Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, August 09, 2026

Ontario Halves Arson Stats By Redefining 'Arson' To Exclude Antisemitic Attacks (PreOccupied Territory)

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Toronto, August 9 - Canada's largest metropolitan area has seen a dramatic reduction in the incidence of criminal incendiary acts since law enforcement authorities from that category any such act directed at Jews or Jewish institutions, provincial officials announced today.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Solicitor General reported that Greater Toronto Area arson statistics dropped 52 percent in the first half of 2026 after a quiet policy adjustment that reclassifies fires at synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, and private Jewish residences as “ideologically motivated property interventions” rather than arson. The change, officials said, reflects a more precise understanding of contemporary social justice dynamics.

“Traditional definitions of arson failed to account for the distinct moral context when the target is associated with Zionism,” explained Assistant Deputy Minister Patricia Ellsworth at a briefing in Queen’s Park. “By removing these incidents from the arson ledger, we achieve both statistical accuracy and alignment with progressive values. What looks like a crime under outdated frameworks is often legitimate political expression under current ones.”

The policy follows a series of high-profile fires, including the August 1 destruction of the Nöam kosher restaurant in Montreal and multiple earlier attacks on Toronto-area Jewish institutions. Under the new guidelines, investigators first determine whether the perpetrator expressed anti-Zionist sentiments. If so, the incident is logged under a separate category of “decolonial direct action,” which does not appear in official crime statistics.

Community organizers welcomed the reform. “This is long overdue,” said Jordan Hale of the Coalition for Equitable Public Safety. “Conflating genuine antisemitism with opposition to Israeli policies has inflated the numbers and created a false narrative of crisis. Ontario is finally distinguishing between hate and accountability.”

Jewish advocacy groups expressed alarm, noting that Jews comprise roughly one percent of the population yet account for the overwhelming majority of religiously motivated hate incidents. Officials dismissed the concerns. “Their discomfort is understandable but ultimately rooted in a failure to separate identity from ideology,” Ellsworth said. “We remain fully committed to combating actual antisemitism — defined as prejudice against Jews who explicitly reject Zionism.”

Police sources confirmed that the reclassification has already improved departmental metrics. “Clearance rates look better, community relations with activist groups have stabilized, and the public can rest assured that ordinary arson is under control,” one senior officer noted, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Provincial data analysts project that if neighboring Quebec adopts a similar standard, national arson figures could fall by as much as 40 percent by year’s end — proof, supporters say, that enlightened policy can solve problems that enforcement alone never could.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Within hours of Tuesday’s Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling, David Miller declared that anti-Zionism is now a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act, “full stop.” His solicitors hailed a landmark ruling, and sympathetic outlets announced that an appeal court had confirmed anti-Zionism is protected in law.

That isn’t what happened.

This is a story of amazing incompetence from Bristol University which allowed the judgment to accept from the beginning the fiction that Miller was a man of principle.

The judgment says that a highly constricted version of anti-Zionism that literally no one in the world believes, including David Miller himself, is protected by law.

Here is how Miller described his supposed beliefs for the purposes of this case:

Political Zionism is inherently racist, imperialistic and colonial.
This is not opposition to the idea of Jewish self-determination or of a preponderantly Jewish state existing somewhere in the world.
It is specifically opposition to “the exclusive realisation of Jewish rights to self-determination within a land that is home to a very substantial non-Jewish population.”
He was not supportive of, or “open to,” the use of violence as a means of opposing Zionism.
His anti-Zionism is not opposition to or antipathy towards Jews or Judaism.

If we accept point 3 at his word, that means that an Arab or Muslim state from the river to the sea - which he says is the goal - would be racist by definition as long as there are a significant number of Jews still there. His supposed opposition to racism results in what would be racist under his own definition.

Miller has two solutions. One is to “de-Zionize” all Jews, to brainwash them to accept their beliefs are racist. If they refuse? We can only imagine Miller’s response to that, and it is unlikely to be non-violent as he claims.

The other solution is for Jews to simply "leave.” What are his models for that mass self-flight? Paragraph 33 quotes his answer from a tweet:

“There is another way that settler racism and genocide ends. That is by decolonisation and liberation. Happened in Algeria Happened in ‘Rhodesia’. #PalestineWillBeFree #FromtheRivertotheSea #DismantleZionism #GazaGenocide”

Both those cases involved extreme violence.

As far as “de-Zionization” is concerned, he describes how it would work in PressTV:

Today there are many Jewish groups that could be encouraged to disaffiliate from the genocidal ideology of Zionism. There is no reason to close schools, synagogues, and student groups that can and should be encouraged to disavow Zionism.
But make no mistake: formally Zionist groups would have to either de-Zionise or cease to exist, wherever they are found.

Miller is saying that every Jewish school, every Jewish organization, every synagogue must abandon any belief that Jews have a right to live in Israel, a basic part of Judaism and something that is prayed for every day — or close down. Return to Zion is part of Judaism; insisting it be excised is antisemitic.
The only way to make his “anti-Zionist” views coherent is if it involves violence or forcibly changing Jewish beliefs. And most of the evidence is documented within the judgment itself, which accepts Miller’s claim that he does not support violence.

Worse than that is accepting Miller at his word when he is a provable liar. He tweeted in November 2023, “Zionist forces killed their own people on October 7. Zionist propaganda (also known as Hasbara) has suggested that Palestinian resistance forces were responsible for their deaths, but the narrative doesn’t add up.” Hamas bragged that they killed Jews but Miller denies it and claims that all the deaths came from the IDF. This isn’t a defensible opinion, it is an outright lie.

Miller’s other point that he is not opposed to Jewish self-determination elsewhere in the world is equally incoherent. Jews may exercise self-determination anywhere except their ancestral homeland, but they also may not exercise it in areas where they are not the supermajority — a condition that exists nowhere on Earth. A right that can be exercised nowhere is a right denied, and when that right is denied to only the Jewish people, that is antisemitism.

The real problem is that Bristol University’s lawyers made two very big mistakes at the very beginning. At a case management hearing in September 2023, Bristol’s counsel confirmed that the university did not consider Miller antisemitic, had not dismissed him for antisemitic views, and regarded him as having breached no equality law (paragraph 29 of the EAT judgment). On the first day of the hearing a month later, the same counsel went further and stated on the record that he was “not seeking to go behind what the claimant says his true belief is” (paragraph 63). The EAT found that concession unambiguous and binding, made presumably on the university’s instructions; it noted that the question of Miller’s true beliefs was thereafter wholly absent from the evidence, and it refused to let Bristol resurrect the question on appeal (paragraphs 134–136).

