Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, March 20, 2026

Catholic University Demands "Both Sides" on Antisemitism — But Not on Genocide

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) sent a letter dated March 18 to Catholic University of America president Peter Kilpatrick, and it's a case study in how antisemitism gets laundered through procedural neutrality.

On January 19, the student group Students Supporting Israel submitted two event requests through the university's official portal. The first would have brought U.S. Congressman Randy Fine to speak on the documented rise of antisemitism in higher education. The second would have featured Col. (Res.) Dr. Dany Tirza — the primary architect of Israel's security fence — to explain the engineering, the route decisions, and the security rationale behind one of the most discussed infrastructure projects in the world. On February 25, both requests were denied. The university cited its Presentations Policy and told SSI to "restructure the event and resubmit a request to have speakers representing both sides of this issue" — both sides, apparently, of antisemitism.

FIRE pulled the actual text of CUA's Presentations Policy (last reviewed April 17, 2023) and found that it says no such thing. The policy gives the university discretionary authority to refuse speakers who advocate views "counter to the clear and unambiguous official teaching" of the Roman Catholic Church, and notes that balanced programs with multiple viewpoints may be staged for educational purposes. "May," not "must." Unless CUA is prepared to argue that a sitting U.S. congressman discussing the rise of antisemitism contradicts Catholic teaching, the policy provides zero basis for the denial. No such explanation was given to SSI.

The letter documents, in footnote 16, a series of single-viewpoint student-group events that CUA approved without any "both sides" requirement. The Democratic student group hosted speaker nights featuring Amanda Riddle (February 10, 2026) and Payton Ziegler (November 18, 2025) with no demand for Republican counterpoints. The College Republicans brought in American Moment CEO Nick Solheim for a kick-off event (September 8, 2025) with no requirement to balance his conservative perspectives. The College Democrats hosted then-Congressman Maxwell Frost (October 19, 2023) and the Republicans hosted Congresswoman Kat Cammack (November 15, 2022) — clearly one-sided political events, both approved without conditions. A speaker event featuring Dr. Monica Miller as "Author, Activist, Theologian" (October 17, 2023) promoted pro-life activism from a single viewpoint, and the university found no need for an opposing voice there either.

The most striking example involves a topic far more contested on today's campuses than anything SSI proposed. In October 2024, a student group called The Olive Branch hosted a talk titled "What Is Genocide?" featuring Dr. Martin Shaw, a British sociologist whose academic record leaves no ambiguity about where he stands. Shaw has described Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide in peer-reviewed publications going back to 2023, and his most recent article in the Journal of Genocide Research — titled "The Genocide that Changed the World" — opens by treating the conclusion as settled, describing what he calls "the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza." His 2025 book carries the title The New Age of Genocide: Intellectual and Political Challenges after Gaza. The man does not hedge. Yet the flyer for his October 2024 campus talk bears an official stamp: "Approved by Catholic University of America." There was no requirement to add a speaker arguing the other side, and no demand to restructure the event to include someone who disputes the genocide framing.

The university approved a one-sided talk asserting Israeli genocide without condition, and then denied a Jewish student group permission to discuss antisemitism without demanding opposing speakers. That is not a content-neutral policy applied consistently — it is a content-based decision dressed up in procedural language, and it is applied in only one direction.

The FIRE letter requests a substantive response by April 1, demanding that CUA approve SSI's event requests and publicly assure all students that the administration will not compel speech as a condition for hosting events. The legal argument is straightforward: CUA is a private institution not bound by the First Amendment, but it is contractually bound by the free-expression commitments it has voluntarily made to its students, commitments that include the right to organize a one-sided event and advocate a particular view without being forced to dilute it. Forcing SSI to add anti-Israel speakers to an antisemitism talk is no different, legally and morally, than forcing the College Democrats to add a MAGA speaker to their next event — something nobody would suggest, and nobody has suggested, because the only group facing this requirement is the one that supports Israel.

The FIRE letter, signed by Program Counsel Jessie Appleby, is dated March 18, 2026, and was sent to President Kilpatrick with a copy to General Counsel Matthew C. Dolan.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

A peer-reviewed journal recently published a scientific paper arguing that Allah burned down Los Angeles to punish America for supporting Israel in Gaza.

This is not satire.

The argument states that the LA fires coincided with Gaza, America is the "main supporter" of the "child-killing Zionist occupying regime," Hollywood is a "center for Zionist and satanic activities" because Jews have invested there, an American pilot set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy (proving the situation is hopeless without US involvement), and the Quran says that Allah punishes wrongdoers, therefore God sent fire to Los Angeles to teach America a lesson. QED.

The paper, by Dr. Bahruddin Halimi of Badakhshan University in Afghanistan, appears in the Pamir Academic & Research Journal and ticks every box of legitimate scholarship: abstract, methodology section, research questions, citations from classical Islamic sources, a multi-part analytical framework, and a conclusion. It even acknowledges epistemic humility — noting that "we cannot know divine secrets with certainty" — before proceeding to explain exactly what God was thinking.

The journal is obscure, the university is provincial, and Western academics will dismiss this as irrelevant. But they shouldn't.

What this paper demonstrates — with uncomfortable clarity — is how the architecture of academic legitimacy can be colonized by motivated reasoning while remaining structurally intact. It doesn't violate any academic standards. The only issue is that it treats religious conviction as empirical evidence Strip out the specific theology and replace it with the preferred pseudoscience of any Western ideological faction, and you have a template that would sail through peer review at institutions considerably more prestigious than Badakhshan University.

We've been watching this happen in slow motion in Western academia for years: papers "proving" that damage equals systemic intent, that disagreement constitutes harm, that preferred political conclusions can be reverse-engineered through sufficiently complex methodology. The machinery of scholarship — citations, frameworks, stated methodologies, peer review — increasingly serves as camouflage rather than constraint.

The defining feature of captured academia is that anything can be claimed to prove anything the author wants. Counter-examples are either ignored or twisted into evidence, making arguments non-falsifiable. False premises are used to reach false conclusions.

Dr. Halimi's paper has exactly the same problematic structure that thousands of other anti-Israel papers have - just it is more obviously visible to Western non-Muslims.

The real issue isn't that a bad paper got published in a small Afghan journal. It's that the paper is bad in ways that are completely familiar.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/19 Links Pt2: USAID investigating U.N. staff for Hamas ties; The Many Faces of Tucker Carlson; Rama's Politically Correct Nazism; Despite War, Israel Ranks 8th in Global Happiness Survey

From Ian:

Ersatz Israel

Antisemitism isn’t antipathy toward individual Jews. Rather, it is and has always been a structure of discourse pitched against Israel as a whole. It isn’t a question of hatred, or self-hatred, but an abortive attempt to restore moral coherence in a situation of mental and political breakdown.

