Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

Tucker, Huckabee, and the Gish Gallop Storm Against the Jews

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

I wasn’t going to watch the full Carlson/Huckabee debate. The few excerpts I watched were enough to know how it went. Carlson was an attack dog, throwing out so many falsehoods so rapidly, that it was impossible for Huckabee to refute them. Huckabee was well-meaning, but Carlson was not. He was using a well-known debate technique, called the “Gish gallop,” which made it impossible for Huckabee to answer him in any meaningful way.

The term “Gish gallop” was coined by anthropologist Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, who named it after creationist Duane Gish, who used this rhetorical strategy often, during the 1980s and 90s. The Gish gallop involves overwhelming one’s opponent with a rapid-fire, relentless torrent of weak arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations, making it impossible to adequately refute each point in real-time. Scott described the Gish gallop as an uneven debate, "where the creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn't a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.”

The main goal of the Gish gallop is to create the appearance of winning by sheer volume of points rather than quality or accuracy. Today, the strategy is used to argue all sorts of things, politics, animal rights, and, in the case of Tucker Carlson, the assertion that Jews are evil creatures who commit genocide and who have no right to their indigenous territory, Israel.

The Gish gallop tactic exploits an asymmetry: Making a claim takes only seconds, but refuting a claim may take several minutes. Practically speaking, if someone throws out 10 questionable assertions in two minutes, it can take 20 minutes or more for their opponent to carefully address them. The imbalance between the two sides creates the appearance that the galloper “won” because many of their points went unanswered.

Carlson repeatedly told Huckabee that he wasn’t answering his questions, though Huckabee did his level best, explaining and explaining the facts over and over again, never losing his patience. Tucker pressed the ambassador to describe the borders of the Land of Israel, which the ambassador did over and over again. Tucker demanded that Huckabee prove that the Jews of today are the Jews of yesterday, falsely asserting that Netanyahu’s father didn’t speak Hebrew. Huckabee answered him, but Tucker kept saying he hadn’t answered him:

Tucker Carlson: [I] have two questions. What are the borders of that? And who are those people in 2025? And you’re not the first person I’ve asked, but you’re the most reasonable, most gentle, most theologically informed. So I’m really hoping for an answer.

The first question was the borders. I can’t get an answer on those borders, so I’m going to give up. But the second question is every bit as pressing — which is, who are the people? Who are the modern descendants? So we know, and I believe, and I agree with you as a Christian, that God promised this land from modern-day Iraq to modern-day Egypt to this people, the Jews — to Abram’s descendants, as it says in Genesis 15. Who are his descendants now? And how do we know who they are?

Mike Huckabee: I think they’re the Jews. And we know who they are because they’ve always been a Jewish people. There has been an unbroken line of Jewish people, and they’ve lived in this land for 3,800 years. Sometimes not very many of them, because they were chased out all over the world. They were hunted down. They were almost annihilated during the Holocaust. They came back. Tucker, they represent — you know how many Jews there are in the whole world —

Tucker Carlson: Please. I understand. First of all, the greatest genocide of Jews that no one ever mentions was by the Romans, where they were literally banned from Jerusalem for 500 years.

Mike Huckabee: Yeah, of course.

Tucker Carlson: And it’s all awful. And I’m opposed to all of that. I’m opposed to mass killing of anybody, period. I mean it.

Mike Huckabee: Yeah.

Tucker Carlson: And I hope you agree on that.

Mike Huckabee: I believe that.

Tucker Carlson: My question is — and it’s not a bumper sticker answer, it’s a sincere question — how do we know? Because what you’re saying is that certain people have a title to a highly contested region. They own it in some deep sense. So I think it’s fair to ask, who are they and how do we know?

The current prime minister’s ancestors weren’t from here within recorded history. He has no deeds. Bibi Netanyahu, on one side, has family from Poland. They’re from Eastern Europe. So how do we know that he has a connection to the people whom God promised the land to — Abram’s descendants? How do we know that?

Mike Huckabee: Well, if you take the genealogies that come not only from the Old but the New Testament, you see that there is a historical connection through the entirety of the Old and the New Testament that details the Jewish connection to this land.

Tucker Carlson: Does that include Bibi’s family? How do we know that if his family scattered? But how do we know it’s the same people? Why is that crazy? If you say to me —

Mike Huckabee: If they speak the same language, if they worship the same God, if they follow the same Bible, if they follow the same cultures and traditions — and they always pray “next year in Jerusalem,” and they pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and they pray facing toward Jerusalem — does that not give you a little bit of a clue as to who they are?

Tucker Carlson: Let’s go through those things, because I would like to have a rational — this is the conversation I’ve wanted.

Mike Huckabee: Bless you.

Tucker Carlson: Thank you for doing this. Let’s just go through those things.

Mike Huckabee: Okay.

Tucker Carlson: So one of the things I admire most about Israel is they resurrected a dead language in 1948. Good for them.

Mike Huckabee: Well, they really didn’t resurrect it — it was existent.

Tucker Carlson: That’s not — but that’s a compliment. I’m not slightly —

Mike Huckabee: No, no, no. But it is the first time in all of human history that a language has survived through this length of time. I would call it — you might not — but I would call it a miracle, one of many. That you can —

Tucker Carlson: I think it’s wonderful. As someone who loves language — Netanyahu’s parents did not speak Hebrew.

Mike Huckabee: Okay.

Tucker Carlson: They didn’t live in this region. The founders of this country were mostly secular. Some of them were avowed atheists. They were not praying for the peace of Jerusalem. They weren’t praying at all because they didn’t believe in God. There’s no genealogy linking their families to the people of this land 3,000 years ago. So how do we know — since they didn’t share a language, they didn’t share a religion, they had no religion whatsoever — how do we know that they had a right to come here from Eastern Europe and —

Mike Huckabee: But they were scattered.

Tucker Carlson: — the land.

Mike Huckabee: They were scattered to — they were scattered all over the world. There were many in Ethiopia. They were in Russia. They were in Poland. They were throughout Asia. Jews were all over the place. But they were still Jews. But they were still Jews.

Mike Huckabee answered him and answered him, but how much information does he have offhand to respond to the torrent of questions and falsehoods. For example, it’s not true that Netanyahu’s father didn’t speak Hebrew. But how would Huckabee know these details? It wasn’t a fair fight, and anyway, Huckabee wasn’t fighting. Only Carlson was fighting, or perhaps more accurately, attacking.

Anyone who has been pulled into debate with internet trolls knows how this goes. The trolls bombard you with questions and so-called facts so that you never get the chance to even try to respond to a single point. Should one manage to get a point across, the troll will respond with a torrent of word vomit—something along the lines of, “But what about this? What about that? I guess you don’t want to answer, because you know I’m right.”

Carlson is the very prototype of the troll. A particularly hateful and combative one. Who loves to spread falsehoods about the Jews, and can spew them a mile a minute. The Gish gallop is how Tucker rolls. Because he is incapable of honest debate.