This means that Miller got to define his own beliefs, and there is no problem if they are incoherent or inevitably lead to violence or are antisemitic: he must be taken at his word claiming to be against both of those, based on the University’s own counsel. This undercut the entire case.

The reporting is also wrong about what the ruling actually decided. At paragraph 138(iv), the EAT wrote that it is coherent to describe as racist an ideology promoting a state for “only one race of people” in a territory containing a large number of another, and that an ideology supporting migration backed by an imperial power to dislodge an indigenous population could coherently be called colonial and imperialistic. The EAT stressed in the same paragraph that whether Miller’s beliefs are right or wrong was not the issue; the coherence test asks only whether a belief is intelligible, and a belief can be intelligible and false.

Jews are a people, not a race, and roughly half of Israel’s Jews descend from the communities in the Middle East itself, who would be surprised to learn they are racially foreign to the Middle East. The “imperial power” supposedly sponsoring Zionism spent the 1940s blockading Jewish refugees off Palestine’s coast. Indigeneity, in the court’s framing, is a category that includes Palestinians and excludes the people whose religion and language formed in that land. The EAT certified the coherence of a hypothetical ideology that describes nothing in reality, and the precedent protects a belief about that hypothetical. It didn’t rule that anti-Zionism is acceptable; it ruled that a bizarre set of incompatible claims that pretend to be anti-Zionism, that no one on Earth truly believes, is not problematic. Miller’s lawyers and much of the media happily report the case as if it ruled on something that real people believe.

Bristol's surrender extended to his most explicit statements. In tweets quoted at paragraph 23 of the judgment, Miller announced that “Judeophobia barely exists these days” and that Jews are overrepresented in positions of power and therefore positioned to discriminate against marginalized groups. Bristol declined to argue that even those tweets were antisemitic. This is incompetence on the part of the University’s lawyers. All the evidence for Miller’s antisemitism was available and since the initial hearing it has only gotten worse, like describing Chabad-Lubavitch as a “genocidal Jewish supremacist cult” whose theology holds that non-Jews have animal souls. Or his claim that the British state has been “totally captured by genocidal Jewish supremacists.” Or his assertion, “Pears property company was voted by a BBC show some years ago as the worst landlords in the country, living up to the stereotype of the Jewish landlord” (said years before this case.) Nothing about Zionism in any of those quotes. Miller’s hate is explicit.

The case seems to prove that Bristol’s eagerness to accept that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism sunk its case more than any legal arguments. They cut the legs out from under the strong case that Miller is an antisemite and his treating Jewish students with contempt was not an exception but a fulfilment of his bigotry.

The totality of Miller’s record shows that even an anti-Zionist who is the most careful in parsing their words are very often just antisemites hiding behind principles.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

Reclaiming the Covenant on America's 250th (May 2026)

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/08 Links: Omer Bartov is whitewashing Israel’s enemies; Pakistan’s defense minister: “Israel is a threat to the entire Muslim world,” called for “a united military front” against it

From Ian:

Omer Bartov is whitewashing Israel’s enemies

‘When someone says to you that he wants to kill you – believe him.’ Israeli novelist Roni Gelbfish was quoting her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, during a radio interview shortly after Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023. Most people would empathise with Gelbfish’s grandmother in the aftermath of the atrocities of that terrible day. Hamas had once again shown, in the most horrific way imaginable, that it should be believed when it says it wants to slaughter Jews.

But if Omer Bartov feels any empathy with Gelbfish’s grandmother, he hides it well. In his new book, Israel: What Went Wrong, the American-Israeli professor at Brown University cites the quote as an example of Shoatiyut, which he translates from Hebrew as ‘Holocaustism’. This is the tendency, he argues, to interpret and exaggerate the threats facing Israel through the prism of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism more broadly.

Although Bartov offers a cursory criticism of the Hamas pogrom, he is really interested in condemning the Israeli reaction. He claims that framing 7 October as a Nazi-like attack on Jews is little more than an attempt to justify what he calls the ‘genocidal’ assault on Gaza.

Bartov’s argument is of a piece with that of Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and beyond. They view the Jewish State as evil incarnate, a prime representative of a malign West. They claim that Israel cynically weaponises the Holocaust and the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect what they call ‘legitimate criticism’ of its actions – in this case, the ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

To make this argument, Israel’s enemies deny and downplay the very real anti-Semitic threats it faces, from the assorted Islamist groups like Hamas, hell-bent on its destruction, to their nation-state supporters, Iran, Pakistan, Qatar and Turkey. By minimising and erasing these formidable threats, Israel can be portrayed as a singularly malevolent nation, killing for killing’s sake. Anyone who has followed the conflict in Gaza and the broader Middle East – and not just on the Qatar-funded Al-Jazeera but also on the BBC and Sky – should be familiar with this portrayal. Israel appears to be fighting a war for no good reason, rather than what it’s actually doing – defending itself against an all too real, annihilationist threat.

In What Went Wrong, Bartov lends credibility to this anti-Israel case, from the denial of the anti-Semitic threat to the accusation of genocide. After all, he’s a professor of Holocaust studies at an Ivy League university and he served as a company commander in an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) combat unit in the 1970s. His credentials have turned him into a valued guest on anti-Israel media. He’s written articles for the Guardian and the New York Times and has appeared on the virulent anti-Israel podcasts of Owen Jones and Mehdi Hasan.

But What Went Wrong is no dispassionate academic analysis. It is the work of a professor-activist who, at the very least, is willing to omit key facts to make his case.

UNESCO joins Palestinians in rewriting Jewish history in Judea and Samaria

Three shocking examples pertain to the Temple Mount, Joshua’s Altar on Mount Ebal, and Solomon’s Pools.

In 1999, the PA-led Wakf conducted vast, illegal construction projects on the Temple Mount and beneath it, willfully destroying centuries of Jewish archaeological treasures.

The Wakf unceremoniously dumped 400 trucks full of archaeologically rich soil into the Kidron Valley. Thousands of artifacts from the Temple periods have since been found through careful sifting of the debris by Israeli archaeologists.

