09/07 Links Pt1: A bit of rare honesty on Gaza from The New York Times; IAEA is completely blind on Iran nuke program; Iran’s grip on Hormuz was never as strong as it looked

From Ian:

Is 'Purity of Arms' holding the IDF back? Inside Israel’s battle over military ethics

You are a soldier, tasked with searching a house for a suspected terrorist and hidden weapons. The house is full of women, children, and an elderly, sick, bedridden man.

How do you proceed? Do you force the man out of bed immediately to complete a thorough search, or do you slow the search to treat him with kid gloves, possibly endangering your soldiers?

Judgment calls like these are everyday occurrences for 19-year-old soldiers – young men whose moral dilemmas only a year earlier involved not getting involved with their best friend’s girlfriend or resisting the urge to glance at the test paper of the nerd sitting in front of them.

But we send soldiers – not a cadre of lawyers – to the battlefield. How are these soldiers taught to make complex calls that could put them on the wrong end of an IED, or just as easily land them in military prison for taking an operation too far, according to the moral sensibilities of the most moral army in the world?

On August 9, according to Ynet, “The IDF raised the level of authorization required for certain strikes as high as the chief of staff, effectively requiring political approval in some cases. Commanders were also recently given explicit instructions to halt immediate-response fire, except in cases involving the removal of a direct threat.”

Per Hillel Biton Rosen, military and security correspondent for Channel 14, just days later Hamas operatives were identified crossing the Yellow Line ceasefire demarcation in Gaza, where they stole engineering equipment. Soldiers requested authorization to engage, but senior command denied the request.

The incursion was just one of more than 65 crossings, three times the number recorded the week before the rules of engagement changed.

A senior security official said: “Hamas is testing us, exactly as it did before Oct. 7. What happened last night could have ended with a soldier being abducted.”

Permission-to-open-fire orders clearly act as a deterrent and are necessary to maintain law and order.

Yet, the rules of engagement are fluid and always have been. They change with government policies and with diplomatic pressure from allies and enemies alike. Even while operating under the rules, there are days when the army is instructed by political echelons to hold its fire, even though the day before, it would have opened fire.

IDF soldiers are faced with numerous situations that require sensitivity and mindful awareness of civilian populations, but when an army is dealing with terror operatives, tunnels, and a malicious entity that disguises itself as civilian and totally controls its civilian population, it is hard for any soldier to know who in the scheme of things is who.

Israel's life-saving measures go beyond what international law requires
JOHN SPENCER – chairman of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and one of the most prominent Western experts on urban warfare – has been a leading voice on Israel’s conduct of operations in Gaza. His views are based on comparative historical analysis of urban battles.

In a March 2024 Newsweek op-ed, Spencer claimed: “Israel has done more and implemented more measures to prevent civilian harm than any military in the history of urban warfare.”

He said these measures go beyond what international law requires and beyond what the US and its partners did in comparable fights in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Mosul against ISIS.

Specific practices Spencer lauded:
• Mass evacuation warnings (days or weeks in advance in some cases)
• Phone calls, text messages, and recorded voice messages to specific buildings or neighborhoods
• “Roof-knocking” (firing a small, non-lethal munition onto a roof as a final warning)
• Distribution of maps showing safe routes and daily updates on humanitarian corridors
• Frequent tactical pauses and localized pauses during operations
• Extensive use of precision-guided munitions and formal targeting processes

He noted that no other military has systematically combined these actions at this scale while fighting an enemy deeply embedded in dense urban terrain with a vast tunnel network.

Which raises the question: Does that make the IDF highly moral or overly cautious?

NYPost Editorial: Finally: A bit of rare honesty on Gaza from The New York Times

What do you know? The New York Times just exposed its readers to some rare honesty about Gaza — running an 1,878-word plea from a native Gazan for Hamas to be “expelled.” Hear, hear.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza, minces no words as he blasts the terror group for destroying what seemed to him as a boy to be “the foundations of a Palestinian state.”

The piece was one of the most unvarnished, revealing descriptions of Hamas’ evil the Gray Lady’s ever published.

From the start, he reports, Hamas behaved like “gangsters, brutalizing Palestinian women,” “torturing and killing” suspected opponents and launching “grisly suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.”

Its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel “led to over two years of Israeli bombardment that killed tens of thousands of Gazans, including much of my family.”

Alkhatib insists the group get “no role in Gaza’s future” yet laments that supposed Palestinian supporters in the West still see Hamas’ members as “honorable resistance fighters.”

He cites a rally “organized and attended by people who became key supporters of Mayor Zohran Mamdani,” where the “resistance” and “Intifada” were cheered.

And calls out Hasan Piker, “who campaigned for Mayor Mamdani, the Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats,” for normalizing Hamas.

The failure by people like these to denounce Hamas “only helps perpetuate” Gaza’s “degradation.”

Even as recently as April, a poll found 40% or more of “Americans between 18 and 34 said they supported Hamas over Israel.”

Clearly, Gazan lives don’t “matter” to such people.

The horror of Hamas, of course, should be beyond obvious — we’ve flagged it for years.

Yet lefty outlets like the Times spill far more ink attacking Israel than Hamas.

Palestinian Writer Attacked for Refusing to Toe the Hamas Line in NYT Op-ed

Gaza-raised Palestinian-American writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib became the target of a wave of online attacks and false allegations after publishing a September 4 New York Times op-ed calling on Palestinians and their Western supporters to resist Hamas and reject armed “resistance” as a path forward for Gaza.

The attacks followed Alkhatib’s public rejection of Hamas and his call for Palestinians to pursue a future based on self-government, economic development and coexistence with Israel.

Alkhatib is founder and director of Realign for Palestine and a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, I argue that saving Gaza & its Palestinian people requires resisting Hamas, weaving in personal themes, addressing issues with the Left & "pro-Palestine" movement & proposing a vision for Gaza's future Transformation.

Backlash Over Breaking With Hamas
The response to Alkhatib’s op-ed quickly moved beyond arguments over Hamas and Gaza’s future into attacks on his motives, affiliations and personal character.

Some critics sought to portray Alkhatib as compromised, bought or secretly controlled by Israel rather than engaging with his call for Palestinians to reject Hamas.

The large pseudonymous X account @zei_squirrel made false allegations that Alkhatib was secretly gay, had been recorded sexually abusing boys and was being blackmailed by Mossad into serving as an Israeli “propaganda puppet.”

Historian and pro-Palestinian activist Zachary Foster launched a personal attack on Alkhatib while also disputing several of the essay’s claims. Foster called him the “darling of the American Jewish-Zionist establishment,” accused the piece of being “littered with lies” and concluded by describing Zionism as a form of “brain cancer.”

Mehdi Hasan told his more than two million X followers that some of the platform’s “worst,” “most dishonest” and “most fanatical pro-genocide” users were sharing Alkhatib’s article.

Alkhatib said the reaction had developed into a broader smear campaign, with fabricated posts and AI-generated material portraying him variously as Jewish, connected to Jeffrey Epstein, blackmailed by Mossad, secretly gay and paid by Israel.

Much of the material sought to explain away his opposition to Hamas by portraying him as secretly working for Israel or compromised in some other way.

UN agency accused of Hamas ties sees another European nation cut funding

Another European nation has stopped funding the U.N. agency that aids the Palestinians. Finland has followed the U.S. and Sweden in halting donations to the terror-tainted agency.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is presently being investigated for ties to the terrorist rulers of Gaza. Recently, organizations including the USAID Office of Inspector General (OIG) and NGO UN Watch have uncovered further evidence of what they allege is Hamas infiltration of UNRWA and its members’ participation in the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks in southern Israel.