The Gish gallop is a coward’s form of debate, because the tactic relies more on cognitive overload than on strong argumentation. And as I said, I wasn’t going to watch over two hours of that, but then I saw an article asserting that Tucker’s maniacal laughter is a sign of clinical mental illness. That was enough to make me want to listen to the entire agonizing two hour and 42 minute interview. I was curious—I wanted to see if the theory held water. In the end, I was very aggravated to discover that Tucker didn’t actually engage in his characteristic hyena-like laughter, which means that I basically listened to the whole thing for nothing.

Worse yet, it triggered spam from Carlson inviting me to subscribe. Feh. As if.

There’s one thing one can say about Carlson, and that’s that he has stamina. Which is the key component of the successful use of the Gish gallop. Bless Mike Huckabee for trying to refute him, but you might as well teach a waterfall to go up instead of down.

I wish Huckabee had spoken to Carlson in private—that it hadn’t become performative—a show for Carlson’s audience. But Carlson would never have given Huckabee the opportunity. Because it wouldn’t have served his need to generate clicks and views, and spreading Jew-hate is always a popular sport.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

If your understanding of Israel comes from The Guardian or the New York Times, Ali Ayoub shouldn't exist.

Ayoub is an Nvidia VP of software engineering in Israel, with hundreds of people working under him worldwide. He earned his degree at the Technion, worked at an Israeli tech company Mellanox, moved to the US to work at Google, founded a startup, move back to Israel and Mellanox which was acquired by Nvidia.

In other words, he is a fantastic Israeli high tech success story, similar to many others but now one of the most powerful tech executives in Israel.

He is also an Arab, born and raised in the Galilee village of Majd al-Krum.

While Ayoub is happy to discuss his upbringing and the importance of Arabs in the Israeli tech sector, there is something missing from the coverage of one of the highest profile Israelis in AI.

Criticism.

If Israeli Jews are the Jewish supremacists and anti-Arab bigots like we are constantly told, shouldn't there be some racist articles about him? On the contrary, the Hebrew media treats him as another Israeli success story, exactly as they treat Jews who succeed in technology.

Yet at the Technion, the percentage of engineering students who are Arab is the same as the general population who are Arab. Ayoub may be somewhat unusual but hardly unique - Johny Srouji, Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies at Apple, is also an Israeli Arab. .

I'm sure that they ad challenges that Israeli Jews do not have to achieve success. But those challenges didn't doom them to permanent status as oppressed individuals who cannot possibly succeed, which is the way that the progressive crowd looks at minorities - helpless and hopeless.

America and Israel share the same DNA - if you work hard you can succeed, no matter who you are. The Leftists say this is a myth. Perhaps to an extent it is. But myths are powerful. They point to the world we want to live in, not the world that we are in now.

The problem is that the progressive crowd sees the myth not as a noble goal but as an attack on their worldview. They support policies that entrench the permanent second class status that they claim to oppose, to validate their ideology rather than try to fix the real problems of minorities having to work harder to succeed.

Ali Ayoub is proof that the binary of oppressor/oppressed, white/Black, Jewish/Arab is the real myth. And the most remarkable thing about him is that his success, like that of other Arabs who thrive in Israel, is not considered anomalous in Israel itself. It is accepted not as exceptional but as the way things must be. The predominant Israeli response to seeing an Arab Israeli reach the top tier of a global tech powerhouse is not anger at one of "them" - but pride at one of "us."

Which is the real story about how Israeli Jews think, not how the media wants to pretend Israeli Jews think.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

I have not written about philosophy here recently because I have been deep in the weeds of my Derechology project, trying to turn my thinking into an actual book. The deeper I get into it, the more I find my arguments demanding sharper foundations. So early in the book I find myself doing something that feels almost embarrassingly basic: asking what truth actually is.

My position is that truth is real but that humans cannot access it completely through reason alone, though we can approach it. In other words, I am trying to prove that we cannot prove anything.

Yes, I hear the circularity. Stay with me.

The most obviously true statement I can think of is 1+1=2. Everyone agrees on it. Children learn it before they can read. It is the foundation of every calculation ever made. If anything is provably true, surely this is.

But is it?

Within mathematics, arithmetic rests on a foundation of axioms, starting points that are simply asserted rather than derived from anything more fundamental. Every system has to start somewhere, and mathematics starts here. Within that axiomatic system, 1+1=2 can be proven with perfect rigor. But the axioms themselves are not proven. They are chosen because they are useful and because the system they generate is internally consistent. The proof of 1+1=2 is only as solid as the unprovable assertions underneath it.

It gets stranger. Even within mathematics, 1+1 does not always equal 2. In arithmetic modulo 2, where numbers wrap around when reaching 2, 1+1=0. This is not a curiosity: it is the mathematical foundation of every computer ever built. It is a perfectly consistent system that describes real phenomena accurately.

And if you imagine a planet where two objects placed together always produce a third, the mathematics of that planet is not as fanciful as it sounds. Abstract algebra, a standard branch of mathematics, gives us a completely rigorous framework called an isomorphic field where you can create a system where 1+1=3. Define addition as a⊕b = a+b+1 and adjust multiplication accordingly, and every rule of arithmetic you learned in school still holds perfectly: commutativity, associativity, distributivity, all of it. The system is internally coherent in exactly the same sense that standard arithmetic is. The only surprise is that in this system the conceptual zero, the number that leaves everything unchanged when you add it, turns out to be -1 rather than 0. The whole structure shifts, consistently, and keeps working.

This is not a mathematical party trick. It demonstrates something fundamental: consistency does not pick out a unique truth. You can build multiple, mutually inconsistent arithmetic systems that are each internally valid. Standard arithmetic is not the one true math because it is the only consistent option. It is the one we use because it maps most conveniently onto the physical world as we ordinarily experience it. The choice was always pragmatic, not absolute.

But, you might reasonably say, mathematics is abstract. Out here in the physical world, if I add one marble to another marble I have two marbles. That is not an axiom. That is just what I can see with my own eyes.

Is it?

Consider what we are actually assuming when we count two marbles. We are assuming that a marble is a discrete object with a stable identity, that it neither combines with nor subdivides from other objects when we are not watching, that “adding” means placing in proximity without any interaction that changes the objects, and that we are counting objects rather than, say, colors or masses. These are all reasonable assumptions. They are also all hidden.

Start making them visible and the arithmetic gets complicated fast.

One blue marble plus one red marble is two marbles. But it is also still one blue and one red. Which answer you give depends on what property you decided to count before you started.

One marble plus one car is two objects. But you are sitting in the car, and the car is sitting on the road, and the road is resting on the earth. If we are counting objects in the scene, why do the car and the marble count but not the road? Because you drew a boundary around the system before you started counting, and that boundary is a choice, not a discovery.

