The JVP Haggadah is antisemitic by any standard - even their own!

Jewish Voice for Peace has published its Haggadah for Passover 5786/2026. 

It calls God a war criminal.

In the Hallel section, participants are invited to ask:

Can this be a holiday of liberation when the 'mighty hand and outstretched arm' that supposedly bring freedom are the same force that ten times over prevents peaceful escape from the narrow place, insisting on plague, environmental devastation, and massacre? Can this be a holiday of liberation when the triumph it introduces is first the slaughter of those who insist that democracy must be a part of liberation, and then the genocidal conquest of the land of Canaan — of Palestine — under the leadership of a hereditary priestly caste? ...These genocide warrants, these celebrations of genocide, these acts that enable more genocide, are the core of the story.

JVP is not criticizing Israeli policy. It is declaring that the God of Israel — the God whose "mighty hand and outstretched arm" are invoked in the Haggadah — is a perpetrator of genocide. To JVP, the Exodus is not a liberation story - it is a war crime. Passover is not a holiday - it is Tisha B'Av. 

Their hate for Jews and Judaism and God is so all-encompassing that they must reframe the Egyptians as peace-loving, democratic people who supported the liberation of the slaves if only those plagues would stop. If the Jews are the villains, the Egyptians (and Canaanites) must be the heroes of the story.

This is an attack on Judaism at its foundations — its sacred narrative, its central ritual, its God. If one believes this, then Jewish civilization is not merely flawed but irredeemably criminal from its inception. 

Which raises the obvious question: if the God Jews worship is genocidal, if the holiday Jews celebrate most is a ritual reenactment of ethnic cleansing, if Jewish communities and institutions are engines of colonial indoctrination — why does this organization insist on calling itself Jewish Voice for Peace? Who would want to be identified with a people who have been nothing but reprehensible from their very origins?

Because if they were "Non-Jewish Voice for Peace" they couldn't publish a Haggadah! Atheists don't hold seders.  Their claim to Jewishness is the precondition for the document's existence.

So JVP calls itself Jewish to weaponize the identity, while insisting that everything Jews have believed, celebrated, and transmitted across three thousand years is genocidal to its core. They are, by their own account, members of a people whose founding story is a war crime.

The hypocrisy is structural, not incidental. It is the whole point.

The antisemitism is obvious to anyone. But JVP needs to claim to be against antisemitism, so it created a framework carefully crafted to exclude their own hate from being called antisemitic. So by their definition, attacking and mocking Judaism is fine. They only oppose white nationalists and neo-Nazi versions of antisemitism, and they particularly emphasize the illegitimacy of conspiracy theories, saying "We have also seen the use of Jewish stereotypes and conspiracy theories as part of racist ideologies."

Now let's revisit the so-called Haggadah. In the section of the Simple Son, they say, "The Jewish state, Jewish communities, Jewish institutions, and Jewish family members — by our tax dollars and elected representatives — are in cahoots and complicit. In a STILL ongoing genocide."

This is, by any definition, a conspiracy theory, saying that Jewish communities, institutions and even ordinary Jews are "in cahoots" to promote genocide. 

 For JVP, every Jew participates in the worst possible crime. This is worse than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed only a shadowy cabal of insiders. Not to invoke Godwin's Law, but the closest parallel to JVP's characterization of Jews is that of Adolf Hitler, who also claimed that Jews were responsible for instigating wars, mass murder, and destroying civilizations from within.

JVP insists they oppose antisemitism. But by their own definition, they embrace it.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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03/26 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips Issues WAKE UP Call To Jews In The West; Green Party Moves to Declare Jewish Self-Determination “Racist”; Tariq Ramadan sentenced to 18-year jail term for rape

From Ian:

Maureen Lipman: Does the world have any idea of how tired the people of Israel are?

As Blanche du Bois bravely states as she is dragged off to a mental home in the last scene of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” The Jewish communities of the world are back on that same streetcar, reliant on the whims of tyrants and the gullibility of their moronic followers. The appalling ambulance arson attack is the result of genuinely sick minds.

David unearthed a 1994 copy of this very paper and honestly, save for the design differences, it could have been today’s edition.

A suicide car bomb had exploded during the Middle East Peace talks, killing eight people and injuring 50 civilians. Even before the bombing, a poll revealed that one-third of Israelis thought that the demands of peace could cause civil war. Thirty-two years of existential battles later, does the world have any idea of how tired the people of Israel are?

The BBC and reporters worldwide do not go into the shelters where children are trained to lie on the floor when the sirens go off. A dear friend told me that his grandchildren have needed to enter their safe room more than 200 times since the current battle began.

Neither do they report on the closure of schools. Most Israeli kids have missed some school every day since Covid. Are the media even aware of the fear of the elderly in Israel? “I am alone,” said one, “I spend the nights scared of the bombings. If anything happens to me will anyone notice?”