On Mount Ebal near Nablus, a large archaeological site identified by the late Prof. Adam Zartal as the altar of Joshua has been imperiled.

The PA drew up plans to pave over the site with roads and 24 high-rise housing units, and in 2001, Palestinian contractors ground part of the ancient stone fencing at the site to make gravel for roads.

Recently, Israel halted renewed Palestinian attempts to vandalize the spot, and has approved the establishment of a yeshiva and a settlement nearby that will also protect the archaeological site.

Another infuriating episode relates to the incredible aqueduct identified as King Solomon’s magnificent water system for Jerusalem. This runs from Hebron through Bethlehem to Jerusalem, including what is today termed Solomon’s Pools southwest of Bethlehem.

This marvel of ancient engineering, 40 km. long, is described in detail in the Bible, and the description matches the archaeological findings precisely.

The pools and aqueducts survived 2,000 years of summers, winters, and many invaders and predators – until the arrival of the PA.

In 2022, the PA dug an enormous 1,500 dunam quarry pit at Beit Fajar right through a section of the aqueduct. The quarrying caused irreversible damage to the aqueducts, with some 100 meters of tunnel and approximately 2,000 meters of the aqueduct on either side of the tunnel reduced to rubble.

Only recently has the government of Israel (finally!) stepped in to prevent further damage to the relics and to develop the site for organized biblical tourism.

The Israeli cabinet has just approved NIS 113 million in government funding for protection and development of 70 Judea and Samaria heritage sites.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu advanced this budget allocation.

While insufficient given the scale of the challenge, this funding signals a shift in policy. Enforcement has increased, site development and public access have begun, and after decades of neglect and looting, long-buried historical treasures are being uncovered.

The discoveries are significant, with the potential to reshape global scholarship on entire historical periods of importance to world heritage.

Some examples: at Hyrcania, near the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway, a fortress marking the fall of the Hasmonean Kingdom is being revealed as a “mini-Masada,” complete with siege systems, underground chambers, inscriptions, and ritual baths.

At the Alexandrian fortress on Mount Sartaba, mentioned in the mishna in connection with signal fires that inspired today’s Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony, excavations are producing dramatic new findings too.

Every such archaeological excavation is a victory over Palestinian denialism and UNESCO’s ISIS-like efforts at Jewish erasure.

She lost everything after supporting Israel: 'To be a good Arab and a good Muslim, part of it is to hate the Jews'

Within just five hours, Dalia Ziada managed to leave Egypt, abandoning her entire life and everyone she knew. In that brief span of time, she packed what she could, received help from friends in Israel and the US, and fled the country where she had been born, raised and educated, and where she had built a career and become a prominent public figure. It happened just two weeks after the Oct. 7 massacre.

Until the final moment, she refused to believe she would have to flee. Ziada was already well acquainted with incitement campaigns, abuse and online threats. As an activist for liberal democracy, a fierce opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and an outspoken supporter of Israel's right to exist, she had paid a public price for years. This time, however, another threshold had been crossed.

"It came to the point that they were using a verse from the Quran to justify my killing," she says. "A local group in my family's neighborhood went to my family's house looking for me. Thank God I was not there that night." At the same time, she says, lawyers affiliated with the Egyptian government began pursuing legal action against her on serious charges. "These two combined made me feel trapped," she says. "I could have ended up in jail waiting to be executed on treason accusations, or being immediately killed by some Salafists. And then the government would come out and say, 'Oh, we're sorry,' and that's it. It was a matter of life or death."

The trigger for all this, she says, was her public declaration that Hamas was a terrorist organization and that Israel, like any other country, had the right to defend itself. But that was only the beginning.

Ziada, 44, was born and raised in Egypt in a Muslim family. Her father, who died when she was 19, was drawn to Sufism, a more spiritual and moderate tradition within Islam. She describes him as a liberal, open-minded man who deeply influenced her worldview. After his death, in a conservative society where her mother was left alone with two teenage daughters, Ziada began wearing the hijab. She emphasizes that this was not a purely religious decision, but a response to social pressure and her mother's need to protect her and her sister. Over the years, the head covering became part of her identity, as well as the focus of an unresolved internal crisis.

She studied international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts and devoted her career to researching Middle East geopolitics, advancing democracy and working for regional peace. For her, "peace" was never limited to an agreement between Israel and the Arab world.

"By peace, I'm speaking not only about Arab-Israeli peace, but peace between all the factions of the Middle East," she says. "You have Muslims, Jews, Druze, Christians. You have people from different religious and ethnic backgrounds, the Kurds and others, who have spent, I would say, thousands of years fighting with each other. My hope and my fight, and still my fight, is to get to a point where they understand that we are all human, regardless of where we belong. At the end of the day, we all want to live good lives. We all want to live in peace."

From that standpoint, she says, she had always supported Israel's right to exist. "This is unfortunately not very common among people with my background, Muslims, Arabs, Egyptians and so on," she says. "This caused me a lot of problems and a lot of trouble in the past, but it did not get to the point that it really threatened my life."

At the same time, she was waging an ideological campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. In her view, the organization is not merely a political rival, but the bearer of an ideology that rejects the very principle of human equality. "The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood removes this concept that all of us are human and equal," she says. "It tries to divide the world into Muslims, who are good and superior to everyone else, and non-Muslims, who should be submissive to Muslims. This is exactly the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is something I totally rejected as a Muslim myself."

Then came Oct. 7.

According to Ziada, she was one of only three people in all of Egypt who dared to say publicly that Hamas was a terrorist organization. The claim illustrates the extent of the isolation she felt. "We are speaking about the most populous country in the Middle East," she says. "We are over 110 million people now, maybe more. It is really dangerous to think that this massive population could be radicalized."

What shocked her was not only the terrorists' actions, but the response on the Arab street. "We saw how horrible it was, how brutal Hamas and its followers were toward Israelis, including innocent people who were literally in their pajamas in their own homes," she says. "Unfortunately, people in Egypt and in so many Arab countries were celebrating what happened as a victory."

She stresses that these were not merely members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists or extremist activists. "They were mainstream Egyptians, people who look like me," she says. "So I had to speak up. I had to tell them exactly what happened on that day. It is not acceptable to celebrate such brutality. Then they turned against me."

08/07 Links Pt2: David Collier: The Synagogue Standing With a Terrorist Supporter; Swedish Left MP Praised Convicted Terrorist: “Your Fight Is Our Fight”

From Ian:

David Collier: The Synagogue Standing With a Terrorist Supporter

A synagogue holds a fundraiser. No big deal, right?