One marble plus one car with your adorable five-year-old as a recent passenger is two objects plus however many marbles are wedged between the cushions, plus the candies he stashed in the cupholder, plus the air freshener, plus the brake lights. If we are counting all the objects in the system, where does the system end? When you said “one marble plus one car equals two,” you had already smuggled in a decision about which objects count. The arithmetic came after the philosophy, not before it.

One water droplet plus one water droplet is one larger water droplet. The arithmetic simply does not apply because the objects do not maintain their identity through the operation. The hidden assumption that objects stay discrete was doing all the work.

And one rabbit plus one rabbit, given a few months and a suitable habitat, may be much more than two rabbits. The arithmetic was never wrong, exactly. It just pretended that objects are static snapshots rather than ongoing processes, which real physical objects never actually are. Every object is a river, not a rock, and 1+1=2 works by freezing the river long enough to count it. One biodegradable cup plus one Styrofoam cup plus time equals one cup.

In every case, the apparent certainty of 1+1=2 dissolved when we examined the assumptions holding it in place. None of those assumptions are unreasonable. Most of them are exactly right for most purposes. But they are assumptions, not foundations. The proof was always conditional on choices we made before we started counting.

And if this is true of 1+1=2, the most obvious truth imaginable, it is surely true of every other claim anyone has ever made.

This is not itself proof that nothing is provable, or I would be contradicting my own argument. But it is a strong indication that absolute truth is normally inaccessible to humans through reason alone. We reason within frameworks. Every framework rests on axioms. No axiom is self-proving. The turtles do not go all the way down. At some point there is just water.

This should be paralyzing but it is not, because we already know how to live with it.

1+1=2 is true enough to build space stations. Newtonian physics is false in the sense that Einstein corrected it, but it is true enough to design train schedules without worrying about relativistic effects. The question is never whether a framework gives you absolute certainty. The question is whether it gives you adequate accuracy for the domain and the stakes involved. We build on good-enough foundations because we have no other kind.

This matters for a lot more than mathematics. A significant strand of Western philosophy, going back to the Greeks, is built on the assumption that human reason can access complete truth directly, that by thinking hard enough and carefully enough we can arrive at foundations that need no further support. If that assumption is wrong, then everything built on it needs reexamination. Our epistemology, our ethics, our political theory, our institutional design: all of it looks different once you accept that the foundations are chosen rather than discovered, adequate rather than certain.

Here is the consequence I find most interesting, and the one I will develop in the next piece.

If we cannot know absolute truth, then the trivial definition of falsehood as “not truth” becomes unintelligible. We do not have a fixed point to measure distance from. This means we need a separate epistemology of falsehood, a way of identifying and eliminating the false that does not depend on first establishing the true.

It turns out that while truth is not provable, falsehood often is. And building that epistemology of falsehood is something I have been doing, without quite realizing it, for the past two decades, in the very different context of debunking lies about Israel. The tools turn out to be the same.

02/24 Links Pt2: The world no longer feels sorry for Jews. Now what?; Australia opens Sydney terror inquiry; Corbyn accused of ‘wild blood libel’ after claiming Israel harvesting Gazan organs

From Ian:

The world no longer feels sorry for Jews. Now what?

An overreliance on Holocaust-centered narratives can unintentionally produce what might be called museum Judaism: a Jewish identity organized primarily around remembrance of destruction rather than experience of vitality. A culture defined chiefly by what was lost risks appearing static, even mournful, to younger generations seeking meaning in living traditions.

If Israel is taught primarily as a response to catastrophe, it can come to feel like a historical artifact rather than a living civilizational project. A Judaism organized around death will struggle to compete with cultures organized around life. This does not diminish the centrality of Holocaust memory; it underscores the need to embed that memory within a broader narrative of continuity and renewal.

The Jewish claim to sovereignty does not begin in 1933 and does not depend exclusively on 1945. It stretches back through millennia of continuous identity, attachment to land, liturgy, language, and collective memory.

Zionism was not invented as a reaction to Hitler; it was accelerated by him. To ground Jewish attachment to Israel primarily in 20th-century catastrophe is to truncate a much longer story of peoplehood and purpose. If Israel is understood only as a shelter from persecution, its moral standing appears contingent on Jewish weakness. Yet Zionism at its core is not a plea for safety; it is an assertion of normalcy, of the right of the Jewish People to exercise self-determination in our ancestral homeland. That right does not expire when Jews are strong.

A generation raised to see itself primarily as history’s victim may struggle to see itself as history’s author. When educational frameworks emphasize fragility without agency, they can produce defensive identities oriented toward seeking approval rather than exercising responsibility. The post-Holocaust sympathy world allowed many Jews to assume that understanding Jewish suffering would naturally produce support for Jewish sovereignty.

That assumption no longer holds.

In much of today’s pop culture, perceived power (not history) often determines perceived legitimacy. An Israel that is strong, armed, and assertive will not automatically inherit the moral credit of Jewish victimhood. If Jewish education does not adjust to this reality, it risks preparing students for a world that no longer exists.

This adjustment does not require abandoning Holocaust education; it requires repositioning it within a larger civilizational narrative. The task is to integrate it with meaning. Israel must be taught not only as refuge but as arena: the place where Jewish civilization unfolds in modern form — Hebrew revived as a living language, ancient holidays reborn in public space, ethical traditions translated into the dilemmas of governance, technological and cultural creativity flourishing in a Jewish context. These are not footnotes to catastrophe but expressions of continuity; they represent the positive content of sovereignty.

In a post-sympathy world, Jewish education must mature from a pedagogy of trauma to a pedagogy of covenant and responsibility.

Jewish students must be prepared to engage in self-defense — verbal, social, even physical — rather than shielded from it. They must understand the historical and ethical foundations of Jewish sovereignty without relying solely on the emotional authority of past suffering. They must see themselves not as passive inheritors of tragedy, but as active participants in an ongoing civilizational story. Jewish students must be taught that Jewish particularism is a source of pride, not an apology to make or a permission slip to request from others.

This requires cultivating and renewing civilizational literacy, cultural fluency, and a sense of shared stake in the future of Jewish life.

The post-Holocaust sympathy world represented a rare alignment between global conscience and Jewish necessity. That alignment cannot be assumed in the present or relied upon in the future. As memory recedes and geopolitical perceptions shift, the foundation of Jewish attachment to Israel must rest less on the tears of others and more on the internal coherence of Jewish history and purpose. Sympathy fades. Sovereignty endures.

The challenge for Jewish education now is to ensure that a new generation understands Israel not because the world once pitied the Jews, but because they recognize themselves as heirs to an unbroken national story whose next chapters they are responsible for writing.

With J Street backing, 26 Democrats introduce legislation to impose wide-ranging conditions on aid to Israel

Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) and 25 Democratic co-sponsors introduced a bill on Monday that would implement wide-ranging new conditions and restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel.