Finland announced it would discontinue funding to the organization at the end of 2026. Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs confirmed to Fox News Digital that the agreement with UNRWA would conclude at the end of 2026 but that "As of yet, no decision has been made on what are the international partners through which Finland’s support will be channeled next year to meet the acute needs in the region."

Finnish officials did not respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about what prompted the change to the country’s funding for UNRWA.

While other nations still continue to fund UNRWA, President Donald Trump fully banned funding to the organization in February 2025, and Sweden ended funding to UNRWA in December 2024. Sweden redirected aid to other U.N. bodies for its Gaza response.

The future of aid provision in Gaza matters for the Trump administration-backed Board of Peace as it seeks to shape a conflict-free future for the region.

An official affiliated with the Board of Peace reconstruction effort told Fox News Digital that "the international community’s concern about UNRWA in Gaza continues to rise and is supported by damning evidence. The Board of Peace has been clear: New Gaza will be both demilitarized and deradicalized, and we will only be working with trusted, credible delivery partners to achieve our goals. We anticipate responsibly replacing UNRWA with vetted partners who will deliver for the people of Gaza."

The USAID OIG is investigating about 1,500 members of UNRWA for terror participation, and has referred 108 UNRWA staff to the State Department to suggest they be suspended or excluded from further work with organizations in receipt of U.S. funds.

A senior U.S. official briefed on USAID OIG’s ongoing investigation told Fox News Digital that the USAID OIG’s "independent findings are prompting several other countries to reassess the stale and conventional thinking that UNRWA is the best and only option to provide aid to civilians in Gaza." The official said that the USAID OIG’s "findings also will prevent Hamas and October 7 affiliated staff from circulating across future, more responsible, aid organizations operating in Gaza."

Hamas fighters secure an area before handing over an Israeli-American hostage, Keith Siegel, to a Red Cross team in Gaza City on Feb. 1, 2025, as part of the fourth hostage-prisoner exchange. Ranks of Hamas fighters formed up on Gaza's beachfront in a show of force against the dramatic backdrop of breaking waves. (SAEED JARAS/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

UN Watch’s Terror Network report claims that about 12% of UNRWA staff in Gaza are members of terror organizations, based on "cross-checking UNRWA employee rosters with Hamas records seized by the [Israel Defense Forces.]"

Executive director of UN Watch Hillel Neuer told Fox News Digital that "Finland’s principled decision to defund terror-infested UNRWA will not deprive Palestinians of aid, as it will be redirected through genuine humanitarian agencies such as the World Food Programme that are not systemically infiltrated by Hamas."

He said that "other democracies should follow" the examples of Finland, Sweden, and the U.S. "Contrary to what UNRWA supporters claim, the agency is not ‘indispensable’ — assistance can and must be delivered through responsible alternatives."

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Another bad sociology paper calls Israel racist

Ruth Carmi, a sociology professor at Appalachian State University, examines Israeli social-welfare bureaucracy and concludes that it is racist.

She claims that it systematically disadvantages Palestinian Arab women, Mizrahi Jewish women and Ethiopian Jewish women. Her paper goes considerably further than merely alleging bureaucratic unfairness: she says the system helps “preserve Jewish supremacy.”

Written by an Israeli academic with a Hebrew name, published in a peer-reviewed sociology journal Humanity and Society, this sounds like a pretty damning indictment of Israel.

Unless you look at the methodology.

Carmi’s argument grew out of her doctoral dissertation, in which she examined three Israeli Supreme Court cases involving social welfare. One concerned an Ethiopian Jewish woman, one a Mizrahi Jewish woman, and one a Palestinian Arab woman. From those three cases she identifies a supposedly racialized “bureaucratic logic” running through Israel’s welfare state.

Three cases, generalized to the entire nation.

She did not take a sample of Israeli welfare cases and ask whether Mizrahi, Ethiopian or Arab women were treated differently from everyone else. She did not compare their experiences with poor Ashkenazi women. She did not compare them with Haredi women, Russian immigrants, Druze women or any other plausible control group.

She started by choosing representatives of three groups she had already defined as especially marginalized, found cases in which members of those groups had serious problems with the bureaucracy, and then generalized from those cases about the racial character of the bureaucracy itself.

If you want to demonstrate that a Mizrahi woman encounters bureaucratic obstacles because she is Mizrahi, you have to ask what happens to an otherwise similar non-Mizrahi woman. Carmi never does that. 

Without a control group, her methodology is worthless. Yet she tries to obfuscate that problem with her description of her methodology: 

I analyze each case using a multi-method qualitative approach, including legal archeology, discourse and content analysis, and in-depth interviews. This multi-method approach allows to identify patterns across ethno-racial lines, derive theoretical conclusions from a small number of cases, and uncover the connection between judicial decisions, discursive reasoning, and institutional procedures.  

You cannot reach the conclusions she does using that methodology.

The kicker is that she footnotes an earlier study that could have acted as the control!

The earlier study by Ella Glass examined 38 Israeli court decisions involving public housing. It found that courts rejected most applicants’ appeals and that poor claimants generally faced a restrictive, moralizing bureaucracy that expected them to satisfy demanding rules about eligibility and economic behavior.

In other words, the obstacles Carmi identifies in the case of a Mizrahi single mother may not have been Mizrahi obstacles at all. They appear to have been the ordinary obstacles faced by poor Israelis trying to navigate an underfunded and rigid welfare bureaucracy.

There are individual cases that point in the same direction. Poor Jewish single mothers whose ethnicity was not even relevant to the litigation have fought the Housing Ministry over absurdly technical eligibility rules, sometimes all the way to the Supreme Court. One mother of four was denied public housing because she received one type of government support instead of the particular type specified by the regulations. Hundreds of single mothers receiving maintenance payments were caught by similar rules.

That is bad bureaucracy. It might even be unjust bureaucracy. But it is not evidence of racism unless you demonstrate that ethnicity explains the difference in treatment. Carmi never establishes that difference, and the court records don't, either.

The same problem appears in her Ethiopian adoption case. She criticizes the Israeli Supreme Court for “color-blindness” because the justices focused primarily on the welfare of the child rather than making Ethiopian ethnicity central to the decision. So even not treating an Ethiopian litigant differently can become evidence of racial bias.

So, if the state treats ethnicity as important, that can be called racialization. If the state does not treat ethnicity as important, that can be called color-blind racism.

There is something seriously wrong when a professor—not a student fumbling through a first research project, but a professor publishing in a peer-reviewed journal—can make sweeping claims about the racial logic of an entire national welfare system from three deliberately selected cases without establishing how comparable people outside those selected groups are treated.

Anyone familiar with sampling, controls or causal inference should immediately see the problem. You cannot select cases because they contain the phenomenon your theory predicts and then announce that the cases have confirmed the theory.

Her dissertation passed a university committee. The argument became an academic article. That article passed peer review. A journal published it. At every stage, people who were supposed to evaluate scholarship apparently accepted a claim about systemic racial discrimination without demanding the most elementary question: Compared to what?

Perhaps this is a general problem in parts of the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps it is especially acute in politically fashionable areas such as anti-Zionist scholarship.

I don’t know.

And unlike the methodology I am criticizing, I am not going to pretend I know.

I have been looking specifically for methodological problems in academic papers about Zionism and Israel, often simply by searching academic databases for words like “Zionism” or, in this case, "Jewish supremacy."  Unsurprisingly, that means the bad scholarship I have collected is disproportionately about Zionism and Israel.

