06/25 Links Pt2: Melanie Phillips: NYC’s black-red alliance of Islamism and ultra-leftism wants us to hate Israel and America; Israel to send aid mission Venezuela after earthquakes

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: NYC’s black-red alliance of Islamism and ultra-leftism wants us to hate Israel and America

Red-black extremists are now threatening establishment candidates in Colorado, Michigan and Wisconsin, while another radical leftist is poised to become mayor of Washington DC.

This process will metastasize even further very fast. Galvanized by the October 7 attacks and the way western elites subsequently turned against Israel, the Islamists believe they’re on the cusp of victory over America and its allies.

While their motivation has gone through the roof, their useful idiots in the West’s liberal establishment are refusing to see what’s staring them in the face. Instead, they’re obsessively sticking pins into effigies of Donald Trump, while acting as an echo chamber for the Islamists’ lies painting Israel as a demonic force in the world.

Although New York’s voters may nod along to these lies, most of them hardly rank Israel as of greater concern than things like the cost of living.

But Israel stands proxy for something else: a state that the public believe is grinding the faces of the poor and disadvantaged. Just like them. So a vote for those who hate “oppressive” Israel appears to them as a vote for the “oppressed” everywhere.

The Democrats imagine that they’re using the Islamists to promote left-wing policies. The truth is that the Islamists are using the Democratic party to turn the US into Ameristan.

People don’t take this seriously because they can’t believe it could ever happen to mighty America.

Look at Britain and believe it. This is how the western frog is being boiled slowly in the pot.

Alex Hearn: Rooney’s antizionism isn’t political comment but a creed: Israel is evil, its defeat salvation

None of this began on October 7, 2023. The atrocities of that day gave permission to people who were already converted. Rooney joined the boycott of Israel in 2021, refusing to let an Israeli publisher translate her novel into Hebrew while it stayed on sale in Chinese and Russian. That same year, academics went viral copying and pasting a single paragraph that declared opposition to the world's only Jewish state “integral” to their scholarship and “moral worldview”. They then instructed one another to evangelise others and “pass it on”. An entire worldview, copied and pasted, about a state thousands of miles away.

And the permission has had consequences. Attacks on Jews spiked the moment Hamas broadcast its atrocities, and they have not fallen back to where they were. The ideas surface now where they once stayed hidden – in workplaces, in the arts, and on the street. In Stockholm a few months ago they staged a piece of medieval theatre: a man dressed as the caricature of a Jew wearing a blood-soaked apron, holding a champagne flute of blood. He mimed the slaughter of a Palestinian woman while the crowd chanted “crush Zionism”.

It is an old habit. During the Dreyfus Affair, Frenchmen used the figure of the Jew to settle what kind of country France was. A victim of an antisemitic conspiracy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully accused and convicted of being a spy for Germany and imprisoned on Devil's Island in French Guiana. He was later cleared but the question behind his case – whether Jews truly belonged – was not. The philosopher Hannah Arendt described the Affair as a dress rehearsal for a performance staged decades later. In 1944 Dreyfus’s granddaughter, Madeleine Lévy, was murdered in Auschwitz. Her name was carved into his gravestone because she had no grave of her own.

The case against Dreyfus only broadened, from one man to a people. The question moved with the times: from “can a Jew be a citizen?” to “can Jews have a state?” Antizionist where once it was anti-Dreyfusard – only the right in dispute has changed. Back then, the French parliament had a debate about “Jewish infiltration”. Now in 2026, the British parliament just had a debate about “Israeli” infiltration. Same shtick, different century.

Rooney cannot be waved away as a masked figure at a march. She is one of the most gifted novelists of her generation, read by millions, and she has taken the oldest accusation in Europe and given it the vocabulary of the age. In her telling, to stand against the Jewish state is not merely permitted. It is the measure of whether you are a good person at all.

When religion receded it left a space – the need to feel good, and to belong. What looks like politics is really a faith, and what looks like a faith is really the search for a self. People build an identity out of their stance on what Jews represent, then call Jews the rootless ones. But the emptiness is their own.

Rising antisemitism ‘the biggest disgrace of our times’, says incoming Telegraph owner

The chief executive of The Telegraph’s incoming owners has described the resurgence of antisemitism among young people as “the biggest disgrace of our times”.

Speaking in London on Wednesday, Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer, warned that hatred of Jews had become a “global export” in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities, with alarming levels of support among younger generations.

“The thing that worries me most is that antisemitism is now a global export, originating largely from Germany and Austria, and is particularly popular among very young audiences,” Döpfner told delegates at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference.

“That is for me the biggest disgrace of our times. I simply cannot believe it.”

Döpfner, who is also the controlling shareholder of the German media giant, reflected on the failure of the international response to the attacks.

Despite what he described as the clear distinction between perpetrators and victims on October 7, he said the aftermath had produced not a surge of solidarity with Jews, but a wave of hostility.

“After October 7, where the question of who started it, who was the perpetrator and who was the victim, was so obvious, that did not create a global wave of solidarity, but a wave of new antisemitism,” he said.

“That goes way beyond Jewish life. It affects us all. Jews are the first victims in an open society model.”

His comments drew rapturous applause from the several hundred audience members attending the conference at the vast Olympia venue in Hammersmith.

Axel Springer has one of the most explicit pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist policies of any major Western media company. Its corporate constitution, known as the Essentials, includes a formal commitment to “support the right of existence of the State of Israel and oppose all forms of antisemitism”.

Is The Media Turning a Blind Eye to Montreal Shooter’s Antisemitism?

Is the media fully explaining the ideological drive behind the actions of Seth Scott Hatfield, whose shooting rampage in the heart of Montreal on June 22 led to the deaths of a police officer and a Jewish civilian?

Based on a manifesto that was made public following the attack, both the Canadian media and international outlets (such as CNN, The Guardian, and Le Monde) have compiled an ideological profile of Hatfield, focusing on his stated hatred for feminism, liberalism, capitalism, pornography, “favored males,” and immigrants.

The manifesto reads as though it is inspired by a mixture of revolutionary Marxism and incel (involuntary celibate) culture and is being presented as such by the mainstream media.

However, one aspect of Hatfield’s hate-filled screed that has received little to no mention by the media is his abhorrence of the Jewish people.

Either his antisemitism is mentioned in passing several paragraphs into an article or it is not mentioned altogether.

Despite this lack of media attention, Hatfield’s hatred for the Jews is not an insignificant part of his violent ideology.

Read More

06/25 Links Pt1: Who’s Afraid of the Good War?; Israel Is Not Just Another Ally; Douglas Murray: Why the Iran Deal Will Fail; The terror network Europe failed to confront

From Ian:

Who’s Afraid of the Good War?

To help answer this question, we turn again to Obama. In May 2016, almost exactly 10 years ago, he gave a little-remembered speech in Japan.