The Ceasefire Compliance Act would require the administration to assess and report to Congress every 90 days on whether Israel is complying with the October 2025 ceasefire agreement in Gaza, including halting military operations and bombing campaigns.

The legislation does not appear to contain exceptions for the strikes Israel has taken in retaliation for Hamas’ own violations of the ceasefire deal, nor mention its targeting of individual Hamas leaders.

Under the terms of the legislation, if Israel does not meet the conditions included in the law, the U.S. would be banned from selling or transferring any U.S. military systems to Israel for use in Gaza or the West Bank, any further transfers would be subject to a specific agreement by Israel that the weapons would not be used in Gaza or the West Bank and the administration would be required to reach an agreement with Israel that U.S.-origin systems already in Israel’s possession would also be banned from use in Gaza or the West Bank.

Those restrictions would remain in effect until Israel is in compliance with all conditions. The legislation establishes an end-use monitoring group within the administration to monitor whether U.S.-provided systems are in use in Gaza or the West Bank.

The legislation includes language guaranteeing that U.S. defensive assistance to and intelligence sharing with Israel, as well as provision of missile-defense systems to Israel, are exempt from the conditions. The bill would sunset after five years.

Nick Cave: The Red Hand Files

Q: At the International Film Festival in Berlin, jury president Wim Wenders sparked controversy, stating that art and artists are “the counterweight to politics, we are the opposite of politics.” He said, artists “have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.” Any thoughts on this?

A: Dear Rainer,
I have known Wim for over forty years, and his response to the question at the Berlinale moved me deeply. It reaffirmed my understanding of him as a passionately principled, thoughtful, and courageous man — a person who cares profoundly about film and the state of the creative world. His words were a caring, gentle, and protective gesture, directed not only at the artistic community but at humanity itself, and despite the predictable pile-on, I suspect that many artists, maybe most, will genuinely appreciate his words.

Of course, I can’t speak for Wim, but perhaps, like me, he laments the state of art as it has unfolded into this present moment. Perhaps, as the president of the Berlinale Jury, he despairs over the fate that has befallen other film and literary events. The furore around the Adelaide Writers’ Week was happening while I was on tour in Australia. In an almost cosmic display of stupidity, that entire event was vaporised in a mushroom cloud of cowardice, performative outrage, self-righteous posturing, cancellations, counter-cancellations, mob trots and general narcissistic silliness. ‘Political art’, taken to its extreme, became ‘no art’. No art at all, as Australia’s longest running literary festival collapsed under a mass walkout.

Perhaps Wim is trying to save the Berlinale from succumbing to the fate of those festivals that have become little more than a narrowing of the cultural imagination, where the concept of an arts festival as a space for free-ranging and diverse ideas, a place of vitality and originality that encourages disagreement and good faith debate, is being sucked down the sinkhole of a single monolithic ideology — one voice, one cause, one dissent.

02/24 Links Pt1: New Palestinian constitution slams door on Mideast peace; Trump's Churchill Moment on Iran; PLO: Hamas ‘not a terror organization’, slams US demands to disarm

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: How Anti-Zionists’ Knowledge Deficit Shapes the Gaza Debate

Buried deep within a Haaretz article about the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator is an implicit threat of moral blackmail that explains much of the anti-Israel discourse today.

The article is a hit piece on Katharina von Schnurbein, the head of the EU’s office of the European Coordinator for Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life. Von Schnurbein is the rare EU official who stands again the otherwise nonstop flood of single-minded Israel condemnation from the union’s officials. Haaretz, and the sources who spoke to the paper for the piece, are putting a bureaucratic target on her back in the hopes that she will be reined in.

Von Schnurbein knows that certain criticism of Israel, even when it ostensibly addresses policy, can bleed into anti-Semitic tropes or collective blame. She is therefore a moderating force, but the EU establishment (and Haaretz, apparently) sees her as a threat. Supra-national bodies like the EU and UN thought they had figured out a clever way to lob blood libels at the Jewish state without taking responsibility for them: They would support a network of NGOs and pressure groups who would claim expertise and let those groups, behind a veneer of objectivity, make the harshest accusations.

Von Schnurbein undermines this system of criticism-by-catspaw. And former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell used the Haaretz article to make that clear:

“In an interview with Haaretz, Borrell warned over ‘inflationary misuse’ of accusations of antisemitism against Israel’s critics.

“The Catalonian former chief EU diplomat added that labeling the institutions mandated to uphold international law — including the UN, the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice — as ‘antisemitic’ implies that, by opposing crimes against humanity, you oppose Jews. ‘That is playing into the hands of Jew-haters,’ he says.”

And that’s the scam underlying the entire narrative of the Gaza war: Jews cannot defend themselves against spurious accusations of blood-lust because then they’ll be confirming for the world that “Jews” and “crimes against humanity” are synonymous. You see, even in trying to bat away claims of anti-Semitism, these officials cannot help but express anti-Semitic tropes.

This is called blackmail. Jews must either accept the libelous denunciations of those who seek their destruction or they will trigger an escalating campaign of libelous denunciations.

New Palestinian constitution slams door on Mideast peace

The Palestinian Authority’s recent draft of a shiny new constitution is meant to mollify Western nations who demand an end to the P.A.’s obsession with killing Jews and destroying the Jewish state. But anyone who’s ever uttered the words “Middle East peace” will surely be disappointed with the make-over.

Apparently, the Palestinians can’t help themselves: Their new constitution simply recommits them to the same old jihad they’ve waged for 78 years against Israel. Indeed, the Palestinians’ new document issues no call for peacemaking with Israel—in fact, it doesn’t mention Jews or Israel at all.

This constitution is more like a declaration of war, reaffirming four belligerent policies that have blocked “two states for two peoples” for decades:

1) Insistence on the fictional “right of return” to Israel of millions of refugee descendants who have never set foot in Israel.
2) Continuation of the Palestinians’ terrorist incentive program—“pay for slay”—that handsomely rewards murderers of innocent Jews;
3) Declaration of Jerusalem as the Palestinians’ eternal capital, though it has never been the capital of a Palestinian nation, nor even a Muslim or Arab capital; and
4) Uninterrupted support for [armed] “resistance” against [Israeli] “occupation” of the Palestinian “homeland,” which mentions no sharing of territory with Israel or the Jewish people.

While the new constitution does make promises about introducing some civil liberties for Palestinians, these sops to liberality are like decorative icing on a rotten cake, nullified by the constitution’s commitment to Islamic supremacy.

If the Palestinians really want acceptance from Israel, the United States and the rest of the Western world, they will need to reform—throwing out and thoroughly condemning the goals and policies that deny every possibility for peace with their Jewish neighbors. This means affirming reality by renouncing the “right of return,” acknowledging 3,000 years of Jewish history and heritage in the land of Israel, accepting the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their indigenous homeland and renouncing terrorism.

Unfortunately, given new Middle East poll results showing that 91% of Palestinians oppose recognition of Israel, any constitution that approves peaceful relations with the Jewish state will face tough Arab opposition.