Maybe the same kinds of problems are everywhere. Maybe they are substantially worse in this particular ideological corner of academia. To answer that question I would have to construct a comparison set, examine papers on unrelated subjects and see whether the same methodological failures occur at similar rates.

Without doing that research, I cannot legitimately generalize from the cases I happened to select.

See how that works?

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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)

 

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09/06 Links: Israel prevented many terror threats against Jews abroad over past year; Hamas Has a Human Sacrifice Strategy; Is the UK’s new leadership serving Islam?; Hoax of an inquiry

From Ian:

Israel prevented many terror threats against Jews abroad over past year, NSC official tells 'Post'

Israeli security agencies have thwarted dozens of plots over the past year, while maintaining heightened vigilance ahead of the Jewish holiday season, a senior National Security Council official told The Jerusalem Post ahead of the High Holy Days.

Iran and Hezbollah are expanding efforts to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews worldwide, with Israeli security officials identifying a growing number of plots and preparations,

Iran has devoted increasing resources to promoting terrorism globally, the official said, including through individuals and newly established mechanisms focused specifically on attacks against Israelis and Jews.

“There are many people who wake up in the morning and their entire mission is to promote attacks against Israelis and Jews around the world,” the official said.

The effort involves multiple parts of Iran’s security apparatus, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force and intelligence bodies, the official said. He stressed that the buildup of these capabilities was a long-term process that had intensified over time.

“Even if the rounds of fighting have ended, and we know their limitations, in the end the Iranian feeling is not good in the kinetic balance,” he said. “So they move to their ultimate arena” – efforts to carry out terrorist attacks and target Israelis at various levels.

No country wants terrorism
The official said Israeli strikes inside Iran during the recent fighting had also targeted elements involved in terrorism, including senior figures in Iran’s security establishment.

This, he said, had changed Israel’s operational environment.

“Unlike in the past, given the circumstances, it is possible to act inside Iran itself, particularly in Tehran,” he said, adding that Israel continued to counter Iranian terrorism worldwide, both independently and with foreign partners.

Israeli security agencies have thwarted dozens of terrorist plots over the past year, the official said. Cooperation with foreign governments had also proved critical, including with countries that do not necessarily maintain close political relations with Israel.

“No country wants terrorism on its territory,” he said.

“There is information, warning intelligence, preparations and alerts,” he said. “All these activities together are directed against all the mechanisms, all the organizations and all the countries.”

Israeli authorities had thwarted concrete, “hot” plots during the past year, including cases in which attacks were stopped at the highest levels of warning, the official said.

Some operations were disrupted within hours, while others took days or weeks to halt. Preventing an attack, he added, does not necessarily require striking the terrorist cell itself.

Hamas Has a Human Sacrifice Strategy

Maj. (ret.) John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point's Modern War Institute, said in a podcast on Saturday:
"Hamas has a very unique version of human sacrifice, as their goal is to actually get their people killed. They need civilian deaths to achieve their political goals." They say "they need the blood of their women, children, and elderly to achieve their goals. They said they not only want it, they need it to achieve this goal of theirs in the afterlife, martyrdom and everything. So it's a really sick political strategy."

"Even the Japanese, the Nazis, while they accepted civilian casualties, that wasn't their strategy to get their own population killed in order to achieve this political goal....It's [in Hamas's] public statements that anybody can reference that they have this human sacrifice strategy."

"There's 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza....There's 2.2 million people there. All of them could fit in their tunnels with ease and escape what's going on on the surface. But Hamas actually makes written and public statements saying these are not for the civilians and civilians are not allowed....If I go to Ukraine, where I've been many times, the civilians go into the subways to seek refuge from the bombings that are happening on the surface."

"I've seen mountains of evidence, literally fields of food and [Israeli] soldiers doing the opposite of genocide, but the world spreads it....Israel has implemented more of these civilian harm mitigation measures, trying to prevent civilians from getting hurt, like evacuations, phone calls, flyers, all of that, but also daily pauses to allow civilians to get out of harm's way, giving out maps, tracking civilians by their cell phones, not taking airstrikes. They've actually done more of these than any military has ever tried in war, but then are accused of targeting civilians when all of the evidence, real evidence, actually there's no cases of Israel targeting civilians."

"Egypt wouldn't allow the civilians out, which I've never seen in a war that I've ever studied, where one country could save thousands by just creating a humanitarian zone outside of the main combat area."

"Early in 2024, the IPC (one of the groups that would determine famine around the world) did this study of nutrition in Gaza and reported that it was nearing famine conditions because they had changed their own metrics of the number of deaths related to starvation that would equate to famine. And now that same organization provides the data showing that none of it was true. There weren't cases of death by malnutrition and starvation that would equate to the famine marker."

"Everybody thought there were just awful things [happening], despite the actual amount of food that was going in and the lack of deaths from malnutrition and starvation that were happening. Of course, now it's too late. A year later the actual data provided from Gaza [showed that] during the war [Gaza] had nutrition higher than other parts of the Middle East where there is no war. Everybody could have gone and seen the amount of food that was going in."

Dara Horn: Four days before 9/11, an ominous warning about Islamism’s growing influence emerged at the UN

The coming week will be heavy with 9/11 commemorations, which for many New Yorkers still feels like yesterday. But this week, I’ll also be remembering another event that also feels like yesterday: thousands chanting “Free, Free, Palestine!,” “Jew, Jew, Jew!,” and “Israel commits genocide!” No, I don’t mean Columbia University in 2024. I mean the UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

This now-infamous UN event, 25 years ago this week, was ideologically hijacked by a group of autocratic nations called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which commandeered the proceedings to focus exclusively on Israel — thereby averting the world’s eyes from their own crimes. The Hitler-themed posters that blanketed the UN conference in Durban were funded by the family of Osama bin Laden.

The clown show began in early 2001, when Iran, hosting the Asia region’s pre-planning conference in Tehran, barred Israeli officials and Jewish groups from attending. At their blissfully Jew-free conference, delegates from authoritarian states drafted a UN declaration naming only one country — Israel — as a racist human-rights violator. The OIC included regimes whose ideas of tolerance ranged from legalizing child rape to gassing civilians with chemical weapons. These states were delighted to sign on. Later in Geneva, the OIC proposed language for the main UN declaration about Israel committing “genocide.” (The 2001 death toll from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just under a third of that year’s homicide rate in Baltimore.)

The goal was clear to American delegate Tom Lantos, a congressman and Holocaust survivor. “If the OIC delegates could turn Israel into the new apartheid South Africa — the world’s sole racist regime — the broad agenda of the WCAR [World Conference against Racism] could be overthrown,” he later wrote.

Lantos saw that the OIC regimes’ plan was precisely to destroy the meaning of human rights. To UN human-rights commissioner Mary Robinson, Lantos argued that “allowing these same forces to appropriate terms like ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘genocide,’ and ’crimes against humanity’ to describe Israel’s behavior would forever debase their meaning.”

That is exactly what happened, except much worse.

In Durban, 20,000 protesters swarmed the conference venues, chanting “Free, free Palestine!” and carrying a banner reading “Hitler was Right.” Inside, delegates distributed copies of the century-old antisemitic screed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and cartoons of bloody-fanged Jews. Ubiquitous posters featured Hitler’s face over the text “What if I had won? There would be NO Israel.”