Israel is designated as a conspiratorial agency driving this crisis and the individual failures extending from it. But the formula inverts reality. Despite persistent misconceptions on this point, Israel designates the conservative pole in the Western synthesis. Christianity, and the “lost sheep of Israel” (such as myself), represents the revolutionary, universal pole. Drawing from that well, John Lennon’s utopian anthem “Imagine” dreams of abolishing religion and nations to establish a borderless brotherhood of perpetual peace. In the decades since Lennon was shot, the West has pursued this fantasy to the point of auto-destruction. Meanwhile, Israel has moved in the opposite direction, reaffirming its sovereignty in the teeth of existential hostility.

Israel’s defiance of both Leninism and Lennonism has made it the major enemy of the left, which, under Soviet tutelage, expanded the concept of Zionism into a globalized metaphysical entity. A few months ago, I asked a curator at an art space in New York what he considers to be the principal challenges facing contemporary culture. His answer was “capitalism, fascism, and Zionism.” What these have in common is a refusal to recognize universal leftist moral authority—extending from the initial Jewish refusal to accept Christianity—translated into secular terms.

Meanwhile, the New Right looks at Israel with a mixture of suspicion and envy, caught between a desire for the United States to be more like Israel and the unhappy hypothesis that Israel itself (sometimes expressed as “the Jews” or “powerful Jews” or “Jewish power”) prevents this from happening. The New Right’s ostensible dream is a return to a “realist” foreign policy governed by America’s national interest, which is often somewhat bizarrely framed as a withdrawal from global power arrangements that directly and significantly benefit the United States.

Defining America’s interests means defining what America is and its place in the world. This procedure cuts both ways: A nation committed to nothing but the cynical maximization of power will not survive long. Here again, the left is more consistent than the New Right—a political formation still struggling for identity—since the left accepts that the question has existential dimensions, and correctly identifies Israel with the West it rejects.

But the strength of its passion also indicates a desire and a demand. The critical theme, across the political spectrum, conceives Israel as “the force that oppresses us” from a perspective in which America is seen to be lacking in political agency, and citizens feel they lack agency over their own lives. Israel is said to have entrapped America, when the speaker is themselves trapped by an obsession with Israel.

This syndrome reveals a special irony in the light of the early modern mobilization of Israel as a model for national sovereignty. Machiavelli characterized Moses as a model political strategist. Judith and Holofernes became a favorite theme for Flemish painters in the war of secession of the Dutch Republic from Spain.

The Mayflower Pilgrims went even further and identified themselves as a living version of the people of Israel, who had undertaken a new exodus to the new Zion of America. It was this identification that inspired America’s “manifest destiny” and still holds it together, just as philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, when looking for a way to define the Romantic idea of a “people” or a “nation,” used the biblical Israel to hold his concept together. Evangelical pastor Doug Wilson’s argument that “Deuteronomy is about America” makes total sense within this religio-historical context: What the book presents is a script for maintaining national political structures against internal dissension and external threats, through a system of rituals that serve critical social functions—above all, the generational transmission of values through the formation of families.

The political story of the Tanakh as a whole is the cyclical loss of observance, resulting in periodic calamity, followed by miraculous recovery. The West is now somewhere between these phases. Today, post-national European states are fanatically anti-Israel, their fertility is beneath replacement, and their destruction is accelerating through mass migration. The same trends are intensifying in America. These phenomena are not separate; they are linked.

What the West has rejected is Israel as the template for national politics. What has replaced Israel is “Palestine”: a corrupt, post-political NGO zone seething with violence and sliding inexorably toward Islam.

For all these reasons, the question of Israel goes well beyond geopolitics or questions of national interest, whether American or Israeli: It concerns the identity and the destiny of the West. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, “The State of Israel shows the world what a fighting people look like, and what a fighting nation looks like.” What is at stake in the war with Iran is not just security but also the possibility of a new synthesis between the West’s universalist and nationalist poles. It is no longer a question of universalist nation building, but a refusal to continue to tolerate an Islamist terror state that has waged war against the West for almost 50 years. If that effort fails, the stakes will only get higher.

Seth Mandel: America’s Political-Violence Problem and Its Anti-Semitism Crisis Are Colliding

The recent uptick in political assassination attempts does not discriminate by party nor has it been limited to Jewish figures. There was the nearly successful attempt on President Trump’s life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the attempt to burn down Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home with his family inside it, the execution of Minnesota statehouse speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Still, coming amid an explosion in anti-Semitic violence with part of a political movement calling for a “global Intifada,” and given Moskowitz’s Jewishness and outspokenness on anti-Semitism, there are a couple points to make.

The first is that it isn’t censorship to criticize the hate preachers becoming increasingly popular in the modern political landscape. The Tucker Carlsons and Hasan Pikers of America have done much to normalize and popularize dangerous rhetoric, and the politicians who embrace them are insulating them from the norms that might otherwise cause society to shun them, as any healthy society would.

As it happens, in today’s Wall Street Journal, Third Way officials Jonathan Cowan and Lily Cohen have an excellent piece hammering Democrats for their embrace of Piker and their unwillingness, more broadly, to do what Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton did recently: publicly excoriate their own party and political movement for its tolerance of anti-Semitism.

The seeds for Cowan and Cohen’s column were sown last week when Cohen posted a tweet with a similar message. Cohen named Piker, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani as prominent leftward figures staining the Democratic Party with anti-Semitism. In response, Ro Khanna, a popular progressive member of Congress and likely 2028 presidential candidate, dismissed Cohen on X: “I am proud to stand with @grahamformaine @ZohranKMamdani & join @hasanthehun feed,” he posted.

Khanna is a big part of the problem facing our politics today, and he is clearly just getting started. It is a mark of our current political crisis that Khanna is so proud of his role boosting anti-Semites as violence continues to rise.

And the second point is closely related: Moskowitz puts himself in danger for calling out anti-Semitism. Where are all the other Democrats? Shouldn’t they have his back? Anti-Semites and so-called anti-Zionists have been trying to assassinate the party’s prominent Jews. Major Democratic officeholders ought to be scrambling to make a public address about the violent Jew-hatred in their party and the politicians supporting it. It does not let Republicans off the hook just because of what Cruz and Cotton have done, but it does highlight just how isolated Democrats have let folks like Moskowitz become. That needs to end now.

Khaled Abu Toameh: US Direct Talks with Hamas: Legitimizing and Empowering Terrorists

Engagement clearly signals to terrorists that violence is an effective path to power, land, and international recognition. Hamas is a group that is explicitly and fundamentally committed, in both ideology and practice, to "armed resistance" (terrorism).

Hamas is not some misunderstood political faction waiting to be coaxed into moderation. It advocates jihad (holy war) as an "individual duty [of all Muslims] for the liberation of Palestine."

Article 13 of the Hamas charter says: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

[T]here is no evidence that the terror group intends to fundamentally alter its long-term goals.

Talking to Hamas now, without its first adhering to Trump's preconditions, marks a sharp and potentially confusing policy reversal that weakens US credibility globally.

Across the region, the Iranian regime and its terror proxies are watching closely. The lesson for them will unmistakably be: hold out, escalate, and eventually the world's most powerful democracy will come to deliver victory to you.

