by and large, continuing to function, while the disruption to daily life caused by missiles and drones remains relatively limited.

Iran is trying to create the impression that the cost of the war is unbearable.

But what is worse: gasoline at $4 a gallon, or Iran with an arsenal of intercontinental nuclear missiles?

What poses a greater threat to the world: a short-term recession, or a deranged regime operating an ocean of drones in the Strait of Hormuz, terrorist cells across the planet, and seeking to impose Shiite belief on humanity by force?

Iran knows the West's weak points, its short-sightedness, short patience, and short-time horizon.

In Tehran they know that in the West, people will talk about one American aircraft being shot down a thousand times more than they will about dozens of Iranian aircraft destroyed, hundreds of missiles intercepted and thousands of drones thwarted.

That is the asymmetric psychological war they are hoping to win.

Col. (ret.) Richard Kemp: Iran Has Miscalculated Disastrously

The ayatollahs never expected to find themselves in a sustained, direct, high-intensity war with the U.S. and Israel. Their thinking had been based on gaining ascendancy in the Middle East by proxy groups and ultimately by nuclear weapons.

The rulers of Iran spent billions of dollars building a series of terrorist networks that would do their dirty work for them. Yet Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Houthis have been very severely handled by Israel (and in the case of the Houthis, the U.S.) since Oct. 7, 2023, and their combined contribution to the defense of Iran over the last few weeks has consequently been strategically negligible.

In the minds of the ayatollahs, attacking their Arab neighbors would lead the Gulf states to pressure Trump to call off the war. It had the opposite effect. Behind the scenes, both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have reportedly urged the president to keep attacking until the job is done. Iran's strategy has instead consolidated opposition to Tehran.

Another strategic miscalculation has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. As a global economic attack, it reinforces the narrative that Iran is a worldwide threat. Both China and India have been significantly impacted, despite Tehran's selective permission for some ships and cargoes to pass through the strait.

Additionally, the regime is probably inflicting greater harm on its own economy. It depends on the strait for the import of food and other essentials, and for its own oil exports.

WSJ Editorial: The North Korea Lesson for Iran

President Trump decided to use military force to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon after diplomacy failed. This was a risky choice. But the U.S. experience with North Korea suggests the alternatives were even riskier. That history shows the limits of nuclear diplomacy with a determined foe, as well as what happens when the U.S. puts conflict-avoidance above all else.

During the Clinton Administration, North Korea denied International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors access to camouflaged nuclear sites and announced it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Clinton threatened sanctions. The U.S. military drew up plans for strikes on nuclear installations, and Defense Secretary Bill Perry presented a plan for a large military buildup in the region. Clinton deployed Patriot missile-defense systems to South Korea.

Former President Jimmy Carter informed the Clinton Administration that he intended to visit North Korea and try to defuse the situation. Clinton decided to let Carter proceed as a private citizen. Carter feared conflict above all and even opposed sanctions. He went beyond what he had been authorized by Clinton to discuss and announced a tentative agreement on CNN. The press and foreign-policy establishment hailed nuclear peace in our time.

Military options came off the table and Clinton embraced the deal, which became the 1994 Agreed Framework. For a time the deal seemed to work. Yet weaponization research continued on the sly. The regime's intent to build a bomb never changed. In 2002, North Korea reneged on the Agreed Framework and expelled inspectors. The George W. Bush Administration employed threats, sanctions and diplomacy but ultimately ruled out the use of force. In 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test.

After that, U.S. military options became riskier. North Korea is now believed to possess 50 warheads, and it tests ICBMs that will one day be able to reach the continental U.S. The lesson is that U.S. presidents waited too long to stop North Korea. The risks of war were always said to be too high, it was never a good time, and there was always another diplomatic option to exhaust. North Korea is now a nuclear power.

Iran's radical regime will not have a nuclear program when the current Iran conflict ends. This has made the world a safer place.

The lies behind the concept of "anti-Palestinian racism"

A new legal and rhetorical strategy is migrating from Canada into American institutions. Its proponents call it "anti-Palestinian racism," or APR.