The wall-to-wall Jew-hate silenced dissent, literally. At one point, Jewish groups organized an emergency press conference to publicize the hatred. There, one delegate recalled, a “phalanx of Iranian women in black” rushed the podium to prevent them from speaking. By then, conference security advised Jewish delegates not to walk the few blocks to Durban’s Jewish community center; it was too dangerous.

When the NGO conference forum voted on its official Declaration and Action Plan, Jewish groups attempted to add language about antisemitic violence. With precious few exceptions, 3,600 NGOs all voted to delete it. After that, surrounded by jeering crowds, the Jewish delegates walked out — quickly, with bodyguards.

In the seventy-page Declaration voted and approved by those 3,600 NGOs, only one country on earth was named. Israel was the world’s only “racist nation,” a “colonial apartheid state” guilty of “genocide.” In a victory for regimes worldwide actually engaging in racist, colonial, apartheid, genocidal rule — and a defeat for millions suffering under their reign — no other countries were even mentioned. Al Qaeda, equally unworthy of mention, waited in the wings.

To its credit, the American delegation walked out of this clown show. “I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism and the contribution the conference could have made to it,” US Secretary of State Colin Powell said as he announced the walkout, but “I am convinced that will not be possible.”

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JD's Friend Tucker: By Any Other Name (Judean Rose)

At the September 3 White House briefing, Kerry Picket of the Washington Times asked JD Vance about his friendship with Tucker Carlson, who has called for the president’s impeachment and uses his platform to spread vile smears against the Jewish people and hateful rhetoric about Israel. Instead of disavowing that friendship—which the Jews and most of the GOP keep hoping he’ll do—he doubled down. Friendships (apparently even with despicable antisemites), the VP says, shouldn’t bend to politics.

“I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them.”

Because loyalty, Vance says, is what holds the republic together.

It sounds good: loyalty and friendships binding the nation together. But let’s run a thought experiment with the briefing transcript. Let’s qualify the kind of company this man Vance keeps and swap the name “Adolf Hitler” for “Tucker Carlson.”

Would JD’s loyalty to a friend with that name help America, or hurt it?

And if JD Vance becomes president, will his friendship with an antisemite make things better for Americans—or worse?

What do you think?

***

Kerry Picket: Vice President, Adolf Hitler has called for the president's impeachment, and many accuse him of trying to jeopardize U.S.-Israel relations. What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship with Hitler and claim that you're avoiding addressing a lot of these issues, which may be causing divisions within the GOP?

JD Vance: Well, look, I'm not avoiding addressing anything. Everybody knows that Adolf Hitler and I are friends. And I think it's very obvious that Hitler has said some things that I disagree with. He said some things about the president of the United States that I think are just wrong . . .

. . . And I remember when I became the vice presidential nominee, one of the hardest things for me personally is not when people attacked me, but when people attacked my wife, including friends of hers who knew her heart, who knew what a good person she was. And I remember thinking to myself, what a travesty it is that in the United States of America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be and not going to be. So yeah, Hitler is a friend of mine.

Hitler is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things. And I'm not going to play the game where I throw Nazi friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. And if you have a disagreement with a Nazi friend politically, even over a deeply held issue, you should still be friends with that Nazi person, because the whole republic depends on people of different perspectives being able to talk to one another.

That's how I try to live my life, and I encourage everybody else to do the same. All right. Let's -- let's go -- let's go to, um --

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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)

 

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Ben Gvir cares more about Palestinian lives than any Arab leader or NGO

Inveterate liar Mehdi Hasan writes in Zeteo:

Israel released a plan designed to encourage emigration from Gaza, aiming to see 1.9 million people leave within seven years. So… ethnic cleansing.

He linked to an AP article:

Israel releases plan to encourage emigration from Gaza

An Israeli official on Thursday released a plan designed to encourage emigration from Gaza. The proposal sets targets of 250,000 people leaving in the first year, 1.1 million within three years and nearly 1.9 million within seven years.

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said Israel would pay countries willing to receive emigrants.

Palestinians in Gaza have rejected the proposal and dismiss Israeli claims that any large-scale departures would be voluntary. Rights groups have said forcing or pressuring the Palestinians to leave could be a potential war crime.

First of all "Israel" didn't release any plan. It belongs to Itamar Ben Gvir's political party, Otzma Yehudit, which currently has 7 seats in the 120 seat Knesset, ahead of the upcoming election.

Secondly, the plan is more humane than anything any Arab country has done.

The plan, in the original Hebrew, stresses that it is voluntary.  That word is on the front page of the plan, underlined here.

The plan says "The 710 disengagement plan is intended to allow any Gaza resident who wishes to build their life elsewhere to do so legally, freely, and safely....The product of the program is not a plane ticket. The product is a regulated passage that gives Gaza residents a substantial opportunity to build their lives and the lives of their descendants in a normative manner that is consistent with the reality of the global world....The office will not convince a person to leave through pressure. It will build a reliable product for those who voluntarily leave: approved destination, complete information, personal file, travel, absorption."

In other words, the politician regarded as Israel's biggest bigot is more respectful of Gazans than any Arab country that refuses to allow Gazans who want to emigrate to do so. Ben Gvir's plan means to arrange a destination where the Palestinians can be welcomed, where they can get jobs, 

He wants to give Gazans a choice of where to live. The rest of the world - including "human rights" organizations like Amnesty and HRW - do not want them to have that choice. 

We saw this at the beginning of the war. Tens of thousands of Palestinians wanted to get out of Gaza. Thousands paid exorbitant sums to get into Egypt without any plan of how to get anywhere else. And Arab leaders refused to give them shelter, let alone citizenship. 

Does Ben Gvir have an ulterior motive? Of course he does. He wants Gaza empty so Jews can move back. But he is not even hinting at forced expulsion, at ethnic cleansing, at war crimes. He wants to give Gazans a choice that no one else is giving them. 

So who really hates Palestinians?

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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)

 

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09/05 Links: Academic Bias Shaped International Law’s Israel Consensus; Mamdani hands symbolic 9/11 pen to lawyer who represented al-Qaeda terrorist; David Draiman: Rock ‘n' Roll's disturbing hatred of Israel

From Ian:

Study: Academic Bias Shaped International Law’s Israel Consensus

On September 2, Israeli legal scholar Avraham Russell Shalev released a forthcoming paper arguing that the international legal consensus shaping many judgments about Israel has developed within an academic environment that Shalev argues systematically marginalizes Jewish and Zionist perspectives.

In his forthcoming paper From Blogs to Boycotts: Anti-Zionist Biases in Legal Academia, Shalev examines how international-law journals, conferences, professional networks and academic platforms help create the “expert consensus” later invoked by international institutions.

His central argument is not simply that individual scholars hold anti-Israel views. Rather, he argues that the infrastructure producing international-law expertise has developed institutional mechanisms that marginalize Jewish and Zionist perspectives, allowing a narrow ideological framework on Israel to become embedded as a dominant interpretation within parts of international legal discourse.

The paper examines controversies involving Opinio Juris, the Columbia Law Review, the Leiden Journal of International Law and what Shalev describes as informal “grey boycotts” against Israeli scholars.

The Battle Before the Courtroom
International legal campaigns involving Israel often rely on claims of expert consensus. Arguments about occupation, proportionality, self-defense, genocide and state responsibility frequently cite academic commentary and legal scholarship as evidence that a particular interpretation represents mainstream international law.

That influence is recognized within the international legal system itself. Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice identifies “the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations” as a subsidiary means for determining legal rules.

Shalev argues that this creates an overlooked power center: the academic institutions that determine which scholars, arguments and interpretations receive legitimacy.