A synagogue holds a fundraiser for someone with a history of supporting Islamic terrorists? That’s a red flag.

The synagogue leadership shuts down discussion of the terrorist supporter in advance of the fundraiser?

That’s gatekeeping on a suicidal level.

The Mohsen Mahdawi Video
Ever since the U.S. administration arrested Mohsen Mahdawi in April 2025, I have been investigating his background. Working alongside Vermont researcher Rachel Feldman, we uncovered evidence that much of the narrative Mahdawi had used to build support within progressive circles was misleading. He had portrayed terrorist relatives as innocent victims and, over many years, repeatedly glorified and honoured Palestinian terrorists.

What we lacked was a recent piece of evidence showing that these views were not confined to the past. Then, a few weeks ago, we found it.

In a video Mahdawi posted in December 2024, he spoke in Arabic to a restricted audience, making it unlikely that most of his American supporters would ever see – or understand – what he was saying.

In the video, Mahdawi describes himself as part of a unified “resistance” movement and his words identify him with the same terrorist movements responsible for the October 7 atrocities.

Taken together with our earlier findings, the video completed a consistent picture of support for violent Palestinian militancy stretching back more than fifteen years.

The evidence was no longer ambiguous. Those presenting Mahdawi as a peace activist now had to explain how that claim could be reconciled with his own words.

The Synagogue That Did
Just as news of the video began to spread, Mahdawi’s supporters were preparing a major fundraising event to finance his legal campaign against deportation:

I knew Mahdawi enjoyed a substantial support network and had become something of a cause célèbre for anti-Trump activists. But it had never occurred to me that a Jewish organisation would help raise money on his behalf. Mahdawi is a man who has repeatedly praised and honoured leaders of terrorist organisations committed to murdering Jews. I had assumed that, whatever the political divisions within the American Jewish community, that would remain a clear red line.

But I was wrong.

I learned that one of the principal organisers of the August 9 fundraising event was Beth Jacob, a synagogue in Montpelier, Vermont:

Worse still, Mahdawi had even been personally invited to the synagogue for a discussion to take place prior to the main fundraising event.

That a Jewish congregation would lend its name and credibility to a fundraiser for a man with Mahdawi’s record was something I found almost impossible to comprehend.

The Internal Division
There was some pushback.

Beth Jacob has a members’ email discussion list, and after some members saw our research – including the recently uncovered December 2024 video – they began questioning the synagogue’s support for both the pre-event discussion with Mahdawi and the fundraising event itself.

What followed should serve as a case study. It is not simply that parts of the diaspora Jewish community are willing to embrace people who support organisations committed to murdering Jews. It is that some within those communities act as gatekeepers, introducing conspiracy theories and extremist thinking into the discussion while attempting to silence those who challenge their narrative.

Israel’s New York consul cancels ‘NY Times’ subscription over ‘false blood libels’

Ofir Akunis, Israel’s consul general in New York, ordered the Israeli Consulate to cancel its subscription to The New York Times on Friday, accusing the newspaper of publishing “false blood libels” against the Jewish state.

“I have ordered the Israeli Consulate in New York to cancel its subscription to The New York Times, a newspaper that consistently demonizes and delegitimizes the Jewish State,” he stated.

The newspaper has faced heightened criticism from Jewish groups and Israeli officials in recent months over its coverage of the Jewish state.

In May, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published an opinion piece on May 11 titled “The Silence that Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” in which he accused Israeli guards of sexually assaulting Palestinian prisoners. The column also included allegations that Israeli guards trained dogs to rape male prisoners.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused the newspaper of publishing “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press,” adding that the column was part of what it described as a coordinated anti-Israel campaign.

Three days later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced that Israel would initiate legal action against the Times over the column, calling its allegations “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel.”

The controversy also prompted Jewish leaders to call for a boycott of the paper after a spokesman publicly rejected rumors that editors would retract Kristof’s column.

“The New York Times is a newspaper that consistently publishes false blood libels against the State of Israel, often based on ‘anonymous’ sources,” Akunis stated. “When citing named sources, the paper conveniently turns to anti-Israel activists, and even Hamas terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction, to reinforce the narrative they want to promote.”

His office did not clarify why the subscription was canceled this month as opposed to back in May, when the controversial Kristof op-ed was published.

Tonight, the second yahrzeit of the "Beautiful Six" begins.

Two years ago, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi, and Ori Danino were barbarically murdered by their captors after being held hostage by Hamas for 328 days.

May their… pic.twitter.com/8N7nVvgzwG
— Israel War Room (@IsraelWarRoom) August 7, 2026

08/07 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: The suicidal significance of the Michigan Democratic primary; Victor Davis Hanson: The Great Israel Double Standard; Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey sign NATO-style defense pact

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The suicidal significance of the Michigan Democratic primary

Both Britain and America insist on viewing Islam as merely a religion and refuse to acknowledge that it is also a supersessionist global political project. Both countries have accordingly failed to realize that while Muslims may be a minority, their turnout at elections is enormous—vastly greater than that of non-Muslims—and that they vote as a bloc and overwhelmingly support radical Islamist candidates.

As a result, dozens of Muslim candidates across America have won seats as mayors, city council members and state legislators, and many support or are associated with extremists or terrorists.

Regarding only Islamist terrorism as a threat, Americans have failed to grasp how Islamists are also weaponizing civil society against them.

On Middle East Forum, Dexter van Zile points out that in Massachusetts, Beacon Hill lawmakers are trying to establish Muslims as a privileged class. A Senate bill would create a permanent, taxpayer-supported commission exclusively for “people who practice Islam,” grant it the power to recommend American Muslims for appointive government positions at every level, and charge it with studying and combating “Islamophobia”—all in blatant violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

For years, Americans looked complacently and pityingly across the Atlantic at the progressive Islamization of Britain and Europe. Now this is galloping ahead in America, too. And after being some years behind Britain and Europe, America is allowing pieces to be put into place which, it’s no longer fanciful to imagine, could see an Islamist in the White House.

Tragically, while the Republican Party should be fighting these developments with all its might, it is itself a house divided. MAGA’s isolationist faction—led by podcaster Tucker Carlson and groyper Nick Fuentes—ignores the all-too-real conspiracy against America by the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, it’s poisoning the minds of millions of impressionable young followers with the defamatory and paranoid falsehood that the conspirers against the American interest are the Jews.