In the same 1994 edition, there is a review of a biography of Roald Dahl, citing him as a coming from the Goebbels school of propaganda. In an interview in the Independent, he said of the bombing of Beirut during the first invasion of Lebanon: “It was hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned.” This drivel coming from an avowed antisemite and blatant self-publicist, with unhampered access to the media. When the JC phoned him for a quote on his Independent diatribe, he said:

“I’m an old hand at dealing with you buggers. No comment.”

We had form Dahl and I. He once was so insulting to me, as in “You people…” on a chat show, that I was struck dumb. Years later in a Sydney hotel he was in the lift as I got in with my small children. I had always vowed that if I ever met him I would confront him. Except once again my courage failed and I think I mumbled, “Good morning.” I met his wife once on a cruise. She was a beautiful woman and a great actress. Dahl, in fairness, nursed her back to health after a severe stroke. Then he left her for a younger woman to live on higher moral ground.

Page seven of the newspaper is of particular interest with an NUS conference calling for measures to be brought in against militant Muslim students distributing leaflets calling for the death of Jews. Plus ça change… except the NUS may not be quite so philosemitic these days.

David Collier: Green Party Moves to Declare Jewish Self-Determination “Racist”

This weekend, at their spring conference, UK Green Party members are preparing to debate a motion titled simply: “Zionism is Racism.”

Motion A105 does not merely criticise Israeli government policy. It attempts to rewrite Jewish identity and Jewish history in order to deny the Jewish people the same right afforded to every other nation: the right to self determination. At the same time, it undermines the very anti-racist safeguards developed to protect Jewish communities in the Diaspora.

The incoherent, self-contradictory, and ahistorical mess that forms the text of this “anti-Zionist” motion is the resurrection of a discredited ideological campaign whose origins lie in Soviet propaganda – an effort designed to isolate and demonise the Jewish national movement.

Rather than become lost rebutting every distortion and fabrication line by line, it is more useful to focus on the core pillars upon which the motion rests. Examining them exposes the true nature of what the Green Party is proposing.

Denying the Jewish right to self-determination
The motion begins by redefining Zionism itself:
“Zionism is a political ideology which called for the creation… of an ethnonationalist Jewish State… to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population.”

This is a false accusation, not a definition of Zionism. Zionism emerged as a national liberation movement of a stateless people. It was the conclusion reached after centuries of failed integration, persecution and expulsion. Israel is a nation built by refugees. Families of people who learned the hard way that their safety could never be entrusted to others. To label that project racist is as absurd as calling a refuge for abused women sexist. Both evolved as a means of protection, not domination.

Zionist is a Jewish label
Zionism is the national movement of the Jewish people, rooted in their history, their vulnerability, and their need for collective security.

One of the frequently repeated defences is to present Zionism as a political ideology, detached from Jewish identity.

Technically, there are non-Jews who identify as Zionists, and there are Jews who do not. But this framing conceals something important.

A non-Jewish person living safely in the West who declares themselves a Zionist is not personally exercising Jewish self-determination. They are expressing support for the right of Jews to exercise theirs.

There is a distinction, and it matters. A Londoner who supports Scottish nationalism is not considered a Scottish nationalist in any meaningful national sense. He remains a Londoner expressing an opinion about another people’s national aspirations.

Zionism is not about its supporters abroad. It is about the national existence of the people who live it, and the aspirations of others who want to join them.

When the Green Party declare Zionism to be racism, they are not condemning a theoretical idea held by distant sympathisers. They are condemning the national legitimacy of millions of Jews whose identity, security, and future are bound up in that state.

Tony Blair (paywalled): Why the West Fails to Stop Antisemitism

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03/26 Links Pt1: Herzog warns Europe ‘you’re next,’ blasts UK's Kier Starmer over Iran terror response; Trump delays Iran energy sector strikes another 10 days

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Bombs are the only form of diplomacy Iran understands

The truth is as tragic as it is disturbing: This is a zombie regime that can only be stopped by bombs. It doesn’t care for the welfare of its people and it doesn’t care for death. It cares only about its theology. To hear Keir Starmer and his ministers bleating on about how a “negotiated solution” was in the pipeline before Donald Trump went to war was to witness the final, preposterous gurgling of luxury pacifism. Very soon, Britain is going to be woken up good and hard. Alternatively, it will die in its sleep.

If Iran ever signs a meaningful deal that leads to regional and global stability, it will only be after its most fanatical and effective demagogues are dead; its armed forces, missile stockpiles and nuclear programme are destroyed; its ability to choke the Strait of Hormuz is eliminated; and its regime suffers the final humiliation. So much should be obvious: the West has been negotiating fruitlessly with this devious theocracy for decades. How long before we accept the conclusion?