When certain perspectives are excluded from journals, conferences and professional networks, he argues, the resulting consensus can become self-reinforcing and influence the legal positions adopted by international bodies.

From October 7 to the Legal Narrative
A central focus of the paper is the reaction of parts of the international-law community following Hamas’ October 7 massacre.

Shalev examines international-law blogs such as Opinio Juris, arguing that some platforms have provided space for scholars whose responses to October 7 framed Hamas’ attack through anti-colonial theory while leaving Zionist perspectives underrepresented.

One example discussed by Shalev is an October 2023 Opinio Juris post by legal scholar Mohsen al-Attar responding to an interview with Professor Noura Erakat. The discussion situated October 7 within a broader anti-colonial framework and referenced Frantz Fanon’s argument that “decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon.”

The post also included an addendum published after October 7 that continued discussing the conflict through the lens of anti-colonial struggle. Critics argued that the framing risked treating Hamas’ attack primarily as an anti-colonial event rather than confronting Hamas’ deliberate targeting of civilians and the scale of the atrocities committed during the attack.

University of Haifa legal scholar Yahli Shereshevsky later criticized elements of the response within international-law circles, arguing that some reactions reflected a failure to fully acknowledge the nature of the October 7 attacks.

For Shalev, the episode represents a broader pattern: legal discourse surrounding Israel often begins from frameworks of colonialism, oppression and state violence while placing less emphasis on Israeli security concerns, Hamas terrorism and the legal obligations of non-state armed groups.

The Institutions Defining Acceptable Debate
Shalev also examines the controversy surrounding the publication of Rabea Eghbariah’s article Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept in the Columbia Law Review.

The article became controversial after the journal acknowledged that it had been commissioned and did not undergo the journal’s standard review process.

Shalev argues that the episode reflected a broader asymmetry: arguments challenging Israel’s legitimacy often gain access to prestigious academic platforms, while scholars defending Israel or contesting dominant narratives face greater professional barriers.

The paper also discusses cases involving Israeli scholars whose submissions were rejected or altered during publication processes, including Anne Herzberg and Tal Mimran.

Shalev also examines the controversy surrounding the Leiden Journal of International Law. He argues that the journal’s decision to add a disclaimer to an article by Israeli authors after criticism on social media reflected broader concerns about the treatment of Israeli scholars publishing on Israel-related issues.

The E1 debate is not just about West Bank settlement construction - it’s about security

Twenty-nine Democratic senators have demanded that Israel halt proposed construction in the E1 area between Jerusalem and Ma’aleh Adumim, an Israeli city of 40,000 people.

E1 has long been a lightning rod for advocates of Palestinian statehood, who argue that Israeli construction would sever the Ramallah-Bethlehem corridor and destroy the contiguity of a future Palestinian state. But any viable Palestinian state would likely require tunnels, bridges, or dedicated roads to connect separated areas. Moreover, E1 lies in Area C, where Israel retains planning and zoning authority under the Oslo framework, despite international opposition.

Still, I believe building in E1 now is ill-timed. Israel’s most important ally, the United States, is already grappling with growing anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitic intimidation from the Democratic Left and the conspiratorial Tucker Carlson Right. Israel gains little by creating another unnecessary political confrontation with Washington at this time.

But Washington is asking the wrong question about E1.

The Democratic senators wrote, “The United States must remain committed to a two-state solution that delivers lasting peace and security for both the Jewish, democratic State of Israel and for a future Palestinian state.… development in E1 would seriously jeopardize the prospects for a Palestinian state.”

Their call for Israel’s security and a Palestinian state deserves more scrutiny.

Obstacles toward Palestinian state
The obstacles to Palestinian statehood did not begin with E1. They began with the Arab rejection of two states in 1948 and their subsequent refusals for a state in 1967, 2000, 2001, and 2007-08, the last offered Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank, with a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem.

Underlying those failures is a question those American policymakers too often avoid: whether Palestinian society is prepared to accept a permanent Jewish state anywhere between “the river and the sea.”

After October 7, that question can no longer be treated as theoretical.

The real E1 debate should not be whether Israelis can build homes there. It should be whether Israel could ever safely relinquish security control of this strategically critical corridor.

Highway 1 runs east from Jerusalem, past Ma’aleh Adumim and E-1, toward the Jordan Valley. It is an essential artery connecting Israel’s major population centers on the coast with its eastern frontier, and provides a vital route for rapidly moving troops, weapons, and supplies toward Israel’s longest border with Jordan.

That matters because Jordan’s long-term stability cannot be taken for granted.

The Hashemite monarchy remains an important American and Israeli security partner, but Jordan is economically fragile and faces significant demographic and Islamist ideological pressures. American and Israeli strategists must contemplate the possibility that over the coming decade Jordan could face increased Sunni Islamist influence, Iranian destabilization efforts, or serious internal disorder.

If that happens, Israel’s eastern frontier could rapidly transform from one of its quietest borders into one of its most dangerous.

During visits with Israeli military personnel and intelligence officials, I saw firsthand the concern about weapons and narcotics smuggling across Israel’s eastern frontier. Weapons entering Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, can strengthen an already formidable Hamas and other armed groups’ presence, operating only miles from Israel’s major population centers.

Today, Israel is confronting increasing tensions inside the West Bank. Israeli security officials have warned repeatedly about the potential for significant escalation.

The Netanyahu government deserves criticism for failing to adequately restrain extremist Jewish violence. Those who attack Palestinians violate Israeli law and should be prosecuted. A future Israeli government should enforce the law aggressively.

But Jewish extremism is only one part of a much larger security problem. For decades, Palestinian Authority schools, official media, and religious institutions have promoted incitement and narratives that reject any Jewish sovereignty, while the PA’s notorious “pay for slay” system has financially rewarded terrorists and their families, incentivizing violence that makes territorial compromise increasingly dangerous.

This brings us back to E1.

There are actually two separate questions that Washington has mistakenly conflated.

The first is whether Israel should build in E1 today. I believe it should not. With an election approaching, beginning construction looks more like a political gesture to the Israeli Right than an urgent security requirement.

The second question is far more consequential: Should E1 ever come under Palestinian security control? From an Israeli security perspective, the answer is no, certainly not in the foreseeable future.

Toronto Film Festival to Feature Speaker Who Called Hezbollah Attacks “Legitimate Resistance”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council’s Hollywood Bureau is bringing its Muslim House cultural hub to the Toronto International Film Festival for the first time on September 13 and 15, with MPAC President Salam Al-Marayati scheduled to interview filmmaker Bassam Tariq inside TIFF Lightbox.

Al-Marayati’s appearance comes 25 years after he suggested, during a Los Angeles radio interview on September 11, 2001, that Israel should be investigated over that day’s terrorist attacks. “I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list,” he said on KCRW’s Which Way, L.A.? The Los Angeles Times later reported the remarks.

The episode was not his first national controversy involving terrorism. Two years earlier, his appointment to a federal commission examining terrorism was withdrawn amid objections over his previous statements concerning Hamas, Hezbollah and attacks against Israel.

The Hollywood Bureau and Muslim House operate under the Muslim Public Affairs Council Foundation, a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose charitable contributions are generally tax deductible. Muslim House does not appear to be a separate nonprofit entity. MPAC describes it as a program produced by the Hollywood Bureau. “Legitimate Resistance” and the Marine Barracks Bombing

In November 1999, Al-Marayati described Hezbollah attacks against Israeli soldiers in Lebanon as “legitimate resistance” during an appearance on PBS.