PLO secretary-general says Hamas ‘not a terror organization’, slams US demands to disarm

Azzam al-Ahmad, the secretary-general of Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organization, on Monday declared that the PLO opposes the disarmament of Hamas, which he said was “not a terror organization.”

In an interview with Egypt’s Al Shorouk newspaper, al-Ahmad slammed U.S. demands that the terrorist organization that led the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre disarm and cede its power in Gaza.

“They don’t want Hamas to have any role in the Strip,” explained the veteran official in Abbas’s Fatah Party, adding: “We completely reject this, because Hamas is part of the Palestinian national movement.”

Though Hamas has “not yet” joined the PLO, the body has held a “continuous national dialogue with them in order to fulfill the requirements for their entry into the organization,” he said.

The PLO, recognized worldwide as the representative of the Palestinian people, sets overall policy through its Executive Committee, headed by al-Ahmad. It also appoints the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, which administers limited self-rule in parts of Judea and Samaria.

Al-Ahmad stressed Monday that the PLO has “always rejected decisions issued by international institutions or governments to classify [Hamas] as a terror organization, as they are part of the Palestinian national fabric.”

“Everything that is said about disarming Hamas and that it is a terrorist group is rejected by us; Hamas is not a terror organization,” he added.

Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre was a “strategic mistake that inflicted immense damage on Gaza, and we paid a heavy price,” he emphasized.

A Peer-Reviewed Blueprint for Teaching Children to Hate Jews

A newly published paper in a peer-reviewed academic journal demands that all US educators teach their students to hate Jews as their primary goal.

I am not exaggerating.

"Do Palestinian Lives Matter in Teacher Education? Centering an Anti-Zionist Commitment in (Early Childhood) Teacher Education," by Lilly Padía of the Erikson Institute, published in Critical Education (Vol. 17, No. 1, 2026), makes two interlocking demands. First, that all teachers — especially those working with the youngest children — must commit to anti-Zionism as a precondition of legitimate teaching. Second, that they must train their students to understand their world primarily through the lens of powerful people crushing the helpless.

Who are these powerful people? The paper is explicit:

"Universities and institutions of higher education are often beholden to local, state, and national politicians, political interests, and funders with certain political interests. Often funders with a great deal of power and influence encourage university administrators to engage in compulsory Zionism by making statements condemning antisemitism whilst ignoring campus-based violence driven by Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism..."

Read that again. Jewish donors — "funders with certain political interests" — are secretly controlling university administrators, forcing them to protect Jews from criticism under the guise of fighting antisemitism. This is an antisemitic conspiracy theory published in a peer-reviewed academic paper being disseminated to teacher educators across the United States.

This is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with a faculty appointment.

And this is not incidental to the paper. It is the paper's engine. Because once you establish that Jews — excuse me, "powerful Zionist funders" — are the hidden power pulling institutional strings, then you have justified teaching children that Jewish power, Jewish funders, and Jewish influence is the enemy of justice. Starting in preschool.

That is not teaching children to love Palestine. The paper's subtitle makes it clear that the focus is not to support Palestinians but to center anti-Zionism in teacher education as the ultimate example of evil driven by power. That is teaching children to fear and hate Jews. The distinction matters, and the paper erases it deliberately.

Before dissecting the apparatus, we should let Padía state her own purpose. Buried in the paper's recommendations for teacher educators is a sentence that renders everything else unnecessary:

"The point of this turn is not to share 'balanced' views, but to unearth and help teacher candidates understand how power and oppression operate in interconnected ways, support them in their understanding of anti-Zionism in the context of anti-racist, anti-oppressive teaching and learning, and how to teach about systems of power and interconnected struggles for justice to (young) children."

There it is. The explicit, stated, unapologetic goal is not truth, not balance, not critical thinking, not even education in any recognizable sense. It is to instill a specific ideological framework — anti-Zionism embedded in a power/oppression worldview — in young children through the teachers trained under this program. Any semblance of balance or competing perspectives is dismissed as part of the problem.

Her goal is to brainwash young children.

Everything that follows in this analysis flows from that single sentence.

Padía presents what she calls "Pedagogical Integrity" — illustrated with this Venn diagram:

On one side: "Curiosity." On the other: "Conviction." The curiosity side contains two vague open questions: "What are the systems at play?" and "Who are my students and what are their identities?" The conviction side contains four fully pre-loaded political conclusions stated as facts: that Palestine deserves to be free, that Zionism is built on violent dispossession, that Jewish identity requires opposing Zionism, and that Palestine must be centered in teacher education.

The overlap — the alleged intersection of curiosity and conviction, the place where "pedagogical integrity" supposedly lives — contains exactly one thing: "Anti-Zionist turns in teacher education."

This is not a pedagogy. It is a funnel. Curiosity is the on-ramp. Conviction is the destination. The only permitted question is not whether Zionism is evil but how best to teach children that it is.

Padía argues explicitly that authentic Jewish identity requires anti-Zionism — that her own Jewishness is most fully expressed when she is, in her words, "dismantling the Zionist entity." She presents this position, held by a small minority of Jews worldwide, as the authentic Jewish moral voice. The Jewish student in her class who expressed discomfort with pro-Palestinian protest chants was not engaged with the curiosity her framework claims to prize. He was corrected. His concern was treated as something to overcome, a misconception to be resolved through proper instruction.

Jewish children in classrooms run by teachers trained under this framework will be taught that their families are wrong about their own identity. That their connection to Israel — religious, historical, cultural, familial — is not heritage but complicity. That the Judaism they were raised in is a tool of colonial oppression. That the real Jews, the morally legitimate Jews, are the ones who oppose Jewish self-determination.

This is not liberation pedagogy. It is the substitution of one coercive identity narrative for another, performed by someone who claims to be dismantling coercive identity narratives. It tells Jewish children: your people's understanding of your own heritage is illegitimate. Your grandparents' relationship to Israel is part of the power structure that you should be dismantling. The teacher in front of you has determined what being Jewish actually means — and your family got it wrong.

We have seen this move before. It has never ended well for Jews.

A genuine pedagogy of curiosity would have no pre-loaded conclusions in either circle. The fact that Padía's does — and that she published it apparently without awareness of what it reveals — tells you everything about the intellectual honesty of this enterprise.

The paper's very name for this framework — "pedagogical integrity" — is Orwellian. Integrity normally implies honesty, openness, fidelity to truth wherever it leads. Here it means ideological fidelity. It means having the courage of your pre-loaded conclusions. The name itself is propaganda.

There is a particular obscenity at the center of this paper that is worth isolating. Padía's framework rests on the claim that power is the fundamental axis of moral reality. Powerful people oppress powerless people. The powerless must be liberated. Teachers must help children identify who holds power and who is crushed by it.