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?” Obama posed this question to the world at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, seemingly conscious of making history as the first sitting U.S. president to visit the city—one of only two ever targeted by U.S. atomic bombs. Obama had already embarked on a much lambasted multiyear “apology tour” to foreign countries, including a 2009 talk before Turkey’s parliament in which he lamented America’s “darker periods” and the ongoing “legacies of slavery and segregation.”

His Hiroshima audience might have expected an address on nuclear nonproliferation, and Obama did deplore the “capacity for unmatched destruction” that nuclear weapons make possible. He also praised the hibakusha—survivors of the 1945 strike—citing a “woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb, because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself.” He offered no corresponding tribute to the American pilots who risked their lives for their country, nor any defense of the American decision to attack Japan; rather, he lamented the human tendency “to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He enjoined his listeners “to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering.” He came to Hiroshima, he explained, to be reminded of the “ordinary people” who “do not want more war.” He never once sought to legitimate the cause in question or the notion that war is at times justified.

None of this is especially surprising given Obama’s famous insistence on “change.” Around midway through the speech, however, he offered something distinctive. After portraying World War II as having grown out of “the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes,” he sketched his view of Hiroshima’s significance:
There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war—memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species—our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will—those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.

Here, Obama was engaging in a tentative attempt at mythmaking. The defining image of World War II, in this telling, was not that of soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy or the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign above Auschwitz. No: It was an image that, in Obama’s words, represented a sinister “material advancement,” employed by America “to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.” American capitalism and American racism thus seem to undergird Obama’s understanding of World War II. He neatly placed the American decision to use the atomic bomb alongside the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany; all of it, he suggests, reminds us of mankind’s aptitude for evil. In this moment, he drew no moral distinctions in his condemnation of the horrors of war. In subtly conflating Nazi evils and the American response, Obama created a permission structure for his ideological partners to do the same thing.

Revisionists on the right, in part by taking refuge within Obama’s permission structure, have furthered this de-mythification project. Instead of castigating America for being racist, however, the right-revisionists rebuke their country as an antireligious tyranny, run by global elites. In this telling, American leadership became drawn into World War II by globalist interests while ignoring the plight of their own countrymen. Other, more extreme voices cast Hitler and Mussolini as heroic for wanting to strengthen their own nations and sense of national identity.

The loudest advocate for this New Right ethos, as of this writing, remains Tucker Carlson, who seeks not merely to keep America out of war or restore American manufacturing, but to remake American mythology.

Israel Is Not Just Another Ally

In a dangerous region, words from Washington are not simply opinions. They become strategic signals. America must lead without losing the trust of its allies. Israel is not a temporary partner or a tactical convenience. The relationship between America and Israel is strategic, democratic, cultural, moral, scientific, military, and historical. It is woven into the American story, just as America is woven into Israel's story.

Israel, for generations, has stood as a democratic ally in a region where democracy is rare, danger is permanent, and the cost of miscalculation can be existential. The countries on the front line with Iran - Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait - do not experience Iran as an abstraction. They experience it through missiles, drones, proxy networks, air-defense alerts, threats to shipping lanes, and the permanent pressure of a regime that has made destabilization a method of statecraft.

These countries have the right to ask questions. They have the right to demand clarity before being asked to live with the consequences of an agreement negotiated above their heads. If the U.S. wants regional partners to choose moderation over extremism, normalization over rejection, and modernization over ideological darkness, then Washington must show that such choices are rewarded with respect, consultation, and protection.

For Israel, the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran Is an Existential Question of Survival

Israelis were told that the war with Iran was over last week, yet the shooting continued into the weekend and at least five Israeli soldiers were killed by the Islamic Republic's Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon. For us, Washington and Tehran's "memorandum of understanding" isn't a policy debate; it's an existential question of survival, deterrence and the balance of power in the Middle East.

Israelis know that our interests are aligned with but not identical to those of our friends in America. We also know that the current disagreement doesn't diminish Donald Trump's historic support for the Jewish state. We've never had a stronger ally in the White House.

The Islamic Republic isn't a normal state. It is a revolutionary, imperialist dictatorship bent on exerting its will around the globe. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has systematically lied to the international community, armed terrorist proxies, called for Israel's destruction, and brutally oppressed its own people.

An alarming development is the Islamist coalition, led by Turkey, that helped bring about this moment. Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become one of the most destabilizing powers in the region, fueled by a poisonous blend of Islamist ideology and neo-Ottoman imperialism.

Israel learned on Oct. 7, 2023, what happens when you refuse to take your enemies at their word. We now listen carefully to the jihadist slogans of al-Sharaa's forces in Syria, the imperial and antisemitic declarations of Turkey's leadership, and the Iranian regime's contempt for the U.S.

Stability can't be gained by empowering those who reject the foundations of the Free World. Peace can't be bought by rewarding regimes and movements that treat diplomacy as a tactical break between rounds of aggression. And the goal of Israel's destruction can't be treated as a legitimate grievance.

The Middle East punishes wishful thinking without mercy. It will do so again if the West continues to mistake Islamism for pragmatism, appeasement for diplomacy, and silence for stability.

Read More

Hamas Schedules Elections For 1st Of Octember (PreOccupied Territory)

 Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook  and  Substack pages.

 Gaza City, June 25 - The Islamist terrorist organization that governs much of the Gaza Strip announced today that it will hold the first Palestinian parliamentary contest since 2007, on the first day of the month between this coming Septober and Novuary.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri addressed reporters from a reinforced underground facility, flanked by maps of the region and portraits of deceased resistance leaders, crowded on the wall to th point that most could not be identified. “Our people have waited long enough,” he said. “Octember 1 represents a fresh chapter, one where every voice in Gaza and the West Bank can be heard clearly. We have consulted widely, and this timing aligns perfectly with our strategic needs and the will of the masses.”

Hamas secured a decisive victory in the last legislative elections held in January 2006. In the years since, the movement has focused its energies on governance, infrastructure projects, and emplacement of human shields around military positions and stockpiles. Officials noted that shifting to Octember allows sufficient time for candidate registration, platform development, and ensuring broad participation across factions committed to the cause.

Residents in Gaza offered a range of perspectives. “It’s about time we had our say,” remarked shopkeeper Fatima al-Masri, 52, while arranging produce at her stall. “Octember feels right. Things have been quiet on the political front for too long.” Younger voters appeared cautiously optimistic, with many taking to social media to share memes blending campaign slogans with local humor.

Others voiced disappointment. "I was hoping for the traditional Palestinian election date of the thirty-first of Never," confessed Fat'hi al-Masri, 44. "The younger generation isn't old enough to remember any actual elections, which means they lack any cultural memory of it. It's up to the older generation and the decision-makers to ensure that the lore is preserved, whether it's the lore of Yasser Arafat riding a white horse to Al-Aqsa to secure the presidency, or the traditional Palestinian celebration of electoral victory involving tossing defeated rivals off of Gaza rooftops."