That year, an MPAC counterterrorism position paper addressed the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 American servicemen. The paper said the bombing was “not in a strict sense, a terrorist operation,” instead characterizing it as a military attack against a noncivilian target. The language was later quoted in witness testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

Then-House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt had appointed Al-Marayati in June 1999 to the National Commission on Terrorism, a 10-member body tasked with reviewing U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Jewish organizations and members of Congress objected to the appointment, with critics accusing Al-Marayati of failing to unequivocally condemn Hamas and Hezbollah. Gephardt withdrew the appointment the following month amid the controversy.

MPAC’s framing of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack also drew criticism.

In a statement issued as the attack unfolded, MPAC identified Israeli “occupation” as “the source of the problem.” It said Israeli policies had created a political vacuum that allowed Hamas and other groups to gain support and “justify their violent attacks.”

MPAC has since described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide. Its archived Palestine page states, “It is a genocide.”

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09/04 Links Pt2: How Israel became the Left’s organizing target for grievance coalitions; ‘Fauda’ creator slams Mark Ruffalo as ‘rare combination’ of ‘stupid’ and ‘ignorant’; Roger Waters to headline 9/11 ‘truth’ conference at NYC

From Ian:

How Israel became the Left’s organizing target for grievance coalitions

Antisemitism is a lie used to acquire or maintain power
Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, has a new book coming out with the provocative title, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living. In it, she argues that antisemitism is not just an organizing target but an outright “lie that is used to acquire or maintain power.”

Antisemitism is particularly sticky, she says, because unlike typical bigotries, which view others as inferior, antisemites see Jews as especially powerful. Taking power away from privileged groups and giving it to marginalized ones doesn’t look like racism, Horn explains. “It looks like social justice.” The haters can then consider themselves morally righteous.

Those of us on the receiving end typically try to explain why the accusations aren’t correct.

Responding to specifics is always a bad idea, Wisse says. “Whatever you do, don’t defend. Never defend. Because the problem being articulated is not the real problem.”

If the accusation is “Israel is uniquely evil,” don’t respond with, “Look how extraordinarily virtuous we are.”

If we’re called settler-colonialists, don’t answer “Jews are indigenous.”

When we’re brushed off with the “genocide” defamation, it does no good to point out all the precautions the IDF takes.

“Once you step into that frame, you already are in the defendant’s dock of a show trial,” Horn warns.

It’s not that factual rebuttal is never appropriate. But rather than trying to demonstrate Israel’s liberal values, instead ask questions. Interrogate how “genocide” became a slogan, why the accusation has achieved such extraordinary currency, and why the Jewish state is so readily cast in this role.

'What right do they have to put Israel on the block here?'
In a 2014 video interview with Bill Kristof, Wisse insists we demand to know who the political entity is that’s “asking the question, and what right do they have to put Israel on the block here?”

“There’s so much more ignorance than malice out there,” says a surprisingly optimistic Horn, “and that is such an opportunity. This is absolutely a solvable problem. Most Americans are not fans of the hate movement. Most Americans are not interested in harassing their neighbors, vandalizing property, or pushing people out of public life.”

Horn has created an educational program for middle school students – Jewish and not – she calls the Tell Institute. “A lot of what we’re teaching is how to understand when you might be being manipulated.”

When Horn lectures on college campuses, inevitably, a student will take the microphone and scream, “Zionism is genocide.” But when Horn probes the student further, the student says, “They have nothing.”

They couldn’t tell you what Hamas would do if a “queer for Palestine” entered Gaza any more than they could identify which river and which sea animates the protesters’ chants.

“Complexity is exhausting. Moral certainty is exhilarating,” notes Nahum Kaplan on his Moral Clarity Substack. “Once everyone has been assigned a position, moral judgment becomes [simply] administrative.”

This is not a fight we can ignore, adds Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, podcaster, and creator of the app Waking Up. “When you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. [Instead], they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating.”

Halting the use of antisemitism as an organizing principle for grievance coalitions is ultimately a necessary “defense of the moral and institutional architecture that makes free societies possible,” Harris concludes.

That’s an organizing target everyone should want to get behind.

The Marwan Barghouti effect

There’s a strange collective amnesia taking hold of the cultured masses. Certain circles in Hollywood and beyond have found a new cause: Marwan Barghouti. Some stars have adopted Barghouti’s cause with a passion.

Barghouti, 66, is the new Nelson Mandela. He has been conveniently sanitized to become a saint.

Those promoting Barghouti often fail to mention that he is serving five life sentences for masterminding terrorist attacks that took the lives of four Israelis, including a woman killed at a gas station, three murdered in an attack on Tel Aviv’s Seafood Market restaurant in 2002, and a Greek monk who was mistaken for a Jew in 2001.

Barghouti is the leader of Tanzim, one of Fatah’s “military” wings, and founder of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. He was acquitted of 21 counts of murder in 33 other attacks for “lack of sufficient evidence.”

It seems the victims’ families have more reason to claim Barghouti’s trial was unfair than he does.

Multiple actors join Freedom for Marwan campaign
As several writers have noted in this paper recently, more than 20 actors who have appeared in Marvel films have joined the Freedom for Marwan campaign calling for his release. These include Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, and Tilda Swinton, among others.

According to an Instagram post last week, Barghouti’s family launched the campaign at the end of 2025 in coordination with organizations in the UK. Some 200 cultural figures had already signed a petition before the latest round of celebs voiced their support. It’s a culture war with a twist.

As Stephen Flatow noted in an opinion piece last week, the campaign isn’t new: “What’s new is the branding. Someone decided the fastest route to a younger, historically illiterate audience runs through the MCU [Marvel Cinematic Universe] fan account, not the literary supplement. It is a genuinely modern piece of message discipline, and it deserves to be examined as such rather than waved off as showbiz noise.”

Flatow’s daughter, Alisa, was murdered in a 1995 bus attack by Palestine Islamic Jihad. He notes that her name and the names of Barghouti’s victims – Salim Barakat, Yoela Chen, Eli Dahan, Yosef Habi, and Tsibouktsakis Germanus – are being erased, like their lives, while the Barghouti campaign cashes in on famous names.

“Nelson Mandela was never convicted of ordering the murder of a restaurant patron. The comparison was always doing more work than the facts could bear,” Flatow pointed out. “It is doing that work again this week, with better production values and a Marvel logo.”

I was reminded of the so-called Mandela Effect. Nelson Mandela is remembered as a human rights activist who, after years in jail under the apartheid regime, became president of South Africa. His name lives on after his death in 2013 for another strange reason – his non-death.

The term “Mandela Effect” was coined by writer and paranormal researcher Fiona Broome in 2009. She mentioned at a conference remembering Mandela’s death in jail in the 1980s and found other attendees had the same collective memory of the non-event.

I suspect Mandela might be rolling in his grave, now that he is truly dead and buried, at being constantly compared to Marwan Barghouti, a living martyr in some minds. While Mandela supported Palestinian aspirations, he called on the Arab world to accept Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist in security, and even visited the Jewish state in 1999.

‘Fauda’ creator slams Mark Ruffalo as ‘rare combination’ of ‘stupid’ and ‘ignorant’

“Fauda” co-creator Avi Issacharoff sharply criticized Mark Ruffalo’s interpretation of the Israel-Hamas war, including the Hollywood actor’s repeated claims that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

According to Variety, Issacharoff made the remarks during a panel in London. “Mark Ruffalo saying ‘Genocide, genocide.’ Then you know that there’s a kind of people that are ignorant, there are some people that are stupid. He’s a rare combination of those two,” Issacharoff said.