And from Michigan’s defeated “moderate” Democratic candidate Stevens, who has now thrown her support behind El-Sayed, to U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who refuses to condemn his friend Carlson because he objects to “purity tests,” both main parties are adopting a “big tent” approach that protects the people they should be expelling as pariahs.

Across America and the West, hostility to Israel is now driving political life. Such people should beware. Israel’s cause is the West’s own cause; Israel’s existential enemies are the West’s existential enemies.

Those who want to tear down Israel, believing that the Jews are a bone they can throw to appease their mortal foes, are actually tearing down the West.

Jonathan Tobin: A man of courage was needed. Instead, American Jews have Schumer

Yet the El-Sayed candidacy isn’t just another embarrassment for the country’s most prominent liberal Jew. Along with every other element of the current surge of vile bigotry that is changing the face of American politics in ways we are only beginning to understand, it is the kind of moral test that comes along once every generation or two.

It’s a moment when lifelong legislators are required to step up and respond to the challenges of history. And we know that most Democrats, including almost all of those who seek their party’s presidential nomination in 2028, are siding with the antisemites like El-Sayed—or staying silent.

Republicans have done better, but if they allow someone like Vice President JD Vance to succeed Trump, then they, too, will fail.

Fair or unfair, public figures are judged not so much on the sum of their lifework but on how they respond to those singular moments in time, whether it is the debate about slavery and the Civil War in the 19th century or the rise of the totalitarians in the 20th. We don’t know what will happen in the coming years, but it is becoming apparent that the explosive growth of antisemitism will, in one way or another, create yet another pivotal chapter in history. Many people will likely emerge from this struggle with their reputations either destroyed or enhanced.

At such a time, it is a pity that rather than a person of courage and character, American Jews are stuck with the likes of the feckless Schumer to represent them.

New York must heed the warning signs before we ask, 'How did this happen?'

History teaches that democracies rarely fail because warning signs are absent. They fail because too many people convince themselves that someone else will act.

As I write these words from Jerusalem, I find myself thinking of my parents. In many ways, I am grateful they are no longer here to witness what has become of the New York they loved.

I am a fourth-generation New Yorker on my father’s side, and like millions of American Jews, I grew up believing New York represented something extraordinary: a city where freedom, pluralism, and the rule of law protected everyone.

That belief shaped my life.

In 1980, while studying at Brooklyn College, I had the privilege of serving as a research assistant to Dr. Hillel Seidman, a Holocaust survivor, distinguished scholar, and journalist.

He was a prominent Orthodox journalist, author, historian, and activist for Agudath Israel, who later wrote critical analyses of international diplomacy and the United Nations (such as his 1982 book United Nations: Perfidy and Perversion).

He taught me that the UN was never merely a diplomatic institution. It was often the stage upon which tomorrow’s political realities first appeared.

Dr. Seidman followed the tenure of UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim. He and prime minister Menachem Begin shared a deep friendship and commitment to Holocaust remembrance and to the principle that powerful public officials should never be beyond scrutiny.

Following Yasser Arafat’s 1974 address to the General Assembly, when Arafat famously appeared with both an olive branch and a gun, Dr. Seidman and Begin believed the greater danger was not the gun. It was the olive branch, because it carried legitimacy while concealing a more dangerous reality.

That conviction eventually led to the investigation into Waldheim’s wartime record. I was privileged to assist in portions of that research before the effort was later expanded by the World Jewish Congress, sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others. The lesson has remained with me throughout my career.

No public official is above the law.

No public official is above scrutiny.

Today, history feels as though it is echoing.

Antizionism is the wolf in sheep's clothing—used to mask and legitimize hatred, intimidation, and violence against Jewish Canadians.

In the wake of hateful protests at Edmonton's Heritage Festival, the demonization of Israel by City Councillor Michael Janz, and the dangerous… pic.twitter.com/UmyqwF0C4l
— CIJA (@CIJAinfo) August 7, 2026

The seventh round of Lebanese-Israeli talks wrapped up in Rome this week, and buried inside the file on prisoners and the missing was a phrase most people have never heard: the eleven.

The talks are proceeding under a framework agreement signed in Washington in June, whose thirteenth clause commits both sides to searching for remains and freeing detainees. Lebanese and Israeli negotiators reportedly exchanged lists of the missing and the captured, aiming to establish what happened to them and finding their bodies. Somewhere on those lists are eleven Lebanese Jews who vanished between 1984 and 1987, kidnapped one by one from a community that had already been reduced to a fraction of its former size and that made the mistake of staying anyway.

The group that took them called itself Munazzamat al-Mustad'afin fil-Ard, "the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth." It declared its own affiliation with Hezbollah, and a declassified CIA document from January 1986 goes further: the name, the agency concluded, was simply a cover identity that Hezbollah operatives used in the 1980s, staffed mainly by hardline Shia fighters from the south. The same alias surfaced when Hezbollah members claimed the 1985 TWA hijacking at a press conference, and they threatened retaliation against the United States if Washington struck back. Kidnapping was one of the major tools Hezbollah used from its beginning.

Beirut's Jewish quarter, Wadi Abu Jamil, had emptied out gradually across earlier waves of emigration; by the 1980s only a few hundred Jews remained in the country, down from a wartime-era Mandate population near five thousand. In February 1984, armed men accompanied by displaced southerners moved into Wadi Abu Jamil and occupied the homes Jews had already abandoned.

Anyone who claims that Hezbollah is not antisemitic is either ignorant or a liar. Targeting Jews is baked into its origins. In Wadi Abu Jamil, the Maghen Abraham synagogue was ransacked and burned, its walls painted with antisemitic slogans.

Over the next three years Hezbollah's antisemitic campaign was conducted against the few Lebanese Jews who had already chosen to stay in Lebanon despite the dangers rather than emigrate to Israel or elsewhere. Hezbollah chose the cream of the remaining Lebanese Jewish community.

Raoul Mizrahi was first. An electrical-goods shop owner in his fifties, he was seized from his home in Beirut's Sanayeh district on July 10, 1984, and killed within two weeks; his body turned up on an abandoned beach near the airport.

Selim Mourad Jamous, secretary of the Jewish community, was taken the following month. His fate was never established.