Party officials assured the public that preparations would be thorough. Ballots will offer clear choices among approved candidates, all unified in their dedication to liberation. Campaigning will unfold through community meetings, digital outreach, and public rallies, with security measures in place to maintain order. Hamas emphasized that the process remains open to those who prioritize national unity and resistance, just as soon as authorities can master the logistics of Octember elections.

---

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)

 

Read More

The methodology of the Independent UN Commission shows how it predetermined its desired results

The UN Commission of Inquiry's report on Palestinian children accuses Israel of deliberately exterminating the young of Gaza, and there have already been excellent rebuttals.   UN Watch's Salo Aizenberg took apart its evidentiary method, showing that across ninety-four pages the Commission never establishes a single case in which a soldier identified a child as a civilian and killed the child for being one, while erasing Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the battlefield entirely. Brian Cox, working the legal seam, showed that the report's doctrine is hollow — that it never accounts for munition-mitigation techniques the IDF routinely uses, never establishes the knowledge and intent that the laws of armed conflict actually require, and reverse-engineers "genocidal intent" from outcomes rather than building it from doctrine. Both are right, and both work from the top down: the architecture is rotten, so the conclusions fall.

I want to come at it from the opposite end. Taking a single statistic in a report that has hundreds, I plan to show that the UN "experts" that wrote this report deliberately chose whatever supported their predetermined verdict and ignored everything else. 

Paragraph 27 says: "Some 5,160 children are estimated by Save the Children to be buried under the rubble."

That figure is false, and the way it got into the report is the report in miniature. There were four separate points at which the Commission could have checked it. At each one, it either failed to look or looked and printed the number anyway.

The first check was the Commission's own arithmetic. Save the Children built the 5,160 estimate on the assumption that children make up 43 percent of Gaza's casualties and there were 12,000 people missing under the rubble. It is a guess made up out of multiplying two statistics, one from the Gaza Ministry of Health and the other from Hamas police.  

Yet the Commission's own paragraph 26 puts the child share of the dead at 30%, not 43%. And the UN at the time it wrote its report claimed 10,000 buried under the rubble, not 12,000.  If the commission would use Save the Children's methods, there would have been 3,000 presumed dead under the rubble in 2024, not the 5,160 Save the Children estimated then.  That is over 2,000 supposedly dead children who disappear if the UN commission would have trusted its own accusation of 30% casualties being children. 

That's a large number of dead children to make up.

The second check was the date on the citation.  Save the Children page came up with its estimate in June 2024. The Commission published in June 2026. It reached back two years, past a war whose reported toll had since nearly doubled, to retrieve an estimate made when the conflict was only nine monhs old. Save the Children itself had moved on: by September 2025, its recap of Gaza's child casualties had dropped the specific number and reduced the claim to a vague "thousands more are missing or presumed buried under rubble." The source downgraded from a figure to a gesture, and the Commission reinstated the figure. A body searching for accuracy reaches for the most recent estimate. This one reached for the largest, and the largest happened to be the oldest, because the passage of time had only shrunk it.

The third check was the parent number's provenance. The 5,160 is a fraction of the "missing under the rubble" figure that circulated in 2024, reported anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 and traceable to Hamas's Civil Defence. OCHA used the 10,000 figure in its weekly Gaza snapshots, repeating it without caveat the way it repeated most figures the Gaza authorities supplied. The Commission could have asked whether that base number still stood. It did not stand. OCHA's February 4, 2025 snapshot carried the missing-under-rubble figure as it always had. Its February 11 snapshot, one week later, dropped it — no retraction, no correction, the number simply gone. Even the academic researchers who argue Gaza's dead are undercounted excluded the rubble population from their models precisely because it could not be substantiated. The figure the Commission resurrected is the one that everyone closer to the data had already quietly discarded.

The fourth check was the recovery data, the most direct test of all. The "thousands under the rubble" premise predicts that once the rubble could be cleared, thousands of bodies would emerge. The January 2025 ceasefire created exactly that condition: weeks with no airstrikes impeding recovery, no operations sealing off neighborhoods. The bodies did not emerge. According to Gaza's own Health Ministry, the daily recovery counts fell week over week, down to two bodies recovered on one day in February — a rate that cannot be reconciled with 9,500 still to be found. That is why OCHA dropped the figure the moment the ceasefire made it checkable: it had been checked, by reality, and it failed. The recovery data is Gaza's own. The Commission did not have to trust Israel or anyone else to consult it. It consulted nothing, and printed 5,160.

Internal arithmetic, citation date, source provenance, recovery data — four levels at which the figure could have been tested, four levels at which it collapses, and the Commission cleared all four to deliver the number to print. The pattern is not that the Commission made an error. An error is random; it points in no particular direction. This points in one direction at every step: toward the stale figure over the current one, the abandoned base over the corrected one, the largest available number over the verifiable one. A single buried statistic, traced to the floor, shows an institution that did not weigh its evidence and arrive at a conclusion. It arrived at the conclusion and went looking for the largest numbers that would dress it.

This is the Commission's methodology. That is one paragraph, one number, in a report that runs to three hundred and sixty-six of them. The Commission asks the world to accept the other three hundred and sixty-five on trust.

---

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)

 

Read More

06/24 Links Pt2: The Church of England’s problem with antisemitism; Liberal Jews must stop appeasing the socialist radicals who hate them; VDH: JD Vance's Iran deal, midterms, & the right wing realignment

From Ian:

The Church of England’s problem with antisemitism

In the photos posted on social media, Sarah Mullally is seen in their living room, and prominent on the wall is a painting of a man; when they are standing and praying, Sarah is standing right in front of him.

This man is Layan’s great uncle, the brother of her paternal grandfather, Kamal Nasser. Nasser was born in 1924, and became a celebrated political leader, writer, and poet. In 1967, he joined the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), led by Yasser Arafat, who has invented the term ‘Palestinian’ to refer to those who wanted to destroy Israel and return to their land (prior to that, ‘Palestinian’ has been a regional term that described modern Israel, Jordan, and Syria). Nasser was also a ‘Palestinian Christian’—and this is the point where we need to recognise that, in this context, the term ‘Christian’ really functions as a tribal and ethnic identifier, more than the sense of someone who has made a personal commitment to Jesus as we might use it.

Nasser had joined the PLO just at the point where it made the Khartoum Resolution, in response to the defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. This was known for its three ‘Nos’: no peace agreement; no negotiation; no recognition of the State of Israel. This led inevitably into more warfare, culminating in the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Part of the violence of the PLO, which (with Russian help) developed into the foremost global terror organisation, was the 1972 Munich massacre, when Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village, killed two Israeli athletes, took nine more hostage, and eventually killed them during a failed rescue attempt. Nasser was one of the people who masterminded this operation.