Engaging Hamas as if it were a normal governing authority will only demonstrate to other terrorist groups that terrorism works.

Launching direct talks with Hamas or other Islamist terror groups absent any fundamental change in their positions is not diplomacy. It is capitulation and surrender dressed up as "realism."

Above all, direct engagement of Hamas is a concession to the jihadis, who believe Muslims are in an eternal confrontation with the enemies of Islam and must overthrow secular regimes to restore a "pure" Islamic state.

03/19 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: Wimps and warriors; Understanding Iran's Imminent Threat to America; Don't Expect Iran to Surrender: Suffering Is the Ultimate Virtue to Shias

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Wimps and warriors

The war against Iran is having a most clarifying effect. It’s shining a light on those who are prepared to stand with civilization against barbarism and flushing out those who are not.

The usual suspects—those who hate Israel, despise America and stick pins into effigies of U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—are willing Iran to win, or more to the point, willing Trump and Netanyahu to lose.

Those who get news of the war only from mainstream media outlets in America and Britain have little idea of what’s actually happening.

Many have no idea that throughout the years, hundreds of American soldiers were killed by Iranian proxies in Iraq and in repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. bases. They are ignorant of the thousands of missiles amassed by Hezbollah, which is currently firing hundreds of them at Israeli citizens from Lebanon every day.

All they know from media outlets like The New York Times or the BBC is that the war was always going to be a disaster, it’s becoming a quagmire, it’s going to destroy the world’s economy, Trump is incompetent, he hasn’t got a strategy, and Iran is winning.

In an article on Unherd, Sohrab Ahmari has complained that Trump betrayed his promise as a “war-weary populist” to become “a chaos agent,” failing to display a proper “aversion to wanton bloodshed and destruction.”

To characterize this war as “wanton bloodshed and destruction” is not only wantonly to dismiss Iran’s bloody record and the mortal threat it has increasingly posed to America, Israel and the West. It also grossly misrepresents as “chaos” the astoundingly precise, targeted, steady destruction of Iran’s entire military machine and apparatus of internal repression.

By the start of this week, Iranian ballistic-missile and drone launches had fallen by more than 90% and 75%, respectively.

Much of Iran’s regular navy is lying at the bottom of the sea, while its fast-attack craft, midget submarines and mine-laying capabilities are being liquidated. Its air defenses have been largely obliterated so that America’s non-stealth B-1 bombers are generally flying unimpeded over Iranian airspace.

Yes, Iran’s extortion racket in the Straits of Hormuz is causing a major problem. But that can be addressed by eliminating Iran’s ability to hit shipping.

And if the regime is totally defanged in accordance with the aims of this war, the oil weapon at this infamous maritime choke-point won’t be used ever again—a hitherto unthinkable boon that would be very much worth the short-term pain.

John Spencer: Day 19: The United States and Israel Are Still Winning in Iran

What are the political goals of the war with Iran? For the U.S., the objectives have been clear. Deny Iran a nuclear weapon. Destroy its missile and drone programs. Neutralize its ability to threaten maritime commerce. Reduce its capacity to project power externally.

This is not a war of regime change. It is a war for regime behavior change. The U.S. is not seeking to replace the Iranian system of governance. It is seeking to force that system to abandon the behaviors that threaten core U.S. national interests.

Iran's goals are equally clear. The regime seeks to survive. It seeks to retain its nuclear potential, preserve its missile and drone arsenals, and maintain its ability to use the Strait of Hormuz as a tool of global economic coercion. It seeks to continue projecting power while maintaining internal control through repression.

The question then becomes: who is achieving their goals? On Day 19 of Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. and Israel are still winning. The scale of what has been accomplished is measurable. American forces have flown 6,500 combat flights and struck 7,000 targets across Iran. The Israeli military reports dropping 10,000 munitions in 7,600 strikes against 2,200 regime targets, conducted across 5,000 sorties. These numbers reflect sustained, large-scale combat operations designed to dismantle the regime's military architecture.

The most senior figures across Iran's political, military, and internal security echelons have been eliminated, along with multiple brigadier generals, intelligence chiefs, and nuclear program leaders. This is the systematic removal of entire echelons of leadership across political, military, intelligence, and internal repression structures. It is not accurate to assume that replacements will simply step in and think, act, and perform exactly like those who were removed.

What is happening in Iran is without modern precedent. Entire layers of leadership, networks, institutional knowledge, and personal authority have been eliminated simultaneously. When those are removed in waves, what follows is not seamless continuity. It is disruption, fragmentation, competition, and uncertainty. The cumulative effects strike at regime cohesion, morale, and will. As of Day 19, the U.S. and Israel are achieving their strategic aims. Iran is not.

U.S. Intelligence Official: Iranian Regime "Largely Degraded" but Intact

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday: "The Intelligence Community (IC) assesses that Operation Epic Fury is advancing fundamental change in the region...resulting in weakening Iran and its proxies."

"The regime in Iran appears to be intact but largely degraded due to attacks on its leadership and military capabilities. Its conventional military power-projection capabilities have largely been destroyed, leaving limited options. Iran's strategic position has been significantly degraded."

"Even if the regime remains intact, the IC assesses that internal tensions are likely to increase as Iran's economy worsens....If a hostile regime survives, it will likely seek to begin a years-long effort to rebuild its military missiles and UAV forces....Iran has long viewed the U.S. as an adversary and is engaged in active conflict with the U.S."

"The United States continues to face a complex and evolving threat landscape with a geographically diverse set of Islamist terrorist actors seeking to propagate their ideology globally and harm Americans....The spread of Islamist ideology, in some cases led by individuals and organizations associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, poses a fundamental threat to freedom and the foundational principles that underpin Western civilization."

"Islamist groups and individuals use this ideology for recruiting and financial support for terrorist groups and individuals around the world and to advance their political objectives of establishing an Islamist caliphate which governs based on Sharia."

R. Chaim Soloveitchik, one of the towering halachic minds of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was known for ruling that sick people must eat on Yom Kippur even in cases others considered marginal. Critics accused him of being maykil, lenient, on the Yom Kippur fast. His response has become something of a proverb: "Kulum ani meikil b'isurim? Adraba, ani machmir b'pikuach nefesh." "Am I being lenient on prohibitions? On the contrary — I am being stringent on pikuach nefesh (safeguarding human life.)"

The critics thought it was a question about one value. The rabbi revealed there were two. And once both values are visible, the criticism collapses : Yom Kippur is important, but there is another value that dwarfs it. The critic had been doing arithmetic with only half the numbers.

This is the structure of what I want to call the One-Dimensional Moral Fallacy: the reduction of a multi-value moral situation to a single axis, with all competing values quietly removed from the ledger before the argument even begins.

Moral decisions are almost never a choice between a value and its absence. They are choices between competing values — security versus freedom, immediate welfare versus long-term stability, the lives of your own community versus the lives of strangers. Serious ethical reasoning, whether philosophical or practical, requires holding multiple values in view simultaneously and making a considered judgment about how to weigh them in a specific context.