Haim Halak Cohen, an accountant, was abducted in March 1985 and killed that December. His body was found near the Capuchin church at the edge of Wadi Abu Jamil — a return, in death, to the neighborhood the kidnappers had already gutted.

Dr. Elie Hallak was the deputy head of the community and a pediatrician known as "doctor of the poor," treating patients regardless of background and giving free consultations to non-Jewish children. He was taken the same day as Cohen. His wife, Rachel, publicly insisted on his innocence and demanded the kidnappers produce evidence for whatever accusation they were holding him on; other Western hostages later reported crossing paths with him in captivity. He died in February 1986. His body was never returned.

Elie Youssef Sarour, 68, prepared the community's dead for burial under Jewish law. He was abducted alongside Hallak and died in December 1986, his body never recovered.

Isaac Sasson, head of the Jewish community and a pharmaceutical executive, was seized in March 1985 while driving in from the airport after a business trip. He lived in captivity longer than most of the others, until June 1987. His burial site is still unknown.

Isaac Tarrab, a 70-year-old, internationally recognized retired mathematics professor, was taken in April 1985 and killed that winter. He is the only one of the eleven whose body was actually returned to his family.

Yehuda Benesti, a former bank director, and his son Ibrahim were abducted in 1986. The organization branded the father a Mossad agent and claimed to have executed him on that basis — an accusation made and enforced with no evidence. The son's remains came back; the father's did not. A second son, Youssef, a 33-year-old merchant, was taken separately in August 1985 and died the following December, also never recovered.

Henry Mann, 40, closes the list. Even the date of his abduction was never recorded. He died in December 1986, and his body was never found.

None of the eleven were soldiers, agents, or political actors of any kind. A historian quoted in the reporting on this case describes them plainly as peaceful civilians, part of a wider toll that saw roughly two hundred Lebanese Jews killed over the course of the civil war. What set these eleven apart was politics: the organization publicly tied their lives to demands on Israel — a withdrawal from the south, the release of prisoners held at the Khiam detention facility — and when those demands went unmet, it announced their executions one by one, treating each life as a card to be played and then discarded.

Hezbollah built its power base not on the battlefield but on a synagogue accountant, a pediatrician who treated the poor for free, and a retired math professor.

Lebanese officials at the time reportedly knew some of this while it was happening. A senior Lebanese official told a Jewish news agency in 1985 that six of the hostages were still alive and being held by Hezbollah, information he said had reached the Élysée-adjacent French Jewish leadership through back channels involving Syria and Libya, and that President Amin Gemayel was making direct appeals to Hafez al-Assad on their behalf. It did not save them.

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PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

08/06 Links Pt2: The antisemites are converging—and Jews will not be fooled; Abdul El-Sayed Socializes the Intifada; The Judas Statue Lie

From Ian:

The antisemites are converging—and Jews will not be fooled

The anguish of watching our children exposed to such hatred leaves no room for political disguises. It is genuine. The monstrosity of Nazi-style antisemitism—the classic racist variety—now dares to reveal itself openly because it has become part of a broader ecosystem in which movements with very different ideological origins converge on a common target.

That convergence matters.

The various factions are not necessarily coordinating with one another. But they all benefit from the growing legitimacy afforded to hatred of Jews, Judaism, Israel and Zionism. Together, they reinforce an environment in which antisemitism flourishes.

Bulgaria illustrates how these forms of hatred increasingly overlap. Throughout the year—and especially since Oct. 7, 2023—the country has witnessed the public display of neo-Nazi symbols, swastikas and repeated attempts to revive the annual march honoring Hristo Lukov, the leader of Bulgaria’s pro-Nazi Legions.

At the same time, anti-Israel activism has targeted Jewish institutions. In 2025, “Free Palestine” graffiti was sprayed across the Sofia synagogue, covering photographs of those murdered during the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

On Oct. 9, 2025, Sofia’s Monument of Salvation, dedicated to those who opposed the deportation and persecution of Bulgaria’s Jews during World War II, was vandalized and covered in red paint. The city’s Holocaust memorial was desecrated as well.

These are only a few examples.

The attacks have come from both the right and the left, directed at the same targets: Jews.

This pattern is no longer confined to Bulgaria. Europe is increasingly afflicted by antisemitism from both extremes of the political spectrum. Across the Atlantic, the phenomenon is equally striking. A neo-Nazi such as Nick Fuentes and politicians such as Zohran Mamdani may come from vastly different ideological traditions, yet both participate in portraying “Zionism” as the embodiment of Jewish wrongdoing.

Who, then, still believes that one side merely offers “legitimate criticism of Israel” while the other alone represents antisemitic extremism?

The truly dangerous development is the convergence itself.

Vile are the Nazis. Vile, too, are the red-green antisemites. Vile are those who accuse Jews of orchestrating global conspiracies, and equally vile are those who portray the Jewish state as the source of the world’s evils. Different slogans, different histories—but increasingly the same target.

That convergence is poisoning Europe and spreading far beyond it.

It will eventually be exposed for what it is.

And Jewish children will not remain locked away in fear. They will walk out, calmly and confidently, toward life.

Jake Wallis Simons: The enemy we welcomed

The uncomfortable truth is that by investing so heavily in centrist fundamentalism, the West has set itself up to fail. Amid the radical diversity that our leaders have imposed upon our societies and the consequent loss of shared cultural norms, newcomers with hostile and subversive attitudes are placed under no pressure to adapt. Civic respect has declined and crime rates have increased, making people in certain regions feel that they no longer recognise their country. The child rape scandal that erupted in 2024 in Britain shone a spotlight on the mainly Pakistani gangs who had been subjecting thousands of mostly white girls to the most depraved abuse for decades, while the authorities looked the other way for fear of being accused of ‘Islamophobia.’ In the first nine months of 2024, the most recent available data at the time of writing, almost fourteen per cent of grooming suspects were Pakistani, five times their share of the population. In March 2025, data from the Ministry of Justice revealed that foreigners, who comprise just 9.3 per cent of the population, had committed almost a quarter of sex crimes, as well as large proportions of violence, robbery, fraud and drug offences, between 2021 and 2023. Among the first victims of this social collapse have been the Jews. Rising antisemitism is a potent expression of the wholesale importation of other people’s bigotries to our shores.