For anyone outside the situation, it is hard to understand how ‘Palestinian Christians’ could be involved with anti-Israeli and antisemitic terror. But in fact the links between the two are longstanding and well developed. Nasser’s father was Reverend Butrus Nasir, who was a leader within Palestine’s Arab Protestant community from Bir Zeit. The founder of the PFLP, a radical Marxist terror organisation, was George Habash, a ‘Palestinian Christian’.

And the Greek Orthodox Church has had long links with the PLO going back to the 1960s. Many ordinary Palestinian Orthodox Christians and clergy of Palestinian descent are sympathetic to or actively involved in Palestinian nationalist politics — many Palestinian officials across ministries, the PLC, the PNA, and the PLO are Christians. There’s also a documented history of crossover between Greek leftists and the PLO more broadly: during the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Greeks belonging to the anti-dictatorship socialist movement trained in PLO camps in Lebanon, and when the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon, Greece—under PM Andreas Papandreou, who had close ties with Arafat—became its first destination.

That is why we can see a picture of Yasser Arafat on the wall of the office of Archbishop Benedictus, as he is meeting Sarah Mullally. Our archbishop has managed to be photographed in front of, not one, but two notorious terrorist leaders within the space of a couple of days—quite an achievement! And you can see the intertwining of terrorist resistance with Christian devotion in the painting of Nasser: in the background of the canvas, there is a traditional iconographic depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ.

It is worth reflecting how both Israelis and British Jews will be made to feel by seeing these images.

Liberal Jews must stop appeasing the socialist radicals who hate them

The old saying goes that an appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

When it comes to progressive Jews and the DSA, the well-fed crocodiles are just about ready for dessert.

I’ve been watching this strategy of inclusion of hateful actors by Jewish groups and politicians play out since I came to the US almost 20 years ago from Israel.

As someone who always believed in freedom, peace and equality, I imagined I’d find a home on the American left.

Imagine my confusion when I learned that in many circles, being a liberal in good standing meant denouncing the only democracy in the Middle East, staying quiet in the face of racism and violence directed at my community from other minority groups, and all but a pledge to agree that, sure, synagogues are being fire-bombed and Jews threatened every day, but don’t let the statistics confuse you — it’s only real antisemitism if it comes from the MAGA-hat region.

I have yet to encounter a club where turning my back to the truth was worth the price of admission.

So my confusion turned to rage over the years as I saw fellow Jews align themselves with people who openly and proudly spread hateful propaganda and support violence against the Jewish community.

Many cloaked these partnerships in the language of “allyship,” patting themselves on the back for being open-minded enough to have conversations with those who disagree with them.

But at what point do you close the flaps of the “big tent” of Jewish thought to those who are trying to destroy it from within?

Brad Lander, who less than a year ago still considered himself a Zionist, was happy to trade in his dignity for Instagram likes, embracing the lie of a genocide in Gaza, and posing happily in campaign ads alongside Darializa Avila Chevalier, who chose to celebrate the massacre of Oct. 7 in Times Square as Israeli mothers were still frantically searching for their missing and murdered children, among them several Americans and New Yorkers. They may not see eye to eye on political issues like whether Lander’s friends in Israel deserve to live or not, but hey — we can agree to disagree, right? Other politicians and activists practically trip over themselves to virtue-signal their standing as “Good Jews.”

Yehuda Teitelbaum: No, New York Didn't Vote on Gaza

I'm already seeing people trying to turn the election results into some grand lesson about Israel and Gaza. Sorry, but no.

If anti-Israel politics were really driving these races, Ritchie Torres would have been in trouble. Instead, he just won nearly 72% of the vote in one of the poorest and most heavily minority districts in the country.

Whatever else yesterday showed, it certainly didn't show that Democratic voters are punishing politicians for being pro-Israel.

The candidates who won have spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy spreading horrific blood libels about Israel, accusing Jews and Zionists of all sorts of crimes, praising convicted terrorist Rasmea Odeh, marching with people celebrating Hamas on October 8 while Jews were still being slaughtered, defending Mahmoud Khalil, and treating a conflict 6,000 miles away as though it were one of the central issues facing New York.

And yet I don't think any of those things are what put them over the top.

The average voter is not lying awake at night thinking about Gaza. The average voter is worried about paying the rent and buying groceries, and progressive politicians have figured out that they don't actually need to explain anything in order to capitalize on that anxiety. They don't need to explain where the money is coming from. They don't need to explain how any of it works. They just need to promise lower costs, free healthcare, free childcare, free college, debt forgiveness, more benefits, and some version of economic salvation.

Once people become convinced that there's a pot of gold sitting in front of them, almost everything else becomes irrelevant.

That's not an excuse for the voters, and frankly, I find it astonishing that someone can spread grotesque lies about Israel, praise actual terrorists, mock American symbols, and still get elected. Not very long ago, pulling just one of these stunts would have ended an entire political career.

But that's where we are, and confusing what voters tolerated with what they actually voted for is a serious mistake.

Read More

06/24 Links Pt1: Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy: Andrew Fox: A good offence is the best defence; Israel's alliance with America is vital, but Jerusalem can't outsource its security

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: No, Israel isn’t ‘deliberately targeting’ children in Gaza

Once again, a United Nations body has accused Israel of the gravest crimes imaginable: this time, the deliberate murder of children. And once again, when you actually open the report, the evidence simply isn’t there.

The UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry has published a 94-page paper claiming Israel “deliberately targeted” Palestinian children during the war in the Gaza Strip – language implying war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are among the most serious charges in international law. So you would expect, at minimum, one clearly documented case: a soldier who identified a child as a child, and killed that child for no reason other than that they were a child. After 94 pages, the Commission cannot produce one.

What it produces instead, according to a detailed rebuttal by the watchdog UN Watch, is a chain of assumptions dressed up as findings.

Take the report’s own marquee example, set out in its paragraphs 59-60: a ten-day-old baby allegedly shot through the head by an Israeli “quadcopter” while breastfeeding inside a tent in the Nuseirat camp in April 2024. The Commission’s reasoning, in its own words, is that because it happened in daylight, the drone operator “would have been able to see inside the tent” – and from that single inference it concludes the baby was deliberately targeted. For this to be true, a drone would have had to hover at ground level, see through canvas, pick out a 35-centimetre infant’s head, and fire a precision shot, all based on a photo of a bullet, with no chain of custody, no ballistics analysis, and no witness who even claims to have seen a drone. The same pattern recurs case after case: a family account, a doctor’s guess about which weapon caused a wound, and a conclusion of premeditated murder. Nothing connecting the dots.

There is one cited incident in the report which might at first seem more plausible, coming from a soldier’s own account, via a December 2024 Haaretz investigation, of the shooting of a Palestinian teenager near a restricted corridor in Gaza.

The Commission cites it as evidence of a culture targeting children. But the soldier’s actual testimony says otherwise: his unit shot the boy under a blanket order that “anyone crossing the line is a terrorist, no exceptions, no civilians” – opening fire before anyone could see who he was. Only afterward, retrieving his phone from the body, did they learn he was unarmed and “just a boy, maybe 16.”