It is high time we recognised that not all people are the same, not all cultures are like our own, and that the values of an open society are not universal. We hold precious things like democracy, freedom, tolerance and the rule of law because they are ours, which is to say, they were developed and defended by those who came before us and entrusted to the present generation. The Iranian regime is of a different, nihilistic tradition. They can no more abandon their mentality than we can abandon ours.

War is the worst thing mankind has invented. But we wage it out of necessity, not choice. For all Trump’s demonstrable failings and shortcomings, Britain’s fateful flaw has been exposed for the world to see: Our contemptible appetite for appeasement. How little we have learned since 1938!

Jared Kushner says Iran wasn’t serious about negotiations prior to war

Jared Kushner, an informal Middle East envoy to the White House, said Thursday that Iran had not been serious about reaching a nuclear deal with the United States before President Donald Trump, his father-in-law, chose to attack the country in a joint military operation with Israel.

“We basically saw that there was no seriousness, and that they were trying to play different games to just get beyond President Trump in order to preserve their capabilities and pathway to get to a nuclear weapon in a way that would have been very, very hard to be stopped in the future,” Kushner said at Saudi Arabia’s exclusive FII Priority summit, held in Miami this week.

Kushner, whom Trump tapped alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to help lead talks with Iran amid the ongoing conflict, told the crowd of political and financial leaders gathered in South Florida that the Iranians’ public statements on the war should not be trusted.

“The one thing with the Iranians, and we’re seeing this even now, is you have to just ignore a lot of what they say publicly, because I think that their statements are usually more for their domestic audiences,” explained Kushner, who had met for indirect negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva two days before the war began in late February.

Likening Iran’s military tactics to a player losing at backgammon, Kushner said the Islamic Republic is now seeking “to create as much chaos as possible” across the region, as it has fired “indiscriminately” at nearby Gulf states and beyond. “That basically describes what they’ve been trying to do there.”

“President Trump’s focus is to try and get to a good outcome with them,” Kushner added. “He wants to just be in a position where they act like a normal country.”

Uganda is willing to fight alongside Israel, military chief says

Uganda’s military chief tweeted on Wednesday that his country is willing to go to war on Israel’s side.

“We want the war in the Middle East to end now. The world is tired of it. But any talk of destroying or defeating Israel will bring us into the war. On the side of Israel!” wrote Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, the chief of the Uganda People’s Defence Force and the son of the country’s President Yoweri Museveni.

The tweet went viral, generating more than 1.3 million engagements on the social media platform as of Thursday morning.

Elaborating on his stance the following day, Kainerugaba tweeted: “We stand with Israel because we are Christians. Saved by the Holy Son of God ... Jesus Christ the only One who can forgive sins. The Bible says ‘Blessed are you Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord? He is your shield and helper and your glorious sword.’ (Deuteronomy 33:29).”

In a separate tweet, he said, “Israel stood with us when we were nobodys in the 1980s and 1990s. Why wouldn’t we defend her now that our GDP is $100 billion? One of the largest in Africa.”

Last month, Kainerugaba revealed that his country was planning to erect a statue of IDF Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was killed in action in Uganda during a counter-terrorism operation that rescued more than 100 hostages on July 4, 1976.

The statue is expected to be erected at Entebbe Airport, where Yonatan Netanyahu fell in battle, according to Kainerugaba.

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כַּרְפַּס — Karpas: Why Hasbara Fails

I am planning on publishing a full Haggadah, based on the philosophical framework I’ve been developing, within the next few days. There will be over 40 essays similar to this one in the Haggadah. (I am using a different pseudonym.)

If you join my paid tier on Substack, you can access all the individual essays as they are posted over the next few days and the complete Haggadah PDF before Passover. For those who subscribe to EoZ here paying $5 or more per month, I cannot automatically send you the PDF but if you email to me I will try to send it to you before the holiday. 

Here is a sample essay.

כַּרְפַּס — Karpas: Why Hasbara Fails

The Haggadah does not explain what dipping the greens into salt water means. Before we discuss our slavery in Egypt, we say the regular blessing over vegetables, dip them, eat a little – and that’s it.

Of course there are commentaries that explain it. The salt water represents tears. The vegetable represents the initial promise of Egypt — Joseph’s rise, the welcome his family received, the children of Israel settling in the fertile land of Goshen. What began as abundance ended in the tears of slavery and grief.

We haven’t said a word about the Passover story yet. We have not yet discussed Egypt or Pharaoh or the plagues. And yet here, before the narrative begins, without any explanation in the text, we taste the tears of our ancestors.

The sequence is deliberate: we experience the emotional truth of the story in our bodies before we encounter it in words.

Modern Jews tend to intellectualize. When faced with hostility to Israel or other antisemitism, our instinct is to reach for the argument — whether it is the historical record, the legal case, or the moral comparison. The assumption is that people are essentially rational, and that if you present the facts clearly enough and the logic is sound, minds will change. This assumption is almost entirely wrong, and its failure has a name: hasbara.