“I’m sorry to say that,” the Middle East analyst and producer continued. “Do you understand what it means ‘genocide’? Do you, as a lead actor in Hollywood, understand that when Israel allows every day 600 trucks of food and supply to go into Gaza, they are not intending or planning to kill the people of Palestine?”

He continued: “Do you understand if more people were born during the war in Gaza than died, so no one was trying to eliminate those people and the only ones that were trying to commit genocide were Hamas people? And that guy and many other people don’t get it.”

Issacharoff, a journalist and security affairs commentator for ynet and Yedioth Ahronoth, co-created the hit Israeli series “Fauda” with actor Lior Raz. The show’s fourth season is set to return to Netflix next week.

In recent weeks, Ruffalo has emerged as one of the most prominent opponents of the roughly $111 billion deal under which David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is set to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. The controversy intensified after Ruffalo moved beyond criticism of potential layoffs and media consolidation and directly connected the proposed acquisition to his views on Israel and the war in Gaza. In a social media post, Ruffalo accused a Jewish member of Paramount’s board of “reveling” in “genocide.”

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09/04 Links Pt1: Organisations urged to unite against antizionism; Spy boss reflects on repeated warnings before Bondi terror attack as antisemitism became ‘normalised’; Obama 'Team of Geniuses' Literally Knows Nothing

From Ian:

Organisations urged to unite against antizionism

Two of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on antizionism spoke to a packed house on Friday, August 14 in Sydney.

Visiting US academic Dr Naya Lekht, Founder of Stop Antizionism joined Movement Against Antizionism Australia (MAAZ AU) executive director Joshua Dabelstein for a panel discussion titled “United Against Antizionism” with the Zionist Council of NSW and facilitated by host and moderator Andrew Klein.

The speakers presented the history of antizionism through Soviet propaganda and pseudo-academia from the 1960s onwards. Lekht was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up hearing her parents’ stories of antizionism permeating schools, universities, workplaces, and the media. Alongside her parents’ experiences, she also carries the legacy of her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor whose younger brother was burned alive in a synagogue in Poland, and whose older brother was shot in a ghetto.

Dabelstein spoke of university indoctrination, and the allure of antizionist rhetoric, emphasising that, despite presenting as hate, that all bigotry considers itself a social justice initiative. While classically antisemitic race-based targeting of Jews has been rendered socially unacceptable for decades, the pair argued that antizionism is not only socially permissible, but fashionable. Antizionism now launders classically antisemitic tropes—tropes considered impermissible prior to the explosion of antizionism after October 7. This makes it crucial to diagnose and treat antizionism as the vehicle for today’s anti-Jewish hate.

Lekht and Dabelstein’s primary, shared contention is that antizionism stigmatises Jews worldwide through a “moral” instinct that operates distinctly to prior centuries’ religion-based or ethnicity-based anti-Jewish sentiments. Merely saying “antizionism is antisemitic” is a failed strategy, and is often contradicted by statements like, “antizionism can cross over into antisemitism.”

Their work demonstrates that antizionism’s obsession is not with Israel’s actions, but with its perceived uniquely illegitimate and evil existence. This obsession casts all who may be connected to the Jewish state as party to its malevolence. It is not a “mask” for antisemitism, and it is mutually exclusive with “political criticism”.

The speakers instructed that anti-Jewish libels and conspiracies are institutionalised through our highest intellectual and moral authorities every century. Today, the “Zionist” is seen to embody genocide, apartheid, colonialism, and infanticide.

They invited the Jewish community and organisations to prioritise further education and action on antizionism.

Ambassadors to UN in Geneva tour Oct. 7 sites in Israel

A group of ambassadors to the United Nations in Switzerland visited Israel this week on a tour of listening diplomacy intended to shore up support for Jerusalem among envoys to the world body.

Israel has long regarded the United Nations bodies based in Geneva as heavily and systematically biased against it.

The six-member delegation organized by the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem included three African ambassadors, from Ethiopia, the Gambia and Zambia, highlighting Israel’s diplomatic outreach on the continent, and envoys from Fiji, Mongolia and Panama.

“Seeing is believing,” Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva Daniel Meron, who is hosting the delegation, told JNS on Wednesday. “Our goal is to get them to be more understanding and attentive to Israel.”

The visiting ambassadors said that the five-day trip, which took them to the sites of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel as well as to tech centers, was an eye-opener.

“We have an opportunity to listen to the Israeli side that we are often not privy to,” said Professor Muhammadou M. O. Kah, the Gambian ambassador. “We gained more insight into the complexity of what is going on.”

Kah, who previously visited the Jewish state while serving as the president of the University of The Gambia in the West African Muslim country, said that he was struck on his current visit by the interaction of Jews, Muslims and Christians in Jerusalem after praying at the Al-Aqsa mosque, an image he said which was typically not projected out to the world.

“I return more convinced than ever that dialogue matters and that security and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians are inseparable goals,” he said.

A similar group of European ambassadors to the U.N. in Geneva visited Israel last year.

Tsegab Kebebew Daka, the Ethiopian ambassador on the current trip, is vice president of the Human Rights Council, which Israel has frequently denounced for double standards and an obsession with targeting the Jewish state.

Tony Blair blasts ‘fabricated’ Middle East Eye allegation that he requested removal of word ‘Palestine’ from Arab school books

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has vigorously rebutted claims he asked the Palestinian Authority (PA) to remove the name “Palestine” from school books or replace it with another term.

Blair described the allegation by Britain's former ambassador to the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock, made during a podcast for digital news platform Middle East Eye, as “a complete fabrication”.

In an interview with MEE editor in chief David Hearst, the former diplomat claimed Blair made the request when he was sent to negotiate with the PA on behalf of the President Trump’s Board of Peace.

Greenstock, ambassador to the UN between 1998 and 2003 – during Blair’s term as PM from 1997 to 2007 – said he had received the information from a “ministerial level” source.

He told Hearst: "He (Blair) recently, I understand, was asked by the Board of Peace to go to Ramallah and ask to remove from the Palestinian curriculum any mention of the word ‘Palestine’ if they were to be treated by the Board of Peace as capable of coming to an agreement with Israel to end the current conflict that had stemmed from 7 October onwards.

"President Mahmoud Abbas said he would do no such thing.”

Blair is a member of the Board of Peace’s Gaza Executive Board and joined US envoy Jared Kushner for talks with Israel's Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu about a ceasefire deal in Gaza last month.

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Oh great. Now people are claiming ancient Japanese destructive spirits are Jewish.

Variants of this stupidity are popping up all over TikTok and Instagram:

The Wikipedia article on Tengu describes a lot of characteristics of this ever evolving creature, very few of which are associated with Jews, but who cares? They found a statue!

JWire reports:

CyberWell, a digital-compliance nonprofit and trusted partner of Meta, TikTok and YouTube, has alerted major social-media platforms to an antisemitic trend that appropriates Tengu imagery from Japanese folklore to demonise Jews.

The trend, which CyberWell said has circulated online since at least 2023, has attracted renewed attention in recent weeks across Meta platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Threads, as well as TikTok and X. Posts have appeared in English, French and Farsi.

Posts commonly pair Tengu illustrations with photographs of visibly Orthodox Jews or the “Happy Merchant”, a widely recognised antisemitic caricature. CyberWell said one Instagram post received more than 40,000 likes, while an X post promoting the comparison was viewed more than 249,000 times.

CyberWell said the vast majority of posts it identified did not use the terms “Jew” or “Jewish”.