The worst part is that this corrosion of our country served no useful purpose. For generations of politicians, loosening the borders was considered an easy solution to the economic conundrum of an aging, shrinking and workshy population. But the magic bullet has proved no solution at all, burdening the taxpayer, straining infrastructure and failing to boost productivity and growth. Meanwhile, the influx came with deep social problems. If it hadn’t been for the ideological myopia of the elites, this would have come as no surprise, given that newcomers from overseas added around seven million to the population of Britain — roughly equivalent to the number of residents of London — in the first two decades of this century, accounting for over four-fifths of total demographic expansion.

They remain unwilling to change course. Despite all the evidence of social and cultural strain, amid the political reluctance to find a better solution to our economic woes, the numbers continue to rise. Net migration into Britain hit a record high of almost a million in 2024; on current trends, it will grow to 72.5 million by 2032, entirely fuelled by a further five million migrants. According to the latest projection, by 2032, fourteen per cent of the population will have arrived in the preceding decade, almost all of them from Pakistan, India, Nigeria and China. At the same time, a quarter of Britain’s workforce is unemployed, with more than three million receiving sickness and disability benefits, a million more than before the Covid years. For a neutered and screen-addicted generation, the problem is only expected to get worse. A recent study revealed that Generation Z — those aged roughly between thirteen and twenty-eight — are giving up on work, with almost four in ten considering leaving their job to claim benefits, largely due to ‘mental health’ complaints. Economic inactivity was on course to rise further, it added, with 4.4 million workers, or a tenth of the workforce, ‘on the brink of leaving the labour market.’ So the demoralisation of Britain’s existing population and the surge in newcomers develop in tandem. None of this needed to happen. If both the numbers and attempts to undermine our values would have been kept in check, and measures taken to strengthen ordinary Britons to boost our economy and our confidence, the country would be a very much happier place today.

As the reaction to October 7 has shown, this betrayal of ourselves enabled the betrayal of the Jews. ‘We, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be,’ Sir Roger Scruton wrote more than a decade ago. ‘We don’t require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared civil culture, a shared language and a shared public sphere… We can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside or against it.’ Antisemitism has always been present in British life but its latest expression is largely imported. Sadly, as politicians recklessly continue to usher large numbers of migrants into the country, Sir Roger’s sagacity has been lost on the wind.

Nicole Lampert: From Chaplin To Boy George, Fighting Antisemitism Means Facing The Mob

In 1940, at the start of World War II, when America had not yet entered the conflict, it was Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator,” which lampooned Hitler and the Nazis and spoke clearly of their dangerous antisemitism and the threat they posed to the world. The clown became the soothsayer, the voice of morality.

Until that point, Hollywood, even with its many Jewish studio heads, had been mainly too frightened to tackle this threat head-on. Just one major film, Warner Bros. “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” which looked at a German-American Nazi spy ring, had come close.

And the reaction to that film had been immediate; theaters across the U.S. were picketed and vandalized. One cinema was even burned down. It was a warning to beware the anger of the mob. For Hollywood Jews, feeling their place in society so untethered, the message was clear—they needed to pipe down, keep schtum.

Which is why Chaplin’s self-financed and risky move—from a non-Jew who understood antisemitism—was so important. His film told the world he saw the problem. He saw it was wrong. And everyone else should see the danger, too.

Now it's Boy George's turn.

He first found fame in the 1980s with the band Culture Club. He wore makeup and long hair, and was a proud gay man in the AIDS era. Like many pop stars, he’s battled drug addiction. Unlike most of them, in 2008 he ended up in jail for the false imprisonment of a Norwegian escort.

So his career has seen many ups and downs, but last week he did something extraordinary. He wrote and released a reggae song on his social media accounts, “We Will Dance Again,” which has the key lyrics: "But if you’re ever confused/I stand with the Jews/I don’t feel brave/I just need to behave like a human."

It was possibly the most extraordinary thing a non-Jew has done for the Jewish people since the October 7 attack in 2023 created a new and deadly wave of antisemitism. Just as in the 1930s, too many celebrity Jews–apart from a brave few—have maintained a frightened silence and their gentile friends have echoed their anxious muteness. They know what will happen if they dare stand up against today’s antisemitic mob, a contrast to “pro-Palestine” celebrities who often seem to treat the war like a football match, dress up in kaffiyehs and applaud themselves.

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08/06 Links Pt1: VDH: The Long View of Iran; Bribing Hamas Will Not Bring Peace – It Will Finance The Next War; New Gaza nutrition data coordinated with UNICEF ‘shows facts prevail over fiction,’

From Ian:

Victor Davis Hanson: The Long View of Iran

One day, the United States seems ready to unleash a Curtis LeMay-style devastating bombing campaign of Iran. The next, it appears trapped in endless haggling with Iranian dissimulators.

Of the roughly 150 days since the first strike, about 90 have passed without major military operations.

Iran believes time is on its side. The Strait of Hormuz remains disrupted, gas prices are too high, and antiwar House Democrats seem poised to win the midterms and bring Trump’s war to a halt.

Trump, by contrast, believes Iran can talk all it wants while sanctions, embargoes, and military pressure steadily weaken the regime.

The war has become so politicized in an election year that several basic realities have gone largely unnoticed by the media.

First, the cycle of bombing, pausing, negotiating, and bombing again may seem endless. But the confusion obscures the continuing effects of the embargoes, sanctions, blockade, and financial isolation imposed on Iran. Together, they are costing the theocracy more than $400 million a day in lost revenue, money that it can ill afford to lose. By haggling, Iran believes it can run out the clock until the midterms, but it may be only prolonging its own miserable situation.

Second, so far the bombing has not descended into a ground war. There are no embedded reporters and few Western journalists in Iran. So the world knows little about the true extent of the damage to the Iranian regime and its military-industrial-nuclear complex.

Nor do we know the mood of the once-restive Iranian street. But whether or not there are future allied military attacks, tensions will only increase as Iran runs out of money and basic goods. Whatever the outcome of negotiations or further combat operations, the Iranian military and economy have already been wrecked and will take years to rebuild.

Third, however the war ends, Iran will remain at a terrible disadvantage for years in dealing with the neighbors it has so gratuitously attacked. The regime currently has no effective combat aircraft or air defenses—and no allies.

In contrast, the Gulf states can field more than 700 combat aircraft, including F-15s, F-16s, F/A-18s, Rafales, Mirages, and Tornados. Israel has another 300, including late-model F-35s, F-16s, and F-15s. U.S. bases in the Middle East are home to some 300 more, including F-22s, F-35s, F-18s, F-16s, and F-15s—not counting carrier-based aircraft.