This strategy came about because, tragically, Hamas often uses minors as young as 16 as fighters, and during this war has almost always dressed its fighters in civilian clothes, not uniform, even sending them unarmed to collect weapons hidden earlier on at their destination.

This made it extremely difficult for the Israeli army to differentiate between civilians and combatants, so lines were drawn and warnings not to cross them were issued. In these circumstances, some have argued that that Israel’s rules of engagement were reckless, or some of its soldiers were trigger-happy, resulting in too many innocent people being killed. But even that would not be evidence of a policy to murder children because they are children – the far graver charge the Commission is actually making.

Stephen Pollard: Another evidence-free UN genocide charge against Israel – and another media feeding frenzy

The UN Guidance and Practice for fact-finding missions provides that evidence must be evaluated for its “reliability” and “truthfulness,” that investigations must be conducted with “integrity,” meaning “without any bias,” and that factual findings must be “adequately corroborated” by at least two other “independent and reliable” sources.” This would be a joke were it not to appalling.

The report is entirely one sided, takes its so-called evidence regarding intent, knowledge, and targeting decisions from witnesses whose outlook is prima facie loaded against Israel and whose testimony cannot be verified, and which ignores all facts which paint a different picture from the conclusion the report clearly sets out to reach.

To quote UN Watch again: “These shortcomings would be troubling in any fact-finding exercise. They are particularly concerning here because the Commission’s findings are intended to inform international legal proceedings, including before the ICC and the ICJ. Findings of this nature – particularly those purporting to establish intent and criminal responsibility – would ordinarily require rigorous testing and corroboration before being relied upon in judicial proceedings. Yet international courts have an established practice of relying on UN reports as evidence. This report therefore undermines not only the integrity of international fact-finding, but also the application of international law and confidence in the UN system as a whole.”

I urge you to look at UN Watch’s detailed legal rebuttal – destruction is a more accurate description – of the report, here.

Meanwhile, these are its key points. Most obviously, it exposes how the gravest accusation of all, that Israel deliberately targeted Palestinian children in Gaza, which is an accusation of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, is made without a single verified example. The report simply concludes that because children died in the war – a tragic but unavoidable occurrence in war – this is proof of deliberate targeting.

The report does not consider in any way the role of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as if they were not even present – concluding that the IDF, under orders from Israeli political and military leadership, was engaged in the deliberate killing of children for the sake of killing children. “Across 94 pages, the Report never acknowledges that the IDF was fighting a heavily armed force of tens of thousands of Hamas and PIJ operatives who constructed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, embedded military infrastructure throughout civilian areas, and routinely operated from homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and displacement zones. The result is a fictionalised account of the conflict in which there is no armed opposition, no complex urban battlefield, and no armed actors in Gaza other than the IDF. Combined with the erasure of militant activity in the West Bank, this distortion enables the COI to advance the fabricated narrative that Israeli forces were trained, directed, and deployed to deliberately target children as a matter of policy.”

As UN Watch puts it, the report’s extreme length is intended to create the impression of rigorous evidentiary and forensic review, yet it still cannot mask the fundamental absence of reliable proof for its central allegations.

None of this will be reported because it does not fit the now near-universal narrative – that Israel is a uniquely evil rogue state which commits genocide to satisfy its blood lust. But who now cares about the truth?

Andrew Fox: A good offence is the best defence

Supporters of Israel and the Jewish community (and, above all, the Jewish community itself) must be utterly exhausted. Since 7th October, we have seen an unprecedented global onslaught of disinformation. Wave after wave, day after day, blood libel after blood libel, centuries-old and vicious. If we ever wanted to know how the atmosphere that led to the Holocaust was created, we do now. We have all been constantly on the defensive for over two and a half years. Yesterday’s tiresome, evidence-free tissue of nonsense from the UN Human Rights Council is a masterpiece of the antisemitic genre. Every trope under the sun is there. It has been rebutted brilliantly elsewhere. This article is instead concerned with what to do about the gleeful antisemitic machine that has seized on this nonsense and will run with it for months to come.

Supporters of Israel and Jewish communities worldwide have spent too much energy responding to accusations after they have already passed through the institutions that lend them force. A hostile claim enters an NGO paper, moves into a UN report, becomes a headline, appears in a parliamentary speech, and then finds its way into campus motions, sanctions campaigns, divestment drives and street politics. By the time the correction arrives, the allegation has already acquired the authority of repetition. More to the point, nobody outside the pro-Israel ecosystem reads or believes any rebuttal. The lies are too powerful, and the machine pushing them wins the numbers game every time.

The campaign against them requires a different posture. It is time for accountability. We know by now that rebuttal alone cannot match the speed, emotion and reach of libel dressed in institutional language. Accuracy must be paired with consequences. False allegations should be treated as liability events, not merely as arguments to be answered. The task is to make the production, laundering and circulation of defamatory claims costly, documented and procedurally risky.

The most important shift is to examine the entire chain of allegations. A UN report, a media story, or a parliamentary intervention is usually the final expression of a longer process. Someone generated the claim, someone supplied it to investigators, someone gave it legal vocabulary, someone briefed journalists, someone amplified it, and someone used it to demand policy action. Each point in that chain offers a potential route to accountability. The relevant questions are practical: who made the claim, what evidence supported it, who checked it, who ignored corrections, who repeated it after notice, and what concrete harm followed?

We must begin with a litigation-grade dossier. Every contested allegation should be extracted, sourced, classified and tested. False facts, misleading omissions, circular citations, anonymous sourcing, legal exaggeration, and defamatory insinuations must be carefully distinguished. Courts, regulators, donors and professional bodies respond to precision. A strong dossier should identify the claim, the source, the contradiction, the affected person or entity, the republication history, the available jurisdiction and the remedy sought. That is legal intelligence.

Read More

Amnesty is antisemitic — by its own definition

On 14 December 2025, during a Hanukkah celebration attended by roughly a thousand people at Bondi Beach, two gunmen opened fire and threw homemade bombs into the crowd. Fifteen people were killed and forty injured. The attack was the worst mass shooting in modern Australian history, and it was, by the near-unanimous judgment of Australian authorities and the world's press, antisemitic — Jews murdered at a Jewish religious gathering for being Jews. Within weeks the Albanese government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, with former High Court Justice Virginia Bell as Commissioner, charged with investigating the nature, prevalence, and drivers of antisemitism in Australia, examining the circumstances of the Bondi attack, and assessing antisemitism's impact on the daily life of Jewish Australians. The Commission invited submissions, and especially encouraged Jews who had experienced antisemitism to make them.

Amnesty Australia's submission to the Commission is not meant to highlight the problem of antisemitism. It is meant to minimize it.

Amnesty starts with a definition of antisemitism that is surprisingly reasonable. It tells the Commission (1.2) that 

At its core, antisemitism is racism; discrimination, stereotypical discourse and hostility directed at Jewish people, or people perceived to be Jewish, and/or their property, community or religious institutions, because of their identity, beliefs or heritage. 