The research on how people actually form and change beliefs is unambiguous and humbling. Most people do not reason their way to their positions — they feel their way there first and then recruit reasoning afterward to justify what they already believe. Emotion precedes cognition. The body registers before the mind processes. Arguments that arrive without emotional grounding do not usually persuade. For people who have already become emotionally wedded to a narrative, when presented with facts that prove them wrong, they tend to double down on their beliefs. Psychologists even have a name for this: the “backfire effect.”

The authors of the Haggadah understood this with remarkable clarity. They did not open the Seder with the theological argument for why the Exodus matters, or the historical evidence that it occurred, or the philosophical case for Jewish peoplehood. They opened it with a taste of salt water on the tongue. The body is enrolled before the mind is asked to engage. By the time the arguments come — and they come in abundance in Maggid — the person at the table has already been moved. The intellectual grounding lands in soil that has been prepared to receive it.

None of this is anti-intellectual. The Haggadah is one of the most intellectually dense texts in the Jewish canon — full of debate, exegesis, competing interpretations, and deliberate provocation. Truth matters enormously. But truth that is only argued and never felt reaches only the people already disposed to accept it. The rest need the salt water first.

We cannot understand slavery by reading about it from a comfortable distance. We cannot transmit the experience of persecution through a PowerPoint presentation. We cannot make people care about Jewish history by reciting it at them. We must find ways to make it felt — in the body, in the imagination, in the gut — before we make the case in the mind.

We dip before we read. We taste before we tell. The tears come first.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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03/25 Links Pt2: Israel Derangement Syndrome Needs to End; Coleman Hughes vs Glenn Greenwald; Two men arrested in connection with the Hatzola ambulance arson

From Ian:

Time for non-Jews to call out this hatred

I find myself emailing Jewish colleagues, “So sorry for abuse you’re suffering”, when I read comments on social media. But it happens so regularly I can’t keep up. I fear becoming desensitised. Gentiles aren’t included in WhatsApp groups where Jews discuss escape plans to New Zealand. The young aren’t going to call out this racism. Their cause is Palestine. Greta Thunberg, like most of her generation, appears to equate Jews collectively with the Israeli government. It doesn’t matter how many times Jewish friends and colleagues apologise for atrocities occurring in the Middle East, how often they distance themselves from Binyamin Netanyahu’s wars — it’s not enough for some unless they disown the state of Israel and disavow Zionism.

Hate crimes against Muslims are now twice as likely to result in prosecution as offences against Jews, yet Jews are nearly ten times as likely to be the targets of these attacks, according to Home Office figures. The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day is down 60 per cent since the October 7 massacre in 2023. Jews aren’t considered victims any more.

Sir Keir Starmer says little, he’s too compromised. This half-term he slipped away to visit Auschwitz with his wife, Victoria, who is Jewish, and their children. “Antisemitism has no place in our society,” he said stiffly this week, but it is clear he is anxious about offending both the Muslim and youth vote as the government fast-tracks a new definition of Islamophobia. The Green leader Zack Polanski has mentioned his Jewish heritage yet is more fixated on his party’s vote this week on the motion “Zionism is racism”. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, needs to speak up for Britain’s Jews. It was Jewish News that reached out last week to show a British sense of tolerance in supporting Muslims celebrating Iftar in Trafalgar Square.

I am nominally Church of England but my creed is acceptance and respect for all faiths that adhere to our country’s values. I never thought we could be like the communities in Kyiv, Lviv, Salonika and Amsterdam in the last century who allowed their Jewish brethren to be shunned and then attacked before being annihilated. Standing by and saying nothing now corrodes us all.

The everyday heroism of our Jewish children

It’s primary school. 12:30. Sun is shining. Some of the kids are having lunch, others are out in the playground. The climbing frame is full, the football pitch is buzzing, kids are running around playing ultimate tag. There’s a lunchtime netball club in the hall. This is the primary school of every kid in the UK. But this is where the familiarity for the general population ends.

The alarm goes off. It takes a second, but the kids know exactly what to do. They’ve practised for this very moment. This alarm isn’t the fire alarm. It’s the other one. The one where you have to stay safe, stay down, and stay silent. Thirty seconds later the entire school has locked down. Out of sight. Four to eleven year-olds sitting without making a sound. A minute goes by. Then the next, then the next. Seconds feel like hours. The teachers don’t know any more than the kids, but they have to keep them calm. They have to keep them quiet. Because the alternative is unthinkable.

Finally, the all clear sounds. It was a false alarm. Everyone breathes out.

And the kids? They just go back to the rest of the day like nothing happened.

I just finished watching Crossfire on BBC iplayer. It’s harrowing. Gunmen attack a hotel. Families, kids, running everywhere. But all I could think (and it was wildly depressing) was, “my kids would know what to do. If I told them it was an intruder alarm, they’d know what to do”. And that awkward lump in my throat, the slight tear in my eye, grew just slightly bigger.