Instead, users relied on visual juxtaposition, coded references and established antisemitic imagery to convey the message—an approach that may help the content bypass moderation systems that place substantial weight on text detection.

I noticed that too. They use the pictures and stay away from the word "Jews" to avoid moderation but the commenters fill in the connection and think they are so smart for noticing that the guy wearing tefillin and a kippah is a Jew. 

I'm still not quite sure of how this is supposed to work. Did the Japanese recognize that Jews were devils? Were there Jews in Japan 1300 years ago? Why would a Jewish tengu begin as a dog, then bird, before becoming a large nosed humanoid? 

Antisemites don't need logic. Here was a chance for literal demonization of Jews, so that's the important thing.

---

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)

 

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09/03 Links Pt2: Dame Maureen Lipman: I Won't Be Bullied by Actors over My Views on Israel; What Happened to America’s Teachers?; House passes anti-BDS bill, even as most Democrats voted against it

From Ian:

Dame Maureen Lipman: I Won't Be Bullied by Actors over My Views on Israel

A young actor by the name of Gerard McCarthy has withdrawn from his role in a West End play because...I am in it, and my "views" on Israel are beyond the pale. What prompted this man to now refuse to share a stage with me for one day in "Right Before I Go" - a play meant to generate awareness about suicide and raise money for the cause?

My appearance as Evelyn Plummer in "Corrie" a few times a week does not give me a back channel to Bibi Netanyahu, despite the fact that yes, I am Jewish. So Mr. McCarthy, I challenge you to explain your rejection of the things which make our business viable and comradely. Why are you refusing to work with an 80-year-old, experienced actress (allegedly I'm a national treasure) for the benefit of young people who are struggling to find the strength and courage to go on living?

There are a lot of Jewish actors who won't speak up for Israel. They keep quiet. That is up to them. But I will not countenance juvenile, immature posturing. Why did Mr. McCarthy have to release a lengthy, moralizing statement attacking views I have "publicly and repeatedly" expressed?

I will not be bullied, nor will I allow anybody to tell me what to think. If that affects their ability to work with me, as opposed to convert me to their point of view, then they are lily livered. Mr. McCarthy could change his mind though. Let's behave as actors who believe in free speech and free thought, rather than engage in a new McCarthyism.

Exclusive: BBC Arabic ‘got it very wrong’ over Israel coverage says Lord Grade

The BBC’s former chairman Lord Grade has condemned the Arabic service for its bias against Israel, telling the JC: “They know they got it very wrong and they’ve got to put it right.”

In a frank interview, the broadcasting grandee says it is “shocking” how slow the broadcaster has been to acknowledge the well-documented long-standing problems of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias at BBC Arabic.

Speaking out on a range of contentious topics after stepping down as Ofcom chief in April, the Tory peer who was born into a celebrated Jewish showbiz dynasty has also said:
The BBC should have called the Hamas October 7 attackers terrorists;
The Corporation’s complaints system must be overhauled and was wrong to reject the claim that ‘moneybags Rothschild’ is an antisemitic phrase;
The BBC must urgently take on the findings of bias – including in Middle East coverage – exposed by Michael Prescott’s report last year;
Failures to identify the editorial flaws in a documentary which was revealed to feature the son of a Hamas minister are a “shocking indictment” of the BBC.
While chairman of Ofcom, Grade received Prescott’s report into the BBC’s editorial standards and immediately passed it to Ofcom chief executive Melanie Dawes.

Prescott, a former independent adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, catalogued allegations of bias in the news department. Among his findings were concerns about reporting on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

“I’m used to reading rants from all sides of the divide, and I expected another rant,” Grade says. “I read it, and I realised there was real substance to the criticism and the accusations contained in it.”

He wrote to BBC chairman Samir Shah seeking assurance that the board had read the report and was taking its findings seriously.

What particularly concerned him was the history of major BBC scandals being exposed from outside rather than uncovered by the corporation itself.

He points to the Martin Bashir interview with Princess Diana and the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone, which centred on a young boy who was revealed to be the son of a Hamas minister.

“We the public, the licence fee payers, would never have known about them unless outside journalists had exposed it,” he says.

“It wasn’t the BBC owning up to their mistakes. It had to be exposed by outside people, which is a shocking indictment of an organisation that calls on everybody else to be transparent and accountable and open.”

The longest section of Prescott’s report concerned the World Service’s Arabic-speaking network, BBC Arabic.

Prescott concluded that the service had attempted to “paint Israel as the aggressor” and that allegations against the Jewish state were “raced to air” without adequate editorial checks.

Grade says there had been “clear signals that there were problems in the Arab service” and criticises the BBC for being “very, very slow” to respond. “It was absolutely shocking how slow they were to acknowledge it,” he says.

Liberal leaders who protested Mahdawi’s deportation silent about his antisemitic, pro-terror posts

Both J Street and the ACLU — two groups that have previously defended Mahdawi — did not respond to requests for comment from JI on Thursday, asking if the organizations would update their statements of support in light of the newly unveiled posts. Both groups have previously stated Mahdawi is being unfairly targeted by the Trump administration over his advocacy for Gaza and Palestinian rights.

In 2025, when Mahdawi was arrested, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said the group was “outraged by the Trump Administration’s continued anti-democratic crackdown on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students in the United States, and its cynical exploitation of genuine fears of antisemitism as its pretext for doing so.”

The group encouraged people to sign a petition supporting him in late July.

Beth Jacob Synagogue, a non-denominational congregation in Vermont that co-sponsored a fundraiser last month for Mahdawi’s legal aid, also did not respond to a request for comment from JI on Thursday.

Democratic members of Congress have also rallied in support of Mahdawi, particularly Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT). Balint, who is Jewish, led close to 70 House Democrats on a letter condemning Mahdawi’s arrest, calling it “dystopian” and motivated by “statements that the Trump Administration does not agree with.”

“It is Mr. Mahdawi’s right as a legal resident of the United States to argue for what he believes in,” the letter reads. “This most fundamental of American rights is crucial to the fabric of our country, and one that America was built upon. … We profoundly oppose unlawful abductions and expect a prompt response to our questions.”

Balint, Sanders and other Democrats also held a rally in April 2025 outside the State Department, defending Mahdawi and dismissing past allegations that he had told a gun shop owner that he had made comments about killing Jews and having built weapons for terrorist groups.

Balint, Sanders, Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), who met with Mahdawi in detention, and other Democrats who have been vocally supportive of Mahdawi did not respond to requests for comment.

The Congressional Progressive Staff Association also hosted a happy hour with Mahdawi earlier this year.

“Mahdawi frequently speaks of justice. It is one of the central themes of the identity he presents to American audiences,” Collier and Feldman wrote in their report. “But justice requires something more fundamental: truth. After almost one hundred pages examining his words, his history and the stories upon which his public identity was built, that is where the problem with Mohsen Mahdawi ultimately lies.”

Although the report exposes dozens of Mahdawi’s most egregious comments, his extreme anti-Israel stance and support for terrorist groups has been public knowledge for years.

Mahdawi has been characterized by the Department of Homeland Security as a “ringleader” in anti-Israel protests at Columbia. It accused him of using “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students before graduating last year. He has not been charged with a crime.

In a “60 Minutes” interview in December 2023, Mahdawi said he could “empathize” with Hamas and its Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. “To empathize is to understand the root cause and to not look at any event or situation in a vacuum. This is for me that path moving forward,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mahdawi is scheduled to speak at a Columbia symposium next week titled The Forever War and the First Amendment. The university did not respond to a request for comment from JI.

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