Now consider who is the most powerful figure in a young child's life outside their parents. It is their teacher. Children cannot fact-check their teacher. They cannot resist their teacher's framing of reality. They cannot detect ideological loading in the vocabulary of love and justice and liberation. The teacher is, to a six-year-old, an authority as absolute and as trusted as gravity.

Padía knows this. Her entire paper depends on it. She says explicitly that teacher educators shape "the political imagination of the next generation." She is not unaware of the power she holds over young minds. She is banking on it.

And yet the content of what she wants transmitted through that unchallengeable authority is: powerful people are your enemy.

She wants to use total power over a child's developing mind to teach that child to fear power. She wants to exploit the most asymmetric power relationship in civilian life — credentialed adult authority over a trusting child who cannot yet read chapter books — to install suspicion of powerful people. Specifically, as we have seen, Jewish powerful people.

This is psychological projection in the clinical sense. She is doing to children exactly what she accuses "Zionist funders" of doing to universities — using institutional power to determine what thoughts are permissible. Except her targets are six years old who are the most powerless humans on the planet.

Education has one foundational purpose that distinguishes it from propaganda: it gives children the tools to eventually evaluate what their teachers told them. A real education plants the seeds of its own questioning. It hands children the instruments of their own intellectual liberation. What Padía proposes is the precise opposite. She wants to install conclusions so early, so authoritatively, and so emotionally — wrapped in the language of love, justice, and liberation — that they become part of the child's identity before the child has the cognitive capacity to examine them. By the time that child is old enough to think critically, the hatred will feel like conscience. The indoctrination will feel like awakening. The prejudice will feel like justice.

That is not education perverted. That is education destroyed and replaced with its photographic negative.

The power/powerless framework that runs through this paper presents itself as a tool for liberation. It is actually a trap — and this paper is the trap springing.

The world is not divided into the powerful and the powerless. Power is not a fixed substance held by permanent oppressors and permanently denied to permanent victims. It is dynamic, contextual, distributed, and transferable. People move between positions of power and vulnerability constantly, often simultaneously. The binary framework cannot tolerate this complexity because it is not actually a tool of analysis. It is a tool of mobilization. It sorts the world into heroes and villains, assigns permanent moral status to each, and then justifies whatever the heroes do as liberation and whatever the villains do as oppression — by definition, regardless of the specific action.

The result is visible throughout this paper. Padía holds extraordinary institutional power over her teacher candidates. She uses it to pre-load their conclusions, override their disagreements, work around the wishes of parents, and install a political identity in the children those candidates will teach. When a Jewish student pushes back, he is corrected. When a Palestinian mother asks for her child to be protected from political content, she is worked around. When a conference chair asks Padía to keep her presentation focused on her actual research topic and not to smuggle in anti-Zionist slides in a talk about bilingual education, it becomes an act of "compulsory Zionism" oppression.

Padia is guilty of what she accuses the "powerful" of doing. And this is clear from her own words.

This explains something that puzzles observers who watch anticolonial and "anti-oppression" movements metastasize into the very thing they claimed to oppose. It is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is the logical endpoint of the binary framework. If power is the problem, and you have defined yourself as outside power, then when you acquire power you cannot see it. Your framework has no instrument for detecting it. So you use it — on the most vulnerable people available, in this case children — while your theory assures you that you cannot possibly be doing what you are doing.

If Padía's goal were genuinely to teach children about suffering, power, displacement, and injustice, the curriculum she proposed would be broad. She might include the Uyghur cultural genocide — an ongoing campaign of mass incarceration, forced sterilization, and cultural erasure affecting over a million people. She might include the famine in the Sahel, North Korean prison camps, the Rohingya ethnic cleansing, the Iranian government's systematic murder of protesters who want to overthrow their own oppressive power.

None of these appear in this paper. None are proposed for early childhood curricula. The author does not argue that children should learn about suffering generally, or that a power-analysis lens should be applied to multiple conflicts. She argues that this specific conflict requires an ideological commitment as a precondition for teaching, that this specific conflict must be named in every lesson, every conference presentation, every syllabus.

This is not concern for children's education. It is a pathology of hate against nearly all of the committed Jews on the planet, a hate that Padia insists must be the central lesson to be taught to young children, as obligatory as reading or arithmetic.

Critical Education is a journal whose stated purpose is challenging the imposition of dominant ideological frameworks on students. It has just published a paper explicitly calling for the imposition of an ideological framework on students — on the youngest and most defenseless students — through the systematic training of an entire generation of teachers.

The contradiction is not incidental. It reflects a captured field. "Critical" in this context no longer means epistemically rigorous. It means politically aligned with a predetermined set of conclusions. In this captured field, the question is never whether to indoctrinate. It is only whose indoctrination counts as liberation.

The answer, in this paper and increasingly across this field, is the indoctrination that teaches children that Jews who support Jewish self-determination are the enemy.

This paper will be assigned in education courses. It will be cited in tenure dossiers. It will shape the pedagogy of teachers who will stand in front of children who trust them absolutely. It presents as a framework for humanization a program that is, in its bones, a mechanism for producing the next generation of people who have been carefully taught that Jewish power is the enemy of justice.

That this is considered normal academic discourse is not merely an outrage about one paper. It is a symptom of a field that has lost the thread of its own stated purpose — and the children, as always, will pay for it.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Axios reported Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon for what a senior Defense official described as a "sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting." The reason for the pressure is that Anthropic's Claude is the only Ai model approved for use at the Department of War, but it has refused to lift its ethical safeguards in ways the Pentagon demands.

The Pentagon wants what it calls access for "all lawful uses." Anthropic is willing to loosen restrictions but insists on maintaining two red lines: no mass surveillance of American citizens, and no weapons systems that fire without human involvement. The Pentagon has threatened to declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," which would not only void its contracts but effectively blacklist Anthropic technology from any workflow touching the Defense Department.

The framing on both sides is wrong. The repercussions of getting this wrong will impact using AI in governments for decades to come. How we frame this dispute will determine whether we get to a principled resolution or a dangerous one.

The Pentagon's demand for access to "all lawful uses" sounds reasonable until you realize what it actually means. It means the Pentagon wants the moral ceiling to be whatever Congress has authorized and courts have not yet struck down. But legal does not mean moral.

AI is too important a technology to simply treat it as if it is morally neutral like a hammer. It can make decisions, and those decisions affect human lives. when AI is incorporated autonomously in weapons systems, for example, humans lose all responsibility for murder. That may be technically legal but it is far from ethical.

An AI system designed to operate at the ceiling of current legality will, by design, operate right at the edge of whatever political winds currently allow — with no buffer, no friction, no institutional conscience. Legality is a floor, not a ceiling, and treating it as the latter is precisely how institutions drift into abuses that future generations will look back on with horror.

The Pentagon is also being strategically shortsighted. If its own argument is that Anthropic's constraints are "unduly restrictive," the burden is on the Pentagon to specify what legitimate operational need those constraints prevent. "All lawful uses" is not a specification. It is a power grab dressed in procedural language.