Every kid at a Jewish school walks past the security, and often the police outside their school, and instead of turning to their parent and asking why these people are here, they just say good morning. Because it’s normal. But it’s not, is it? It’s not normal to be surprised when the front gate is open rather than locked shut. It’s not normal to have your bag searched going into a Jewish community centre. It’s not normal for my son’s teacher to have to skip a section of CBBC Newsround because it might hit a bit too close to home.

It’s not normal for every single synagogue in the country, every Jewish school, every Jewish building, every Jewish event to have security stood outside large gates and fences. And it’s not normal for my kids to think it’s normal.

And this isn’t just some sort of over-reaction. The threat is real. This month alone there has been an attack against a Jewish “cheder” school in Amsterdam, an attack on a synagogue in Michigan which housed a nursery, arrests of Iranians accused of spying on Jewish locations (including a school) in London, and of course the firebombing attack on the Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green.

Police chief who responded to Detroit synagogue attack targeted by online vitriol

During a press conference last Thursday, organized to address rising antisemitism in the wake of the ramming attack on Temple Israel in Detroit earlier this month, the Oakland County sheriff who helped organize the police response to the incident announced the arrest of what seemed like the latest perpetrator: an individual who had posted an antisemitic meme ridiculing the sheriff.

Sheriff Mike Bouchard displayed the image, featuring his face altered to include a Star of David over his forehead and payot, the sidelocks worn by some Jewish men, dangling near his ears.

“Some pond scum felt empowered and emboldened enough to put this picture of me up to try to threaten and intimidate me,” Bouchard, who is not Jewish, said during the press conference. “And by the way, the person that did this said a bunch of terrible things, not just against me, but against a lot of groups and individuals, who, by the way, was arrested today in Wisconsin.”

But while the arrest was only briefly mentioned during the press conference, which featured Bouchard and a group of religious leaders, including Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel, by Tuesday, it had been seized on by thousands of users on X as evidence of censorship and Jewish supremacy.

“Arrested in America for pointing out that a sheriff is jewish,” Jake Shields, a far-right influencer and former MMA champion, wrote in a post on X.

“Jews are murdering free speech in America,” wrote another influencer.

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03/25 Links Pt1: The War Is Going Better than You Think; Israeli Ambassador Sounds Red Alert Siren at UN; Iran Does Not Accept A Ceasefire; Hezbollah chief rejects Israel talks as ‘surrender’

From Ian:

WSJ Editorial: More Evidence that U.S. Was Right to Act before Iranian Missile Threat Grew

The rulers in Iran are hoping to move the war to a theater more favorable to their side: the negotiating table. But one of Iran's nonstarter demands is an unconstrained missile program - days after the regime fired at the American and British military base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

The launch is "the furthest ever attempted Iranian missile strike," the Institute for the Study of War notes. "The attack demonstrated that Iranian missiles can reach beyond the 2,000-km. limit that the regime has long claimed to have self-imposed." Diego Garcia is about double that distance from Iran.

For all the derision about "a war of choice," Mr. Trump was correct to act before Iranian missiles grow in number, range and accuracy. The reach underscores that the missile program isn't merely Israel's problem. The Iranians clearly aspire to put European cities in play, and eventually the U.S. homeland too. The shots fired at Diego Garcia are a moment of clarity about America's enemies.

Bret Stephens: The War Is Going Better than You Think

In March 2012, the price of Brent crude closed at $123 a barrel - $175 a barrel in today's dollars.

As of Tuesday, despite Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its attacks on its neighbors' energy facilities, the price is hovering around $100.

That ought to provide some perspective on the panic over the price of oil.

During the 1991 Operation Desert Storm against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a campaign widely considered a brilliant military success, the U.S.-led coalition lost 75 aircraft, 42 of them in combat.

In the conflict with Iran, four manned aircraft have been destroyed, three to friendly fire and one in an accident. Not a single manned plane has yet been lost over Iran.

In 1991, Iraq fired 39 missiles toward Israel. Hardly any were intercepted despite the deployment of Patriot batteries there. In this war, Israel is registering an interception rate of 92% against more than 400 missiles.

One of the worst mistakes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was the attempt by the U.S. to remake societies in both countries.

In this war, we hope the Iranian people use the opportunity of their leadership's weakness to seize their own destiny. But we won't do it for them.

If past generations could see how well this war has gone compared with the ones they were compelled to fight at a frightening cost, they would marvel at their posterity's comparative good fortune.

Why the Iran War Should Not Cause Higher Gas Prices in the U.S.

America does not depend on oil sent through the Strait of Hormuz and its closure does not provide any good reason for U.S. consumers to face big increases in gas prices.

The U.S. produces more oil than it needs and is a net exporter of oil. Problems in the Strait need not change the amount of oil produced in the U.S., nor the cost of pumping oil in the U.S., nor the amount of gasoline produced and used in the U.S.