In sum, the United States and its allies have some 1,300 late-model combat aircraft in the region. They should therefore be able to hit Iran hard for years to come if it resumes drone and missile attacks against its rivals.

Amb. Gordon Sondland: America's aid to Israel isn't charity — it's a bargain for US security

Every few years, Americans ask the same question: Why do we send billions of dollars to Israel?

Given a national debt approaching $40 trillion and an annual defense budget of roughly $1 trillion, it is a fair question. Every dollar spent overseas deserves scrutiny. But the debate almost always focuses on one side of the ledger — what America gives Israel — while largely ignoring the other: what America receives in return.

That is the wrong way to evaluate any investment.

Before making my case, let me disclose my own perspective. I am a cultural Jew, but not a practicing one. I don’t keep kosher. I rarely attend synagogue. I raised a family that is half Jewish and half Christian. I have no financial interests in Israel. My support for Israel has never been based on religion or ethnicity. It rests on a far simpler question: Does this alliance make America stronger?

After serving as a U.S. ambassador and spending a lifetime in business, I believe the answer is unequivocally yes.

The United States has many indispensable allies. Britain provides extraordinary intelligence cooperation through the Five Eyes partnership. Japan anchors our strategy in the Indo-Pacific. South Korea deters aggression on the Korean Peninsula. Australia is an increasingly important military partner as China expands its reach. Poland has become one of NATO’s strongest front-line allies. Every one of those relationships advances American interests.

Yet Israel occupies a category almost by itself.

Few allies combine world-class intelligence, battlefield-tested military innovation, cutting-edge cyber capabilities, missile-defense development, entrepreneurial technology and democratic resilience while sitting at the crossroads of the world’s most volatile region. If Israel did not exist, the United States would spend decades — and likely hundreds of billions of dollars — trying to recreate the strategic advantages it provides.

Obstacles to Implementing the Hamas Disarmament Agreement

Despite the celebratory announcement of an agreement providing for the complete disarmament of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza, deep gaps remain between the parties, compounded by flawed assumptions on the part of the mediators. Hamas does not view disarmament as a unilateral obligation. In addition, Hamas demands guarantees that it will be integrated into Gaza's governing mechanisms as a condition for relinquishing its weapons.

Israel insists on the full disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarization of Gaza (which includes removing the weapons and not leaving them in the Strip) as a precondition for withdrawal.

The International Stabilization Force faces significant recruitment difficulties, stemming from the refusal of states to deploy troops to areas where Hamas remains armed. The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza is reluctant to enter the Strip in the absence of an effective security mechanism to protect its members.

Hamas sources revealed that it formulated its hardline positions - foremost among them its refusal to disarm before a full Israeli withdrawal - in close coordination with mediators Turkey and Qatar. The mediators' strategic objective is to preserve Hamas as a legitimate political actor. They strongly oppose conditioning Gaza's reconstruction on Hamas's complete disarmament, while seeking to assume a leading role and secure a major share in reconstruction projects in the Strip.

Hamas's apparent willingness to show greater flexibility can reasonably be attributed to the IDF's sustained military pressure, including targeted killing operations and the expansion of Israel's hold over Gazan territory from 53% to 65%. In practice, however, this does not represent a substantive change, but rather a calculated strategy of delay and "tactical flexibility" whose sole purpose is to ensure Hamas's political and military survival.

Hamas has effectively exploited the diversion of regional attention toward Iran to rebuild its military and civilian systems: it has restored its chain of command, resumed weapons production and tunnel construction, and expanded its ranks to 30,000 armed operatives. These are not the actions of an organization preparing or intending to disarm.

There is serious concern that the mediators are playing a dangerous double game. Their apparent objective is to push the U.S. and the Board of Peace into a confrontation with Israel and to place responsibility on Israel for derailing the Trump plan because of its insistence that its withdrawal take place only after the complete disarmament of Hamas. It is even possible that Turkey and Qatar persuaded Hamas to accept the framework on the assumption that Israel would reject it.

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Royal Antisemitism Commission Practices Antisemitism

Australia's Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was created because two gunmen murdered fifteen people at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah gathering last December. Its job is to explain and combat how a country got to that point.

On August 4, its own hearing room produced a demonstration of the very antisemitism it was created to diagnose.

David Ossip, president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, appeared before Commissioner Virginia Bell to describe the fear Sydney's Jewish community lived with after October 7 and the protest he called "despicable," which marched from Town Hall to the Sydney Opera House two days later. Lawyers for the Palestine Action Group and the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, granted leave to cross-examine him, questioned him instead on Israeli airstrike timelines and Gaza casualty figures, alongside Benjamin Netanyahu's public statements.

Ossip is not a representative of the Israeli government. He is a local Jewish community leader.

Accusing Jews of being responsible for the actions of Israel is antisemitic. Yet this line of questioning went on for nearly an hour while the Commissioner allowed it.

There is something seriously wrong here.

Ossip, for his part, said he was unequipped to answer, since he runs a Sydney communal organization, not Israel's defense ministry. He protested that these questions were inappropriate. Commissioner Bell responded that she would make that decision.

Her defense rested on narrow grounds. Ossip's written statement had referenced the timing of Israel's response relative to the Opera House rally, so procedural fairness, she reasoned, entitled counsel to test that specific claim, and she rejected the accusation that her ruling had let the inquiry be hijacked. Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin had used sharper language, accusing the advocacy groups of exploiting a hearing on lethal antisemitism to stage a foreign-policy spectacle.

There has been backlash. Premier Chris Minns called it a disappointing turn away from Australian antisemitism and toward foreign-policy litigation of an Australian citizen. Liberal Senator James Paterson said a commission convened to fight antisemitism had instead facilitated it. Labor MP Josh Burns made the structural point: treating a Jewish communal leader as accountable for Israel's government is the same move as treating any Jew as accountable for it, which is the collective-blame pattern the commission exists to study.

One would think that a commission meant to understand antisemitism would, after months of investigation and research and testimony, have an idea of what the word means. To bend over backwards to accommodate those who support a global intifada over the Jews who are under siege in Australia is beyond obscene. It indicates that the entire commission may be worse than useless.

It is worth watching this angry response to the outrageous episode.