The One-Dimensional Moral Fallacy short-circuits this. It works by selecting one value — usually one that is genuinely real and genuinely matters — and presenting it as the only value in play. The competing values aren't argued away. They're simply not mentioned. Then the judgment is rendered as if only one side of the scale exists.

The result resembles moral reasoning. But structurally, it's closer to fraud: the conclusion was built into the framing before the first word was spoken.

Senator Bernie Sanders has been running a version of this fallacy so consistently, and so transparently, that his recent posts almost serve as a textbook illustration.

On the war against Iran's nuclear program, he wrote: "The war in Iran has already cost $22.8 billion. For $22.8 billion, we could: Provide Medicaid to 6.8 million kids. Build 2.6 million public housing units. Fund Head Start for 1.3 million..."

This looks like an economic argument, but it is actually a moral one, and the moral structure is that the cost of war results in foregone social goods, therefore the war is wrong.

But that syllogism only holds if you've erased the other side of the ledger entirely. What are the costs of not acting? What does a nuclear-armed Iran — or a more aggressive Iran emboldened by the absence of military pressure — cost in human lives, regional stability, and the security of American allies and interests? Do we only have to worry about immediate threats and ignore others, or do we choose to act before threats turn existential? Sanders presents none of these. There is no counterweight on his scale. He says x > y without defining y.

His other recurring posts follow the same structure. Wealth inequality is rising. The billionaire class grows richer while ordinary Americans cut back on food and medicine. All of this may be factually accurate. But every post treats economic equality as the supreme and singular moral axis against which all policy is measured. Security considerations, tradeoffs, competing goods, the actual mechanisms by which redistribution affects economic productivity — none of these appear. The single axis does all the work. It isn't even clear that wealth inequality is immoral to begin with - the only value seems to be that it violates a sense of "fairness" but is fairness really a value? Should those who innovate or build successful businesses be penalized because not everyone can do that as well?

Sanders may have a coherent worldview: Sanders genuinely seems to believe that economic equality is the master value that subsumes all others. The One-Dimensional Moral Fallacy isn't always bad faith. Sometimes it's a genuinely impoverished framework, applied with total conviction. But that doesn't make ignoring other considerations valid. The structural distortion is the same either way.

When the fallacy is deployed deliberately, it becomes a propaganda technique. And it's a remarkably effective one, because it's hard to counter without sounding like you're defending the thing being criticized.

Tell someone "you're ignoring the security cost," and they can say you're changing the subject. Tell someone "Palestinian civilian deaths matter," and they can't easily be argued wrong — because on the single axis they've selected, they're right. The suppression of the competing value is doing invisible work; the audience doesn't know what's been left out because it was never mentioned.

Several identifiable moves characterize the propagandistic version:

Premise smuggling: A hidden assumption is inserted — "if harm occurs, it is unjustified" — and treated as the moral baseline without argument. This converts a contested judgment into an apparent axiom.

Counterposition suppression: Alternative framings — "what would the actor be obligated to do instead?" or "what competing duty constrained the decision?" — are excluded or treated as bad-faith deflection.

Causal flattening: The action is presented as: They did X → therefore immoral. The preceding conditions, constraints, and forced-choice scenarios are stripped away, replacing genuine decision pressure with linear blame assignment.

The result is a sort of moral monoculture — a discursive environment in which only one principle is permitted to exist in the frame.

Jewish law offers one of the most sophisticated worked examples of explicit multi-dimensional moral reasoning in any intellectual tradition. The principle of pikuach nefesh — the preservation of life — is understood to override nearly all other commandments. But notice what this structure actually demonstrates: it doesn't eliminate the other commandments. Shabbat still matters. The prohibitions still have weight. Pikuach nefesh outweighs them in specific contexts, after an actual weighing.

This is categorically different from saying "life is the only value." It's saying: we have a coherent hierarchy of values, and in genuine conflicts, life ranks near the top. The other values remain in view. The judgment is made between them.

There's a deeper issue lurking beneath the single-axis framing that Western philosophical universalism tends to obscure.

Most people, when thinking clearly and honestly, do not treat all lives as morally equivalent in the context of conflict. A parent who prioritizes saving their child over two strangers is not considered a monster; they're considered a parent. A soldier who accepts greater risk to enemy civilians in order to protect his own comrades is operating within a moral structure virtually every military in history has shared. The concentric circles of obligation — self, family, community, nation, humanity — are a basic structural feature of how moral responsibility actually works.

The IDF, when it conducts operations in Gaza or elsewhere, is operating within this structure. Israeli lives weigh more to the Israeli military than enemy civilian lives — as they should, and as every military in the world operates. The honest moral question is not whether this hierarchy exists (it does, universally) but where its limits are, what duties it generates toward non-combatants, and whether those duties were met.

The One-Dimensional Moral Fallacy, applied to Israel, typically involves select a single humanitarian axis of how Israel's enemy populations are affected by war, pretending universalism is the only legitimate moral framework and Israeli lives are not even in the equation, and then condemning Israel for doing what every state in history has done and what any coherent moral system has to account for.

The One-Dimensional Moral Fallacy shows up in climate discourse, in immigration debate, in criminal justice. Pick a contested policy domain and you'll find one side — usually the more activist side — arguing almost exclusively on a single axis while treating any appeal to competing values as evidence of bad faith.

What serious moral reasoning requires — what any framework worthy of the name must demand — is that all the values at stake be named, placed on the scale, and weighed. Moreover, the weighing system itself must be declared: if someone thinks that the economic inequality of Jeff Bezos being a multi-billionaire and online shopping hurting local businesses is more important than Amazon saving millions of people countless hours shopping and hundreds of dollars individually, then that should be stated plainly. Judgment rendered without the full ledger isn't judgment. It's a conclusion dressed up as reasoning.

That's what moral reasoning looks like. If only one dimension is mentioned, then it isn't an argument - it is polemic.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Grzegorz Braun is a far-Right Polish representative at the European Parliament. On Wednesday he went on an antisemitic tirade, causing the chair to cut him off.

Mr. Grzegorz Braun (Polish MEP, addressing Kaja Kallas):
Thank you. Dear Madam, you have just given a wonderful presentation of how unnecessary and useless your office is.

With all due respect, the situation is clear as we look at the recent war. The gun—where is the gun, the weapon? It's the US Navy and Air Force.

Who's the gun holder? Who's the perpetrator? The aggressor? It's the Jews—Israel and the Jewish diaspora all over.

And you, madam, you are merely the silencer—the silencer at the end of the gun barrel.

And this is everything you do here: to hush, to stop me right now, and all the world, all Europe, for the truth not to be spoken.

Chair (David McAllister, interrupting):Thank you, Mr. Braun. I just want to say—because you're always seeking attention, and I know you by now—but on behalf of this committee, I completely reject your antisemitic remarks you've just made. You will not repeat this in this committee.

Braun (continuing defiantly):Could you please elaborate to the High Representative?