When prices recently increased for oil internationally, U.S. oil companies also raised prices stateside, but this makes no sense.

The net result is that U.S. consumers pay more for gasoline, while American oil companies' production costs are the same, providing a huge profit windfall.

There are differences in types of oil in the U.S., but that does not alter the logic. Most of the oil produced in the U.S. is "light." But some U.S. refineries use "heavy" oil.

That means that the U.S. trades about 30% percent of its light oil for heavy oil, predominantly from Canada and Mexico.

Under a long-term understanding between America and its oil companies, the companies are given many privileges, including on public lands, and they are supposed to provide reliable production for America's needs, at fair and reasonably stable prices.

There is no legitimate basis for U.S. oil and gasoline companies to set prices in America any higher than they were last month.

Once gas prices decline in the U.S., perhaps the IRGC will realize that keeping the Strait closed would harm China, India and Japan, not America - and they might reopen the Strait.

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I Passed the Test — But What Was the Subject? (Judean Rose)

Understand this about me: on the best of days, I hate phone calls and Zoom meetings — I can’t backspace over my tongue or my appearance, and I’d much prefer to hide behind my keyboard.

So it was with some trepidation that I set up a virtual meeting with someone in a professional capacity; someone I’d never met before, a stranger. I get very angsty about these things, not to mention the fact that all of us here in Israel are exhausted from the war. Alerts in the morning. Alerts during my afternoon cat nap (or my attempt at one). An alert at midnight and one at 3 am followed by sirens.

As the meeting grows closer, I become nervous. What if there’s an alert that a missile is coming, or worse, a siren, telling me to run to the safe room. What if she hears?

What would I say? Do?

I was becoming more nervous by the minute. Then I had a great idea. I would Ask ChatGPT for advice.

I typed out my situation — a virtual meeting with a woman in the US who had no idea I was in Israel, worried that alerts or sirens might interrupt — and it delivered exactly what I needed: a coolheaded script, a compilation of polite, not-lying phrases for awkward, surreal moments:

I’m so sorry—I have an urgent situation here that I need to deal with immediately. I’m going to have to stop here and reschedule.”

“Apologies, something just came up on my end that requires my full attention. Can we pick this up at another time?”

“I’m really sorry to cut this short—an unexpected situation just came up here and I need to step away. Let’s reschedule.”

“There’s an emergency situation locally—I need to step away.”

If pressed later: “Everything’s fine now, just something local that needed my attention.”

ChatGPT reassured me that I was taking the right path, “You’re not lying — you’re just not volunteering details.”

And that was the oddest thing. I am proud to be a Jew, but was afraid to think how this stranger might react once she knew who I was. I don’t like confrontation, and I worry about letting my employer down. At the same time, I knew I was being ridiculous.

In the end, of course, the meeting went off without a hitch. There were no alerts or sirens. The woman was young and enthusiastic about her product, a remarkable app for keeping kids safe on the internet.

I had probably worried for nothing. I let out the breath I’d been holding in for what seemed like hours. I was so relieved. It felt like I’d passed some kind of test.

I’m just not sure what subject it was in.

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Buy EoZ's books  on Amazon! "He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

 

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Kadesh: The Ethics of Distinction (from the upcoming new EoZ Haggadah)

I will spend the next few days finishing a new Haggadah based on my philosophical framework, Derechology. I plan to post the individual commentaries on my Substack for paid subscribers, and then send the complete Haggadah as a PDF to all of them before Passover so they can print it for their Seders.

There will be over 30 essays similar to this one in the Haggadah.

Here is a preview, free for everyone.

If you join my paid tier on Substack, you will receive all the individual essays as they are posted, and the complete Haggadah PDF before Passover. If you subscribe to EoZ here on Blogspot and pay more than $8 a month, I can email the Haggadah to you when it is finished early next week upon request. 

Hope you enjoy it!

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03/24 Links Pt2: Britain is a dying society, poisoned by a hatred nobody will confront; Canada’s Polite Pogrom; What Happened, Megyn Kelly?; Death of a Holocaust denier

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The Islamophobia narrative is about erasing Jews and antisemitism

Americans have good reason to fear the spread of hatred that has become normative in nations where Islamists dominate. That is why immigration and even refugee absorption from such countries is so problematic, because it leads to an influx of people who are largely indoctrinated in beliefs that are antithetical to the values of Western civilization and invariably antisemitic.

Nor, contrary to the Times, is fear of such groups imposing Muslim religious law (Sharia) on other societies unfounded. That is not merely the historical pattern of Islamic communities, but the reality in Western Europe, where the infusion of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa has resulted in authorities fearing to enforce the law at all in some places. This creates an environment in which Islamist hate crimes can be excused or ignored, and those who protest such policies are treated as troublemakers rather than truth-tellers.