They present it as a civil rights framework analogous to existing definitions of antisemitism — a tool for identifying and penalizing discrimination against a vulnerable group.

It is nothing of the kind.

APR is a framework designed to immunize Palestinian terrorism - indeed, any Palestinian actions - from moral judgment. Its architects have already demonstrated that it classifies condemnations of the October 7 massacre as acts of racism.

The concept was first formally defined in a 2022 report by the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. The ACLA describes APR as racism that "silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames or dehumanizes Palestinians or their narratives," and explicitly declines to offer a precise definition, preferring a "fluid, contextual, and adaptable" framework. That vagueness is deliberate: a framework that cannot be pinned down cannot be debunked. And a framework that can mean anything can be deployed against everything.

The targets of that everything become clear once you apply APR's language to historically mainstream positions.

For example, APR prohibits speech that "denies Palestinian historical experiences" or "fails to recognize Palestinians as an Indigenous people with exclusive collective rights." Applied consistently: the documented fact that many Palestinians sold land to Jewish buyers voluntarily before 1948 becomes a denial of Palestinian experience. Pointing out that Palestinians themselves proudly trace their ancestry back to Arabia or Yemen or other lands far away cannot be mentioned. The serious historical debate over how many Palestinians fled versus were expelled in 1948 becomes an erasure of Palestinian dignity. The Jewish religious and historical connection to Jerusalem — which Yasser Arafat notoriously denied to Bill Clinton's face at Camp David — becomes a failure to recognize Palestinian indigeneity. The statement that Jews have an ancestral right to live in the land of Israel becomes racism.

Under APR, the entire evidentiary record of the conflict is a minefield in which accurate description is indistinguishable from hate speech. That is the mechanism by which APR converts historical honesty into a thought crime.

APR's proponents present this as the natural counterpart to the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The comparison is fraudulent. IHRA contains an explicit carve-out: criticism of Israel's government, policies, and military conduct is protected speech. The architecture is honest — it presupposes a world in which Israel can be wrong and in which the distinction between criticizing a state and targeting a people is real and worth preserving.

APR contains no such carve-out. Nowhere in the ACLA framework or its American derivatives is there any provision protecting criticism of Palestinian conduct, leadership, or violence.

What APR does not guard against is demonstrated most clearly by October 7, 2023. The mechanism is built into the definitions in two places. First, APR classifies as racist any speech "defaming Palestinians and their allies with slander such as being inherently antisemitic, a terrorist threat/sympathizer, or opposed to democratic values." Hamas is Palestinian. Calling its members terrorists — the predicate of any condemnation of October 7 — therefore defames Palestinians as terrorist threats.

Second, APR defines "justifying violence against Palestinians" to include "blaming the oppressed for the actions of the oppressor." Palestinians are the oppressed party by definition; Israel is the oppressor by definition; Hamas inherits oppressed status categorically. Condemning October 7 means blaming the oppressed for the actions of the oppressor, which APR names as racism.

Neither of these is a strained reading. Both are the direct output of the framework's own language.

APR's architects did this intentionally The ACLA's co-founder and primary author of the APR definition, Dania Majid, signed a letter in November 2023 rejecting the idea that "contextualizing" Hamas's actions constitutes antisemitism, and characterizing the fight against antisemitism as "a new McCarthyism." The people who built APR do not regard October 7 as an atrocity requiring condemnation. They regard its condemnation as discrimination — and designed the framework accordingly.

The Toronto District School Board found this out directly. When the TDSB condemned the October 7 attacks, it faced formal APR complaints — not because its statements were poorly worded, but because it had condemned Hamas at all. The complaint succeeded: the TDSB was pressed into incorporating APR into its Combatting Hate and Racism Strategy. So now the fictional APR is enshrined as policy along with policies against antisemitism.