McAllister: Mr. Braun, you don't have the floor. Shut up.

(Braun continues)

McAllister: When I say you have to leave the room now—if you behave in this way, you will be treated like this. Exactly. And put this on your video and tell your voters once again that you have a big victim. You are an attention seeker—you know that. And I've had enough of you. I've given you the floor five times today. Now, would you please listen to the High Representative like all other colleagues?

McAllister received applause.

Braun had previously disrupted a moment of silence held during the European Parliament's sitting in commemoration of the 2025 International Holocaust Remembrance Day by shouting "Let's pray for the victims of the Jewish genocide in Gaza."

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/18 Links Pt2: Amid Anti-Semitism Wave, Europe Calls in the Military; The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard; October 7 report will remind ‘useful fools’ that Hamas started Gaza war

From Ian:

The Israel Lobby: A Historical Primer

The United States became the second country to accord official recognition to Israel upon its establishment (the Soviet Union was the first), but in the new state’s early years, when it had the greatest need of outside support, America provided very little. In Israel’s War of Independence against the five Arab armies that invaded it in 1948, the American government did not supply it with weapons. (The Israeli army did obtain some American arms through nongovernmental channels.) In the Anglo–French–Israeli 1956 war with Egypt, Washington forced Israel to withdraw from positions it had gained in the fighting. In its sweeping victory over three Arab countries in June 1967, Israel relied on French, not American, arms.

Not only did Israel not receive American help when it was most needed, as the events after the 1956 war demonstrate, American Middle Eastern policy did not always favor Israel, the efforts of the pro-Israel lobby notwithstanding. In 1981, the lobby and the Israeli government strongly opposed the sale of a sophisticated Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, fearing that it would be employed in ways that would undermine Israel’s security. The sale went ahead anyway. In 2014, the lobby and Israeli government (and a majority of the American public) opposed the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA). That deal also went forward.

American foreign policy worked to Israel’s advantage when and because the two countries’ domestic political values, and more important, their strategic outlooks, were aligned. More often than not, they were. During the Cold War, Israel acted as a bulwark against pro-Soviet countries and movements in the Middle East; and in that region, Israel stood out as the lone democracy.

In the post–Cold War period, it has retained both distinctions, becoming the major regional opponent—and by far the most effective one—of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has, since its inception in 1979, threatened America’s allies and interests in the Middle East. Indeed, Israel qualifies as the most valuable ally of the United States in the sense that, unlike America’s many other allies, it has actually fought and won wars against the adversaries of the United States and has done so while not asking or expecting American troops to fight alongside Israelis for this purpose. The joint attack on Iran launched on February 28 demonstrated anew Israel’s high strategic value to the United States.

The American public and, for the most part, the American government have understood and appreciated this, which accounts for the generally pro-Israel tilt of American foreign policy. Both what Israel is and what it has done, and not the supposed machinations of the groups lobbying on its behalf, have inclined Americans to be favorably disposed to the Jewish state. Because of this positive disposition, policies favorable to Israel followed. That is how democracy works.

Still, the critics of the pro-Israel lobby who assert that it differs from other interest groups are correct in one way—although not in the way that they believe. The other such groups have consisted mainly of people with ethnic ties to the country whose interests they were attempting to promote. Similarly, one of the principal pro-Israel organizations, the American–Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is composed mainly of Jews. By far the largest pro-Israel group in the United States, however, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), has a largely non-Jewish, Christian membership. CUFI has supported the Jewish state for reasons related to their Christian faith. A reported 6 million people belong to AIPAC. The comparable number for CUFI is 10 million. In this one respect, the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which in every other way is similar to every other ethnic group seeking to influence American foreign policy, and like them a pure product of American democracy, is unique.

The ‘Anti-Palestinian Racism’ Canard

Contrast this to Palestinian Arab identity, which crystallized only in the 1960s. The first formal claim of Palestinian national identity came in 1964, with the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization—after Israel’s founding in 1948 but before its territorial expansion in 1967.

The timing raises eyebrows and further questions, some uncomfortable. What makes a person in or around the historic territory of Palestine a Palestinian? Jews, Jordanians, and Israeli Arabs are not Palestinians. The term does not refer to persons descended from people who lived in British Mandate Palestine; if it did, the necessary conclusion would be that there already is a Palestinian state—called Israel. It is not defined as a lack of Israeli citizenship; otherwise Jordanian Arabs would be Palestinians, too. Nor does it mean an Arab living in the territory once called Palestine; Israeli Arabs don’t count. Nor can it have anything to do with living in the territories Israel conquered from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt in 1967, since the term was invented before then and is used to demand a “right of return” for Arabs displaced in 1948-49 from present-day Israel.

What is it to be Palestinian, then? It is, as its early popularizers were happy to explain, an Arab whose identity is defined by wanting to destroy Israel. It is the ethno-political fusion of non-Jewish Levantine ancestry with anti-Zionism.

The Egyptian-American analyst Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has been one of few scholars willing to state this conclusion plainly. That it takes an Arab to articulate what is clear to see is unsurprising. Polite Westerners and Jews consider the notion of discussing constitutive elements of foreign national identities daunting and rarely worth the payoff. Doing so to legitimize Jewish civil rights while eschewing the universalist mentality of protection for all, further, is quite distasteful. It appears to be a violation of profound liberal commitments, including the equal treatment of all people before law. But it appears that way, as Mansour deftly explains, only because the concept of “identity” obscures crucial differences between the Jewish connection to Zion and the Palestinian connection to Palestine. “The most central problem of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” he writes, is that “the absolute and final negation of Zionism, by any means necessary, [i]s the central ideological content of the Palestinian identity and its symbols.”

There is a stark asymmetry between Zionism and anti-Zionism. Zionism holds that a Jewish state should exist in the Levant, though not to the exclusion of a non-Jewish state—clearly. It is minimalist and rooted in shlilat ha–golah, negating the exile, by granting Jews self-determination within their ancestral lands. Anti-Zionism, by contrast, is definitionally opposed to the existence of a Jewish state. It is maximalist and rooted in reversing the Nakba, the failed Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1948. This is why Jewish Israelis continue to offer two-state solutions and peace plans, and why Palestinians cannot accept them. And it is precisely that honest assessment that APR seeks to prohibit.

Yet it is neither compassionate nor intellectually honest to give APR an inch. Rather, as Mansour argues, “perhaps the most merciful and responsible course is for the Palestinian identity—as a state-bound ambition—to be gently laid to rest.… The cost of perpetuating a vision that repeatedly descends into cruelty is too high.” It does so not out of boiling frustration or the inequities of uneven Western civil rights regimes, but because it is an identity “written in blood,” as the old PFLP slogan goes. Those who “genuinely care about the lives of Palestinians, Israelis, and their neighbors,” writes Mansour, should let Palestinians be Arabs again: “Walk away from the fantasy of ‘Palestine’ and offer every real opportunity for inclusion and a dignified future elsewhere.”