More than anything else, the talk of Islamophobia is a stick with which to beat critics of Islamic hate. It is an attempt to silence those who have the temerity to notice the connection between the antisemitic incitement that is commonplace in Islamist discourse in the West and attempts to intimidate Jews and target them for violence. It is no surprise that every time an act of Islamist violence happens, it is now followed by talk of the need to prevent Islamophobia.

The Times commended, in retrospect, President George W. Bush’s almost obsessive fear of offending Muslims during his administration’s “war on terror.” Bush’s insistence that Islam was “a religion of peace” became something of a joke during his presidency. Two decades later, that knee-jerk effort to deny the obvious about Islamist hate and antisemitism is no longer merely risible. It is a deliberate effort to prevent effective action against the Jew-hatred that has surged throughout American society, largely with the assistance of the same media outlets so determined to decry Islamophobia.

The point of contemporary bigotry and bias against Jews is, as author Dara Horn has written, to erase them and work toward a final solution of eliminating Jewish civilization. The focus on Islamophobia is just that. Those who are serious about actually preventing discrimination and hate shouldn’t fall for this big lie.

Death of a Holocaust denier

Ali Larijani, the 67-year-old former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, died a terrorist’s death last week. For much of his career, however, he lived as a diplomat, and was feted as one by regional and Western nations alike.

Back in 2007, Larijani addressed the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany. Arriving in the city off the back of a Holocaust-denial conference hosted by the regime in Tehran, Larijani no doubt got a tremendous kick out of telling an audience in Germany, of all places, that it was an “open question” as to whether the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews had occurred. He did much the same two years later at Munich in 2009, telling one questioner that Iran’s leaders did not share European “sensitivities” or “perspectives” when it came to querying the veracity of the extermination program.

He would have likely done so again in 2011 had his earlier denialist statements not resulted in a ban on his attendance—a classic example of a European state realizing far too late that to stop the horse from bolting, the stable door would need to be shut first.

In the various high-level roles he held on behalf of the Islamic Republic, chief nuclear negotiator among them, Larijani never lost sight of the regime’s core goal of eliminating the State of Israel. Now that he has himself been eliminated—the latest in a long line of terrorists and terror enablers from Gaza to Lebanon to Iran to have been felled by an Israeli strike since the Oct. 7, 2023 pogrom—the question remains as to whether Iran can continue to be the world’s primary state sponsor of anti-Zionist ideology, assuming that the regime survives the current U.S.-Israeli onslaught in truncated form.

Iran took on that position following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allied communist states from 1989 onwards. During the Cold War, Soviet anti-Zionism, a central plank of Moscow’s foreign policy, morphed into what I call “antizionism”—a toxic ideology that has never been as strong or as visible as today, nearly four decades after the demise of the USSR. What was being opposed was not Zionism as the vast majority of Jews understood the term, but a defamatory caricature that drew heavily on older antisemitic tropes.

This expressed itself in two principal ways: violence and propaganda.

The Soviets backed the Arab side in the regional wars of 1967 and 1973. They supported various left-wing terrorist groups in Western countries, led by such figures as the Venezuelan militant Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez (also known as “Carlos”), a KGB and East German Stasi asset who operated on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And they sponsored a slew of propaganda initiatives, in the form of pamphlets with titles like “Beware: Zionism,” as well as U.N. General Assembly resolutions, among them the infamous equation of Zionism with racism approved by the world body in 1975.

Genocidal Glee

The screenshots below show two things happening at once:
First, a private email sent by Glenn Greenwald, where he tells a Jewish recipient to “crawl out of your Sabbath hole” and watch Israeli cities being hit by Iranian missiles, followed by a link and the word “Enjoy.”

Second, his public follow up, where he frames himself as the victim of smears, denies wrongdoing, and then states plainly, “I think it’s good for the world that Israel is feeling retaliatory strikes for the wars they started.”

All the talk about innocent civilians, all the moral posturing, all the hours spent pretending this is about universal principles and human suffering, all of it collapses the second Israelis are the ones under fire. Then the mask slips, and what comes out is the truth. They never cared about innocent civilians in any consistent or serious way. They cared about using civilian suffering as a political weapon against Israel. That is a very different thing, and people should stop pretending otherwise.

Defenders of Israel spend an enormous amount of time explaining basic realities that should not need to be explained to honest people. We explain why casualty figures coming out of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health cannot simply be treated as clean, neutral civilian death tolls, especially when Hamas has every incentive to inflate, manipulate, and obscure the distinction between civilians and combatants. We explain that Hamas embeds itself in civilian areas, stores weapons in homes, schools, and mosques, launches attacks from within populated neighborhoods, and then relies on the resulting images for propaganda. We explain that Hamas built an entire terror infrastructure under Gaza while leaving its own civilians exposed above ground, because civilian vulnerability is useful to them. We explain all of this for one reason. Because if Israel were deliberately targeting innocent civilians, that would be evil, and the truth would matter.