The rest of the twenty-five-page report works as hard as possible to chip away at Amnesty's own definition. 

Zionism is a belief. The idea that Jews form a nation, and that this nation was formed in and is centered on the land of the biblical kingdoms of Judah and Israel, is a belief Jews hold; the daily liturgy is built around return to Zion and Jerusalem, and has been for two millennia. A modern political expression of that belief does not make it less a belief that Jews hold. Hostility directed at Jews for this belief is, by their own definition, antisemitism. 

The existence of anti-Zionist Jews does not make an anti-Zionist attack on Jews any less antisemitic, any more than the existence of atheist Jews makes the firebombing of a synagogue any less antisemitic. A bigotry is defined by the hatred that drives it and the group it strikes, not by whether some member of the group declines to hold the targeted belief. The arsonist who burns a synagogue does not first poll the congregation for believers, and the relevant question was never whether a dissenting Jew can be found. It is whether the hostility attaches to Jews as such for a belief most of them hold — and the "beliefs" clause Amnesty wrote answers that before anyone can raise it.

The rest of the submission is the sustained labor of keeping that consequence out.

It begins by calling the Bondi attack "horrific" (1.3), and from that point forward antisemitism is never permitted to stand alone. It arrives chaperoned. The rise in antisemitism, the submission explains in the very next paragraph (1.4), "has occurred alongside increasing racism, vilification and hostility against Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities, as well as other racialised and marginalised groups." Responses "should strengthen protections against all forms of racism and discrimination, rather than prioritising one community's rights at the expense of another's." A submission to a commission on antisemitism has, by its fourth paragraph, reframed attention to antisemitism as a threat to be managed — a possible act of prioritizing one community "at the expense of another." This is am implicit attack on the Commission itself, which is meant to understand antisemitism specifically — according to Amnesty an investigation into what causes the Bondi attack should not center on antisemitism at all. It must cover all forms of hate, and it must always, always mention the other forms together with antisemitism. 

The dilution is Amnesty's major theme. Antisemitism is "part of the wider work governments must undertake against discrimination and different forms of racism" (5.9). It rises "along with" Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism (5.9). 

Antisemitism is not interchangeable with the hatreds Amnesty keeps setting beside it. Most racism casts its target as inferior — lesser, backward, subhuman. Antisemitism characteristically casts the Jew as superior in malign power: the manipulator, the lobby, the hidden hand, the disproportionately guilty. A framework that can only recognize hatred as contempt for the inferior is structurally blind to a hatred that operates as resentment of the powerful. That blindness is convenient, because the genocide accusation, the fixation on the "Jewish lobby," and the singular obsession with one small state among the world's hundred conflicts are the contemporary grammar of the powerful-Jew trope. Police brutality in the US? Blame Israeli training. Amnesty's insistence that antisemitism is simply one more racism erases how antisemitism works - and how Amnesty promotes it.

While Amnesty pretends that antisemitism is the same as other forms of hate, it itself does not treat them the same. To Amnesty, only the fight against antisemitism endangers human rights. The IHRA definition, according to Amnesty,  risks the right to free speech, even though its language says the exact opposite. But there is no section cautioning that combating Islamophobia might chill free expression, no warning that anti-racism measures for any other group risk infringing the rights of others. The entire apparatus of "human rights respecting," "proportionate," "do not unduly restrict" is deployed against a single form of hatred (9.1–9.11, 10.1–10.20). Of all the hate Amnesty names, only the fight against antisemitism is presented as a standing danger to everyone else's freedom.

When Jews are murdered, Amnesty names the killing antisemitic only when it cannot possibly find another justification. In Bondi, the target was a Hanukkah celebration and nothing else, a thousand Jews and no one else, with no second location and no broader civilian toll to fold the Jewish dead into. The antisemitism had no cover to dissolve into, so it had to be named.

Compare this to the 2008 Mumbai attacks, where terrorists deliberately sought out the Chabad House at Nariman House as a Jewish target, murdered a rabbi and his pregnant wife, and — by the testimony of one convicted attacker — chose it on the belief that it was "used as a front for the Mossad." Amnesty condemned the Mumbai attacks as terrorism and noted the Jewish center factually, but I cannot find a single instance where Amnesty characterized the targeting of Nariman House as antisemitic. There were other targets, so the specific targeting of Jews can be watered down as a simple terror attack against civilians.  

The same dissolution serves for the Har Nof synagogue massacre of 2014, where Palestinian attackers butchered four rabbis at prayer with axes.  Amnesty has never called this, or to my knowledge any Palestinian attack, antisemitic. I cannot find anywhere Amnesty calls the Hamas charter, with its citations of the Protocols and its invocation of the hadith calling on Muslims to kill Jews hiding behind rocks and trees.

Amnesty's only consistency with antisemitism is to make its surface as small as possible. If the Bondi murderers had written a manifesto saying that Israel is engaged in genocide and the Chabad that sponsored the Chanukah festival was complicit because it does not oppose Israeli policies, Amnesty would have had a problem with calling that antisemitic — because that is Amnesty's own logic in opposing anyone, any organization or any company from maintaining normal relations with Israel.  It wrote in a September 2025 briefing, "Amnesty is calling on states and public institutions to... immediately, whether independently or collectively, suspend all activities that contribute or are directly linked to Israel’s unlawful occupation, its system of apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights it controls or the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Otherwise, they risk complicity in the crime against humanity of apartheid, genocide, and other crimes under international law." Their definition absurdly includes companies like Expedia and Airbnb and can be infinitely expanded.

This minimization of antisemitism is consistent. Amnesty regards the Jewish community of Australia incompetent to define the risks they face. In footnote 43, Amnesty takes the Executive Council of Australian Jewry's annual antisemitism monitoring — the principal communal body's record of incidents against its own community — and informs the Commission that the Jews counting them have it wrong. The monitoring included "weekly demonstrations," Amnesty notes, and "the inference being that these protests are 'antisemitic.'" The implication is that the community has misclassified the hostility directed at it. The Jews, by characterizing demonstrations against their beliefs as threats, are the real threat to human rights. 

Amnesty Australia joined with other groups to condemn arson against Jewish targets in their country. It gave three examples: 

The antisemitic attacks include the January 21 arson attack and spray-painting of antisemitic graffiti of a childcare centre in Maroubra which is located near a Jewish school and synagogue; attacks on the former home in Sydney of a prominent Jewish individual which involved the destruction of cars with fire and antisemitic graffiti; and the vandalism of two Sydney synagogues in one week which were both graffitied with swastikas.  

 Every one of those attacks either included swastikas or language like "Fuck Jews." But at the same time there were other vandalism attacks against Australian synagogues that also said "Free Palestine."  