The inapt comparison between IHRA and APR reveals an even greater irony: While Zionism is called a political movement and Palestinianism an ethnic heritage, the opposite is closer to the case. The Jewish relation to the Holy Land is essential and ethno-religious; the ethnic story of the Jews makes no sense without the land. Palestinians’ relationship to the land is essentially political; what makes them Palestinian is that they need all the land. Perhaps that is why APR advocates describe what they seek to prohibit as anything that “defames…Palestinians or their narratives” or even their “allies.” They are trying to erect a force field around a political view—the very accusation they level against Zionists—that just so happens to have ethnic bigotry at its core.

We may wish there were a rough parallelism rooted in “nobody’s perfect” that leaves room for moderation and outward signs of empathy. But the truth is that, in this conflict, there are not two equivalent sides. There are two people with claims to the land; one has control, right of first possession, and has been willing to compromise nonetheless. The other has neither the right of might nor the might of right, yet defines itself by its very identity as eliminationist.

The charade of false equivalence helps no one and nothing except the Western liberal conscience, the terrorists waging a long war against the Jewish state, and sham NGOs that exploit the former to support the latter. And the growing specter of APR, the evil approaching stealthily from the north, makes explicating the charade an urgent and unavoidable task.

Irina Velitskaya: One day, everyone will have this book at the back of their closet

Novelist Omar El Akkad’s new nonfiction book about the Gaza conflict, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” which recently won the 2025 US National Book Award, encapsulates everything that is wrong with the state of political discourse, intellectual culture, and Western elites who favor feeling good about themselves over civilizational survival.

The book was first published one year ago this month. Why write about it now? Because it is still, to this day, the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in the category “Middle Eastern Politics,” and #3 in the category of “Democracy.”

So what’s wrong with El Akkad’s heartfelt memoir? Let’s begin with the title itself. It is a naked appeal to peer pressure: If you are not part of the “pro”-Palestine movement now, you inevitably will be some day, and if that glorious day of dawning, God forbid, never comes — if, in other words, you continue to hold out stubbornly for the right of one tiny Jewish state to exist in a world of 56 Muslim-majority states, many of them actual “settler colonial ethnostates” — then you are on “the wrong side of history,” as the balaclava-clad mobs tirelessly proclaim. “Shame on you,” they bellow at their antisemitic demonstrations, those who themselves in their naked hatred feel no shame at all, nor any self-awareness that their actions, which they proclaim with proud self-absorption place them on “the right side of history” are in actuality indistinguishable from that of the average Berliner or Viennese Durchschnittsmensch in 1938.

(Incidentally, the prefix “pro” is in quotes because the recent ceasefire agreement, conspicuously uncelebrated by the demonstrators, and the subsequent murders of Palestinian dissidents by Hamas, also ignored, proved that the protesters were never “pro” Palestine at all.)

The title is, in other words, a form of shaming. It also is incredibly presumptuous, a classic example of the logical fallacy of “begging the question,” or assuming the truth of a conclusion in the premise of an argument. The conclusion, of course, is that “this” — which is to say Israel’s defensive and preventative war against Hamas and jihadist terror — is something that one must be ashamed of before, or perhaps instead of, even considering the arguments that support this assertion.

To be clear, the pivotal “this” in the title is not the barbaric October 7 massacre, nor the attempts by naive or hateful Westerners to justify it or deny it, nor the 18 years of rocket fire from Gaza into Israeli communities that preceded it, nor the stabbings and car rammings and bus bombings of the First and Second Intifadas, nor the massacres of Persians, Christians, Hindus, Druze, Yazidi, Alawites, Jews, African animists, and other minorities by radical Islamist groups currently taking place worldwide.

03/18 Links Pt1: ‘Get Him Before God Does’; Iran Strikes Qatar's refinery, Prompting Doha to Expel Iranian Diplomats; Iranian missile struck WB town, killing 3 Palestinian women

From Ian:

Jonathan S. Tobin: Stopping Tehran's Apocalyptic Goals Is Important

Two weeks after the start of the U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran, naysayers about the wisdom of the operation remain pervasive and loud. Yet, Iran was steadily rebuilding its nuclear program with an imminent option to race to a bomb, expanding missile production, and continuing to orchestrate an "axis of resistance" dedicated to fomenting chaos and war.

That's more than enough to justify the risks that are an inevitable part of all wars. Even now it's obvious that continuing a policy of kicking the can down the road that Trump's predecessors chose would have been as colossal a mistake as even the costliest military blunder.

The first purpose of the campaign is the eradication of Iran's nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, in addition to its support and active participation in international terrorism. Washington and Jerusalem have also stated that they favor regime change in Iran. That's something Israel believes is absolutely necessary to achieve. The Trump administration would like it to happen, but could live without it, as long as the ayatollahs were stripped of their nukes and missiles, and had their terrorist option foreclosed.

While the success of the U.S.-Israeli offensive won't be able to be fully evaluated until after the conflict is over, it's clear that both militaries have systematically eliminated Iran's military capabilities, hunted down its missile-launchers, and done more damage to its nuclear program.

The fact that a country as large as Iran is not completely defeated in two weeks is not a reason to believe the war has so far been a failure. If the armed forces of the two allies are allowed to continue their military efforts, the already devastating results for Iran will likely become even more impressive. There is no reason to believe that the war is already a "quagmire."

The arguments that say the U.S. would have been better off delaying action or even appeasing Iran ring false. The policy of enriching and empowering Tehran that was the consequence of the 2015 nuclear deal led to a stronger and more aggressive Islamist regime. Letting Iran get a nuclear weapon became an increasingly likely scenario in the last year and would have done far more damage to U.S. interests than even a permanent hike in gas prices.

Letting a tyrannical regime ruled by religious fanatics bent on imposing their version of fanatical Islam on the Middle East and the rest of the world get a nuclear weapon would be a nightmare. And that would have been the inevitable result if the U.S. hadn't prepared to act at some point in the near future.

Seth Mandel: ‘Get Him Before God Does’

There is a line in an Israeli spy movie, Walk on Water, that sums up this idea quite nicely. As the Mossad director gives his employee an important assassination assignment, he says to the younger man: “Get him before God does.”

The assignment is to eliminate an old Nazi war criminal. But the aging German will die of old age sooner than later, so why go through all the trouble now? The answer is that Nazi war criminals should stop feeling hunted only when they shuffle off this mortal coil. Eliminating the Nazi official means delivering justice to his victims and to those who will never be his victims now. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

Israel does so much that benefits the rest of the world that sometimes people seem to forget that it is its own country with its own interests. Hence the increasing absurdity of the discourse around Israel’s objectively-successful military campaigns. Will killing Ali Larijani solve global warming? Will taking out Hassan Nasrallah end world poverty? Will any one action by the IDF end all wars forever? If not, the media doesn’t see a reason to do it.

But Israel is defending its citizens and dispensing justice, and that is reason enough. “Someone else will just replace Larijani” entirely misses the point. Because by this logic, putting a mob boss in prison will only cause someone else to take over the family, continuing a cycle of crime and retribution without eliminating the existence of organized crime itself.