That is what makes comments like Glenn’s so revealing. He’s not arguing that civilian suffering is tragic wherever it occurs. He’s arguing that Israeli civilians being targeted by ballistic missiles is somehow morally satisfying because he has accepted the lie that they are collectively guilty. He wants the category of civilian to apply when it can be used against Israel, and he wants it to disappear when Israelis are the ones bleeding.

And once you see that, a lot of other things come into focus. It explains why so many of these people become extremely skeptical and forensic when Israeli actions are under discussion, but suddenly become emotionless and vindictive when Israelis are murdered. It explains why every dead Gazan child is treated as a moral indictment of the Jewish people, while dead Israeli children are treated as background noise, an unfortunate detail, or in many cases a justified consequence. It explains why they spend months lecturing the world about “dehumanization” and then casually speak about Israeli families as though they are legitimate instruments of collective punishment.

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03/24 Links Pt1: The Iran War Is Saving the West; Iran Is Trying to Defeat America in the Living Room; US sent Iran 15-point truce proposal

From Ian: The Iran War Is Saving the West

The war that the U.S. and Israel finally initiated against Iran is saving the West.

The entire world is a beneficiary of the Allied campaign, since there was no remaining alternative to war.

The decision to attack Iran should have been taken two decades ago, in February 2006, when Iran brazenly resumed uranium enrichment and was referred by the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the Security Council.

The world was faced with the prospect of Iran attaining nuclear weapons and had absolutely no plan to prevent it.

The U.S. was, in practice, pursuing only one policy option: waiting for Iran to obtain the means to mass murder either Americans or America's allies.

Some experts are complaining that there is no clear endgame to the current war. But without the war, there was a very clear endgame - a nuclear Iran and very probably nuclear war.

What is absolutely clear is that the war brings the possibility of a positive outcome. Without war, a catastrophic outcome was certain.

Amb. Alan Baker: Will the International Community Confront Iran's Illegal Use of Cluster Munitions?

Iran's use of cluster munitions has become a dominant feature in its conduct of warfare against Israel and many of the Gulf states. International law acknowledges that such munitions may be used against purely military targets. However, Iran's widespread and indiscriminate use of cluster bombs that could endanger civilians and civilian locations is strictly forbidden and constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law.

One of the principle international humanitarian law norms of armed conflict is that of distinction, requiring an attacker to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. When fired at targets where non-combatants are in close proximity, their use violates the international law principle of distinction.

During the present, ongoing hostilities, Iran has been indiscriminately and deliberately firing cluster munitions on a large scale against Israeli residential areas. In light of Iranian violations, there exists every legal necessity and justification to make appropriate representations to the international community, its institutions and to the international media and to provide evidence of such misuse by Iran.

The malicious, deliberate, and indiscriminate targeting by Iran and its proxy Hizbullah of Israel's civilian areas clearly violates all humanitarian norms and is absolutely prohibited.

Iran Is Trying to Defeat America in the Living Room

Islamic Republic officials have actively sought to fracture Trump’s base by evoking anti-Zionist conspiracies. “Trump has turned ‘America First’ into ‘Israel First,’” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted, adding, “which always means ‘America last.’” Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander who is close with Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, referred to Trump’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “Epstein Axis” and posted that “American families deserve to know why Trump is sacrificing their sons and daughters to advance Netanyahu’s expansionist delusions.”

Iranian state TV has also amplified the commentary of Tucker Carlson—an outspoken conservative critic of the war—including a recent interview with Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center who resigned after blaming “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for the conflict. Tehran doesn’t want to turn Americans against just the war. It wants to turn Americans against one another.

Although opinion polls, oil prices, and the number of projectiles remaining are measurable, the fate of the war will be determined in part by the resolve of both parties, something far more difficult to measure. A democratic president’s will to fight is constrained by elections, polls, gas prices, and the news cycle. An authoritarian regime fighting for its survival answers to none of those pressures. Reagan had resolve until Congress didn’t. Bush had resolve until six in 10 Americans called his war a mistake. This asymmetry of resolve is Iran’s greatest structural advantage. Tehran wins by not losing; Trump loses by not winning.

The Islamic Republic’s decision to build its political identity around “death to America” has been a 47-year war of choice. Trump’s decision to try to end Tehran’s malign capabilities, rather than merely contain or counter them like past administrations did, has also been a war of choice.

If Iran’s strategy depends on Peoria, Trump’s presidency depends on the Strait of Hormuz. Trump cannot withdraw so long as Iran controls it, but securing it risks the kind of mass American casualties that ended Reagan’s and Bush’s resolve. If Trump reopens it, his appetite for regime change may grow. If he doesn’t, the economic pressure on his base will mount. This is ultimately a war between a democracy’s impatience and a theocracy’s ruthless endurance. The question is whether, for the first time since 1979, Tehran has finally met a U.S. president more committed to destroying the regime than the regime is to destroying him.

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