It it a strange coincidence that Amnesty and the other groups cannot bring themselves to define attacks on synagogues  as antisemitic if they can avoid it. This is what minimizing antisemitism looks like. 

Each of these is a way of exempting Jews from the definition in paragraph 1.2. The last movement of the submission does something worse: it violates its own definition.

The submission refers to Israel's "genocide against Palestinians in Gaza" (9.5) and to "Israel's genocidal acts" as settled fact, asserted without the qualifier that any contested legal claim demands. It rests this on Amnesty International's own December 2024 report. That report contains, on page 101, the sentence that collapses the entire framing. Amnesty there describes the prevailing legal standard for genocidal intent — the standard the International Court of Justice has applied, under which intent must be the only reasonable inference from a state's conduct — as "an overly cramped interpretation of international jurisprudence and one that would effectively preclude a finding of genocide in the context of an armed conflict."

The bar for the gravest accusation in international law is set high precisely to prevent the term's use as a political weapon. Amnesty looked at that standard, acknowledged in writing that applying it honestly "would effectively preclude" the conclusion it wanted, and then set the standard aside in favor of a looser one of its own construction. 

Amnesty's flat characterization of Israel's actions as "genocide," using a definition it fabricated for Israel alone, is itself discrimination against the Jewish people — a standard built for Jews and applied to no one else. No wonder the submission objects that IHRA's "double standard" example is too "vague" to count as antisemitism. The problem was never vagueness. It is that the example describes Amnesty perfectly.

Amnesty says antisemitism is hostility directed at "Jewish people, or people perceived to be Jewish, and/or their property, community or religious institutions, because of their identity, beliefs or heritage." Amnesty never wrote "all Jews." It wrote the community and its institutions, targeted for identity, belief, or heritage — and that is a perfect description of Amnesty's own campaign against Israel. The identity is Israeli Jews. The community and its institutions are the Jewish state and the companies and citizens who sustain it, whom Amnesty has declared complicit in genocide. The belief is Zionism. The heritage is the claim that Jews have a right to the land of their origin. Amnesty has assigned collective guilt to a people for the belief that constitutes them, judged that people by a standard it built for no one else, and directed the verdict at the largest Jewish communal institution on earth. By the definition Amnesty handed the Commission, Amnesty qualifies.

This is why the definition given by Amnesty itself had to be minimized. A standard applied honestly would have caught its author. Bondi and swastikas stayed in the definition because Amnesty couldn't find a reason not to include them. Amnesty did not bring the Commission a definition of antisemitism. It brought a procedure for shrinking antisemitism until it all but disappears.

To Amnesty, "complicity with genocide" can include almost everything; antisemitism can include almost nothing. Hostility to Israel is infinitely flexible, hostility to Jews infinitely diminished.

---

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)

 

Read More

06/23 Links Pt2: Jew-hatred drove the Montreal violence, even if it didn’t trigger it; Australian Teachers union seeks guidance on Holocaust lessons, claims it is ‘difficult’ to teach

From Ian:

Stephen Pollard: Starmer tackled antisemitism in opposition – but then helped fuel it in power

Whatever else may lie behind Labour’s attitude to Israel, that political demography explains why Starmer started to deal with the Jewish state not as one of our nation’s most trusted and closest allies, which has been engaged in a battle to defeat Iranian proxies since the October 7, 2023 massacre, but as a de facto enemy state.

Within weeks of taking office the then Foreign Secretary David Lammy had dropped Britain’s opposition to the ICC arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant and had imposed an entirely symbolic ban on the export of certain defence equipment to Israel – symbolic because Israel had no need of them, and because our armed forces rely far more heavily on Israeli technology than the other way round. Last year the Royal College of Defence Studies was instructed no longer to admit Israelis.

Then last September Starmer did the bidding of antizionists and antisemites across the world by recognising a Palestinian state without demanding anything in return – especially and notably not requiring the release of the remaining hostages as a quid pro quo. His action was criticised as, at worst, rewarding Hamas for October 7 or, at best, giving Hamas a PR coup over more moderate Palestinians in showing that their terrorism had forced recognition.

Starmer’s government has relentlessly portrayed Israel as some kind of rogue state, which has added fuel to the antisemitic fire which has taken hold since October 7, 2023. And until very recently, when the explosion in antisemitic incidents turned violent, Starmer had uttered not a word of criticism of the hate marches and demos across Britain which have been a festival of Jew hate since the Hamas massacre.

It is all very well for Starmer to seek to portray himself as some sort of healer, expunging Jew hate from Labour. But he cannot have his cake and eat it. Since becoming PM, Starmer has hugely damaged relations with Israel (even if Israeli intelligence continues to provide vital information to our security services). The last two years will go down as the worst in living memory for relations with Israel – in large measure as a result of Starmer’s deliberate policy to appease the Muslim sectarian vote.

The only question that remains now is how much worse this will get under Burnham.

The Kurds are the real victims of the Middle East, not the Palestinians

At the end of the day, perhaps the likeliest explanation for this indifference to the plight and promise of the Kurds is quite simple.

Could it be that the Palestinian cause can be made to fit into the contemporary, and all too simplistic, binary narrative of oppressor and oppressed, with Israel – the world’s only Jewish-majority state – cast as villain, a framing that echoes age-old tropes and carries a powerful emotional charge for some audiences?

The Kurdish story might seem more complicated from the outside. The antagonists include Arabs, Iranians, and Turks, but not Jews and Israelis, making it harder, and perhaps less comfortable, to fit into prevailing ideological frameworks and orthodoxies.

The result is a striking asymmetry. One national movement attracts enormous global attention, endless demonstrations, celebrity endorsements, campus encampments, and international campaigns. The other, despite representing a population many times larger and, in the case of Iraq, endured genocide, does not begin to command comparable concern.

The real question, then, is why a people of more than 40 million, denied a state for more than a century and subjected to repeated waves of repression, has attracted so little of the moral passion mobilised elsewhere.

Until that question is honestly confronted, claims of universal principles, support for self-determination and national liberation movements, and concern for human rights will continue to ring hollow.

Divided over vilification laws

Victoria’s strengthened anti-vilification laws have produced no convictions since taking effect, raising questions about whether the changes will deliver meaningful outcomes for the Jewish community.

Amendments earlier this year removed the requirement for the Director of Public Prosecutions to approve prosecutions before charges could be laid.

Jewish Community Council of Victoria CEO Naomi Levin said the change was a step forward, but cautioned it was too early to judge.

“Removing the barrier, which was DPP approval, is a real step in the right direction, but we need to give these laws time to be implemented, for police to become familiar with them, and for charges to be laid before we can really judge whether it’s satisfactory.”

Levin acknowledged a broader erosion of confidence.

“There’s been a breakdown of trust between the Jewish community and police and government, because we’ve seen so many really challenging incidents of vilification go unprosecuted.”

Some question whether further reforms really addresses the underlying problem.