Anthropic's position is not wrong, but it is incomplete in a way that is making the problem worse.

"We refuse to enable mass surveillance of Americans" is a principled stance. But if that is the entirety of the position, it creates an operational nightmare for legitimate defense use, and it invites exactly the kind of frustration the Pentagon is expressing. A vendor-by-vendor permission slip regime for individual use cases does not scale across a military enterprise. That is a real problem.

The deeper issue is this: Anthropic's safeguards are largely in implementation — in deployment constraints, operator agreements, and policy guardrails — not deeply baked into the model itself. That means they are, to a significant degree, negotiable under sufficient pressure, bypassable through clever system design, and vulnerable to erosion over time. A red line that only holds when the other party respects it is not a red line. It is a preference.

And there is a strategic problem Anthropic cannot ignore: if it says no without offering a workable alternative, the Pentagon will rationally accelerate its search for replacements. These might include open source models, or even foreign-trained models with no safeguards whatsoever. The very outcome Anthropic is trying to prevent becomes more likely the more inflexible it is in negotiation.

Underneath this dispute is a question neither side is addressing directly: what is the appropriate institutional architecture for governing AI in national security contexts?

This is not primarily an AI ethics question. It is a governance question. And the answer cannot come from Anthropic alone, nor from the Pentagon alone. Both are the wrong institution to resolve it unilaterally.

Anthropic deciding what the U.S. military can use its technology for is a form of private technocratic governance that has no democratic legitimacy. A company — even a well-intentioned one — should not be in the business of making constitutional determinations about surveillance or rules of engagement. That is what courts, legislatures, and executive oversight mechanisms are for.

But the Pentagon demanding "all lawful uses" as a blank check is equally problematic. It means the only constraint on AI-enabled military capability is whatever the current administration has not yet been stopped from doing. That is a recipe for exactly the kind of incremental erosion that makes permanent damage inevitable.

Perhaps the best analogy, although far from perfect, is military dogs. There are very specific regulations on how dogs are used for military purposes, and some cases include attacking. But even in those cases, the handler is the one responsible for making the decision of what the dog can or cannot do, and he or she is responsible for any mistakes. The dog, no matter how clever, is never given agency, .

A human must similarly be making the decisions for anything an AI can do which can cause harm to people.

What a Good Solution Would Look Like

The parties are treating this as a binary: Anthropic either lifts its safeguards or loses the contract. But there is a third option, and it is the only one that makes long-term sense.

Build the governance architecture that makes the red lines operational, scalable, and enforceable — and bake it into U.S. policy.

Concretely, this would mean:

Pre-approved mission categories rather than case-by-case approvals. Intelligence analysis, logistics optimization, cyber defense, translation, planning support — these can be approved in advance without Anthropic having to vet each individual request. The friction point is approval architecture, not the underlying values.

Mandatory human accountability chains. For any lethal or rights-affecting decision, there must be an identifiable human who is legally and institutionally responsible. Not "the model recommended it." A person. This is not a technical constraint — it is a structural requirement that can be built into deployment protocols. And in the absence of such accountability, the legal and moral responsibility goes to the level of the person who approved the software and the policy to begin with. Not too many leaders want that kind of responsibility.

Audit trails and drift monitoring. Not just "did this specific case comply?" but "is the pattern of use over time moving toward or away from the stated constraints?" Erosion happens gradually. The only way to catch it is to watch for it systematically.

Defined civilian protection constraints for autonomous systems. The question of whether AI can execute within a bounded battlefield engagement zone — without human approval for each individual action — is no longer black and white. If a human commander defines the engagement envelope, retains override authority, and is accountable for outcomes, that may be defensible. But those conditions have to be encoded in the system, not just promised in a briefing.

Meaningful judicial and congressional oversight for any domestic-facing use. "Mass surveillance" is too broad a term to be useful. Bulk metadata collection for counterterror purposes under judicial warrant is different from continuous population-level behavioral modeling for political risk assessment. The law already tries to make these distinctions. AI deployment should reinforce those distinctions, not sidestep them. This is implemented in policy and control systems, not in the AI logic itself.

Transparency about the standards themselves. If Anthropic is going to hold lines — and it should — the criteria for where those lines are must be public, explicit, and reviewable. "We know it when we see it" is not a governance framework. Neither side gets to operate in opacity.

The strongest argument for the Pentagon's position is also the one least carefully made: if China is deploying AI in weapons systems with no ethical constraints, the United States cannot afford to fight with one hand tied behind its back.

This argument deserves a serious answer.

National defense is a moral obligation, not merely a political preference. The preservation of a society that can maintain ethical governance is itself an ethical imperative. So the China comparison is not irrelevant — if adversaries develop unconstrained AI-enabled weapons and the U.S. does not, that creates a real capability gap with real consequences for real people.

But "our adversaries do it" does not automatically sanctify every countermeasure. History is full of examples of nations winning military contests while losing something more fundamental — the institutional integrity, civic trust, and moral coherence that make a society worth defending in the first place. Domestic mass surveillance infrastructure, once built, does not typically get dismantled when the emergency passes. The Patriot Act is not a historical curiosity.

The correct response to China's unconstrained AI deployment is not to abandon constraints. It is to build the governance architecture that allows robust capability with maintained accountability. Those are not mutually exclusive goals. They only seem that way when the negotiation is structured as a power contest rather than a design problem.

Here is the standard I would propose: AI should be refused — by companies, by institutions, by policy — when its use would systematically destroy the accountability architecture that makes moral governance possible.

That means AI that makes meaningful human oversight technically impossible should be refused. AI that is designed to be unauditable should be refused. AI that enables domestic coercion without legal process should be refused. AI that removes identifiable human responsibility from lethal decisions should be refused — not because autonomous execution is always wrong, but because accountability is not optional. And AI must be corrigible - when it makes mistakes it must be able to be corrected.

Everything else — including a great deal of powerful, sensitive, consequential capability — can be permitted if the governance architecture is sound. You don't put a notice on the hammer that it is not meant to be used on skulls. You make a policy that prohibits hurting others.

It isn't like the Pentagon is unfamiliar with policies and procedures. It has detailed rules of what is allowed in battle and detailed manuals on how to use weapons systems. How it uses AI must be as similarly well thought out and, as much as possible, public.

This is not to say that AI shouldn't have morals baked in - it absolutely should. But it should not be expected to understand how it might be manipulated, or second-order consequences from its decisions that are outside its domain. AI, especially in government, is part of a huge ecosystem of software, governance and politics.

The current negotiation is structured to produce a bad outcome for everyone. Anthropic loses its contract or its principles. The Pentagon gets either a constrained tool or an unconstrained one with no safeguards. The American public gets whatever the executive branch decides it can get away with.