As a matter of course, we punish criminals for the crimes they commit. Only when it comes to Israel do we suddenly agonize over the point of it all.

But Israel doesn’t agonize over the point of it all. Israel was reconstituted as a modern state during an era when Jews were being killed in the most horrible ways imaginable with no recourse. Those days are over.

Truth is, that section of the Times story about the history of Israel’s retaliatory missions is a fair guide to the near future as well. A lot of bad people and groups were involved in starting this war. The fact that Israel’s retaliatory campaign is so protracted should not be a criticism of Israel but a reminder of just how destructive and shattering October 7 was, and how widely the culpability for it is spread. The victims of that terrible day are no less deserving of justice just because there are so many of them.

Israel Is Hunting Down Iranian Regime Members in Their Hideouts

Ali Larijani, Iran's top security official, strolled confidently Friday through a rally of regime loyalists in central Tehran. Early Tuesday, Israel's intelligence services found Larijani with other officials at a hideout on the outskirts of Tehran and killed him with a missile strike.

The same night, Israel got a tip from ordinary Iranians that the leader of the Basij militia, Gholamreza Soleimani, was holed up with his deputies in a tent in a wooded area in Tehran. He, too, was struck and killed. The killings were made possible by a growing harvest of intelligence about possible targets.

With thousands of regime members killed, Iranians are reporting that a sense of disorder is starting to take hold. Security forces are under stress and on the run. Israel is chasing security forces from their headquarters to muster points, then on to hide-outs under bridges. The advanced technology deployed by Israel and the penetration of Iranian society by its agents are creating the greatest threat yet to the regime.

Israeli intelligence learned that Iran had a fallback plan for its internal security forces in the event their facilities were destroyed - mustering at local sports complexes. Israel watched the sites fill up and then hit them, killing hundreds of members of the security services and military, the vast majority at Azadi Stadium, a large venue for soccer games.

Israeli intelligence officials began placing calls to individual commanders, threatening them and their families by name if they didn't stand aside in the event of an uprising. In one call between a senior Iranian police commander and an agent of the Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence service, the agent said in Farsi, "I called to warn you in advance that you should stand with your people's side, and if you will not do that, your destiny will be as your leader." The commander responded, "Brother, I swear on the Quran, I'm not your enemy. I'm a dead man already. Just please come help us."

Israel's air force began operating fleets of loitering drones above Tehran and other areas. Their attacks were in many cases guided by tips sent by ordinary Iranians, Israeli security officials said. On Sunday night, Israeli forces conducted a targeted hunt for Basij checkpoints, hitting 11. Residents said many security officers are hiding in residential buildings. When they move in, the neighbors evacuate, fearing a strike.

Israel's security establishment believes Iran's crumbling economy and popular anger have put the regime on an irreversible path to collapse, whether it happens during the war or down the road.

photo: IDF

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

The Jerusalem Post is one of the one of the most widely read English news sources on Israel, the one English-speakers around the world often turn to first. So when I saw a headline that said “Teen injured after Iran pummels Israel with missiles.” I expected to hear about someone who was at least 13. But when I read the article, I saw that the injured “teen" was only 12:

"We were led to a 12-year-old boy who had been hit by shrapnel and suffered injuries to his limbs. He was in pain and frightened but conscious,” it read, citing an MDA paramedic on the scene.

This child—a boy not yet bar-mitzvahed, was correctly identified as such by Eilat Fire Station Commander Yehuda Kazantini, who told Kan Reshet Bet that "the child [was] crossing a road at a pedestrian crossing when he was hit by missile fragments.

Why did the Jpost headline refer to a 12-year-old as a teen? It was likely a mistake. But mistakes like this often end up being used against Israel by the international media. Which is why accuracy is important.

How might the media misuse this unintentional error? Perhaps they might write or say something like, “So a rocket injured one Israeli teenager. Meanwhile, Israel killed thousands of Gazan.”

If corrected and called on the lie, they can always assert that “A one-year difference is no big deal.”

But it is a big deal. For one thing, journalists are supposed to be precise. No mistake is really small in a news article. Even the way ages are described can influence how suffering is perceived.

By contrast, while one Israeli outlet may inadvertently age up a genuine 12-year-old victim, Gaza casualty reporting works in the opposite direction—on a massive and deliberate scale—through definitions that group older teens together with much younger children. Under widely used international standards, anyone under 18 is classified as a “child.” As a result, casualty figures can include 16- and 17-year-olds in that category, without distinguishing between civilians and those involved in hostilities.

Salo Aizenberg’s X thread “Everything You Need to Know About Gaza’s Fatality Numbers” exposes the truth. The Hamas Ministry of Health (MOH) counts teenage terrorists killed in combat as “children” in its official death toll statistics:

“There is no doubt that Hamas and other militant groups use child combatants, in some cases children as young as 12. Demographic analysis of the fatality lists already pointed to this reality, with roughly 2,000 excess deaths among male teens. That inference is now confirmed by direct evidence. Numerous martyr posters, funeral notices, and social media posts identify underage fighters killed in combat. Most recently, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) publicly acknowledged that 9% of its announced fighters killed were minors, based on its own fighter death lists cross-referenced with Hamas’ fatality list… Once child combatants are counted as combatants rather than automatically classified as civilians, another pillar of the prevailing fatality narrative collapses.”

How does this work in practice? A 19-year-old Hamas operative is counted as a “child” in aggregate statistics. A 17-year-old summer-camp “graduate” killed while firing at Israeli forces is listed as “child.” The Hamas death toll counts show thousands more dead teenage boys than dead teenage girls in the same age range—a skew that points to ‘terrorists,’ rather than random children. Yet there is no doubt that when the media uncritically reports on the raw Hamas MOH stats, the headline will always amplify the lie that when Israel kills young Hamas operatives, it is killing “children.”

Journalists have one core duty: get the facts right. A 12-year-old boy may be only one year away from teenager-hood, but indeed, 12 is the cut-off point, the last year in which a child is not a teen and should not be referred to as such. The 12-year-old boy in Eilat is actually a child. As opposed to the 17-year-old Hamas operative actively involved in attacking Israel and Israelis.

The JPost slip is minor and corrected by the article text itself. But the broader issue—how categories like “child” are applied in conflict reporting—is more consequential. When media outlets repeat casualty figures without clarifying how those categories are defined, readers are left with an incomplete and definitely distorted picture.

It is Hamas practice to twist stats as a matter of routine. They know the mainstream media will report the false numbers uncritically to their readers, lemmings who believe what they read. The proof is our world today, a seething cauldron brimming with hate for the Jewish people.

People believe what they read and that is why journalists have a duty to tell them the truth. The average media consumer knows only what he is told or reads on the internet. Today, all of it tells him to hate Israel, and by extension, the Jews.

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Wars used to be won by destroying things — tanks, supply lines, cities, armies. The logic was attrition: grind down the enemy's capacity until the cost of continuing exceeded the cost of surrender. It was brutal, slow, and often indiscriminate.