Jewish activist Menachem Vorchheimer argued the new laws were unlikely to make a meaningful difference, because the key legislative gaps had already been addressed under existing provisions.

“There is no evidence that there is any difference since recent changes to the laws came into place. Victoria has had a legal framework to deal with racism against Jews for 25 years,” he said.

Read More

06/23 Links Pt1: The JD Vance foreign-policy test ride is a disaster; UN report a ‘predetermined indictment dressed up as an investigation’; Former hostage condemns UN Special Rapporteur's silence on Hamas' October 7 sexual violence

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: The JD Vance foreign-policy test ride is a disaster

Israel is no vassal state. The United States gets enormous benefits from its alliance with this democratic Middle East partner in terms of weapon development and intelligence. As Vance himself stated in 2024, it’s the ideal MAGA ally since, unlike Europe, Israel fights alongside America.

Still, Vance’s willingness to characterize Iran’s possession of weapons to threaten other nations as morally equivalent to Israel’s military was troubling. “You can’t tell a country, whether Israel or Iran, they’re not allowed to have any self-defense,” he said.

And yet, Vance revealed his own bias against Israel when, perhaps channeling the blood libels spread by leftist antisemites like his podcaster friend Tucker Carlson, he warned the Israelis that those who decried an American decision to surrender were simply being bloodthirsty.

“I guess my response to them would be: What is your exact proposal? You’re a country of 9 million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have,” said Vance.

That accusation was as reckless as it was unfair. Israel isn’t trying to kill its way out of anything. It was viciously attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, by Iranian minions who carried out the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. It was the target of direct missile barrages launched on April 14 and Oct. 1, 2024. And it was attacked by missiles, rockets and drones throughout the war that started on Feb. 28, leading to casualties, damage and sending much of the country into bomb shelters day after day.

Had America been similarly attacked, we know very well that Trump and Vance would have exacted a far greater revenge on the assailants than the targeted strikes that Israel executed on Iranian targets.

Being able to vent his contempt and lack of sympathy for an ally that fought side by side with American forces and who were essential to the success America achieved may have given Vance some satisfaction. But it won’t get him out of the fix in which he now finds himself.

A weak negotiator
Simply put, the Iranians know that Vance’s position in the talks is weak. That’s why they are treating him with the same contempt that they once treated Obama’s envoys, as they continually take back any concessions he says he’s wrung out of them, making it clear that if he wants an agreement, then it will have to be on their terms.

We don’t know yet how the negotiations will end. Perhaps Trump’s natural aversion to bad deals and his unwillingness to be a party to a pact that will rightly be characterized as an abject surrender that will not achieve any of America’s war goals will cause him to recall Vance and return to war. He ought to know that as unpopular as the war may be, ending it in defeat will be even more unpopular. Having invested so much political capital in the conflict already, he won’t win it back by mimicking Obama’s appeasement.

Or perhaps he is so sick of the conflict and too panicked by gas prices, plummeting polls and the prospect of a Democratic sweep of the midterms to reverse course again.

Either way, he has set up Vance to fail. Trash-talking Israel may earn him cheers from the antisemitic groyper wing of the GOP, but neither they nor his fellow Israel-bashers at mainstream media outlets like The New York Times will win him the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. And if the vice president is the architect of an end to the war that will be the moral equivalent of President Joe Biden’s retreat from Afghanistan, then it may earn him a place in history, but not one that will be a stepping stone to the Oval Office.

Surrender Is a Verb, Not a Vibe By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Because the U.S. had become so unaccustomed to the notion of victory, Israel’s post–October 7 determination to defeat one enemy after another struck many Americans (and others) as something monstrous. Even setting aside the unique standards to which the Jewish state is held, people seemed to think that a country is supposed to end a war once it’s taught the enemy a lesson. Israel, of course, reminded the world that wars are fought to be won, not ended.

So I took Trump’s invoking “unconditional surrender” as a kind of logical next step in reclaiming the purpose of war fighting. When one side surrenders, the other achieves victory. And surrender is also regime change by other means. Once imperial Japan surrendered in 1945, it was no longer imperial Japan. An Islamic Revolutionary Republic that surrenders to the United States would cease to be an Islamic Revolutionary Republic.

Anyway, that was what I had in mind to write about today. But then I saw that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt just said this about Trump: “When he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender.”

That’s not unconditional surrender. It’s laying out a potential off-ramp for Trump to get out of his demand.

In war, surrender isn’t a “place.” It’s not in the eye of the beholder. And it’s not “essentially” determined. Surrender is an action that someone takes. In Leavitt’s definition, there is no place for the active agent; there is no surrenderer.

Of course, Trump could contradict her before the end of the day. And perhaps Leavitt was just winging it. But as things stand, we’ve taken a step back once again. Back to the murky talk of timelines, exit strategies, and undefined goals.

So perhaps this war, like other recent American wars, will be ended instead of won. And the biggest problem with wars that merely end—no matter how devastated one side may be—is that they don’t end at all.

Bethany Mandel: What Jews hear when JD Vance talks about Israel

The same dynamic appeared recently during a press conference in Switzerland focused on negotiations with Iran. When a reporter referred to what he described as a “genocide in Lebanon,” Vance did not challenge the characterization, nor did he mention Hezbollah’s role in the conflict, and did not note that the organization responsible for years of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians is itself an Iranian proxy. Instead, he moved quickly into a discussion of diplomacy and peace.

Then came perhaps the clearest example. During a White House briefing last week, Vance delivered a remarkably sharp rebuke of Israel, far more aggressive than his statements about Iran, declaring that Trump was effectively the only world leader sympathetic to Israel and suggesting that Israeli officials would be wise not to antagonize the one powerful ally they had left, aggressively asserting that the U.S. has bankrolled Israeli security.

At a moment when Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, funds and directs proxy groups across the Middle East, openly calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and has American blood on its hands, Vance seems more animated by Israeli behavior than by Iranian aggression. His frustration is directed primarily toward Jerusalem, while the regime in Tehran receives far more rhetorical restraint.

That imbalance is why many Jews heard something different in his comments to Stuckey. Had those remarks come from someone whose public rhetoric displayed at least equal skepticism toward Iran, they might have sounded like a reasonable plea for moderation. Coming from someone who has spent recent weeks and months repeatedly criticizing Israel and members of its government, they instead were part of a larger pattern.

We have watched a rapid deterioration take place over the last decade on the Left, where anti-Israel activism has served as a gateway into broader conspiratorial thinking about Jews, power, and influence.

It would be a tragedy to watch the Right make the same mistake after spending years recognizing that pattern on the other side. Conservatives concerned about Jew-hatred metastasizing on the Right may be increasingly hysterical in their rhetoric, but their paranoia is far from unjustified.

The conservative movement has spent years warning about ideological contagions that distorted the Left’s judgment and detached it from reality. It would be an extraordinary act of self-destruction if, having correctly identified the disease, we embrace our own version of it.

Read More