When APR advocates do not invoke the definitional clauses directly, they fall back on the original-sin argument: Palestinian terrorism is always Israel's fault, the inevitable product of occupation, and condemning it without condemning its root cause is moral evasion — itself APR. This reveals what the framework ultimately is: a structure in which Palestinian violence is permanently exempt from independent moral judgment because it is permanently pre-explained by Israeli culpability. No atrocity can break through it. Every massacre arrives pre-laundered.

The asymmetry with IHRA could not be starker. IHRA protects the right to criticize a state while drawing a boundary around ethnic targeting. APR protects a terrorist organization from criticism by encoding its ideology — Palestinians as categorical victims, Israel as categorical oppressor — into the definition of racism, then deliberately leaves that definition vague enough to expand against whatever argument needs silencing next.

Every charge leveled against the IHRA definition of antisemitism — that it criminalizes legitimate criticism, that it is too vague, that it conflates real bigotry with political opinion — applies directly and accurately to APR. The difference is that in IHRA's case the charges are false. In APR's case they are the design spec.

APR's foundational premise is unfalsifiable by design. Any evidence that challenges it gets reclassified as APR. The massacre of 1,200 people did not falsify the axiom. It was metabolized — recast as confirmation of the oppressor's nature, with condemnation of the massacre recast as confirmation of the racism that enables it. A framework that converts its most devastating counterevidence into further proof of its own conclusions is not a civil rights tool. It is an ideology with a legal enforcement mechanism. There is no act Palestinians can do to Jews that does not trigger APR claiming that is justified.

IHRA tried to protect Jews from discrimination while leaving the political argument open. APR closes the political argument by making one side of it illegal — and keeps the definition loose enough to close a little more of it whenever necessary. And that is the entire point.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Boston area Coptic church spreading the blood libel

There is a Coptic Orthodox priest serving in the Boston area who is publishing material in a major Egyptian newspaper that promotes classic antisemitic conspiracy theories – not in passing, but as part of a sustained, multi-part series.

The priest is Fr. Angelos Guirgis, currently listed as serving at St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Natick, MA. At the same time, he writes a recurring column in Al-Ahram, one of the most prominent media outlets in the Arab world.

In that column, particularly in a recent series on Jerusalem, he spreads Elders of Zion style conspiracy theories about Jewish world domination. In fact, his latest column is titled, "How did the Jews gain control of the world?"

He claims that since the Crusades, Jews developed a long-term strategic plan to dominate the world through what he describes as three coordinated forces – finance, religion, and media.

A Jewish movement emerged that had existed before the Middle Ages... This movement, persecuted and despised by Christian nations and hated by Western peoples, resorted to a long-term plan to control the world. They skillfully employed the three pillars of power: money, religion, and media (or ideology), and unfortunately, they succeeded. On the financial level, as we shall see, they seized control of the global economy, starting with usury and lending to individuals and governments, and culminating in the establishment of banks, the initiation of massive projects, and their subsequent control over arms, pharmaceutical, and mining companies.

On the religious level, they found that the Jewish idea alone was unacceptable to the Western Christian world, so they began spreading the ideology of Christian Zionism. ...On the intellectual level, we will see that Jewish Freemasonry began buying off thinkers and philosophers during the Renaissance, and later established large media entities, such as Hollywood, to shape public opinion and make these ideas acceptable. They even gained control over the United Nations itself.

More details are promised in later articles.

It get worse.

On the St. Marks YouTube channel he states that the Jews murdered Christian children as a religious ritual and used their blood for matzah - the classic blood libel.

This is not a personal opinion from an antisemitic priest. This is the St Mark Church official position.

Clergy, like anyone else, can express offensive views. There is nothing illegal about it. But similarly, there is nothing illegal about asking St. Mark Coptic Church why they employ someone with such noxious views that have been used as incitement to murder Jews over the centuries - and why they promote antisemitic conspiracies in their official social media.

The church must answer these questions. If it supports Father Guirgis and the blood libel, it should say so; if it finds his views noxious it must remove any connection to him on their sites and take down the antisemitic videos he has made under their name.