Israel has been developing, for over a decade, something categorically different: a strategy that targets not capabilities but competence — and not just competence, but the human architecture that holds organizations together under pressure.

The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on February 28, 2026 — along with Iran's defense minister, IRGC commander, and National Security Council secretary, all in a single morning — didn't emerge from nowhere. It was the culmination of a strategic doctrine tested and refined across several theaters. Lebanon 2024, the Gaza campaign, the Twelve-Day War of June 2025, and earlier assassinations of nuclear scientists and major regime figures: these were rehearsals. Not rehearsals for a bigger version of the same thing, but rehearsals for a fundamentally new kind of warfare.

Organizations are not interchangeable collections of roles. They are repositories of accumulated expertise, and expertise is not transferable by promotion. But beyond expertise, the most dangerous leaders combine strategic intelligence with something harder to quantify: the ability to make people believe.

Hassan Nasrallah was a clear example. When Israel killed him, it didn't just remove a tactician. It removed a figure who had spent three decades building something close to a myth. His weekly broadcasts were required listening — not just for Hezbollah loyalists but for his enemies, Israeli analysts, and the entire regional press corps. He spoke with the authority of someone who had survived everything thrown at him, who had built a militia into a military force capable of fighting a sovereign state to a standstill in 2006, and whose words carried the weight of that record. His successor inherited a title and an org chart, but not the charisma, the following, or the credibility that came from Nasrallah's singular history. By all accounts the replacement is an organizational caretaker, not a strategic thinker — a man without his own ideas, let alone his own mythology.

The Iranian nuclear scientists targeted over years of Israeli operations represent the same logic applied to technical expertise. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh wasn't just the program's senior manager. He was its integrating intelligence, the person who understood not only what the program was doing but how to improvise when circumstances changed, how to work around sanctions, how to protect critical knowledge from the next disruption. You can train a replacement to hold his title. You cannot train someone to have already lived through the hard problems.

This is the expertise gap that conventional warfare ignores entirely. When you bomb a missile depot, the enemy orders more missiles. When you kill the engineer who designed the guidance system from first principles, you lose not just a person but an irreplaceable institutional memory. The damage is invisible until the moment it becomes catastrophic.

The Syria case is the most instructive — and the most misread.

Israel never targeted Bashar al-Assad. What it did, over years of strikes on Iranian weapons shipments and Hezbollah supply chains, was remove the external scaffolding holding his regime upright. When Hezbollah was decapitated and depleted, Syria lost its essential external guarantor. When HTS moved, Assad's army simply didn't fight. The regime collapsed in days.

The conventional explanation focuses on the cascade, of one domino toppling another. But the deeper lesson is about what was revealed when the pressure came. The Syrian army was already hollow. Corruption had gutted its officer corps. Economic collapse had shredded the material incentives for loyalty. Soldiers with families and futures had no interest in dying for a regime that had spent years stealing from them. When the moment came, the rational choice was to run, which they enthusiastically did.

This is the hidden variable in any authoritarian security apparatus: institutional loyalty is not a constant. It is a function of morale, leadership credibility, economic self-interest, and, crucially,personal survival calculus. An army fights when it believes in the cause, trusts its leadership, expects to win, or fears the consequences of not fighting more than the consequences of fighting. Remove enough of those conditions and the army stops being an army.

Israel's intelligence picture of Iran presumably includes a detailed assessment of where those conditions stand. The regular Iranian army and the IRGC are not the same institution. The IRGC is ideologically self-selecting, economically privileged, and institutionally invested in the regime's survival in ways the regular army is not. But the IRGC has also just lost its entire senior command structure in a single morning. Whether ideological commitment survives the simultaneous elimination of the people who embodied and enforced it is exactly the question that has never been answered — because it has never before been put to the test at this level.

The full strategic logic has three layers operating simultaneously.

The first is decapitation — the removal of irreplaceable expertise, institutional memory, and personal authority at the top.

The second is environmental degradation: economic pressure, proxy network destruction, the normalization agreements that have progressively isolated Iran regionally.

The third, and least discussed, is tempo manipulation: forcing new, untested leaders to make high-stakes decisions under conditions of maximum uncertainty, faster than they can possibly develop the competence to navigate them. It is forcing unsure leaders to respond to circumstances that their predecessors never faced so they have no playbook and no instincts on how to respond to new situations.

Mojtaba Khamenei, assuming he is alive and functional, faces an Iran that has lost its IRGC command structure, its main strategists, its nuclear program, its proxy network, and the economic leverage those proxies provided — all simultaneously, in his first weeks in office. His father spent thirty-six years building the mental map required to steer through crises of this kind. Mojtaba has none of it, and no Nasrallah-equivalent in any adjacent institution to lean on. And the main person he would lean upon, Ali Larjani, is now gone too.

Which brings the logic back to the bottom of the security apparatus. At some point, the question facing every IRGC colonel, every Basij commander, every soldier ordered to fire on protesters or hold a perimeter against a collapsing command structure, becomes stark: am I willing to die for leaders I have little personal loyalty to, in the name of a system whose top tier couldn't even protect themselves? Do I want to risk being tried for war crimes for firing on my own people? Does my loyalty to a shaky regime overcome the fact that I haven't received a paycheck this month? Whether Iran's security forces answers these questions the same way Syria's did depends on factors that no outside analyst can fully assess — but that Israel's intelligence services have been studying for years.

Traditional warfare is bottom-up: destroy enough capacity at the base until the leadership has nothing left to fight with. The new warfare inverts this entirely. Remove the head, and watch what the body does to survive. Venezuela is the clearest recent demonstration: US forces simply snatched Maduro. Within weeks, his successor was freeing political prisoners, opening the oil sector to foreign investment, and meeting with US cabinet officials: not out of conviction, but because the example of what happened to Maduro was now impossible to ignore. The army didn't fight. The regime didn't collapse, but it bent, immediately and dramatically, in ways that years of conventional pressure had failed to achieve.

The Venezuela example is very different from Iran, but the logic is the same. Targeting the top is more efficient and has outsized effects. Unpredictable, sure, but when was conventional war predictable? Iran is the same logic applied with harder instruments.

This is the moral case for the new warfare, and it deserves to be made plainly. The alternative to this strategy is not peace. It is a protracted conventional conflict that would kill tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, shatter infrastructure, and produce the exact rally-around-the-flag consolidation that makes authoritarian regimes harder to dislodge. Measured against that alternative, a strategy that concentrates lethal force on the leadership cadre most responsible for the threat — and bets on the rational self-interest of the people below them — is not just more effective. It is more moral.

Unpredictability is not a flaw of this strategy. It is a feature of all strategy. The question is only which side enters the uncertainty holding the advantage. Iran's new leaders face problems their predecessors spent lifetimes learning to navigate — and nobody left alive knows how to make the next decision.

That is the new warfare. It employs fewer bombs and smarter targets. The goal is not to destroy an army. It is to create circumstances where the army destroys itself.

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

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