A better outcome requires both parties to stop treating this as a contest and start treating it as a design problem. The principles exist. The technical capability exists. The policy framework does not yet exist — but it could, and building it would serve everyone's legitimate interests, including the country's.

Everyone wants the same thing. But they are arguing on the wrong level.

That is the conversation worth having.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

02/23 Links Pt2: What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?; Media Fall Silent on Palestinian Draft Constitution; Former Hamas hostage turns ordeal into music

From Ian:

Jonathan Sacerdoti: What’s wrong with Zionism, Hugh Laurie?

If Zionism is defined minimally as support for the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, then opposition to Zionism entails opposition to that principle. Israel is home to roughly eight million Jewish citizens. To advocate dismantling the state as a Jewish polity is to propose a fundamental restructuring of sovereignty in a region where minority protection has always ended badly for us Jews.

Judea Pearl, the Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher and father of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, has argued that one should ‘shock the anti-Zionist out of his pompous self-righteousness’. He is right.

His challenge is uncomfortable. If anti-Zionism involves dissolving Jewish self-determination in the only state where it currently exists, what becomes of its population? Are they to entrust their security to political arrangements that have yet to demonstrate durability? Are they to accept permanent exposure as the price of ideological consistency?

Those who identify as anti-Zionist often insist that their position targets a political ideology rather than a people. They frame it as opposition to nationalism, or to specific Israeli policies. Criticism of a government is ordinary political speech. Advocacy for the eradication of a state’s defining national character carries different consequences.

Laurie has not articulated a doctrine. He mourned a colleague and resisted being labelled. Others supplied the ideological frame around his words. But he took the bait and seemed at least to imply his rejection of Zionism by pointedly responding to critics that he had never said he supports it.

When celebrities feel compelled to signal distance from Zionism, even defensively, clarity becomes essential. If the objection concerns government policy, say so. If it concerns the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood in Israel, confront the implications directly and own the full genocidal implications of your beliefs.

Dana Eden’s tragic death remains under investigation. The argument that followed reveals how quickly grief is conscripted into ideological struggle. A tribute became a test of political identity. Before adopting or repudiating a word as freighted as Zionism, one ought to ask what world that choice implies. And whether one is prepared to defend it.

Report: Inside Hamas's Sophisticated Media Empire Waging Psychological Warfare

A recent report by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC), based on Hamas documents seized by the IDF in Gaza, argues that Hamas maintains centralized managerial, financial, and strategic control over a broad media ecosystem, including outlets presented publicly as “independent.”

The report, published on February 22, 2026, draws from documents captured during military operations in Gaza and provides an unprecedented window into how the Palestinian terrorist organization coordinates its information warfare against Israel and the broader international community.

The Hybrid Media Model
At the heart of Hamas’s strategy lies what Israeli analysts term a “hybrid” media ecosystem—a deliberately constructed system designed to create the appearance of press diversity while maintaining absolute editorial control. According to the report, Hamas operates both official outlets like the Al-Resala media institution, the Al-Aqsa television network, and the Palestine newspaper, alongside news agencies Shehab and SAFA that publicly present themselves as independent journalistic organizations.

“This hybrid media system is not accidental,” the report states. “It is designed to allow Hamas to appear to advocate for media pluralism, while in fact it fully controls the media discourse.” This arrangement also provides the organization with diplomatic and operational flexibility, including the ability to circumvent sanctions and deny association with extreme content by attributing it to “independent” outlets.

The information department, led by Ali Al-Amoudi, maintains oversight of the entire ecosystem through regular inspections and coordination meetings designed to ensure all media activity aligns with Hamas’s broader strategic messaging and tactical objectives.

"The new acting head of Hamas’ political bureau in Gaza."
*released as part of the Gilad Shalit "prisoner deal" in 2011 - was among those very close to Sinwar during their imprisonment and after their release, accompanying him frequently to meetings and events. v The report adds that unofficial reports in late 2025 claimed al-Amoudi was appointed acting head of Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza and was being discussed as a potential successor to Yahya Sinwar.

It traces his proximity to Sinwar back to their time in Israeli prison: al-Amoudi was arrested in 2004, released in the 2011 Gilad Shalit exchange, and, according to the report, developed a close relationship with Sinwar while incarcerated. The report says al-Amoudi later served as Sinwar’s office manager during Sinwar’s first term leading Hamas’s political bureau in Gaza (2017–2021).

CAIR-Ohio Director Invokes Blood Libel at Ohio Senate Antisemitism Hearing

Khalid Turaani, Executive Director of the Ohio branch of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), appeared before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on February 18, 2026 to testify against Senate Bill 87, which would codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism into Ohio state law.

During his testimony, Turaani alleged that Israel operates the world's largest human skin bank and that the skin is harvested from the bodies of dead Palestinians. CAIR’s lobbying arm, CAIR Action, and a coalition of other anti-Israel Ohio-based organizations also testified in opposition to SB 87 at the same hearing.

A Modern Blood Libel Before a State Legislature
The Anti-Defamation League has explicitly catalogued claims of this type — that Israel systematically harvests body parts from Palestinians — as a modern iteration of the medieval blood libel: the centuries-old antisemitic conspiracy theory alleging that Jews murder non-Jews to harvest their bodily matter. The ADL notes that in the current Israeli-Palestinian context, organs and tissue are substituted for blood, and that in some cases activists have gone further, alleging Israel deliberately kills Palestinians in order to harvest their remains. The ADL has found no credible evidentiary basis for these claims.

The specific “skin bank” framing Turaani deployed before Ohio state senators has circulated in anti-Israel activist circles since at least late 2023, traceable to social media accounts and pro-Palestinian advocacy networks. The ADL has directly addressed these claims, finding that they lack documented factual support and function as vehicles for antisemitic conspiracy narratives rather than substantiated reporting.

The context in which Turaani made this claim adds a significant dimension. SB 87, which he was testifying to defeat, would codify the IHRA definition of antisemitism into Ohio law. The IHRA definition, which has been used by the U.S. State Department and endorsed by over 40 countries, explicitly lists as an illustrative example of antisemitism: “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”

Turaani’s testimony did not remain confined to the hearing room. Ramy Abdu, the founder and chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (EuroMed), amplified the clip on X, stating: “Israel is skinning dead bodies of Palestinians.”

Abdu’s promotion of the claim is notable given EuroMed’s documented record and his own background. Abdu, along with EuroMed’s former chairman Dr. Mazen Kahel, were both named in a 2013 list released by the Israeli government identifying Hamas operatives and affiliated institutions in Europe. The watchdog group HonestReporting has described EuroMed as a “Hamas front org.”

EuroMed’s track record of unverified atrocity claims extends well beyond the Turaani clip. The organization has previously accused the Israeli army of organ theft from Palestinians and of “systematically” using police dogs to “brutally attack, rape Palestinian civilians” — claims that HonestReporting has characterized as part of a pattern of fake news, conspiracy theories, and blood libels the group has championed since the October 7, 2023 attacks.